Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?

We also see devs just flat out going into new fields altogether.

I agree about the second half, though. My current job is just a terrible meat grinder, hiring and churning like crazy, and they just keep pouring gas on the fire by trying to grow headcount without retaining people they already have. Everyone is sick of interviewing and the solution is to hire more people so the new people can start interviewing and take some pressure off the old people.

I'm in a similar position (not remote though) and yeah... my boss told me during my first year that the guy who was hired before me said he'd only stay 2-3 years, and that was 6 years ago. It's almost 10 years later and we're both here, along with the rest.

We're a small company though, so like you say, we've just hired a few programmers since I started.

Part of what I realized in that 12 years was that I by the time I was ready to bail I was so frustrated and hated life so much that anything _but_ this current position looked good, which opened the door to taking something that was equally as horrible. I've long advocated in starting at the bottom and working your way up, but there is a limit as to how much abuse a person can take. If the climate goes south you have to bail. The long term consequences of not are higher than the immediate annoying ones (relocating, etc.).

I can only assume that it is because of stronger labor laws, more relaxed work/life balance, etc.

Some of my American (contractor) colleagues would work like dogs for 6 days a week, often from early in the morning to late in the night - depending on the status of the project. It was the first time I observed actual burnout in people, and how visibly it changes people and their personalities.

In any case - most of them, especially those over 40, would often discuss their big plans: Only work 5-10 more years, then retire, and live life.

If 50-60 hour weeks, all year round, is any good indicator of American SWE life - I can understand why devs. are daydreaming about retirement.

> The job market is essentially a market for lemons, unfortunately.

Somehow I just visualized the job market as analogous to the romantic dating pool for people past say 35. That complaint about all the good ones being taken, and those who get back into the scene have baggage by that point and several failures along the way. I've never conceived of the job market like that, puts a whole new spin on it when I conceptualize it as such.

I'm currently reading "Manifest. 7 steps to living your best life". It's pretty much exactly what you've described. It sounds like you're going through an amazing transformation. Embrace it and change your life. They don't come round often.

Give that book a read when you get the chance :)

Not hobby programming or sideprojects.

Coding is far from the only field I've seen this. Some guys figure they'll go above and beyond to impress the boss, or just because they want to make more money.

A good boss will obviously let their employees know what is expected - but some bosses will start to ask other "Hey, John goes the extra mile all the time. Why can't you too?"

And it sort of becomes a race to the bottom.

I'm not sure what OP had in mind when asking the question, but at least for me it can be rephrased as:

"I LOVE Software Development/Engineering but HATE the industry. Can anyone relate?"

I really like the challenge of everything regarding SWE...users, specifications, documentation, planning, working with teams, testing, et.c.

But in most projects I have worked in something else has crept in:

  - No access to customers/product owners to discuss solutions
  - Everything being treated as manufacturing line
  - Fixed long term plans even though conditions have changes
  - Developers taking blame for changed conditions/wrong features

Your "customer" for a framework is a fellow dev. That can make all the difference in the world. Design and marketing generally take a back seat.

I (everyone?) agree that software development is not only programming/writing code. It also system design, documentation, finding solutions, troubleshooting, load testing and so on. And yes, it is also gathering and understanding requirements and collaborating with other teams. But if your average developer only has 20% of time for coding and everything else goes to meetings, you are doing something terribly wrong. Simply because the time of the developers is used inefficiently, unless you are doing something very simple (from technical point of view) and cut costs on other roles, so devs are doing everything. Usually it means that there is no proper Product/Project management and technical leadership. You can build a lot better and faster if your developers have time to focus on development itself without going to constant meetings to understand this sentence in requirements. Even during my 'worst' (from dev time perspective) years as a TL I spent ~40-50% of my time to management/communication work. It allowed team of 5 devs to be almost distraction free (less than 3 meetings per week per dev), because I worked as proxy for them.

In my experience adding good technical PM between devs and other managers can greatly increase devs efficiency and more importantly - their happiness

Taking pride in useless make-work turns you into another useless make-worker, making life suck more for anyone who is still actually trying to get anything done.

It’s good advice if you want to suck the soul out of everything you do and become a cog that works 20% of the time, producing less than 20% of what you’re capable of, but getting along really well with management drones holding endless meetings.

Responsibility for actually shipping something will shift to the next guy who hasn’t yet embraced the futility of trying to get anything done.

He’ll be the one blamed for not shipping and for not being a source of joy in the endless meetings.

I think there should be a sane amount of bitching, but it's all in how you do it and the purpose, if its to get people motivated to improve things, go for it, if its just to always be salty, nah no thanks. I usually tell my team "idk why this is this way, but we can definitely make it better, so why not?" till something catches enough of my managers attention.

That said, we need to be honest about something: from a strictly business perspective developers ARE disposable tools. Virtually all employees of all orgs are. Great employers are willing to treat their employees with dignity and respect because that's how we should treat everyone. Not because it's smart from a business perspective to do so, but because it's the right thing to do.

So yeah I think the most important thing you can look for in an org is ethical leaders, and that that tends to cascade down into ethical employees who treat each other with respect and dignity.

I've monetized every hobby I have ever had any passion for, and despite having buyers remorse it took me until my mid 30s to realize to keep hobbies a thing to do when you are not earning a living. It's hard to envision my life not having taken those decisions and challenges, but I'm pretty sullen at the idea of just how heart-wrenching it is to have seen the inner machinations of something that brought me so much joy because this time 'I won't work a day in my Life.'

I think it's only with maturity that one realizes that you'd rather build a career on something you're curious about, but not passionate about because the latter tends to be suffocated to death when you see how 'the sausage is made' and you realize that most Lifers have simply lost any passion in that field in order to stay in it: money is/can be a motivator, but it cannot be the only driver of why you wake up because existential dread soon kicks in every time you get a respite from having to do it.

I left Startup-World/Fintech when I completed my objectives in order go back to culinary for my last tour with a path towards AI and ML when I felt 'I had enough,' so after COVID it accelerated things a bit faster but I realized that I'm just curious enough about ML to keep me engaged that if I keep learning at my own pace I think it will be a sound transition-- I'm doing my CS undegrad in AI/ML and I'll be attending a conference with Dr. Ng next month as he has been very vocal about how his views on the Industry which resonates with me and likely most of you ITT.

I agree. I work at a place where:

> devs [going] out of their way to work weekends without being asked, [...] the endless meetings, constant micromanagement, bringing the stress home to my family.

Is the complete opposite of what I'm experiencing. I left a place where meetings and micromanagement (through agile / scrum-like work management) were becoming an issue, but it was still okay.

You can find places where employee well-being is an actual concern.

Good luck.

As an automation integrator, I frequently have to push to the forefront of my mind that my customer's focus is not on the machine that I'm designing for them. Yes, I'm going to spend 600 hours on the intricacies of hazard mitigation and operating modes and IO and quality control and timing, with a deadline looming large to ship the machine - it is easy when you're that deep to think of the machine as the end goal. But for my customers, the focus is on the chairs or door handles or valves or whatever they're making that come out of the machine. Graceful fault handling, alternate paths through the sequencer, purge and single-cycle modes, calibration wizards, or whatever other features I can build in might be elegant and might be powerful - but the customer doesn't care about the machine itself. They especially don't care about the machine when logic I've written gets in the way of making products come out the other end!

I think many people are overthinking this and coming up with a problem solver myth when in reality programming is an independent professional skill which has been and continues to be paid for its intrinsic value.

The stuff around programming - talking to customers, writing documentation, discussing business requirements, meeting of all sorts would be basically worthless without the actual code.

One day.

That's it, exactly. I was a hiring manager for 25 years, and never gave a single coding test, during that time. I never made any technical errors. The only bad hires were folks that couldn't adapt to the work environment. Some of them were quite technically proficient.

Some of my most gratifying hires, were ones that came in, with little tech proficiency or experience. I kept people for a long time, and helped them to develop their careers. It was not always a a bad thing, when they left. If my company wasn't willing to do what it took, to keep them, then I sincerely wished them luck.

In my rather truncated modern interview cycle (I gave up, after a few months), I came to understand that the interview process is, quite literally, a hazing ritual. Companies don't want "outside the box" thinking. They want people that won't rock the boat, and will do as they are told. I also personally believe that leetcode tests are "young pass filters." Us "olds" are quite unpopular, and it has nothing at all to do with how much we cost. In my entire career, I never made as much as many kids get, at their first job (yet, I still have more to show for it, than many).

When I would ask interviewers why they refused to look at my portfolio, and, instead relied exclusively on leetcode tests, they would hem and haw, but eventually, it would boil down to "Well, I got hazed, so you are, too."

After running into this a few times, I realized the fox ain't worth the chase.

A very few people get lucky and don't deal with this. But from what I've seen, the rule is that work is mostly hell, everywhere.

For one, the requirements are utterly clear so you CAN systematically prepare and do well even if you lack the exact years of experience they're asking for.

Two, the payoff is massive if you're in the US. I mean.. if you land at a FANGetc, you can literally put your feet up, buy a house anywhere, send all your kids to Harvard, and retire before your parents ever dreamed.

Three, prepare slowly over time. I would do one or two leet code questions a month. Pickup a trick here and there. When I hating my job now, I do a few per week. Now I've accrued most of the knowledge about these questions and interviews are a lot easier

We'll be free one day.

Keep building.