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Ask HN: What's it like working in Agtech?

6 points by willsmith72 ↗ HN
I'd love to work on something agricultural but have 0 skills in that area. What use can a software eng be? Any notable companies which still act a bit like tech companies?

Most of my experience out of the tech world has been really painful, e.g. business devs writing 50-page "product specs" to go and implement over 2 years, or saying they want tech workers but actually wanting IT support.

8 comments

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bhag2066
>>Any notable companies which still act a bit like tech companies?

I'd bet John Deere, Caterpillar and Syngenta all operate this way.

ironmagma
I'm curious why you are looking for a company that acts like a tech company but then note a core pain of working for those companies? Are you expecting agriculture tech to have avoided those characteristics somehow?
willsmith72
Tech companies don't work that way, what kind of company are you talking about?
ironmagma
What do you mean? You just said:

> Most of my experience out of the tech world has been really painful, e.g. business devs writing 50-page "product specs" to go and implement over 2 years

So are you expecting agro-tech to be different somehow? Why? If they are a true "tech company" they will be expecting 10x-100x returns and have similar problems. If they aren't, then they won't "act a bit like tech companies".

willsmith72
i don't see why a company has to choose between "10-100x returns" and writing 50 page product specs. Why not neither of the 2? I don't see some innate correlation there

Also, I don't care if the company wants 2x returns or 100x. I enjoy product teams, engineers with ownership and skin in the game, customer collaboration, modern tech. Why couldn't I get all of that in an agtech company?

The more i've worked on things in the "real world" (like agriculture), the less i've seen those things, but i don't see why it has to be that way. I'd like to find companies working more like tech companies, but on "real-world" stuff (ag, health, energy), as opposed to ecommerce, dev tools, social media, digital entertainment, etc, ie faang and co. Maybe that wasn't clear from my original post

ironmagma
Capital-T "Tech companies" can uniquely provide engineers with a sense of 'code ownership' because engineers actually own the company. This control is given because of the expectation that it will accelerate the company's growth. If growth is less of a goal, less control is given, and the role of engineer tends to be more of a wage slave type of role, where as much value is extracted from the employee as possible over a very short timespan and not much thought is given to transformational growth.

You'll notice even in tech companies that have matured, they tend to lose the engineer ownership, modern tech, and collaboration. They trend towards your typical hourly job that people are not personally invested in. This is a natural consequence of not being employee-owned, and also of not having much of a transformational future in store.

Of course, it's possible for an agriculture company to exist and be employee-owned. But without the 10x growth, it's not really a "Tech company" and you'll have a very different experience of the working conditions, amount of control/ownership, etc.

samstave
I hear that Agtech is a growing field, I should get a job at the local Plant.