Comment by ilrwbwrkhv
5 years ago
> When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.
This is the saddest. One more soul taken by the shrinking of the hacker culture.
5 years ago
> When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.
This is the saddest. One more soul taken by the shrinking of the hacker culture.
I don't know. Possibly it's simply because when you accept a career in the thing you're passionate about the thing you're passionate about becomes work.
Another thought that has occurred to me of late: when I started in this field it was "Computers" (capital "C") — a thing really by nerds, for nerds. Increasingly it's the web, mobile. Our "customers" are increasingly not us and so the decisions that would have come so readily to us on how to proceed, what features to implement are instead handed down to us from design, marketing....
There are quite a few topics in CS I like, from compiler construction to robotics. That was the "hacker tech" for me. For a long time, I managed to have work with an interesting angle, but slowly it got to the point where I'm solving a fucking npm caching problem that caused a junior headaches, moving a server with an EOL OS with minimal service interruption, looking for another 2FA mechanism, and getting older tools to play well with mobile. None of it is interesting, and it takes a lot of time.
Not that it used to be better: many of my fellow students ended up in business administration. Some might even be architecturing COBOL systems on an IBM mainframe.
Yeah, I don't think there's anything special about working in tech. I've seen the same exact dynamic happen in lots of other fields. People who love cooking and become professional chefs only to leave after a few years is extremely common, for instance.
So much so that I would have said it is pretty common advice that if you try to turn a hobby you love into a job, there's a good chance you'll end up losing your passion for it.
I still love programming and if I wasn't working I'd be doing it as a hobby. But its halfway satiated/suppressed by the sheer amount of it I have to do every week now.
Your second point hits close to home.
It's inevitable, now everyone has access to computers and that means the average audience inches ever closer to the average person.
But boy, it feels like crap to make something I'd never use in a million years.
It happened to me too. In fact I'm in the process of leaving the field for something else altogether. I do tend to get weird looks and "whys" when I mention it, but its difficult for me to really explain in a concrete way, but I've just lost all excitement and motivation to do anything with programming (despite my mind still operating in very much a hacker mindset, where I see X and thing "I bet I could make X do Y)
Try building something of your own just for fun. See if you see sparks of your old love back.
That's the thing, I've been trying to do that for years now. I've got about a dozen cool ideas that bounce around in my head and a new one every few months or so. I can spend all my non-free time thinking about and designing them in my head, but when it comes time to actually write the code, I just kinda lose all motivation.
3 replies →
Been doing this professionally 15 years, and still am enamored with tech and programming. I actually avoided getting into the field because I was worried it would ruin my favorite hobby if I did it professionally (which is why I majored in Philosophy instead of CS in college)
I get sick and tired of all the rest of the bullshit, but never with tech and programming itself.
Being the best coder doesn’t make customers want your product. So at a certain point, I got over coding. I am now more interested in business and product managements.
Perhaps because we don't feel productive anymore. 90% of the day is meetings, slack, and dealing with production issues because of the unnecessary complexity, then the last 5%-10% of your time is developing - usually involving getting JSON to and from a database.
The other day, I started playing this game called TIS-100. The game simulates something like assembly programming and I had so much fun with it. Then I realized it’s been nearly half a year that I’ve actually written proper code for something (rather than a GitHub workflow script or account provision mechanism for testing framework) and built something that I was actually proud of.
The love and passion are still there, but their buried under the needs of my current mediocre job. I need to find a position that will let be get back to the task of building things again, rather than just tweaking scripts and keeping the machinery humming.
Part of the problem is, to borrow an analogy, the frame has gotten really big and the space for the painting is smaller. We recently finished a two or four sprint to ... deploy yellow world. It has bitbucket pieces, Jenkins pieces, EKS terraform, et.c etc., we were all super happy that it worked, but it doesn’t do as much as you can do with twenty minutes in basic in a 1990 PC. And most of the people that wired all this stuff together can’t even write code to draw parabolas or calculate or whatever. It used to be I would develop for a few months then spend a week or two getting stuff in production, for new projects, or few days adding features/bug fixing form existing code, then get it shipped in a few days. There was thorough testing thru code all along, and evil network layers, and so on., and most of the head space was in the code. Now it seems like teams end up spending months trying to get a docker image with all their dependencies and yaml files and so on. And the code is just taking some SQL that ran in a database and running it on some new cloud platform that is still solving acid problems Oracle mastered twenty years ago. Half the code is just orchestration run this hello world Spark job that moves data from here to there. It is cobol level Scala.
I know this is a tangent to your main point, but in case you haven't already done so, check out some of the other Zachtronics games. SpaceChem is my favourite; it's not literally a programming game like TIS-100, but conceptually it pretty much is.
They also have another game (the name of which escapes me right now) that is sort of like a bigger version of TIS-100, where you have to write code for microprocessors. I didn't get into that one -- it was a bit less pure and straight to the point compared to TIS-100 or SpaceChem, and one of my favourite things about those games is their fundamental simplicity and transparency -- but I've heard it is good too.
I think I’d feel that way to if I had stayed in web development (which I only did as a short stint many years ago by now), and I felt it happening already.
It just doesn’t have much to do with computers and technology in the specific ways that I got enamored with computers and technology. Playing with bare metal stuff at work does. Of course, for someone else it might be the opposite.
Is it "the shrinking of the hacker culture"? I've become an expert in 3 different js frameworks in the last 7 years. Its' fucking exhausting.
I think it’s ok. That quote describes me too. There are lots of things to be interested in and excited by in life, computers are only a very very small thing. So don’t be saddened.
For me it’s almost like a graduation or transcending, getting so worked up about the details of computer shit just seems so silly nowadays. It’s actually quite dry and dull when you get down to it. There is a lot more to life.