Comment by a4z349
3 years ago
I definitely miss the nostalgic past. Not just programming when I was a kid, but when I became an adult as well. Not only was everything new, everything was very...visceral. You didn't have to learn to/pay for/etc 500 different services to get anything running. You downloaded programs that ran on your computer. There was no cloud to speak of. This all changed after ruby on rails took off by my estimation. It made it so the "common man" could code, and with that pandora's box open became the vast simplification of an otherwise artistic industry.
I don't really code at home anymore. At work I do the bare minimum to get by, as I always do. I hit my sprint goals to please the PHBs whose entire job it is to remind you of your failures (PMs). I no longer enjoy fixing bugs, writing new features, or anything else. I just do what I do because the pay is good enough. I'm truly only motivated to do anything, for any company, because otherwise I'd be fired. Thank you for destroying my bright eyed we-can-do-it attitude, SV.
I could've lived with cloud and a thousand frameworks. But the politicization of our industry and the micro-management culture almost every SV company exudes is toxic to anyone who believes in merit and creativity. I've been unable to find a company to work for that won't take an expedient political stance on whatever the "important social issue" is. Entire code bases are upended by entirely arbitrary sets of rules set by people who arent hackers at all. These people are simply social-science sit ins who want to elbow in on a lucrative industry.
The final nail is the coding interviews. Having been in the industry for 15 years, most of that senior, I would expect to be treated with dignity in an interview. It seems like every corp wants to treat me like a junior until proven otherwise. Yet they require me to send a resume anyway. How exhausting.
The industry is exhausting to be in. It takes bright eyed talented and creative individuals and grinds them to dust. The only benefit is it's one of the only ways to broach the upper middle class boundary now. So I can't leave to do something else and maybe find my joy in coding again someday. It's just suffering, and crying over the memory of a simpler, less political, and less vulture-capital driven hobby.
To put it bluntly I'm tired. Yet I can't rest, it's my only way to afford to retire.
> The industry is exhausting to be in. It takes bright eyed talented and creative individuals and grinds them to dust.
Sadly, I think this is true of every industry - with a few rare exceptions, perhaps. Workers are burnt out everywhere, and companies treat them as grist for the mill. It's just how industrial society is organized, it seems.
Elsewhere in the thread, someone mentioned how the school system "completely removed that joy" (in this case of mathematics). That sounds like the same situation, it's not just tech workers, it's teachers and students too.
There definitely are some pockets of hope, niches where creative juices are flowing, where people are enjoying their work. It's so rare to see, but I believe that's actually how things are supposed to be - I mean, the ideal state of society.
The historical period we're in currently is very primitive in some aspects, brutal and ignorant, despite all the advanced science and technology. The hope I see is to nurture and cultivate our "bright eyed talented and creative individuals", so that some of them may survive the grinding gears of Mordor.
> You downloaded programs that ran on your computer. There was no cloud to speak of.
You can still do this, there's probably a FLOSS package for your favorite thing floating around. It might even be packaged by your distro and be just an 'install' command away. Not everything runs on the cloud.
> Entire code bases are upended by entirely arbitrary sets of rules set by people who arent hackers at all. These people are simply social-science sit ins who want to elbow in on a lucrative industry.
If you're curious about exploring computers, doing worthwhile things with them and expanding your skills, you're a hacker. There are no inherent skill requirements, the whole thing is based on personal attitudes and observed results. You don't have to be a "rockstar coder", though it doesn't hurt either.