Comment by delbronski
17 hours ago
Sir, I’m 40 and I’m already at the stage of not wanting to do any programming. I used to love this stuff. But after watching all my favourite companies and CEOs turn to greedy villains… I’m just done. How do I survive another 35 years doing this stuff?
Good news! According to some, we don’t have more than 3.5 years in the career path, so that’s 10x less time you have to survive.
Now _that's_ the kind of 10x engineering I can get behind!
I hope they're wrong, I need to squeeze out 6 years for this career. Fortunately I work for a big stodgy old company whose idea of fast tech adoption is measured in years anyway.
Are they hiring and are they ok with remote ;)
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Go work for companies you like. There are plenty of good people out there making useful software. Or make your own opensource software and put your effort where your heart is.
It’s easy in our industry to burn out doing commercial work with no soul. But it’s not the only kind of work out there.
I worked for a large unethical company in the US that worked to emulate big tech, and took a page out of Jack Welch's playbook (stack ranking etc). I was miserable working there and thinking of changing careers.
I ended up moving to New Zealand and working for a small civil engineering firm that has developers to write internal tools that are used by the engineering team to process their data. The technology I'm working with is a lot more dated, the development processes aren't sophisticated (there are 0 meetings and no attempt at project management) and I took a real pay cut, but I genuinely feel that the software I'm working with is beneficial and has a net positive impact on the world, no matter how small. There is also no on call and I work exactly 37.5 hours a week, on top of all of the workplace culture differences in NZ.
I switched into medical 4 years ago because my top priority was making something that directly improves peoples lives. Early in my career it wasn’t so much of a concern. Now it’s a must. There are many companies like this. Highly recommended if you have the desire
Sounds miserable.
Where do we sign up?
They've always been greedy villains.
Nah, this is a really dangerous narrative. Shareholder primacy is a pretty recent concept (a fundamentally anti-American one) that has recently gone metastatic and is now completely self-referential.
We've Goodharted the entire premise of the profit-seeking corporation and now openly say that Goodharting it is actually the point. Maybe it should be called Meta-goodharting or something.
Edit: Since large numbers of 1) historically illiterate and 2) "ideas don't matter" type people tend to congregate on HN, it's worth saying explicitly that the takeover of shareholder primacy is empirically visible in all sorts of corporate behaviors.
John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the other robber barons of the Gilded Age have a hearty chuckle and say hi.
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Could you elaborate? Goodharting what metric exactly and how was that different earlier?
Isn't the distribution of shares among the population instead of just a few private investors a good thing? Democratizing in a sense, everybody can participate? (If only wealth was distributed more evenly. But that's a different problem it seems.)
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Quantity has a quality all its own
Spend less money, save more money, then retire. I'm retired at 42 and I hardly had a top shelf career, middle of the pack at best. Even if you're starting at zero you can do it in 10 years very easily, 5 if you haven't spent every dime up till now and you are aggressive.
Do you have kids?
The answer to this question seems obvious. There are no 42 year olds that retire by merely "saving and not over spending" when even one child is involved.
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> Sir, I’m 40 and I’m already at the stage of not wanting to do any programming.
It's a shame you didn't come to this conclusion 10 years ago!
Find a hobby that doesn’t involve computers. It’s the only thing that will keep you sane in these trying times.
Switch the work mindset off, turn your nose up at technology and go touch grass. I wouldn’t be recommending if it didn’t work for me.
If nothing else it helps reframe your perspective on the world which technology companies as of late have been trying to distort to enrich the dozen or so people at the helm to their own benefit..
I have come to the conclusion recently after trying to use computers as a hobby for years. Hobby coding, games, shows … anything with a screen just doesn’t provide the relief I need. Just takes a lot of time and leaves with a feeling of exhaustion
Holy batman, are you me?? I too am 40 and so sick of this industry after the masks came off and AI greed forced all CEOs and execs to salivate like hungry hyenas.
Are you sure you're just not frustrated that you didn't win the greedy villain lottery?