I have no standout passion or interest, like many in this thread I am tired of the industry in general and the job itself.

I am considering doing a part-time horticulture degree to dome something different. How did you find your passion?

1. The interview process

This is my biggest gripe. Imo it's a hazing ritual that pretty much doesn't tell you anything about the candidate -- I think companies have it because they had to go through it, so why shouldn't you have to?

I really wish I knew that this was a thing before I got into this profession because I most likely wouldn't have gone into the field if this were the case. If I knew that I'd be asked arbitrary questions on literally everything I learned over the course of my CS degree + 3-4 years of professional experience on virtually every programming topic, language and tool imaginable, I'm not sure I would've entered the industry.

It used to be all whiteboard questions of leetcode, for which I would consume many hours a week just practicing even though it has nothing to do with coding unless you're writing C/C++ code, and even then, you'd probably use already existing libraries for algorithms. Some say it's a proxy for an IQ test, but I'd argue that's BS: it can be easily gamed, and I know a lot of smart people that butcher those because they're introverted and/or don't do well with on-the-spot performance tests with someone watching over their shoulder.

This now got replaced with often arbitrary coding projects that have nothing to do with the job and often take up considerable amounts of time to write. 3 hours? sure if you want to deliver the bare minimum, but then someone else who wants the job more will do way more, so you do (a lot) more if you want the job. A lot of them are now at the screening stage, before you ever even talk to anyone. I've often been ghosted on coding projects: I'd say I've dumped maybe 100+ hours and been ghosted on those projects. It really wears me out. Some places started to add time limits to the projects, which helps, but I'd rather have a 1 hour whiteboard interview on a project than several hours with a considerable amount of time spent setting up the tech stack instead of working on the problem because you're building it from scratch. You could game this somewhat by setting up a ton of template projects over a wide variety of tech stacks to save time, but it's all just a time sink (tooling fatigue).

2. It's always > 40 hours/week

Related to #1. The pay is high, but if you consider the fact that you need to:

- Have a decent open source portfolio to stand out from the crowd

- Constantly learn new tech and show that you know it (learning on the job is apparently out of the question), usually as part of the open source portfolio or a blog. The new tools usually aren't interesting -- they're usually a rehashed version of the older tooling with maybe one very small kind of useful improvement on the old tooling, and possibly 1+ drawbacks, but requires you to have to relearn a whole new api/way of doing things.

- The interview process is incredibly time consuming now that everyone is doing screening tests with several hour-several day coding projects, often which never gets followed up or read

- Meet arbitrary deadlines and create a bunch of technical debt because 'move fast and break things', and then be expected to come in after hours to put out fires that you have no control of preventing or didn't even start, because feature creep trumps sound technical decisions

Then, considering all of this, the pay is actually quite low when you realize you need to put in 60-70 hours/week to stay ahead. Unless you work for a spyware company (unless you get into netflix), see:

3. Detrimental to society: automate or spy

Most of the apps out there either don't actually improve society in any way or are actually actively detrimental to society. You're often either writing spyware (probably backed by some govt), or you're writing software to automate away some white-collar job that society desperately needs as the middle class, the backbone of a healthy society and economy, is continually shrinking and politicians are doing jack about it (to be fair I'm not even really sure what they can do about it...). Modern day spies are basically all in the tech sector, so there's plenty of spy shit. I'm from an eastern european country working for western companies, and I'm sure trust plays into whether or not I'm even considered for positions. Same deal as #1: I really, really wish I knew this as well before going into this field because I probably would've stayed well away

4. You're not a software engineer

There's very little actual engineering involved in the day-to-day work. It's really like 70-90% debugging (repairman) and 10-30% development (white-collar construction). Maybe like 1% is actually engineering in most jobs. I thought I'd get to be an engineer, and it's the aspect I liked the most out of my classes. I like developing stuff but not if it's detrimental to society (#3) and only with a reasonable amount of tech debt. Sound engineering practices would reduce repairman down to like 10%, but tech goes in hype bubbles and is often crap, and the best pieces of engineering are utterly unpopular for some bizarre reason

5. It's all getting automated away

There was a time when having strong linux and networking chops gave you a lot of street cred. Now those people are obsolete as more and more people are switching to cloud companies to save on costs (#3). Open source has killed the engineering aspect as jobs are now all about slapping libraries together and debugging (construction repairman). It used to be a white collar job but it's increasingly turning into a blue collar one (bootcamps?), so I think it's not surprising that the industry is treating it's employees increasingly like replaceable code monkeys (we probably are, and soon to be obsolete) and making us jump through all sorts of arbitrary hoops to get a job.

I've been thinking of getting into teaching + research and becoming a professor, but I'm not sure because:

1. I might just run into other issues in academia that I didn't know about before entering the industry, just like with the tech industry

2. There's also the aspect of bad luck/making your luck -- there are companies where none of this stuff applies, and so I could try to find/target those kinds of companies. My earlier experiences at companies were different. And the culture could probably change on a lot of this stuff, like how interviews are done, though some of it is probably inevitable and unavoidable (like automation + spy shit)

Despite that, I studied Economics in university. It fit my personality as being a lover of data and 'business' but a lot more of the human side of it. I'd always loved business, and while I started out in business school, I found quickly I didn't like 'business people'. So I switched into Econ. Halfway through my economics degree, I took a course on the history of labor markets. This course made me realize I needed to learn to code to stay relevant for the rest of my life. I didn't have aspirations of doing a trade and the course and further research made me realize how vulnerable my skill set was to automation.

So I finished school and then learned to code. I did a bootcamp, and became a very junior full-stack dev. I absolutely loved programming at this point. But I still missed 'business', so I decided to mix the two and start my own software development company. I quickly figured out there is little money in building businesses websites, but plenty in building custom applications or add-ons for e-commerce businesses and focused my efforts there. I made good money, got to live and work in Europe (I'm Canadian) and overall enojyed myself for a few years.

All the while I was perfectly content in the back-end world of web development, working mostly in Ruby, Elixir and PHP. But the front-end started sneaking in. JS has a way of doing that. Soon I found myself spending more time fixing broken node packages than I was coding. Someone above me said it felt like being a carpenter, while spending 80% of the time fixing your tools. That couldn't have described how I felt any better.

Turns out, while I love programming, I hate JS and the world that node has given us. If you want to work on the web, sadly, you're often faced with dealing with it at some point or another.

At this time, I was also discovering that while I always knew I loved interacting with people, that managing remote teams and having occasional video conference calls was not enough to satisfy my extroverted personality. I was becoming lonely in my work.

So I quit. I spooled down my business, going into maintenance mode only. I've since switched into the finance industry, doing underwriting for a small private bank. I love it. I still write code. I spend a decent portion of my time optimizing our company (we're small and the board is happy with any of my tech proposals so long as I explain the value added) with technology wherever possible.

Programming is now only a small portion of my day, but I treasure it now. I still program in the evenings (Elixir Nerves is super cool!) for fun, and of course at work. But it's not my primary role. I will still get paid, even if Yarn breaks something that day.

I've since discovered that .asdf handles 90% of my dependency problems, and that the finance industry doesn't care if your app uses webpack or any javascript for that matter. Removing the need to follow or even keep up with the latest trends in web development from my life has been a breath of fresh air. I couldn't be happier.

Despite being an incredibly small shop, we "leaned in" to the Agile thing in a way that was completely foolish. Scale was irrelevant, we had some services that were hit an average of seven times a day, sometimes spiking to ten. You will have to trust me when I say that they would never go viral. Ever. We did not have teams of programmers working on one product, we had a few programmers constantly bouncing from one little project to another as management demanded. This "pivoting," (and I guess you have to be Agile to pivot so often) resembled nothing more than Brownian motion from the ten thousand foot view. Management would shift in and out, old work was looked at with "why did we build that?" while never asking if the hotness du jour was similarly unnecessary. Meanwhile, backbone processes were neglected and began to crumble.

Ah, but the churn, that was huge. We kept switching from one platform for engineering issues we didn't have before to another platform. We had this, now we are going to Trello. Then it turns out that our parent organization was going to switch to something else entirely in six months, but let's take a little detour from Trello to this other platform just for fun before we go to what the parent organization will mandate. This was most likely to be just another bullet point on the old resume for the lead, to say that he had done it, on his way out the door to somewhere else; if I had to guess, he had figured out what ecosystem his target job was using and picked some items out of that for us to purely temporarily migrate to.

People would buy wholesale into services that simply were not going to last. I would smell the stench of impending death upon them but no. And then later, into the Google Graveyard or the like it would go. So much jabbering about frontend frameworks when almost no Javascript was required, only to have to then keep those frameworks current.

The churn was there in other ways. I had never used a particular backend framework before, in fact had little experience with them. I was forthright about this, so I bought some relevant books, set up a test machine to dabble with, and was ready to go with a tiny little "get my feet wet" project that would still have some minor value. The other "contributor" had agreed to all of this, and when I was set up and ready to learn, somehow everything pivoted to Django. No "buy-in," as the lingo I had to learn goes, from me. Time, effort, money: wasted. Update update, migrate migrate.

I remind people often that nomads never left great architecture behind. If you are constantly migrating, you are not building anything to last.

I switched to something tech-adjacent. I still program. I still use technology to solve problems. Now, when I program to solve a problem, it stays solved. I do not have endless meetings fractally interspersed into my schedule like some kind of stuttering hardware interrupt all to talk about solving a problem.

I follow Hacker News because I am interested in some trends, pet projects, and the like. On a purely cruel level, watching people simply tear into one another again and again over what looks like religious differences (Agile in particular is a fantastic example, makes top-posting vs. bottom-posting thing look tame) reminds me of why I left.

[0] http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm

For example, are you in tech if your employer has been around for 20 years and your employee number is five digits? If the business model has nothing to do with technology, or are technology companies like microprocessor manufacturers inherently disqualified because their business model is technological as opposed to financialization? Can you only be in "tech" if you live in SV? Or is it just voting for Democrats that makes one a tech worker as opposed to a typical engineer?

Something I kind of like about the hardware side, is that you're forced to keep at least one foot on the ground. Real physics problems are a good source of real business problems because you can't wish them away, and mother nature will tell you if your stuff works or not.

Granted, I'm not rich. I'll never see the kinds of salaries that get thrown around for programmers at the big five.

I've read a lot of the posts here, about the headaches of programming in a modern setting, and the ethical issues spanning a large swath of the "tech" industry. At one time I thought that I'd encourage my kids to get into coding, and I'd still do so, but they are aware of what the culture is like these days, and I'm not sure the money is a big enough attraction for them to jump through the hoops. Also, I can't honestly say that it's career worthy, given the level of attrition and the specter of age discrimination.

One of them is easing her way into coding anyway, because it's fun, and I always guessed that she might have a bent for it. I'm inclined to let her do it as a hobby without pushing her to make a career of it.

I used to be a business consultant and made a career pivot because I got burned out from working 60-80 hours a week and flying 100k+ miles each year. I loved all the projects I worked on, and many of them were very large scope (50m to 300m+ USD) with tremendous impact. I got to work with people in the senior leadership positions at multi billion dollar multinational corporations, and we were understanding their problems and coming up with solutions. It was so much freaking fun.

I barely feel that at my current work, where I'm just working on a CRUD app lol. It is so boring. I don't really care anymore about code juggling, because anyone can figure it out if they have a little dose of motivation. At first it was fun to be a "problem solver", but not like this.

I'm not really that interested in becoming a specialist. I look around at work at some of my colleagues who have years of experience in their specific subset of work, and they only know and care about that thing. These are highly qualified experienced people, but I really don't want to be like that. I like to get a low-level understanding of things I am personally passionate about, and I love learning so I try to get a high to mid level understanding of everything else. I'll fuck with dev ops, database performance, product strategy, marketing, sales, mobile app dev, whatever else that I find interesting.

Being a software engineer at a larger company does not satisfy me one bit, and it really sucks when you realize you're only in it because it is easy money.

I'm working on my own ideas now, and I'm learning as much as I can during this COVID remote time to make it on my own.

When I started my nursing job at the hospital I continued to work with my old company once per week. Now that I'm super busy as a nurse and continuing my nursing education, I fear my old tech job will really end soon. I kinda like it once per week!

I love my new career. I get to work closely with people and help them through tough times. It's very rewarding and my new colleagues appreciate my tech background. I've gotten 2 raises since I started 6 months ago and now make more than my old job working only 3 days per week. The job is not easy, but when I go home, someone else is doing the job so nobody is calling me urgently to get something done.

At the same time, I moved from a small company to a large company. The benefits are good and the perks are complete. Since I started my job as a nurse I have received almost 200 hours of professional development training. Useful classes that apply towards making me better at my job. In my old tech job, I went to an annual trade show and that was about the extent of training.

Anybody else have a job like I did in tech? I had infinite projects to do and unlimited time to do them in. It was weird and not conducive to productivity. Now every day I go to work, I know I will do something important. My patients will be grateful and my employers will support me. Yeah, no regrets here!

For the most part I liked the companies I worked at (which tended to be ~50 people when I joined) and my coworkers. The problems were interesting, though largely not things I was especially passionate about (I spent a couple years making software for call centers, a couple years on enterprise videoconferencing, etc.).

I decided to go my own way for a few reasons. First was financial - I had already started investing in some real estate on the side, and it wasn't a leap to see how much of a financial advantage you can gain from owning and running an operating business vs. being a salaried employee. Second was just that I really like to be in control. Even in a 100% self-owned small business you find that you're not really in control on a lot of things (getting permits from the city for stuff is exhausting, plus you've got a landlord, bank, etc.), but from a day-to-day perspective, I am the one who makes the call on everything.

Last was that it was a good way out of SF. I'm engaged (would've been married in three days... sigh), and I just have no desire to have kids anywhere in the Bay Area. This allowed me to move to San Diego, a place that I love and that is also perfect for this business.

Edit: To answer the last couple parts of the question, no regrets (I mean I guess in theory I would've kept working a steady job and started the business post-pandemic, but I believe all my choices were sound at the time that I made them). Also I still follow HN because I'll always be interested in tech.

I've gone to a number of career counselors. Trying to find something else to do. I have a number of other passions/interests. Just not sure how to turn them into a career? How did other people determine an alternate career to get into?

Well my case is biased of course by my limites experience but that experience really bums me out.

Few reasons why I left:

- Wanted to try something different.

- Incompetent management (Biggest reason), and politics at the workplaces.

- I am not good at expressing my self. Not good at kissing asses. Political correctness and all the stuff/

- Getting old (40)

- Single earner in the bay area with family. I couldn't afford a house in the area that I was living in. I didn't want to drive far for a job. I had the money for a downpayment, but paying $4000-6000 in a mortgage + taxes seems scary. I end up buying a rental property.

- The majority of the family is in the east coast.

So far, no regrets. I am not sure how this COVID-19 will affect the future.

I love writing frontend code (don't like react or other frameworks). Whenever I am bored/feeling down, I write code. I write my own utilities that I needed to get stuff done for my business. I was using JS for theming in one of my 5 years old PWA. Yesterday, I updated to CSS variables.

After all, technology is the future. Not sure any better place then hacker news.

It's all I ever really wanted to do, so yeah, regrets. Feels like I got to the party ten or twenty years too late.

I left to be a pilot. Spending time traveling, watching the aircrews and staring at airplanes taxi up got to me. I put my time in flying small planes and just finished training for my first airline job on Valentine’s Day this year. The work is amazing, and I’m still very solidly in the “I can’t believe they’re paying me for this” phase of my job as I eat breakfast and watch the sunrise from up high.

I’m not sure if I’ll still have this job by next week, much less October. Oh well.

Programming off and on for over 40 years. Left several times. Because nothing is as fucked up as I.T.

Did sales, consulting, several small businesses, and writing. Kept getting sucked back in. Because no one else digs as deep into things as us programmers. Became frustrated because we were always "skimming on the surface" of everything instead of deep diving into the cause instead of the effect. Besides, nothing turns me on more than watching something I built from nothing working for the first time. I haven't found that feeling anywhere else.

What do you do now?

Back into enterprise programming. Should be having a ball, but I'm more miserable than ever because of the total fuckedupness of management. Planning my next one-person business now.

Any regrets?

No. I had choices but picked programming. I often wonder how my life would have been different if I had become a mathematician, teacher, writer, artist, musician, or something else. But every time I talk to friends who went in those directions, I realized they had their own shit to deal with and I followed exactly the right path meant for me.

And how come you still follow HN?

Because my "Delete Programming from my DNA" button returns a stack overflow.

The reason is simply that i realized that i was not as good at problem solving as i thought, i also dont find joy in sitting for hours solving problems.

I used to be passionate when it came to programming, but i realized that the reasons i thought it was fun was mostly because i thought i was better at it than i actually where. I was the only kid in the entire school to program and all that.

But after starting a startup and working with other developers i realized that am pretty crappy at it. I also don't get enough joy to try to become better and on one level i can kinda see where my limit will be.

I always been extremely bad at maths and logic solving, i always had problems with sitting down and being focused on doing something like writing, playing video games or coding. I never will be able to solve problems fast enough to be a productive programmer.

It just is not for me, and its just a burden now when i have to do some coding.

Also other people in tech are just annoying, people who only brag about how smart they are. CEOs who are bullies and try to mimic steve jobs. Managers and other people seen tech as a burden for the company etc etc.

I really want that normal people would be building functions on their computers which today are startups.

If everyone is super, no one is.

Not only was it an awful workplace, but I was capable enough to work alone, and therefore did, so I had no colleagues to build strong comradery with.

We tried to hire myself a senior developer to mentor me and make me happy, but to put it simply, if you were capable of doing that you were simply overqualified for the company in the first place.

Imagine that, hiring your own boss...

Edit: I'm talking about 1 job because thats as many as I got through in this industry. All my applications are custom made, so after a couple dozen with no responses, I've kind of given up and have stopped looking.

I did a Ruby bootcamp 4 years ago at the age of 18, because I always liked computers and hacking around a bit. 4 years later I don't regret doing it, I learned a lot, but I have to motivate myself too much to keep on going with programming.

I find more joy in doing activities where I get to use my hands and body, being active all day. Last year I started working at a bakery which was so much fun and these quarantine days I have been starting repair an old house and painting artworks.

I guess I'll have to find out how to turn that into a living, but it gives me more joy then chasing the money that is in the tech industry. We'll see how it goes!

I have a few questions, if you don't mind.

How did you get started with this? Is investing in real estate something you can do while being a salaried employee or do you need to do it full time? Also, what kind of investments were/are you making?

I'm now ~7 years removed from active development and am finding it increasingly more difficult to find time to make a side project to show off while trying to raise a family. I miss development and keeping up with all the new stuff. It'd be hard for me to take the pay cut to return as a junior dev- so now I feel stuck.

9 years professional experience, four year Computer Science degree, multiple reviews of my resume and cover letter by trusted friends in the industry. Stable work experience where I am not hopping around a bunch. Important position at a successful start-up. Resounding success at every job I've had.

I've been putting my resume out. Radio silence. I have heard NOTHING back from anyone. People don't seem to like my start-up experience.

____

Why I (might) leave if I get back in?

* Infantilization and Micromanagement: Agile is a plague. I hate being micro-managed and forced into meetings all the time. I hate the constant pressure to sacrifice code quality for expedience of release ( when bugs will be much more expensive to detect and fix ). I just want to do my job but anymore that entails being harassed by middle-managers who can't take "no" for an answer when their boss's boss sets an unrealistic deadline.

* The people. I've been saying over and over that one of the best things you can learn in programming is how to lose an argument. I am done with the divas and the control freaks. I am done with the 0 training, three-years of experience clowns that show up and work extra hours ( thus creating an expectation for the rest of the team to work extra hours ), who suddenly know everything and think you are now their bitch ( management loves these people for some reason. Probably because they are cheaper. )

These two things were what I experienced at my last role. Though, I suspect these people exist in other careers as well.

Why do I want back in?

* I have had good jobs before. Jobs where the team is in sync and everyone just wants to do a good job. I think if I can find a team, I can create that environment around myself.

* I have learned a lot of lessons from my previous gigs. I think a layer of indifference is important for a developer job and I am ready to embody that role with kindness and mindfulness. I can deal with the people if I keep them on the other side of the bell jar.

* I love writing code and I am good at it. I even enjoy drudgery like writing a bunch of unit tests or writing documentation.

At the same time I was running an environmentally focused project on the side that I really enjoyed and was starting to take off commercially.

One day I just decided to jump into it full-time.

Now I must stress, I am incredibly fortunate 30 year old, no massive student debts, large mortgages, kids, etc. In some ways, this was one of the biggest contributing factors in the decision. Sure, doing good is nice, but we all need to survive.

The reason I'm posting though, is that the project went full circle, and is now what I brand as a tech company (non-profit) with an environmental focus. I put this down to my background in tech.

Moral of my story (I think), is that most humans all long to do something new and different, but typically head back towards what we are good at. I'm just hoping I don't get bored this time around...

I realized I didn't really want to be a cog in the wheel without human interaction, and I wanted the perspective one gets in medicine to be able to come up with solutions that help people. That evolved while in school to building software/hardware that increased access to medical care, and it's been a cool ride trying to figure out how to actually come up with studies that prove my ideas work (or don't). It's also extremely gratifying to treat patients and make them better, even if it's at the micro scale.

But that's still a drop in the ocean compared to all of the other tech out there!

Literally every system you can think of, both good and bad, had to have someone build it. Systems for managing schools? Someone built those. Systems for managing your local restaurant? Someone built those. Systems for internally managing some niche organization no one's ever heard of? Yep, someone built those too.

Those kinds of things are numerous, and super important.

I always assume that 95% of programmers have some mental disability to do what they do. Nobody with a sane mind can sit in front of a black screen with white text for 8 hours each day solving weird shit.

I started as a CS student and totally sucked at programming, wanted to quit. I finished my Bachelor and started at a StartUp. I totally loved it. I could build things they way I wanted, had a great CTO who helped me along the way.

But of course, you are getting ambitious, so you move on. Next company, higher pay, more complex problems. At some point I switched to freelancing and did 3-6 months gigs for several companies.

Now I taught myself Systems Programming, got a job at a really high paying and interesting company - so it seems.

What I figured out: No matter how high the pay was, the problems were always bigger. I quit a project early despite them paying me 20k a month and I was basically sitting my time up, nobody cared. I couldn't do it.

Now I realize, the ones who are really good at programming have some mental disability which lets them focus on this one thing for hours day in and day out. There is no way you can compete with someone further on the spectrum then you.

Then, what's the point?

You are either wanting to improve, but the better you get, the more challenging the environment. And the problems don't stop. The higher the pay, the more shit you got to eat. That's the whole point.

So you either give up, accept your situation and have a life outside of work, or you switch careers.

My problem is that I just can't seem to find the right company with the right people. Both smart, interesting but also ambitious. You either have super smart introverts who don't want to talk and socilaize, or you have fun people who can't code shit.

I had my first interview at a semi-technical role and boy this was the first time a job interview was fun. People talked, cared about how you present yourself and just didn't want to get as much money out of your mind as possible.

Programming is great, but a too big of a power for smart people not to make use of.

The tech industry nowadays is no longer about solving real-world problems and making the world a better place, instead it's all about screwing the end user in every single way possible, whether it's ads, stalking and privacy violations, spam ("marketing" as they call it) or just plain fraud where the company is happy to take the money but can't make it right if things don't go to plan and the customer is left holding the bag.

Most tech products nowadays aren't there to solve a real problem and aren't funded by customers buying them because they are good; instead they're funded by some VC scum and they're there to capture the market (or rent-seek) and prevent a legitimate business from starting (nobody can compete with free or below cost).

Technology-wise, we no longer use engineering as a means to an end to solve a business problem. Instead, engineering became its own thing and most companies encourage and reward those who opt for over-engineered solutions, which means you spend more time fighting with dozens of layers of abstractions and chasing the latest JS framework instead of actually delivering functionality. This is mostly a symptom of the previous point where showing "growth" and bragging about your (over) engineering is more important than actual profit.

Unfortunately there's just nothing out there that pays as well so I have no choice but to tough it out.

I really don't want to return to tech, because it simply is not my passion. I'm going to try to start an aerospace startup instead, which is my passion. Perfect timing right?

https://stackexchange.com/performance

It highlight the need to be diligent in daily decisions day-by-day. And when working somewhere that's doing something borderline, or totally unethical, working to move it in the right direction. I hope I can be aware enough to create a net benefit. The problem is knowing enough of the consequences of any action to evaluate if it's a net benefit. That's really hard, but I have to believe that toiling away _trying_ to make net positives happen will _actually_ result in net positives happening. Doubting I could ever make net positives happen leads to cynicism and ensures nothing good will come of my work.

(and thank you for bringing up point about benefit systems - that's the next gig for me, I will work to not be part of the problem)

This is a good point and I'm glad we're finally seeing some pushback. I would have a problem working for a company that does unethical things and I was surprised that so many people don't care. And before you tell me that people don't have a choice — perhaps some don't, but that certainly doesn't apply to all the crowd that moves to Silicon Valley to work for Google.

https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.spotify...

And by weird coincidence to this post I've recently been browsing around trying to find any other type of traditional businesses looking for equivalent help. But I've mostly found boutique places that wouldn't have need for a full-time developer.

Any tips on places to look for opening greatly appreciated.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/12/06/where-theres-muck-...

There are plenty of unsolved problems.

An alternative is to look for a problem that has been "solved", but not in a certain niche. For example, inventory control and tracking production seems to be a "solved" problem, but it turned out it wasn't a "solved" problem for small/medium-scale electronics manufacturing, which is the niche I'm in.

I just found out yesterday that AWS Amplify doesn't have a manual deploy button. It's only job is to build and deploy an app and there is nowhere on Amplify itself where you can press a button and kick off a build! Junk like this is everywhere now. It's a golden opportunity for people who know what they're doing.

The functionality delivered by products is not screwing people unless you're talking about surveillence capitalism ala Google et.al. Capitalism and the pricing of goods is how we incentivize people to bring things to market and more importantly how we allocate resources. No one, anywhere, through any scheme has ever replaced the market for performing these functions and thereby driving civilization and invention forwards.

People keep believing they can (socialism/Venezuela), or give up on the project entirely after decades of trying (communism/ China / Russia). Maybe one day someone out there qwill have a genuinely new idea which works. Until then you have a right to feel good about contributing, in whatver little customer support / feature adder / managerial capacity you do, to the forward progress of society generally and the amazing, rocket-like increase in wealth absolutely everyone on this earth is experiencing relative to the past 30,000 years.

I'd much rather have a 40 hour a week job somewhere else, where everyone understands it's a job and you can be your own person at home. It's hard to articulate, and I could write much more about it, but it's almost like the identity you have to don to fit in there feels too all-consuming.

I don't want to pretend I'm changing the world instead of just installing a new social hierarchy run by the meritocratic elite. I don't want to pretend that programming is my only hobby -- I want to do other things than learn new Javascript frameworks at home. I like my nice 3 bedroom house which is just minutes from downtown and is less than 3x my annual income.

It's admittedly an outsider's perspective but the only reason I would go back is to save up money for a few years then go somewhere else.

ACM Code of Ethics: https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

There are incompetent people in every industry. So what.

Hiring is an arcane mystery in every industry where productivity can't be quantified. So what.

I'm not sure I've worked directly with anyone recently who could pass a DOM test like that. Everything is React and and Axios and the browser (and HTTP, TCP, DNS, etc) is a mystery.

Edit: mystery isn't even the right word really, if you mention any of the other layers I've seen people get actually hostile.

My experience in frontend feels like everyone learns ad hoc without digging deep into basics. Overall, I felt if you have aptitude or real passion for the work, you would just get a computer science degree and be attracted to other parts of the stack or other problems to solve.

This obviously doesn't apply to large tech companies which make it a point to hire talent (frontend, backend, whatever).

> Hiring software developers is still somehow an arcane mystery few people can objectively figure out.

This is actually one space where I feel the frontend world shines. Almost every frontend interview question has been very practical.

There is how to get into a data science job, and how to make that switch.

There is how to get into doing data science as a hobby or a skill/experience, and how to make that switch.

There is how did you make the switch to data science. That is, what is your story?

And there is the deeper dive, most people do not consider enough: "Will I like doing data science work?"

My story:

When I was a teen, I wrote a stock market bot that was pretty profitable. That may be a quant researcher job and skillset, but it is a kind of data science too, as data science is a research position, where creating models is part of the job spec, identical to a quant researcher.

So I got into it, out of hobby, not out of taking a class or reading a book, but by being infatuated with the plots I see in the stock market, seeing patterns everywhere. When I'm doing a 9 to 5 I have to put a timer on when I'm looking at plots, or I can easily spend days just taking in information. I just like it, a lot.

In 2010 I applied for a job as a software engineer, passed all the interviews, was going to do another SE gig, and then I was talking to a manager during an interview and I said something like, "With enough time and effort, nothing is impossible. That's what I love about programming." So, he threw a curve ball at me. He said something like, "We have a team of roughly 15 people classifying web sites, labeling if the site is porn, education, business, and so on. There are a little over 60 categories." This team worked on the web filter schools and dmvs all over the country paid a service for, to limit what websites people can go to.

I jumped on it, "I can automate that!" So he started a new team and put me on it. What did I do? I looked up how SEOs work and how Google's search engine worked. Certainly they were classifying websites in one way or another, so it was just a matter of research and figuring it out.

...in the end the project succeeded. What strongly surprised me at the time was how it ended up categorizing websites to a higher degree of accuracy than the people we were paying.

That's the non-business side of data science in a nutshell. It's figuring out how to do something often suspected or assumed to be impossible, and making it possible. It's not just researching how to do something, but using cutting edge research from published papers and often doing the next that no one has figured out yet.

Programming is a tool that automates thoughts. If you can figure it out you can put it into code. If it's a complex enough of a problem you can use ML to automate the writing parts of that algorithm you could write by hand. ML is often thought of as a way to generate a process, that can't be written by hand, and to some extent that is true, but only in the sense that it would take too long to write by hand. Eg, where writing by hand would need an if statement for each of the millions of hypothetical scenarios.

ML is also useful for giving insights. You have a hypothesis -- an idea of how to do a task -- and you run ML over it, and either it solves the problem, or it doesn't, and what it comes up with that is incorrect will always teach you something, so data science is often an iterative loop, where you put some ML in just to see how the data varies from your hypothesis giving better ideas in how to write a better model.

Sometimes someone will say data science is an analyst + software engineer, but that's not quite right. An analyst looks at data, plots it, organizes it, and then reports on their findings about what is to management. A data scientist looks at findings and applies predictive analytics to it, finding solutions to potential problems. Eg, "We'd like you predict future customer churn, and propose solutions that will eliminate this potential future customer churn, before it happens." This is done through identifying or classifying what the causes of customer churn are, then finding solutions to those causes (hypothesis), then writing some software that automatically enacts that solution. Then you can look at if that solution is working, and validate your hypothesis or invalidate and learn more of what is really going on. Hopefully that makes sense.

In summary, if there is a task that other software engineers can't figure out how to do but you can, regardless if you're using ML or not, it may be data science. (Keep in mind, software engineers can use ML, so while data scientists often use ML, ML is not data science.) The path from software engineering to data science is usually just that, taking what is deemed impossible by those around you and making it possible.

How to get into DS as a career: As a software engineer, your best bet is to transfer internally. It's rare for a company to higher a fresh data scientist who previously was a software engineer. Data scientists can help all companies, from startups to large companies, so you don't have to be at the "right" company to switch, you just have to find a problem that could benefit the company, advertise your hypothetical solution to management, and start doing it. Data scientists are the ones finding projects to benefit the company, and doing it. They're usually not being given projects from management like software engineers are, though ofc they can be given projects too. Keep in mind: I'm a lead data scientist, and my first data science roll I ended up leading a data science team, so my views are biased towards my own experience.

Most of the enterprise sales cycles I have worked under go from 3 months to a year anyway, and the implementation time might take 8 weeks to a year+ - so drive by spamming doesnt really get results.

(Payroll, Commercial Real Estate)

Who says that? It's so backwards from everything I'm accustomed to in the bay area. (In the bay area I've done 10 years of data science and 5 years as a software engineer before that.) Maybe it's because I didn't go to universities out here and it's university culture? People at MIT can get very passionate about their projects.

I've had companies (many of them) advertise to me saying I should join them because they have a healthy 9 to 5 work culture. But what company doesn't? Maybe a young startup, but you sign up for that at that point.

Everyone I know who regularly works more than 40 hours a week (who isn't a CEO) is almost always because their boss asks for X quantity load of work done, which might be 50 hours of work, so they do the 50 hours instead of communicating they can't do that much within 40 hours. Sometimes it's because they're a junior and are afraid of not fitting in and are afraid of getting fired, but sometimes it's a senior who has their tech down, but not their communication skills down. It happens, and it's sad to see, because it almost always leads to burn out on their end. It's not a good thing.

I love what I do, but I do 40 hours a week. Want more? It better be a rare event (crunch times are a real thing in some industries) or you need to be paying me more, and I'm not cheap.

>So the solution for people like me is to pretend to be someone like you, who loves programming above all other things, and it's mildly exhausting.

I love programming, but it's just a tool. It's like saying you love hammering. It doesn't make a lot of sense when you take a step back. What I love is the projects I do. You mentioned hacking your tread mill, so it sounds like you do more tech hobby stuff after hours than most software engineers.

Frankly, I rarely do projects outside of work, despite loving what I do. Why? Because companies give me inspiration to do specific tasks that I love. Without working I have a hard time finding things to do. If I could find infinite things to do, I'd be a CEO, providing things for everyone else to do. The only people who truly don't turn off, end up being CEOs, not software engineers. (Unless they don't know how to capitalize, or some other edge case, of course.) So it's unrealistic to believe you have to be doing non-work tech to work in tech. That's just absurd.

Also, I can't say from country to country, but within the US software engineer culture, while it varies from company to company and team to team, is generally somewhat similar across the country. On the NYC side, working more than 40 hours a week is common (eg, quant work), where on the bay area side only working 40 hours a week and turning off (unless you're at a startup) is common.

Is it possible this has to do with too small of a sample size? It's easy to stereotype. We naturally do it unless we learn otherwise, sometimes through learning statistics, sometimes through other routes.

Ycombinator comes from Stanford which centers around creating CEOs, creating most of the companies in the bay area. Most non-yc bay area companies still have Stanford at its roots. I don't have a direct data point, but almost every company I've interviewed for in the last 10 years and have worked with, their CEO or CTO or some other c-suite "club" is strongly tied to Stanford and from that directly or indirectly tied to YC.

The NCO Creed, however, absolutely is a code of ethics.

Fair enough. :) I've experienced a similar issue with interview questions where they often floundered on the question because they hadn't ever spent time digging under the surface. For example, I notice that a lot of (typically junior) developers seem to only think of JSON as a representation for hierarchical objects but never really spent time thinking about the typed-ness of its keys/values or the limits of what JSON can actually represent. An interview is a bad time to be confronted with that realization.

I cannot remember if I specifically mentioned refreshing on the DOM methods or not.

Well, it was a long time ago, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and just talk about what I've experienced. I go back and forth about how specific I should be about the type of questions I might ask. On the one hand, it seems kind of foundational that someone writing web frontends is aware of the DOM and how it works, even if they never directly interact with it. On the other hand, I think questions need to control as much as possible for the "preparation" factor because some people simply interview better or have more time to study.

It doesn't seem too crazy to me today that a competent FE dev these days might have spent their whole career in React, and therefore they don't really have a strong grasp on the DOM. If you had asked when I first started doing web FE development, that would have been crazy! But frameworks got a lot better and a lot more comprehensive since then.

I recently had an interesting experience asking a question involving dealing with UTF-8 encoding. I figured "everyone knows about UTF-8 right?" I retired the question pretty quickly once I realized that bit manipulation is not actually something you have to be even remotely familiar with in order to be a functional developer today in the vast majority of programming tasks, and therefore it wasn't even a good fizzbuzz-type test.

Nowhere near as many headaches as juggling all the moving parts in the Javascript web app ecosystem, which I'm doing for work right now (currently stuck on something right now).

This is a great quote, I'm going to steal this from you!

I had a go at our manager recently after letting two people do our tech test then say they were too inexperienced. We could have worked that out before wasting their time.

it's kinda depressing in a way, because coding was at first, something that pulled me out of the slump i was in due to a shitty upbringing. i really like writing code, but the industry sure does know how to suck all the fun out of it.

I have some bad news for you. As you become a more senior developer you will spend most of your time interacting with people, and a lot less time just "sitting and thinking".

Depends on the job. There are employers who recognize the value of somebody who has broad experience, and who can/will do things that are necessary but not fun. There are also employers who only measure hands-on-coding skills, and/or who insist that everyone should be on a "growth path" even if they're already at a higher level than most will reach. Good people don't have to worry at the first kind, and very much have to worry at the second.

In case anyone is curious, I've been able to live well on about $6000-8000 a year. I certainly eat like a king, since fruits and vegetables are amazingly cheap here. Otherwise my hobbies are inexpensive, e.g. exercise and sports, writing software for personal projects, making digital art, etc.

It's not for everyone, but I would have really struggled on a more conventional path. It's been my experience that working for someone else is really degrading, although I'm sure some companies are better than others.

I consider myself extremely lucky, as most of my neighbors here lead very difficult lives. In the poorer half of the world, life is extremely brutal and arduous for most people. It's very sad and I've seen things here that are shocking and appalling (and I am not faint of heart, after spending many years "hustling" in the US). The behavior of other expats here also leaves something to be desired, although at least it's not as bad as Thailand...

Again the deadlines and lack of planning ahead bites. Look we just need this little feature now, it can't take long? And again, and again. You never get enough time to take a step back and re-evaluate design decisions (or, God forbid, plan ahead and do it right in the first place) and fix what wasn't done right. No, it's always this little feature that needs to be quickly hacked in, another branch, another special case, how it interacts with other past or future special cases is anyone's guess, and the code base that was already full of hastily hacked together barely-functional crap grows more and more poorly thought out crap. Tests? What tests? No tests, so if you dare go back and try quickly fix some poor design.. well, someone is eventually hopefully going to find out what you broke and give you a completely uninformative bug report. Updates? Well there's no ticket for that. And besides, something might break, because there are no tests. There's no ticket for tests.

Sometimes you might even wish that the whole thing would be discarded and done from scratch..

Well, the state of New Jersey is looking for programmers to update COBOL programs that were written 50 years ago, so you might be underestimating the sheer power of inertia in software development...

It's the same with how a lot of tech folks idolize farming. In reality it's a tough job with long hours and cold weather.

Short-terms gains at the expense of long-term losses is a fact that has to controlled by the board of directors and the ridiculous salaries of CEOs has to be stopped. A rule must be put in place that the shares they gain cannot be used during their tenure and only used 2-5 yrs after leaving the post.

Founders bring in an MBA to run the company is like parents bringing in a Consultant to raise the children. You can never expect anyone else to care of the kids as much as their own parents.

I think that Google lost its way due to Eric Schmidt. Considering that [Page was forced out in 2001](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page#Changes_in_manageme...), he was away too long and Eric did his MBA-shit and screwed up the company. Page should have returned as CEO in 5 years instead of 10 yrs, it was too late by then. Now Google is Evil.

I feel that if someone like Page was leading Google and all the tech giants where lead by nerds like Satya Nadella & Sundar Pichai. PRISM & attack on encryption would not have been too strong. We need more founders like Elon Musk & Jack Dorsey. I hope someone like Sergey Brin advices the WhiteHouse on tech-business while Steve Woz or Richard Stallman advices on tech-ethics.

Mark Zuckerberg is a disaster, so is Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison & all Steve-Jobs-like creatures.

Video: "McDonnell Douglas had used Boeing's money to buy Boeing" - https://youtu.be/EESYomdoeCs?t=468

Had a coworker say to a client, "I could explain it you but you're not smart enough to understand it."

Absolutly ridiculous and toxic individual.

I am too old to hang out with negative people, also too old for people who are only interested in making money. So I searching for a new tribe, I think outdoors people are the happiest bunch. I just don't know what can I do.

I always laugh whenever TechCrunch or someone runs a story about some hot shot university winning a programming competition because they implemented an algorithm the fastest or created yet another new app.

When in the real world, most programming jobs are making changes to a really large code base trying your hardest not to break other things. Not nearly as glamorous.

As long as you understand digital logic well enough you'll be able to grasp the concepts. Having more formal education helps but is one of those fields that isn't strictly necessary unless you're working in a specialized sector. My personal take is that Software is still playing catch-up in this domain to the rest of the world but its coming. Up until the last 5 or 10 years the software was mostly just running the facilities but now integration to the business environments is becoming a bigger and bigger requirements of my clients.

I've mostly become hands off on the PLC/SCADA systems at my company now because the requirement for software utilities to function within the control system for data collection, trending, reporting, etc. has become so so much bigger. I have clients that want to use OCR to track shipping containers throughout their yard, clients who want me to integrate their invoicing systems to the operations so staff can see the scheduled daily loads coming, designing unmanned kiosks for customers to key through when coming to site and a whole lot more things.

The programming languages are all defined in IEC 61131-3, and you can more or less use them interchangeably. You can use structured text for (clunky) text-based programming, ladder logic if you want to feel like an electrician in the 70s, or functional block diagrams if you like flowcharts. They each have pros and cons, and being able to use the different languages (with different paradigms) in a single application is one of the more interesting things about PLC programming. There are probably good textbooks for this, but I don't know of any.

PLC programs execute in a constant loop (scan inputs, execute program, set outputs), so basic programming problems (e.g. delaying execution of some function) often require some re-thinking on PLCs. Having a basic understanding of how a PLC actually executes your code is pretty critical. Again, there are probably textbooks for this, but if you buy a physical PLC, its datasheet might also explain this.

You'll need to connect the PLC to some hardware for it to do anything meaningful, so having a basic knowledge of electronics would be useful. If it's just a hobby, you probably wouldn't need to know any more than you would if you were working with an Arduino.

There aren't that many major PLC vendors, so to get started, you could by an entry-level PLC from one of the big players (e.g. Allen-Bradley Micro800 series). Admittedly, I haven't looked at PLC options in 5+ years so there might be better options these days. Unfortunately, PLCs are pretty pricey, and even a small one will probably set you back a few hundred bucks. There are probably simulators available if you're just curious about PLC programming languages, but I don't have any experience there.

Right now I'm trying to hack my treadmill with an Arduino unit so I can control it with software, and I'm learning a ton. Plus it's not a huge investment.

The guy who got me my job was a MS CS, my employer sought him out because they needed a guy for internal software projects. I did a hackathon with him and he hired me as his replacement when he moved to the gaming industry.

My degree is Software Systems Engineering, most of my coworkers are Electrical Engineers or some form of Electrical Diploma.

As long as you have a decent foundation in Networking and Digital Logic you'll be perfectly suited to program PLC/SCADA...

Edit: System integrators as sibling says, I second that!