Ask HN: Do You Enjoy Your Career in Tech Nowadays?

I do still enjoy it, but only because I'm so deep into it that I don't need to work all the time, and can pick and choose exactly who I work for, work with, and what tech I work on. If I were younger and less established, I would be seriously looking elsewhere.

I’ve got 15+ years in industry and still working full time plus routine consulting on the side.

The grass is always greener so I absolutely fantasize about doing much anything else. I also wonder if I can keep on until retirement or if I should seek an exit while I have good finances.

As a Senior+ I’m constantly in battle with god awful leadership. So that sucks, a lot, it’s not what I’m here to do. I’m here to build good software. I’m also here to mentor, that’s fun, but without good leadership it’s pissing into the wind. Also, if you’re not a FAANG type you get capped pretty quick salary wise. While most folks would kill for a 160k salary and benefits the hedonic treadmill is something of a reality and inflation is also cruel.

Still, I get paid to work in flip flops and a t-shirt from my house. Set my own hours (mostly) and do something adjacent to what I love. So it is what it is.

Other than it brings food to the table and pays back debts, no.

I would rather losing sleep hacking ancient Linux kernel with the help of ChatGPT, knowing that exactly one person is going to use what I code.

I enjoy development as much as ever. However, the industry has changed and is behaving in ways that I find highly ethically objectionable. I have come to think that, on the whole, our industry is doing much more harm than good to people and the world at large. I cannot support that, so I'm absolutely exiting.

> After a few conversations with seniors, several of them feel jaded and are looking for an exit from this industry altogether.

Why? This is the best time to be in this industry.

Never been a better time to join.

I (36) feel simultaneously as old and as young as I've felt since being an actual fresh grad / student.

Old because I can see behind the curtain now. Things feel different than they did when I first started working in tech around 2006-2008. So much of the fixation on recurring revenue, rent-seeking, optimization at all costs, dark patterns, manufactured addiction... I watched the industry as it slowly stumbled into these ideas, leaned in, and ultimately perfected them. But when I read accounts from people older than I am, they all have their version of this comment. The early days of the PC era and browser wars had no shortage of dark shit. It's not like corporate fuckery wasn't rampant in the 80s or 90s. I was just too young and dumb and optimistic to understand most of it. I've gotten much more cynical in the last ~15 years.

I feel young because AI tech actually feels new and promising and exciting in ways I haven't seen since the dawn of mobile and web2.0. There's suddenly this vast new surface area for innovation, a bleak geopolitical landscape, and a palpable rush to create. 2008-2012ish kinda sucked, economically. The fallout from GWOT + GFC, OWS, snowden leaks, etc. The nerdosphere had this collective feeling that the jaws were tightening around us. And yet the technology was moving so fast, was enabling whole new ways of interacting between people and machines. You could tell that the future was going to be completely wild, but it was early enough that it had to be built, and there was a frenzy of excitement, like we'd just been set loose across the louisiana purchase to figure out what was possible in a whole new kind of environment.

It was an oasis. A refuge from everything else that felt broken in every other part of the world. You could just duck down and build shit nobody had ever seen before in a week, and people would take it seriously because there was this shared understanding that nobody knew what the new rules were yet, and the next big idea might come from anyone.

It feels like the best time in a long time for technologists who thrive on curiosity, optimism, and inventiveness. We've finally got a gold rush for experimental tinkerers! Crypto is just grift tech, NFTs were transparently stupid, AR/VR has mostly felt like a gimmick, etc. AI is already so useful, and it's only the beginning.

The market's delusional, the US government is horrific, megacorps are squeezing every drop out of anyone they can stuff in their mouth... but did anyone really think we had a future where that doesn't happen? That snowball's been rolling since long before I was born. I'm just stoked at the chance to get to experience technology as magic again for a little while along the way. Maybe that's a cope. Or escapism. IDK, fuck it. So far, it's nice. The bad shit I've been expecting for many years. The good shit surprised me.