[idoby]

Shit, are you me?

You're just being over 30, welcome. Those documentaries you watched on your old CRT TV while growing up were showing you fiction.

The tech industry is an ad mill. Academia is about innovation killing fiefdoms. What you need to realize is that for an institution, the first priority is maintaining homeostasis, and that means not letting you do something that might risk resources or upsetting the established order.

There's a reason why the hackers on TV were called rebels. They founded new institutions because the incumbents wouldn't let them play.

You want the hacker ethos? Make it yourself, that's what it's about.

[gcheong]

"Those documentaries you watched on your old CRT TV while growing up were showing you fiction."

Ironically perhaps a truer picture of the industry was probably the fiction series "Halt and Catch Fire".

[godzillabrennus]

Yeah, start your one thing. I’ve never worked a W2 job and I’ve been able to work on interesting problems my entire career.

[mindentropy]

Curious, what type of interesting problems did you work on?

[godzillabrennus]

Inventing a novel approach to telephony timing issues when voip was new.

Working in countless industries.

Inventing asynchronous technology for an industry specific use case.

Using amalgamation of existing technologies to resolve industry specific issues.

Loads of others.

If you are young and healthy without crushing debt. Don’t go looking for a job. Go find an adventure.

[mindentropy]

> If you are young and healthy without crushing debt. Don’t go looking for a job. Go find an adventure.

I am looking exactly for adventure. I was in a consulting company where I was solving such problems. Now I am in a large product company where the bureaucracy is becoming unbearable. It is also more about where you are presently to get opportunities. I am in a country where the scope is limited.

What kind of expectations did these companies have when they interviewed you? Did they expect you to have experience in the domain or samples of previous work etc?

[idoby]

What's W2?

[kube-system]

There are two worker classifications in the US which refer to the tax forms they get:

"W2": An employee. A regular job.

"1099": Independent contractor, freelancer.

[mywittyname]

To expand on this, the differences come down to taxation. There are taxes in the use called FICA that are half-paid for by the employer for W2 workers and not covered for 1099 employees. Also 1099 workers are able to deduct business-related expenses from their income ta.

[one2know]

The most important distinction is clients large and small will try to rip off 1099 workers. The state labor office will not help 1099 workers. They must hire lawyers sometimes to get payment.

[leereeves]

W2 is the form on which wages are reported to the IRS (American tax collectors) by an employer.

[ranc1d]

basically means working as a contractor in the US

[jacknews]

lol, metoo

To some extent it's always been this way, but I think a combination of extreme financialization, globalization, and practices like scrum (which means well, I think, but is often used as a cudgel to 'inspect' developer performance) have made average developer life even less pleasant in the last decade.

[cybwraith]

I think a huge part of it is the move from desktop apps as a sold product, to disposable web/web-wrapped apps. This happened mostly over the past 10-15 years and while I'm older than OP, I noticed a similar drop in quality of life for programmers with certain values and motivations during this time. Scrum-style and "agile-in-name" processes really hammer it home and are practically designed to create burnout.

I would suggest getting into development for embedded systems. The jobs don't seem as numerous as in VC-fueled web/app start-up style development, but when your product is expected to function without the ability to update its firmware/software near-instantaneously as modern webapps do, I think it changes the style of development cycle pretty dramatically.

[enraged_camel]

Yep. It's worth noting that, had Wozniak stayed in his safe job at HP, he would never have become a legend.

[flanker]

> Shit, are you me?

That's what I said, I suppose there are lots of people in their early 30's having a dilemma. I'm also struggling with something similar, but I recognise I have much to attain in level of expertise but do I want to do that? Is another question.

[y-c-o-m-b]

> I suppose there are lots of people in their early 30's having a dilemma

I'm approaching my 40s and I've had this dilemma since I was 25. I used to strive for being a top performer despite my hatred for working in this industry. I accelerated through the lower ranks and significantly increased my salary, but my happiness plateaued very early on. Over the last few years I've learned to lay low and give just enough to not get fired. I couldn't care less about the company or my work, I just want to clock out at the 8 hour mark - and not a minute later - then go work in my garden. I found this to be the optimal balance between financial security and my happiness.

If you've ever read "The Gervais Principle" - https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... - you can classify me as a "Loser" on that spectrum.

[flanker]

>The Gervais Principle

I cannot thank enough for the article, absolutely nailed it. I have seen & been part of a startup growing from a mid stage to a unicorn and now after reading it I can connect the dots, it all make sense in such exhilarating way. My journey till now has been from over performing looser to a looser which is not bad. I'm seeing a pattern though, every 8-9 month I over-perform become a looser then get completely disillusioned and go off to a backpacking retreat. This worries me a bit now.