[solardev]

I've also gone in and out of software dev (don't really consider myself an engineer), with gaps of several years or longer in between. I did it part time for half a decade, full time for about a decade, and I'm back to part time now.

Other jobs in between were both enjoyable in and of themselves, but also made me see dev work in a different light. Namely, that it's super cushy but pretty soulless, lol. Definitely not for everyone, and not at every stage of their lives either. I would be happy to give up the cush for more meaning and fulfillment. Whether you would is up to you to find out!

A lot of dev work is becoming less relevant now too, now that the ad bubbles have burst, countries are cracking down on privacy, Skynet is just around the corner, etc. Maybe it's a good thing you have other skills!

If I were you, I'd use your youth not to fret about the past but to explore different options for the future. You're barely getting started. It's OK to try different things until you find one you like, do that for a bit, and then switch. My mom was an English major who switched careers four or five times, becoming happier each time. My dad was an engineer (civil/electrical) who had one job his entire career, and he was the most one-dimensional and unhappy person I ever knew, at least until he retired. Different life paths and outcomes.

Your CS degree wasn't wasted. You still have a bachelor's, which is more than most people can say. You learned enough to work on the field, but maybe didn't want to stay there forever. It's okay. Even if you do want to go back, it's like riding a bike, you just remember and pick it back up again. Sure, the frameworks and languages might change, and the person next to you might be a killer robot, but the underlying principles are probably still similar.

Your real job isn't coding, it's figuring out what would make you happy, fulfilled, and financially sustainable enough for the next few decades... but a few years at a time, typically, not all at once.

[Gooblebrai]

Would you mind to expand on what do you mean by soulless?

[gymbeaux]

When I was still in college I got an internship at a local startup. One day, the other SWE and I went to lunch with a former coworker of the other SWE, and he told a story about how he worked on a team for YEARS that ended up not creating anything of value. I forget if the software just wasn’t needed in the end or what, but I remember thinking “damn, that must be really rare”… fast forward 8 years, I’ve now been on a similar team. The job was lax as fuck, like I worked maybe 8 hours A WEEK, but it was still somehow soul-crushing. What little work I did do, I knew it was garbage and wouldn’t live to see production use. The team was laid off a few months ago and I assume the code is in the garbage. Somehow I wish I worked even less than I did.

[diarrhea]

Not GP, but I understand soulless as without meaningful human interaction. Developers are generally and purposely shielded from end users. A lot of interaction is not in person, but in video calls, chats, email, internet forums like HN itself. It’s all very sterile.

I’ve never shaken a happy customer’s hand, (nor been yelled at in person for that matter), for example. It’s not a thing many developers experience regularly.

I like to think of health workers as a strongly contrasting occupation. Much higher highs, much lower lows. Certainly anything but sterile. Certainly not soulless!

[screwturner68]

Yep, I moved from Dev to ops many years ago simply because I wanted to talk to someone..anyone. I've been in consulting for the last 20 years and I talk to customers good or bad almost every day and I do get a kick out of it when they are stoked with my work. The funny thing is as I'm getting older and working with more complex and closer to alpha products I find myself writing code to make my life easier, funny how that works. As far as the industry as a whole, I wouldn't recommend it to my kid I think it's dying or at least dying in the US.

[solardev]

Sure, but this is just my opinion.

Part of it is what diarrhea said in a sibling response: Having minimal meaningful human interaction. Scrum meetings with your owners and such don't really count. If anything, those are worse than not having social interactions, lol. We're cloistered plumbers working in the dark crevices of systems most people don't want to touch or know about, and it's pretty much always a conversation killer to tell regular people outside of tech bubbles that you're a programmer.

But more than that, often our work is itself devoid of purpose or meaning. We make ad tech and crypto and marketing pages for these big soulless corporations that only enrich a few shareholders, often at the expense of everyone else and sometimes society and democracy itself. I don't think Meta, Twitter, etc. are a net good for humanity. Maaaaaybe Netflix and Google are arguably less evil to some degree, but even that's debatable. And that's just the products and services they make, not even counting the knock-on effects of tech bubbles killing livability across the USA, for example.

My first tech experience was as an intern, and the anti-spam startup I worked for in the early 2000s decided to sell their tech to the Chinese government to censor dissidents instead. I noped the heck out of there and tried to stay away from evil tech since then, instead working for small solar businesses and nonprofits. But even then, I'm under no illusion that I'm any sort of rebel, rather, just someone living on the fringes and feeding off the leftovers. All my work is still directly developed by Google (Analytics, GCP, etc.), Meta (React and FB ads), AWS, etc. -- the same companies that make their billions exploiting people.

At the end of the day I think it's just run-of-the-mill capitalism, not that dissimilar from bankers, railroad barons, newspaper owners, mine owners, whatever... profit-driven and rent-seeking overlords that always put their own interests ahead of society's.

It's a very different world than people who work in civil service, or as a professor or a rural teacher, or a nurse, or a dentist, or even a civil engineering, etc.

Not only is it often a lonely and asocial job, it's also often an anti-social job that actively makes society worse in order to enrich a few people.

I know it's not a popular opinion since this is a community of startup entrepreneurs, after all, but it's the hacker side of things that interested me at first. Big tech killed little tech, and I think it's also making our lives worse, offering more convenience at the expense of community. I often miss the pre-smartphone, pre-Amazon era when you'd still have to go out and interact with people and get to know them, instead of just WFH and getting everything delivered, for example. I often yearn of moving to less capitalist societies whose cities and towns are more walkable, more local, and generally more intimate.

After twenty years of doing dev work, I feel like my impact on the world has been exactly zero, or maybe slightly negative, lol, and I can't wait to find another career. (Working on going back to school).

But again, that's just me. Maybe someone like Sam Altman can look back in two decades and think "wow, we really changed the future of humanity for the better, huh?" Or not. We'll see, lol.

[gymbeaux]

Software engineering today reminds me of how the 80s were with stock trading. Lots of money getting thrown around and blown on stupid shit, and then seemingly overnight the credit crisis tightens belts and computers make the trading floors of NYSE and others obsolete. They were getting paid stupid amounts of money because the work they did was making someone higher up EVEN STUPIDER amounts of money. Just like the tech industry today. Google SWEs make $300k/year because the CEO is making some comparable-to-their-level multiple of that. In this case, the shareholders are paying the SWEs through stock options because they speculate Google shares will appreciate even more. History will probably reward those who sold their GOOG when it vested.

[solardev]

Exactly

[bomewish]

Fascinating re the Chinese govt thing. Can you talk more about that? What dissidents? Did they buy the software? Did you find out any of this stuff?

[solardev]

TLDR they developed a server-side spam classification tool and tried to sell it to US ISPs but couldn't find buyers. Eventually someone from China reached out and told them the government might be interested. The founder was really excited about the prospect and told us about it. I was really upset with him and resigned the next day. Don't know what happened after that =/ The company is no more, though was apparently involved in a series of investor scandals for several years after I left. It's not clear to me if China ever actually bought it. Doesn't seem to be in the public record, at least.

----------

Here's the longer narrative, if you really want more details. This was nearly 20 years ago, so my memory is foggy, but...

The technology was essentially bulk message classification at the ISP/mail server level (though could be adapted to SMS carriers), clustering together similar messages through several statistical techniques, like looking for similarities in the message bodies and headers. They filed a bunch of patents and was making a MVP to try to sell the tech directly to ISPs.

A couple years in, they weren't getting any bites -- this was also right around the time Gmail first came out and really "disrupted" the email space, so poor timing -- and I think the investors were getting concerned.

I remember one morning, we were standing outside in the garden (our office was just a repurposed residential home in a suburb of Los Angeles). It was a beautiful day and one of the founders had good news to share about a possible sales lead. He was glowing with excitement and mentioned that some of his contacts in China had expressed interest in the technology, on behalf of the government there. This was around the time the Great Firewall was being developed, so maybe that was part of the draw (my speculation).

I blinked, surprised. Up to that moment, the founder seemed like a perfectly normal, bright, wizened old sys-admin type geek. Imagine Richard Stallman, but in a business suit. I looked up to him. It was hard to reconcile the idea that man I had worked for the last couple years, who treated us all well and always had a smile and a joke handy, was about to sell us all out.

My (flawed) recollection of the convo:

"Wait, what? You're... you're going to sell the technology to China? Not to an email provider there, but the government itself...?"

"Yeah! This tech could easily scale up to millions, hundreds of millions of users. It's exactly what they're looking for. I was thinking too small before. Why sell to one ISP at a time when an entire government of a billion people could use it?"

"But... but you know they're just going to use it to monitor and block their citizens, right?!"

I think that caught him a bit off-guard, maybe even slightly offended. "Well, yeah, maybe. But if we don't do it, someone else will. We're just selling tools. We can't control how they use it."

It was a major WTF moment for me. "No, how could you, as an American, purposely contribute to something like this?! Don't you care about human rights at ALL? You have two kids of your own at home, growing up under the protection of a liberal democracy. There are kids in China who will never know what that's like, and you are actively subverting their future. What will you tell your kids when they grow up? That Dad sold out his entire company and all his morals to the first convenient buyer? This is not ok." I was like 21 then, pretty naive and idealistic, and this was my first real professional confrontation with a higher-up (who's also the CEO).

I don't remember what he said in response. I walked away, fuming, and resigned the next morning. Disillusioned, I unfortunately stopped keeping track of the company's affairs, and I don't know if China ever actually bought it.

Looking up the company twenty years later, they've apparently abandoned all their patents, and pissed off a bunch of investors who felt misled. The website is no more. Probably it was just another failed dot-com startup, unless they went to great lengths to hide their sales to China, but that seems too conspiratorial.

Shrug. As an older adult, I don't think too much of this incident any longer. It's probably par for the course for US tech businesses wanting to do business in China. Some sell out, others pull out, but in the end they all have their price, and they all choose their battles. But 21 year old me wasn't OK with that (I still wouldn't be), and left what was otherwise a really great internship. The people there treated me well, I learned a lot and had a ton of fun with them. I want to believe that the whole thing was just a dumb misguided idea from a desperate CEO, needing the money after several failed sales leads, and not some elaborate ploy to develop censoring tech specifically for China. I dunno. These days, censoring tech is everywhere, both in the East and the West, and technologies like this probably aren't that special anymore anyway.

That's all...

[bomewish]

Thanks man. Read it all with great interest. I think you made the right call. I’ve heard similar cases to this.