[BatFastard]

Seems like some people are missing the point. He loved it when people enjoyed tech for the pure "creation" and "exploration" aspect. Not the money money money that it has often become. I also disagree with him on this point. I see a huge amount of new ideas and work from people who just like to create, but it tends to be at a more grass roots level like the Arduino community, or the hackerspace groups. So I say to him "Your love not only still exists, it has grown to encompass the whole world". Just don't look for it in Silicon Valley.

[fat0wl]

i went on a rant about this stuff in a recent comment asking about Tech Bootcamps that i deleted half of cuz i knew it would just piss ppl off & was a waste of breath (all other comments were pretty much from ppl who lOoooOooOove 'em, half commenters had vested interest).

but yeah tech bootcamps, consultant scammers, open source hipsters.... i see this stuff is rampant & it seems to be a downer in cyberspace. I code because its a passion, got a web dev job because one was offered & am desperately trying to get out of it so i can get some of the bloody CRUD out of my eyes (though thankfully I'm in Java web services which is much more expansive/rewarding than previous web technologies i've used).

my coworkers complain that no one will throw raises/promotions at them. I look around & think "Why would you want to continue down this path? You're making well above a living wage and you claim to hate being in such a dispassionate workplace, why not just look for something more rewarding?" The response is always some utter bollocks about wanting to have a house so that when their parents visit they can have a nice place to spend time (for the sake of those 3 days/year, a major lifestyle choice is made).

These ppl are pure scum and I see completely unqualified devs with this mindset making more money than myself & other much more intellectual programmers (the high rate guys are generally migrant consultants who blow with the wind). Then I see bootcamp classes advertised to overpriveleged failure-to-launch types, teaching them to be just as scummy/desperate.

There is a joy to coding as there is to other creative disciplines, but the market doesn't encourage it so you need to look elsewhere. It's true that its there, but I bet it was much more prevalent in the cowboy days when the whole industry was a hacker movement. I also bet it was more difficult to sort things out when you couldn't just Google easily for the trending libs, so I suspect the concentration of pseudo-intellectuals was much lower.

And in fact the venom I have against tech bootcamps is that the greatest takeaway I have from years of programming is the ability to self-educate. If I didn't gain this wonderful skill, I would not want to be in this industry at all. Programming without the ability to go above & beyond is a recipe for a dead-end job.

[fat0wl]

if you downvoted this can you please explain why? I am actually desperate for reasons not to be so cynical about my job so i can at least scrape something out of my days until i find a better place...

I wish I had a sunnier view of things but I am someone who wants to work hard but feels like an ant on an ant farm. ppl have advised me to go into startup scene but all the startups i've interviewed at in NY are mock corporations -- ad delivery, ad multimedia, analytics, facebook ripoff.... bleh. where to go?

[logfromblammo]

Consider revising your writing style to be more formal and less conversational. Make an attempt to use punctuation where appropriate, especially with respect to commas and capitalization.

Grammar errors will impact a reader's perception of you, regardless of whether your original intent had true merit or not. Your goal should be to communicate exactly the ideas you wish you convey, as concisely as possible.

Natural language is the transfer protocol for ideas between humans. If you do not adhere to the published standards, you risk experiencing data loss in strict clients.

[fat0wl]

lol that is too true.... i don't mind conversational hippie-styling but HN is the one forum where i get regularly shredded for it

[scrollaway]

I have a casual and uncaring writing style in many places, but HN is not one of them. This is a place where I enjoy writing properly and reading properly-written comments, mostly because it forces commenters to put some thought into what they write.

When you're here, you know that the majority of comments will have something insightful to add to the discussion and you do not feel like you're wasting your time reading them.

Don't hate on this mindset. It's not appropriate everywhere, but it's not just a hippie concept, it has merits here.

[bjelkeman-again]

I didn't downvote, but maybe it was the tone. "These ppl are pure scum" qualifies for me for others than some devs with other motivations than what I have.

There are definitely good jobs which one can be passionate about out there. I didn't easily find that job myself when I was sick of my job and ended up creating it instead. This industry offers so much potential that I feel it is nearly only a matter of looking around to see what needs to be done. Not a given one will be successful, but doing ok so far. Done give up, look around yourself, the good stuff is out there.

[fat0wl]

thanks... I think the reason I get a bit heated is because I come from an arts background actually. There are a lot of slippery slopes in industry, and now I am on one. It disgusts me when I see that my peers are just tumbling over one another to reach the bottom first, just to put another $5/hr on their rate whereas I used to work with people who didn't care if they spent their whole careers as penniless musicians so long as they got to experience the feeling of genuine pursuit of passion. I see a lot of devs implementing a mess of seriously nasty sweat-shop code with tools/langs they only embraced because of some perceived gap in the market. It seems unethical to me as a developer to do things in an inefficient manner, or its at least sad in that it means you have no sense of personal efficacy or investment in your own growth (beyond how a corporation views you).

A lot of tech feels like a very spiritually empty game, and I resent it for becoming this gruesome when really programming can be a beautiful pursuit as well. I'm trying to be patient, there is a company that has expressed interest in me that is much more into embracing proper design paradigms and modern approaches at least. At my current gig we are handcuffed by lots of legacy code, layers of bureaucracy, "Senior Devs & Architects" who are really at about junior level, and people who are difficult just for the sake of slowing down the pace of work.

Even in academia, I saw a lot of music tech students receive their masters degrees only to promptly jump into a tech bootcamp so they could then assume the position of low-end web dev rather than use any of the audio research skills they spent years trying to assimilate (bit of pot calling the kettle black here but I purposely ditched Ruby for a Java-based job so that I can get back into coding DSP & performance-intensive research apps -- I also spend a lot of time decompiling audio libs).

Living with this job for 2 years has been maddening & I am relieved that I have enough on my post-academia resume now to escape it one of these days. I really need to meet artists who code. Have even been considering going into indie game programming just to meet more of those types, though really my passion is more in electronic art than gaming (but electronic art is barely an industry at all outside advertising!)...

[digisth]

You (and others with real software development skills and drive) are in an incredible position today. You've graduated into a very exciting market (I went through the previous boom and it was frenzied, but this is one is even more so) with opportunities everywhere. If you can't seem to find anything on the 'art and design technology' side, take a look into organizations like EyeBeam [http://eyebeam.org/] and AdaFruit's job page [https://www.adafruit.com/jobs/] to start with; they may not be trivial to find, but some are out there. Before I became a software developer, I was in audio engineering (didn't last long) and am an occasional musician, so I've seen both sides. There is definitely an incredible amount of boring stuff out there, but there's also exciting stuff to be found.

Many people do just jump in for the money, and others in this thread have addressed it, so I won't except to say that there are people who start out in an industry because they need the money (for example, I had to live on my own and start work at 17, no familial support), but then realize they really enjoy it and stay for the other stuff: problem solving, puzzles, building elegant things, and all the rest. Perhaps not most, but there are some.

As far as the passion vs. profit stuff, there's no denying that there's a serious tension there, and that's not going anywhere anytime soon. I've dealt with this too, and I saw three choices:

1) You can live like a pauper in an expensive area/decently in a very cheap area and do what you enjoy, even if no one ever buys it. There are people who do this with code - I've seen plenty of indie game devs pick a cheap area in the US, work the occasional freelance job, and spend every other moment working on their games. This can be a totally valid path if you're OK with its limitations. You know what this is like from the art side already, too.

2) You can try to get wealthy and then do whatever you want - no more working terrible jobs, being paid a fraction of what you're worth, being engulfed in [other] company politics, working for others when you'd rather be working for yourself, etc. I'm sure many people of us here on HN are doing exactly that.

3) You can try to find a decent compromise - some companies will give you 5% time, others may pay you to just do research (a previous company I worked for paid a few people to do nothing but work on an audio/3D visual coding framework, for example), others simply hit that sweet spot of giving you interesting stuff to work on for decent money.

[fat0wl]

thanks for the suggestions. I actually spent some time as an "intern" (hang out making art & doing whatever) at Harvestworks [http://www.harvestworks.org/], which is very similar to EyeBeam. I just decided it wasn't for me when I saw that artists spent so much time on grant-writing just for a chance at a sum of money most of them (they were pretty tech-savvy) could make through a few days of freelance if they sharpened their coding skills a bit.

I didn't mean to come off as a spoiled brat chastising hard-working people. I definitely understand that folks have to take jobs and make a wage, not always doing what they want. My criticism is much more directed toward those who have reached the intermediate level but then choose to excel at mediocrity. I work with some devs who are shining examples of this. They use a rapid dev tool that encourages awful programming practices, and they jump from shop to shop leaving piles of code-dung behind. They are slightly jealous as I refine my Java skills to becoming increasingly more powerful & effective, but not to the point where they would actually commit to learning. Instead, they are content knowing they have a niche skill and will be consistently overpaid for poor quality implementations.

Anyway I digress.... your breakdown seems pretty deadon. I wish I had the stomach for #1 but didn't, so I thought it would be easier to do #3 to pave the way for #2 (I had this idea that working corporate gigs was the only true test of and exercise for my coding skills)....

I guess I need to find a better #3 or jump ship to 1 or maybe even 2 if I can handle a startup run... it's just hard to leave because the current gig actually doesn't work us very hard its just too much politicking within a very dull talent pool, kinda lulls me to sleep (though trust me I would take a more challenging job in an instant, its not about being lazy just lack of opportunities thus far).

[fat0wl]

thx... I think the reason I get a bit heated is because I come from an arts background actually. There are a lot of slippery slopes in industry, and I am on one. It disgusts me when I see that my peers are just tumbling over one another to reach the bottom first, just to put another $5/hr on their rate whereas I used to work with people who didn't care if they spent their whole careers as penniless musicians so long as they got to experience the feeling of genuine pursuit of passion.

A lot of tech feels like a very spiritually empty game, and I resent it for becoming this gruesome when really programming is a beautiful pursuit. I'm trying to be patient, there is a company that has expressed interest in me that is much more into embracing proper design paradigms and new approaches to back-end code. At my current gig we are handcuffed by lots of legacy code, layers of bureaucracy, "Senior Devs & Architects" who are really at about junior level, and people who are difficult just for the sake of slowing down the average pace of work.

Living with this for 2 years has been maddening & I am relieved that I have enough on my post-academia resume now to escape it one of these days.

[kansface]

I downvoted your post for the reasons:

1. Too much bile: | tech bootcamps, consultant scammers, open source hipsters... pure scum... i deleted half of cuz i knew it would just piss ppl off & was a waste of breath

If you know enough to not write this, why did you write it?

2. The lack of proper grammar. If you can't take the time to neatly express your ideas, why do you expect anyone to take them time to understand them?

[innguest]

Thanks for writing this. HN is full of touchy-feely folks, hence the downvotes. For many, it's hard to look past tone. They react emotionally. Sure, maybe your grammar could be better or maybe if we forced everyone to have perfect grammar we'd never had read your post.

I also have been dissatisfied with the industry and what it has become. I got into this to create solutions, not to glue others' solutions together. This isn't fun anymore. I'm looking for something more artistic like concept art drawing. I like what you said, "can't wait to get the CRUD out of my eyes"!

I also agree on the startup point you made. Everything is about ads and how to make them better. Yawn to the max. So uninteresting. I'm afraid I don't have a cure for your cynicism. But I want to leave you with something. I was watching an instructional video of an artist teaching environment drawing technique. He said one of the fun things about drawing professionally is he has been doing it for 50 years and it's still interesting to him. Programming is mercurial and will have different "interesting" periods that will appeal to different people as it progresses. This era in programming is not my favorite.

[fat0wl]

heh yes its funny i dont karma points seriously, i was mainly interested in hearing some qualitative sort of discussion but the main complaints i got were about grammar & negativity, neither of which i am particularly apologetic about. anyway, glad u appreciated & provided a thoughtful response :)

i think you are right about the "mercurial" nature. my boss says it used to be much more fun before lots of mature libraries & package software existed. It was literally about algorithm design at all points. Now things are more about vetting existing technologies to see what the most widely-accepted & reliable standards are. And honestly, there are design patterns you can learn from that but realistically I've been in enterprise Java for 2 years and with that small amount of experience, I am already finding that 99% of the work we do is trivial. Anything that would be over my head is provided in a vendor API, and with modern code we can keep our own domain logic slim enough that it almost never gets out of hand.

I think there is still a lot of interesting stuff to accomplish with code but as others pointed out, the industry is sortof over-expanded. Ideas are not leading programming so much as programming is leading to iteration through mundane ideas. The boring startup problem is the result of there being way less thinkers in the industry than do-ers, I'm sure... or that entrepreneurialism is in reality just planting the seeds of micro-corporations rather than acting as an incubator for mind-bending ideas.

Having to be a part of this mundane period is probably my fault (for straying from art toward a career in programming) but maybe I can redeem myself somehow & take a last shot at heaven. I've been thinking of starting my own company, but as a deep-sleeper cell for DSP algorithms development... continue my machine learning / AI research from my master's degree, develop some really powerful tools with heavily optimized algorithms, then try to integrate them into the commercial space (audio editing software, most likely). Hmm... we'll see. Best of luck, again I appreciate u taking the time.

[innguest]

Funny we've both been seduced away from arts by programming. :)

Best of luck to you.