If so I'm curious:
1. What pushed you to do it?
2. What will you be doing? (Even if nothing!)If so I'm curious:
1. What pushed you to do it?
2. What will you be doing? (Even if nothing!)Currently not doing anything IT related. Just went on a bike ride.
Lots of new bike tech, so depending on how old your “old” bike is. I would recommend going to stores and doing some test rides. Enjoy!
Is that privilege? I consider it basic fiscal responsibility.
These are some I can think of or have witnessed since starting my dev career in 2010:
- 4GL business languages making developers redundant
- Big data
- Cloud computing
- DevOps
- LLMs
For those about to quit, I salute you.
I quit later, as it became increasingly clear to me that this guy knew nothing about technology, didn't care, but also had a fragile ego where he had to present himself to the company as being in charge, even though he was the worst person for the role. To top it all off, it also dawned on me over time that we basically had an absentee CEO who was working only ~15 hours a week at most. Then when I quit I found out there was a third co-founder who owned a huge stake of the company and I did not even know existed while I worked there.
When I first interviewed, the CTO seemed like a nice and friendly guy, I didn't immediately see red flags. This was my first startup experience. I'll try to research things better if I decide to join one again. I might also just not join unless I can myself be a co-founder. Fuck reporting to incompetent twats.
Currently taking a sabbatical. I decided to take the summer off. I'm working on personal projects. Lucky enough to have good savings from a previous job so I can afford to do this. I'm planning to take gradual steps towards returning to work near the end of the summer.
This is so funny, because describes like the last four CEOs and companies I worked for :-) Is there an alternate reality I have yet to experience?
Founder of a deeptech/hardware startup in a difficult sector and we are struggling to get our tech validated (latest datapoint are no improvement over the current practice). While i believe with sufficient time it can be proven and improved, that crosses into the realm of academia and not entrepeneurship.
So yeah motivation is quite low at the moment, and im not sure if to push-on or accept failure and move on.
Any advice?
Are you doing it because you want to bring something new into the world? Acknowledge that and keep going as long as it's healthy for you overall.
If it’s new tech or bust, build the most honest techno-economic model you can and use that to make your go/no-go decision.
I did a crazy experiment: Built and shipped 25 projects in 25 weeks.
Several of those projects made it to the top of HN here. One went viral and ended up in TechCrunch and many other big-name sites: https://channelsurfer.tv
I wasn't _trying_ to make money. I just wanted to build a bunch of cool shit, rekindle my love for building websites, make the web more fun, and maybe figure out what I wanted to do next.
Now I'm trying to focus on making money. I'm kind of out of money, so I'll likely need to do some freelance work for a while.
Soon I'm going to release something to help others do the same thing. Ship high-quality stuff quicker.
At least you now know what privilege feels like
Remember that there are people who never had the opportunity to study or lives in a precarious situation.
1. Leadership, culture, and (development) process changes; I've been looking casually for over a year and finally got something.
2. New company, same role, but should be much more amenable and stable.
Got tired of having to talk to like five different people who barely spoke English to get anything done and the increasingly naked hostility from the c-suite about our value to the company.
I wake up every day wondering if I should quiet quit or go for a clean exit.
To anyone reading this: don’t be afraid to make the move. It’s your life. It can feel scary before you do it, but once you finally quit, it’s not scary anymore.
Building software has become dramatically easier over the last year. The hard part is no longer creating products—it's getting people to discover and trust them.
I spend far more time thinking about distribution today than implementation. That's a shift I didn't expect.
I'm currently looking and I'm considering cutting my salary up to 50℅ to work for a company with a very interesting product that doesnt push AI and let us instead decide where to use it.
I'd rather lower my quality of life than put up with this bs and being forced to use a tool that I disagree so much on an ethical and moral pov. Let alone letting managera decide which tools I have to use on my engineering work
I’ll be joining a startup in a few months to hopefully find the joy in my profession again with a fresh start and more skin in the game.
I will say that the experience taught me a lot about working on a team and also the importance of understanding my own (and my coworkers) limits when it comes to actually implementing stuff. Very worthwhile even if I left with a bad taste in my mouth.
I found a little job in education (no tech at all) that pays $22k/yr. That'll float the bills while I use my spare time to build other things. Got a couple dev boards (one SBC, one for that cheap TI component that came across HN a few days ago) to toy around with some little hardware ideas I have that maybe I could productize.
Grabbing a PD analyzer and an older M1 or M2 Mac to explore Asahi Linux and maybe start contributing in a few months.
It was already clear to me last summer that the agentic stuff was kind of the final nail in the coffin of a "normal" software dev shop. All the routine of typical SCRUM-based etc activity was degrading even further from ritual and theater into a pointless charade or comedy, or as you say, absurdity. Dueling LLMs on the code reviews, people sitting around a conference room on laptops counting fantasy story points, getting Claude to write their annual self-assessments.
Unfortunately I still need to make money. I've done a couple freelance gigs. Some is less absurd than others. I'm sporadically interviewing to go full time again but I'm being extremely picky.
Anyways, that shut down about two years ago. I tried my damndest to get a new job but I could never get past the initial interview --if I even got one!
I've sold my house and moved into a small apartment. I have about five more years of living expenses saved up. What'll I do after that? No idea. What am I doing now? Sitting by a river reading the day away.
I’m working on my passion project, a mobility focused fitness app (bendy.fit), and searching for work that doesn’t feel morally repugnant!
Sadly I'm tightly mortgaged and in a very high cost of living area in the US.
My plan is to move to Europe so I can cut my cost of living in half, not stress over health care, and eat real food instead of fake American chemicals. Need a few more years ..
i quit after realising how ineffective it is to support a founder who stopped focusing on the product.
Trying to do something on my own now, maybe I'll reassess in the fall and ask for my job back or start looking around if this doesn't work. Its not really a "break" because I'm working a lot (maybe more than before) but I figured this is my window to try. Somewhat hoping big tech will always be there but if not i can make do with whatever I get as long its doesn't have a toxic culture.
Maybe this time management will learn its lesson but probably not.
Of course, then I just grew up and you just get on with things...
Not saying you should be a butcher, but a week and no training is a difficult approach.
Point is it’s an apprenticeship that takes years and starts with helping a butcher do low value stuff. Grabbing half a cow and trying to cut it up probably isn’t the best entry point or test of aptitude.
I hope you give startups another go if that sounds good to you, and as you say, it sounds like you will be able to see the things you dont want at least. Good luck.
Can you go back and monetize them if you haven’t already?
But nowadays I am extremely glad that I bill hourly. It's a different skillset. There's a lot of acting and drama involved but thankfully I'm good at both engineering and acting.
I feel kind of bad for colleagues who take their job too seriously though. I can feel their pain but I can't tell them to relax because I have to also act my part and pretend to feel passionate.
I'm passionate about money hitting my bank account. Really passionate about that... And I'm paid by the hour. So logically I need to create situations to maximize my locking factor, above all else.
If you can keep up the pretense for 2 years, then that's enough to keep you employed perpetually. So engineers should focus more on acting skills and other soft skills and less on technical stuff. Look at all the people who made big money, none of them have technical skills. It's all about acting.
poolnoodle•49m ago
oriolgfarssac•38m ago