This (tech) career has proven to be so disappointing, and it's all the stuff around the actual work. I love working on computers.
Started my career in the decade of offshoring and didn't think we'd have anything close to an "AI" taking our jobs before we potentially unionized or had a government that would protect its labor force from being replaced by literal robots.
2020-2022 felt like the usa tech ship was finally growing into something really great. All gone now.
When I worked in devops I always worried that my job was automating away other engineers, it definitely had a "when will this come for me" feeling, because it really was, now the dev and ops are both getting automated away.
This is my first time looking at HN in practically a year. Tech is just so uninteresting to me now. Nobody is hiring SDE/SWE/SREs except for the problem makers, like Anthropic, Meta, etc. Anthropic has pages and pages of $300k-$600k roles open right now. But do you go help the rest of your colleagues lose their jobs?
I guess lets talk about kubernetes or something...
I don't know the minutia and I'm thankfully nowhere near the webhosting industry any longer but Wordpress dominated my life for almost 20 years- I'm pretty sure it can be summed up with "WPEngine is taking all of our enterprise/etc business and I'm mad.." And he's trying to get rid of the opensource (he dropped their monthly dedicated hours from I think 2k-4k to 45, just 45 hours) to funnel people to wordpress.com.
Which, honestly I really do get from his end money wise, because I have friends in that industry who are worth hundreds of millions today from lucky breaks, timing, etc. and I'm still a wee-engineer.
But he made those choices, he was always the CEO. I didn't start with the funding my rich friends had.
And WordPress can thank CPanel and the tens of thousands of customer support and sysadmins that supported millions of WordPress users at $9/mo for a decade and have never once interacted or known who Mullenweg is.
And they can thank mysql.. and apache.. and php..
Take your money and be happy.
I met some of the worst people (CEOs) working in webhosting. Some truly awful people became very rich.
edit; I thought this was referencing old drama. This is brand new. www.reddit.com/r/wpdrama. I don't know anything about Mullenweg, I don't mean to sound like I'm calling him awful specifically.
Most companies don't need anywhere near my level of dist experience and I'm totally aware of that. I'm at an AWS-using company now so it's all basic terraform and CI work but previously I built a literal AWS/Google Cloud kubernetes competitor for a CDN so I dealt with the actual backend of k8s a lot which nobody but CDNs really need. CRIO/Containerd/virtio secure container sort of stuff. Cgroup manipulation at the lowest syscall levels.
I'm not pedigreed though. I can't get hired at Google/FAANG because I'm not good enough at compsci/programming to pass any of their coding/committee interviews. I really thought I'd find my way into G, interviewed there with many referrals, etc, but they have no interest. And now I don't even want to go there. My dream companies have dropped to a handful, like Pixar, Nvidia, Arm types. But I don't have the CS. "Get better at programming" .. yeah.. I need to.
So I'm in this weird spot where my salary is basically stuck. I'm at around 17 years of experience (I turned 40 today but have worked on bsd/linux since a kid) so who knows what the next 20+ years will look like. Maybe I'm pricing myself out of work.
Senior SRE work at this level seems to be 180-250 and you're lucky to get anywhere near that 250 unless you work at FAANG/Datadog/blahblah. Datadogs one of the highest paying SRE groups I'm aware of, but non-remote.
Do you work for global companies? I'm in a major city that has a horrible/non-existant tech comnmunity so if I took a "local" job I'd drop my salary by at least $80k. I have worked for Denver companies and the vibe is completely different though, which is nice. Like, everyone will know Wednesday is a great skiing day so half the company leaves to go ski and nobody cares. Or we have hockey playoffs or whatever everyone expects you might be celebrating.
Can't do that at my globo corp which can barely handle setting meetings in my time zone.. but pays way more..
The current market has me absolutely terrified. Twitter was one of my dream companies to work for because, for anyone unfamiliar, they had incredible open source projects and the complexity/reqs of running it were intense. I love the challenge of scaling systems, it's like building fast cars and squeezing what you can out of what you've got. The market getting flooded with thousands of Twitter, Meta, Google, etc SWE/SREs who can work at scale has seriously constricted what felt like was finally sysadmins/engs being appreciated for what they do.
I've also heard of people getting THOUSANDS of resumes. I was hiring 2 SRE 1s last year and barely received any at all. Unless my Recruiter got thousands and filters that well. This WAS before a ton of Meta/G/etc layoffs though. I wonder if they've flooded the market now. I had both hired by I believe last summer, so prior to a bunch of layoffs.
I didn't expect them to know much more beyond a computer and a thirst to learn/program. I'm self-taught as is my entire team. We didn't need Stanford grads. We hired a previous IT Admin who had never touched distsys/code (me at one point) and promoted one of our customer support agents to SRE. I'm very proud of that because it was incredibly hard for me to go break into the field.
I'm in CO so pay a lot of attention to this as it's a law to post salaries here. I really haven't seen THAT many CO excluded jobs. I definitely have seen them. More often than not I just see no mention of the statute/salary at all.
I don't know if I'd outright call them fake but I've gone through https://hnhiring.com/ which aggregates these posts a few times with an absolutely impeccable and perfect resume for some companies in a fairly niche role, I'm a Staff level SRE, so way less common than a SWE, less job postings, and I've never received a reply to any of them when I can absolutely guarantee you that me as a hiring manager seeing my resume would at least give me a phone call.
For instance Kubernetes came out in 2015 (alpha/beta, 1.0) and I've worked on it since then and I'll apply to lead K8s eng jobs from these and not hear a word. I've also worked for companies like Rancher and a few CDNs that literally make K8s distros. I've worked with companies like Google, Meta, Nasa, the USA gov, etc launching production k8s clusters across the world. Like I've seen it all including in cell towers, fast food drive thrus, military use, etc.
I hire for the same roles on my team and if I saw my resume I would have a heart attack and get them in immediately. I know how rare my LOE with distsys is, I build platform teams. 99% of the people I interview that "know k8s" don't know k8s, they know Helm or yaml, whereas I have a literal github portfolio full of 7 year old gcloud/k8s/aws tools I provided the community that's also listed in my resume.
Could just be luck of the draw, of course. But my initial "oh this person will know me from HN and look at my portfolio!" is gone from these posts and I just send resumes like a normal job that won't call me back.
When I was a kid (teens/20s) I got a bunch of my first sysadmin/neteng jobs off of IRC and it doesn't feel the same at all.
The amount of on-site only job listings now in 2024 is insane.
I cannot believe you people will work for these companies and managers that require on-site and not fight back. We're losing our power. I hope nobody applies to these jobs.
Datadog, on-site only in NYC, Paris, Boston and Tel Aviv.. lmao. I live in one of the USA HCOL cities (not those, I'm Denver/Austin) and I wouldn't go near those places rent wise. $3500/month for a 2 bedroom is high enough for me to sit on my computer and write go. I've worked at 4 companies in the last decade moving off of Datadog to Grafana and they require on-site in NYC to write log chutes and charging an insane amount for their product while paying their NYC engineers $300k+. Wild.
I read a ludicrous amount of books as a kid. Stuff like The Wheel of Time, 1000+ page books.
Now I just buy books and don't read them. I'll also buy audiobooks and bounce between them not really remembering much of the plots until I fall asleep.
I think the instant gratification of refreshing reddit/digg(rip)/instagram and having completely new things to see/read has destroyed my long term attention span.
I don't really like watching TV or playing consoles without having my laptop on my lap so that I can multitask and if I get bored for a minute refresh and see new things. It's bad. I'm single right now so I haven't actually used my living room TV in months. I do everything on my computer.
I always find it interesting when people have a hard time getting a diagnosis. I was diagnosed as a child with ADHD and I've had ... tens of psychiatrists over my life and when I eventually move and go to a new one I've never once had one want to re-diagnose or have me prove in some way that I'm ADHD. I just tell them that I'm ADHD and my other neurodivergent issue and they prescribe me my medication.
I've never told a new pysch who my previous psych was so I'm sure they're not getting my medical records from them unless there's some sharing system I'm unaware of.
I wonder if I come off as strongly ADHD. I've been called "intense" before, whatever that means. I'm definitely fidgety and a horrible leg bouncer.
I had a coworker a few years ago who worked ONLY on his laptop. No monitors. No keyboard. No mouse. He programmed all day on a 13" Macbook Pro.
I will never understand it because I absolutely hate having full screen windows and I am almost worthless working off my laptop when traveling. Just lots of frustration juggling windows back and forth. I always have 2 or 3 apps side by side on my 48" and I have a 28" 16:18 DualUp monitor next to it for long text/dev.
I didn't work with him so I don't know how productive he actually was but I've always been curious if he kept up with the people who had 2-3 monitors and input devices. I have a hard time believing that he did but no actual idea.
My frustration is not knocking this out over 10 slack messages right now and having to round back to it days later. I want it done and off my plate.
I'm ADHD. I don't want lingering tasks floating around giving me anxiety when they can be done quickly. I'm going to forget it exists until 10 minutes before when it pops up on my notifications, then I'll have to context switch over to that situation.
One of my biggest coping mechanisms is as soon as something pops into my mind I do it RIGHT NOW. If I walk by the laundry basket and think of doing laundry I grab it and do it RIGHT now. Or I'll just walk by it for a week completely oblivious to it.
It's something that I unfortunately didn't put 2+2 together until my 30s after ruining quite a few and always wondering why I would be so enamored with someone and they never felt like I was giving them enough.
And my most recent ex was anxious attached. That was rough. I'm far more on the avoidant side, not sure how much of that is upbringing vs adhd.
There's a bunch of books about marriage/relationships with ADHD people. I haven't read any but I should. The lady in this video has written a bunch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pyAfOPGKlI&t=1s
I'm a Staff SRE. I literally mentor an entire SRE team every single day.
I didn't say a single thing about paired programming. Christ. Did I say that the dev wanted to pair program? No, I didn't. I would have happily hopped in a huddle with him as OPPOSED to scheduling a meeting 3 days later.
I am sick of meetings and people who are incapable of working async, especially when we're in different timezones, which is exactly what this thread I'm responding to is about.
I'm about 20 years in and the first 10 years of my career as a SWE I had absolutely horrendous managers and daily checkins felt more like proving to someone that you had done any work the day prior, shaming you if you didn't produce enough. I have a hugely negative connotation to them even today, vs feeling that they're a positive team-collab sort of scenario.
At two companies the actual CEO and CTO were in every single one of our standups (startups of course).
That Amazon Silent Meeting thing... I think that would drive me crazy. It's annoying enough when someone hasn't read what you've posted as an agenda in a meeting invite and you have to tell them about it. I don't want to sit on camera with 6 other people reading a 6 page document.
Started my career in the decade of offshoring and didn't think we'd have anything close to an "AI" taking our jobs before we potentially unionized or had a government that would protect its labor force from being replaced by literal robots.
2020-2022 felt like the usa tech ship was finally growing into something really great. All gone now.
When I worked in devops I always worried that my job was automating away other engineers, it definitely had a "when will this come for me" feeling, because it really was, now the dev and ops are both getting automated away.
This is my first time looking at HN in practically a year. Tech is just so uninteresting to me now. Nobody is hiring SDE/SWE/SREs except for the problem makers, like Anthropic, Meta, etc. Anthropic has pages and pages of $300k-$600k roles open right now. But do you go help the rest of your colleagues lose their jobs?
I guess lets talk about kubernetes or something...