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.
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.
If you ever forget or wonder if you have ADHD vs being inattentive, just look back at its affects on your romantic relationships and how much it damaged them or made them more difficult.
How often a partner probably told you that they felt neglected or forgotten, or how often you'd wind up in a rabbit hole and forget that you also have to nourish that relationship.
I don't understand it. My company is fully remote but they are absolutely horrendous at async comms. I was trying to walk someone through adding a docker build process to their CI and.... he just couldn't communicate/understand it through slack and he wanted to schedule a meeting. Great, now instead of being able to respond while working on other things I have to cut out an entire hour of my day just for you.
Thanks.
Beyond that I refuse to do daily standups. I'll quit a company if they won't let me do async or communicate through slack. I'm not logging in and the start of my day being a meeting every single day. Absolutely not. I've been there before.
I'm staff and I don't consider Manager a vertical step at all. It's a horizontal. Completely different type of job and I really doubt they make much more if more at all money than me. I would never go manager.
My problem with programming (of which I've been trying to really do decent at for years but failing) + ADHD is my memory is absolutely trash. I'll spend a week or two working on an app and then put it down for a month and it takes me a day just to get rolling with it again because I basically learn/work by brute forcing things to work as opposed to remembering concepts that would make it work without having to do so.
It's frustrating and makes me often give up. I work in Ops, so it's not a day to day thing for me to write any code. Thankfully with all of the fires and different things to work on in Ops I think it's a very good fit for an ADHD person.
I'm a horrible hoarder but I've also had a kindle and have been using Calibre since it started. You can store a ridiculous amount (thousands+) of books on a Kindle but as soon as you do that the interface slows to a crawl, it's really unpleasant to use at that point. Just page turning in your library takes seconds and I think it only lists 10-20 books a page.. oof.
I bounce between books a LOT. I don't read daily or anything and no speed reading skills but I'm usually reading 5-10 at a time and I fall asleep to audiobooks.
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...