You are still a human. You are intelligent. Yes - you are, this is demonstrated by the ability to think critically and independence of your views. So - You are capable to adapt into new environment and into new tech. Search for anything and switch job. Don't wait for a toxic environment to destroy your confidence.
You must look around and see the lack of men, and force yourself to become one.
As a man I need you to expand on this because I'm trying to imagine what concrete actions you think "a man" would do in this circumstance, and of the things I've come up with the only one I think I'm allowed to say on this forum is "quit and find a new job."
What exactly does this mean?
It's a weird way to phrase it, in my opinion, especially in this era where we are generally avoiding ambiguously gendered collective nouns... but I'm pretty sure that's the gist. Or, at least, it's how I read it.
Younger generations might bristle at this use of the word, and that's fine, but try to give the benefit of the doubt (in fact, it's a rule on HN).
Apparently equal in value according to some fools.
The world is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
There are precious few of us left who even still know how to write in our own voice, who have a will to grow ourselves and faith left in human ability. I urge you beyond all urging not underestimate yourself, for you have never been more rare and valuable!!!
You don't have to quit to start looking for another job, just start looking. You have 10 years experience, how can you say that you have no marketable skills? You could network, go to events, get involved in your local dev communities, show someone else your enthusiasm.
The only thing that I can realistically think through is the fact that because such owners were able to get the personal income and expenses sorted out for a few years and maybe got a bigger house.
But if things change, which realistically speaking, it would. they might get so accustomed to the way of doing things and the shock would be too much in too short period of time.
It doesn't atleast in the moment, seem worth it to me to try to create or chase trends for investors or anything.
I also sympathize with the workers working in said companies like OP. Not sure what realistic solution is out there, the job-market is terrible at the moment for many people and IMO business-making is a hard thing to do and some of us might like to over-estimate ourselves in it too (& side note on under-estimating yourself too)
Accurate estimations of if you should do business or not seems to me to always contain some inaccuracies and you might have to decide your own decision in that and in that sense, job seems better.
You also can't go live without money if one has to exist within society.
I don't know if there is a catharsis to such problem. To me, it seems like an authenticity/trust issue on if you can trust the founders or not but trust by definition is a bit weird and immeasurable and it can always have blind-spots. Maybe the investors investing into such a company trusted the wrong guy but what if the company somehow sells to more people (Ahem SpaceX) and ends up making incredible amounts of money. You would never know and thus you have to just trust the system but the system doesn't work sometimes in a good fashion.
[0]: (We need a better term for such companies which are just trend-chasing and mostly are just built to impress investors rather than try to generate actual profits)
Hot take: moving is more about interview skills than coding skills. Whether you leave or not, start interviewing now. You might end up finding a better place sooner than you hoped.
In either case, this job is clearly not healthy for you in several different ways
I went from jQuery to a brief dalliance with Angular to HTMX+_HyperScript. Everyone wants full stack Devs to use react and struggle eternally with insane dependency trees and challenging client side state management.
I like to build things that can be maintained in perpetuity by small teams.
So I'm not very marketable.
That doesn't mean you don't have good skills, it just means that too many people have them. It happens from time to time in every industrial, for all skills.
Obviously, I don't have any good advice about how to deal with it.
That's the key.
I've been an AppSec engineer for about 12 years, but it wasn't until about 5 years ago I started working somewhere that actually paid a market rate. I wasn't living paycheck to paycheck for the first 7 years, but certainly wasn't putting much away.
Now, I've got nearly a full year of after-tax paychecks in savings. I could easily go ~18 months without pay without a change in lifestyle. I could stretch it out to 3 years with some belt tightening.
In about 6 more years, the house will be paid off and any savings I have could last even longer.
If in 19 years as a SWE, you haven't saved up a lot of money, you are one or more of:
1. Incredibly unfortunate in the jobs you've been taking.
2. Have made some incredibly bad investments.
3. Are spending like a sailor, burning every dollar as it comes in.
4. Have gone through one or more absolute life catastrophes.
... Then yes, you are also likely to have financial problems if you're out of work for two years.
I don't mean to say that these are incredibly uncommon. They aren't, especially in people chasing the startup carrot and ending up with nothing but the brown, sticky bit.
But I think it's fair to say that a large number of people in the profession should have managed to avoid all four. (With #3 being the main 'avoidable' culprit, and with #4 being largely unavoidable.)
Consider that somehow, people making less than a quarter of our prevailing wages manage to live... Fairly comfortably.
I don't think I could go more than 2-3 months. Maybe I should start saving some money.
The parent comment mentioned North America. This is huge. Tech salaries in Europe are half what they are in NA. In India, they're like 1/4 to 1/3.
Saving is absolutely important, especially in such a layoff-ridden industry. You should really strive to get at least 6 months of living expenses into savings.
My company pays 10k a year for an Indian contractor, full time. I don't know what their agency pays them, but it can't be even 1/4 of a typical NA SWE salary. More like 1/12th.
But I keep reading about people getting fired because of AI and every time I do I get progressively more anxious and closer to getting start on that.
Don’t live in the hype. Not everyone is drinking the ai cool-aid bottoms up.
What do you mean by fastapi being a mistake ?
If you’re new to it, it might be a shock.
If it’s not to your taste you might look for work in an industry that matches your values such as social services or environment.
Repeatedly, around the world.
No, this time will not be different.
What are other economic systems..? Nobody seems to be able to answer, I would be happy to look them up to learn more about them.
Look into what the Blackfoot Indians were doing. Their lifestyle inspired Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs — though he gets it pretty wrong IMO.
But here’s the thing: the Blackfoot didn’t really have an economic system divorced from other systems. It was all part of a whole that valued people and made sure everyone had what they needed.
Now here’s the kicker: Its my belief their society was based on spreading abundance. Whereas Capitalism is based on spreading scarcity.
I dunno. I’m not an economist… have you asked an economist?
Edited to add: hey I found a use for AI; here’s a prompt for your favorite model:
“What economic systems have humans devised over the course of recorded history?”
:)
Capitalism, socialism (what people refer to as communism), and then communism which will never exist because it always stops with the government stealing everything and not wanting to give up power to move on to communism.
What are other economic systems? Not saying there aren't any other ones, I just don't know.
Isn't there capitalism, socialism--which is what people are actually talking about when they talk about communism, and then communism which will never exist?
What were you referring to?
It’s not a black and white choice of either we jump hardcore into capitalism or all the other way into socialism.
Similarly to OP I work at a company that has a certain set of core values and the moment they have changed irreversibly I am gone out the door.
Which is good, I can't figure out how anybody can see the government owning everything as a good thing for anyone.
If you just look at postal services across the world, as an example, or anything else run by government, they're 100 times less efficient then competitors and their workers always look like they're super-miserable. Imagine if that was the only option.
Funnily enough it's the couriers working for the private companies that I see looking more and more dead inside recently.
So, yknow, anecdote for an anecdote.
If you're saying FedEx people are also depressed, then maybe it's just delivering boxes that's the problem?
But I think it's pretty safe to say that there is nobody more pissed off than post office workers. Are they nice in Estonia? Luckily I do most stuff online nowadays but when I have to go to the post office it's always an awful experience.
A few grumpy delivery workers aside, most people in Estonia are nice in general. You should come visit :)
I don't know where you are but consider that the reasons your postal workers are pissed of may go deeper than simply being government employed. Could it be your state-owned services are being managed in way that makes their workers unhappy because they are run by people who think that government services even need to be profitable in the first place?
Other low-paying jobs don't seem to generate the same amount of unhappiness.
I have no idea what the reason is, to me it's just that governments can't do anything right because they're too big with no oversight.
That's why I was complaining about socialism, anywhere I've been where the government runs more than just post offices it was hell.
In Poland, all these Soviet buildings and if you look at old pictures of people standing for hours in queues for bread. Truly horrific. I was recently in Cuba and even if they can't talk about it many people told me they would flee right away if they could, but the government doesn't give them passports. Socialism destroys everything.
FedEx and UPS do... and in fact in those rural communities often uses the USPS for last mile service.
If it's deeply entangled in the Protestant work ethic and prosperity gospel ideals in the U.S., then what's bad is the Protestant work ethic and prosperity gospel--whatever that might be.
If you're saying that governments always mess with the free market, then I guess we're in socialist-capitalist economic systems..? Still better than just socialist.
Personally I don't find a framework so reductionist that it considers the USSR and the US to be equivalent to be very useful.
I can't figure out why that must necessarily mean that those companies can't leave the world in a slightly better place. A LOT of them do, specially small businesses.
I've seen the destruction that socialist governments left even after decades and I went to Cuba and other socialist countries and the government treats them like literal slaves and life is shit over there, with no way out.
Anyways, I know of capitalism, socialism, and communism. I just wanted to see if you meant another form that I wasn't aware of.
But what I was responding to in particular with my original comment was the parent commenters claim that "It’s just business" and that engaging in capitalism means you must inherently engage in the practices the OP was complaining about.
If the government owned the company OP works at, it would still be "just business" according to the commenter.
So tired of elites complaining about totally normal working practices in every other workplace on earth. Oh no you have to come to the office and you have to clock in. Join the club with the rest of us. Your McDonald's fry cook has to come to work & clock in, so should you.
To ask exempt employees to clock in and out demonstrates that management doesn't trust its employees, which is a failure on the part of hiring/management, not the workers.
This is the poison that kills entire societies.
I have to fill in a time sheet, but I never ever clock in and out.
If someone clocks in and out, they don't need a timesheet. It's automatically recorded.
And if it doesn't apply to you, it doesn't apply to you. There are plenty of people here it does apply to.
If the barrier to becoming an "elite" is that low and you still consider 6-figures a meaningful benchmark in a world that sells big macs for 10 bucks, are you also calling anyone running even a modestly successful small business "elite"?
I'm not even sure I'm engaging with a meaningful political statement here. The barriers to this level of "success" are more reliably psychological, not systemic. You're basically upset at anyone with a career. There are definitely things we need to do to help those struggling, but yelling here is slacktivism.
I don't know why you think making a 100k or higher salary is just "Big Mac money," but you're either larping or exactly the kind of out of touch I'm talking about.
lol not even close. I have a positive outlook and think the world can be a better place. I just think that world will involve most people working together in workspaces and clocking in. There will always be some professions & situations where that's not the right call but I have no reason to believe SW dev will always be one of them.
Haha fuck you, no. That's your choice, don't put it on the rest of us.