As a Fireman/EMT of 7 years whos been in high-tech for almost 10 - I feel sorry for this guy.
Sure, some parts of work will definitely get better and feel different. But a lot will get worse.
Say goodbye to good working conditions and simple problems. Work life balance is meaningless when your work has a habit of sticking around everytime you close your eyes. And the hero culture of EMS wears off quick when you realize 90% of the time you're societies janitor. That 10% you make a difference is amazing, but for the most part it's medics who are really making an impact and that world is almost as political and overmanaged as technology is.
The real problem is trying to make your career your life source rather than just an income stream. Tech utopia is no different than emergency-medicine utopia - its all fantasies that have no bearing to real life.
I wish the author the best of luck, and the issues they bring up are oh so real, but the source of the problem lies elsewhere in my humble opinion.
My perspective as someone who’s done some of both.. regardless of working conditions, doing “janitorial” work is rewarding in that it is, um, real work.
What I mean is that it’s really easy to have a multi decade career in tech and look back, realizing that not only is none of the code you worked on still running anywhere, but none of the companies even exist. Frustrating on some level, even if you managed to avoid directly contributing to society’s problems.
Emt can be horrible on many days but saving a life lasts, well a lifetime roughly, more if the person has kids. But shit, even painting a fence is more of a “legacy” than most of the code that most people will write professionally. even more if you’re a land scaper. If someone removes the fence or the tree, there is a decent chance it was done for a better reason than resume-driven development, sketchy m+a to manipulate stock prices, etc.
Janitorial work is not necessarily intellectually stimulating though, knowledge work is not necessarily meaningful. Ideally every life would have some time and space for both, and if that were possible I think society as whole would also benefit.
> doing “janitorial” work is rewarding in that it is, um, real work.
> ... it’s really easy to have a multi decade career in tech and look back, realizing that not only is none of the code you worked on still running anywhere, but none of the companies even exist.
Precisely. I feel the same way. I wrote tonnes of Terraform code years ago at XYZ/ABC Ltd and I often think, "Who knows what that code is doing now. Who cares? Does anyone care?"
I have a few answers for you:
1. Go part-time in the tech field (contract or consult for a few hours per week) and reduce your involvement whilst capitalising on the high income
2. Produce (digital) goods that are closer to the consumer: videos, books, etc. on anything that takes your interest
3. Use your free time to do something like cleaning up your local community of trash
For (2), what I'm doing is getting back into making YouTube videos. Even then, I've fallen into a trap for weeks now. A trap of thinking: "What should the format look like? What amount of work should go into it?" And so on. In the end, I decided to turn on the web cam, record, throw the footage in Canva and do some basic editing and overlays, and publish. Quick, simple and, to get back to your point (or rather to attempt to counter it): I'll have produced something that I can see, through stats, is being observed and having a positive impact on people. That's hopefully going to help too.
For (3), go into your local community, even just your street, or a neighbouring street, and clean it. Take a thick bin bag, a pair of pinchers for picking up trash, and clean up. Do that once or twice a week, and the impact will be massive for you and everyone around you. You'll feel better for it because it's physical and "real".
It's a tough position the OP is in, but I'm getting there my self as well. I can feel it.
Re: the YouTube thing, that’s an interesting point of comparison too. I can well imagine a younger version of myself looking at all “content production” stuff as quite silly and ephemeral, and of course much of it is.
The irony though is that lots of things more or less in this category still have a longer shelf life than software (or effort you put into technology related stuff in general). A 5 minute journal entry about that day still may serve some purpose even years later, but 5 hours/weeks/years spent on an obsolete platform or now irrelevant problem? Probably not. Even setting aside companies and professional work, bitrot gets really frustrating eventually after you realize that practically everything requires so much care and feeding. I don’t customize things like phones, browsers, or IDEs anymore because I fully expect most of the effort is pointless treadmill where most problems actively resist even semipermanent solutions.
Awareness of this kind of stuff helps some, which is why you see enlightened devs being pretty ruthless about pruning dependencies. Some tech ecosystems are obviously better than others too, but once you see the treadmill you never really unsee it
I have hundreds of videos on YouTube, and even the old tech tutorial ones around Terraform and Ansible, which are super dated now, get comments thanking me for my time. It's interesting to see videos from 5+ years ago getting positive engagement and making a difference to someone.
> doing “janitorial” work is rewarding in that it is, um, real work.
> What I mean is that it’s really easy to have a multi decade career in tech and look back, realizing that not only is none of the code you worked on still running anywhere, but none of the companies even exist
Actual janitors have their work undone by the time their next shift begins. I don't get the tech nihilism[1]; making software is "real work" - maybe you're too far removed from your actual users to experience their appreciation, or perhaps you hate your users - not judging, I've worked in the enterprise space too. One doesn't need to leave software to make a difference, but if its tech that's burning you out, more power to you.
Expecting permanence is a fools errand, and likely born of hubris. A truly janitorial mindset is knowing your work makes things temporarily a little better, but entropy always wins if not for people like you.
1. I suspect people complaining about "bullshit jobs" have limited imagination, experience, or both.
Thanks for your perspective. It’s a very real concern I have — am I trading one kind of burnout for another?
I do think there’s a difference between approaching EMS as a first career, and coming to it later in life (I’m 43) as a second career. I’ve talked to a number of people who’ve done what I’m doing and a higher percentage of them are happy with the decision vs those who started younger.
I’m also not going in with rosy glasses. I’ve been thinking about this for at least seven years, and have had plenty of time to talk to folks at all levels of emergency healthcare, including right here where I’d be working. I think I have a pretty realistic view of what I’m signing up for.
Only time will tell, though. Maybe I’m making a terrible decision; only one way to find out.
I would have thought that if you are the co-creator of Django, co-owner of a consulting agency, and Treasurer of the Django Foundation, at this stage you would have enough financial flexibility to say no to doing any work you feel is evil, and invest some time into work that you think advances the cause of good.
So it doesn't make sense to me that he would leave the tech industry because of the evil in it. I agree with him completely about the evil being there, it's increasingly horrifying what the tech industry is becoming. But the net is vast and infinite. Surely he can go somewhere the evil isn't involved.
Going anywhere the evil isn't involved is hard. I'd say that the human nature has the capacity for evil, as much as it has the capacity for good. Anywhere you go with the intent to do good, you have prospects of seeing evil, because you're going to work with humans, and especially their social structures.
Maybe one can get into e.g. pure mathematics. Proving a conjecture usually does not have a direct societal impact, so it's can't be evil. By the same token, it doesn't do anything obviously good.
I write this from the ER after my dad took an ambulance for chest pain (he is fine).
I imagined that the job of the EMTs were difficult. But I also felt the real tangible impact they had in ways that I haven’t in 25 years of being in tech.
No value judgement in profession. But boy can I relate. And so many others my age ~45 (some in tech, not all) that I talk to can as well.
> ... the issues they bring up are oh so real, but the source of the problem lies elsewhere in my humble opinion.
I'll bell the cat - Capitalism is the source of the problem, specifically the strain championed by American companies. It's the root of surveillance tech, and why medical systems can act in ways that result in terrible medical outcomes which deteriorate to emergencies.
Please don't bother to reply whinging about communism. Capitalism may be the best system humans have adopted, but it's far from perfect.
So I totally get feeling disillusioned...tech has definitely caused harm, no question. But writing off the whole industry as just a force for bad is kinda missing the full picture. It's like only seeing the shadows and ignoring all the light.
Yeah, "surveillance capitalism" is real (though I might take issue with the terminology). So are predatory gig models and all the rest. But the same tech that powers that stuff also lets a kid in a village take a free coding class. It lets someone stuck in a war zone video call their family. It lets people in remote places talk to a doctor without traveling hours. It helps small business owners make a living without middlemen, gives a global voice to folks who used to be ignored, and helps disabled people live with more freedom.
Tech has also made a huge difference in:
- making communication and education basically free
- speeding up medical breakthroughs (including vaccines)
- Helping organize disaster relief and mutual aid
- connecting people to jobs, homes, and communities
- bringing corruption and injustice to light thanks to mass documentation
Of course there's a dark side. Every powerful system has one. But saying "this is all tech ever did" isn't clarity...it's a kind of burnout talking. Which is, of course, understandable. You're allowed to feel that.
But I don't think it's fair or illuminating to erase the very real ways this stuff has made life better for billions. It's not perfect. But better. And worth building on.
Very well put. No need to apologize for tech as a whole, nor is there a need for boosterism.
I can relate to the OP’s disillusionment coming from the halcyon days where “computers” were simply awesome.
Software development is quite unique in that a single person can have a huge impact. If your career doesn’t let you do that, you can do it as side projects or open source. How many other professions let you do that with such low barriers to entry?
I understand why you'd feel disillusioned if you went into the surveillance capitalism part of big tech in the USA. It's probably similar to what a lot of people will feel about the AI industry when it does to the office floor what robotic automation did the factory floor a few decades ago. I'm not sure I'm quite as optimistic about tech as you are, but I completely agree with your point on how tech is more than just silicon valley.
There is the medical tech that you mention, but there is also green energy tech, farming tech and so on. All which are areas that are improving the lives on the planet for a lot of people. Of course many of these industries are kind of hard to break into if you're a "software engineer" and not really used to working with machinery, but it's not like it's impossible and it's certainly an area where your stuff will stick around. Some of the earliest software I build for solar plant data loggers will probably live a lot longer than me.
I do think people should follow what they want to do though. I completely get wanting to try something different and I don't think the authors reasons are any worse than people who burn out because of all the pseudo-management-bullshit in our industry. You don't really see anyone questioning when someone becomes a woodworker because they're fed up with associate agile scrum it business partner managers and little boxes on a board.
People burning out and blaming the world around them is pretty common. Unfortunately, that's just not how it works. As the saying goes, the only constant in all your problems is you. The wisdom behind that is less about finger pointing and more about just figuring out that the way to address what makes you feel bad usually starts with changing or at least acknowledging yourself.
The tech industry is part of our bigger society, which for better or worse is actually not completely horrible compared to essentially all of recorded human history. By most objective standards, we're better off than ever. Most of us get to live long and not worry about starving to death, being eaten by predators, freezing to death, being killed by violence, etc. Actually we're pretty well off and reach average ages unthinkable only a few generations ago. It's been relatively peaceful in most of the world for a while despite some really ugly conflicts, the occasional genocidal maniacs, terrorists, and what not. But the bottom line is that there are many places that haven't been war zones for a relatively long time now that are prospering. Even places that we still think off as relatively poor (e.g. most of Africa).
Technology has contributed to a lot of this progress. It extends our lives, provides better quality of live, wealth, etc. And it enables people to help themselves.
It's easy to forget that most of that progress has happened in an extremely short time span. Alan Turing was only born (1912) a few years before my grand mother (1914). She passed away aged 94. That was this century. Alan Turing lived and died before most of what we currently regard as the tech sector even existed. He helped invent the modern computer but he died long before computers became widespread. Donald Knuth, one of the founders of what is modern computer science still lives and publishes books.
That's an insane amount of progress in just a couple of generations. We live in amazing times. Yes, it's not all good. But honestly if you only focus on the negatives, you are missing the point. It's mostly good despite the negatives.
I get that people burn out. Many middle aged people do. And honestly, I'm not immune to that either. But that too is something that we can deal with better these days. Thanks to a lot of progress in medical and psychological world. And thanks to technology, most of that knowledge is at your finger tips.
I feel the same way as the author. I wrote tonnes of Terraform, Ansible, Go, YAML, Bash, Python code years ago at <company-name> and I often think, "Who knows what that code is doing now. Who cares? Does anyone care?"
I have a few answers for the author and anyone willing to give me their time:
1. Go part-time in the tech field (contract or consult for a few hours per week) and reduce your involvement whilst capitalising on the high income
2. Produce (digital) goods that are closer to the consumer: videos, books, etc. on anything that takes your interest
3. Use your free time to do something like cleaning up your local community of trash
For (2), what I'm doing is getting back into making YouTube videos. Even then, I've fallen into a trap for weeks now. A trap of thinking: "What should the format look like? What amount of work should go into it?" And so on. In the end, I decided to turn on the web cam, record, throw the footage in Canva and do some basic editing and overlays, and publish. Quick, simple and, to get back to your point (or rather to attempt to counter it): I'll have produced something that I can see, through stats, is being observed and having a positive impact on people. That's hopefully going to help too.
For (3), go into your local community, even just your street, or a neighbouring street, and clean it. Take a thick bin bag, a pair of pinchers for picking up trash, and clean up. Do that once or twice a week, and the impact will be massive for you and everyone around you. You'll feel better for it because it's physical and "real".
It's a tough position the OP is in, but I'm getting there my self as well. I can feel it.
I’m chuckling at your advice because I tried those things! Went part-time, wrote, lots of local volunteering. (Didnt try picking up trash; that’s a good one!) Unfortunately, didn’t work for me. In fact, the more I cut back my hours and did other things, the less I wanted to be working the work hours I had left.
I still think it’s great advice, and probably something that’ll help many people! I just reached a point where I needed something more drastic, and I have the financial security to take a big swing.
Being an EMT has its rewards I’m sure. But a lot of it is showing up to help yet another person who hasn’t done anything to live a healthy life, or leads a violent life, or has abused alcohol or drugs or food, now demands the most expensive form of healthcare delivery we have, and is unable to pay a penny for it, and consumes resources that an accident victim may now have to wait for, and will go right back to those behaviors again and again.
I don’t think EMT burnout has much to do with the situations you mention, but rather whether the workers are adequately supported by their employers: given the resources to do their job, healthy shift length and scheduling, mental health care, etc. My friends who work in emergency medicine seem mostly burned out by being overworked because the hospitals are perpetually understaffed.
I don't see why it can't be both. I've also heard this from the better-compensated police. Not discussing "physical danger" or whatever mind you, but the toll of constantly facing conflict and seeing some of the worst of humanity. Not a direct parallel, but burn out extends beyond compensation. I've also heard this from social workers, who granted also deserve better compensation.
I think it's possible we should be spreading out emergency response better amongst society, but I don't have much in the way of practical suggestion.
Of course, we should also compensate our non-police emergency responders much better. My understanding is that EMTs make close to minimum wage and tend to carry higher individual liability.
And one of those drunk people may turn out to be the next RDJ, which went to become sober and take his most famous roles and now donates millions to FootPrint coalition, Make-a-wish foundation, among others, or maybe Slash from Gun's n roses which almost died from a drug abuse and is now sober and helps many folks with his S.E.R.P.E.N.T. festival; pretty sure a number of EMTs were part of their lives when they were at their lowest, so yeah, making judgments based on where someone is at at any given time is not the best for society or for any given EMT; heck, I would have loved to help Hemingway once despite being an alcoholic until his bitter end, so no, when you look at life the way you describe is almost looks like you are looking for the burn out; I'm more willing to believe in physical burnout in that profession, is well known being an EMT can make quite a number on your limbs and back.
I’ve heard sentiments like this from most of the people I know who work helping the disadvantaged populations of our society. These are genuinely altruistic people, but they still get tired. For example, an addictions doctor was venting to me last week about how half of their patients don’t show up for appointments, and can’t even be located by the social workers who are employed to keep track of them.
Do you think those who optionally exercise the mental activity of making judgements of those behaviours are likely to suffer more or less burnout than those who choose not to? How useful an activity do you think making judgements of people you interact with is? Who is it useful to? The judge? The judged?
Not everyone exercises perfect control over the activities of their mind, and not every thought is carefully selected for optimum results before thinking it.
The point is just that even altruistic people, who one might presume are disinclined to such judgments, can find themselves making them after a time.
Besides, the doctor in my example was not even judging people, merely expressing exasperation at the inability for the resources expended to hit their intended targets. No one likes to feel like their work is meaningless, and getting paid (in public funds, no less) for patients who don’t show up might feel meaningless.
We agree on the empirical fact that many people generate suffering for themselves by encouraging an inner narrative of complaint about others' behavour.
If there's disagreement, it seems to be about whether or not this is necessary. I contend (along with thousands of wise narrators from just about every culture throughout human history) that it is not. This is just spiritual/ideological/psychological pragmatism (depending on your metaphysical orientation), and is intrinsically unrelated to altruism or perhaps ethics. Indeed someone holding a view that judgement of others is ethically or morally 'bad' merely shifts the target of the wasted mental judging-activity to their own putative ego.
It reinforces ego. It's a common malady. An optional one (which isn't to say it's always easy to ditch given constant and insistent if irrational social reinforcement).
I'm just a little surprised when I see a post like this, not because of the change in career and possibly lifestyle, but because I would never imagine to post stuff like this online.
Even if I were in an incredibly visible position, I just can't imagine who out there would care that I'm leaving to have fun in my hobby farm. This sounds like something I'll share with a friend over a beer. Publicly, I'll just post about leaving.
I do wish the author best of luck and well regards.
I see these kinds of proclamations all the time: “Tech failed me so I quit.”
I don’t relate at all.
I grew up poor, tech was a way to survive, not the path to a “woo woo socialist utopia”[0] a la Star Trek. Why would anyone think it would be? Tech isn’t special it’s just a tool. Tech didn’t fail, the political apparatus did.
Making yourself small and giving up your power to make a large scale impact is akin to wizards burning their spell books to focus on their dagger collections. Sure it might bring them joy, but they’re going to be doing 1d4-1 damage for the foreseeable future. And that’s if they ever even land a hit.
Tech is neither good nor bad. And, the demonization of tech and tech workers is at best unproductive, and, at worst will cause the conscientious to self-select out of tech.
People are free to do whatever they want but I wish we were giving people positive reasons to be in and in love with tech instead of trotting out trite jokes about <insert tech villain of the week> and showing nothing but surrender.
I’ve been burned out since 2013 but I don’t have the luxury of walking away or even taking a break. Even if I was rich I’d keep going because a) it’s what I love and b) unless you all want to elect me king it’s going to be the best way for me to make an impact in 2025.
I wish Jacob all the best.
Anyway, I’m going to quit swimming because teaching people to swim has increased the number of potential recreational drownings.
[0]: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S02E03. “Tell the Louvre to get off my back!” God, I love Carol Kane.
Also, in universe, Star Trek’s socialist utopia only came about after a period of inequality, instability, science run amok, tyranny, and war. So, we’re on track!
This feels like a cynical interpretation of Jacob's post.
I think it's perfectly reasonable for someone to want to retire with a feeling that their career was a net positive to society; and it can be very difficult to get that feeling when working in tech. So even if switching to being an EMT means his maximum individual impact is vastly reduced, it's far easier to make the claim that he's doing good.
Other than the Star Trek bit, I’m not really responding to the post at all. I’m talking about the trend of people who have made ones, tens, or hundreds of millions moaning about the “tech industry” (whatever that is) now that they’re getting out.
My point, you can make whatever impact you want with tech and don’t have to think much about “THE INDUSTRY”. Talk to high school aged kids today and a lot of them look at going into tech as if they’d be lobbyists for big tobacco.
"I left left the "TECH INDUSTRY" to jar pickles in my Vermont farmhouse. It changed everything." or "I created surveillance capitalism and now I'm telling you to make your iPhone grayscale." make for great headlines, NPR segments, and TED Talks, but, who benefits from it?
I have many relatives that died in war. Specifically WWI, WW2, and Vietnam. The direct stories I’ve been told are insane - my grandfather ran communication wires on the German front line and he experienced great trauma.
Then I read books about these wars, and other wars throughout ancient time, and they casually mention so many killed and raped. People struggling to survive. The Japanese called Guadalcanal the “Island of Death” because so many starved and the cannibalism was rampant.
I’m not suggesting we ignore our problems today or minimize them based on what was common even 50 years ago. But it is very helpful to appreciate what we have now, the luxuries, the safety, the technologies, when our ancestors lived in such abject pain and difficulty.
> It’s been incredibly demoralizing to discover what the tech industry actually did was to invent surveillance capitalism, create exploitative “gig economy” business models,create a new generation of robber barons, enable the rise of global fascism, facilitate genoicde,
Is the world actually good?
I struggle with this idea that if you actually create some sort of game changing tech, the business incentives will eventually use it to cause net negative harm for society. At best this takes the form of just resource extraction of customers. At worst it will be twisted by societies current power centers to further each of their collective tragectories (not net positive)?
Why create things for a society that will abuse them.
> I cringe at past-Jacob’s naiveté. It’s been incredibly demoralizing to discover....
I don't think he's reached the end of his road to cynacism; maintaining the moral high of looking for a utopia requires not spending any time assessing the evidence presented by reality. If he has complaints about the tech industry, stocked full of utopianists, he's in for a rude shock in the rest of the world if he keeps thinking about work in moral terms. The economy is a material system that optimises material results. The best outcome is making people you like materially better off (which can be easily done in tech, FWIW), but there are always going to be side effects because the world is messy and competitive.
A fun challenge is to come up with a set of moral principles where most people aren't enabling evil. There is a reason that sociopaths tend to rise to the top, principled people don't get much support and are going to struggle with the actual impacts of what they do.
Sort of. But I've seen what he's seen and worse. The situation isn't solved by changing "careers" or nibbling on the periphery. It requires either changing socioeconomic conditions through effective political organizing over a long timeframe or moving to another country that values community, solidarity, and people as more than just sources of money and labor to be used as tools.
> I cringe at past-Jacob’s naiveté. It’s been incredibly demoralizing to discover what the tech industry actually did was to invent surveillance capitalism, create exploitative “gig economy” business models,create a new generation of robber barons, enable the rise of global fascism, facilitate genoicde, and I could go on but Christ I’m exhausted.
At least he acknowledges this. A lot of people getting their 6-7 figure salaries deny any wrongdoing. A good number of them post on this forum.
Glad he linked articles on Facebook's culpability in the genocide of the Rohingya people as well. That should be an absolute, disqualifying reason when considering taking their money.
Very strange to see the level of criticism here aimed at someone choosing to explore other paths. You're not a shortsighted fool for trying to do something else. Especially something that's directly, meaningfully helpful to the people around you.
As a Fireman/EMT of 7 years whos been in high-tech for almost 10 - I feel sorry for this guy.
Sure, some parts of work will definitely get better and feel different. But a lot will get worse.
Say goodbye to good working conditions and simple problems. Work life balance is meaningless when your work has a habit of sticking around everytime you close your eyes. And the hero culture of EMS wears off quick when you realize 90% of the time you're societies janitor. That 10% you make a difference is amazing, but for the most part it's medics who are really making an impact and that world is almost as political and overmanaged as technology is.
The real problem is trying to make your career your life source rather than just an income stream. Tech utopia is no different than emergency-medicine utopia - its all fantasies that have no bearing to real life.
I wish the author the best of luck, and the issues they bring up are oh so real, but the source of the problem lies elsewhere in my humble opinion.
My perspective as someone who’s done some of both.. regardless of working conditions, doing “janitorial” work is rewarding in that it is, um, real work.
What I mean is that it’s really easy to have a multi decade career in tech and look back, realizing that not only is none of the code you worked on still running anywhere, but none of the companies even exist. Frustrating on some level, even if you managed to avoid directly contributing to society’s problems.
Emt can be horrible on many days but saving a life lasts, well a lifetime roughly, more if the person has kids. But shit, even painting a fence is more of a “legacy” than most of the code that most people will write professionally. even more if you’re a land scaper. If someone removes the fence or the tree, there is a decent chance it was done for a better reason than resume-driven development, sketchy m+a to manipulate stock prices, etc.
Janitorial work is not necessarily intellectually stimulating though, knowledge work is not necessarily meaningful. Ideally every life would have some time and space for both, and if that were possible I think society as whole would also benefit.
> doing “janitorial” work is rewarding in that it is, um, real work.
> ... it’s really easy to have a multi decade career in tech and look back, realizing that not only is none of the code you worked on still running anywhere, but none of the companies even exist.
Precisely. I feel the same way. I wrote tonnes of Terraform code years ago at XYZ/ABC Ltd and I often think, "Who knows what that code is doing now. Who cares? Does anyone care?"
I have a few answers for you:
1. Go part-time in the tech field (contract or consult for a few hours per week) and reduce your involvement whilst capitalising on the high income
2. Produce (digital) goods that are closer to the consumer: videos, books, etc. on anything that takes your interest
3. Use your free time to do something like cleaning up your local community of trash
For (2), what I'm doing is getting back into making YouTube videos. Even then, I've fallen into a trap for weeks now. A trap of thinking: "What should the format look like? What amount of work should go into it?" And so on. In the end, I decided to turn on the web cam, record, throw the footage in Canva and do some basic editing and overlays, and publish. Quick, simple and, to get back to your point (or rather to attempt to counter it): I'll have produced something that I can see, through stats, is being observed and having a positive impact on people. That's hopefully going to help too.
For (3), go into your local community, even just your street, or a neighbouring street, and clean it. Take a thick bin bag, a pair of pinchers for picking up trash, and clean up. Do that once or twice a week, and the impact will be massive for you and everyone around you. You'll feel better for it because it's physical and "real".
It's a tough position the OP is in, but I'm getting there my self as well. I can feel it.
Re: the YouTube thing, that’s an interesting point of comparison too. I can well imagine a younger version of myself looking at all “content production” stuff as quite silly and ephemeral, and of course much of it is.
The irony though is that lots of things more or less in this category still have a longer shelf life than software (or effort you put into technology related stuff in general). A 5 minute journal entry about that day still may serve some purpose even years later, but 5 hours/weeks/years spent on an obsolete platform or now irrelevant problem? Probably not. Even setting aside companies and professional work, bitrot gets really frustrating eventually after you realize that practically everything requires so much care and feeding. I don’t customize things like phones, browsers, or IDEs anymore because I fully expect most of the effort is pointless treadmill where most problems actively resist even semipermanent solutions.
Awareness of this kind of stuff helps some, which is why you see enlightened devs being pretty ruthless about pruning dependencies. Some tech ecosystems are obviously better than others too, but once you see the treadmill you never really unsee it
I have hundreds of videos on YouTube, and even the old tech tutorial ones around Terraform and Ansible, which are super dated now, get comments thanking me for my time. It's interesting to see videos from 5+ years ago getting positive engagement and making a difference to someone.
> doing “janitorial” work is rewarding in that it is, um, real work.
> What I mean is that it’s really easy to have a multi decade career in tech and look back, realizing that not only is none of the code you worked on still running anywhere, but none of the companies even exist
Actual janitors have their work undone by the time their next shift begins. I don't get the tech nihilism[1]; making software is "real work" - maybe you're too far removed from your actual users to experience their appreciation, or perhaps you hate your users - not judging, I've worked in the enterprise space too. One doesn't need to leave software to make a difference, but if its tech that's burning you out, more power to you.
Expecting permanence is a fools errand, and likely born of hubris. A truly janitorial mindset is knowing your work makes things temporarily a little better, but entropy always wins if not for people like you.
1. I suspect people complaining about "bullshit jobs" have limited imagination, experience, or both.
Thanks for your perspective. It’s a very real concern I have — am I trading one kind of burnout for another?
I do think there’s a difference between approaching EMS as a first career, and coming to it later in life (I’m 43) as a second career. I’ve talked to a number of people who’ve done what I’m doing and a higher percentage of them are happy with the decision vs those who started younger.
I’m also not going in with rosy glasses. I’ve been thinking about this for at least seven years, and have had plenty of time to talk to folks at all levels of emergency healthcare, including right here where I’d be working. I think I have a pretty realistic view of what I’m signing up for.
Only time will tell, though. Maybe I’m making a terrible decision; only one way to find out.
I would have thought that if you are the co-creator of Django, co-owner of a consulting agency, and Treasurer of the Django Foundation, at this stage you would have enough financial flexibility to say no to doing any work you feel is evil, and invest some time into work that you think advances the cause of good.
So it doesn't make sense to me that he would leave the tech industry because of the evil in it. I agree with him completely about the evil being there, it's increasingly horrifying what the tech industry is becoming. But the net is vast and infinite. Surely he can go somewhere the evil isn't involved.
Going anywhere the evil isn't involved is hard. I'd say that the human nature has the capacity for evil, as much as it has the capacity for good. Anywhere you go with the intent to do good, you have prospects of seeing evil, because you're going to work with humans, and especially their social structures.
Maybe one can get into e.g. pure mathematics. Proving a conjecture usually does not have a direct societal impact, so it's can't be evil. By the same token, it doesn't do anything obviously good.
I write this from the ER after my dad took an ambulance for chest pain (he is fine).
I imagined that the job of the EMTs were difficult. But I also felt the real tangible impact they had in ways that I haven’t in 25 years of being in tech.
No value judgement in profession. But boy can I relate. And so many others my age ~45 (some in tech, not all) that I talk to can as well.
> ... the issues they bring up are oh so real, but the source of the problem lies elsewhere in my humble opinion.
I'll bell the cat - Capitalism is the source of the problem, specifically the strain championed by American companies. It's the root of surveillance tech, and why medical systems can act in ways that result in terrible medical outcomes which deteriorate to emergencies.
Please don't bother to reply whinging about communism. Capitalism may be the best system humans have adopted, but it's far from perfect.
So I totally get feeling disillusioned...tech has definitely caused harm, no question. But writing off the whole industry as just a force for bad is kinda missing the full picture. It's like only seeing the shadows and ignoring all the light.
Yeah, "surveillance capitalism" is real (though I might take issue with the terminology). So are predatory gig models and all the rest. But the same tech that powers that stuff also lets a kid in a village take a free coding class. It lets someone stuck in a war zone video call their family. It lets people in remote places talk to a doctor without traveling hours. It helps small business owners make a living without middlemen, gives a global voice to folks who used to be ignored, and helps disabled people live with more freedom.
Tech has also made a huge difference in:
- making communication and education basically free
- speeding up medical breakthroughs (including vaccines)
- Helping organize disaster relief and mutual aid
- connecting people to jobs, homes, and communities
- bringing corruption and injustice to light thanks to mass documentation
Of course there's a dark side. Every powerful system has one. But saying "this is all tech ever did" isn't clarity...it's a kind of burnout talking. Which is, of course, understandable. You're allowed to feel that.
But I don't think it's fair or illuminating to erase the very real ways this stuff has made life better for billions. It's not perfect. But better. And worth building on.
Very well put. No need to apologize for tech as a whole, nor is there a need for boosterism.
I can relate to the OP’s disillusionment coming from the halcyon days where “computers” were simply awesome.
Software development is quite unique in that a single person can have a huge impact. If your career doesn’t let you do that, you can do it as side projects or open source. How many other professions let you do that with such low barriers to entry?
I understand why you'd feel disillusioned if you went into the surveillance capitalism part of big tech in the USA. It's probably similar to what a lot of people will feel about the AI industry when it does to the office floor what robotic automation did the factory floor a few decades ago. I'm not sure I'm quite as optimistic about tech as you are, but I completely agree with your point on how tech is more than just silicon valley.
There is the medical tech that you mention, but there is also green energy tech, farming tech and so on. All which are areas that are improving the lives on the planet for a lot of people. Of course many of these industries are kind of hard to break into if you're a "software engineer" and not really used to working with machinery, but it's not like it's impossible and it's certainly an area where your stuff will stick around. Some of the earliest software I build for solar plant data loggers will probably live a lot longer than me.
I do think people should follow what they want to do though. I completely get wanting to try something different and I don't think the authors reasons are any worse than people who burn out because of all the pseudo-management-bullshit in our industry. You don't really see anyone questioning when someone becomes a woodworker because they're fed up with associate agile scrum it business partner managers and little boxes on a board.
People burning out and blaming the world around them is pretty common. Unfortunately, that's just not how it works. As the saying goes, the only constant in all your problems is you. The wisdom behind that is less about finger pointing and more about just figuring out that the way to address what makes you feel bad usually starts with changing or at least acknowledging yourself.
The tech industry is part of our bigger society, which for better or worse is actually not completely horrible compared to essentially all of recorded human history. By most objective standards, we're better off than ever. Most of us get to live long and not worry about starving to death, being eaten by predators, freezing to death, being killed by violence, etc. Actually we're pretty well off and reach average ages unthinkable only a few generations ago. It's been relatively peaceful in most of the world for a while despite some really ugly conflicts, the occasional genocidal maniacs, terrorists, and what not. But the bottom line is that there are many places that haven't been war zones for a relatively long time now that are prospering. Even places that we still think off as relatively poor (e.g. most of Africa).
Technology has contributed to a lot of this progress. It extends our lives, provides better quality of live, wealth, etc. And it enables people to help themselves.
It's easy to forget that most of that progress has happened in an extremely short time span. Alan Turing was only born (1912) a few years before my grand mother (1914). She passed away aged 94. That was this century. Alan Turing lived and died before most of what we currently regard as the tech sector even existed. He helped invent the modern computer but he died long before computers became widespread. Donald Knuth, one of the founders of what is modern computer science still lives and publishes books.
That's an insane amount of progress in just a couple of generations. We live in amazing times. Yes, it's not all good. But honestly if you only focus on the negatives, you are missing the point. It's mostly good despite the negatives.
I get that people burn out. Many middle aged people do. And honestly, I'm not immune to that either. But that too is something that we can deal with better these days. Thanks to a lot of progress in medical and psychological world. And thanks to technology, most of that knowledge is at your finger tips.
I feel the same way as the author. I wrote tonnes of Terraform, Ansible, Go, YAML, Bash, Python code years ago at <company-name> and I often think, "Who knows what that code is doing now. Who cares? Does anyone care?"
I have a few answers for the author and anyone willing to give me their time:
1. Go part-time in the tech field (contract or consult for a few hours per week) and reduce your involvement whilst capitalising on the high income
2. Produce (digital) goods that are closer to the consumer: videos, books, etc. on anything that takes your interest
3. Use your free time to do something like cleaning up your local community of trash
For (2), what I'm doing is getting back into making YouTube videos. Even then, I've fallen into a trap for weeks now. A trap of thinking: "What should the format look like? What amount of work should go into it?" And so on. In the end, I decided to turn on the web cam, record, throw the footage in Canva and do some basic editing and overlays, and publish. Quick, simple and, to get back to your point (or rather to attempt to counter it): I'll have produced something that I can see, through stats, is being observed and having a positive impact on people. That's hopefully going to help too.
For (3), go into your local community, even just your street, or a neighbouring street, and clean it. Take a thick bin bag, a pair of pinchers for picking up trash, and clean up. Do that once or twice a week, and the impact will be massive for you and everyone around you. You'll feel better for it because it's physical and "real".
It's a tough position the OP is in, but I'm getting there my self as well. I can feel it.
I’m chuckling at your advice because I tried those things! Went part-time, wrote, lots of local volunteering. (Didnt try picking up trash; that’s a good one!) Unfortunately, didn’t work for me. In fact, the more I cut back my hours and did other things, the less I wanted to be working the work hours I had left.
I still think it’s great advice, and probably something that’ll help many people! I just reached a point where I needed something more drastic, and I have the financial security to take a big swing.
Have you settled on something yet?
Being an EMT has its rewards I’m sure. But a lot of it is showing up to help yet another person who hasn’t done anything to live a healthy life, or leads a violent life, or has abused alcohol or drugs or food, now demands the most expensive form of healthcare delivery we have, and is unable to pay a penny for it, and consumes resources that an accident victim may now have to wait for, and will go right back to those behaviors again and again.
Burn out is a thing in that line of work too.
I don’t think EMT burnout has much to do with the situations you mention, but rather whether the workers are adequately supported by their employers: given the resources to do their job, healthy shift length and scheduling, mental health care, etc. My friends who work in emergency medicine seem mostly burned out by being overworked because the hospitals are perpetually understaffed.
I don't see why it can't be both. I've also heard this from the better-compensated police. Not discussing "physical danger" or whatever mind you, but the toll of constantly facing conflict and seeing some of the worst of humanity. Not a direct parallel, but burn out extends beyond compensation. I've also heard this from social workers, who granted also deserve better compensation.
I think it's possible we should be spreading out emergency response better amongst society, but I don't have much in the way of practical suggestion.
Of course, we should also compensate our non-police emergency responders much better. My understanding is that EMTs make close to minimum wage and tend to carry higher individual liability.
And one of those drunk people may turn out to be the next RDJ, which went to become sober and take his most famous roles and now donates millions to FootPrint coalition, Make-a-wish foundation, among others, or maybe Slash from Gun's n roses which almost died from a drug abuse and is now sober and helps many folks with his S.E.R.P.E.N.T. festival; pretty sure a number of EMTs were part of their lives when they were at their lowest, so yeah, making judgments based on where someone is at at any given time is not the best for society or for any given EMT; heck, I would have loved to help Hemingway once despite being an alcoholic until his bitter end, so no, when you look at life the way you describe is almost looks like you are looking for the burn out; I'm more willing to believe in physical burnout in that profession, is well known being an EMT can make quite a number on your limbs and back.
> But a lot of it is showing up to help yet another person ..
It must be an distressing burden to carry that weight of judgement, regardless of what job you do.
I’ve heard sentiments like this from most of the people I know who work helping the disadvantaged populations of our society. These are genuinely altruistic people, but they still get tired. For example, an addictions doctor was venting to me last week about how half of their patients don’t show up for appointments, and can’t even be located by the social workers who are employed to keep track of them.
Do you think those who optionally exercise the mental activity of making judgements of those behaviours are likely to suffer more or less burnout than those who choose not to? How useful an activity do you think making judgements of people you interact with is? Who is it useful to? The judge? The judged?
Not everyone exercises perfect control over the activities of their mind, and not every thought is carefully selected for optimum results before thinking it.
The point is just that even altruistic people, who one might presume are disinclined to such judgments, can find themselves making them after a time.
Besides, the doctor in my example was not even judging people, merely expressing exasperation at the inability for the resources expended to hit their intended targets. No one likes to feel like their work is meaningless, and getting paid (in public funds, no less) for patients who don’t show up might feel meaningless.
We agree on the empirical fact that many people generate suffering for themselves by encouraging an inner narrative of complaint about others' behavour.
If there's disagreement, it seems to be about whether or not this is necessary. I contend (along with thousands of wise narrators from just about every culture throughout human history) that it is not. This is just spiritual/ideological/psychological pragmatism (depending on your metaphysical orientation), and is intrinsically unrelated to altruism or perhaps ethics. Indeed someone holding a view that judgement of others is ethically or morally 'bad' merely shifts the target of the wasted mental judging-activity to their own putative ego.
People are products of their environment. What purpose is served by being judgemental and separating people into deserving/non-deserving baskets?
Everybody should have a right to healthcare.
> What purpose is served by being judgemental ..
It reinforces ego. It's a common malady. An optional one (which isn't to say it's always easy to ditch given constant and insistent if irrational social reinforcement).
You really think the typical patient fits the profile you describe?
Only healthy people, physically and mentally, should be granted healthcare, amirite?
The person you replied to only commented about burnout, not about who deserves healthcare.
"Jacobian" and "changing direction" is already sort-of a pun, but the actual text is of drier humor.
Leaving tech to become an EMT is a bold decision. Good luck!
I worked with someone who left tech to become a nurse, so much respect for him. Loved working with him too.
I wonder how hard to get started these kind of jobs are for an older person. Jobs that presumably require a lot of energy.
I'm just a little surprised when I see a post like this, not because of the change in career and possibly lifestyle, but because I would never imagine to post stuff like this online.
Even if I were in an incredibly visible position, I just can't imagine who out there would care that I'm leaving to have fun in my hobby farm. This sounds like something I'll share with a friend over a beer. Publicly, I'll just post about leaving.
I do wish the author best of luck and well regards.
I see these kinds of proclamations all the time: “Tech failed me so I quit.”
I don’t relate at all.
I grew up poor, tech was a way to survive, not the path to a “woo woo socialist utopia”[0] a la Star Trek. Why would anyone think it would be? Tech isn’t special it’s just a tool. Tech didn’t fail, the political apparatus did.
Making yourself small and giving up your power to make a large scale impact is akin to wizards burning their spell books to focus on their dagger collections. Sure it might bring them joy, but they’re going to be doing 1d4-1 damage for the foreseeable future. And that’s if they ever even land a hit.
Tech is neither good nor bad. And, the demonization of tech and tech workers is at best unproductive, and, at worst will cause the conscientious to self-select out of tech.
People are free to do whatever they want but I wish we were giving people positive reasons to be in and in love with tech instead of trotting out trite jokes about <insert tech villain of the week> and showing nothing but surrender.
I’ve been burned out since 2013 but I don’t have the luxury of walking away or even taking a break. Even if I was rich I’d keep going because a) it’s what I love and b) unless you all want to elect me king it’s going to be the best way for me to make an impact in 2025.
I wish Jacob all the best.
Anyway, I’m going to quit swimming because teaching people to swim has increased the number of potential recreational drownings.
[0]: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S02E03. “Tell the Louvre to get off my back!” God, I love Carol Kane.
Also, in universe, Star Trek’s socialist utopia only came about after a period of inequality, instability, science run amok, tyranny, and war. So, we’re on track!
This feels like a cynical interpretation of Jacob's post.
I think it's perfectly reasonable for someone to want to retire with a feeling that their career was a net positive to society; and it can be very difficult to get that feeling when working in tech. So even if switching to being an EMT means his maximum individual impact is vastly reduced, it's far easier to make the claim that he's doing good.
You’re misreading my comment.
Other than the Star Trek bit, I’m not really responding to the post at all. I’m talking about the trend of people who have made ones, tens, or hundreds of millions moaning about the “tech industry” (whatever that is) now that they’re getting out.
My point, you can make whatever impact you want with tech and don’t have to think much about “THE INDUSTRY”. Talk to high school aged kids today and a lot of them look at going into tech as if they’d be lobbyists for big tobacco.
"I left left the "TECH INDUSTRY" to jar pickles in my Vermont farmhouse. It changed everything." or "I created surveillance capitalism and now I'm telling you to make your iPhone grayscale." make for great headlines, NPR segments, and TED Talks, but, who benefits from it?
I have many relatives that died in war. Specifically WWI, WW2, and Vietnam. The direct stories I’ve been told are insane - my grandfather ran communication wires on the German front line and he experienced great trauma.
Then I read books about these wars, and other wars throughout ancient time, and they casually mention so many killed and raped. People struggling to survive. The Japanese called Guadalcanal the “Island of Death” because so many starved and the cannibalism was rampant.
I’m not suggesting we ignore our problems today or minimize them based on what was common even 50 years ago. But it is very helpful to appreciate what we have now, the luxuries, the safety, the technologies, when our ancestors lived in such abject pain and difficulty.
> It’s been incredibly demoralizing to discover what the tech industry actually did was to invent surveillance capitalism, create exploitative “gig economy” business models,create a new generation of robber barons, enable the rise of global fascism, facilitate genoicde,
Is the world actually good?
I struggle with this idea that if you actually create some sort of game changing tech, the business incentives will eventually use it to cause net negative harm for society. At best this takes the form of just resource extraction of customers. At worst it will be twisted by societies current power centers to further each of their collective tragectories (not net positive)?
Why create things for a society that will abuse them.
> I cringe at past-Jacob’s naiveté. It’s been incredibly demoralizing to discover....
I don't think he's reached the end of his road to cynacism; maintaining the moral high of looking for a utopia requires not spending any time assessing the evidence presented by reality. If he has complaints about the tech industry, stocked full of utopianists, he's in for a rude shock in the rest of the world if he keeps thinking about work in moral terms. The economy is a material system that optimises material results. The best outcome is making people you like materially better off (which can be easily done in tech, FWIW), but there are always going to be side effects because the world is messy and competitive.
A fun challenge is to come up with a set of moral principles where most people aren't enabling evil. There is a reason that sociopaths tend to rise to the top, principled people don't get much support and are going to struggle with the actual impacts of what they do.
Sort of. But I've seen what he's seen and worse. The situation isn't solved by changing "careers" or nibbling on the periphery. It requires either changing socioeconomic conditions through effective political organizing over a long timeframe or moving to another country that values community, solidarity, and people as more than just sources of money and labor to be used as tools.
> moving to another country that values community, solidarity, and people as more than just sources of money and labor to be used as tools
Ok, but where is this?
On paper, the Nordic countries get closest but they are not immune to this either.
> I cringe at past-Jacob’s naiveté. It’s been incredibly demoralizing to discover what the tech industry actually did was to invent surveillance capitalism, create exploitative “gig economy” business models,create a new generation of robber barons, enable the rise of global fascism, facilitate genoicde, and I could go on but Christ I’m exhausted.
At least he acknowledges this. A lot of people getting their 6-7 figure salaries deny any wrongdoing. A good number of them post on this forum.
Glad he linked articles on Facebook's culpability in the genocide of the Rohingya people as well. That should be an absolute, disqualifying reason when considering taking their money.
Very strange to see the level of criticism here aimed at someone choosing to explore other paths. You're not a shortsighted fool for trying to do something else. Especially something that's directly, meaningfully helpful to the people around you.