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Maybe you just dropped a tab of acid and realized you don’t want to have regrets on your deathbed: “What if I regret having worked too much? What if creating value for the stakeholders is not the ultimate purpose of life?”
You don’t need to drop acid to understand what’s happening right in front of your face.
While I liked the article, I can’t help but feel it was basically, “find your dream job” as the overarching message. It did give some pointers of where it could be, but finding those are going to be harder than just landing any job in the current landscape, which is already difficult.
Overall I liked a couple things I hadn’t thought of (NGOs), but the end of the article… that just sounded like any other consultancy service to me. Perhaps that’s too harsh but it doesn’t feel like a new career field (just my opinion).
I did not read the full article, but the first advice is what I did, and I don’t regret it. I’ve been working in a public institution’s dev department for 3 years, after a dozen working as a contractor for big companies. It pays a fraction of what I could get elsewhere, but I got benefits I value way more than that.
A lot less stress, concrete work on services that have immediate and beneficial impact on people, colleagues that don’t consider everyone else is competition, and somewhat flexible hours with generous annual leave.
I am not sure that kind of job is available everywhere, so I got “lucky” I found this, I guess. But it’s not like I had to fight for it either. Our team had vacant positions for years because nobody was replying to the job offers. And I just had my contract renewed. I was the only candidate.
Most people don’t know they are allowed to dream, let alone in which direction. While this might not connect with you, there are millions of tech workers who have zero perspective on what’s out there.
“find your dream job”
Which is what I did: working in tech. Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to build things, but I also wanted to support a family. At first I wanted to be a carpenter, but the likelihood of making good money with that was small, so I learned to build websites and decided to make a career out of it (I actually thought about patent law, but realized SW patents don’t build, but prevent things from being built).
So yeah, I’m basically doing exactly what I want, and I’ve avoided working for companies I hate.
That said, I’ve been doing the same thing for many years now, so a change of pace would be welcome, but I still want to build things. Unfortunately, LLMs are trying to take the part of like (actually building things) and is trying to replace it with designing things. I guess I could pivot to that, but seeing something built doesn’t have the same satisfaction for me.
If I had enough to retire, I’d probably start an indie game studio, and I’d hire a lead designer and work on the fun algorithms myself. So my main complaint is what I work on, so I could probably be happier with a different company, but there’s no perfect company and I like my current team, so I’m not particularly interested in leaving.
The meme in the article cracked me up fwiw
Ya fucked. We all are.
Why Milan?
What do you do if you want to leave tech?
You don’t. Every aspect of modern society needs some amount of tech. But the tech we need doesn’t automatically need to be the adware-laden, spyware-as-a-service enshittified garbage that BigTech foists on us in the name of ever-increasing quarterly profits.
We all have a choice. If you can make tech, you can choose to make tech for humans, not corporations. There are numerous apps that we would all love a simple, cleanly implemented version maintained by a small team of individuals dedicated to creating a useful application that solves real-world problems without ripping anybody off or filling our viewscreens with pointless ads.
There’s a simple equation anybody can follow. Make something useful that someone else finds value in, sell it for a reasonable price. That’s it. That’s all any of us need to do in tech. Grab the off-the-shelf hardware, the open-source software, make something useful, and sell it for a modest profit that the makers can live a modest life on.
We all can choose to be less greedy any time we want. We can choose to work for less greedy people. We can choose to maximize for human impact, or for quality, or for longevity. We do not need to keep choosing maximum profit at the expense of our own ecological well-being.
They’re talking about leaving big tech. FAANG types.
"I will try to make as few assumptions as possible:
I assume you’re a technical worker I assume you want to keep using your skills "So you can still be a technologist, just not in a tech company.
I will add soon as I possibly can. I’ve got several ideas banging around and as soon as the opportunity presents itself, I will. I’m (educated) guessing within the next 5 years.
Exactly, I doubt the person or persons who developed ICEBlock are getting tons of income from the project compared how much it costs to host and run the project, but the project is immediately creating a positive impact in society.
