News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry? by jwr on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @10:52AM (#22878387)
I can relate to your point of view, which is why I don't work for "the tech industry", but instead have my own SaaS. This lets me stay close to tech (I love programming in Clojure and ClojureScript!), do what I enjoy, and not have my soul sucked out by evilness and stupidity of today's adtech world.

I have a product which solves a real problem and I'm getting paid by customers who appreciate that their workflow is somewhat easier with my tool. No tricks there.

So, you do have a choice. I'm not saying it's easy or quick, but the choice is there.

Re:Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry? by _davebennett on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @10:54AM (#22878416)
How do you propose finding those real problems to solve? I know that every problem I encounter in my life (or work) has already been solved 100 times over.
Re:Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry? by nradov on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @12:41PM (#22879861)
Joel Spolsky had good advice on that. “Where there’s muck, there’s brass.”

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/12/06/where-theres-muck-...

Re:Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry? by jwr on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @11:28AM (#22878874)
If I were to start again, I would look outside of my tech bubble. Go see a local workshop, baker, restaurant. Look into niche industries. There are plenty of inefficiencies and unsolved problems there. I think the best ones are where you deal with physical things (e.g. not just advertising or getting customers).

There are plenty of unsolved problems.

An alternative is to look for a problem that has been "solved", but not in a certain niche. For example, inventory control and tracking production seems to be a "solved" problem, but it turned out it wasn't a "solved" problem for small/medium-scale electronics manufacturing, which is the niche I'm in.

Re:Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry? by kimi on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @12:00PM (#22879328)
Find a problem that is un-sexy enough and work on it. Success is 99% persistence.
Re:Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry? by non-entity on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @11:01AM (#22878489)
Yeah in honestly shocked at how many niche problems. I encounter that have ready solutions. If I ever find a truly unsolved problem, in likely to assume that its just too hard to properly solve at the time.
Re:Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry? by jmstfv on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @11:14AM (#22878672)
> If I ever find a truly unsolved problem

Why do you think you need to find a truly unsolved problem? If all you want is a profitable, sustainable business, look at what companies are already paying for, and build a product that solves one of those problems. It doesn't have to be a carbon copy of an existing product. You can differentiate by price or combination of features. Or you can target a different niche. Competition is a signal that there's money to be made in the market.

It won't be easy, and you will have to learn sales & marketing. But it is doable. If there are X companies in the market, there's likely a place for another one (as long as this isn't a winner-takes-all type of market).

Re:Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry? by winrid on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @11:56AM (#22879278)
Just find a pain point. One of my products sells just because people really don't like certain aspects of my biggest competitor. So I capitalize on that and make migration easy.
Re:Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry? by ScottFree on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @11:15AM (#22878682)
So solve it for the 101st time, but better. Everything is broken and nothing works. So, build something that isn't broken and does work.

I just found out yesterday that AWS Amplify doesn't have a manual deploy button. It's only job is to build and deploy an app and there is nowhere on Amplify itself where you can press a button and kick off a build! Junk like this is everywhere now. It's a golden opportunity for people who know what they're doing.