You could say the same thing about ICs though -- "I refuse to believe there are people whose purpose in life is to spend 5 days a week for 3 years building an enterprise line-of-business app to automate an obscure legacy business process that will be used by 10 people in total, and all 10 of those people will complain about the new app and wish they could go back to doing things the old way"
That is a real meaning and sense of purpose for your earned money!
Though, that's just semantics on the naming. IC just means not having direct reports.
The world we live in still sucks away the best years of your life but at least you don't have to wait until your 60s to live the life you want. You can also work on side projects in your spare time that will hopefully accelerate this process.
This should be doable on a tech salary.
I retired at 50 and "the dream" of FIRE is almost like someone else's idea of an ideal goal and I'm not that satisfied with it - perhaps because I'm out of sync with my peers (I have gained some retired 65+ friends). I had planned to enjoy investing however I find investing soulless and unsatisfying even though I'm doing well at it, so my life plan needs to change. My hobbies remain hobbies - they are not fulltime.
> The world we live in still sucks away the best years of your life
Some of the most satisfied people I know work in plain jobs.
I could found a startup but that's just creating a job for myself and the benefits of many many millions don't seem like they'd improve my life enough.
Agreed, but how do you know you are doing well at it? Who hasn’t? Stock market only goes up and has been fueled by low interest rates for almost 2 decades.
But, at least at some point in your life, doing work within a company may provide that life. At some point, you're done. And that point may vary. But many people wouldn't really love (or at least benefit from) a bunch of money dropped in their lap when they graduated from college.
Have a big trust fund? Sure. If it were from Day 1, depending on the circumstances, 9-5 would have been ehh. But not sure how directed I would have been absent strong parental direction.
And that is true for all memory, I suppose. There is none. It's constant communication, down to the quantum level, a constant vortex of information, and if the vortex stops, all memory is gone.
You can have your cake and eat it, too: if your work is satisfying and seeing people use the things you built gives you joy, you can make good money doing something you life without optimizing your entire life solely around ladder climbing or bigger paychecks.
as an extreme example I'm aware of, the core AWS infrastructure is still heavily dependent on Perl scripts mashed together 15+ years ago.
What part of the infrastructure? The control-plane logic that triggers when the dashboard/CLI/CloudFormation request modifications to resources?
If you can switch to management without draining your life energy, go for it? I hope you're a good manager.
Personally, all of my experiences managing people have been very draining.
I've attempted to follow the traditional/expected progression path of senior->management and had a horrible experience each time. Even though I was getting praised for the work,it was taking way more energy from me to the point of burning out much faster than anything at the IC level.
I suppose that depends on what kind of work you are talking about and your perspective on what different kinds of work really are.
I wouldn't consider "The thing i do so me and my family don't starve" to have an inherent need to be hard or tiring.
Whereas "The thing i do to fill up my time with something i feel is meaningful" might have a hard and/or tiring component, but only if you personally feel like the hard/tiring part is required.
Things can be rewarding without being draining and value is subjective.
Now, did our presence impact the company? Did our code survive? Or documentation? Do people who work there today have any idea we ever existed? No, perhaps not. But really... who cares? The relationships we have with people in our lives matter, as do the impacts we have on each other, regardless of what our impact was on some rando corporation I earned a check from some number of years ago.
I have to wonder how things will change when the last couple of us from those days move on, as we are the last links to that time.
The exception is if you build a fundamental component of the system, and that component is so unique in what it does that nobody who comes after you will even consider the idea of ground-up reimplementing it, but instead just has to immerse themselves into your mindset, trust your docs, etc, whenever they're maintaining that component, forever.
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The bad/painful version of this, is when the component relies on unique hardware (e.g. a mainframe's native IO-acceleration capabilities), and was designed by someone who was immersed in that ecosystem and understood how to write code to take advantage of it. So the code is incredibly non-portable, written in terms of the low-level abstractions of the hardware, that nobody else in the company will ever understand to the same level the original programmer did. This is e.g. flight booking.
You should hope to never encounter these, since they make the rest of your service that has to interact with this thing into a tar pit of low momentum, from your lack of ability to effect change on this component.
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There is a good version of this, too, though: when the component relies on unique concepts and math (say, doing static analysis by generating constraint statements and solving/simplifying them using a prover) that are portable, and could in theory be reimplemented in a new codebase if desired... but which were literally invented by the programmer in the process of implementing the code, at the climax of months of lateral thinking about how to solve the problem. This is an engineering True Dweomer.
There's usually nothing wrong with codebases containing True Dweomer code; they're not any less maintainable than usual. And they solve a problem that isn't solvable with simpler solutions — that's why such a weird solution was arrived at in the first place. So they usually tend to stick around.
But everyone who arrives at the company will nevertheless be slightly afraid of touching the True Dweomer code. They don't understand it, even though they know they could understand it given enough time (and prerequisite textbook reading.) Unlike mainframe code, people might look fondly on the code, looking for opportunities to be assigned to a project that requires that they come to grips with it... but the project usually ticks along by itself, not requiring much maintenance.
(What you'll actually hope for, is that whoever writes the True Dweomer code requests to lift it out, out of whatever project it's a part of, out of the company itself, into an open-source project. Because that way, that person who does understand it, can keep maintaining it, even after they leave.)
E.g., tech suffers from the former, politics from the latter, and for both fields, the effect is a warping of the good that they could be doing for society. Society should be set up to encourage "correct" entries and exits and to discourage "incorrect" ones (with allowances, during the transition, to avoid having a "lost generation" that never gets to contribute).
Letting people hang on, with their outmoded ideas, into their 70s and 80s? Forcing breadwinners to take on maximum workplace responsibility at the same time that they are most able to contribute to raising their family or building and maintaining their community? There's something perverse about this set-up. To say nothing of the people forced to spin their wheels while the 10xers load their own plates with all the opportunities.
Every couple years since, I've gotten a bug in my butt and investigated how many sites still had pieces I'd clearly worked on. On this most recent occasion, I could no longer find anything. They've changed over to some open source CMS and I was unable to find anything I had built.
It's been 12 years in there since I left, but as far as I can see on the front side everything I'd written is gone. It's a strange feeling, like 5 years of my life just evaporated.
A gas station sells gas that is gone within weeks. But someone fills their car, and drives to Mountain View and gets a job that changes your life.
Helping a business grow by 10% more each year because they were an early adopter to websites is something you impacted, even if your code isn’t there to remind people why.
“All we are is dust in the wind.” (Kansas and Ecclesiastes)
The world isn’t a static place. The impact is often closer to saving X thousands of people a few seconds than anything more meaningful. Perhaps the indirect result is someone finds the love of their life but it could just as easily be a life changing STD or getting run over and impacting many people means many such indirect changes both positive and negative.
Very odd to look at it and know that I'm probably one of 2 or 3 people who know why that specific code is there, and also to know that the base of this is still running.
But that's the exception, not the rule.
To quote Roy Batty, "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."
If there's anything I've noticed in this industry, it's that abstractions tend to outlive their origins. For instance, back in the 80s the Unix systems my workplace used (and subsequently, many of the applications they ran) had an 8 character max username length, and although those old Unix boxes (and their vendors) are long gone, we're still given 8 character usernames since nobody wants to find out the hard way that there still are some applications that depend on an 8 character max or which truncate longer usernames to 8 characters.
If you want to make a lasting impact on an industry but you weren't able to get in on the ground floor, your best bet is to get into advanced R&D, whether at a major hardware company or in academia. Anywhere else and your knowledge will either be wasted because nobody cares or it will be siloed off because the company will never open-source the tech you pioneered (and someone else will likely take the credit for it later on when they create an open-source equivalent).
The goal of many software engineers is to build software / systems they can be proud of. They love software and the machines it runs on.
Many people here have Arduino projects, 3D printers, home servers, and similar hobbies.
A few weeks ago, I was looking for compression algorithms for a particular use case and came across Brotli[0]. I was surprised to learn it was developed by Google. That realization hit me hard. Google used to be a hub for this kind of innovation. Projects like Brotli aren't built to maximize personal profit; they're driven by passion and a genuine love for software engineering.
It's clear that the industry is shifting from being geeky and nerdy to being more business and management focused.
Maybe for people <30. Priorities change very fast, as you age. I’ve met a good chunk of very talented engineers through work and other venues who acknowledged that they stopped caring after some point.
I fundamentally believe a lot of my issues with our field is partly a skill issue on my part -- if I were talented enough, then I might be able to achieve what I truly desire: to work on projects where people care about quality and care about the problem that is trying to be solved.
However, I feel like my IC career is akin to an assembly-line worker. The people I have worked with do not care about quality nor programming/computer science at all. They just want to get things done as fast as possible while extracting as much money as they can.
So yes, I am about to stop caring. If companies want fast churning, low-quality software, then so be it. I'll just need to get over tying some part of my identity to my work.
However, the risk of burnout still exists, but this time, from overwork, because there is essentially an unbounded amount of work that could be done. Additionally, my career growth at my current place is probably stalled out unless I want to do substantially less tech work. This occurs because they have a lot of people who've amassed a lot of specialized expertise, so technical skill is commonplace.
Ultimately, I arrived in a spot in my career that isn't terribly different from most people, despite the amount of work and time put into trying to break away from that. I don't regret it, but there is a sense of wondering whether it was really worth it if my progression, pay, and everything else follows the same age-gated gradient that is prevalent in industry.
> I don't regret it, but there is a sense of wondering whether it was really worth it if my progression, pay, and everything else follows the same age-gated gradient that is prevalent in industry
I am going to assume that you are much further along in your career than I am. Not perhaps in years of experience, but rather more in terms of literal career progression. I'm just a small shop code-monkey, so there isn't really any verticality to my position (unless I jump ship).
However, I do sympathize with your questioning the worth of it all. In some ways, I think I have prematurely questioned many of the same ideas. Such questioning has perhaps aided in my procrastination in bettering my situation.
Maybe what I am looking for is purely fantasy and does not exist in a truly feasible manner? I mean, we have only one life on this planet. I often find myself questioning if this is how I one to spend such time. . .
> Maybe what I am looking for is purely fantasy and does not exist in a truly feasible manner?
I felt those same things. Places where quality work is respected do exist, but they may not be in FAANG. You may need to choose between interesting work and money eventually.
Happy to chat more over email if it is helpful.
This.
I read here on HN some time ago an article stating that teenager-ish people crave to find "meaning" in work due to being what in essence can be described as emotionally retarded (although intellectually normal). This all changes fast as they age and/or have kids or other inevitable live event that manages to pull their head out of their ass.
Basically Mark Twain's "When I was 17, my father was so stoopid" remark.
Then once they reach about 30 they realize family is what mattered the most, work is just a means to an end most of the time and it's really hard to make your "mark" on the world. Why not make your mark in a smaller way that's more guaranteed? By being there for family and friends
I've heard this same complaint for the last 30 years, probably starting with this - Bret Hart helps you debug a null pointer dereference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSmKiws-4NU
In the case of Google, they very much are driven by profit. For a small company, reducing your payload size or decompression time by 0.01% may be senseless, but at their scale the benefit will greatly outweigh the costs.
Disclosure: have collaborated with Jyrki and the compression team, including WOFF2 font compression, an early application of Brotli.
And this type of work was only possible because someone provided resources because they were expecting some type of payoff.
Let's stop romanticizing the past. Brotli's first release is from 2015. More than 10 years after Google's IPO. To claim that this type of project used to indicate that companies were more geeky and nerdy is completely asinine.
I worked at my first consumer-oriented tech company, right after the dotcom crash. It was a really unexciting interlude in my career. I was given the job of writing the database and Java representation of credit/debit cards, and the related business logic. As often happens, the code grew over time, as requirements and card types were added. And it was finally time for a rewrite, and this code became a poster child for technical debt.
Startup activity resumed, and I left for a far more interesting startup.
Then, maybe 15 years later, I was retired, and doing consulting, and ran into a friend from the company, who told me that a new company doing something very similar, and was looking for help. I go in and talk to them, and discover that they actually licensed the software from my former company. Including my long-in-the-tooth credit/debit/xyz-card software. The code was still completely recognizable, disturbingly so. It lived on far past the point that it should have.
I decided to not take the consulting job. I really did not relish the idea of going back to this very forgettable and uninteresting code. But most importantly, I had just retired, and wanted to spend my summer on a lake, not keeping this code alive a bit longer.
We pressure people into management roles who have no reason being there other than "that's where more money is" or "that's how you create change". If someone's "end state" is a highly competent and flexible IC, then why isn't there more money for them to continue succeeding at that role as compared to an ineffective manager? For all the talk that tech is a meritocracy, it obviously isn't, otherwise we'd be rewarding the best talent without forcing them into bad roles or hollow titles.
Motivations aren't restricted to money alone, either, as we've seen post-pandemic with the WFH-RTO conflicts. A plurality of workers have realized their time is more valuable than their work, and are refusing to take chump change for multi-hour commutes from affordable suburbs just because their employer is arbitrarily demanding butts-in-seats in a pricey city. Others want their employers to be more involved in politics, or at least acknowledge that choosing to be a for-profit business is in fact a political statement in and of itself; hiding behind faux-neutrality in times of crisis isn't sufficient response anymore. The times are a changing, and the workforce is increasingly making its frustrations known.
Which brings me to your last paragraph:
> ...for most techies, the most useful goal is to make money fast in a way that doesn't drain your life energy.
I would like to proudly stand up as one of those not in that "most techies" crowd. I do this work because it comes easy to me, is incredibly interesting, and allows me to work in infrastructure in a way that isn't building roads or laying pipe. I identified my career ending way back in High School: acting as the jack-of-all-trades IT guy for the school or district, grey hair and hoarse voice, gradually nerd-sniping the kids who, like I was, are bored out of their skulls and looking for a challenge. The money certainly helps (even if it's not nearly enough to buy a home close to the office), but my career begins and ends in ultimately the same place.
And that's the point of the post: identifying where your career ends, and the arc it takes to get there. It's why I'm doing the leadership courses and trying to beat a new path upward in the corporate world, one where highly-competent ICs who are also good leaders are recognized as such and put into long-term positions within an organization, to weather the storm of cyclic leaders and fickle shareholders, and ultimately build a stronger, successful, and sustainable entity as a result. I need those years/decades of leadership and money to reach that position where I have a paid-off home, decent retirement savings, and can finally dedicate my remaining time and talent toward building a better future for the next-generation of people.
This is a tightrope I think many people wind up struggling with—it’s easy to slip into doing something that pays well but does drain your energy, then struggle to wind things back once you’re used to the increased income.
With lifestyle creep, mortgages or kids' educations to pay for, the sum that would have been "enough" in your twenties isn't in your forties.
Many people work hard for decades and drop dead of a heart attack the first day after their retire.
Others retire too early and find out the hard way that they did not, in fact, have enough money.
Some people get both right and still find themselves bored or spiraling unhealthily (drinking to much etc).
also I know one family who retired early, realized they will run out of money and instead of going back to work moved to costa rica :)
How are you positive that you can get to VP level in a decade as a manager? That doesn't sound easy. Just by looking at the number of managers and number of VP in my company it would seemed that around ~2% would eventually become VP if the ratio hold, that's an incredible standard for "reasonably good". Doubly so if you are not even starting from the same track.
Is it so insane to think that it is possible to enjoy your job? I feel that this treatment of your job as a toxic thing that must be handled with safety gloves from a safe distance may contribute more to the "drain[ing] of life energy" than the actual job itself.
There's a couple issues with your assertion. Even if you go the VP route, people rarely make VP in under, say, seven years, and usually more like twenty years, without exceptional luck like getting in on the ground floor of a rocket ship. If you don't like the managerial path then you'll burn out long before you get to VP. The second issue is that learning to control your expenses is far more powerful than earning more money. I promise you, no matter how big the salary is, there are people drowning in debt despite of it.
Hobbies, friends, family - none of these should require outsize financial outlay. Doing what you love, building your community, and living below your means is a much more powerful strategy for lifelong happiness and fulfillment, and also much more likely to succeed than some years-long "sprint" to a job you can barely tolerate.
I know it sounds preposterous, but ask anyone over the age of 55 or 60: except for folks who built their own companies or made truly exceptional contributions to their field, most will say that hobbies, friends, and family mattered a lot more.
So, there is this fundamental contradiction in this article: you can engineer a very neat career, but for most people, the most useful goal is to make money fast in a way that doesn't drain your life energy. And most of the time, this means responding to opportunities, not sticking to your guns. For example, a lifetime IC job may be ultimately worth less than a management job that gets you to VP level in a decade. You don't need to dream about being a manager; you just need to be reasonably good at it.