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0 pointsinnguest11y ago0 comments

Thanks for writing this. HN is full of touchy-feely folks, hence the downvotes. For many, it's hard to look past tone. They react emotionally. Sure, maybe your grammar could be better or maybe if we forced everyone to have perfect grammar we'd never had read your post.

I also have been dissatisfied with the industry and what it has become. I got into this to create solutions, not to glue others' solutions together. This isn't fun anymore. I'm looking for something more artistic like concept art drawing. I like what you said, "can't wait to get the CRUD out of my eyes"!

I also agree on the startup point you made. Everything is about ads and how to make them better. Yawn to the max. So uninteresting. I'm afraid I don't have a cure for your cynicism. But I want to leave you with something. I was watching an instructional video of an artist teaching environment drawing technique. He said one of the fun things about drawing professionally is he has been doing it for 50 years and it's still interesting to him. Programming is mercurial and will have different "interesting" periods that will appeal to different people as it progresses. This era in programming is not my favorite.

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fat0wl11y ago

heh yes its funny i dont karma points seriously, i was mainly interested in hearing some qualitative sort of discussion but the main complaints i got were about grammar & negativity, neither of which i am particularly apologetic about. anyway, glad u appreciated & provided a thoughtful response :)

i think you are right about the "mercurial" nature. my boss says it used to be much more fun before lots of mature libraries & package software existed. It was literally about algorithm design at all points. Now things are more about vetting existing technologies to see what the most widely-accepted & reliable standards are. And honestly, there are design patterns you can learn from that but realistically I've been in enterprise Java for 2 years and with that small amount of experience, I am already finding that 99% of the work we do is trivial. Anything that would be over my head is provided in a vendor API, and with modern code we can keep our own domain logic slim enough that it almost never gets out of hand.

I think there is still a lot of interesting stuff to accomplish with code but as others pointed out, the industry is sortof over-expanded. Ideas are not leading programming so much as programming is leading to iteration through mundane ideas. The boring startup problem is the result of there being way less thinkers in the industry than do-ers, I'm sure... or that entrepreneurialism is in reality just planting the seeds of micro-corporations rather than acting as an incubator for mind-bending ideas.

Having to be a part of this mundane period is probably my fault (for straying from art toward a career in programming) but maybe I can redeem myself somehow & take a last shot at heaven. I've been thinking of starting my own company, but as a deep-sleeper cell for DSP algorithms development... continue my machine learning / AI research from my master's degree, develop some really powerful tools with heavily optimized algorithms, then try to integrate them into the commercial space (audio editing software, most likely). Hmm... we'll see. Best of luck, again I appreciate u taking the time.

innguestOP11y ago

Funny we've both been seduced away from arts by programming. :)

Best of luck to you.

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