cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/34411807
While many of them still provide free food and pay well, they have little compunction cutting jobs, ordering mandatory office attendance and clamping down on employee debate. […] “Tech could still be best in terms of free lunch and a high salary,” Ms. Grey said, but “the level of fear has gone way up.”
Along the way, the companies became less tolerant of employee outspokenness. Bosses reasserted themselves after workers protested issues including sexual harassment in the workplace. With the job market flooded with qualified engineers, it became easier to replace those who criticized. “This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts co-workers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said in a blog post last year.
I’ve been a software engineer for almost 10 years now and lately, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to doing something else. I went into the field because coding and computing in general are genuine passions of mine but I find it difficult to be the code mill I’m expected to be, especially when getting work done quickly is prioritized over getting it done correctly. I also feel like most of the coworkers I’ve had over the years don’t have any genuine interest or intrinsic motivation, and are just in it because it pays well - which I don’t fault them for, especially in the current economy, but they’re much more likely to put up with being treated like shit.
I just don’t know what else I would do. Teaching high school CS seems fun but I’m pretty sure making that transition would take a couple years, since I gotta get a teaching degree and be a student teacher and all that, and I’m not sure I have the patience for that
Same. Half the time the code base is an indicipherable, spaghetti filled dumpster fire. More often than that, the business plan is either non existent or just plain idiotic. Management can’t even answer basic questions like, “who is going to pay for this?” The last three projects I worked on were DOA because there was no clear path to profitability. This was at large, well established corporations.
I’m still trying to figure out how it’s possible to graduate with an MBA without understanding the inherent need for revenue to exceed expenses.
Those soulless people who have no live off the craft drive me nuts, and a lot got in the field like 2017-2023 when everyone was trying to grow headcount as fast as possible.
Those people drive me mad.
I think you can teach at community college without a teaching degree. You might need a master’s though.
I have a CS degree but started out in nuclear power, then that got me into automation and robotics. There’s way more of that take your time to do it right atmosphere, and these jobs are all over hiding in unexpected places. I guess nobody wants to turn on an expensive machine just to have it eat itself because of a software bug lol.
I imagine you mean well, but teaching is a profession — not a hobby you dabble in when the honeymoon with your career is over.
What kind of company do you work at? I try to aim for big enough to pay well and give good benefits, but has small enough teams that we own the whole product, start to finish. If you’re working at a software development company, maybe try a company that does something else, but still needs developers?
Industrial automation is always looking. Don’t underestimate the satisfaction of watching your code produce something tangible in front of your eyes.
Just be prepared to integrate with 40 year old equipment and add new features in to a PLC that should have been decommissioned a decade ago and the program is a mangled Frankenstein piece of shit made by 50 different people, many with no real understanding of programming or how to structure things…oh, and various “temporary” hacks upon hacks to keep production running with minimal downtime.
i am in a similar position. i have started to give serious thought to the idea of moving back home (to a country with a much lower cost of living than the US), and live from savings while i figure out what i want to do the rest of my life.
This is where I got the hell out of the industry. I now manage IT for a major university and love it. It doesn’t pay as well but it has great benefits, is pandemic-proof, and allows me to work with a lot of excited and motivated students. When I help them get through their studies with confidence, it means the world to me.