The rest of big tech isn't much better. Big G is less stressful, but you'll see vicious and cringey behavior left and right. Hyped large startups are cults and 100% cringe. Meta is kind of the worst of both worlds though. "But they pay so well". Yeah, also: life is short.

Even a mediocre chatbot with some in-domain training data is fine for their purpose, which is not to maximally help the customer.

Meanwhile, they're distracting the public away from the real issues, which are the same as always: filling the web with more garbage, getting people to buy stuff, decreasing attention spans and critical thinking.

The threat of job loss is also real, though we should admit that many of the writing jobs eliminated by LLMs are part of the same attention economy.

Another thing you can do in parallel is reaching out to other friends/acquaintances you might have lost touch with. Tell them honestly what you appreciate about them and that you'd like to revive the friendship.

In both cases you'll feel awkward and uncertain. It's normal. Also, don't expect any single relationship to fulfill your unmet needs. But making yourself vulnerable to others is the beginning of "working through it yourself".

My complaints with FAANG have to do with perverse incentives that reward nonsensical decisions, poorly thought-out and over-engineered projects, grandiose documents, duplication of work, selective reporting of metrics, etc.

The few times I had a really good manager, a sane environment, and fulfilling work only lasted until the next reorg. It seems like most organizations are either stressful with a lot of adversarial behavior, or have almost nothing to do but depressing busywork. I also find the social aspect lackluster if not downright alienating. I feel at a dead end both in career growth and opportunities to learn on the technical side. I could roll the dice with another team change, but I'm not eager at the prospects.

Most of my work experience is in ML, but I don't want to box myself into that. I find the current hype around generative models insufferable, and the typical ML project today consists of somewhat sloppy Python and a lack of good engineering practices. I'm also tired of the increasingly long and opaque feedback loops (come up with an idea, wait for your giant model to retrain, hope that some metric goes up). I'm still passionate about some aspects (e.g., learning representations, knowledge grounding, sane ML workflows).

I hear that academia has similar issues (though again I mostly know about ML), and I imagine lots of industries have worse conditions than tech. I realize that sloppiness and politics are a fact of life, so I'm wary of falling into the "grass is greener" trap.

I figure I could take a sabbatical and explore some new areas, try to transition to contracting, or look for jobs outside of the big tech/web startup scene. Ideally I'd like something that requires rigor, with a focus on software architecture or algorithms/optimization. I'd also like to minimize the type of workplace politics I've experienced at FAANG. I'm open to suggestions that don't exclusively have to do with software. Part of me is tired of spending so much of my life in front of a computer.

Here are some disorganized ideas that might give a sense of my interests:

- Cryptography and security (not cryptocurrency/blockchain): I have a math background and I was always an algebra/discrete math person, so this seems a potential fit.

- Formal verification / theorem proving

- Open messaging standards (e.g., Matrix): I find the current state with siloed proprietary messengers a travesty

- Open repositories of knowledge (e.g., Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap)

- "User-empowering" software (e.g., Emacs, Ableton Live)

- Distributed systems

- Programming language development (compilers, libraries)

- Graphics (though the gaming industry isn't exactly the place to recover from burnout)

- Research in cognitive science, psychedelics (lots of hype here though), complex systems, physics

- Studying music composition or audio engineering

- Helping out with homelessness, loneliness, the elderly or disabled

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34719088

Points: 163

# Comments: 170