I left after over 25 years. I love programming and love working with Linux, but the jobs always came down to "help us steal peoples personal information so we can slam them with spam for products the neither want or need." It was unfulfilling. I went back to school and got an MA in history. I teach humanities though I still teach a couple of programming classes. I miss it a little. I would go back in a heartbeat for the right position, but I am through getting mauled in tech interviews which turned into combat trivial pursuit. I love technology and I still create applications mostly for myself or to help automate my school. I get new ideas from HN.
rvz|5 years ago
This. Something has definitely changed in the last ~10 to 20 years since the end of the dotcom era of interviewing in the tech industry. Before it was as simple as reading the AUTHORS file in an open-source project like Linux to vouch for a programmer applying to somewhere like Red Hat or Mozilla. But now we are expecting them to write a proof of quicksort's worst-case runtime complexity or to explain the Diffie-Helman public key exchange mathematically on a whiteboard to "see how you think" and "prove programmer ability" which is unnecessarily academic and they either don't use it directly or search on Google for it anyway.
That's just the onsite interviews, pre-interviews are riddled with Leetcode, Hackerrank and Codility tests which can be cheated or the solution can be found on Google. What a shame that these flawed tests still exist.
potta_coffee|5 years ago
notacoward|5 years ago
Excellent phrase. Thank you.
lappet|5 years ago
elroyjetson|5 years ago