I have a love-hate relationship with working in tech. I’m great at it, but I hate it with every fiber of my being. Most people don’t believe me when I say I’d do almost anything to get out of tech if I could maintain the basics for my family, but I’ve tried so many times and keep ending back in this hell.
Tech work would be satisfying if not for the products, the customers, and the mindset of the people involved. If you fix PC’s, you get to be a glorified service person with a technical requirement. When you code, you get a mix of mind-numbing and impossible tasks. One day you’re asked to replace Google in a week, the next you’re asked to do glorified data entry.
Let’s see the 10 reasons I hate tech. There would be more than 10, but I don’t want to write a whole book here; I just want to blow off some steam. Take this with a grain of salt and laugh with me as we cry. It’s been one of those days… months… years?
1. Fixing a Computer vs. Fixing a Car
You can go to the worst mechanic, and while they may not even replace the right part, but they’ll still bill you and expect you to pay. Meanwhile, with computer repair, I can replace the right part, the right way and if something goes wrong elsewhere, now I’m on the hook to make it right. It seems to be inevitable. I did my part, I should be done, but no, the client usually still wants to complain because they don’t know what’s going on. Their ignorance is now my burden because they don’t really value what I do. After all, all I do is click stuff.
2. You Just Click Stuff
I hear this so much, especially when coding. Why isn’t the convoluted API that makes no sense integrated in with this code that is predicated on a completely different base within an impossibly short time frame? I have to sit and explain this to someone who needs a wrangler to make sure an umbrella is over their head when it rains to prevent them from drowning.
Apparently, I just click stuff and slap stuff together. It’s not that I do anything more, it’s just that I’m “technical” enough to slap the keyboard with some “for” loops (or whatever coders do) over and over. Anyone could do it, but it takes a special kind to want to do it. Otherwise, I mean seriously, what is it I do?
You’ll hear this from family and similar when you try to “guilt” them into paying you for your time to fix their “minor problem”. The computer wasn’t submerged in salt water for more than 3 days, it should be good right? They waited to plug it in until after getting it to stop dripping water.
3. But It Only Took 10 Minutes!
I know how successful musicians feel when people complain about them getting paid buckets for a 3 minute song. I may not experience the same money, but I know the frustration they feel. My crime is that I only spent 10 minutes fixing the thing from the 100 page manual I memorized with the years of experience I have to fix a part that normally can’t be fixed.
It’s okay though, it only took me 10 minutes! Good thing nothing else went into the entire process or I’d be raging right now. Remember, I just click stuff, so it’s really not that hard.
4. Digital Plumber
A qualified technician should be like a plumber with qualifications and experience to back it. Even though I have this, I’m going to get to hear why the technical equivalent of their toilet didn’t flush a year after I replaced a faucet in the kitchen.
I remember helping a friend of a friend buy a hard drive years ago. We went and picked one up (a questionable brand from a questionable store which I warned against). I told this friend of a friend to copy some junk they didn’t care about, to check it after a couple more copies, then to delete it and repeat this a few times.
Naturally, the friend of a friend decided to copy their one of a kind photos over instead of their 100 gigs of porn (this was when a 500GB drive was the biggest consumer size). The drive died and they freaked out and threatened (and tried to follow through) with legal action. They wanted to sue me for the cost of a clean room restoration. They also decided to tell everyone about how I screwed them with my bad tech advice.
5. An Understanding As Deep As a Shower
Our friend from the previous section isn’t the only idiot I’ve met doing tech. I didn’t charge them for a reason, I was wasting my free time to go with them to an electronic market in a foreign country to help serve as a free interpreter and help them pick something which suited their technical needs. Their complete and utter lack of understanding meant they made the wrong decision, and I didn’t want any kind of leverage to “deliver”.
They weren’t the first, and they weren’t the last. That’s why I charge 2-3 times as much as “I should”, because it discourages people and it means I can comp them without hurting myself (as much). I spent 10 hours and got to bill for 2 with a client this last week. They were actually reasonable too, the original job was a favor that spiraled out of control.
Since so few people understand what you do, they’ll throw a fit about how you took food off their table when their computer didn’t boot after they ran it over with a tank and you billed them to look at it.
6. Programming vs. Fixing
If you work in coding, you know the difference between a software architect and a full-stack architect. There’s a reason they get an extra digit in their salary. Coding is different than fixing a technical problem.
Programmers aren’t usually technicians, but if you work with one aspect of a computer, you work with all aspects as far as the public is concerned. You don’t ask your vet about your kid’s ADHD because it makes no sense, but people will ask a programmer to fix their Outlook issue, or a technician to write them a script to fundamentally “replace Google”.
7. If I Could Do That, I’d Be Retired Already
If I could mix up your ideal native language parser in Perl and Powershell, I’d have done it for someone paying real money already. No, it’s not just a “simple script” to interpret these text pieces and turn them into actionable data unless someone (or something) is controlling the inputs.
I’ve literally been asked to write a native language parser which can interpret a variety of statements, some of which I couldn’t make heads or tails of because of how strained the grammar was (I have a degree in applied linguistics too) as a minor feature request to an ERP I wrote. I wrote a whole ERP and it “wasn’t that impressive”. The fact it couldn’t read typos and grammatical abominations pretty much no one could read (the people who filed the reports forgot what their notes meant) was a deal breaker though.
8. What If We…
Redo everything for this harebrained idea which makes one person’s job easy at the expense of everyone else? Oh cool, let me just drop these 5,000 lines of code I’ve spent weeks working on in conjunction with the necessary SQL, unit testing, error handling, and integrations so we can reorganize something so Mister Front-end doesn’t have to adapt to the way everything is done on every other part of the site.
Maybe we’ll throw in some features no one asked for to really show them what’s what too. Screw the wheel, let’s make a round object with a hole we can put a bar or some other round dowel type thing through in order to drive our cart! Luckily, it’s done just differently enough everything I’ve already made is practically useless.
9. You’re Just Sitting in Front of a Screen!
Don’t mind that progress bar and the command line where I’m running a command every few seconds to track something down. Timing is everything for this process, but I’m just staring idly at my screen. That project a sub-tier 1 should do? Sure, throw it at me, I have nothing else to do, I’m just sitting in front of a screen as you so eloquently pointed out to every manager in the company!
There are times you just have to run something and watch how it progresses. The how is as important as a “successful” output. If the 20 second process takes 10 minutes, what’s happening on the machine to make it do so? That detail is missed though. I’m supposed to be one of the most trusted techs in the hierarchy, but I end up assigned to things that someone below a tier 1 is supposed to work because I’m “just sitting there”.
10. Stay Your Lane
All I’ve wanted to do for years is get out of tech, but any time I get a job, I end up pushed back. I’m good at it, but it just about makes me fantasize about running off into the woods never to deal with humankind again.
Once they see I can fix my own desktop issue or whatever, they start asking me about theirs. If I don’t help, I’m not a team player and I have to get out, if I do, now I’m a tech again. “Dumbass David” (literally what the company referred to the resident IT guy as at a company I worked at previously) may break every computer he touches, but he gets his yearly raise for being a hard worker and staying late. I fix the problem and all I got was work he couldn’t accomplish because he couldn’t cut it.
If you’re on the fence, but you don’t hate tech yet, you should learn to hate it soon before you’re stuck in this unending groundhog’s day hellscape.
Image by andreas160578 from Pixabay