Title: i&#x27;m 31.<p>have Bsc in CS, worked as software eng. for ~7 years.<p>tbh, i&#x27;m completely disillusioned with the industry and people in general. my expectations coming into the industry were based on the hacker ethos from the 80&#x27;s and 90&#x27;s, where a group of passionate and crazy smart people worked on tough and important problems, pulling engineering miracles daily. i&#x27;m talking about netscape and jamie zawinski, xerox and alan kay, l0pht and mudge, valve and gabe newell. legends.<p>entering the industry in the early to mid 2010&#x27;s i found a landscape filled with self serving product managers, conmen (i think they call them executives and MBAs), and a populous of engineers that cared nothing for the tech or the work, and didn&#x27;t need to as there were no real challenges to tackle.<p>perhaps i made bad career choices but what&#x27;s frustrating is that the industry seemed to shift into something else. in other words, the hacker ethos was lost. the culture changed. instead of engineering-centric one it shifted to sales and &quot;growth&quot; and hype. engineers have become relegated to the &quot;peasant&quot; cast, working the fields so that the ceo can sell the company for an inflated sum and move on to the next con (sorry, startup).<p>as i see things, my choices are either to open a company of my own, making what i believe in, or go back to academia where i&#x27;ll have more spare time to pursue my interests. but academia is dying, and dare i say irrelevant. it&#x27;s an outdated concept for a world where i can get &quot;educated&quot; on a subject within a week using the internet, at least enough so i can accomplish what i need. i&#x27;m not going to discover the higgs boson, nor do i want to become an expert in a singular domain. i want to build things.<p>so that takes me back to creating a business around something i believe in. but, it&#x27;ll have to be bootstrapped (vc money is just another boss), so the chances for success are extremely low.<p>what do you think?
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