Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Best way to optimize career for money in IT?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 27 posts

Re: Ask HN: Best way to optimize career for money in IT?

#11

Post by f0e4c2f7 »

imworkingrn wrote: post #9
f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #7

This is fairly straightforward imo. Most money is in big tech. Look at levels.fyi to get an idea of the roadmap. Big tech hires mostly off leetcodes. There are other factors too. Your journey begins with practicing leetcodes and reading all the books on teachyourselfcs.com Study dilligently. Watch YouTube courses too but this should be considered supplemental. Apply for big tech jobs. This will probably take several…

Okay, sounds solid but dummy question: What are my chances of doing this if I'm from Europe? Also, I don't have a full UNI degree, I dropped out after I got my Bachelors.

Fortunately big tech jobs are available in EU too. Highest salaries might trickier without moving to US, shouldn't be too hard to transfer to US once you get a job at one if you want to. Making quite a high salary without moving is possible too (though still need to be a in a major metro that has big tech companies.)

Re: Ask HN: Best way to optimize career for money in IT?

#12

Post by austin-cheney »

imworkingrn wrote: post #10
austin-cheney wrote: post #6

To maximize for money without moving into management here are the options: * Follow a trend, as in do what everyone else does. For example be great at both Java and JavaScript React. When I say great I only mean above average at programming but administratively great at agile and closing tickets. Beef up your resume with numbers and move into a role as a corporate principal. AI and cloud infrastructure are hot right…

Also, the data doesn't seem to show that people who follow trends end up making more. It's quite the opposite - focusing on niche languages like Go, Rust or frameworks like Flutter can make you more.

You have to advance your career. Just being employed will not get you more money.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to optimize career for money in IT?

#14

Post by austin-cheney »

imworkingrn wrote: post #8
austin-cheney wrote: post #6

To maximize for money without moving into management here are the options: * Follow a trend, as in do what everyone else does. For example be great at both Java and JavaScript React. When I say great I only mean above average at programming but administratively great at agile and closing tickets. Beef up your resume with numbers and move into a role as a corporate principal. AI and cloud infrastructure are hot right…

Do researchers make any real money? I feel like all around I hear about it being stale there as far as funding goes.

Researchers are in a unique position to get paid to discover things. Its a lottery in that what they publish could potentially be worth tremendous money in industry, but its a safe gamble because if everything else goes wrong they are still employable with a higher than average salary doing work that is less boring than average.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to optimize career for money in IT?

#15

Post by imworkingrn »

hajimuz wrote: post #13

Optimize the rate, not the money itself. With Remote work, automation, now I can work only around 20 hours a month with a full month salary.

Can you elaborate on this? Do you automate replying to emails? Coding? Or just general productivity?

Re: Ask HN: Best way to optimize career for money in IT?

#16

Post by austin-cheney »

sim7c00 wrote: post #2

Hi, The best advice I can give is do not go for the money. I fell for it, and all it gave me was unhappiness and stress. I used to earn about 11k a month doing technical work for an American big tech company. It was not worth it. I earn not even half now, but I can smile again and enjoy my life. That being said, it's really a simple equation and there's a few options. The lottery way: Try to join a promising startup,…

I completely feel this. I won't go back to paid JavaScript work for less than half a million in a low cost of living area. The alternative is that I will just have to continue to be happy working in something different that isn't a complete race to the bottom.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to optimize career for money in IT?

#17

Post by sim7c00 »

imworkingrn wrote: post #5
sim7c00 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

last comment: advice i got from a very professional and good guy who helped me in my early days. structure your learning. He was a pentester and did it along the lines of: I am learning windows priv-esc now. I am learning linux priv-esc now. I am learning sqli now I am learning XSS now. Then go over all the topics you wanna learn, becomming expert in them one-by-one. It can be a mess of 1000 things at once. Take lots…

Thanks a lot for the advice. Yea I can hear what you wrote about Germany. I currently work with a client who outsources some of their management work to Germany and apart for the titles people have before their names, their technical knowledge is really poor. As far as the startup route, I'm experimenting with various things on the side but do not rely on them. I suppose it might be worth trying to build some "plugga…

id like to emphasize i didnt say anything about the skill levels of german engineers. ive worked with really talented ones, and poor ones. but for me its impossible to land a job there, having no education and certs. definitely feel u. a lot of people u meet in corporate arent the hackers you expect. like anywhere, most people do the minimum not to get fired. and some people do all the work and suffer burnouts :D. wonderful world!

Re: Ask HN: Best way to optimize career for money in IT?

#18

Post by redleader55 »

I'm going to address your TLDR question. In order to get more money, the impact you have in your company needs to be higher. As a manager, you are a multiplier for your team - this is why you get payed more. In order to get that without being a manager, you need to be in a company that allows individual contributors to have independence from the managers, so that ICs can be multipliers for others. Those are usually very big companies, but with a dynamic way of communicating internally - ie. you don't need to go through "gatekeepers" to expand your scope. A place where the manager needs to approve you working on every single task, or a place where engineers report to "project managers" are not that.

Leaving that aside, if you want money go to places where you are on the critical path for the company to make money and become more important to the company by what you are doing there - either solving hard problems, or solving problems that no one wants to touch, or problems that only you know how to solve. The toxic way is to create problems and then solve them; please don't do that, because we have enough of those assholes.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to optimize career for money in IT?

#19

Post by Desafinado »

sim7c00 wrote: post #2

Hi, The best advice I can give is do not go for the money. I fell for it, and all it gave me was unhappiness and stress. I used to earn about 11k a month doing technical work for an American big tech company. It was not worth it. I earn not even half now, but I can smile again and enjoy my life. That being said, it's really a simple equation and there's a few options. The lottery way: Try to join a promising startup,…

I'd echo this advice. It's a tale as old as time, young workers chasing money, status, and prestige, only to realize later that they gave years of their life and energy to a faceless corporation.

If you want to optimize for money and time, what you're looking for isn't how much money you can make, you're looking to find the perfect balance of money/stress that will satisfy your financial needs. What is the lowest salary you can make which will still meet your lifestyle needs. You want to aim for that.

Try not to lose sight of the fact that we pursue money for financial independence and leisure in the future. But if your job is one that you enjoy and doesn't burden you, then you can fast forward to the leisure part right now. Every day of your working life will be easy and stress-free. That's huge.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to optimize career for money in IT?

#20

Post by giantg2 »

redleader55 wrote: post #18

I'm going to address your TLDR question. In order to get more money, the impact you have in your company needs to be higher. As a manager, you are a multiplier for your team - this is why you get payed more. In order to get that without being a manager, you need to be in a company that allows individual contributors to have independence from the managers, so that ICs can be multipliers for others. Those are usually v…

"the impact you have in your company needs to be higher."

Really just the preceived impact.

Post reply on HN