11–20 of 92 posts
Have done almost every job, found system administration/DevOps/SRE stuff the most interesting. Security stuff is cool but also too product-oriented for my tastes.
I got pigeonholed quickly into enterprise development, mostly at non tech companies of various sizes.
I knew I never wanted to work as a software dev professionally. I had other plans initially that fell through. However I found myself in a situation where my choices were to struggle off of a low skill job or try and break into the industry have a reasonably comfortable life.
Of course, even that didn’t work out as expected. I was significantly underpaid (even with local COL/salary data in mind), still at least it was a foot in the door and a full time job. My salary came more in line with what someone would expect in a small city around the time, but still barely at the bottom of that range.
Around the time of the COVID glut, I finally landed a six figure job, as well as the closest thing I’ve had to a job ”in tech”. It was pretty decent, but half the company was dumped a year or two later.
I didn’t expect to have much of an issue in the market, ignorant of how bad it really was and with the understanding that with my experience I couldn’t be a total pariah. Instead it took over a year to find a new job and that was solely due to nepotism.
A little bit into my current job, I realized my career was dead. I don’t keep up with the industry outside my day to day anymore, I’m certainly not keeping up with newer fresher people and to some extend miss that enthusiasm. But it really does not interest me anymore. Rarely the tech and never the product.
I’ve thought about leaving before that happens, but I have yet to see a path to something else that I wouldn’t hate just as much.
I figure I’ll either die of from stagnation or AI will replace me or lower that value of my work to the point where the money is no longer worth staying
To answer your question: I got into computers and programming when I was 8 years old in the 1970s, and haven't stopped.
For the first ~ten years of my career I worked shit jobs for pretty mediocre pay at small companies that overworked and under appreciated me. I did Open Source to stay sane, to learn, for fun, and I leveled up every few years, learning CS, hardware, algorithms, FP, type systems, and more.
Eventually I worked at larger companies, smaller companies with big scale, and eventually FAANG.
I would venture to say that most people working in tech do not have a STEM degree. To answer your question: I got into computers and programming when I was 8 years old in the 1970s, and haven't stopped.
During interviews my lack of degree is often brought up - usually asking if I accidentally forgot to add it to my CV.
At first it was tough but now I'm two decades deep into a career in Ops.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44599228
Here is almost the exact same comment but specifically in the context of WASM and tree structures receiving the maximum number of downvotes:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44657549
It’s weird but apparently insecurity among software developers is super common. It’s why I left a career writing JavaScript and refuse to go back.