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Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?

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Re: Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?

#201

Post by fogetti »

OK, so this will all be anecdotal. But what I am describing is not that uncommon. And I only worked for a very short time in the US. So if you plan to stay in the US for your whole working life than this advice might not even apply to you at all.

What you are asking and describing is happening right now. In some places around the world the industry is already an unsustainable shit-show, which offers zero financial incentive to a CS undergrad. Some such countries are Japan, Germany and Hungary.

The working hours are extremely long!!! You have to work 60 hours or more most of the time, but managers will try to sell it as a big plus (like, look you can go to all these flashy conferences and you can have kicker table + free buffet, you just have to work hard in exchange) even in face of concrete evidence that the industry in large is to the detriment of your well-being mentally and physically. This management technique is also called stick and carrot.

Also there is real age discrimination. Especially in startups. So it's really difficult to get work-life balance if your life does not revolve around the actual business that your company is doing.

If you can put up with all this shit, and you can save enough money let's say in 10 years so that you can quit, then it might be a good idea to pursue this kind of "career". But again, what kind of career is that sets it's goal as quitting in a reasonably short time.

Salary-wise your payment is gonna be slightly higher then let's say a simple journalist, accountant or let's say an average salesman, but not that great, and because of the long unpaid overtime you will basically get a quite low amortized salary.

Re: Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?

#203

Post by fg6hr »

malvosenior wrote: post #100
commandlinefan wrote: post #80

I’ve been thinking about that a lot myself for a few years now, since my 16-year-old son is talking about majoring in CS when he gets into college in a couple of years - he’s even optimizing his high school courses to maximize his chances of getting into a good program in a good school. Having worked as a programmer now for nearly 30 years, I see programming devolving as a career more and more every year: now we have…

It's pretty much always been that way though. Death March was written 20 years ago: https://www.amazon.com/Death-March-Developers-Surviving-Impo... I'd say the demand for programmers is higher than ever and pay is definitely higher overall. 20 years ago $150k was a good salary for a programmer, now it's more like $350k.

(350/150)^(1/20)=1.04. Slightly better than inflation.

Re: Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?

#204

Post by leetrout »

MaximumYComb wrote: post #160
leetrout wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I look at my skills compared to the earning potential of some other trades. This is certainly not 100% accurate because it’s based on what I pay in more rural America but I like it: Barber - 3 cuts per hour @ $20 ea = $60 / hour Mechanic - $60-80 per hour Lawn Care - $40 / yard up to 3-4 yards per hour = $40-$120 per hour Steam cleaning = $150 for a couch = $150 per hour (carpets are less) Plumbers in East Tennessee…

As a general rule, the jobs you listed aren't making $120k+. The ones that make that money are working long hours with poor conditions. Developers making $120k are very privileged compared to labour roles

Indeed. The overhead of a developer is a $1000 for a laptop and an internet connection.

All the other jobs I listed have a lot of overhead. I think barbers pay 200-400 / mo for their chair or a lot more if they are covering rent. Landscapers have equipment, maintenance and fuel. Steam cleaners have equipment and fuel.

Re: Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?

#205

Post by leetrout »

sybarita wrote: post #174
leetrout wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I look at my skills compared to the earning potential of some other trades. This is certainly not 100% accurate because it’s based on what I pay in more rural America but I like it: Barber - 3 cuts per hour @ $20 ea = $60 / hour Mechanic - $60-80 per hour Lawn Care - $40 / yard up to 3-4 yards per hour = $40-$120 per hour Steam cleaning = $150 for a couch = $150 per hour (carpets are less) Plumbers in East Tennessee…

You have a really distorted view of how much people doing these jobs actually take home

That’s fair. I shouldn’t have compared earning potential and said something along the lines of what people pay for services in the marketplace. I was thinking in my head about comparing the cost of a developer to the cost of other things in the physical world. As noted in another comment reply these other jobs have a lot of overhead as well.

Re: Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?

#206

Post by bzbarsky »

martinesko36 wrote: post #20
toast0 wrote: post #14

People who are in CS for the money are probably not going to stay in CS long term. There's plenty of ways out for people who don't enjoy the work (management of people or products, technical writing, possibly design). Certainly some people come for the money and stay for the experience. My best advice for internship applications is try to have some interesting project on your resume --- preferably one of the things y…

I'm almost certain I'd never do an internship. It's not a way to optimize for learning and personal growth. And definitely not a whiteboard generic software engineering. Lots of things about internships in the tech field put me off. If it is a startup, I have had a startup, high chance it's a shitshow. FAANG, don't think so. Also what meaningful work can you really get done in 3 months? I feel like internships are a…

> Also what meaningful work can you really get done in 3 months?

It really depends on where you are and how seriously they take their interns. I've seen interns accomplish a fair amount in 3 months where I work (Mozilla). As a concrete example, we had an intern propose and implement a new devtools feature that lets you see what your site design looks like to users with various visual impairments.

Still depending on where you are and what you have already done, some things that one can learn from an internship that one might not encounter otherwise during college:

* Working with a large codebase.

* Working with a distributed team.

* Code reviews, both as the recipient and actually doing them yourself.

* Dealing with large existing suites and writing your own tests, then dealing with the intermittent failures.

* Finding out what various people in the industry are working on.

* Finding out what jobs actually look like in practice on a day-to-day basis.

It's possible to pick some of these up via various open-source project involvement, of course, even without doing an internship.

As a personal anecdote, during the one internship I did I learned a lot about the concept of "just because it's a spec doesn't mean you should implement it", ended up fixing a ship-stopping bug for the product I was working on, made some friendships that continue until today (nearly 20 years later), learned some hard lessons about the failures of corporate IT provisioning in a large corporation, plus some of the things I listed above.

Re: Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?

#207

Post by randomdata »

steamer25 wrote: post #193
randomdata wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even farmers, it might not be necessary, but it can make a huge difference. As a software developer by day, farmer by night, I'm not sure there is much overlap. Some of the problem solving skills I learned on the farm have made me a better programmer, I expect, but I don't see much advantage in building software for my farm. Anything you can dream of is available commercially at a fraction of the cost it would take…

> I could easily turn development into a full time job in that industry. There is a lot lacking in what already exists. Care to describe what's missing in a little more detail?

The thing is that all farms (producing a given product) are pretty much the same. When something is a commodity, there is no benefit in differentiating your business through process. A tomato is a tomato is a tomato. Nobody cares about what it took to get it to market. This means that everyone converges in the same direction. This means that the tools that are out there for other farms are pretty much guaranteed to fit right into your operation with ease. It would actually be counterproductive, economically speaking, to try and recreate this existing tools. It will cost you more in the end.

In this consumer space, there is more effort to try and be different. In this case, the customer notices processes and better processes make for a better customer experience. That is how you beat the competition. Often the tools that are out there don't fit nice and tidy into the way we wish to do business. They are either tailored for other businesses or try to be a jack of all trades, master of none. There is all kinds of room to build software that is specific to our operation, and beneficially so. There is a room to get a leg up on the competition if you do it well.

As a bit of an aside, when you're paying $500,000 for a tractor what you get, in terms of technology, is also quite different to a $100/month SaaS product. That is the other big thing I have noticed is simply quality of software. Nobody could ever afford to pay $500,000 for a system in this consumer industry, so the options that are out there are quite low quality. Understandably – I know all too well from my day job the corners we often have to cut and the concessions we have to make to keep things within budget – but in an ideal world the software would be better.

Re: Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?

#208

Post by huntie »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #181
agentultra wrote: post #5

I've heard of people going from a bootcamp course straight into Google and optimizing 100% for the career path. They make embarrassingly more than I do, have been programming for a scant few years, and I couldn't care less. I've been programming for most of my life. I've poured hours into learning 6502, BASIC, 8086, C, C++, Perl, Python, Javascript, Common Lisp, Haskell... to say nothing of physics, linear algebra, g…

> They make embarrassingly more than I do, have been programming for a scant few years, and I couldn't care less. I think the bigger question is, with programming being made more common to the public (aka being taught in elementary school), will the supply/demand ratio that makes US development a six figure job go away with the influx of "new would-be coders"?

Unlikely, it will just eliminate the "easy" jobs. Just look at writing, mass literacy surely eliminated many jobs but lawyers are still quite well compensated. Another area is mathematics with actuaries.

Democratization of computing will lead to greater stratification of programming jobs. The "Excel Programmer" won't exist being supplanted by the "Office Drone" whereas the "Distributed Systems Engineer" (or whatever) will keep on going.

Re: Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?

#209

Post by j45 »

It is a good career as long as you keep learning. If you stop learning it will be like being stagnant in other careers

It’s far more important what you make of your education once you have it.. and not what your education makes of you.

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