Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How happy are you working as a programmer?

news.ycombinator.com

221–230 of 549 posts

Re: Ask HN: How happy are you working as a programmer?

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In retail, you don't get free food / liquid. Water is free, most likely. I've never had free food programming, beyond nutra-grain bars, once. > Customers are allowed to scream at you and you have to figure out how to make them happy. Toxic clients exist in the programming world, too. And as a low-level peon, you have a lot more leeway in telling an abusive customer to get out than you do a multimillion dollar clien…

Try crawling around in asbestos filled attics or rat infested crawl spaces for 12 bucks an hour. Programming is much easier than so many professions I've had in the past it's absolutely unbelievable.

I was a "pest control technician" (exterminator) before I started programming professionally, so I know how you feel. My life now is a cakewalk by comparison.

Re: Ask HN: How happy are you working as a programmer?

#223

6/10. I'm less than 3 years into my career, but I think I've worked for some of the best companies with great pay, benefits, environments, etc, including a tech giant and two startups. End of the day though, work is boring. Its always work. Your time and effort is going towards making someone else rich and their priorities are more important than your own. The only things I really look forward to are vacations and ev…

You are less than 3 years into your career, and you think you have worked for some of the best companies, and yet you are unhappy. How do you know you have worked for some of the best for you? You are going by names.

My guess is that you are talking about hot valley companies, and guess what? In those, someone with little experience will not get to work on anything fun, because they have enough talent that almost everyone is batting below their weight. You see similar things in startups where there is no challenging technical component to the business: If all you need to do is scale an app that is just a bunch of forms, then guess what? it will be boring. Go work at a company that is doing science instead, and then tell me it's boring.

You complain about compensation peaking early, as if that's a bad thing. In the US, 300K is not insane for senior devs, and that doesn't count miraculous exits. Many doctors don't make that, and they had to pay for a lot more education, and handle the terrible life of the resident before they can get to real money: And let's not forget, the top of the market for doctors involves getting your own practice. How long does it take to save the money, and have the name, for the practice to be that profitable?

There are a lot of people with law degrees that wish that, at 45, they made the money that anyone with a breath makes in SV when they are 22.

I have seen finance: You don't have a life when you work for a big hedge fund. Not even close.

And let's not forget, you don't have to live in San Francisco to get paid very well writing software. I have a 4 bedroom house that is worth about 200K. I work from home. It's not hard to amass major savings when you don't have a $5000/mo mortgage. And if I am sick of the place, I can spend a month working from Puerto Rico, or an island in Georgia, go to conferences in Europe. How many doctors can say that? How many lawyers? And I am no early googler: I have never made a dime in equity.

As far as people being boring: Different people have different ideas of boring. For instance, I find the classic "I work in software, but look at my unique outdoorsy activity" profiles that most of SV seems to follow to be very boring. Yes, you can enjoy your rock climbing, or your kayaking, or whatever else you do, but it's not something that is really any fun to hear about: People with different activities like that just get to vomit information onto the other. At the same time, many people find the things I do, like reading literature, history and philosophy, to be boring as hell. There's nothing wrong with that.

Also, in America, we hide the things that might make us interesting, different from the crowd. When instead of belonging, we try to fit in, we do what everyone else does. For someone to be really interesting, they have to be different. To be different is to take personal risks of being disliked, because what will make you interesting for one person will make you a weirdo to another. In my experience, the more you get to know about someone, the less boring they are, precisely because of all the little things that we couldn't see before, when all they were to us was a role at a company and some clothes.

Re: Ask HN: How happy are you working as a programmer?

#224
After 21 years in the business I am finally starting to realize that I want it to be something that it isn't. In the past, I have always been interested in programming as a means of creative expression. The last thing a programming team wants, however, is creative expression. You are successful as a programmer to the degree that you are able to make your thoughts, your solutions, your algorithms, and your code consistent with those of the rest of your team. Creative expression is ground away through application of best practices and through code reviews.

I have a healthier relationship with my work, and am thus more successful, now that I view it as assembly-line work and don't try to express any creativity at my job. That said, I don't find the work to be the least bit fulfilling, and I am working to make a career change.

I find programming to be an easy path to a steady, but ultimately empty living. I would only recommend the field to those who want nothing more from their job than a paycheck and who find meaning and fulfillment entirely in the nonwork parts of their lives.

Re: Ask HN: How happy are you working as a programmer?

#225
I love it. I've been programming since I was 12 (I'm 32 now). For me, the key to avoid burning out, is to constantly keep learning new things. I currently work remotely for a NYC dev agency, and we have a massively good team.

I have a couple of side projects, and one of them is generating an income of $500/week. Just keep building stuff during the weekends. Try to learn marketing, UX, UI, etc. Apply those new skills to your side project, and iterate again.

It's also important to not work in isolation. The most effective way to become a better programmer and keep learning things, is to pair constantly with better programmers than you are.

I spend about ~14h/day in front of a computer. If I don't enjoy what I do, then I'd be wasting my life.

Re: Ask HN: How happy are you working as a programmer?

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would sincerely, sincerely suggest to research the MISERY most of our world is in. There are 1 billion people without food or clean water. Imagine what someone with your skills can do to help? You don't need to make any money - and implementing deliverables in that scenario will only alleviate actual, real PAIN for others - not fuel the chase of more profit for someone who has hired you. I'm sure you've probably th…

I'd be interested to know a good place to start with this kind of thing. Do you have some examples of software engineers contributing their skills to charities, open source projects aimed at assisting in these situations or just some boards or communities that can assist in finding a starting point?

It's a luxury for someone who isn't deeply in the hole and doesn't have a family to support.

Re: Ask HN: How happy are you working as a programmer?

#227
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VoIP/telecom, SIP. It is far from amazing, and I'm not saying it always fetches that kind of bill rate, just that it is specialised work and requires telephony domain knowledge.

I read your description of your work and how it makes you feel. I thought it sounded awfully familiar. It isn't you, it's voice. I've worked in this industry for 18 years and it keeps getting worse, but there is money to be made. It's a trap, but a mildly soul destroying comfortable one. Do get out if you can.

Thanks. I do wonder if there's something in particular about voice that lends itself especially to cynicism. Every time I wonder that, I always figure: surely not, when there's actuarial software, Wall Street...

Re: Ask HN: How happy are you working as a programmer?

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember being 16 and forging teacher's noted to get out of study hall to go to the library. Why? Because they had a REAL computer there! A Commodore PET! With 4K of RAM and BASIC! I came in, sat down, and thought "what do I want this machine to do that would be cool?" And so I wrote a game. Other kids loved the game enough to fight over who could play it. That was pretty cool. But I look at programming now? Damn,…

> You can do a ton with just plain html, some css, and a bit of simple functional-like programming Or, you know, you don't need a virtualenv running inside of docker running inside heroku running whatever to make your stuff run Or setup 20 "automation chores" before you write a line of code Yeah, things today look like 80% is nitpicking and 'best practices' (by whom?) and 20% writing some code that will fall off beca…

Let's suppose I want to write a quick app to text people horoscopes. They enter their phone number and the horoscope is texted to them.

My first step now would be write a command-line function to send the texts. Once that's working, I'd knock out 5 lines of html and start showing it to people. I'm not even sure I'd wrap the freaking thing in tags. For something nobody may ever use, it's simply not important.

The way the vast majority of programmers would begin this would be to set up a container. Then start installing a framework. Then buying a domain, downloading some tools, purchasing a gateway....

Programming is still programming, of course. But the way people think about programming today is total crap. You can ride the "It's cool! It's new!" horse around the merry-go-round a few times, but sooner or later it's gotta start getting old if you have any sense at all. Know what's a travesty? The number of working programmers in the world who have worked for years and have yet to actually make something that people use.

Re: Ask HN: How happy are you working as a programmer?

#229
post #199

I worked in landscaping and then as a custodian making $7/hr before I started learning to code. Working as a programmer has transformed my life. I've got a lot of autonomy in my days, I enjoy solving technical problems, I get to work from home and see my 2yr old grow up. Yeah it sucks when your manager puts heavy deadlines on your team, or having to do things you don't necessarily agree with, or navigating corporate…

I have a side question, did you end up pursing a CS/Engineering degree? I'm trying to get a dev role and have a business background and looking for some advice on getting in.

Re: Ask HN: How happy are you working as a programmer?

#230
post #146
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying people the same value they contribute is not socialism. It's called: Being a good person. Capitalism seems to have made us all think it's completely okay to exploit someone else's surplus labour. How is the risk the founder takes that different to Employee #1's? Their payout is usually vastly different, but their contribution not so much.

You misunderstood me, I am not saying you should exploit your workers, pay them fair wage. What I am saying is that founder who took the risk should enjoy the fruits. > How is the risk the founder takes that different to Employee #1's? Employee #1 will probably be getting a salary, if the company fails he can get a job somewhere else. Meanwhile the founders who worked on the idea probably used their savings initially…

>if the company fails he can get a job somewhere else //

Because it's so hard to adapt CEO skills to the jobs market? Whilst peons can pick up a low paid job and should just lap it up and be happy about it??

If the founder is taking a risk running the company then the employees are taking a risk working there; their risk is often as great, the chance to lose one's livelihood.

To my mind a guy in sales that wrote up £1 million of orders in one days work and a guy in janitorial that cleaned the toilets all day both did a days work and both deserve a days pay - they're both humans who gave a day of their lives to the purposes of the company.

Post reply on HN