231–240 of 372 posts
I'd like to link to the top HN story now: http://math-blog.com/2014/03/10/stem-shortage-claims-and-fac... The WhatsApp guys are experienced engineers who were rejected from FB and Twitter. Prepare yourself for ageism. Your path is to create a $19B company.
In other words, you sit in the planning meetings & your experience on past projects helps get over that "where do we start" mode. You make sure the proper QA and testing is being done, things like that.
Your day is filled with many other tasks than just writing code. You go home at 5pm & work on your private projects for fun & interest (not that 9-5 is uninteresting, but you don't have the time to "play" so much any more)
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What is a TSC and how do I get one?
It's a "Top Secret Clearance," a certificate saying that you are trustworthy to perform top secret government work. Based on what I've heard from others, getting one includes taking a lie detector test, having family members, neighbors, and colleagues interviewed, and hopefully not too many other probing things. My impression is that any warm-bodied US citizen who doesn't have much of a record, and who knows the righ…
I'm 41. I also worry about ageism but so far I don't feel that it has affected me yet. > Do you have to go into management to continue progressing upwards in pay and influence? I know this isn't the case at some companies (e.g. Google), but is it rare or common to progress as an individual contributor? That has not been the case for me. I'm currently doing software development for a startup - the same thing I've done…
> As we get older I suspect the demographics of our profession will change along with us, and there will be more older people in roles we stereotype as being for younger people. At least that's what I keep telling myself! That's my hope too. At 36, I still enjoy what I do and have zero desire to move into management or run my own consulting business (I like the security of steady pay). While software is considered a…
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Pretty much covers it. If all you do is 'write code' then you have to be prepared to start 'write the same code in a new "paradigm" several times.' Once that starts you'll do one of two things, either get bitter and grouchy and become unemployable as a coder (trust me when I say that nobody likes working with someone constantly whining about how they already wrote this code 5, 10, 15 years ago), or you will change th…
>As a coder, your pay will definitely plateau. Mine seems to keep climbing. I'm hearing reports of >$300k, and have received an offer in that range myself (counting signing bonuses and stock grants). Granted my pay might plateau there , but honestly that's enough money to keep me happy without having to see it go up every year. I'm a total generalist, but I also have a few areas where I would qualify as a specialist;…
There are two problems with hitting a plateau @ 300K: Housing costs and College Tuition.
At the traditional 3x debt to gross income metric, your home mortgage would be capped around ~$900k, vs the $1.3-1.5MM range of current trading prices. Which is not terrible if you lock something in. However, once you are at 4x paying for schools becomes a far greater challenge. You could be looking at anywhere for $175-250 per kid. So, capitalize this and you are at $350-500K. That is, your combined "future obligations" would be something in the range of $1.7 to $2.0MM (exclusive of retirement). Which is something closer to 6.5x gross income. Which is pretty highly leveraged. You're after tax cash flow without real-estate tax shields could easily be ~200k, so you are looking at something like 10x cash-flow leverage. That is about as high as most PE guys will take a decent c-corp.
Just start shielding your income and assets as soon as possible. Strategize to minimize exposure to asset inflation (housing, education). The IRS (tax man) and the "doo gooders" in academia (ironically, the new "alternative minimum tax" man) have really boxed in the middle class (read: the not-rich enough) from the perspective of lifetime earnings. Most of your "savings" will be at risk to get swept from you, thanks to "financial aid" effect driving college tuitions.
These numbers get bounced around every now and then but they are worth considering. Inflation in "raw materials costs" for knowledge workers (kids) need to get passed on to customers (ie, employers) if you want to stay in the same place (red queen effect and all that).
This is relevant when you are evaluating career moves down the road.
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3 bedrooms (Weekly Average Prices, San Francisco)
$1,339,274 $1,573,313 $1,805,297 $1,720,736
For me it's not just about building things anymore. It's more about what I consider - building things and doing it with style. Give me the time to plan an app, put together a team, predict our finish date and then build our system. My goal is to do it with the team feeling happy and proud of their work the whole way. No horrible crunch mode or last-minute heroics. At this point in my career that's what I aim for more so than just getting an app built.
I also like helping young people become proficient, reliable developers who know how to plan and maintain large systems. Young developers tend to have a lot of clever ideas and know the latest tools - but I have various skills that they lack or find uninteresting. So I don't see them as competition. I think young and old developers can really compliment each other.
As for salary, it's hard for me to say since I'm in year 5 of a startup venture that just hit the black last year and is looking towards being a profitable company. So whether or not I will ever be looking for another job is something that I'm unsure about. I've pretty much decided that I would like to manage larger teams - not because I have to but because I enjoy it.
Most of my friends are between 35-45, all fully employed with good salaries (mostly Java / Enterprise shops though, but also some cool startups / Googlers / Twitter / Amazon)
My take on this, both as an older guy, and also as a hiring manager is that for me merit and skill matter more than anything else, I'm completely age, race, color and gender blind. (I recently hired a 50+ years old dev who didn't work for 5 years, he was simply that good)
Good developers of any age will always find job, at least this is my theory.
Yes, there are 10X 1 year of experience people, yes there are people who as they grow older they have less desire to work long hours / cut salary (due to having a Family, this is legitimate) but I don't really believe that anyone out there will say no to a 40 years old developer if she is an ace. If someone does, then they are missing the talent and hurting their own companies.
I'm 100% unforgiving to skill issues, but in my experience, usually the older the candidate, the better they do, merely due to more experience.
They might not all know the latest vagrant / docker / hadoop / scala / Haskell / scss / node.js trends, but they know how to write code.
I'm shocked how many people with BSc or even MSc in CS, years of experience, simply don't know how to code. I mean some can't code their way out of a paper bag. But this has nothing to do with age, the last thing I care about is someone's manufacturing date. really. it just doesn't make any sense to do so.
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>As a coder, your pay will definitely plateau. Mine seems to keep climbing. I'm hearing reports of >$300k, and have received an offer in that range myself (counting signing bonuses and stock grants). Granted my pay might plateau there , but honestly that's enough money to keep me happy without having to see it go up every year. I'm a total generalist, but I also have a few areas where I would qualify as a specialist;…
">As a coder, your pay will definitely plateau." There are two problems with hitting a plateau @ 300K: Housing costs and College Tuition. At the traditional 3x debt to gross income metric, your home mortgage would be capped around ~$900k, vs the $1.3-1.5MM range of current trading prices. Which is not terrible if you lock something in. However, once you are at 4x paying for schools becomes a far greater challenge. Yo…
I understand that everybody wants more money - hell, I want more money too. But a lot of that is because everybody wants to be in the top 1% of nice neighborhoods, nice homes in nice neighborhoods, nice colleges, etc. You can have a life that is just fine on far, far less than $300K/year.
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Congrats on the pay grade! but you need to look at averages not anomalies like yourself 300k is definitely not the tract most programmers are on
Actually, I hear LOTS of reports of people with $100-$140k salaries who receive signing bonuses close to their salaries. To the point where it seems like the "new standard." No, you don't see this in start-ups. I think HN may skew toward people who usually work in start-ups, so the perceived average will be lower as a result. Until this recent offer, it was my perception as well. And no, that's not quite my pay grade…