Ask HN: Reasons to stay in Software Engineering

tl;dr:

- None of us know everything about every environment, even though we often imagine we do

- If you want a job, and spending a few hours prepping on data structures and algorithms (either to improve your performance, or to verify your performance is in fact perfect) will help your chances of success or your confidence, why not do it?

You might want to consider:

- Just because you don't want to follow the recruiter's advice, it doesn't mean it's a 'stupid book'.

- Although the recruiter mentioned 'programming problems', the problems in the book may test a wider (or just different) range of skills than what you (or I) consider 'programming'

- The fact that you've 'never prepped for a tech interview' may have impacted the set of environments in which you have worked, and it may be hard to know whether you would enjoy working in those places where preparation is 'table stakes' (i.e. necessary but not sufficient) for success.

- Companies that interview in ways that require/expect some preparation might be (intentionally or unintentionally) filtering out candidates who are not willing to do what is required to achieve their aims. (If you're not willing to spend a few hours with a book to increase your chances of landing a great job for the next 2-3 years, then maybe you wouldn't be willing to learn whatever JS library is required to succeed at your next project.)

You and I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting. But I know other people with 10+ years of coding experience, and the majority would improve their chances of succeeding at a given interview loop, by preparing using 'cracking the coding interview'.

I find writing software to be a very tedious exercise a majority of the time, punctuated by moments of intense joy and concentration. However I still do it because I see it as an indispensable tool for turning my own ideas into reality and its hard to put a price on that. If you're worried about interviews and what not, pick a domain your intensely interested in and let your passion glow during the interviews, I know from exp. that many good employers would rather have a knowledgeable passionate hire than a dev who knows "everything" but couldn't care less about the domain.

I think there’s also the mistake of assuming having “programming credentials” means you are prepared for every “programming” job. Whereas, in reality, each job is it’s own microcosm of domain knowledge (even if you’re using the same languages/frameworks between jobs!)

So you have the opportunity to ask “Do you like the work?” under many different circumstances.

The interview process sucks, and it probably isn't much better for other careers. I have friends that have master degrees unable to find jobs with no logical way to explain it. Experience and having a good personality isn't a golden ticket to a job.

You really don't need to know a lot. You choose to know a lot probably because you either feel uncomfortable not knowing the whole picture, or because your just curious. I have meet a ton of great developers that their knowledge base was their language and libraries because that was all they needed to know to be great. One guy I know that hires peoples ask one question in interviews to gauge peoples knowledge "You click the address bar of a browser type in www.google.com and push down enter on the keyboard what happens?". There are some people that give 5 min answer and some that could spend a hour just explaining the keyboard interaction with the operating system across 4 different operating systems for a hour. Find what domain you enjoy and just do it.

Everything is "just" something, and their is no way around having to do cumbersome work and making decisions to get some where doing anything.

You should stay in software because you want to. If you need others to validate a reason for you then you probably should get out while you can. Keep it as a hobby, but the second you start questioning something like this you either need to try something new or go on a camping trip and drop some mind altering drugs so you can find a answer. Maybe do some volunteer work in a third world country.

Start your own company; you are probably highly talented and our industry went recently insane, trying to normalize to the lowest denominator. Build a product with high quality and charge a lot of money for it to dysfunctional companies that are in despair and incapable of their own excellence. Most of them are like that these days. Never put all your eggs to a single basket though. Invest all your income above your needs and some safety margin to both stable investments like index funds and to high-risk investments like what blockchain was recently. In ~10 years you should be way better off than almost anyone you know (unless there is some wide-spread societal collapse that can't be ruled out).