I joke with programmer friends that we should become gardeners instead. I guess the appeal of physical labor is you get to leave work at work.
Yeah, that and a lack of responsibility sometimes attracts me. My whole career (+15yrs) has basically been in industries where things are not allowed to go wrong. Some days I wish I was a lumberjack or maybe a programmer in an industry where you don't kill people or cost millions of dollars with a bug... But at the end of the day I can't stop myself from programming and I want to work on things that make a difference…
Odd that you would pick lumberjack as an example since that is a job where mistakes frequently do kill people.
I can give you a little advice from seeing some non-degree-having peers make it. Have some idea what you're doing. Talking the talk is great, but you must be able to walk the walk. Apply to everything that sound like you can/want to do it, even if you don't technically meet the requirements. Those are mostly for HR pre-filtering since HR doesn't really know what they're talking about in 99% of cases - they're just lo…
Great thanks. I've built stuff before and have been learning/coding for the past ~4 years so I don't classify myself as a complete beginner. When applying without a CS background how tough are the technical interviews? Do they tend to expect more or are they more lenient and look more at fit and ability to grow?
Depends where you're going. Top companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc are looking for people who can pass some tough CS questions, whereas more standard corporate or mid-stage startups are going to be a bit more lax. I've seen everything from "parse this integer from a string without your language's built in parse function" to "build a small database schema using ER diagrams" to "write us a P2P chat server with a central login server".
I'm 33 year veteran of programming. I'm more or less 7 years from retirement. I've worked as a civil servant, at two startups, a large corporation, and for a three letter government agency. I made a decision early in my career not to move into management, but to advance to the "team lead" position at most. I love and hate my job every day. I have no better time than when I am coding, but I hate frameworks pushed in l…
I'm at the start of my career but am starting to notice some of the downsides you've experienced. Any advice on how to avoid some of the trappings?
Easier said than done, but I believe you need to be in charge. This can take many forms, but I lean toward self employment creating a product the customers use as a black box.
Let me elaborate on the points of that last statement... "Self employment": I talking small company where you are in charge. Trying to be an entrepreneur in a large corporate setting or another founder's startup means that at the end of the day, they decide what is next, not you. "Customers use as a black box": Again, this is about who is in charge. If the customer is familiar with the inner workings or the possible features, they will leverage their investment in you to change priorities.
What does this mean? You need to find a way to produce a product that people will pay you for, and pay you enough to support yourself and others (depending upon the complexity of the product). As you can see, I value self determination above anything else (as far as work goes).
My motivation currently is fear of loss (albeit very little of it) of employment. I don't think that would change much if I were "self employed creating a product the customers use as a black box", but it would pivot much more closely to my choices than choices made for me.
I just want to note that there's strong social pressure to not to claim that you don't love working as a programmer on this site. The odds a future boss or coworker is an HN regular is extremely high, and "passion" is high valued. Weigh the responses accordingly.
If you're scared of putting your actual opinions on here, why do it in the first place? Why even have an account? I'm sure if you searched through most people's comment history here, including mine, any given future boss could find something they take offense with, if they only looked hard enough. I also find your implication that everybody here is (or should be) lying about their experiences reprehensible. Disagreem…
I'm not implying anyone's lying, I'm just saying there's selection bias. I doubt anyone's lying, I bet a lot of people just don't reply.
Any time I catch myself complaining about my career I do my best to jolt myself out of it. That's not to say I have nothing to complain about or that aspects of my career and my job can't be improved, but my god, is there really any other profession in the world that is as lucrative, open, and challenging as programming? There are no bullshit certifications to go through, the best tools and resources are free and ope…
> the only real downside is that there aren't enough hours in the day to do it I opened this comment section just to write that line. When your hobby becomes your job, you never work a day in your life.
Assuming that you do not come to hate your hobby in the process. I know plenty of people who turned their hobby into a job and came to hate it because of all the other things they had to do for work that they avoided when it was just a hobby.
Plus, some of them were like me in that being told or required to do something, even if I would have done it anyway, instantly lowers the enjoyment of that activity a bit.
I love programming. The line between work and play is very blurred for me. The only thing that makes me cringe every morning is the fraking drama. I became a programmer cause I thought I would have less interaction with people(among other reasons). Why are office politics like freaking high-school?
I loved it when I was younger. The older I get, the less satisfying it is. At this point, I just tolerate it. I realize more and more how damaging it has been to spend 25 years sitting at a computer. It is not all bad - the career is great for supporting my family and the life we have built. I work with decent people. But I do not intend to take another programming job after my current one.
Been coding professionally 37 years. Started as a self taught video game developer back in the Apple II, Commodore era. I loved it at first. University had me working at a 3D graphics research lab with Mandelbrot himself, later on I was an OS developer for the 3DO and the first PlayStation. I worked on tons of high profile video games, and later transitioned to VFX for film, and worked on a ton of popular blockbuster…
> If I could do it all over again, I'd have thrown that temper tantrum at 17 and gone to animation school rather than a normal university. Is animation that different? It's also "create on demand on schedule".
Animation tools do not go obsolete as quickly as software frameworks, so an expertise can develop that far exceeds the expertise we can develop because our OS/language/framework foundations turn over over three years. Plus, in animation one is dealing with story telling; much more satisfying than the typical software project.
If I'm 45 minutes late for work 3 days in a row with no good excuse, no one gives a fuck. Retail worker shows up 45 minutes late one day and they're most likely fired. I also don't have to worry about people fucking around with my shifts and thus how much money will be in my next paycheck. Having even a modicum of job and financial security removes so much stress from your life.
> If I'm 45 minutes late for work 3 days in a row with no good excuse, no one gives a fuck. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way for all developers. At my last job there were continual reminders and reprimands for being even five minutes late.
If you are a salaried exempt employee, you should not have to put up with that BS from timeclock nazis. But it is all entirely legal, and for many companies, obeying the letter of the law on paper is the only requirement for corporate policy.
Sadly, without the muscle of collective bargaining to back you up, your only real options are to politely beg your management to stop being timeclock nazis, or to leave for greener pastures.