Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

431–440 of 549 posts

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

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the contract. For the most part, the scrutiny of government auditors ensure that you actually can't work more than 40 hours in a single week. Sometimes the contract also ensures that the work cannot be done outside of a government-controlled facility. So if you're the actual do-the-work peon instead of someone in any of the several tiers of useless middlemen, you work regular 8 hour days, get 10 or 11 p…

11 or 10 paid holidays? Do you mean that's the total number of holiday days you get in an entire year? Does that include public holidays?

The federal government has exactly 10 federal holidays: New Year's Day, MLK Jr. Day, Washington's Birthday, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day. Government controlled sites are closed on those days. That means contractors can't work at such a site on those days. Rather than requiring their employees to work elsewhere, contractor companies often just concede that their employees can get a holiday too, and most of them even make it paid time off.

Some companies observe different holidays, such as by adding Christmas Eve and the day after Thanksgiving, and removing Columbus Day.

There is no such thing as public holidays in the US. Some days are bank holidays. Some days are school holidays. Some days are federal holidays. But there is no law that requires any employer to give all of its nonessential employees paid time off on any particular day. The only sort-of-exception is that an employer can't prevent someone from voting on Election Day, but that does not have to be paid leave.

Wal-Mart, for instance, has only 5 paid holidays: Easter, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas. (Note that Easter is always on a Sunday, a time when many people already have a day off from work.) And if you get holiday bonus pay for working on those days, your hours are rumored to be cut afterward to compensate.

Some companies are also generous enough to allow 80 additional hours of paid time off every year, to be used as either sick leave or vacation days.

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

#432
I've gone back an forth between working as a programmer and working as a system admin (plus some data stuff for grant programs). I have been happiest as a programmer and the most depressed. Strangely, it wasn't legacy code, new creation, programming languages I hated but was good at, or languages I loved that made the biggest delta in experience. It was the policies surrounding the programming that made or broke the job.

I think the single killer to programming is the production support rotation that is something more than emergency pages. At the end of one job, I was constantly being woke at 1AM because of database issues that I couldn't correct (not the DBA). I really don't need much sleep to feel great, but the disturbances for a week at a time was a killer. Worse, our team had no power to fix the problems, and the team who could was really not that interested. They would wake up (maybe) and fix their issues. Management didn't really care because they thought it was part of the job. I really blame our immediate bosses for not making the fix a priority.

tldr: programming is fun even in crappy languages, its the environment that will kill you.

PS: SQR and T-SQL are the from the devil - when you're looking forward to shell, awk, and perl you have issues - VB was ok, Pascal was "really, me, now" moment, and Objective-C & C are still my favorite. Being only allowed to code review other people's C and C++ was bizarre and painful.

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

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the contract. For the most part, the scrutiny of government auditors ensure that you actually can't work more than 40 hours in a single week. Sometimes the contract also ensures that the work cannot be done outside of a government-controlled facility. So if you're the actual do-the-work peon instead of someone in any of the several tiers of useless middlemen, you work regular 8 hour days, get 10 or 11 p…

> For the most part, the scrutiny of government auditors ensure that you actually can't work more than 40 hours in a single week. Have yet to encounter a contracting environment where is is true. In fact, I was explicitly told that since I was salaried I was expected to put in whatever work it took to make deadlines, despite only putting 40 hours down on my timecard. Considering the facility I worked in had a DCAA of…

Oh, how delightful. Call the government ethics hotline and inform them that your employer is defrauding the government. You might get a nice bonus out of it, in theory.

In reality, whistleblowers always get screwed. You would have to extensively cover your own ass, and gather evidence that absolves you, specifically, of wrongdoing first.

If you are reporting time worked as anything other than the actual number that you were working, that is illegal. So alternately, start reporting the actual hours worked. If your employer makes an issue of it, tell them that you will need a signed, written copy of any order they give you that instructs you to violate the law.

If you get fired, you can retaliate by getting someone sent to jail.

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

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm reading you right, "realistic shot" = 1 in 10 succeed right? I'm not saying that's right or wrong, good or bad, but just to let people know that's generally the statistic that gets thrown around for becoming profitable as some new tech startup trying to make it. I am unsure if that stat is VC-funded only or contains bootstrapped startups and VC-funded ones. I absolutely agree with your post. This is what I fee…

I think the original poster just means that, compared to other industries, the odds of success starting a software company (especially a bootstrapped business or consulting business) is a lot higher than other industries. I'd take software odds over the odds of starting a restaurant that succeeds any day.

Yep - and with that I completely agree -- just wanted to convey that the odds aren't like... 9/10 succeed, but like you said, it's waaaaay better than starting just about any other type of business

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

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am a particularly privileged individual because I have a choice of what labor I can do, and even how much to an extent. Most people don't have the choice of just switching careers because they feel like it, and even fewer have the option of even realizing that there is some sort of activity that would be more fulfilling than what they do to survive. This is poisonous thinking. Programming is one of the most acces…

> This is poisonous thinking. Programming is one of the most accessible industries on the planet that doesn't involve physical labor. If somebody has the desire, they can learn how to program and land a job for FREE. Not when you spend 8+ hours doing a demanding but low-paying job (like most are) and then have to come home (+1-2h) to take care of the spouse/children/parents. And even without the latter obligations, t…

There are several aspects of life that are not fair. However, there are countless anecdotes of people psychologically sustaining to learn something new and improve their station in life.

I will say, I support opening opportunities to learn. Not everyone has a computer - help foster an environment that gets people access to one.

You cannot force someone to have the willpower to work on this, the _best_ you can do is offer opportunities.

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

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. If there are objective sources of stress (e.g. problems of economic survival), I don't perceive that to be an emotional problem. Emotional problems, as I would use the term, are problems which are strictly endogenous in nature. 2. I generally go about my business just fine and am quite functional. But since the OP asked if I'm happy per se doing software work... 3. I'd probably be happier in engineering management…

> 1. If there are objective sources of stress (e.g. problems of economic survival), I don't perceive that to be an emotional problem. Emotional problems, as I would use the term, are problems which are strictly endogenous in nature. I meant psychological problems rather than emotional, but I feel like those two are intertwined, anyway. Sorry for the confusion. Being burnt-out is also a type of stress. What I meant to…

Duly noted! But the question was about whether I'm happy working as a programmer, not whether there are large, existential and cosmological life issues to solve here apart from and beyond that.

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

#438
I think it's a job like any other. There are days when you hate it; there are days when you love it. One thing I do notice is I actually do programming on my own time, coding my own projects. And on bad days at work, I wish I could instead work on my own projects (so it's not programming per-say I dislike). I guess the same idea works for a carpenter or an electrical engineer; it's a lot more about where and for whom you do the work than work itself.

Programming, however, is definitely a field where you can learn the profession and get a job making good money without getting formal education. I notice a lot of recruiters are more interested in your passing a sample test or viewing your past projects than necessarily with your University diplomas and certificates.

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

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. But what about everyone else? The longer I work in this field and the more I understand about optimization and physical processes, the worse I feel about the work I do and the work of most programmers. Not "but it's just a social app?!" people, but the people in medicine, law, education, small business, hardware, logistics, etc, all pushing business forward bit by bit, automating away the repetitive pieces an…

> But what about everyone else? The longer I work in this field and the more I understand about optimization and physical processes, the worse I feel about the work I do and the work of most programmers. Not "but it's just a social app?!" people, but the people in medicine, law, education, small business, hardware, logistics, etc, all pushing business forward bit by bit, automating away the repetitive pieces and maki…

"Do you really need a basic income implementation for this to work? Can't you simply downsize your expenses to x/10 what they are now, work x/10 as much to pay for them, and do whatever you want for the other (10-x)/10 worth of time?"

I am genuinely curious to know as to how this equation can be practically implemented. To be really effective in your non-work time, x would have to be at most 5 or less. There are multiple problems with this: 1. Reducing expenses to half is pretty tough given the biggest expense is rent/mortgage. 2. Reducing work to half is harder since there are not very many companies that are okay with 20 hrs or less a week. This also means you wont get health insurance.

I guess it can be done by moving to a different country with cheaper expenses, job hunting for a while till you find a company that meets your needs, etc, etc. But as a single person or a family in the US, this just doesnt make sense.

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

#440
post #126

I'm a programmer who doesn't really get to program. I work for a consulting company. Most development work is off-shored, which means most roles for UK staff are more client facing. Right now I'm building a web front end for a bloated piece of enterprise software. There's no technical difficulty, it's just frustrating and boring. I can't leave to work in 'proper' software development because I don't have the relevant…

In the same boat, mate. I upvoted you to 500 though, enjoy the downvoting!
Post reply on HN