51–60 of 91 posts
Realize that answers from those who have been in your position years ago are answers fitting to a low interest rate landscape. The rule book has changed and so will the industries that are at the top.
Learn Java or C++, get good at leetcode, and work in finance. You don't need to be a good engineer – these places are messes of legacy code created in fiefdoms run by people who care more about money than the engineering. You'll make a ton of money and feel poor because the quants will make far more than you ever will. In my opinion this is a truly terrible path to choose, but you will earn more than anyone in tech w…
I am a junior that does C++ currently for HFT. Lots of legacy code, although I don’t think the code is that terrible (although I am a junior so maybe I can’t tell). Any reason why it’s a terrible path to choose? Am I stunting my growth? I was hoping HFT would help leverage me into a big tech company for systems level stuff since (at least I was told this as a selling point to get me to join) its tougher here so FAANG…
Base on what I can gather from my friends who work in the space (DRW, Citadel) it's just more stressful and has more politics than my current role (ML Engineer @ a retail company). Trading income for work-life balance and stress, and maybe OP is hinting that as you progress down that track the WL balance and stress only increase.
Just my 2 cents and why I didn't choose to pursue that path.
That said, just pick anything and become better than average at it. What do you like? If you think statistics is boring, you’ll hate the Python/ML path. If you think CSS sucks, you’ll hate the FE path. Etc. Find something you actually like and become better than average at it, and then shop that skill around. Once you get a job, seek out the smartest people/most interesting work at that company.
Rinse. Repeat every 2-3 years (faster iteration earlier on, slower iteration after more experience).
I know this question is situated around the tech, but the real answer is to leave every couple of years. There is always more money to be made, and the more experience you have the easier it is to get it. I'm not saying this is what somebody should do, but if you're only indexing for income, then it's the only answer IMO.
It's not that it's a bad career, and frequently the places that still use COBOL are pretty stable and unlikely to do mass layoffs (governments, banks, insurance companies, etc), but it's TERRIBLE for maximizing your income, which is what your question is about.
If they don't have the money to rewrite all that old legacy code in something needlessly new and shiny, they very likely do not have the money to pay high programmer salaries, either! Well, that, or they have a finance-focused hand at the tiller, working to keep costs (and salaries) down. Neither of which is terribly conducive to you making big bucks in the short term. (And yes, ten years is "the short term". You in ten years will agree with me, even if you don't now. =) )
Key points:
1. Search for jobs with high salaries.
2. Move to Switzerland.
I haven't seen anything consistent yet when it comes to how high your salary is based on what programming language you know. What I did notice, like many people wrote already that you can hop between jobs and that way get a higher salary, I think that's not entirely true, you could probably pull it off without hoping between jobs but just look for jobs with a high salary, always higher depending on how high the salary of the job was where you were successful before in getting an offer. If needed you could probably also lie about how much you earn now just to see if anyone is willing to pay more.
Regarding the second point, I think it's incredible how high the salaries are in Switzerland same as the US but the market is not competitive at all and basically any idiot (me) can get a really good salary by just going through enough interviews. I can't even imagine how high you can go if you're actually like really good.
I personally started (only 3 years ago) with 72k a year (franks/dollars/euros it's basically all the same) then I went up to 78k and towards the end of 2022 I jumped up to 115k in less than a few months only by consistently taking interviews with higher salary expectations. A good way to get started is by sending a contact request to all the recruiters on my LinkedIn page and they will take it from there and bombard you with offers...I even tried optimizing the process by sending the recruiters this: https://chagai.website/notes/recruiters
Since you're a junior in an Agile shop, no one will bat an eye at assigning you to solve ticket after ticket. Since it's legacy code and they're staffing juniors to it, management won't really care about your code quality. Use the LLM penetrate the dullness of the legacy codebase. Just make sure not to solve tickets faster than the average burn rate.
Spend your brainpower working on your LLM system - the model, the vector database, the git integration, etc. At the end of this process, you'll own the IP for your LLM system and will have made money from two jobs.
You can rise and repeat this by applying for more junior positions and editing your resume to remove older positions. Once you're bored, just pivot directly into consulting because what I've described is literally consulting.
braces for downvotes
Graduated college in 2017 and landed a job at a Real Estate company that employed 2 other developers. I was the "junior" for 1.5 years or so, but when we hired another I sort of fell into "mid-level", as I wan't the most-junior person.
In year 3, I jumped to a smaller company that was mostly engineers in ecommerce. They wanted someone to lead a consumer-facing marketplace thing that fed off a bunch of existing APIs. It was maybe a little over my head in hindsight, but they were letting me build something from scratch and hire some juniors to help so I jumped on the opportunity. Went from 60k to 100k here.
That place ended up being fairly chaotic and I didn't really believe in leadership, so after I finished the platform and had it basically in maintenance mode, I started looking for another job. I went from 100k to 120k here.
I think the last place bolstered my resume a bit, as I led building out an app from scratch. This got the attention of a f500 finance company that hired me at 155k+20k bonus as a senior. After a year that went to 165+20. I wanted more, but this was during all of the layoffs and apparently a lot of the org just got a 3-5% raise.
I definitely could have started higher, but coming from a ~3.0 GPA from a Southeastern liberal arts school I wasn't complaining and I think I've done a pretty good job so far moving up in pay. If I have any advice to give, its
1. Work hard. I generally only work 40hrs, but it's not unusual for me to do more without being asked. I care about my work, I take ownership of it, and I try to learn more outside of work.
2. Never accept the raise/bonus amount that is offered to you. Until the f500 company, I asked for a bigger raise/bonus than was offered to me and I have always gotten it. This move was probably the biggest contributor to my take-home, though I don't think it'd have worked if I didn't do [1] above. No one is going to fire you if you ask for more, the worst they will do is say no and acknowledge what you're looking for in the future. This is what happened to me at my current company at the end of the last fiscal year, and honestly I understood why they said no. The company was tighter than last year, but my boss and his boss both know what I'm after this year.
I hope this is helpful to someone. Not all of us land the cushy tech job out of college, but you can run your way up the ladder if you apply yourself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not necessarily, not when I hire. On-boarding, and ramping up in a new environment is a skill and to some extent, I see that as a value add. A person who has gotten comfortable in a role for 10 years is often slower to ramp vs. a person that has seen a lot of environments and projects.
Optimizing for “ramping” seems incredibly shortsighted. Does seeing things through, pushing through the hard bits, the bits that only come up after a few years when your pet project starts spouting fire or some major restructuring happens and not to mention loyalty doesn’t mean anything anymore?