Of course! It is the best bang for the bucks when considering student loans.
Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?
81–90 of 311 posts
Re: Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you're trying to maximize income, you should focus on understanding finance/business and building soft skills. You're probably over the threshold of how much you need to know about computers. Maybe get some training on how to work better with others, or how to negotiate effectively. In other words, soft skills are going to be the value you have over your peers that have been cramming CS for the last 4 years. Thi…
> It'll usually get you the medium bucks, though, before topping out, which ain't the worst. Can confirm. I make medium bucks. The way the economics work, it made more sense for me to make medium bucks remotely in a cheap CoL area than it did to try and get big bucks in a major city.
I think what he means by big bucks is ownership.
Salaries top out at... $200,000 for non-specialized professions, $500,000 for the best of the best...
Compare that to the capital gains made by people who are owners of businesses. Or other large capital investments.
Re: Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?
#83It's really not a career path you should get into if you're just in it for the money. Your friends will probably wash out within 3-5 years after they figure out they're not actually interested in software engineering.
Disagree. I don't care about CS at all. Still like the work, but wouldn't do it if it weren't for the money.
Am I good at SE? No. But I went from terrible to average in a period of 4 years and am now earning 6 figures. All without side projects or unpaid learning.
Re: Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?
#84One of the hardest things in life is figuring out what you want; that can be as hard as getting it, sometimes.
As it pertains to programming as a career, it's important to understand whether you are looking for a job or a calling. Do you want to work to live, or live to work? Do you want to make decent money without becoming consumed by it, or do you want to do something for a living that you also find deeply fulfilling?
Re: Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?
#85Do what you love - as cliche as that. The best career is the one that gives you joy and fulfillment. If CS is what floats your boat then it’s the right choice for you. Go for career that pays much more but you must drag yourself from bed to go to the office every morning and you are set up for a life of misery - no matter how much money you make.
>> Do what you love - as cliche as that. >> The best career is the one that gives you joy and fulfillment. What? No. This is actively harmful advice.
Genuine curiosity: why is it considered bad/harmful advice?
Re: Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?
#86People who are in CS for the money are probably not going to stay in CS long term. There's plenty of ways out for people who don't enjoy the work (management of people or products, technical writing, possibly design). Certainly some people come for the money and stay for the experience. My best advice for internship applications is try to have some interesting project on your resume --- preferably one of the things y…
I'm almost certain I'd never do an internship. It's not a way to optimize for learning and personal growth. And definitely not a whiteboard generic software engineering. Lots of things about internships in the tech field put me off. If it is a startup, I have had a startup, high chance it's a shitshow. FAANG, don't think so. Also what meaningful work can you really get done in 3 months? I feel like internships are a…
I understand the sentiment. But before I did an internship, I was also in the same position as you where I had been coding a lot. However, like others have mentioned, an internship is very helpful for the following reasons:
1. You get experience working with important concepts that exist in production like proper git usage, technologies like Kubernetes and Docker, managing differnt build flavors on the client, unit tests, how to review other peoples code professionally, etc
2. You learn the soft skills part about building software. More often than not, software is a team effort and learning how to navigate different peoples egos and personalities and trying to get your ideas across are very important. Even if you're the best coder in the world, if you can't get your ideas across, it doesn't matter
3. 3 months is actually a lot of time to get meaningful work done. Even full-time employees will have feature development that takes around 3-4 months from ideation to shipping (in high velocity companies). As an undergrad, you have 3 summers and I would consider at least allocationg 1 of those summers to an internship to see how you like it
Re: Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?
#87My take: in the late 90s/early 2000s, we saw a lot of the same.
The good times: the passionate rose above the income-chasers because there was a lot of mediocrity
The bad times: So many people washed out and probably haven't come back. The passionate had less competition.
The anti-fragility of it all: When the economy turns bad, companies look to software to optimize costs. (not exactly the same thing, but I was hired on as a contractor for a logistics company while they were in the middle of Chapter 13)
Re: Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?
#88I’ve been thinking about that a lot myself for a few years now, since my 16-year-old son is talking about majoring in CS when he gets into college in a couple of years - he’s even optimizing his high school courses to maximize his chances of getting into a good program in a good school. Having worked as a programmer now for nearly 30 years, I see programming devolving as a career more and more every year: now we have…
As blue collar jobs vanish, programming is becoming the new manufacturing. Oftentimes that unfortunately involves a focus less on elegant design and more on a simple closing of x number of tickets. We have developed our own production pipeline where x number of widgets have to be completed each day. With that said, the pay is generally decent but if you have not made it to a Sr. level job by your 40's, it can be tough.
Programming also has the unique benefit of allowing you the freedom to build your own business with almost zero capital. Even if that business only earns you $500 a month, nothing is stopping you from building 5 more.
Complicating that though is very often its hard to muster energy after working 11 hour days 6 days a week depending on the job.
Re: Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?
#893-5 years is an incredibly short horizon.
I got an Information Systems major just after the .com crash. I did it because I liked it. The major had gone from 100+ to just 8 in my graduating class.
If it's not obvious, the industry has recovered since then.
Re: Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?
#90> honestly makes me worried about the future of the field in terms of whether it'll still be a good career in the future.
I had the same thoughts back in the late 90's and early 00's. Everytime I told someone I was interested in CS, they thought it was because of the money. While working on the major many people told me my job was going to go overseas and that the future was in managing developers. In fact, during my first internship, my boss thought that way and said in the future programming would be done by low paid individuals overseas or that programs would be generated by computers from flow diagrams (which she liked creating).
Things turned out differently and the field has grown and only become more lucrative. I only see the number of jobs for CS majors growing, and I actually wonder if there will be enough good programmers to fill them. Not everyone can write code, and I still run into developers who can barely code. If you're good at coding, you can go far.
Additionally, I really enjoy programming. It's fun and rewarding to solve problems and to build things that people use. If you're good at coding, I wouldn't worry about the future, I see it being very bright.