Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?

IMO blue collar work is a better option because it's easier work and more stable, and lets you have a life outside work. In software the hours are increasing to no real benefit, and free time is burnt just keeping with the times. The evolution of tools, best practices and high availability of quality knowledge has made it trivial to spin up new hires which makes everyone highly expendable; not to mention that there are now millions of unwashed masses happy to accept lower wages just for their chance.

There was a HN post a while back where some guy was begging to pay for a code job. What does that tell you? Software workers are also now pitted against a global market with outsourcing and programs like H-1B which has raised the bar by increasing the pool of highly educated candidates and people who commit resume fraud. They're likely also more willing to work long hours for less pay just to be in the US. Software wages have also stagnated for ten years.

Now I work as a remote programmer for a Geoinformatics company. My masters will be in Geoinformatics because I found that I like maps and that cool mapping tech that uses different kinds of sensors and stuff.

It sounds like your friends, who got into it for the money, may be the kind that burn out and not get into it later on in life. If what you say is true, you're more passionate about it and will continue to code even in the bad times.

Use it as a platform to find problems you want to solve, and use your knowledge to solve those problems.

CS has _always_ involved unsustainable hours. The trick is to get good enough so that you don't have to do that. Maybe go into a more niche field (like what I'm doing)

If you limit the search space to fields where you will be able to earn a living, it's not half bad advice.

It's an albatross around Microsoft's neck, but every time they update Windows, they keep around the runtime DLLs - because so many businesses have software written internally and otherwise that can't migrate to something else.

If you know VB6 - and you are confident in migration to another platform, or willing to maintain old code (maybe while migrating) - you'll likely have work long into the future.

The most likely migration path would be from VB6 to VB.NET or to C# - staying on the Windows platform. Another option would be migration to GAMBAS or Mono (aka .NET for *nix).

Those feeling adventurous might try Python with QT, or some other GUI framework; at some point, it might be better just to examine and understand the core logic and flow - then convert it all over to a web-accessible system (of whatever choice you want).

I imagine that in time we'll see some kind of VB6 to WASM compiler or something, if someone hasn't already taken a stab at it. What we won't see, though, is Microsoft open-sourcing VB6 or anything like that. They've said they want to, but due to the various licenses used in the development of the language (and components) - it's virtually impossible for them to do it.

I coded in VB (3-6) for well over a decade, but it's been forever since I last touched it. That said, I'll always have a soft-spot for BASIC (having grown up on a version of Microsoft BASIC on the TRS-80 Color Computer line) - so I could probably pick up where I left off once I rebooted the VS compiler/IDE, without too much trouble.

I expect that might be where my career turns to as I get older (currently 46 and working in SPA Javascript/NodeJS apps).

Try personally pinging the people you respect the most -- send an email to Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, creators your respect. You'll be surprised with two things: first, they'll respond, and second, their responses will surprise you.

This is a public forum -- it's going to be hard for you to separate signal from noise.