101–110 of 124 posts
I think you have:
I'm fortunate to have had jobs since I graduated college.
Edit: I mean that it shouldn't be down to luck whether you have a job or not and how productive you can be in the limited time when you can be productive, in your life. It's rotten that not everyone can. We're doing human civilisation wrong, if it's down to luck whether you live a satisfying life doing fullfilling work, or spend your life in slavery.
> I want to get away from coding for you and code for me. > I don't like coding for you. I don't think any of us do. I'm sorry you haven't found anything to like and be excited by, but i assure you it is out there. I personally have never worked in a company with much process, so i haven't experienced that kind of hell. But do keep in mind, there's also another kind of hell: Where everybody is a cowboy coder and walk…
Thanks for the advice. My first job was full stack Java backend (SpringMVC) and jQuery hell front end. Second was full stack, Python backend, AngularJS front end. My new job is writing Protractor tests for multiple AngularJS applications. I enjoy writing Python. Javascript isn't that thrilling to me. Not super excited by the countless FooJS libraries and Promises and async everything. In Protractor if I want to get t…
Perhaps you could aim for something similar. There's employers out there (eg. RedHat) that will happily pay you to hack on open source if you can show that it's in both of your best interests. That way you get to choose what you're working on going in. Even just specialising a bit more might make things more interesting as you'll be hired to work on instead of some random stack put together by someone who may not have a clue.
Good luck in your search :)
Wonder what this guy would say to the countless millions who toil away in factories, big box retail, and accounting offices. None of these people do this for the love of the job. They do it because it needs to be done and they get paid for it. I wouldn't be so critical of your feelings but you whine about how society didn't let you do what you want to do on your terms. Change your circumstances. No one is just given…
There's always someone doing worse than you do. I'm a programmer now but in a previous life I fed conveyor belts. I did menial jobs most of my life until I migrated and graduated (and, yep, got a student loan to repay). I thought I had it bad, but I once saw a video of a boy diving into a midden with a stick to unclog it. No joke- he dove into a big hole in the ground filled with shit. He had a rope tied round his waist and a stick.
So what do you say to that boy? "Stay where you are because think of all those countless minions who don't even have a stick"?
No, people will always want to do better. We'll always want our every working hour to be productive and fullfilling. And as well we should. We should strive to achieve that.
So, speaking as one of those countless minions, I'm glad that I could escape the Hell of One-Thousand Soul-Crushingly Meaningless Tasks, and I don't wish anyone to use my sojourn there to keep anyone in their place.
If programmers made twice as much money, it would be such a great job. And yet salaries have been relatively flat for over a decade (adjusted for inflation). Something is wrong that salaries never seem to rise with demand in Silicon Valley. We know there was a secret deal to help suppress wages at one point, but it's not obvious why it's been so successful. Is it new graduates, immigration abuse, internationalization…
Silicon Valley presumes to disrupt everything, why not labor laws? And by disrupt, I mean in favor of the worker, and not management.
Hey, kudos for thinking this: > And then I want to get away from coding for you and code for me. I don't like coding for you. I don't think any of us do. Too many people think of coding as only a career...thus, we shouldn't teach coding to non-comsci-majors because not everyone should be a programmer as a job. Programming is an intellectual and productive pursuit in it of itself, and there is a huge difference betwee…
I have this long-standing argument with a friend, who's also a programmer, because I say the exact same thing you say, that for me writing code is like writing prose. I even edit my code in the same way I used to edit my writing, way back when.
Btw, I don't think that the fact I like to code makes me better at it. Frx, I like music, but I would suck at it and I know lots of people who are in the same position; except that many don't seem to understand it.
I've also seen people do completely stupid things with their code exactly because they like to code. They want to show off their shiny techniques and overengineer something to death, for no good reason.
Actually, I've done that myself now I think about it. Many times. We'll see if I learned not to do it again.
Work is called work because it isn't supposed to be fun. If your's is remotely tolerable, only requires your time from 9 to 5 and pays you enough to cover all your necessities and even some luxuries you are better off than 95% of the world. Life's a bitch, then you die. At least you make enough money to not have to do it past your 40s if you don't want to.
And what's that I hear, about getting a pension in your 40s'? Wasn't that what the Greeks did wrong, that they wanted to get a pension in their 40s, and that's why their economy died?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're all making glorified crud apps, stuff that I could make solo. I'm not excited by it.
Well, you seem to work with web applications. So no wonder. In my opinion, in terms of fun, interest and challenge web programming ranks slightly above Cobol, for exactly the reasons you state. You mentioned you wrote a game. Game programming might be something you like and not every place is a sweatshop, although you have to be discerning. Embedded/low-level programming is cool too. I used to write router firmware,…
Hey. Lay off the COBOL, especially if you haven't actually done it (I don't know if you have).
I've done web dev for the last four years, since graduating. I now learn mainframe development, with COBOL and JCL (and also REXX recently). It's fun. There's a lot more actual, honest-to-god, programming to do in a mainframe job than there is in web development. At least you don't spend your every waking life trying to shake the angle brackets out of your eyes (XML, right?).
Most of my web dev work was in back-endy stuff btw, primarily C# and a little bit of RoR and Java. Which means 60% configuration, 40% actual coding and even then, the actual coding is implementing some framework interface. That sucks the life right out of "programming" (because it really isn't).
the entitlement is strong with this one
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alright, fine, we don't deserve anything. We don't deserve to be treated like children. We don't deserve to have the majority of our productivity either stymied or taken from us and bastardized. We don't deserve to be told "do this for us and we'll take care of you" and that turns out to be nothing. Yeah, there's a lot we don't deserve. I'm owed what I was promised. I was promised "pass these tests, you can get into…
Keep on insisting you're owed what you were promised, and keep on saying "Eff. That. Noise." See how far it gets you. My rules may suck, but they have the advantage of being reality. But you probably have your own reality? Great, just don't be surprised if you're the only one living in it.
Seriously though. If you don't like the hand you're dealt, you try to change it. How is that unrealistic, or unlike what most people do?
And how is it unreasonable to fervently wish to have it better in life than what you do? Why is it entitled? There's nothing more common-sense, down-to-earth, than that. Otherwise, what the hell are you striving for?