171–180 of 200 posts
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It's too long because he likes to write, lives to write, and writes to live.
All the more reason it should have been shorter.
Excellent article; at 3,860 words, it's a bit long, but recommended. Here's a much shorter response, with more pathos: "Oh. And if your reading this while sitting in some darkened studio or edit suite agonizing over whether housewife A should pick up the soap powder with her left hand or her right, do yourself a favour. Power down. Lock up and go home and kiss your wife and kids." -- Linds Redding, "A Short Lesson in…
It's too long because he likes to write, lives to write, and writes to live.
Some people thrive on "solving puzzles", which is sort of what engineering is. For better or worse, there are an infinite number of puzzles to solve.
The troubling thing, at least for me, is that as I get older I realize that most puzzles one encounters as a software engineer are related to non-problems. When I was fresh out of college I would jump at any such puzzle that was presented to me and would not sleep until I had solved it. I never stopped to think about the larger picture where that puzzle was embedded in, and if it actually required solving or if a mor…
Amen, brother. Just four years of work experience here, but I can totally confirm that. The actual product is built in a week, then it's multiple months of "this department over there needs a special case implemented pronto".
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Interesting thoughts. To me, it has always seemed like, if I had something figured out, that had made me happy, i would WANT to share it, if it could help others. When people find a diet or an exercise regimen that works for them, they love to talk about it. I don't think it purely comes down to boasting. I agree that people with deeper wisdom will often be less eager to boast or force their values on others. But I a…
This. I keep bugging my friends and relatives to learn programming - I make way more than the local average, and I work from home, whenever I want. I don't tell them about it because I want to brag; I do it because, to quote Miles Vorkosigan, "if I can do it, you can do it". I want them to do better, they're my friends.
I moved to SF in 2008 as a poor college grad. Since then, I've spent all of my time in startups. It's an unhealthy addiction and it's going to kill me. I was the third engineer at Eventbrite, and I spent years working many extra hours. After 4 years, it felt like I worked 10 years. I quit and moved to Europe to try to leave the startup scene, but a month later, I found myself the CTO of a startup in London. The addic…
There's a term for this called "revealed preferences." If you keep saying "I wish I could work sane hours" but actually keep making decisions to work insane hours, chances are you actually really just want to work insane hours. I spent a lot of time being confused by this, listening to perfectly healthy young people with good paying jobs and no attachments telling me "I wish I could just drop everything and go travel…
There is a danger to armchair psychological terms but it is extraordinarily fun to use them. :)
I moved to SF in 2008 as a poor college grad. Since then, I've spent all of my time in startups. It's an unhealthy addiction and it's going to kill me. I was the third engineer at Eventbrite, and I spent years working many extra hours. After 4 years, it felt like I worked 10 years. I quit and moved to Europe to try to leave the startup scene, but a month later, I found myself the CTO of a startup in London. The addic…
Similar story here, been doing the crazy startup founder hours for half a decade now, haven't really lived much outside of the office in that time. Feeling also trapped: if I drop out, then I'm somewhat giving up on all of the people who over the years I had to convince to join me in a vision that I'm becoming tired of. It'd very likely lead to the collapse of a source of fulfillment, purpose and income for many peop…
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This. I keep bugging my friends and relatives to learn programming - I make way more than the local average, and I work from home, whenever I want. I don't tell them about it because I want to brag; I do it because, to quote Miles Vorkosigan, "if I can do it, you can do it". I want them to do better, they're my friends.
It's a little confusing view about bugging them to learn programming and you mention making more. Lately on HN, the general view of our community seems to programming is a fairly low rent blue collar position and all the salaries will be driven down to the third; it's weird fore to see that and also the "everybodyish should learn to program" view. In a way, it kind of speaks to this glorification of work in this arti…
It has a very odd wage curve, though, where the vast majority of your salary increases will come in the first 5 years of your career, and the technologies that you became an expert in will be obsolete within 5-10 years. If you don't retrain, you'll be very much obsolete. That's behind most of the complaints on Hacker News; these were people who tasted glory once, and then fell off the technology curve into irrelevance and don't want to hop back on it.
Any profession where you can make $300-400K/year as an employee with ~5 years of experience, or over half a million as a consultant, would be considered fantastically lucrative by most of the world.
Take a look at this chart: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/12/14/a-brief-history-of...
Yes, things are not quite as volatile since 1930, but also note that there is only inflation, whereas before, there was deflation to balance out the inflation. I know everyone says deflation is the devil. I'm not so sure about that.
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It's a little confusing view about bugging them to learn programming and you mention making more. Lately on HN, the general view of our community seems to programming is a fairly low rent blue collar position and all the salaries will be driven down to the third; it's weird fore to see that and also the "everybodyish should learn to program" view. In a way, it kind of speaks to this glorification of work in this arti…
Programming is not by any means a "fairly low rent blue-collar position". It has a very odd wage curve, though, where the vast majority of your salary increases will come in the first 5 years of your career, and the technologies that you became an expert in will be obsolete within 5-10 years. If you don't retrain, you'll be very much obsolete. That's behind most of the complaints on Hacker News; these were people who…
The 99.9% of the rest of developers are making $90k in the Midwest up to $150k in high cost areas on the coasts.
Yes this is certainly better than most other jobs, but considering a developer will hit the inflation rate raises by about 30, while other professions like doctors and lawyers tend to continue seeing large raises, I really don't feel software is a great gig, all things considered.
Mid thirties and I'm already seeing my first decades's go-to languages and frameworks becoming obsolete (Java, MVC, single RDMS, etc). Taking the massive amount of time to learn the new ones will not increase my pay one bit, but just give me another few years of employment.
It was great at 28 making $90k while most my peers were still in grad school and / or making $40k in crappy positions. But now a lot them are getting into mgmt, making partner, have a good book of customers, and have caught up. Even a few Fed and state workers I know with liberal arts degrees are hitting six figures with the gov't, along with job stability, pensions, and guaranteed raises. Meanwhile we get more H1Bs and offshoring.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a little confusing view about bugging them to learn programming and you mention making more. Lately on HN, the general view of our community seems to programming is a fairly low rent blue collar position and all the salaries will be driven down to the third; it's weird fore to see that and also the "everybodyish should learn to program" view. In a way, it kind of speaks to this glorification of work in this arti…
Programming is not by any means a "fairly low rent blue-collar position". It has a very odd wage curve, though, where the vast majority of your salary increases will come in the first 5 years of your career, and the technologies that you became an expert in will be obsolete within 5-10 years. If you don't retrain, you'll be very much obsolete. That's behind most of the complaints on Hacker News; these were people who…
As far as the "pace of technology change;" I don't really see that. I don't count the rather comedic constant wheel reinvention in the JavaScript community really counts as really "technology change" or even think the Web mvc framework du jour rises to that level. So, ok let's look at general cs, what I see is fairly incremental changes in distributed systems, file systems, and so on. Ok let's consider the machine learning craze, but this has been a utilization of 50 year old methods in a much more distributed fashion -- the people who wrote the Statistical Learning textbook in the 70s probably don't think of this is as mega technological change, maybe more like "well, this is finally popular." So I dunno.