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My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

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Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#111

Post by imtringued »

dakics wrote: post #55
Swizec wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly what ddorian43 said. My particular friends (and me of old) are located in Slovenia, clients are in San Francisco. You can have a decent life in Slovenia for $20k/year. You can easily get a gig in San Francisco for $60k/year. Probably even easier for $100k/year because of the whole signaling thing. I wasn't able to save as much as my friends are because of lifestyle inflation, but I sure had a lot of fun. My m…

$48k/y gig for US client converts in less than 2000 eur/month net with some creative book-keeping. Rent and utilities in Ljubljana cost us about 800 eur. What is left is maybe enough for one person, who will never own any property. $20k/y is close to a welfare level in Slovenia, except maybe in countryside.

The GDP per capita of slovenia is about 20k. So pretty much everyone needs welfare? I don't believe that.

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#112

Post by mattlutze »

Zelmor wrote: post #24

He would have been unhappy with the other choice as well, because then it is the programming side he would be missing out on. I would advise everyone to read The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173536 You chose one option out of many, and the others may no longer be a possibility. However, the writer's unhappiness does not spawn from his inability to be successful at what he does,…

Well, the author seems to feel like he wanted to make a difference on the product side, and in that way the roads are not at all the same.

If your goal is to build software products, how do you make the biggest impact?

This feels like the question the author is answering with his observation that, as a programmer, you rarely have the clout to make the decisions necessary to drive the best product (or any at all) to market, outside of intentionally writing back code.

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#113

Post by Zelmor »

tomp wrote: post #29
Zelmor wrote: post #24

He would have been unhappy with the other choice as well, because then it is the programming side he would be missing out on. I would advise everyone to read The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173536 You chose one option out of many, and the others may no longer be a possibility. However, the writer's unhappiness does not spawn from his inability to be successful at what he does,…

10X the assets => retire 10 times sooner => program when you're retired => no missing out

That's stupid. I am not willing to suffer for 20 years to then enjoy the remaining 30-40 whatever there will be. You don't know how long you will live, and what is your old days worth if you broken in your youth trying to be safe when you are 50? I'd rather work, as some do, 3-4 hours every single day for the rest of my life, than 12 hour days for 10 years and then compensate my lost youth, health and relationships with yachts or whatever money could buy.

That is what socialism->communism was about in my country. We have to suffer just a little more and then we'll get there. Guess what. We never got there.

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#114

Post by amirmc »

eru wrote: post #76
askyourmother wrote: post #37

Regrets as a programmer: 1. Every piece of unpolished, unfinished code that management decided should ship to the customers regardless 2. Ever using node and npm. 3. Seeing and living through the train wreck of J2EE and the XML horrors that ensued. 4. Not seeing the beauty in simple functions early on. Not everything needs to be a class or module. 5. Most business problems are political/social - regret every time we…

> 5. Most business problems are political/social - regret every time we were called in to try and provide a "technical" band aid to those same problems. Why? Social and political problems are really hard to solve. If you can use technology to sidestep them, that's exactly the right way to do it.

I've been in many situations where people thought that the solution lay in something technical, whereas the actual issue was social/cultural. In the worst case, time and energy is spent on the technical thing, which then simply fails when it hits the 'market' (so to speak). In the best case, the technical solution papers over a few cracks and merely kicks the can down the road.

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#115

Post by imtringued »

zelos wrote: post #54
iopq wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying the newest laptop every two years is what like $2000 every two years? That's only $1000 per year, hardly a dent in a programmer's salary.

When you factor in kids, mortgage, pension, car, travel costs etc, it probably ends up being a bigger dent than you'd think for a lot of programmers.

This just means you have different priorities. Nothing wrong with that but if you really want that laptop then you can afford it.

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#116

Post by Chris2048 »

Zelmor wrote: post #24

He would have been unhappy with the other choice as well, because then it is the programming side he would be missing out on. I would advise everyone to read The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173536 You chose one option out of many, and the others may no longer be a possibility. However, the writer's unhappiness does not spawn from his inability to be successful at what he does,…

He could of gone into management/leadership, and failed miserably. The cherry-picked success stories don't mean success is more likely.

If he had gone into leadership, he might now be looking at examples such a notch, who got rich from dev work without becoming a 'manager' - at the same time indie dev startups are very competitive.

I guess you have to balance risk and reward. If you focus on the best examples of an option, you have to also compare it to the risk (how many fail).

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#117

Post by Chris2048 »

henrik_w wrote: post #73
amelius wrote: post #61

My biggest regret as a programmer: not sitting in correct posture for 30 years :/ On the bright side: I'm correcting this now, and I really feel like a different person.

It didn't take me 30 years, only 15, but I did develop problems - RSI in my arms. Luckily, it recovered, but it took a lot of effort: http://henrikwarne.com/2012/02/18/how-i-beat-rsi/

As a 30yo dev, I started getting pains in my wrist, and numbness on one side of my hands (the pinky and finger-next-to-it).

I switched to a ball-mouse at work, and no longer get this. I believe the large amount of time using a mouse had compressed and damaged my nerves somehow.

I'd recommend the switch for anyone spending hours with a mouse.

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#118

Post by douche »

almostarockstar wrote: post #106
wtbob wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> JavaScript is actually an incredibly flexible and effective language. == vs === No integers. Assignment is declaration. Prototypes. Curly brackets & semicolons. Semicolon insertion. It may be flexible (in the sense that an Alfa Romeo driven into a telephone pole at 120 mph is flexible), but it sure as heck ain't effective. JavaScript is the great shame of the computing industry: that it exists, and that it is used,…

The flexibility of JS is not how the language is designed, it is the hole that the language is filling. The fact that using JS you can write a browser based app, a mobile app, backend software, configuration files and flat data files (JSON) without switching gears is the flexibility. I would also argue that if you really don't like JS, you are using the wrong tool for whatever job you are trying to do.

That'd be fine, if there was any other tool that worked in a browser. Sure, you can transpile from some other real language, but it's still javascript when you finish up, with all the foibles and warts that haven't been fixed in twenty years.

Unfortunately, instead of going back and fixing core deficiencies in the language standard, it looks like ES6 & 7 are thick cakings of lipstick on the pig.

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#119

Post by kabes »

wtbob wrote: post #80
forgottenacc56 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript is actually an incredibly flexible and effective language.

> JavaScript is actually an incredibly flexible and effective language. == vs === No integers. Assignment is declaration. Prototypes. Curly brackets & semicolons. Semicolon insertion. It may be flexible (in the sense that an Alfa Romeo driven into a telephone pole at 120 mph is flexible), but it sure as heck ain't effective. JavaScript is the great shame of the computing industry: that it exists, and that it is used,…

prototypes are actually a really good way to deal with inheritance.

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#120

Post by Chris2048 »

Swizec wrote: post #42
not-much-io wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a international company, mainly based in the US. I get paid what a local developer gets paid, our chinese employees get paid what the local norm is there etc. Do other companies just outright decide salary based on where the company HQ is? Call me cynical, but I'm a bit skeptical that a company would pay more than they had to. Note: Assuming of course your role is not super vital for the whole company or s…

If you are as valuable as a local developer, then they will pay you as such. It's a business. They pay for value. And no, your salary/rate isn't defined by where the company HQ is. That part defines their price tolerance. The price is defined primarily by how much you ask for and what you can offer in return.

I doubt this, if there's a chance other local devs might then ask for more.
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