Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll be 57 in 3 months. I've been coding professionally for 35 years.
I'm about to write my first Hello World and I already dislike it.
don't worry you could end up as the lucky one the author talks about :)
My Biggest Regret as a Programmer
221–230 of 634 posts
Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took a management path at first, thinking it was a natural progression upon obtaining over a decade and a half of experience and being enouraged by my peers over the years. I was never unhappier. I gave it everything I could. My team loved me and I shielded them from mountains of pain and frustration. I got sick from stress and mildly depressed from lack of a technically creative outlet. It took me over a year to r…
I get the impression that it's always "easy" to move into management, so there's no need to rush into a management role. In contrast, I fear that once I try management, it will be hard to move back to being a developer. How easy / hard was it for you to return to being a developer?
I think it would depend in large part with how active you keep your programming skills and how up to date you stay on industry changes. Sure, your initial reaction to reading this is that you would stay sharp as ever, but management is a different kind of grind, and it tends to wear on your soul. Perks are good, trade offs not so good.
Personally, I'm glad I got our of management and back into the nuts and bolts side of the house.
Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer
#223Im of the belief that technical people and managers should really be at the same level financially and otherwise quite honestly. That's really the only way I can see the whole manager/programmer thing can work out for the benefit of everyone. When you have non-technical managers or technical-managers who's skills are out of date making decisions on behalf of the programmers you end up with a mess. That is often the c…
Ironically, the only way to fix this is for conscientious programmers to go into management, where they will have the power to actually change things.
The issue though is that many (most?) developers/engineers avoid management like the plague since it involves having to actually deal with people
Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in my late forties and have been a professional developer for 25+ years. I agree with what you said in your comment, but this stood out: "You might be dead tomorrow; you might as well enjoy today." This is not a bad way to live, but as I get older I am increasingly aware that there will be a day when I'm dead tomorrow. And for that reason I'm increasingly less interested in spending time in the state where "time…
I'm about to turn 30 in just over a month. I got my first programming job at 20 and am seriously wondering where my twenties went? Honestly it terrifies me how quickly they went. All of my twenties went about as fast as tenth grade. I blame the time shift of programming. I hear about all the adventures my wife had before we met and just think "well I was busy programming". Since getting married in September I have sp…
Great realization. I'm in a similar boat. On the upside, 30 is still quite young, there's lots of time to do other stuff and slow things down ever more.
Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer
#225The best time to start a project was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
That's the same thing they say about investing in the stock market.
Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer
#226Earlier 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,…
prototypes are actually a really good way to deal with inheritance.
Single inheritance is awfully limiting which is what Javascript's prototypes provide. And structurally copying multiple prototypes into a single object to achieve multiple inheritance is an awful hack.
Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer
#227He 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,…
I understand the authors frustration, and it's not really about money as some here believe.
In my 6 jobs as a programmer I've also seen so many incompetent managers, so much time wasted, so much bullshit, so much backstabbing and narcissists galore.
But the problem is not really about THEM managers, but about ME and my maladaptive cognitive schemas (commonly known to everybody as lack of social skills, subjugation to authority, procrastination, lack of discipline and so on).
The bitterness results from the fact that even if you're a great programmer, most companies will try to stamp you into a predictable, replaceable and interchangeable little cog and will use you as it sees fit.
If you're not happy with that, if you think you posses great insight and you can do better, you either develop your own product or you take on some sort of leadership role.
Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer
#228He 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
your first inference is incorrect.
Lifetime earning potential is almost never linear.
Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer
#229IMHO, the OP is missing a big, huge point: He is really in the best position. So, here is what he should do:
Step 1: Create a small business. For this, he should pick a product or service that can be that of a significant business, e.g., the one he would like to manage as as technical CEO and where initially he can develop the product or service mostly just by programming on his own. Then from that product or service, get revenue.
Step 2: Be the CEO of the business, still just a one person startup except with as much outsourced as possible -- e.g., rented offices, bookkeeping, accounting, taxes, benefits, business insurance, legal, colocation or cloud for the server farm, consultants for specialized technical topics he is not already good at, etc.
Then as the first hire, hire an office manager later to grow to one of an administrative assistant, chief of staff, head of HR, or COO. Hire the product development staff and then the CIO to manage that staff. Hire a CFO, CMO, etc.
Then for this business, be the leader he wished he'd been in the past.
His abilities as a programmer let him do well in Step 1 and also be good at the technical parts of management in Step 2.
Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks guys, you all make me feel better about turning 31 in a month and a half and have been coding since 15.
I stated coding when I was 11. I turned 19 a couple months ago. I guess that makes me one of those junior developers everyone talks about.
Coding as a child often makes you a better junior developer. It very rarely makes you anything but a junior developer, your first few years full time at it.