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My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

thecodist.com

581–590 of 634 posts

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#581

Sounds like the typical success anxiety everyone suffers from today. You could have been everything, successful, rich, famous, but you chose what you wanted and that's ok, it's for the best, that's true success, don't run after the carrot. Every programmer I meet dream of being CEO, having their own company, making more money. Yet over 90% of them don't enjoy any of their current profit. Literally, with my programmer…

Success is not related with money. For me success is being a person who can inspire people with thoughts. Money is just a metric for our society which deemed as ultimate result of success. If you are rich, people start to listen you and have inspiration from you. I would be a person who can change people's life in a good way, a person my ancestors would be proud of my actions. Difference with Bill Gates and regular people like me or you is not the way living our lifes, it is the number of people listen when we talk.

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#582

Im 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 When you have non-technical managers or technical-managers who's skills are out of date making decisions on behalf of the programmers you end up with a mess.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…

Eh, dealing with people is harder than dealing with code. Code does what it's told, has no emotions, is debuggable, doesn't need motivation, etc.

If people you are "managing" are the product and not building the product then I would say maybe you have a point. Additionally, management doesn't bear the brunt of the fallout most of the time when they are bad managers or unable to make good technical decisions. So of course programmers given these factors should be paid the same as management.

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#583
Management types are simply pimping someone else's talent. In reality they should only get a small financial cut from doing that rather than the oversized influence and share of the decision making they do get from doing such things....that's how the entertainment industry handles "management".

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#584

Sounds like the typical success anxiety everyone suffers from today. You could have been everything, successful, rich, famous, but you chose what you wanted and that's ok, it's for the best, that's true success, don't run after the carrot. Every programmer I meet dream of being CEO, having their own company, making more money. Yet over 90% of them don't enjoy any of their current profit. Literally, with my programmer…

How much do you make? I don't think what you say is true for an average salary.

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript is actually an incredibly flexible and effective language.

> JavaScript is actually an incredibly flexible and effective language. My problem with people who say such things is that they almost always have been saying the same thing for many years, while the language itself did several 180° turns and backflips. "Classes are stupid, we don't need them!" "Look, we have fake classes in ES6!" "Asynchronous code is awesome!" "Asynchronous code is horrible!" "Prototype mutation is…

Or maybe they are focusing on other things altogether?

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#586
post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at least artists in other realms get to enjoy some permanence, very little in software get's preserved, more so now, but still, I don't expect anyone to be putting my stuff in a gallery any time soon...

One could argue that the impermanence makes it even more of an art form as the work of art only exists for a brief moment in the grand scheme of things, and so the artist must be one true to the art as they could not be working for the everlasting glory of fame... ...Or that could be taking the analogy a bit too far.

> Or that could be taking the analogy a bit too far.

No way! Totally agree. ImTalking's story above proves it. He has those stories for life, and those who knew him or read this will have them too. That is art and something to be proud of even if it is only a few paragraphs. It says a lot about what someone felt was important in their life. And if you don't feel it is important to express your thoughts and desires to others that's fine but some people do find it useful.

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#587

Sounds like the typical success anxiety everyone suffers from today. You could have been everything, successful, rich, famous, but you chose what you wanted and that's ok, it's for the best, that's true success, don't run after the carrot. Every programmer I meet dream of being CEO, having their own company, making more money. Yet over 90% of them don't enjoy any of their current profit. Literally, with my programmer…

I think it is not about what you can do now, but what about when you are 30 years in this job (I assume you are less).

I am also still relatively young and am probably doing OK if I look only at the present day (I am a developer). But what about in 10 years? In 20? When I think of it I get really really uneasy (although it is probably me as person this way - I guess I would be uneasy whatever role I had).

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#588
post #505
post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and of course we have class syntax now anyway Even using Class syntax you're still locked into prototypical inheritance model. There is no classical inheritance in JS. (Probably a backward step in UX to call it "Class")

Yes, but you're locked into the subset of prototypal inheritance that basically is class inheritance. A class is, fundamentally, just a prototype of a particular kind.

Classical inheritance sucks.

https://medium.com/javascript-scene/the-two-pillars-of-javas...

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#589
My biggest regret is, I could have been a lawyer or doctor easily but i choosed to be a "programmer". I worked at New York(appnexus) and SF (yahoo, ebay). Now I work as Director of Software development for a very large org.

Programming is hard. really hard. I hope we can all agree on this. It is not easy to develop proper software. There are always changes along the way, hence we choose to be "agile". But still there is always something missing. I guess this is the nature of it.

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#590
post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely with you. I think the answer is you can't help some people. It's just sort of a myopic view. Could you imagine in 50 years someone asks you what regret you had about your career and you said "that I ever used node that one week in 2015"? I mean, wow.

If you spent a couple years building everything you could on top of Node and then realized you completely disagreed with some of its basic design then that would be a memorable experience. This may be hard to understand if you are still in love with Javascript.

I don't know, I see disliking my old work as a good sign of engineering growth, and hating old decisions as personal / professional work...
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