Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?

#511

Post by Grishnakh » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 9:33 PM UTC

fastcars wrote: post #377

I hate programming as a job. Spending all day sitting at a computer with little human interaction outside of the person next to me and having to concentrate for hours on hard problems is really bad for my mental health. Most programmers seem to either burn out, or spend their day trying to avoid programming by going to meetings and so on. There is also an extreme amount of micromanagement at my current job. I just ge…

Sounds like you'd be much happier at a place like Bloomberg, where there's just a big open room and a lot of noise and zero privacy and lots of talking and "teamwork".

There's no shortage of workplaces like this. Go apply for new jobs and look for ones that use "Agile" and have "open-plan offices".

I'd love to have a programming job where I have little human interaction and have to concentrate for hours. Those jobs are very rare these days thanks to the open-plan office.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?

#512

Post by david927 » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 9:43 PM UTC

david927 wrote: post #467

gaastonsr wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no elegance and no higher vision. It's an Asperger profession; smart but artless. I guess it's not for everybody. There's always going to be people that whatever they do it's just going to be a job. While other people find it to be an art. You can say this of finances, music, programming, accounting, anything, really.

Notice that I'm quoting Alan Kay. You're not just disagreeing with me, you're disagreeing with a Turing Award winner -- and that's not to say that he's right, or by extension that I'm right, but you can't simply hand wave it away as coming from someone who doesn't understand it well enough.

I didn't word that well. What I'm saying is that it specifically is missing what architecture or math has, which is a sense of higher understanding and managed view. So in other words, this isn't just a failure to find the beauty of PHP, but that PHP (for example but any language will do) is fundamentally misshapen and malformed.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?

#513

Post by Grishnakh » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 9:52 PM UTC

mpfundstein wrote: post #148

iends wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but I have a graduate CS degree, a wife, and a kid on the way :)

Me too. My kid is now 2 1/2. I'll stick to work until April. Then I'll quit and do something else. I also want to get more involved into business, so I'll enter business school. Saved me a good amount of money! One thing that is important to me is that we have quite low costs of living. And I mean really low costs. No expensive car to maintain, no fancy hobbies. So this works... Don't know about your situation though…

Only so much. Things like rent and medical insurance are impossible to avoid, and rent is highly dependent on your location, which is tied to your job. You could get cheaper rent by moving to rural Wyoming, but you're not going to find a tech job there. If you can work remotely, however, or you have your own work-at-home business, this does give you the freedom to seek out lower CoL locations. But medical insurance is still a big factor, esp. when you have a family.

I'd say that these days, housing is easily the #1 cost for most Americans, and in terms of the fraction of a person's income, it's really ballooned from 20 years ago.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?

#514

Post by Grishnakh » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 9:56 PM UTC

digler999 wrote: post #473

Grishnakh wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I learned quickly, eventually got good at interviews, and ultimately got a job at bloomberg, which is fairly difficult to get past their interiew process. Bloomberg, where it's just one giant open noisy room? Doesn't sound like much of a reward to me. Personally, I wish I had never gone into programming. I wanted a profession where I could sit in peace and quiet and work on interesting intellectual problems on my ow…

The point of my comment was not that bloomberg was an awesome reward. I only stayed a year, and yes it was noisy as hell. The floor sounded like a drum when people walked on it. My point was that I went from a blundering buffoon in an interview to passing a notoriously difficult software engineering interview in 8 years (with a few jobs in between).

Good point. Was turnover high there? Did you manage to find a place with a better working environment?

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?

#515

Post by jkosinski » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 10:00 PM UTC

biztos wrote: post #211

So nobody's interested in sales? It's a job that solves a lot of the problems people complain about in programming, like spending all day staring at the screen or not interacting with people or doing things that might be pointless. The downside of course is that you eat what you kill.

I'm interested in sales, particularly enterprise software sales. As a software engineer, I find it alluring: generally a higher income potential than programming combined with the social aspect.

Like the the other commenter, I'd be interested in hearing from those who work in sales.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?

#516

Post by digler999 » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 10:05 PM UTC

Grishnakh wrote: post #514

digler999 wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of my comment was not that bloomberg was an awesome reward. I only stayed a year, and yes it was noisy as hell. The floor sounded like a drum when people walked on it. My point was that I went from a blundering buffoon in an interview to passing a notoriously difficult software engineering interview in 8 years (with a few jobs in between).

Good point. Was turnover high there? Did you manage to find a place with a better working environment?

I think turnover is pretty high there. People dont want to get locked into BB's proprietary (or in some cases antiquated) technologies. However, there are tons of departments, many of them are modernized, and you can really learn a lot for your first few years out of school. If you stay and are faithful you can go up the ranks.

I am doing fine. I went contractor, and currently in healthcare / imaging. I dont even sweat interviews anymore :)

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?

#517

Post by segmondy » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 10:22 PM UTC

nilved wrote: post #372

segmondy wrote: post #346

A bit too late, but if I could do it all over again, I would have gone into health care. I have lot's of friend in the industry. Ask them about their day, they just saved lives - heart surgery, brain surgery, trauma stabilization in ER, just saw a toddler through cancer treatment, and so on and so forth. What did I do? Oh, I wrote code.

I see where you're coming from but I'd hang myself over the bureaucracy. Give me the code. Not to mention, it's just as possible to positively effect the world as a developer as a doctor (easier without the red tape, actually.)

Hah! I don't work for a startup, I work for enterprise, we give meaning to bureaucracy too!

I'm not going to a startup, please don't suggest it. I've been there done that. Too broke for my liking, Enterprise got money, plenty of it! I like money and not worrying about it.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?

#518

Post by mikestew » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 10:31 PM UTC

Grishnakh wrote: post #471

d0lph wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except with amazing pay, serious benefits, and better working conditions.

Compared to factory workers of 50+ years ago? Certainly. Compared to programmers 25 years ago? Absolutely not. The pay is worse (inflation-adjusted), and the working conditions are far, far worse (see: open-plan offices).

(My apologies for crappy formatting. All I wanted was a bulleted list. Wasn't that doc'ed in the FAQ or something?)

Let's see what I was doing 25 years ago:

    * Private office with a door that closed.

    * Status updates mail to $SOMEONE once a week that were mostly auto-generated from the tools we used. Took 30 seconds.

    * Sat down to a chunk of work uninterrupted for long periods of time because no one was micro-managing me or bugging me on Fashionable-Chat-App-of-the-Week.

    * Used development tools that had a half-life measured in years, not months.

    * Got to really, *really* know my tools because they weren't swapped out for the new hotness every six months. Man, the ways I used to abuse FoxPro bordered on criminal. I can't do that these days since the tools get swapped from under me so often.

    * Was paid well, and treated with professional respect. Sometimes a collared shirt was required, but I didn't mind when everyone else had to wear ties.

    * Was provided with good equipment, often without asking. "I have a quad-core server box with an assload of RAM for a...mikestew?" "That's me, but I didn't order it." Boss: "oh, thought you might need that for multithreaded testing." Thanks, boss!

    * Went in at 9:00, went home at 5:00. Every day.

Today:

    * Today I'm sitting in a retasked storage room because I refuse to sit at the "hotel desks" (note that I'm currently a consultant, so it's not *as* egregious. But 20 years ago, clients that wanted me on-site provided a desk or sometimes an office.) My last full-time position was in an open office plan sitting next to people that literally (and I use that word literally) spent more time talking about the fucking Seahawks than they did working.

    * Daily stand-ups to justify my existence.

    * Treated like an interchangeable line worker.

    * Working on the cheapest Macbook Pro that Apple would sell the client. With a 120Gb drive, I spend at least a billable hour a week trying to free up space what with Android/iOS dev environments and the multi-gig simulator images. But, hey, at least they saved $100 on the cost of the machine!

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?

#519

Post by geebee » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 10:31 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #431

clentaminator wrote: post #256

I think about leaving programming every day. I love programming, but I'm not sure I enjoy software development as a career. I enjoy coding and understanding how computer systems work, but I don't care for the constant changes in tools and techniques in certain domains of development. I'd rather practise with and improve my existing knowledge of a subject, instead of constantly playing catch-up with someone else's too…

The money is hard to pass up, regardless of area. As I've mentioned before I own a gym business (multiple locations) with my wife and some other business partners. Part of the purchase process was financial disclosures of everyone so we all know what each other makes on paper, what we actually take home, household wealth and assets, etc. I'm 30, younger than my business partners by multiple decades, and am the only o…

I did see some data on US News Best Jobs on salaries for various positions. It's a roundup of BLS data, and provides data based on location.

I find the data a whisker suspicious, but this is BLS data. Supposedly, the media salary for a software developer in SF is $118k a year. Keep in mind, in San Jose, it is $142k, which sounds more like it.

http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer...

But now look at salaries for other fields. A registered nurse in SF earns a median salary of $123k. Every time I point this out, I always make sure to emphasize that I am not complaining that registered nurses earn a lot of money in SF - they should! And yes, it is a hard job, but perhaps a rewarding one as well. Would you rather do a hard job that is important and pays well, or log into JIRA to fix bugs and report on them in your daily "standup"?

Dental Hygienists, according to this roundup of BLS data, earn about $102k a year. Ok, that's less than developers, but do 45 year old dental hygienists get run out of the field because they are too old, or because they withdrew for a few years with kids and family responsibilities?

And keep in mind, salaries for lawyers, nurse practitioners, physicians, physician assistants, and other professionals or para-professionals often substantially exceed what software developers get paid. If you want a relatively low stress job, there are better options. If you're ambitious, there are better options as well. In short, you'd better really like code if you ant to do this, and you may find you don't, once you discover what that means on an "agile" team. Great for hobby, sure, so is music, dance, and painting. Do you like it more than music, dance and painting?

The unspoken truth is that Software development isn't really that great a job for the pay, career prospects, and working conditions. It's not horrible, either, but there's no need to scratch our heads about an alleged "shortage". I know the industry has a bunch of reasons they promote for the "shortage", but in the end, it's a market response to pay and working conditions. People with the skill to do this have realized they're better off in a different field.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?

#520

Post by digler999 » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 10:36 PM UTC

rmdashrfroot wrote: post #418

bsenftner wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look for older development companies, where the developer staff is all over 40. The work tends to be in C/C++, you'll find none of the modern programming fashions (Agile, whatnot...) and they expect you to be a mature adult capable of self managing. They don't care how one works, as long as you own your work, can fix if issues or bugs are found, and can generally operate as a respectful peer to the other developers.…

Do you have any examples of this type of company? I'm a sophomore CS student looking to work in Aerospace, and this type of company, where the work is done in a self driven manner and where the work matters, that I'd love to work for.

make sure you have a github or some sort of portfolio of personal projects you've done. Write your own kerbal, or wind-tunnel simulator, drone autopilot, something that shows you are captivated by the field and took matters into your own hands to work with it.

Also, prepare to work in a formal-verification development environment. Some aerospace jobs are like this, which basically means code moves as slow as molasses. If it's flight control software, you may find yourself writing 20 pages of documentation/paperwork for every one page of code. (Think about it, if your code could destroy a $12 million jet engine, you should be pretty confident your code actually works, right ?). So research CMMI [1] and if that is a dealbreaker for you, make sure you avoid those kinds of jobs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model_Inte...