I have been coding for around 35 years now and I love it as much as when I started. Although I do other things (professional brewing for instance), devving is the thing I like the most. Only thing I guess I would change is less focus on money and more on research when I was uni and shortly after. Money seems to, usually, make programming boring in my experience. Outside firmware that is, but only the kind that has to run in 20kb, not the kind where embedded means just a full ARM system with megabytes of memory. So that's what I do now (among other things).
Ask HN: Would you still do software engineering/dev if you could do it all over?
41–50 of 59 posts
Re: Ask HN: Would you still do software engineering/dev if you could do it all over?
#421000x yes. I live my dream life because of it - can travel anywhere in the world and never have to worry about going broke.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still do software engineering/dev if you could do it all over?
#43I don’t know, but if I did, I’d get a CS degree and skip grad school, probably ending up with 1/3 the student loans.
What loans? Grad school in CS is free, and undegrad is easily financed by internships in software developer.
> Grad school in CS is free
In the US it's not free unless you are a thesis student.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still do software engineering/dev if you could do it all over?
#44I cooked in fine dining for 5 years. Then did 5 years in the military. Now I'm coding. If I had to do it all over, I'd probably still do se/dev, just earlier. Sucks being behind my friends when it comes to money/homeownership/etc. After having two careers where money wasn't great, I'm all about the money now.
I'm kind of the opposite. I have a very good salary now at a young age, but I feel that I'm losing my youth. In many ways I would half my current salary to not be stuck in an office writing CRUD - but then I think about all the flexibility my salary provides and go the other way. It's a hard choice
I've been struggling with a parallel problem recently. I'm on track to go into engineering management, which I'm very interested in doing. But part of me wants to take a remote job even if it means a pay cut and moving somewhere cheap and traveling more and working more flexibly.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still do software engineering/dev if you could do it all over?
#45I would still do software engineering if I could do it all over. I came into SWE from the EE side. I studied both mathematics and computer (hardware) engineering, with a hefty CS minor in undergrad. I think EE/CE is a tremendously intellectually profitable (if somewhat unconventional) preparation for a career as a developer. You get an intimate understanding of how computer hardware and low-level stuff works that is hard to get in a CS program. I still find it gave me a toolkit for thinking about software problems that most of my colleagues don't have.
I echo the sentiment that programming doesn't really exist on its own. Most great software engineers really have two skillsets: the programming skills and domain knowledge. Rich Hickey remarks on this in one of his ClojureCon talks. One thing I think I would do differently is to find one or more domains to apply programming to sooner in my life. I'm about eight years out of school and only starting to figure out the answer to this question myself.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still do software engineering/dev if you could do it all over?
#46I would still do it but I would also do something else. I didn't realize this until after college, but outside of a CS 101 class you can't be just a programmer. Programming doesn't happen in a vacuum - it must be applied to a domain. For some people, a lot of whom are on this website, the domain can be computer science. Writing a compiler, database, or operating system would fall into that category. Things on the cut…
This makes sense and I agree. You will learn some about the domains you write software in but often you are in those by force and not by choice and you will only ever be so interested in the problems you face/software you build. I once got to write a compiler for financial formulas and that was very interesting but that was the exception and not the rule for most of my professional work.
Maybe you get lucky and have a hobby/personal interest that can fulfill this need to some degree (this partially has happened to me, apparently people who write software don't often overlap with people who cross stitch).
I do enjoy writing code but I much prefer writing code for problems or in domains that interest me.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still do software engineering/dev if you could do it all over?
#47No, I would've tried harder in school and tried for med school instead
Grass is always greener I guess. Most of the doctors I know work tough hours and envy the engineer lifestyle. There also isn't a huge gap in pay unless the M.D. is specialized, but then you have quite a few years of low-earning vs. engineer's almost instant earning power so probably comes out about even.
I see doctors as being more stable in later career than engineering. I don't really have any data for it; that's just my gut impression.
Also you can be a doctor anywhere. Being an engineer in tech feels like you're geographically stuck unless you're willing to make other (career) trade offs.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still do software engineering/dev if you could do it all over?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Grass is always greener I guess. Most of the doctors I know work tough hours and envy the engineer lifestyle. There also isn't a huge gap in pay unless the M.D. is specialized, but then you have quite a few years of low-earning vs. engineer's almost instant earning power so probably comes out about even.
I see doctors as being more stable in later career than engineering. I don't really have any data for it; that's just my gut impression. Also you can be a doctor anywhere. Being an engineer in tech feels like you're geographically stuck unless you're willing to make other (career) trade offs.
Yeah, you definitely don't hear about ageism being a concern for doctors.
Family & internal med doctors can work pretty much anywhere, but specialists don't have a ton of choices when it comes to geography. Positions in desirable cities can actually be very competitive and hard to find.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still do software engineering/dev if you could do it all over?
#49No, I would've tried harder in school and tried for med school instead
Grass is always greener I guess. Most of the doctors I know work tough hours and envy the engineer lifestyle. There also isn't a huge gap in pay unless the M.D. is specialized, but then you have quite a few years of low-earning vs. engineer's almost instant earning power so probably comes out about even.
The difference is doctors basically "keep moving up".
Unless you screw up massively, once you get in it only gets better.
For engineers, you get "used up and thrown away".
The default pathway for software engineers is not that great for a large portion of people.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still do software engineering/dev if you could do it all over?
#50I would still do it but I would also do something else. I didn't realize this until after college, but outside of a CS 101 class you can't be just a programmer. Programming doesn't happen in a vacuum - it must be applied to a domain. For some people, a lot of whom are on this website, the domain can be computer science. Writing a compiler, database, or operating system would fall into that category. Things on the cut…
So can you not shift into this work? I imagine for something like economics, not all the programmers behind banks or quants have a high level of economics knowledge? I would have thought they want someone with a major CS background to fill the gap they have in that regard?