471–480 of 508 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was already lucky: My side-projects were chosen based on interest and benefits. I don't need more money.
Have you considered getting in touch with people who have interesting ideas about side projects and enable them to live well while pursuing them?
I'm talking about standard software engineering roles - CRUD based applications and so on. The story is different for more specialised roles that involve expert knowledge i.e. machine learning, data science, computer graphics, info security etc.
If I see the CV of somebody who has been doing the same kind of software engineering jobs for 20 years my thought is that this is somebody with no real interest in it and just does it as a 9-5 job. Now personally I don't see anything wrong with that. However, the problem is the difference between an "enthusiast" and a "9-5er" is much less apparent when they are young, their CVs will likely be very similar if they both have 3-5 years experience, however after 20 years it will become clear who is "passionate" about their craft and who just wants to go home to their family at the end of the day. Again I have nothing against people like that and I'm sorry for using the word passionate like that but I think that this is one of the root causes of this issue..
Sometimes you don't make enough money to retire early from a combination of bad luck and poor financial decisions. In my career, I followed a pattern of going to a company just a bit too late to get the really low priced options. I've ended up with dozens of former co-workers who are multimillionaires. I had a family and was (in hindsight) too conservative about when I went to a company. I also was a "paper" milliona…
I got hurt from that time in a different way. the year before graduation companies was asking me if I would come work for them and not graduate. the next year everyone was out of business and I couldn't find a job as I was competing with devs with years of experience. the following year of still not being able to find work was a different problem, why hire me when they can hire a fresh grad? after 3 years I finally f…
Well, thats the part where wisdom comes in. No one gets lucky. Some people do. But even those don't get lucky all the time.
If you are making $100K straight out of college. Just understand that its an exceptional period in your life. Be grateful and lock up every single cent into some investments.
Or when reality of life comes to hit in mid-30s. Your best is behind you, you have nothing to show for what you've earned, and whats worse- There is no way of earning it back again.
I'm one of those people who doesn't have to work, but I do because I enjoy it. I moved to the silicon valley nine years ago, and in that time I've done half a dozen or so job interviews. I got no offers, so now I run my own company. It was different story each time, but the upshot (IMHO) is that the interview process seemed to assume that I was a fresh-out undergrad. In one case, they asked me to debug some Ruby code…
By the way I'm a big fan of your work, and seriously envy the quality of projects you've worked. Especially your work at NASA using Common Lisp.
You sound so humble. But I'm sure a lot of people(including me) here on HN aspire to be somebody like you.
When I started programming I was very productive, even more then today, but I was ignorant about performance, data races, xxs, sql injects, lower level programming, sysadmin, general CS, etc. So I think the problem is managers see new guys being more productive, but the old "slow" guys gets paid double.
I would argue if you were ignorant of those items, you were not very productive. Someone eventually had to come back and fix that. It’s like tossing code at QA that you didn’t debug first. If your initial dev time was 8 hours but you have 6 more in fixing issues you didn’t really get done in 8 hours.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you considered getting in touch with people who have interesting ideas about side projects and enable them to live well while pursuing them?
You mean funding them? I sort of have done that, though probably not in ways you would recognize easily. Unfortunately it would be too private to expand on this here.
If you're doing the same thing for 30+ years you probably are doing something wrong anyway unless it happens to be the thing that you enjoy doing most.
Brain craves diversity. That's a fact. I love programming a lot even at 38 but lately I really feel the need to immerse myself into something else for a while -- and I am pretty sure I'll come back to programming even stronger and smarter. I just need to get programming out of my head for a few months. ...But living paycheck to paycheck robs us of the opportunity to give in to this very human need (diversification of…
Yes, quite a few in fact. It has led me to the point where I purposefully shake things up every couple of years to avoid getting stuck in a rut. It took me a decade or two to realize this was causing me problems, but once it became deliberate it actually helped to provide structure. Easily bored is a complete understatement.
> If so, how did you handle it?
I try to do something radically different every couple of years now. The last company I started has upset my careful plans though, it took more than a decade to take off.
I'm one of those people who doesn't have to work, but I do because I enjoy it. I moved to the silicon valley nine years ago, and in that time I've done half a dozen or so job interviews. I got no offers, so now I run my own company. It was different story each time, but the upshot (IMHO) is that the interview process seemed to assume that I was a fresh-out undergrad. In one case, they asked me to debug some Ruby code…
I quite liked my Triplebyte interview too (all the better that I could do it with my own Emacs config and in Racket).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The questions being asked have nothing to do with solving the types of problems that my experience is indicative of, or of the teams/projects/products I've lead. Nor are they types of questions that even measure for engineer work experience and how they approach solving the types of real world problems that 10 minutes of white boarding a bit counting and funky array manipulations alg won't show. They are questions th…
I haven't interviewed in a long time, though I read interviewing advice from Nick Corcodilos at AskTheHeadhunter and it seems to make sense. The basic idea is to take control of the interview and start doing the work right there in the interview, just like if you were on your first day of the job. Yes, this takes all sorts of social skills and preparation, but it sure would make you stand out from the crowd of softwa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> requiring employers to provide say parental leave You pivoted into govt laws on employers. That is not what we are discussing here though, I was referring to "values" that employers come up with voluntarily. I don't have any issues with clearly laid out govt policies. > Setting working hours that can accommodate having kids is another reasonable thing I don't disagree with this as long as everyone can use this flex…
Raising children is a service to society. That doesn't mean the childless should be discriminated against, but it does mean families should be accommodated. Giving a parent more flexibility than a non-parent is not discrimination, it is accommodation, and it's for the good of us all. The childless clearly benefit from healthy families.