161–170 of 311 posts
I agree with the other comments: programming is no longer a good career to make money, but it’s become an essential requirement of many overlapping professions.
I charge $100 / hr. There are people on upwork who are much better than me that charge $20 / hr. The market forces will quickly play out.
> honestly makes me worried about the future of the field in terms of whether it'll still be a good career in the future. I had the same thoughts back in the late 90's and early 00's. Everytime I told someone I was interested in CS, they thought it was because of the money. While working on the major many people told me my job was going to go overseas and that the future was in managing developers. In fact, during my…
>> While working on the major many people told me my job was going to go overseas and that the future was in managing developers. I had a friend in the 90s tell me the entire workforce in the US was shifting to management. Everything will be outsourced and people here will just manage everything. This was an MIS major drinking the business school koolaid. I thought it was rather arrogant to think China or India could…
Beyond the competition, a skilled person in CS is much easier to differentiate. In the same thread though, being able to build any company you think of in your garage for peanuts means you can do the most good or work on the most interesting things you can imagine at cost. It's much much harder to have massive impact without a CS background if you haven't had huge success already.
Banging on a keyboard can be great, fulfilling fun when you get to decide what's worth doing. OTOH, I heard that many experienced university glassblowers make more money than the full professors. If/When you get tired of coding, that second major might be the escape tunnel. Even if it costs you an extra semester or two.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> CS isn't a career. CS is part of all careers. This right here. I was in awe when I realized that software engineering affects all industries. Even farmers, it might not be necessary, but it can make a huge difference. Also I too have been coding for a long time because I love programming. The way I see it, if I ever tire of it, I can switch careers. I'd still code regardless of who pays me to do what.
> Even farmers, it might not be necessary, but it can make a huge difference. As a software developer by day, farmer by night, I'm not sure there is much overlap. Some of the problem solving skills I learned on the farm have made me a better programmer, I expect, but I don't see much advantage in building software for my farm. Anything you can dream of is available commercially at a fraction of the cost it would take…
Depends what you need it for https://tractorhacking.github.io/
This worked - I can't quite remember the numbers, but probably the entering class was 2/3rds the size it would've been otherwise.
And clearly, it was going to be a terrible idea to graduate in Computer Science in 1992, so who can blame them? The field had clearly hit its peak by 1987... (this was in Switzerland, on a 4.5 year degree program)