Software can still be a lot of fun, even more so today, when we can make huge stupid mistakes and things still mostly work.
You just have to work on things you like, instead of what's fashionable or high paying.
I no longer build software
161–170 of 891 posts
Re: I no longer build software
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another interesting fact: if you're freelance software developer in Russia who work remotely for western company and register as entrepreneur then your efficient tax rate at most is 8% for fees and taxes. Then let's say 1% extra for banking and accounting, etc. So you basically keep more than 90% of income. And there is even lower tax rate options available if you work alone and earn between $10,000-80,000 / year. Yo…
Anyone doubting the fintech claim, have a look at this https://www-ft-com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/content/38967766-ae... TLDR: Russia's IRS/HRMC equivalent digitized VAT collection (similar to sales tax). Basically every 90 seconds all tills/cash registers across the country report back the sale to the taxman, so you don't even have to manually submit any VAT returns. Russia started with 20% tax gap between revenue due…
Russia also have instant payments for consumers between all major banks which are free for first ~$1400 / month (100,000 RUB) and it's should be soon available for businesses as well. It's all run by central bank.
For fintech there is Tinkoff bank which is more advanced than Monzo / Revolut / N26 / etc as well as two "virtual" B2B fintech banks that even do accounting for entrepreneurs on their own. And to be honest even Russian largest state-owned Sberbank is far more advances than most of institutions in US and EU.
So as long as your business can't be forcefully taken away and there are no political risks it's quite comfortable to be freelancer when it's come to taxes.
Re: I no longer build software
#163This is a privileged position to take. IT is one of the very few ways to have a relatively decent life in my third world (well, technically second world) country, especially for those of us who can't rely on nepotism to put them in a comfortable place. Sure, I can go make furniture out of wood for $150 a month (and I did at some point in my life), but I'd rather keep my cushy lifestyle and stare at a screen for 16 ho…
I wonder if those making furniture are just doing it to stave off boredom after cashing in millions of tech stock profits. I've already seen exactly this sort of pattern in a few people I know.
When I was a manager for a few years I started wood working as a hobby. If you have the builder/creator itch then when you stop building software then you will need an outlet for your itch. When I went back into software development, I have not touched the wood working.
Re: I no longer build software
#164Strangely enough, to a degree I envy this guy. I've been at my current job for over 8 years and up until a few months ago I was pretty happy. However politics caught up and I decided to leave. At the moment I have a few offers on the table, one of which is from a company somewhere in the FAANG realm. Senior software engineer, awesome conditions, very generous paycheck, lots of benefits. So tempted by all this I said…
> pulling comments and likes on things which can be considered "inappropriate" and "offensive"
> That alone is enough for me to turn down the offer
> I take chopping off my finger in a heartbeat
You would rather lose a finger that work in a company that has strict very rules around offensive behavior?
...
Re: I no longer build software
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
how? SAP/ERP consulting?
Embedded programming i.e. automotive, industrial, aerospace. The problem is they pay poorly in comparison to web dev but are a lot more stable long term.
It's a nice area
However some places are 10, sometimes 20 years behind into best practices, be that in coding, tools, PM practices, innovation, etc.
There's a reason a lot of mobile phone companies closed down (as an example).
As much as I like the area I don't miss staring at a hodge-podge of C/C++ code done in weird style that might or might not have been auto generated and will as many memory bugs as possible.
Re: I no longer build software
#166This made me laugh, because I actually am planning on making a transition to woodworking. My house is paid off, and I can live on a fairly small income that I can probably generate mostly from passive income. If I can actually supplement that with building furniture, bonus. If not, then I still get to build furniture.
I won't move away from my main job for a while, but I do want to move to a lifestyle where I grow all my own food. It's a very interesting problem, of whether a single person/family can be mostly self-sufficient on food while spending only a small part of their day growing the said food. Lots of biology, perhaps a little bit of tech thrown in, if it helps.
I think you easily can, the difficulty comes with whether you can be happy with what you're limited to, so more a question of personal tolerance for lack of variety in order to be happy with your food, IMO.
Re: I no longer build software
#167Add me to the woodworking ex-developers. I built a website that pays the bills, and now I have a lot of time on my hands. I am finishing my first piece of furniture today. It's pretty scary to work without an undo button. The physical world isn't just instructions, but movements. A little twitch can ruin a cut. A clumsy movement can dent a piece of wood you spent an hour sanding. You truly experience the meaning of "…
Hit the nail on the head. Work is work and it drains passion out for most people. Obviously not all cases, but at least I feel of you are looking for purpose and joy from work you may be looking in the wrong spot.
Agreed. Loving something and it turning into a real job with all the added fluff/protocols/whatever (things like talking to customers, having to do marketing, having to meet deadlines and such) will suck up everything you think you love about it and make it feel bad once it's in the real world with actual constraints and dependencies. It's no longer only you and it, it's no longer exploring and playing in the sandbox.
From what I've heard from other sources, it's kinda like what people call being a grown up.
Re: I no longer build software
#168It seems like nowadays you just can't make money building interesting things anymore.
Most of the available programming work is really just writing glue code to make big software systems work as intended, to the point where it can feel more like writing configuration files than actual programming. Put simply, 98% of programming these days is scripting.
On the other hand, you have lots of fun things one can do with code, from building weird experimental things that lack any real-world application but are very interesting to think about to simply recreating some of the giants of the software world in creative ways or in different languages to get a better appreciation of their inner workings and the principles behind them. None of that has any value from a busyness perspective and nobody will pay you for it.
The way I feel about programming is in equal parts as an art and as engineering. The weird obsession of the IT industry with treating code as a resource that has no purpose other than create wealth is absurd and, I believe, one of the reasons why many programmers end up disillusioned and simply drop programming altogether, both as a job and as a hobby.
Re: I no longer build software
#169Strangely enough, to a degree I envy this guy. I've been at my current job for over 8 years and up until a few months ago I was pretty happy. However politics caught up and I decided to leave. At the moment I have a few offers on the table, one of which is from a company somewhere in the FAANG realm. Senior software engineer, awesome conditions, very generous paycheck, lots of benefits. So tempted by all this I said…
> I take chopping off my finger in a heartbeat I wouldn't make so light of that.
Totally off-topic, but the automatic blade brakes on modern table saws are really cool. It runs a current through the blade, so when something moist like your finger or a hot dog gets too close (maybe using capacitance?), it automatically drops the blade and instantly stops it with a single-use brake mechanism. Better to destroy the $100 blade-and-brake assembly than to lose a finger.
Re: I no longer build software
#170I personally think programming is a terrible job. In these threads, there are always people who say "it isn't programming, it is x", where x is "poor management", "the fact that it is a job", "the type of programming you are doing", etc, etc. It isn't, it is programming. Anyway, I want to go one step further and return to a more ancient living style. I don't want things like artificial light, computers, etc, to be a…
> The best time I have ever had, even to this day, was when all of those things didn't exist.
Watch out for Rosy Retrospection [0].