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I no longer build software

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Re: I no longer build software

#351

Post by wing-_-nuts »

notacoward wrote: post #308
mabbo wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some day most of you will get over the dollar-induced Stockholm Syndrome that seems universal among junior developers We aren't working hard because we just want money. We want to save up enough money so that we can retire at 55 and stop working. Then we can start spending all our time complaining that the software industry is going in the wrong direction. Because in any other industry, the effort:earnings ration i…

> We want to save up enough money so that we can retire at 55 and stop working. If that's what anyone takes away from my jeremiad, then I actually think that's pretty great. Except ... why not 45? Maybe if more people could use software development as a quick route to something else that created more personal satisfaction and/or social value, that would actually be a good outcome. A bit more "it's just a job" and a b…

Not everyone here works for FAANG companies in silicon valley. Retiring by 45 is possible in much of the rest of the country but one has to go hard to do it.

For myself, I simply wanted to be free from financial worries and financially independent. I hit that at 35, and yes, I'll probably be able to retire by 45, but I'm a bit too frugal for my own good. For someone living a more 'balanced' lifestyle I think 50 or 55 is a fine goal.

Re: I no longer build software

#352

Post by leothekim »

notacoward wrote: post #180
leothekim wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Building software was never simple or easy I think it’s gotten a whole lot simpler in the past 10 years. People used to have to rack their own hardware, install PDUs, check temperature gauges, plug wires, configure the switches, setup RAID and backups, make sure you have that serial cable plugged in so you can telnet in in case the switches don’t work, and lock the data center doors without forgetting their keys ba…

> People used to have to rack their own hardware, install PDUs, check temperature gauges, plug wires, configure the switches What you describe is what used to be considered sysadmin work. I too did quite a bit of it, but most of it went to people who specialized in those things. And no, I don't do any of it now. On any given day I'll probably deal with machines in at least a dozen geographic locations across two cont…

Re: the sysadmin work, app developers have to worry a whole lot less about it, oftentimes not at all. In startups, that's a huge plus. I still remember servers going down because some workloads were destroying the RAID arrays s.t. that they were drawing down too much power and overloading the PDUs in their racks. I ended up having to hardwire the distribution of jobs to other servers while we (actually it was me, I was at a startup) got the PDUs upgraded by talking to a sysadmin on the phone. (Amusingly at some point we had to fix some DNS while restarting one of the boxes so I had to tell the guy what to do by dictating vi commands.)

But yeah it's like over time we ended up scaling the crappiness of software along with the software itself. At the same time, I'm inclined to believe that software development at large is in a much better position to solve a whole bunch of other problems than ever before. That keeps me motivated personally, though I get the frustrations for sure.

Re: I no longer build software

#353

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

gridlockd wrote: post #80
jordache wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it pays well for as a job, what else can you ask for? Unless you are independently wealthy, how can one be so picky as to complain about the nuances of software development at the tooling/dependency management level? Sheesh Look at the broader job market. Compare the pros n' cons of any career against software development. Compare the barrier to entry, demand, and other market conditions. Software dev comes out pr…

You must be in your twenties. Software development can be a uniquely depressing kind of work. All the complexity, which can be compensated for with youthful vigor, can eventually become so overwhelming and exhausting that you will need a break. Money isn't everything. If you can do a job that pays less but doesn't depress you as much, you probably should go for it. You won't keep your job as a developer forever anywa…

The trap is that the youthful vigor leaves but you still need the money. I find myself growing tired of the constant churn and needing to learn new stuff to keep up with what's going on, and then pretending I know enough of what I barely learned to be able to talk to a room full of clients about it, but I need the money (I am nowhere near the valley so I make a mnerely average amount of money for where I am in life) so what can one do? Just keep plugging away because I can't not have the money.

Re: I no longer build software

#354

Post by matthewmacleod »

notacoward wrote: post #276
matthewmacleod wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes without saying that your feelings are personal ones, totally valid, and nobody can really question them. I'm 20 years behind you, and I don't know what effect that will have on my views. But I don't really recognise the picture you're painting. Compared to the first steps I took as a developer about 15 years ago, almost everything about software development seems better to me. I find developing software to be…

Thank you for sharing your perspective. It honestly warms my heart to see that some people believe the trajectory is still upward. > Maybe I just enjoy software right now because I've now got the technical competence and confidence to avoid some of the frustrations that I experienced earlier Just as some but not all of my (mostly negative) perception is surely personal, might I suggest that some but not all of your (…

I think that's a good way to think about it. Everyone's individual perspectives are valid, and they're a mix of real things that have happened in the industry and their own experiences.

I'm very much aware of how bad some parts of the industry can be (particularly having recently dipped my toe into some machine learning work and discovered an entire sub-field in which nobody has ever heard of documentation, testing, coding standards, or things like releasing software that actually works).

Re: I no longer build software

#355

Post by fsloth »

notacoward wrote: post #224
fsloth wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can secure a decent life by programming outside of US - if this is understood as position of comfortable financial independence. I'm a programmer, my income is in the top 10th percentile, but that just means I'm in the upper middle class with the privilege to pay more taxes. I need to work until I get to retirement to secure myself financially.

> I need to work until I get to retirement That is true by definition. No matter how much or how little you make, it remains true. The question is: when do you get to retirement? Making a lot of money makes it a lot sooner.

In my country I get to retirement when the government says I can go - more or less. Otherwise the pension is really small.

To explain: a large chunk of our salary goes to the state's pension fund - not my fund. When I reach the official retirement age the government will allow me a pension that is scaled based on my payments while employed.

At this time I'm looking at 3 decades on front of keyboard (am 40 and the official pension age for me will be around 70).

Re: I no longer build software

#356

Post by devwastaken »

nicbou wrote: post #251
devwastaken wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woodworking is apart of a series of skills that transfer to other useful trades. Hard to make buildings if you don't know how the basics of how wood works.

I didn't pick up woodworking to build a house. If that was my goal, sticking to programming would be the fastest way to get a house built. My ability to make money from programming far exceeds my ability to save money by doing anything else. If it was about the money, I wouldn't rent a garage, fill it with tools and spend my weekends building subpar furniture for twice the cost (a common woodworking trope). I'd just…

Okay, good for you, as I said in my original post the job market for software is not generally that good, and the vast majority of people work low paying jobs.

Re: I no longer build software

#357

Post by kukabynd »

vbezhenar wrote: post #11
k33n wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dude lives in Indonesia. Not sure he ever saw much of a reward for writing software, sadly.

From my experience, writing software in 3-rd world country is a reliable way to get out of the poverty. Some example numbers for Kazakhstan: average salary for many low-skilled labour workers is around $100-$200 per month. Average salary for junior software developer is at least $500 and you would quickly reach $1000 and very skilled developers might get $2000+ per month. The same is true for Russia or Belarus or Ukr…

Couldn’t agree more. A fellow Kazakhstan native here with a similar sentiment.

Re: I no longer build software

#358

Post by amoitnga »

inglor_cz wrote: post #129
ArcMex wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, I want to move to a farm and keep goats and chickens (I am a Systems Architect). I still want to code in my spare time, if only to just pass on the skills to my offspring.

The great thing about chickens is that they debug your farm for you :-)

:)

the downside is you have to 'install' and continuously 'run' a shovel

Re: I no longer build software

#359

Post by leothekim »

kls wrote: post #205
leothekim wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Building software was never simple or easy I think it’s gotten a whole lot simpler in the past 10 years. People used to have to rack their own hardware, install PDUs, check temperature gauges, plug wires, configure the switches, setup RAID and backups, make sure you have that serial cable plugged in so you can telnet in in case the switches don’t work, and lock the data center doors without forgetting their keys ba…

I think it is funny you mention 10 years because I would agree with you, in the last 10 years we corrected a lot of the sins that we did in early web dev, but I think the lament reaches further back. Move back 25 years ago and it was much easier. A kid in his room could singlehandedly write the next big thing. Things in a lot of ways where much simpler then, it's hard to not look back on that period without a lot of…

I was around 25 years ago pushing bits around SunOS boxes and when people were still figuring out CMSes. FTP and BBEdit ftw. Definitely some things were simpler, but stuff would fall over in a heartbeat. I still think of the day of 9/11 when major websites couldn't serve their homepages because they were bombarded by traffic.

Kids in their rooms still do write the next big things. The difference now is they now raise a ton of money along with it. They scale a whole lot further, and much faster. There are more entering the engineering profession through Lambda School and bootcamps and what not. They also leave around a lot of shitty code that usually ends up building some business value. Much of this was true back in the day. It's just gained a whole lot more momentum IMHO.

Re: I no longer build software

#360

Post by djhaskin987 »

bad_user wrote: post #292
jlangenauer wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are right to say that the methods are vastly improved, but the ends to which those methods are applied have become ever more uninteresting (for a lot of people), and often morally suspect. We have built exquisite tools, but we use them to extract profit, to manipulate behaviour and often for no discernable purpose at all. Programming has become joyless. There are ever-shrinking spaces where a developer ge…

No, programming became useful for the mainstream. I program ever since you had to restrict arrays to 64k in Pascal's 286 real mode. It was definitely fun, but other than building really limited games and freaking text areas (that would regularly crash with out of memory errors, losing your changes), along with bad accounting software build in MS Fox, there wasn't much you could do. And I remember people literally lea…

While we should not discount your experiences, and while there are many complainers out there about nothing, I think the poster to which you replied has a deeper point.

I too am relatively young. When I was a kid, Bill Gates and windows was the devil. Nowadays I realize I judged him too harshly and that he does a lot of good in the world, but at the time Microsoft was the bridge troll.

Looking back, everything seemed so simple. Programming open source things had meaning to it. People didn't program open source back then to my knowledge as part of a larger corporate strategy. They did it because it was fun.

Corporations entered open source programming as far as I'm aware en masse in the early 2010s late 2000s. Around the same time Facebook and Google reached their peak of popularity. It felt awesome to have corporations join in the fun and it felt like the software got much cleaner and much higher quality.

After a while though it just felt like corporations took over the place. Software is better now but it's tailored to corporate needs even in the open source world.

Now that our apps have millions of users, and we can see how they interact with the app in near real time, there is a constant push to manipulate the behavior of the user. Like our app? Leave a review! How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague? And so forth. To your point, we have always been asked to do things like this but in the 90s there wasn't nearly as many ways to do so. Seeing the greater capacity of our code being used for yet more greed is disillusioning.

I get it, everything is terrible, and it always has been. But I do wonder if we haven't lost something from the '90s to now. I feel like there have been several Eternal Septembers, but instead of our communities getting flooded with trolls they have been flooded with corporate interests in communities that didn't used to have these interests at play.

To try and combat this feeling, I have tried to find those communities for programming that try to get back to our indie roots. In the '90s we didn't care or need corporations to sponsor us or our open source projects. I'm still sure there are those out there that run their projects without the need for GitHub Stars or corporate funding but it's now seen as unreliable or otherwise undesirable to use projects that are simply done for fun. I think remembering that that's all I ever used to use will help me find more fun like I used to have. Preserving the space of programming is a hobby I think is really what's at stake here.

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