121–130 of 274 posts
How?
The coop program i.e. the four month work then four month study program.
Except maybe for the startup stuff. That said, there are are overarching initiatives being undertaken by uWaterloo to infuse entrepreneurship and student success. The most popular one? http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/
How jaded. Sounds rather like a "Guide to Success in High School" written by the guy that graduated with perfect grades but got his ass kicked every day. Well, not everybody gets their ass kicked every day. I absolutely cringe at the idea of a bright-eyed young programmer becoming prematurely jaded based on somebody else's experiences. "This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer." Definite…
Counter anecdote: I wish I had read this when I was a young coder starting out. Would have saved me much time and trouble.
In fact, I think it would have spared me some of the jaded moments I've had when felt I wasn't progressing as much as I had expected.
Want to see someone get jaded fast? Keep telling them that they just need to be really good at what they do and work hard and their value will be justly rewarded.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone knows I pay my rent by making bingo cards for elementary schoolteachers and bear no ill will for small businesses, right? If you are sufficiently skilled to create a popular iPhone app, you can sleepwalk your way into either $100k+ as a salaried engineer or $200+ an hour doing contracting work. The vast majority of app devs will not reach these numbers.
With all due respect...I think that the factor we are trying to maximize is not money...It is overall life satisfaction and happiness as a hacker. Personally I would choose 80K a year building my own awesome apps ,making a name for myself,travelling the world ,meeting awesome people than making 200K at xyz corp where I spend my day exchanging bullshit emails with upper management.
> If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired. If you work at a place like that, I feel sorry for you. Even the owner of my company lists himself on Twitter and his blog as just Programmer at RAD Game Tools. Besides being the sounding board for us when we have problems and ideas, he still writes more code than most of us can regularly muster.
I came to the comments to express the same sort of opinion. I work at a place that understands and values programmers. I can't imagine working in any other kind of environment unless I was between real jobs and really strapped for cash. If you're at a place run by a bunch of clueless MBAs that don't understand the value of their in-house engineers you just don't have a good (or reliable) job.
>>"Programmer" sounds like "anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo." If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired. I call myself as a programmer because I enjoy programming and do a lot of programming as part of my job. It is unlikely that I'll get fired because I run the (tiny) company I work for :). and customers seem to like the…
It's a very business oriented article. E.g. "You’re in the business of unemploying people. If you think that is unfair, go back to school and study something that doesn’t matter.)" I for one have created more jobs than I've destroyed in my coding career. By building a business, as you've done, you're going in the opposite direction of this kind of sentiment.
Now of course, the economy on the whole is not a zero-sum game. But you don't see that at the micro-economic level. It is rare indeed that a programmer creates new jobs without negative consequences somewhere else in the world...
> If you really like the atmosphere at universities, that is cool. Put a backpack on and you can walk into any building at any university in the United States any time you want. Backpacks are a lot cheaper than working in academia. You can lead the life of the mind in industry, too — and enjoy less politics and better pay. You can even get published in journals, if that floats your boat. (After you’ve escaped the min…
> If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired. If you work at a place like that, I feel sorry for you. Even the owner of my company lists himself on Twitter and his blog as just Programmer at RAD Game Tools. Besides being the sounding board for us when we have problems and ideas, he still writes more code than most of us can regularly muster.
>If you work at a place like that, I feel sorry for you. I came to the comments to express the same sort of opinion. I work at a place that understands and values programmers. I can't imagine working in any other kind of environment unless I was between real jobs and really strapped for cash. If you're at a place run by a bunch of clueless MBAs that don't understand the value of their in-house engineers you just don'…
Yes, there's value for an in-house engineering team, but with widely varying skill distributions and unevenly matched compensation. Managers know this, and Patrick's point is that "I'm a programmer" is starting off on the wrong foot as it just re-affirms that you are a large, fixed cost, saying nothing about your specific contributions.
"Want to get trained on Ruby at a .NET shop? Implement a one-off project in Ruby. Bam, you are now a professional Ruby programmer — you coded Ruby and you took money for it. (You laugh? I did this at a Java shop. The one-off Ruby project made the company $30,000. My boss was, predictably, quite happy and never even asked what produced the deliverable.)" Unless an employee actually gets permission to do this, this mak…
Technically, the employee would not be fired right away. He or she, however, would be red flagged for close observation by being put on a Performance Plan. Basically, a PP is required to legally fire you. For example, if you had a bad record of coming in at a consistent time, they could put you on a PP. In this PP (which you would have to sign as a condition of further employment), there would be a contract for comin…
Not living in the bay area I see what he is saying, most programmers are not selling apps, or selling small consumer applications. Most make internal apps, and many of those internal apps are more interesting than mobile apps or web apps.
Does anyone else think that this article is in poor form? On the perils of describing yourself as a programmer: If you're hiring someone to provide a specific skill set (programmer) you want them to be good at programming. Would you hire an accountant if they didn't know accounting? Should lawyers not describe themselves as lawyers? Doctors as doctors? On the perils of selling yourself as an expert in a certain techn…
Reprising a comment of mine from earlier: the actual work performed by most lawyers is letter-writing at $X00 an hour. No lawyer describes themselves as a "professional letter-writer" or "professional letter-writer specializing in Mostly Empty Threats." When "programmer" starts showing up with lawyer and doctor on "high status occupations used as the canonical examples of professional jobs since you were three years…