241–250 of 274 posts
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Assuming he had a green light on the project itself, and it creates value, I don't see why that would be selfish.
Suppose the OP leaves. It's going to be hard for the his former coworkers to maintain the Ruby app.
One of the things that I see among hardworking smart people is they somehow tend to use 'difficult work' as a yardstick to measure 'good work'. Difficult work need not necessarily be good work. Unfortunately if you fall for this, you will end up wasting a lot of time, effort and energy over years and at the end wonder why you are not as rich as someone who does has half the difficult work as you do. 'Good work' or so…
Not very good advice. It's basically an accountants view of engineering, which can be summarized as follows: - Only be interested in increasing profit or reducing cost - Don't care about what you do unless it conflicts with the above - Treat people you meet as commodities - Produce cruddy code, because "good enough" is all that matters - Good engineering is not a "profit center" - Don't bother keeping up with new pro…
I'm kind of terrified of "At the end of the day, your life happiness will not be dominated by your career." Hopefully he means that primarily for employees, not for startup founders, and even then, I know a lot of people who work in research, engineering, etc. where career is by far #1.
Hopefully he doesn't mean it just for employees. The Hacker News community has a bent towards "startup = happiness" which I disagree with, but all things considered, is better than the screddit "eSports is important, and it's important to practice Starcraft" bent.
This is something that even I have observed, in some cases I have even seen when people take it like "only startup = happiness".
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If you were a carpenter, you'd tell your friends you're a carpenter. If you were a janitor, you'd tell your friends you're a sanitation worker. If you were a stripper, you'd tell your friends you're an exotic dancer. Patio is saying we should say "engineer" instead of "programmer" because programmer has similar connotations to janitor.
In my experience, 'engineer' has closer connotations to janitor than 'programmer'. Certainly in the UK, engineering as a profession has a big image problem because the average person doesn't distinguish between e.g. a heating engineer (who fixes the boiler) and say, a civil engineer (someone with a Masters degree + 4 years professional experience and accreditation). People I know who are programmers all have professi…
> 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…
How long have you been out of grad school? If you are still in grad school... Write us back in ten years and tell us how academia is coming along. Meanwhile, carpe diem . If you're out of grad school, tell us how much more awesome your career is than those of your relatively-untrained peers. More money? More respect? More challenges? What? I went to grad school, and then I did a postdoc, and these things were indeed…
For me it was a wonderful choice. I didn't like the startup work for precisely the reasons patio sort of hints at. Our business was primarily about making money, and we had to focus on what customers actually wanted rather than what (I thought) would be most interesting, most challenging, or most elegant. Nothing wrong with that, but going to work was a drag in the morning.
Now there are downsides to academia -- committees, teaching freshmen who don't want to learn, and yes I have to write grant proposals -- but the bottom line is that all of my research (and most of my teaching) gives me a deep sense of satisfaction. What I am learning and teaching, mathematics, is inherently perfect -- even if our understanding of it isn't. I could not say the same of the half-baked APIs I was writing wrappers to as a professional programmer.
Now about opportunity costs... I don't follow you here. I am making about $72,000, which is about half what I could be making in the private sector. But so what? I value my time way more than I value my money, and I want to spend 9-5 everyday doing something I personally care about. And I don't place any value on luxury, which means that $70k is easily enough for me.
And, yes, I have plenty of time to spend with my hobbies, my friends, etc.
There are a lot of people who derive intense satisfaction of providing products that people in the business world need and are happy to pay money for. I have nothing to take away from them. But personally, I am a perfectionist and an idealist, and the opportunity to work in the field of "pure knowledge" is one I am immensely grateful for.
Academia has its disadvantages, but for many, it is incredible. At any rate it is for me.
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You missed the point of the article. You can do cool thing even at large companies iff you put yourself out there and look for opportunities that interest you. You can also get paid for it if you are smart.
It's actually pretty hard to get on to the most interesting projects in large companies. Your first project is a roll of the dice, and you usually have to do well on that first one to get an upgrade on your second. Yes, there's cutting-edge work going on at Fortune 500 tech companies. It's about 5% of the workload, and it's competitive to get onto these projects. You're competing against PhDs who have been with the c…
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> "One of the things that I see among hardworking smart people is they somehow tend to use 'difficult work' as a yardstick to measure 'good work'. Difficult work need not necessarily be good work. Unfortunately if you fall for this, you will end up wasting a lot of time, effort and energy over years and at the end wonder why you are not as rich as someone who does has half the difficult work as you do." A connection…
I would like to explain this in more detail. Imagine a person is working to deliver a business application, a typical application with a OO language that interacts with a database. And he sort of uses the normal set of tools for the job. He uses a version control system, bug tracking/time tracking systems. He uses scripting to do data heavy lifting tasks, he learns SQL and learns to use various features of a RDBMS. H…
I worked for a Megacorp briefly, but it was just a couple of internships: enough to get some real experience on the resume, open-ended and unsupervised enough that I could actually learn a thing or two... but if I'd gone to work for the group that wanted to hire me afterward it would have been a complete waste of my talent as I banged my head against a legacy codebase and dozens of layers of bureaucracy. Instead I went for a little startup, worked with some seriously skilled people, and learned what the heck I was doing... and if the place had fallen apart after a year or two, I'd still have been able to get a much better job than any of my alternatives at graduation.
If you're straight out of college, don't worry much about the salary, or the size of the company -- just go for the team that you're going to learn from. It can be the difference between launching your career and running it into the ground.
90% of programming jobs are in creating Line of Business software: Most software is not sold in boxes, available on the Internet, or downloaded from the App Store. Most software is boring one-off applications in corporations, under-girding every imaginable facet of the global economy. It tracks expenses, it optimizes shipping costs, it assists the accounting department in preparing projections, it helps design new wi…
When you are talking of big IT bellwethers, they are in a business of supplying services at affordable costs. Aren't you seeing the massive potential in this business? today maintenance and services massively outweighs product development and this is time tested truth. Because once you develop something you have to maintain it all the time. Also this is the only business, where you can retain your technical hands on and still climb the corporate management ladder. Combining both parts of the world. This will give you an edge, to add value in both areas. Also these companies, offer massive infrastructure, training and experimenting grounds which a start up in India can never possibly offer. You also get access to great books, and huge network of good people. If you are lucky you get opportunities to travel around the world, doing business,learning and enjoying various cultures around the world. Also their pay is difficult to match.
The start up scenario in India is really messed up badly. After so many years we get to see only one flipkart and Infibeam. And from what I have been hearing its no honey and milk there. Its your usual 'safest way to production' route that they take. They are generally Java heavy shops. I wonder if all this trouble is worth. If all you want to work is on Java.
After few years if you see you peer in a big IT bellwether(who is/was as good as you) being more successful in terms money and life style. Don't be surprised, he is in a place where there is steady supply of money and opportunities.
Its like you will be average among the best. And he will best among the average.
Another thing that I have noticed is start up's in India and especially founders are extremely stingy. They tend to see developers as tissues(use and throw entities). And chances of large number of people making into start up's are also lesser. And there aren't too many good start ups.
Also these Indian IT companies did a major job of propelling India to global IT forefront. If they were to go away, we will loose massive amounts of employment opportunities, exposure and more importantly confidence to open start ups in the future. Remember they were themselves start up's some time back.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would like to explain this in more detail. Imagine a person is working to deliver a business application, a typical application with a OO language that interacts with a database. And he sort of uses the normal set of tools for the job. He uses a version control system, bug tracking/time tracking systems. He uses scripting to do data heavy lifting tasks, he learns SQL and learns to use various features of a RDBMS. H…
I don't think it's realistic for someone two years out of school to go found their own startup. It's also a mixed bag at your local Megacorp as to whether you'll be able to build the programming knowledge and domain knowledge that would assist you. I'll grant you superior contacts. I worked for a Megacorp briefly, but it was just a couple of internships: enough to get some real experience on the resume, open-ended an…
>>If you're straight out of college, don't worry much about the salary, or the size of the company -- just go for the team that you're going to learn from. It can be the difference between launching your career and running it into the ground.
I would say a MegaCorp experience is important for quite many reasons apart from just programming. There N number of things that are as important as programming to your success. Which you can't really learn in start up's for all sorts of reasons.
Initial MegaCorp experience and then followed by good start up work looks a little better to me.