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Don't call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2011)

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Re: Don't call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2011)

#111

Post by bitwize »

klabb3 wrote: post #49

This whole article is great advice for playing the career game, or “how to fit in and not get bullied at school”. Note that it comes at a cost, and that cost may or may not be worth it to you. Note also that playing a game for a long time you forget that you are playing a game, and you start incorporating the rules of the game into your mind. Some people are more resistant to this effect than others, and some people…

Playing the game is an important life skill. Go for that pile of money early. Compound interest over years means it can make the difference between just making ends meet for the rest of your life, and actually having something substantial to retire on. Apply to FAANG or whatever it is these days if you're smart enough. Prove you're smart enough by grinding leetcode and doing mock interviews. Don't faff about with homebrew game consoles or microcontroller things, things of that nature unless work demands it. Focus on GPGPU and open source FPGAs. Not quantum computing, though, it looks like that might be another time/money/energy sink like crypto. (Reconsider it if I'm proven wrong.)

Don't get distracted by the Lisp lotus-eaters. The future will be built on doing massive array-based computation as fast as possible, as parallel as possible, using as little power as possible.

Knuckle down and do the high-paying work early on, and possibilities will open up as to what game to play in your 30s, 40s, and beyond. Play the tech bohemian in your 20s, and you may find yourself struggling in later life.

Re: Don't call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2011)

#114

Post by dinkumthinkum »

mrguyorama wrote: post #78
bee_rider wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since we’re generally sitting on top of a giant pile of semi-understood abstraction that doesn’t have a real mathematical model and is often defined by matching legacy behavior (aka precedent), “Software Lawyer” could be a better name.

Naw, we should be honest about what we actually do, mostly so we can stop pretending our industry is good at what we do. We are "Framework and API plumbers" by and large, taking existing packages and just hooking them into each other.

There is a large world of programmers outside of the Web world.

Re: Don't call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2011)

#115

Post by dinkumthinkum »

jmclnx wrote: post #97
mempko wrote: post #43

Don't be ashamed to call yourself a programmer. Alex Stepanov, who created hundreds of billions in value by creating the C++ stl calls himself a programmer.

I got the exact opposite advice decades ago if you want to remain technical. If you start becoming the company expert on their business processes as a programmer, time to move to a new company. That served me very well and I remained a programmer for my whole career.

I think this is very good advice for many programmers. I think a lot of programmers become stagnant in sone company because if the phenomena you describe.

Re: Don't call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2011)

#116

Post by hinkley »

klabb3 wrote: post #49

This whole article is great advice for playing the career game, or “how to fit in and not get bullied at school”. Note that it comes at a cost, and that cost may or may not be worth it to you. Note also that playing a game for a long time you forget that you are playing a game, and you start incorporating the rules of the game into your mind. Some people are more resistant to this effect than others, and some people…

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." - Kurt Vonnegut

Re: Don't call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2011)

#117

Post by hinkley »

blintz wrote: post #99

I’m sure this article is right about some stuff, but man if it doesn’t make me sad to read. Software can be so exciting and fun, and this “careerist” perspective really sucks the joy out of it. If you’re looking for something that is kind of the opposite of this article: https://ferd.ca/the-little-printf.html .

On the flip side, the reason so many musicians get exploited by the recording industry is because music is supposed to be fun. So their agents arrange for fun and keep the money for themselves.

Re: Don't call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2011)

#118

Post by brailsafe »

bitwize wrote: post #111
klabb3 wrote: post #49

This whole article is great advice for playing the career game, or “how to fit in and not get bullied at school”. Note that it comes at a cost, and that cost may or may not be worth it to you. Note also that playing a game for a long time you forget that you are playing a game, and you start incorporating the rules of the game into your mind. Some people are more resistant to this effect than others, and some people…

Playing the game is an important life skill. Go for that pile of money early. Compound interest over years means it can make the difference between just making ends meet for the rest of your life, and actually having something substantial to retire on. Apply to FAANG or whatever it is these days if you're smart enough. Prove you're smart enough by grinding leetcode and doing mock interviews. Don't faff about with hom…

> and you may find yourself struggling in later life.

Generally you don't get to pick no struggles. If you play the tech game real hard in your 20s, you might have no friends in your 30s, and your struggle might manifest in "Ask HN: How do you make friends after 30?" type posts.

You can always push personal value down the line until you don't remember what it is you truly value. If that's only money and arbitrary success, then great, spend your 20s doing that.

Re: Don't call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2011)

#119

Post by hinkley »

strict9 wrote: post #4

>You are not defined by your chosen software stack: I recently asked via Twitter what young engineers wanted to know about careers. Many asked how to know what programming language or stack to study. It doesn’t matter. There you go. I generally agree with this point and many others in the article but when looking for a position the tech stack of a company you're interviewing with matters a whole lot. Using some older…

It's not so much that there's a best one as a bottom five. There are in any given year a certain number that you should probably just avoid.

Re: Don't call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2011)

#120

Post by laurencerowe »

bitwize wrote: post #111
klabb3 wrote: post #49

This whole article is great advice for playing the career game, or “how to fit in and not get bullied at school”. Note that it comes at a cost, and that cost may or may not be worth it to you. Note also that playing a game for a long time you forget that you are playing a game, and you start incorporating the rules of the game into your mind. Some people are more resistant to this effect than others, and some people…

Playing the game is an important life skill. Go for that pile of money early. Compound interest over years means it can make the difference between just making ends meet for the rest of your life, and actually having something substantial to retire on. Apply to FAANG or whatever it is these days if you're smart enough. Prove you're smart enough by grinding leetcode and doing mock interviews. Don't faff about with hom…

Having played the open source tech bohemian in my 20s I think it was fine. While I earned a fraction of what I earned later in Silicon Valley it paid better than most of my contemporaries and through it I met a bunch of interesting people from around the world and became a much better programmer than I’d otherwise have been.
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