Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50? • Hacker News Board

Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

#111

Post by pfedor » Sat, Oct 06, 2012, 4:58 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #103

I think this is a bit cynical (and dangerous) but agree with the premise that currently the number of programming opportunities continues to exceed the number of programmers. However there are signs that this is changing. I do know a programmer who became an IP attorney (doing well at it too) and a couple of programmers who have gone off to do entirely different things (one is a guide in Africa, another drives a tugb…

However there are signs that this is changing.

I've been hearing this for fifteen years now, which is about as long as I've been paying attention. For the first five years I was maybe even a little concerned. (In the nineties programmers were going to become obsolete because OOP worked and all code was about to become highly reusable so there wouldn't be any need to write new code. Yes, people were saying this in earnest.)

Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

#112

Post by padobson » Sat, Oct 06, 2012, 5:06 PM UTC

Money is about being good at something. I know of lawyers that barely scrape by on insurance law suits because all they know how to do is prey on the fear and pain of injured people. Such lawyers have to buy $500 suits and drive BMWs and belong to country clubs to stay presentable, and thus have to scrape by on 80-100k a year.

Similarly, I know carpenters and plumbers who will get the job done - and make a lot more than the aforementioned lawyers. These pros can demand hourly rates of anywhere from $60-$80, but more often will make $250-$500/hr by quoting a job price and doing it quickly. And it's no problem for them to drive to all their appointments in their 1997 Ford E series wearing flannel and jeans.

I could also introduce you to janitors that make six figures a year because they know how to penetrate insurance bureaucracies and get black mold cleanup jobs.

If money is your aim, pick a job out of a hat and be excellent at it - and not just the actual execution, but the promotion, estimation, and pricing of your talent too. If you can get into the 25th percentile of solving problems in your expertise, you'll be well compensated for it no matter what it is.

Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

#113

Post by bzbarsky » Sat, Oct 06, 2012, 5:08 PM UTC

johansch wrote: post #94

adgar2 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft and Apple both have multi-billion dollar projects. Edit: Google and Amazon likely don't, actually.

Microsoft yes (example: Windows Vista). The others... no. And that is a good thing, for them.

Google sure has multi-billion dollar projects. Chrome is an example. They're spending that much just _marketing_ the thing every year.

Even if we stick to just the development side, I would be very surprised if Google has not spent > 250 million a year on Chrome development over the last 4 years.

Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

#114

Post by dpark » Sat, Oct 06, 2012, 5:08 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #96

dpark wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people spend years or decades moving from job to job and from career to career looking for happiness. Most of them don't find it until they learn that your job just isn't what makes you happy. "Do something you love" is a myth. Jobs are jobs because they involve a lot of crap people don't want to do. No one's going to find personal meaning by writing specs, or by cutting a beautiful design down to an ugly minimu…

>"Do something you love" is a myth. As someone who is currently working his dream job, this statement couldn't be further from the truth.

A dream job is still a job. There are still parts that are tedious, and frustrating (if you're not encountering anything frustrating, you're not doing anything important), and annoying. That's why they pay you. And that's why "do what you love" is a myth. You can't always do what you love. Sometimes you have to do things you do not love, and just be happy that part of the time you get to do what you enjoy.

Far too many people chase a "dream job" not understanding that every job will have parts they simply will not love. And instead of accepting that this is reality, they fixate on the problems and fall prey to "the grass is greener" thinking. I'm sure Elon Musk loves his job (indeed he has many people's "dream job"), but I bet 90% of it is tedious bullshit.

Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

#115

Post by gammarator » Sat, Oct 06, 2012, 5:08 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #96

dpark wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people spend years or decades moving from job to job and from career to career looking for happiness. Most of them don't find it until they learn that your job just isn't what makes you happy. "Do something you love" is a myth. Jobs are jobs because they involve a lot of crap people don't want to do. No one's going to find personal meaning by writing specs, or by cutting a beautiful design down to an ugly minimu…

>"Do something you love" is a myth. As someone who is currently working his dream job, this statement couldn't be further from the truth.

I think a better statement is: love what you do (by getting good at it). Cal Newport summarized this recently: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/jobs/follow-a-career-passi...

Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

#116

Post by jeremyjh » Sat, Oct 06, 2012, 5:09 PM UTC

rsaarelm wrote: post #47

_yosefk wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't the field extremely competitive now? The demand has been strong for a decade and a half; it seems like a lot of time. (I'm not sure I have an explanation myself, really; perhaps it's something innate in people and perhaps it's something about education, but the fact remains that the world still hasn't churned out enough programmers even though the incentives have been there for a long time. One possible exp…

There's definitely more you could do with education. A lot of professional programmers are people who started doing programming as a hobby as kids. Attempting to teach programming to 20-year-olds entering an university seems to not work terribly well, while the basics can be picked by a 10-year old. If you waited until people are 20 to start teaching them to read and write, you would probably also get poor results, w…

This is a very interesting idea. It certainly seems plausible, I wonder if anyone has studied it.

Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

#117

Post by mcantor » Sat, Oct 06, 2012, 5:09 PM UTC

Passion only burns out if you consistently fail to pace yourself, or if it wasn't really innate passion in the first place.

Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

#118

Post by randomdata » Sat, Oct 06, 2012, 5:11 PM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #109

randomdata wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programmer talent is sparse worldwide And yet, when I look around at the job postings in Canada, a job with requirements that go on endlessly tops out at about $80,000/year. Expect less if you are an average programmer. Such a low income, relative to what US-based companies are offering, doesn't really speak to a shortage in my mind. I admit, there could be some kind of survivorship bias here: I'm only seeing the low…

They do not top out at 80k, but for positions that are truly senior companies don't even post those on job boards. You need to network and get noticed if you want to be earning 130 or 150 here.

But a shortage would see throwing those $150K+ jobs to just about anyone who can turn on a computer. The fact that you have to have existing networks and secret handshakes to even find such jobs is not what a shortage looks like, it is just a normally functioning market.

Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

#119

Post by pfedor » Sat, Oct 06, 2012, 5:21 PM UTC

_yosefk wrote: post #108

anovikov wrote: post #79

I know a programmer who became a lawyer (in Netherlands). It lifted his hourly rate 10x (50->500 EUR/hour), and while not all time is paid, and he isn't working full time having a lot of time to spare, he's getting like 2x than before.

That's rather nice indeed; I think the mean earnings for lawyers aren't that high and there's quite a lot of variance, not? (Unfortunately, this is a theoretical discussion for me, since I'd make a lousy lawyer.)

The starting salary distribution for a lawyer is an interesting graph: http://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib

Basically, after graduating from a law school you either get hired by a good law firm or not. In the former case, which happens to some 20% of graduates, your starting salary will be $160k. In the latter case your salary will be dictated by an unexciting distribution with the peak around $50k.

Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

#120

Post by kfcm » Sat, Oct 06, 2012, 5:21 PM UTC

The author is a bit naive in his cheerleading, extrapolating his situation in his location to a nation-wide situation. That is just simply not the case.

As a business-owner in my mid-40's, I travel around quite a bit. There are locations where the employment picture is similar to what the author describes. But what he describes is far from the norm in the places I travel to, or from what I hear from friends and old coworkers during lunches. Ageism, low-salaries, "sweatshop"-like/highly-political work environments, lack of diversity in companies/economic sectors, lack of interesting problems to solve. All are observations of mine, as well as old friends' concerns voiced softly after looking over their shoulder during lunches over the past year or two.

Very good IT people (programmers/developers, DBAs, infrastructure, the whole gamut) wanting to leave their current job, but wondering where to go, because their friends in other "just as bad" companies are looking too. Discovering they can still get interviews--but maybe not the job--after age 35; and discovering the difficulty in even getting interviews after age 40. Watching their companies hire either H-1Bs for 40-50% of what they're paid, or college interns (or even recent grads for intern salaries) for even less.

Yeah, people would like to be making this much money in technology when their 50. But in most places, it's a pipe-dream.