one thing the most successful - truly succesful - programmers i know or have heard of do, is understand the importance of the big idea, of designing something worth designing.
on the previous article (do you want to be doing this when you're 50), i tried to submit the following comment.
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Well, a programmer can - in a matter of hours, or at most days/weeks - assemble a factory performing the work of 10,000 full-time highly trained workers (actually more, we're talking billions of operations per second), at a total direct cost of a couple of coffees and use of a device costing few hundred dollars new, and then fully own all rights to the factory, and operate it full-time for about the cost of a normal person's phone bill per month (server instances). So the question isn't why there are millions of high-paying jobs to do so for someone else with the resulting rights and ownership by someone else:
the question is why anyone takes any of these jobs. why not build your own damn factory. It's usually only because you lack some of the skills (design, business development, marketing, choosing what to produce, etc).
so, team up with a cofounder. hence: hacker news. well, there is one downside here. the programmers who work here would never team up with a designer who knows just what to build. instead they both get hired by someone who does. the designer gets hired at a low rate, then the programmer gets hired at a high rate, just because the person hiring the two knows what is needed to get the factory producing something people will pay for: but the programmer (readers on this very article right here at hacker news), doesn't.
so yeah there are millions of jobs for you to build value for others, but it's just because you're not quite wise enough enough not to need these jobs.
(suppose i'm such a designer. split a company 60/40 with me? No, you would not. But work for 1.5 my wage at the same company, so that neither of us gets to reap the benefits. yes you would.)
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