Programming Is a Dead End Job • Hacker News Board

Re: Programming Is a Dead End Job

#161

Post by ronwl » Sun, May 04, 2014, 2:10 AM UTC

cool-RR wrote: post #63

So... Not-likely-to-make-you-into-a-multi-millionare == Dead end? Also: "in 15 years he went all the way to being CEO of a $4B company. After 10 years he retired recently with mansions and cars and no worries" If not having any worries is your goal, I'm not sure that CEO is the right career path for you.

> After 10 years he retired recently with mansions and cars and no worries

Having no worries(at least financially) 'after' busting my ass for 10years is definitely a good career plan.

Re: Programming Is a Dead End Job

#162

Post by autokad » Sun, May 04, 2014, 2:33 AM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #159

autokad wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you cherry picked the most successful languages, and also ignored how much they changed. you also doubled the amount of time c++ was actually used. 30 years ago COBOL was all the rage I'm sure. And lets face it, knowing just those is not going to get you very many jobs, maybe for a few hundred people in the entire united states. and people have to look ahead and see the trend. newer stuff is coming out faster and fas…

You quite underestimate the number of COBOL jobs. E.g. simple search [1] reveals thousands of COBOL jobs just on one site, and most of these jobs I imagine would not be even advertised on generic job-search sites since these go through consulting firms which already know who they can hire. Deeper research shows there are millions of COBOL programmers now [2] and massive numbers of COBOL applications still in business…

yes there are a few COBOL 'jobs' scattered throughout the country, but that really doesnt matter. a person can stick with learning one language and hoping it remains relevant for their 40-50 year career, but outliers do not make a rule. theres lots of people doing really well playing the lottery.

making a web page today in 'html' is NOTHING like it was 5 years ago, let alone 10. you're simplifying it way too much.

if you were a web designer, and just stuck with what you taught yourself back in 2005, you would be out of a job. you constantly have to learn new libraries, new languages because no software operates on an island. yes, every field must adapt and add changes, but none so much as like with tech.

all of this is COMPLETELY irreverent anyways. IF you want to be a programmer, and not look ahead to your future to find out what you will need to grow into, BY ALL MEANS. And if you think people will still find your skills valuable even though you don't plan on updating them constantly, good luck.

the point is, if you read the article and dont want to gamble with your future, a programmer is a dead end job in the sense that if you are not moving into some sort of managerial position, there is no where to go.

Re: Programming Is a Dead End Job

#163

Post by icedchai » Sun, May 04, 2014, 2:45 AM UTC

michaelochurch wrote: post #124

jamesaguilar wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watch out, you might lose all your karma for interrupting the Bay Area self flagellation. Honestly, it is expensive, but not enough to offset the insane salaries, at least for devs. If you're going to feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for everyone else who lives here.

Honestly, it is expensive, but not enough to offset the insane salaries, at least for devs. If you're going to feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for everyone else who lives here. Programmer salaries are not "insane". A half-decent programmer is worth $500,000 to the business and costs about $100,000. A good one is worth over $3 million, and only costs about $150,000. Programmers are actually incredibly fucking cheap…

If you know what to do is key. Unfortunately, most businesses cannot properly utilize a decent programmer, never mind a good one.

The average mid-size company is a monument to bureaucracy, ruled by mediocrity and incompetence.

Re: Programming Is a Dead End Job

#164

Post by pmoriarty » Sun, May 04, 2014, 4:12 AM UTC

pyrrhotech wrote: post #80

netcan wrote: post #46

This is silly. First, very few people become millionaire CEOs. If thats your standard for success, then every path likely leads to failure because no path reliably leads to that kind of success. Some paths are more likely than others, but none are very likely for the average person. Part of the reason for flat-ish career trajectory is that programmers earn more at the start than most. Some professions have more of a…

You can become a millionaire CEO if you are intelligent with at least a 10-20% success rate. Get 5 years work experience, ace the GMAT, go to a top 5 MBA, do consulting at 250-500k/year for 10 years for a company like Bain or McKinsey, then get hired as CFO of one of the companies you work for, 5 years later get promoted to CEO. Even if you don't make CEO, you can get to several multiples of an engineer's salary with…

Programming wasn't very well paid even when there was no competition from abroad.

Re: Programming Is a Dead End Job

#165

Post by smsm42 » Sun, May 04, 2014, 5:49 AM UTC

autokad wrote: post #162

smsm42 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You quite underestimate the number of COBOL jobs. E.g. simple search [1] reveals thousands of COBOL jobs just on one site, and most of these jobs I imagine would not be even advertised on generic job-search sites since these go through consulting firms which already know who they can hire. Deeper research shows there are millions of COBOL programmers now [2] and massive numbers of COBOL applications still in business…

yes there are a few COBOL 'jobs' scattered throughout the country, but that really doesnt matter. a person can stick with learning one language and hoping it remains relevant for their 40-50 year career, but outliers do not make a rule. theres lots of people doing really well playing the lottery. making a web page today in 'html' is NOTHING like it was 5 years ago, let alone 10. you're simplifying it way too much. if…

Nobody says "don't learn anything for 10 years". That would get you in trouble in almost any profession but maybe burger flipping. What I am saying that what you learned in 2005 about HTML is still useful, you just add stuff to it bit by bit, becoming more experienced - and your value actually raises, not declines. Nobody says "do not update your skills". What I am saying is "don't discount the skills you already have". This is additive, not zero-sum - if you know both COBOL and Ruby, it's better than just one of them, and your expertise should cost more even if you don't write COBOL on current project - because you have wider experience and thus probably can see solutions or aspects somebody with narrower experience can not. That's why I think "unhireable by 40" is a nonsense that is long gone from any shop that is interested in hiring actually good programmers and not cheapest coders to generate KLOCs for some contracts where it won't work anyway but it's OK because it means more contracts.

>>> IF you want to be a programmer, and not look ahead to your future to find out what you will need to grow into, BY ALL MEANS.

This is a false dichotomy. I want to be a programmer AND look into my future, and I do, thankyouverymuch. I do not want to be a CEO, it's not a job for me, I'd suck at it. But I don't suck at programming, and that's what I want to do. And I think there are lots of opportunities around to earn your bread and butter on it.

>>> that if you are not moving into some sort of managerial position, there is no where to go.

That's plain wrong - there's everywhere to go, and you confirm it yourself by noticing new things appearing all the time. That's where you go - doing new things! You don't have to have a 'C' in your title to live a fulfilling professional (or personal) life. Of course, if your goal is to have that 'C', go ahead - but there could be many more goals than that.

Re: Programming Is a Dead End Job

#166

Post by smsm42 » Sun, May 04, 2014, 6:03 AM UTC

BugBrother wrote: post #108

rschmitty wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a bit of a reach to call it blue collar. I have blue collar friends from high school who envy what programmers do and make and I do what I can to try and persuade/teach them to learn to code and make a better life for themselves.

Most everyone has forgotten the 2000 dot com crash, when all the computer jobs disappeared. This "learn to code" is just how it was then. I would bet money that in less than five years, a lot of software people will be unemployed -- again. (If I win, good. If not, good. :-) )

I'm curious - how much money would you be willing to bet on that? At which odds?

I've been through the dotcom crash and minor disturbances after, and the jobs never "disappeared". Yes, there were layoffs, pay cuts and hiring freezes. But not all jobs disappeared, and most of the people who lost their jobs found new ones after a while. I'm not diminishing the pain and suffering of those who got caught in bad situations there, but it's not like the whole IT disappeared and people went back to abacuses and wired telegraph.

Re: Programming Is a Dead End Job

#167

Post by stefanobaghino » Sun, May 04, 2014, 6:13 AM UTC

This post holds that coding and managing a company are different jobs and that you can't do both at the same time. I don't find this any kind of shocking.

Re: Programming Is a Dead End Job

#168

Post by Im_Talking » Sun, May 04, 2014, 8:17 AM UTC

I think it's because most programmers end-up working on shit corporate software or under some PHB which just destroys any joy, and finally your creative soul. If your joy and/or soul is gone, any job is a dead-end job. I sold my software business to a public-listed company and hated every day I was there; corporate politics, PHBs, most software developed by company being absolute shit (I pathologically hated their core software platform). I had enough. Now I'm back on my own writing software I enjoy and couldn't be professionally happier.

Re: Programming Is a Dead End Job

#169

Post by maigret » Sun, May 04, 2014, 8:42 AM UTC

the_watcher wrote: post #103

netcan wrote: post #46

This is silly. First, very few people become millionaire CEOs. If thats your standard for success, then every path likely leads to failure because no path reliably leads to that kind of success. Some paths are more likely than others, but none are very likely for the average person. Part of the reason for flat-ish career trajectory is that programmers earn more at the start than most. Some professions have more of a…

High finance (banking, PE, hedge funds) are basically the only career I know of where you begin at a relatively high salary, and have potentially unlimited career growth (in terms of salary and earning power), where at the highest end, you aren't doing substantially different work than you did at the beginning (this is simplistic, obviously. You work at a higher level, and begin to employ people to do the work you di…

When you asked "Am I wrong?", I nodded in agreement, until I read the next sentence. Successful doctors and lawyer are usually people that proved a better track record, usually both in their relation to their client (so important for those jobs) and their factual successes and special skills. Additionally, they usually also succeed at leading teams of talented younger people that help them succeed at a bigger scale.

Re: Programming Is a Dead End Job

#170

Post by maigret » Sun, May 04, 2014, 8:58 AM UTC

autokad wrote: post #157

smsm42 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Unemployable beyond 40" has been dead for years in the software industry. Probably for decades. There's nothing in current industry that requires you to be under 30 (actually, there are tons of positions which require extensive experience) and technologies don't die that fast - C programming market is still alive, C++ is over 30 and not going anywhere, Java would be 20 years old next year and not disappearing any ti…

you cherry picked the most successful languages, and also ignored how much they changed. you also doubled the amount of time c++ was actually used. 30 years ago COBOL was all the rage I'm sure. And lets face it, knowing just those is not going to get you very many jobs, maybe for a few hundred people in the entire united states. and people have to look ahead and see the trend. newer stuff is coming out faster and fas…

we have less IT/programming jobs today than we had in the late 1990s.

This site seems to disagree with you: http://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-2/careers-in-growing-fiel... . I work with numerous people over 40 actually.

Also, I beg to differ that learning a new programming language is a big deal. We've yet to see a single complete disruption in the way we program... It's still editors, compilers and debuggers in the end.