Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years

I'm about to do some interviewing and I am much more interested in how they would handle a credit card provider being down when processing a transaction. Or if they can articulate that solution verbally. Or if they handle me taking an opposite position as devil's advocate well, etc.

> "Sure, I could make an extra 10% every year, but would that make me happier than working from home, on my own terms?"

If it allows you to provide more ('stuff', or security, or stability) for a family, then yes, it might make you happier.

I read articles like this and they mostly tend to be from the perspective of younger people and/or folks without families to support.

An extra 10% pay increase, over just a few years, provides more general savings, perhaps buys solid life insurance, helps pad savings for future education, or moving expenses to fund a job/life change, etc.

Another nugget - "Know your worth". It's not bad advice, but something the author didn't mention was understanding how your worth is determined. You can do the exact same work for company A and company B. Company A may be able to extract huge value from your work, and company B may struggle to keep the lights on. When working for someone else, "your worth" is directly related to how capable they are at operating their business profitably.

I've no doubt the author's views work for him, and probably many people like him, but as with most posts like this, they're not universal.

> “ Don’t like your new boss? Just quit. Enough people do it, and their boss will fix it. You don’t like your company’s policies around privacy, diversity, inclusion, human rights? Quit.”

This is psycho advice. It ranks up there with the crazy myths about just being able to instantly get new software jobs (when the actual time of job searches is usually longer than 6 months, despite the tone deaf wave of gainsaying comments this is sure to incite).

Voting with your feet rarely leads to organizational changes, especially if you don’t give clear feedback or spend sincere effort trying to fix the issues you’re having prior to quitting. More likely, you quitting is just tacitly reinforcing power and control by the shitty people who made your experience shitty.

When you need to quit, by all means, absolutely do it. But don’t kid yourself that there’s any “voting” going on. Do yourself and others a favor: give feedback and take responsibility for your own job satisfaction. Nobody can help you if you won’t try to get help.

And don’t count on a fast job search. This topic is so tone dead on HN. Some cacophony of commenters will swear you can get a million jobs from all your spam LinkedIn headhunters and be re-employed in weeks, but it is emphatically not true and the selection bias of those examples has to imply just ignoring them as inapplicable to the vast majority of software engineers. Interview prep, finding a good fit and getting what you want in a position and in compensation is really hard and takes a long time in software.

As someone with a family, my preference is that I can work from home to be around my family more. I feel this is more valuable to them than some more money in our savings account but that’s just me. To each their own!

It wasn't mentioned in the article but I'd say as developers, we often underestimate the amount of time a task/project would take.

Learning how to properly estimate a given task and delivering it on or before your proposed time-frame will make your life as a developer much better.