201–210 of 411 posts
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How about team lead?
Team lead is acceptable as it's more of a servant leadership relationship, and under the right circumstances, a team lead should be able to grow into a full blown manager role.
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I can guarantee that it's far too much when you have a family. You want to be able to spend at least some time with your kid(s) and see them in a state other than overly tired and/or hyper before going to bed. If tech companies want to encourage women to join by paying them to freeze their eggs, I don't see why they wouldn't pay men to have a vasectomy too. What better way to ensure that family won't get in the way?
What is an acceptable amount to work then?
So even at "standard" work hours I have almost zero quality time with my kids 5 days a week. If I worked 50 I'd basically not see them except to get them around in the morning and tuck them in.
> What is an acceptable amount to work then?
The amount of time I think ordinary non-owner workers should strive for (by which I mean in a collective action, trying-to-pass-legislation way), as far as FTE work hours, is 24/wk. 32/wk would be a good start. Hell, even just not letting companies abuse exempt status would help.
When you claim to be a senior engineer with 20 years of experience and you don't know what ES6 is then you don't deserve a job.
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Can confirm. Also, I suspect a lot of this "there's no life after 40" stuff mainly relates to startups and certain small companies. It certainly doesn't apply to BigCorps.
I suspect this is true. I hear the "middle-aged programmers aren't employable" story a lot on the internet, but in the large organization where I work I, in my mid-20s, am conspicuously very junior. Most of my coworkers are middle-aged, most of the program management are getting into their '50s, as you might expect of someone in a role seen as senior.
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An LOB programmer could work on computer vision side projects for a couple years and probably put together a neat portfolio of work. But the few people who are really hiring people who "own" CV want PHDs with a relevant thesis and you're not going to get one of those working weeknights after the kids go to bed. Meanwhile people pursuing PHDs have no idea if their area of research is going to be hot in industry when t…
If you want to convince me that computer vision is a bad domain to specialize in for journeyman programmers because it takes post-grad education to get a job, that'll be a quick and easy argument. As a counterexample, though, most serious work in cryptography (for instance) is done by grad students, but the best jobs in crypto are not automatically going to grad students. Either way: if your goal is to maximize lifet…
Are you sure about that? I mean sure, if we're talking someone who wants a deep learning research project to improve the metric for recognizing human faces from 99.7% to 99.78%, then we're talking about PHDs.
But there are plenty of "simpler" problems that one can work on, and plenty of more engineering-oriented problems that one can work on. Lots of companies just need to apply semi-standard techniques to problems that are specific to their business, and nothing more complicated or research-y.
I would prefer to stay in the technical track, but I probably need to specialize in a hot field, i.e. machine learning, in order to become more sought after and less of a commodity.
I was going to add this as a reply to a comment downthread but I think it's too important to bury. The fundamental rule of career progression in the technology industry is to position yourself as a domain expert in something more specific than "programming" . It's very difficult to "own" "programming" in a way where you can use scarcity to drive integer multiple increases of the median salary. It is not as difficult…
I'm not sure every programmer should start with trying to specialize in a domain. But definitely, at some point, you're reaching diminishing returns for getting better at programming.
Put another way: Getting better at the craft of programming allows you to write programs faster and better. Specializing in new domains allows you to do things you couldn't otherwise. This is the realization that made me decide to stop learning new programming languages, and instead spend my time learning new domains - I realized that learning Haskell, while incredibly fun and rewarding to my abilities as a programmer, will not let me make fundamentally different things than with Python. Learning e.g. Deep Learning, however, would.
Btw - even learning totally other skills - e.g. learning 3d modeling helps me a lot in gaining deeper knowledge of 3d than I would otherwise have - even if it's not 3d programming per se, it's still relevant. And learning new Maths is not as directly applicable or as valuable as learning new software domains, but can open up new avenues you wouldn't otherwise have, that learning "yet more programming languages" or similar won't. (It's still more valuable to work directly on relevant things, of course, but sometimes it's fun to broaden your scope in relevant ways.)
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The OP mentions a couple domains that you could also dismiss as "just programming", but actually have a depth to them which allows for specialization: Security, and kernal development. You could claim that software security is "just programming" for instance... But you likely wouldn't, because it requires a level of understanding that is especially deep, and niche. It doesn't really matter that a security expert like…
I think I managed to communicate about half my point to you, but missed the mark with the other half. Yes: you can specialize in being a really good programmer for a particular platform. I have a lot of friends who specialize in being Serious Engineers, who understand how to get interesting and important things done with lenses and how to effectively get a whole project away from null pointers and into monadic error…
I agree with this entirely. But it makes me realize that perhaps I haven't explained my position well.
I would agree that being a mobile expert is likely going to be LESS lucrative than being, say, an expert in recombinant DNA technology with a fluent C++ background and a PHD in machine learning.
The only issue I see with advising people to invest tons of time and money into niche fields, is exactly what others have pointed out in this thread - You can't really predict what's going to be valuable in 10 years.
So take your pick - Go the safe route and become an expert in a more general field like, for example, mobile. Or pick something incredibly niche, which will shrink your competitor pool and increase your relative value proposition. A classic risk/reward scenario if I've ever seen one.
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Understand business needs. Be able to communicate. Be upstack: infrastructure, DNS, SSL, etc. Go deep on security: many concerns cut across many languages, but if you're a language/framework of the week developer, you're too busy learning the same thing over and over to have that depth, which businesses desperately need. (I'm 40 and my current role is with a small company where I implement solutions rather than have…
> Go deep on security Bingo. Security is one of the few cross-discipline, cross-domain specialities where it is possible to be a reasonably good domain expert and still have a good coverage across other domains. The fundamentals don't change. (And I say this as someone who's been immersed in the field for 25 years, so of course I'm biased.) There are few other domains that can offer the same level of constant demand.…