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

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

#251

Post by ramblerman »

kfcm wrote: post #211
foohbarbaz wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on! I am in mid-forties and not just did not have any problems getting interviews, but also did not have any problems switching jobs a few months ago. Where I work we can't find enough decent devs for any money. H1-B is just a memory at that point. Mind you, this is not Silicon Valley, the market is quite a bit smaller (north Denver metro). Someone is either feeding you bad information or you are extrapolatin…

Apparently you didn't read my comment all that well. Re-read, and catch the "there are locations" where the article would be correct. You are falling into the same trap as the author of the original article. Just because Denver metro (or the Valley, DC, Minneapolis or a couple of other tech/government centers) are doing well, you're extrapolating that the rest of the nation is the same. I know there are places where…

why is everyone else's evidence anecdotal?

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

#252

Post by zurn »

dmethvin wrote: post #99
_yosefk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said "little or no education" compared to other fields. I'm a grad school dropout, so my bet is that my CS education is above average for a working programmer. A hiring process considered "demanding" (such as Google's) is basically testing if you know the stuff they learn in the first year and a half of an undergraduate program. Contrast that to the amount of training and test-taking that a doctor must go through a…

In that case I think "little or no certification" would be more appropriate. It does seem kind of strange that doctors, lawyers, electricians, plumbers, and barbers all have to take tests to get into (and sometimes remain in) their professions, but a programmer can write the software for a missle system, voting machine, or power plant with no certification whatsoever.

Possibly US-biased view? From my experience developer certificates are more common among developers than professional certificates among doctors.

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

#253

Post by guard-of-terra »

dmorgan wrote: post #209
dmorgan wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There would be computerized food transport, real world garbage collectors, pizza machines, miner droids and 3D plotters handling bricks for building. This is sci-fi as for now, and for the foreseeable future. It's like someone in 1800 saying that the mailman is not needed anymore, because we could use electronic mail. Possible, but far off in the future. See the factories that make iPhones for example: some prefer…

> We live in sci-fi. So were are our servant robots and flying cars? > The only things withholding this sci-fi from happening: lack of competent workforce (programmers and roboengineers) and lack of vision. That's too generic an accusation. One could say that about any problem. > We could have a program writing programs, but I won't bet on that. Somebody will still have to give it orders; and the guy giving orders to…

No. We don't have means of teleporting matter; this is a problem; and we can't blame it on lack of vision yet. We don't know how to do it, don't know if it's physiclly possible.

Sure you can automate more and more things, in this case programmer will be the last [productive] job remaining. One that slowly wane when more and more things are fully automatic and all other jobs already gone.

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

#254

Post by rorrr »

foohbarbaz wrote: post #165
kfcm wrote: post #120

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 c…

Oh come on! I am in mid-forties and not just did not have any problems getting interviews, but also did not have any problems switching jobs a few months ago. Where I work we can't find enough decent devs for any money. H1-B is just a memory at that point. Mind you, this is not Silicon Valley, the market is quite a bit smaller (north Denver metro). Someone is either feeding you bad information or you are extrapolatin…

> we can't find enough decent devs for any money

I don't believe that for a second. For $500K/year you will have top 3% developers moving to your office tomorrow (unless you're in Iraq or some other messed up place).

What that means is that your budgets suck.

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

#255

Post by blaenk »

ghostoffuture wrote: post #225

Perhaps I can add my experience in this. I was very good at programming in college. I was one of those guys that left the labs under the hatefull gaze of the entire lab section having finished his assignment early. And boy I loved it too. I was so happy having finished a large programming project or a large engineering design assignment. After getting an interesting assignment I would literally skip on the way back h…

Thanks for this. As a first generation US citizen, there are times when I feel like maybe I fell short and should've aimed "higher", because I consider how easily programming comes to me that I figure it's easy for anyone, child's play compared to "hard" engineering and science like Physics, Electrical Engineering, or medical studies, law, etc. But it's true, like you said: the simple fact is that I love programming, so I figure that I'm fortunate enough to have found something I love doing so much, and will also (hopefully) allow me to live comfortably while doing it.

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

#257

Post by goblin89 »

rayiner wrote: post #242
jaxn wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also have the issue of "digital natives." In programming, there is a difference in someone who learned computers in college, someone who learned computers in high school, and someone who learned computers in grade school. Then the next wave was kids who grew up with the internet. I suspect it will continue with kids who grew up with touch devices. I don't think there is a similar parallel in other industries.

I don't really buy who "kids who grew up with touch devices" might make better programmers than the generation of people who built Windows, NeXTStep, etc, who are in their 50's and 60's right now. Hell, Knuth is 74. The fundamentals of programming, as an engineering field, haven't really changed since the 1980's.

"Kids who grew up with touch devices" may not necessarily make better programmers, but there's such factor as being comfortable with tools, I guess.

It's like the language. You spend a lot of time observing and using the system (writing, speaking)—even without full understanding—and you get comfortable: you easily distinguish between characters, recognize speech, can quickly and legibly write. It takes much less effort to apply this knowledge to do successfully things that may require it.

Likewise, if you spend a lot of time around computers, it takes much less effort then to use them for many things, including programming, since computers (or, maybe in future, touch devices) are tools we use for programming.

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

#258

Post by maigret »

rayiner wrote: post #242
jaxn wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also have the issue of "digital natives." In programming, there is a difference in someone who learned computers in college, someone who learned computers in high school, and someone who learned computers in grade school. Then the next wave was kids who grew up with the internet. I suspect it will continue with kids who grew up with touch devices. I don't think there is a similar parallel in other industries.

I don't really buy who "kids who grew up with touch devices" might make better programmers than the generation of people who built Windows, NeXTStep, etc, who are in their 50's and 60's right now. Hell, Knuth is 74. The fundamentals of programming, as an engineering field, haven't really changed since the 1980's.

Cannot emphasis that enough. I would even argue the opposite: people who are now older than 30 did have the possibility to hack much nearer to the hardware of the devices, and could understand how they work. Now, because the tech is both so well packaged and more complex than before, no one tinker with devices really anymore. Sure, there is stuff like Arduino, but this is really reserved to a couple hackers. You don't have a Arduino hacker in every classroom. So maybe the digital natives are more comfortable with SMS and social media, but that doesn't mean they do better software or hardware developers.

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

#259

Post by akurilin »

dmorgan wrote: post #209
dmorgan wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There would be computerized food transport, real world garbage collectors, pizza machines, miner droids and 3D plotters handling bricks for building. This is sci-fi as for now, and for the foreseeable future. It's like someone in 1800 saying that the mailman is not needed anymore, because we could use electronic mail. Possible, but far off in the future. See the factories that make iPhones for example: some prefer…

> We live in sci-fi. So were are our servant robots and flying cars? > The only things withholding this sci-fi from happening: lack of competent workforce (programmers and roboengineers) and lack of vision. That's too generic an accusation. One could say that about any problem. > We could have a program writing programs, but I won't bet on that. Somebody will still have to give it orders; and the guy giving orders to…

We already have cars that drive themselves and are getting sci-fi glasses with really primitive Augmented Reality. We're getting there, I just don't think we'll ever consciously realize it as we experience it.

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

#260

Post by akurilin »

VexXtreme wrote: post #32

I agree with many of the things written in the original post. But I definitely disagree with the notion that the barrier to entry in this profession is low and that any Joe Sixpack can start programming for a living because it's supposedly easy. I can vividly remember my days in back in college where a lot of fellow students in my CS classes had substantial problems writing even the simplest of programs and understan…

I think it's getting progressively easier. I think that back in the day before the Internet, perhaps in the mainframe days, you had to be a true wizard and know your domain extremely well to make anything happen. Think K&R kind of attitude and skill level.

Nowadays anybody with sufficiently good Googling skills can put something together by stitching pieces of Stack Overflow code. You don't need a specialist to make it happen, just about anybody will do. Perhaps you shouldn't leave mission-critical aspects of development to those people, but you can get away with most of the other work.

Was it Mark Suster who said that most companies out there do not fail because of bad technology?

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