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My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

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Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#451

Post by bloaf »

tcfunk wrote: post #415
JimboOmega wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incidentally, isn't $80k around the point where happiness from income levels off? The advantage of big money isn't just charities and companies - it's having your time back, since you're not tied to getting an income from it.

I feel like $80k must be an outdated number. My wife and I pull in just under $100k together, and we can't even (comfortably) afford a home. Between rent, student loan payments, health insurance, bills, and car loans, and food, I think we maybe have $500 left to throw around each month. If we were paying against a mortgage, that would basically be zero.

There are whole communities of people dedicated to answering this question [1] and most of them seem to think that they'd be content with $40k/year in passive income.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#453

Post by jventura »

okyup wrote: post #140

I agree that programming is a dead end job. It's popular and relatively easy. It doesn't require any special skills. Anyone with an average IQ can learn it. There's low cost and barrier of entry to getting started. It's fun and addicting when you're a kid. Then you get trapped and it becomes monotonous. There's only so good you can get at programming. Beyond that, most of your time is spent on debugging trivial issue…

I do agree quite a lot with your argument. However, as a former researcher, I would say that you can be creative a lot if you have margin for that.

But if you only work for enterprises, I agree it is mostly grunt work. I should know, as I've just quit working 8 months for a startup doing backend web dev and got bored and depressed as hell. Now I'm back at my own projects and doing freelance to get the money rolling until one of my projects hits the jackpot, if ever.

My opinion, maybe similar to yours, is that professional developers should see programming not as an end on itself but just as a mean. Focus on other areas (engineer, medicine, sports, whatever.) and try to apply your technical skills to fix a problem. Basically, it is what we do when we work for some company, but we should be conscious of that and maybe try to focus on IT + another area instead of just knonwing how to program a computer..

TL-DR: Domain knowledge is a must!

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#454

Post by seivan »

daxfohl wrote: post #144
askyourmother wrote: post #37

Regrets as a programmer: 1. Every piece of unpolished, unfinished code that management decided should ship to the customers regardless 2. Ever using node and npm. 3. Seeing and living through the train wreck of J2EE and the XML horrors that ensued. 4. Not seeing the beauty in simple functions early on. Not everything needs to be a class or module. 5. Most business problems are political/social - regret every time we…

>1. Every piece of unpolished, unfinished code that management decided should ship to the customers regardless Looking back, I view this as a pro. You get to work on more projects that way. I spent five years working with an "ideal" manager that trusted coders to make the deadlines. When I look back on that, while it was the only time I've ever gotten to code things to "perfection", it was also a big black hole of wo…

I'm currently in this situation. My manager(s) and colleagues have been angels and incredibly patient with me rewriting the same library several times. I just need to get this out of my system and they seem to have understood. But you're right, it's not always best to set your own limits.

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#455

Post by maerF0x0 »

kdamken wrote: post #174

I think this guy may actually just be dumb. Yes, C-Suite positions make more money, and get to make more decisions. If he wanted to do that, it sounds like he could have at any time. Of course just being a programmer would earn you less. > Being a programmer for nearly 35 years... > I doubt I will ever be able to really retire. How do you have a good paying job like being a programmer/the other high level gigs he men…

Mr Money Mustache was a programmer and retired in something near 10 yrs of work. http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#456

Post by tetraodonpuffer »

dcw303 wrote: post #38
Zelmor wrote: post #24

He would have been unhappy with the other choice as well, because then it is the programming side he would be missing out on. I would advise everyone to read The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173536 You chose one option out of many, and the others may no longer be a possibility. However, the writer's unhappiness does not spawn from his inability to be successful at what he does,…

I'm still coding after almost 20 years in the job, and have no intention of stopping. I tried some other options - teacher, artist, entrepreneur. None of them give me the thrill that I get from programming. I still get locked into a flow where time shifts, and before I know it hours have passed. The only other activity that does that is Civ, and no-one is going to pay me to play that ;) If 10x assets is what drives y…

there is also 'you might become too sick to work, but not sick enough to die tomorrow' which is what makes me more and more worried as I get older and society provides less and less safety nets

To me the 'my sister has 10x the assets' is like saying 'my sister is going to be ok in her retirement years, while I hope I'll be able to keep working for as long as I need to', but maybe I am reading that through the lens of my concerns/fears

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#457

Post by Joeri »

hawleyal wrote: post #210
wtbob wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> JavaScript is actually an incredibly flexible and effective language. == vs === No integers. Assignment is declaration. Prototypes. Curly brackets & semicolons. Semicolon insertion. It may be flexible (in the sense that an Alfa Romeo driven into a telephone pole at 120 mph is flexible), but it sure as heck ain't effective. JavaScript is the great shame of the computing industry: that it exists, and that it is used,…

Such hate. By far not as bad as you portray. Have you attempted the 8th level of hell that is PHP?

PHP7 is ok. They rewrote the parser to use a real AST which fixed a lot of the weirdness and inconsistency, threw out a ton of deprecated stuff, and made error situations saner by replacing errors by throwables. I like also that php is gradually getting strict typing as an option. Function signatures are strictly typed now, with class properties getting it soon. Plus, PSR guidelines have made the popular libraries object-oriented, namespaced and consistent. My main complaint with php these days is that it's starting to look too much like java with dollar signs.

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#458

Post by Gonzih »

okyup wrote: post #331
Gonzih wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So programming is not creative in your opinion?

It's barely creative. You have a small amount of room to work within someone's requirements. You can be the guy creating the requirements, but then you're better off specializing in that and letting someone else do the grunt work.

I think this statement is very extreme case scenario. I never really saw programming job without freedom to create requirement at least on technical front.

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#459

Post by wdr1 »

> I simply didn’t realize how little room you have to advance as just a programmer

I think this is one thing that has changed dramatically (and for the better) in the last ~10 years.

I started as a developer in the 90s. The only way to advance was to go into management. I was pretty conflicted, as I was promoted from developer to manager. Quit, went to be a developer at a new job, and got prompted to manager again. Quit again & later was promoted to manager again. Did it a forth time & then have been in management ever since.

I really loved coding, but coming from lower income family, was terrified of poverty and thus very motivated to climb whatever ladder someone put in front of me.

I'm an engineering manager today at Google and really happy to see there's now a world where engineers can excel without having to be a manager.

Over the years, I've had a lot of good career talks with people about if they wanted to do people management (or at least try it).

A little bit of a tangent, but it's interesting the myriad of ways those conversations go. Sometimes people who would be clearly great at it, don't want to try it for less-than-good reasons. (E.g., not feeling worthy, would the team respect them having been a peer).

Sometimes people who would be terrible at it, really want it for bad reasons as well. (E.g, manager = power (ha!), manager is the only way to advance or be respected (not true!).)

Of course, they sometimes want/don't want for very good reasons too. (E.g., "I like helping people grow" or "I would have to talk to people and I hate that", respectively.)

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#460

Post by rifung »

JimboOmega wrote: post #408
cookiecaper wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only amount of money people really need for autonomy is the amount of money it takes to supply their immediate needs and some reasonable wants; the amount of money necessary to provide for a normal middle-class lifestyle. I would ballpark this around $80k/yr. It's not enough to make big donations to candidates, companies, or charities, and it won't buy the most expensive stuff out there, but it's plenty to keep y…

Incidentally, isn't $80k around the point where happiness from income levels off? The advantage of big money isn't just charities and companies - it's having your time back, since you're not tied to getting an income from it.

I assume you're referring to: http://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489.abstract

for the $80k number.

In case you haven't seen it, there's another paper that argues the opposite: more money does make you happier (but only if you know how to use it). http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/danielgilbert/files/if-mone...

I make more than $80k and I can certainly say that I was less stressed before I took a huge pay cut. On the other hand, I like my job more so I guess I might actually still be happier. All else being equal though, if I made more I imagine I would be much less stressed..

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