551–560 of 634 posts
For me, software has been nothing more than a tool to get myself the lifestyle I want. I enjoy the creativity associated with writing solid software of course but it's not a hobby, it's certainly not a religion for me, it's a tool, nothing more. I enjoy the creativity associated with developing a solution that people use and pay me for, but at the end of the day, I am a business-guy who uses software to get what I wa…
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Then keep looking? The market favors the developer right now.
Oh I do. But I hear this a lot more than I see it, especially in the Midwest without a degree.
The easiest ways to find a job you don't hate that pays what it should is paying attention to the right technologies. Sadly, the percentage of crap jobs that are using older technologies like PHP, Java, and C# is much higher than those working with Ruby, JS, or Golang. This isn't to say it's impossible of course- but it can help narrow things down. So I'd say, try to find a technology you like most in your spare time, and look in that area.
The second thing, is give remote work a shot. Sites like weworkremotely.com almost guarantee better conditions, because often the companies hiring are both better-informed and located somewhere that a 10-20k salary bump is barely noticeable, and even if it was, they know who butters their bread.
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That's one of the reasons I got out of programming, was the salary ceiling. Sure, your first job hop as a programmer will probably get you a 20% or so increase! That gets your hopes up. Then your next one will be only 10% or so, and by the time you're 20 years into your career, you're barely getting any pay raises by changing company. And if you think that changes by just being a different kind of individual contribu…
Anecdotal, but I am not exagerrating when I say about a quarter of the developers I'm friends with (i.e. hang out with outside of work) make substantially more than a new partner at a big firm. Source: They discussed their negotiations with me so I know their compensation, and I used to work as a CPA at one of the big 4
This post resonated with me. I've realized that, more often than not, technical individual contributors have very very little influence over the general direction of a product, let alone a business, and have a very well-understood (and, in my opinion, low) salary cap. Job hopping helps with ensuring that your compensation doesn't stray too far off from market rate, but this only brings you closer to the proverbial gl…
That's one of the reasons I got out of programming, was the salary ceiling. Sure, your first job hop as a programmer will probably get you a 20% or so increase! That gets your hopes up. Then your next one will be only 10% or so, and by the time you're 20 years into your career, you're barely getting any pay raises by changing company. And if you think that changes by just being a different kind of individual contribu…
There are places where technical leadership runs in parallel to people leadership, but I feel like those are in the minority...
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> But tech is not a meritocracy. Some people say it is, others say it isn't. Neither use a lot of data in their arguments.
Some people say it is, until you ask them if tech interviewing is sane. We can't even find a tech interview process that correlates well with performance and that's just who we let in the door before they even get to rise up as their value merits. Then you add questions of if who is chosen for promotion is sane, if what products a company chooses to focus on is sane, if what products the market chooses to make popula…
2. Being good at self-promotion is a merit. Some have it and some not. You could not define merit as just technical skills.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
There are two things that boost careers. The first is the employer. Your employer determines your success through their success, and so your fate truly is in their hands as long as you are just doing work that is provided. Hence successful companies produce successful employees with successful careers. But to be good at this, you need to be a visionary employee. You must be able to tell apart the good entrepreneurs from the idiots. You need to become a good follower, not worker.
The second is overreaching your job's boundaries and overachieving. This is what catches a lot of people, because it's being non-complacent when that's all that is being asked of you. It's the ability to demarginalize yourself because jobs are maginalizing, not people. If you fit a better job, your career will take you there. Either a good employer will recognize your worth, or you will recognize the worthlessness of your employer and move on.
I have this extremely strong hunch that we all rise to our potential. And when I see someone complaining of how little they've accomplished, in more cases than not, they will make excuses, talk of regrets, and list all the bad luck and negative circumstances that surrounded their demise. Rarely do I hear them admit how bad they sucked, or how bad they compromised, or how they let it happen because they didn't act otherwise.
"I am still just a programmer."
That's you marginalizing yourself. Mark Zuckerberg was just a programmer. But you become more not by fitting tighter into that cast. You become more by breaking it. Eventually people will stop calling you just a programmer. And if that's your employer, you either just got promoted, or fired.
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Granted, in a decade, if you'll still be in this profession, you'll remember J2EE and XML and Node and npm and pip and git and Golang and JavaScript and code polish and functions-vs-methods debate as tiny specks on what actually constitutes you career. The author of the linked article tries analyzing his entire life from a standpoint of being a programmer, and your comment analyzes last few years of your life staring…
I agree completely with you. I think the answer is you can't help some people. It's just sort of a myopic view. Could you imagine in 50 years someone asks you what regret you had about your career and you said "that I ever used node that one week in 2015"? I mean, wow.
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…
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…
> 5. Most business problems are political/social - regret every time we were called in to try and provide a "technical" band aid to those same problems. Why? Social and political problems are really hard to solve. If you can use technology to sidestep them, that's exactly the right way to do it.
Every programmer I meet dream of being CEO, having their own company, making more money. Yet over 90% of them don't enjoy any of their current profit.
Literally, with my programmer's salary, I can do everything I want in the world. There's nothing Bill Gates can do I can't, sure, maybe some of the things when he does them they're bigger, or fancier, but they're the same things. There's no better film for him to see, there's no better waterfront for him to sit, there's no better food, etc. I can afford the best of all.
I think we need to stop with the regrets, the illusions, etc. If you ain't driven to be tech leader, don't force it, just accept you're not and enjoy life.