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As an MIT student... should I not become a programmer? I do feel like I'm nearing the peak of my programming ability, and now would be the time to switch to a field with more "lock-in". What would that field be? Medicine? Mechanical engineering? Consultancy?
I do feel like I'm nearing the peak of my programming ability
Note Phil hasn't been in the corporate world himself. He struck it rich with a dot.com in the 1990s boom and worked on several interesting projects since. Among them was photo website, a Thiel-like coders academy, and flying. He has had one of the first and longest running blogs of my fellow MIT students about tech, business, travel, flying and politics.
I took Phil's class (6.171 - Web Development Lab) in college. It was a ridiculous experience, regularly had to put 40hrs/week just on this class and I'm not exaggerating. Story time: As part of the class we were working with real clients to develop a web project for them. One day during class, he talked to us about the "technical sidekick", typically a friend of the client's that is somewhat technical and is behind-t…
I wonder how much of this 'programming is a dead-end' angst that seems to cycle through HN fairly frequently these days is US-centric? I say that as an almost-40 Australian software developer...
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I don't know when that particular name for it dates to, but some sort of liberal arts requirement has been around for even longer. To be sure, if you take the minimum and take courses that aren't really liberal arts (e.g. accounting or microeconomics), it's fairly minimal. But the opportunity is certainly there to get a fairly broad education.
Feynman writes about having to satisfy a liberal arts requirement in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman , so the requirement goes back at least to the late thirties.
I could be misremembering, though, and that was written much later in his life.
Note Phil hasn't been in the corporate world himself. He struck it rich with a dot.com in the 1990s boom and worked on several interesting projects since. Among them was photo website, a Thiel-like coders academy, and flying. He has had one of the first and longest running blogs of my fellow MIT students about tech, business, travel, flying and politics.
I took Phil's class (6.171 - Web Development Lab) in college. It was a ridiculous experience, regularly had to put 40hrs/week just on this class and I'm not exaggerating. Story time: As part of the class we were working with real clients to develop a web project for them. One day during class, he talked to us about the "technical sidekick", typically a friend of the client's that is somewhat technical and is behind-t…
I do think tech undervalues experience and overvalues familiarity with technological fads. That said, there are two sides to the coin. Those other fields the author mentions all aggressively put people into "tracks" early in their careers.
Take the corporate lawyer, for example. His job is secure because most of the competition for his job from his cohort was tracked-out in earlier filtering stages. If tech was like law, you'd have job ads for people with 10+ years' experience saying "top undergraduate school (MIT/CMU/Stanford/Caltech or the equivalent) and top company (Apple/Google/Facebook or the equivalent) required." That would certainly create a lot of insulation for people who went to MIT, interned at Google, then put in 3-5 years after graduation to earn a credential they could bank on the rest of their careers. I'm not sure we'd all prefer that to be the case.
- The academic is completing their PHD program, with it's associated vow of poverty and about to start a multi-year tenure cagefight, in low-wage contract instructor roles. Only a small fraction will make it to full tenure; the rest will drop out to pursue industry jobs, 10+ years behind the engineers who went directly into industry.
- The young doctor FINALLY completed their training, with a truckload of debt. In the horizon, they see many sources of downward pressure on medical pay (rising power of insurance companies, malpractice liability, lower reimbursement rates due to Medicare and Obamacare, etc.). In 20 years, will Medicine be a $300K/year job or a $125K/year job? Oh...and a bunch of their peers already dropped out, loaded with debt.
- Meanwhile, the 30 year old MIT engineer has good odds of making six figures as a senior tech or technical lead. They are young enough to start a business and bounce back when things don't work out. Young enough to start a big family. If their spouse is also a middle class professional, they have a decent chance of saving $1MM by age 45 for a solid start on retirement. Making enough to pay down their debt early.
Yeah...the back end of the engineering career has a shelf life; you get your money up front. Using it wisely is up to you.
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Yup. Hacker News is full of silly "programming exceptionalism", but programming is not all that fundamentally different from any other vocation. Go to a site for, say, doctors, and find people singing many of the same paeans to medicine that are here presented as specific to software engineering. People in many lines of work think that their field is the one thing truly worth doing.
I love baseball and I'm good at it, but it will never pay my bills. I am on a minor league team and I program to pay the bills.
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As an MIT alum in my 50s, let me assure you that a specific fundraiser is assigned to target you, personally and individually. "Ugh," indeed.
MIT alum in my 30s. When to babes start throwing themselves ta me because of my degree? My parents promised me this would happen.