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I started during the 2008 recession. I think the people who hurt the most back then were the people who'd just attended 6 week Ruby on Rails bootcamps and gotte

I started during the 2008 recession. I think the people who hurt the most back then were the people who'd just attended 6 week Ruby on Rails bootcamps and gotten 70k/year jobs (which was a cliche at the time). Suddenly, that was no longer realistic. And even among them, the passionate people found a way. I got into tech with no education during the recession just on psychotic passion alone. I was working at <physical job> but hacking all night. Eventually I convinced someone to hire me as a sysadmin and it was game on. I intuit that if you are insanely dedicated enough the universe has a weird appreciation for that kind of thing, and eventually throws you a bone. I know it's wrong and irrational but everytime I've tried that it's worked, so there's some anecdotal personal truth. Conversely, the (completely respectable and valid) 'I just need a solid way to provide' people get fucked the hardest every time. Cosmic irony. Maybe there's some real psychology behind it though. Doing something for practical necessity is a weaker motivation than personal obsession. According to the Overjustification Effect, extrinsic rewards harm intrinsic motivation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect). Meh, who knows. I know some people hiring Python devs in Mexico if anyone is hurting and lives here.

__s 7y ago
> I intuit that if you are insanely dedicated enough the universe has a weird appreciation for that kind of thing, and eventually throws you a bone. I know it's wrong and irrational but everytime I've tried that it's worked, so there's some anecdotal personal truth. I've experienced this too, & entered the profession in 2011 without completing post secondary Essentially I believe it comes down to the fact that if you take a 0.3% chance every day, you'll land it once a year. When you're just trying to scrape by you won't make take those odds. But if you're passionate you're not thinking about those odds, they're a byproduct of your passion Prefer opportunism to goal setting
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dmd 7y ago
  > if you take a 0.3% chance every day, you'll land it once a year. "actualllyyy" you've got a 2 in 3 chance of landing it each year. 1-((1-(0.3/100))^365) = 0.66 EDIT: stop upvoting me, he's right. The question isn't "what is the probability of at least one success in a year", but rather "how many trials, on average, does it take to get one success" - and the answer to THAT is in fact 333, from the geometric distribution.
  - socketnaut 7y ago
    “actualllllyyyyy” he’s saying something different. If you take a 0.3% chance for N days where N is large, you’ll land it 0.003N times, or once every ~333 days. The chance of landing it within any particular window of K days is a different concept (which you showed how to reason about).
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - dmd 7y ago
      You're right! Edited my comment.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - lalaithion 7y ago
    But you've also got a 20% chance of landing it twice and a 7% chance of landing it three times and a 2% chance of landing it four times and so, on average, you'll land it every 333 days.
- electricstate 7y ago
  > Essentially I believe it comes down to the fact that if you take a 0.3% chance every day, you'll land it once a year. This is very true. Life is like poker, not chess. On that front everyone should read Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke.
complianceowl 7y ago
Siempre me asombra ver la diversidad de personas en HN. En que parte de Mexico estas? Saludos!
- seisvelas 7y ago
  Saludos de Mérida, Yucatán!
scraggz 7y ago
What kinda dev work? Would definitely be interested.
- seisvelas 7y ago
  If you'd like more details, the recruiter I'm thinking of is https://www.linkedin.com/in/miguelsuarezr/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/miguelsuarezr/. They probably have stuff elsewhere as well. I just started a position in security (which I found here on HN on the last Who Wants To Be Hired thread!) so I didn't follow up but I know they are looking for Python people. Good luck!
andreilys 7y ago
“ I intuit that if you are insanely dedicated enough the universe has a weird appreciation for that kind of thing, and eventually throws you a bone. I know it's wrong and irrational but everytime I've tried that it's worked” Also known as survivorship bias.
- scottLobster 7y ago
  Not necessarily. A prerequisite for winning any game is showing up. Those who show up most often are therefore more likely to win. Someone who practices a skill for 20 hours a week for a year will have had 1040 hours of practice vs 258 hours of practice for someone who practices 5 hours a week, and that linear increase in time will likely produce an exponential increase in skill as knowledge builds on itself. Assuming there's a market for the skill, the odds of success in that market will also go up exponentially. And if demand shrinks (ie economic recession) that filters out the 5-hours-a-week people.
  - jrimbault 7y ago
    Assuming we have defined "success" and the person A will multiply their chance of success by 2 after each try. That leaves almost zero chances of success. Success, however we choose to define it, is in large part a result of luck. Skill, to a much lesser degree.
    - sosborn 7y ago
      Luck and skill aren't mutually exclusive. They work together.
    - scottLobster 7y ago
      Maybe with a uselessly broad definition of "luck", as in "lucky to be born at the right time for software to be a viable career" or "lucky to be alive, the dead can't earn any money at all". But if you think that successful engineers are only successful because they just magically got hired one day, and if they never learned any science, math, or got an engineering degree and put in zero or near-zero effort they would have had the same odds of been hired, that's just not a logical argument. Same goes for other professions. We all start with the hand we're dealt by the universe, but it is possible to improve one's odds quite substantially given time and good decisions (that's arguably the definition of a "good decision").
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
In 2015, my first software job paid 95k and it wasn't a small firm. It was a large, publicly traded software company. It's possible salaries could plateau in this industry. You'll "make it" but you won't be making bank like the unprecented growth in stock valuations that occurred in the 2000s and 2010s. Silicon Valley won't be minting as many millionaires as it did in those decades.
- icedchai 7y ago
  I think the 2000's were a bust for most people. It was the proverbial lost decade. We had the dot-com crash, followed by 9/11, a short recovery, then the GFC a few short years later. It wasn't until 2013 or so that things got back to positive. If you adjust for inflation, it's even worse. Play around with https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/
seattle_spring 7y ago
Dev Bootcamp popularized rails bootcamps, and they weren't even founded until 2012. The bootcamp "scene" definitely wasn't around in 2008.
- seisvelas 7y ago
  Woops, you're right, I mixed up my eras.
- flomo 7y ago
  Maybe they weren't called bootcamps, but these short webdev training courses have been around since the late 1990s.
  - tomnipotent 7y ago
    The classes/courses prior to Dev Bootcamp et al. were vastly different and not comparable to current programs, and certainly did not have even close to the number of students/customers.
KKKKkkkk1 7y ago
> I intuit that if you are insanely dedicated enough the universe has a weird appreciation for that kind of thing, and eventually throws you a bone. I know it's wrong and irrational but everytime I've tried that it's worked, so there's some anecdotal personal truth. This is an unfalsifiable assertion. It also implies that if you failed, you just didn't want it hard enough. That's not a message that people who are having trouble finding a job need to hear.
- seisvelas 7y ago
  Yeah that's why I said 'I know it's wrong and irrational', haha. It helped me when I had trouble finding a job. Maybe different people need different messages. Like the OSCP motto, 'when the going gets tough, try harder'. For some people that would be demotivating, whereas for others it has the opposite effect. Perhaps people have 'motivational styles' and the best approach is to learn what kind of message works best for one's personal styles.
duxup 7y ago
I went through a bootcamp too. I'd look around the room and "Man at least half of these folks have no chance.". It is very much a thing that for most people you need to be "INTERESTED" in how this works for it to work out as a career / push through frustration and have the tenacity to keep at it. Just programming as a job with tasks like a garbage man or something where you go do the thing and never do it if you don't have to ... just is a rough way to learn.

__s 7y ago

> I intuit that if you are insanely dedicated enough the universe has a weird appreciation for that kind of thing, and eventually throws you a bone. I know it's wrong and irrational but everytime I've tried that it's worked, so there's some anecdotal personal truth. I've experienced this too, & entered the profession in 2011 without completing post secondary Essentially I believe it comes down to the fact that if you take a 0.3% chance every day, you'll land it once a year. When you're just trying to scrape by you won't make take those odds. But if you're passionate you're not thinking about those odds, they're a byproduct of your passion Prefer opportunism to goal setting

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dmd 7y ago
> if you take a 0.3% chance every day, you'll land it once a year. "actualllyyy" you've got a 2 in 3 chance of landing it each year. 1-((1-(0.3/100))^365) = 0.66 EDIT: stop upvoting me, he's right. The question isn't "what is the probability of at least one success in a year", but rather "how many trials, on average, does it take to get one success" - and the answer to THAT is in fact 333, from the geometric distribution.
- socketnaut 7y ago
  “actualllllyyyyy” he’s saying something different. If you take a 0.3% chance for N days where N is large, you’ll land it 0.003N times, or once every ~333 days. The chance of landing it within any particular window of K days is a different concept (which you showed how to reason about).
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - dmd 7y ago
    You're right! Edited my comment.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- lalaithion 7y ago
  But you've also got a 20% chance of landing it twice and a 7% chance of landing it three times and a 2% chance of landing it four times and so, on average, you'll land it every 333 days.
electricstate 7y ago
> Essentially I believe it comes down to the fact that if you take a 0.3% chance every day, you'll land it once a year. This is very true. Life is like poker, not chess. On that front everyone should read Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke.

complianceowl 7y ago

Siempre me asombra ver la diversidad de personas en HN. En que parte de Mexico estas? Saludos!

seisvelas 7y ago
Saludos de Mérida, Yucatán!

scraggz 7y ago

What kinda dev work? Would definitely be interested.

seisvelas 7y ago
If you'd like more details, the recruiter I'm thinking of is https://www.linkedin.com/in/miguelsuarezr/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/miguelsuarezr/. They probably have stuff elsewhere as well. I just started a position in security (which I found here on HN on the last Who Wants To Be Hired thread!) so I didn't follow up but I know they are looking for Python people. Good luck!

andreilys 7y ago

“ I intuit that if you are insanely dedicated enough the universe has a weird appreciation for that kind of thing, and eventually throws you a bone. I know it's wrong and irrational but everytime I've tried that it's worked” Also known as survivorship bias.

scottLobster 7y ago
Not necessarily. A prerequisite for winning any game is showing up. Those who show up most often are therefore more likely to win. Someone who practices a skill for 20 hours a week for a year will have had 1040 hours of practice vs 258 hours of practice for someone who practices 5 hours a week, and that linear increase in time will likely produce an exponential increase in skill as knowledge builds on itself. Assuming there's a market for the skill, the odds of success in that market will also go up exponentially. And if demand shrinks (ie economic recession) that filters out the 5-hours-a-week people.
- jrimbault 7y ago
  Assuming we have defined "success" and the person A will multiply their chance of success by 2 after each try. That leaves almost zero chances of success. Success, however we choose to define it, is in large part a result of luck. Skill, to a much lesser degree.
  - sosborn 7y ago
    Luck and skill aren't mutually exclusive. They work together.
  - scottLobster 7y ago
    Maybe with a uselessly broad definition of "luck", as in "lucky to be born at the right time for software to be a viable career" or "lucky to be alive, the dead can't earn any money at all". But if you think that successful engineers are only successful because they just magically got hired one day, and if they never learned any science, math, or got an engineering degree and put in zero or near-zero effort they would have had the same odds of been hired, that's just not a logical argument. Same goes for other professions. We all start with the hand we're dealt by the universe, but it is possible to improve one's odds quite substantially given time and good decisions (that's arguably the definition of a "good decision").

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago

In 2015, my first software job paid 95k and it wasn't a small firm. It was a large, publicly traded software company. It's possible salaries could plateau in this industry. You'll "make it" but you won't be making bank like the unprecented growth in stock valuations that occurred in the 2000s and 2010s. Silicon Valley won't be minting as many millionaires as it did in those decades.

icedchai 7y ago
I think the 2000's were a bust for most people. It was the proverbial lost decade. We had the dot-com crash, followed by 9/11, a short recovery, then the GFC a few short years later. It wasn't until 2013 or so that things got back to positive. If you adjust for inflation, it's even worse. Play around with https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/

seattle_spring 7y ago

Dev Bootcamp popularized rails bootcamps, and they weren't even founded until 2012. The bootcamp "scene" definitely wasn't around in 2008.

seisvelas 7y ago
Woops, you're right, I mixed up my eras.
flomo 7y ago
Maybe they weren't called bootcamps, but these short webdev training courses have been around since the late 1990s.
- tomnipotent 7y ago
  The classes/courses prior to Dev Bootcamp et al. were vastly different and not comparable to current programs, and certainly did not have even close to the number of students/customers.

KKKKkkkk1 7y ago

seisvelas 7y ago
Yeah that's why I said 'I know it's wrong and irrational', haha. It helped me when I had trouble finding a job. Maybe different people need different messages. Like the OSCP motto, 'when the going gets tough, try harder'. For some people that would be demotivating, whereas for others it has the opposite effect. Perhaps people have 'motivational styles' and the best approach is to learn what kind of message works best for one's personal styles.

duxup 7y ago

I went through a bootcamp too. I'd look around the room and "Man at least half of these folks have no chance.". It is very much a thing that for most people you need to be "INTERESTED" in how this works for it to work out as a career / push through frustration and have the tenacity to keep at it. Just programming as a job with tasks like a garbage man or something where you go do the thing and never do it if you don't have to ... just is a rough way to learn.