8 ms·

To be fair, 2002-2003 would have been a pretty rough time to graduate as a developer. The industry hadn’t yet recovered from the whole dot com thing and there w

To be fair, 2002-2003 would have been a pretty rough time to graduate as a developer. The industry hadn’t yet recovered from the whole dot com thing and there were still a million “converted business major” developers on the market who hadn’t yet got the hint that they should go to law school. The advice you got might not have applied to you on the way in. But it certainly applied to all the students those professors had just seen graduate. It probably took them a few years to notice the tide coming back in. Incidentally, the jobs had all been “going to India” for a long time by then. I’ve personally heard about them going there for at least 30 years now and I don’t doubt they will continue to do so in the future. At this point I’m not overly convinced they will all make it.

donatj 5y ago
> The industry hadn’t yet recovered from the whole dot com thing You are completely right about that and that slipped my mind. Either way it was kind of nice how easy it was to get a job back then. Getting my foot in the door was a little difficult actually, but once I had some thing on my résumé I got an interview for basically every job I applied to. My résumé is much more impressive these days, and it may be in part ageism or higher salary expectations, but it’s much rare to hear back from a job application.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  It's ageism. Sorry for being so blunt, but I know to many people who were just uninteresting to human resourses after hitting 45-50. I know more than a few homeless people in my life, and over half were once Programmers. It makes me sick. I do know this, if you are in tech, save up that money. (I have never understood this industry's way of hiring. Long drawn out interviews, and candidates whom are just average that get jobs. Why not hire a guy for two weeks. See how they do. And of course, be upfront. Tell them this is probationary. You don't sent a guy to relocate, just to be let go in a few weeks. There are some really great older workers that some company will scoop up when hiring is upgraded to this decade. Sorry about the sentence fragments. Too lazy to fix.)
  - sersi 5y ago
    As someone who's been in charge of recruitment, I've made an effort in hiring people who are less likely to get a chance at other places (minorities, older candidates) One thing that stood out to me though is that a lot of the older candidates I interviewed that had been struggling had deep knowledge of a technology that's no longer used and had had very little interest during their career in learning new things outside their job. So once the thing they were expert in was no longer fashionable, they had a hard time catching back up. I know it's unfashionable to say this and I know that a lot of people have full time jobs and don't want to have side project additionally to their full time job but if you want to keep a career as a software developer past 40 without going into management then you need to do side projects,you need to keep up to date with some of the latest fad (even if some of those fads are cyclical and recycle concepts from 20 years ago). Doing a job well and becoming an expert in an obsolete technology is no path to career growth.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - blooalien 5y ago
      > … "if you want to keep a career as a software developer past 40 without going into management then you need to do side projects,you need to keep up to date with some of the latest fad (even if some of those fads are cyclical and recycle concepts from 20 years ago). Doing a job well and becoming an expert in an obsolete technology is no path to career growth." Sad thing about this is that some of us (like me for one example) have known this since the days before personal computers were even a thing, but it don't really help to stay on top of modern tech when all the people in charge of hiring in the tech industry are twenty-somethings who automatically instantly hate anyone with even a single gray hair or wrinkle visible, and instantly dismiss a lifetime of knowledge based entirely on ageism. Even sadder is that the "decision makers" in many tech jobs still to this day actively ignore good advice that people like me have been giving since the early days re; things like network security being more important than they want to admit to themselves (just to name a simple and obvious example), and then when their ignorance of such issues come back to bite them in the ass they always scapegoat the "new guy" somehow and out he goes.
deanCommie 5y ago
I can confirm this. I started my CS program in 1999 and was supposed to do a Co-op placement (university-facilitated internship) after 2nd year, and after 3rd. In 2001, I had dozens of interviews and could easily choose whatever placement I wanted. In 2003 I couldn't get a job, and had to wait until the next cycle 4 months later.
fnord77 5y ago
...and now every business major knows Python
- thundergolfer 5y ago
  …knows enough to make a half-working ball of mud.
  - fnord77 5y ago
    so about the same as most python "developers"
quickthrower2 5y ago
Oh yeah 2001! 6 months and dozens of applications to get a job offer. I would have done 100s of applications had their been that many to apply to. Low points was being rejected from a job maintaining access databases in a small town. Being rejected from another job because I hadn’t suggested manually unrolling a loop as an alternative solution to a problem and I said “oh yeah you could do that I guess” (feedback: bad communicator I withhold information), and a 2 day hoop jumping affair for a dev job involving fake meetings where you had to make up bullshit. Fuck graduating 2001. Also probably heavily affected my lifetime earnings as I started on £18k.
- happyhardcore 5y ago
  FWIW £18k in 2001 is ~£30k in today's money which is on the upper end of graduate starting salaries even for today
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    Im especially glad I’m not British - in America my $150k TC out of undergrad was mediocre.
    - quickthrower2 5y ago
      Yeah America seems to have the nice combo of reasonably price places to live and high tech salaries. Since “remote, but US” is common I do t see why you can’t take your $150k and live off a quarter of that somewhere and save most!
      - rejectedandsad 5y ago
        I recently got an offer that was $175k base, full remote and felt comfortable enough declining it (though most of that is because Im optimizing for liquid total compensation so….) $200k total compensation liquid is still mediocre for a mid level engineer but at least I don’t pay London real estate prices.
      - 5y ago
Netcob 5y ago
My boss loves to play with the idea of outsourcing, but he seems to be aware of the issues to some degree. In our situation, the idea is pretty hilarious - we as developers have to make sure our products don't become unmaintainable, product management doesn't like to think things through when specifying new features, and we already don't get time for refactoring. I think outsourcing (especially when done to save money) requires pretty fantastic product management and my intuition is that it's fundamentally incompatible with a codebase that is growing along with the company.
- mavhc 5y ago
  Programming used to be getting a computer to do something. Now it's refining the idea someone has until it's code. People think they know what they want, but have no clue about the masses of details required. If the person with the idea and the programmer are far apart (in space, time, or culturally), it's pointless. Most ideas don't require 100s of programmers, so the cost saving is minimal
  - matwood 5y ago
    > Now it's refining the idea someone has until it's code. This is one of the most succinct ways I've seen this said. Thank you. For the most part the days of handing a programmer a spec who then codes it up are gone. For many problems, programming itself is the easy part. Figuring out what to program, and the complete solution is where the majority of the work resides.
robertlagrant 5y ago
I graduated in 2003; did volunteering for 9 months and then got a very low-paid job in a startup in the Midlands in the UK. The assumption I was given was almost all the thinking and innovation had been done, and it was just a matter of working your way up the Java coder/senior/architect hierarchy over time. I feel a bit cheated in retrospect - almost all other times the industry's felt amazingly exciting/fun. At that time it was a bit deflated. Luckily I just wanted to work with computers, so at the time I wasn't bothered.
kevstev 5y ago
I graduated in 2002. My peers had been boasting about how we wouldn't even entertain offers below $75k when we graduated in 2000. There was the general .com bust, but I was also literally working on my resume the morning of 9/11 which essentially froze up the market entirely. Most offers which were "locked up" were rescinded. I was fairly fortunate that the small software consulting firm I had interned at landed a new contract and made me an offer- for $37k. I swallowed my pride, the market was absolutely flooded with java devs with a few years experience that I was competing against. It seemed far better to be working and building a resume even if for a non living wage. I received only one hit on my resume my entire first year working, despite sending it out to multiple places each week. After about a year, things picked up a bit and I landed a job with a group that was impressed by my distributed systems undergraduate research work and curiosity and was building what would become known as a high frequency trading system. My salary was still lower than my 2000 self thought acceptable, but at 55k I could at least afford to move out of my parents house. Things took off from there a bit, but it was a rough start. And it's a post 2010 thing that engineers can retire in their 30s. My expectation was that this would lead to a comfortable middle class lifestyle but the eye popping salaries of today were beyond the expectations of any of us. Tbh, when one of my coworkers left to go to Facebook in 2007, I looked at it with disdain- a website? How disappointing... I imagine his net worth is deep in the 8 figures- he is still there.

donatj 5y ago

> The industry hadn’t yet recovered from the whole dot com thing You are completely right about that and that slipped my mind. Either way it was kind of nice how easy it was to get a job back then. Getting my foot in the door was a little difficult actually, but once I had some thing on my résumé I got an interview for basically every job I applied to. My résumé is much more impressive these days, and it may be in part ageism or higher salary expectations, but it’s much rare to hear back from a job application.

hellbannedguy 5y ago
It's ageism. Sorry for being so blunt, but I know to many people who were just uninteresting to human resourses after hitting 45-50. I know more than a few homeless people in my life, and over half were once Programmers. It makes me sick. I do know this, if you are in tech, save up that money. (I have never understood this industry's way of hiring. Long drawn out interviews, and candidates whom are just average that get jobs. Why not hire a guy for two weeks. See how they do. And of course, be upfront. Tell them this is probationary. You don't sent a guy to relocate, just to be let go in a few weeks. There are some really great older workers that some company will scoop up when hiring is upgraded to this decade. Sorry about the sentence fragments. Too lazy to fix.)
- sersi 5y ago
  As someone who's been in charge of recruitment, I've made an effort in hiring people who are less likely to get a chance at other places (minorities, older candidates) One thing that stood out to me though is that a lot of the older candidates I interviewed that had been struggling had deep knowledge of a technology that's no longer used and had had very little interest during their career in learning new things outside their job. So once the thing they were expert in was no longer fashionable, they had a hard time catching back up. I know it's unfashionable to say this and I know that a lot of people have full time jobs and don't want to have side project additionally to their full time job but if you want to keep a career as a software developer past 40 without going into management then you need to do side projects,you need to keep up to date with some of the latest fad (even if some of those fads are cyclical and recycle concepts from 20 years ago). Doing a job well and becoming an expert in an obsolete technology is no path to career growth.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - blooalien 5y ago
    > … "if you want to keep a career as a software developer past 40 without going into management then you need to do side projects,you need to keep up to date with some of the latest fad (even if some of those fads are cyclical and recycle concepts from 20 years ago). Doing a job well and becoming an expert in an obsolete technology is no path to career growth." Sad thing about this is that some of us (like me for one example) have known this since the days before personal computers were even a thing, but it don't really help to stay on top of modern tech when all the people in charge of hiring in the tech industry are twenty-somethings who automatically instantly hate anyone with even a single gray hair or wrinkle visible, and instantly dismiss a lifetime of knowledge based entirely on ageism. Even sadder is that the "decision makers" in many tech jobs still to this day actively ignore good advice that people like me have been giving since the early days re; things like network security being more important than they want to admit to themselves (just to name a simple and obvious example), and then when their ignorance of such issues come back to bite them in the ass they always scapegoat the "new guy" somehow and out he goes.

deanCommie 5y ago

I can confirm this. I started my CS program in 1999 and was supposed to do a Co-op placement (university-facilitated internship) after 2nd year, and after 3rd. In 2001, I had dozens of interviews and could easily choose whatever placement I wanted. In 2003 I couldn't get a job, and had to wait until the next cycle 4 months later.

fnord77 5y ago

...and now every business major knows Python

thundergolfer 5y ago
…knows enough to make a half-working ball of mud.
- fnord77 5y ago
  so about the same as most python "developers"

quickthrower2 5y ago

Oh yeah 2001! 6 months and dozens of applications to get a job offer. I would have done 100s of applications had their been that many to apply to. Low points was being rejected from a job maintaining access databases in a small town. Being rejected from another job because I hadn’t suggested manually unrolling a loop as an alternative solution to a problem and I said “oh yeah you could do that I guess” (feedback: bad communicator I withhold information), and a 2 day hoop jumping affair for a dev job involving fake meetings where you had to make up bullshit. Fuck graduating 2001. Also probably heavily affected my lifetime earnings as I started on £18k.

happyhardcore 5y ago
FWIW £18k in 2001 is ~£30k in today's money which is on the upper end of graduate starting salaries even for today
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  Im especially glad I’m not British - in America my $150k TC out of undergrad was mediocre.
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    Yeah America seems to have the nice combo of reasonably price places to live and high tech salaries. Since “remote, but US” is common I do t see why you can’t take your $150k and live off a quarter of that somewhere and save most!
    - rejectedandsad 5y ago
      I recently got an offer that was $175k base, full remote and felt comfortable enough declining it (though most of that is because Im optimizing for liquid total compensation so….) $200k total compensation liquid is still mediocre for a mid level engineer but at least I don’t pay London real estate prices.
    - 5y ago

Netcob 5y ago

My boss loves to play with the idea of outsourcing, but he seems to be aware of the issues to some degree. In our situation, the idea is pretty hilarious - we as developers have to make sure our products don't become unmaintainable, product management doesn't like to think things through when specifying new features, and we already don't get time for refactoring. I think outsourcing (especially when done to save money) requires pretty fantastic product management and my intuition is that it's fundamentally incompatible with a codebase that is growing along with the company.

mavhc 5y ago
Programming used to be getting a computer to do something. Now it's refining the idea someone has until it's code. People think they know what they want, but have no clue about the masses of details required. If the person with the idea and the programmer are far apart (in space, time, or culturally), it's pointless. Most ideas don't require 100s of programmers, so the cost saving is minimal
- matwood 5y ago
  > Now it's refining the idea someone has until it's code. This is one of the most succinct ways I've seen this said. Thank you. For the most part the days of handing a programmer a spec who then codes it up are gone. For many problems, programming itself is the easy part. Figuring out what to program, and the complete solution is where the majority of the work resides.

robertlagrant 5y ago

I graduated in 2003; did volunteering for 9 months and then got a very low-paid job in a startup in the Midlands in the UK. The assumption I was given was almost all the thinking and innovation had been done, and it was just a matter of working your way up the Java coder/senior/architect hierarchy over time. I feel a bit cheated in retrospect - almost all other times the industry's felt amazingly exciting/fun. At that time it was a bit deflated. Luckily I just wanted to work with computers, so at the time I wasn't bothered.

kevstev 5y ago

I graduated in 2002. My peers had been boasting about how we wouldn't even entertain offers below $75k when we graduated in 2000. There was the general .com bust, but I was also literally working on my resume the morning of 9/11 which essentially froze up the market entirely. Most offers which were "locked up" were rescinded. I was fairly fortunate that the small software consulting firm I had interned at landed a new contract and made me an offer- for $37k. I swallowed my pride, the market was absolutely flooded with java devs with a few years experience that I was competing against. It seemed far better to be working and building a resume even if for a non living wage. I received only one hit on my resume my entire first year working, despite sending it out to multiple places each week. After about a year, things picked up a bit and I landed a job with a group that was impressed by my distributed systems undergraduate research work and curiosity and was building what would become known as a high frequency trading system. My salary was still lower than my 2000 self thought acceptable, but at 55k I could at least afford to move out of my parents house. Things took off from there a bit, but it was a rough start. And it's a post 2010 thing that engineers can retire in their 30s. My expectation was that this would lead to a comfortable middle class lifestyle but the eye popping salaries of today were beyond the expectations of any of us. Tbh, when one of my coworkers left to go to Facebook in 2007, I looked at it with disdain- a website? How disappointing... I imagine his net worth is deep in the 8 figures- he is still there.