10 ms·

You’re not wrong, but I’ll say the part about not going into it for the money is becoming less and less true all the time. For developers who are ~35 and up, a

by dpeck 5y ago

You’re not wrong, but I’ll say the part about not going into it for the money is becoming less and less true all the time. For developers who are ~35 and up, almost 100% true, once you get younger than that you’ll find that there are a large and growing minority of people who are very much in it for the money alone without any particular interest or affinity for computing. Their parents, advisors, etc saw how much money was being made and pushed them towards computing as something more like a high ROI trade. You see the same done for specialized welding for smart, but not academically smart, kids. It’s hard work to get into, but if you get there it can pay very well, regardless of if you care much about the underlying metallurgic properties that you’re dealing with or not. This is completely fine either way, but it’s important to realize that we’re not really the professional of child prodigies that it once was.

kk6mrp 5y ago
It feels to me like most people no longer find fulfillment in their work, regardless what it is. It really seems like almost everyone is in it for the money and could care less about the lack of craftsmanship.
- pradn 5y ago
  A lot of that seems like it comes from the company or industries not seeming to care about the worker: bad work environments, precarious jobs, stress, working on something commercially useful but not otherwise meaningful.
- cma 5y ago
  It is hard to imagine e.g. Google devs are enthusiastic about manipulative ads or blocking parts of Linux from developers in a software lock-in scheme.
- Matrixik 5y ago
  I liked tinkering with computers all the time before I started working as software engineer. But after over one year of working I started wanting everything to just work so I don't need to do anything with it...
gampleman 5y ago
Perhaps this will paradoxically be a good thing. I have for a long time been wondering if or to what extent are the reports of ageism in the industry well founded. If it turns out that hiring older developers gets you a much higher likelihood of getting someone who cares, this might change matters significantly (assuming of course that there actually is a problem in the first place).
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  I expect this to change radically as the entry level 6-figure crowd gets older. Speaking for myself, my ability to care about my work is inversely proportional to my retirement account balances, and I want out asap. Software development and the internet in general isn't fun any more and there are things I'd rather do.
v77 5y ago
I'm in my 40's and my graduating comp sci class was the biggest in history at that time because of the money people were making in the first dot com boom.
- dpeck 5y ago
  There was a bit of a downswing in CS degrees around the first DOTCOM bust, a lot of folks left programs at 2nd tier colleges and moved to adjacent but less “software” and “subject to outsourcing” like industrial engineering, electrical engineering. I didn’t exactly have a broad view at the time, but it seemed like top ~20 Comp Sci programs were largely unaffected and kept growing the whole time.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  Not sure how it is today, but for me in the mid-90s, there was a lot of interest in software and computer degrees, but the curriculum was sufficiently difficult to filter out the posers. I went to a huge state school, and our first year Comp Sci class was, not exaggerating, an auditorium-sized lecture of 1000+ students dreaming about becoming a Microsoft Millionaire. Most of the students didn't make it through hello_world.c. We also had requirements like Linear Algebra, Matrix Theory, MOSFETs, Linear Systems, and Signal Processing. The electives were all very tough, too. By the time we graduated, there were about 30-40 of us. So, there was a lot of interest, but most didn't actually graduate with the major.
3pt14159 5y ago
That's true, but they also often leave. I've taught three[0] people a little younger than me software that all wanted to do it for the freedom and financial security and two of the three transferred out of software to something else in tech like product management. It really bummed me out too, because it was the two women out of the three. Their lives are still markedly better than before, but I want more women in actual software. [0] Well, more than that, but the others gave up on the first week or two.
- MathCodeLove 5y ago
  I don't understand this weird fetishism with getting X demographic into software/tech. Naturally I don't think that any demographic should be restricted from entering the field, and everyone should be equally encouraged and provided the same opportunities, but more and more I see these pushes for trying to pump the numbers of specific demographics. If someone wants to join the industry, great. If not, also great. I think that to an extent these movements do more harm than good. Women should absolutely be made aware that tech is a viable career path for them as much as anyone else - yet it seems that as of late there's a sort of societal coercion that mimics that historically seen in gender dominated industries like welding for men or nursing for women.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
    It’s hard to know if an environment is hostile to you or not if there are no examples of safety. For example I would hesitate to join a magic the gathering group if I didn’t first check that they’re friendly to newbies. Especially because I know magic the gathering can vary in experience and that a group that isn’t friendly is not an outlier. If I think about it this way I can understand why a woman might not want to join a company with no other women engineers; how is she supposed to know she’ll be treated with respect, and won’t be pushed to something like management or product, if there are no examples to go off of? It likely worsens broadly if a woman knows exactly 0 women who are engineers as she grows up and considers a career for herself. She might not know any engineering is a viable path.
    - 5y ago
Mezzie 5y ago
Agreed. I spend a lot of time on TikTok (my main interests tech-wise are HCI, digital discovery, and social computing so it's like catnip) and a LOT of younger people are going into tech for the money. I'm 33 and I started programming in the 90s (I was raised by two geek parents a la Larry Page who were supportive), so I'm sort of in-between the two 'generations'. At age 37 and above, pretty much everybody is either a career switcher (in which case they've considered things that aren't money) or started before developing got big. I say 37 because that was old enough to already be coding and brought INTO the money with job offers in the dot com era. (I had a couple of offers from people who didn't believe I was 11/12, and I knew some people who were 16-19 who were leaving school to take REALLY well paying jobs none of us ever expected.) After that, it was well known that coding could lead to a lot of money, and as the sector continues to grow and other opportunities to escape poverty shrink, it's pretty inevitable that people end up in coding for the money. Especially since that's how we teach them: All the tech courses are about employment, not playing. Kids don't learn tech as a joy or a tool to make their lives better, it's just another corporate hoop.
- gonehome 5y ago
  I’m 31 and at least in my age bracket most of the people I was in CS with weren’t the money crowd. I’d believe it’s true now (I don’t really know), but it’s likely more recent than the OP thinks.
  - Mezzie 5y ago
    Post 2008, I'd say. I was a 2010 graduate, and the change between 'do what you love' and 'College is for MONEY' was like a culture bomb going off.
    - gonehome 5y ago
      I think the real calculus should be do something that interests you, but also consider ROI and if education cost is worth it. Most of the people I know with the worst financial outcomes overpaid to study stuff they didn’t care much about (and isn’t marketable or often even valuable) because they thought it was what they were supposed to do.
ryandvm 5y ago
What I always tell people thinking about a software engineering career is that, yes, it's great money but I strongly advise only doing it if you actually like working with computers. Otherwise it's going to be a nightmare. Working as a software developer without a passion for coding is kind of like doing math homework every day for the rest of your life.
- silicon2401 5y ago
  > Working as a software developer without a passion for coding is kind of like doing math homework every day for the rest of your life. I disagree. I coded for fun once, as a kid, and have never felt the need to do it again. If I never coded again, I wouldn't even notice because I my passions lie elsewhere. But working as a software developer is still tolerable because I'm just sitting at a desk, typing on a computer. As long as I don't have meetings...
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Are you above 35?
    - handrous 5y ago
      Not that poster, but I am over 35, and I hate computers. Fucking around with computers without being paid to do it is just about the last thing I'd want to do. They're miserable time-sinks unless you've got a strong need for something only they can do, or you just like tinkering with them for the sake of it. Which, I did enjoy once upon a time, but not anymore, and I don't have any hobbies that really need computers beyond some light use of existing software, and even those are mostly just nice-to-haves. Everything else I might use a computer for that'd require real work to set up handily fails the XKCD software ROI chart.
      - pbourke 5y ago
        I feel lucky that at 44 I still get a thrill when something runs as expected for the first time or when tests go all green. I still enjoy working with software in the general sense and learning new things in my areas of interest. Organizations, however, and the environments that they create (both human and software) are a different story ...
toto444 5y ago
And that's great. High wages means the market signals a shortage of workforce. That more people of lower productivity fill the gap means the market works in a healthy manner.
paganel 5y ago
> For developers who are ~35 and up, almost 100% true I'll come up with one of the few exceptions to the rule, i.e. me. I'm in my very early 40s and I went in it for the money 20+ years ago, I hadn't even played with a computer as a kid or as a teenager for the simple reason that my parents couldn't afford to purchase me one (and I wasn't really thinking of becoming a computer programmer back as a teenager, I found the work boring). Pretty soon though I discovered that I liked this, I even, in a way, avoided a career path that would have brought me into larger companies so into management (I think it's harder to remain a computer programmer in a larger company once you pass a certain age, I can't explain the reason for why that happens). Either way, I'm almost 100% sure that no-one can spend 15-20-30 years in this job if they don't like it, i.e. only for the money alone, at times it can be really draining on one's mental condition.
jjav 5y ago
> For developers who are ~35 and up, almost 100% true, once you get younger than that you’ll find that there are a large and growing minority of people who are very much in it for the money alone without any particular interest or affinity for computing. Just to add, during the dot.com boom there was a brief spike of people coming into software purely due to the hype of riches without much interest in software development. Thankfully the dot.com boom was relatively brief and it crashed hard, so from what I saw then most of those people got disenchanted right away (by the time they graduated the crash was happening) and changed careers. This time the boom has been going on for basically a decade, so it is becoming more common and lasting.
swat535 5y ago
I see nothing wrong with this. Very few people truly have a passion for their work and for most , it's just a means to an end. This has been true for all other "high paying" professions such as law and medicine. One of my best friends is a lawyer and he happened to mention that no one really gets into law because to fulfill some higher purpose.. Further, I don't think it really has an impact on the quality of the work they produce, you don't need a spiritual awakening to build good systems. You just need to be vigilant and gain experience. As an older engineer (is mid thirties old?..) I've grown out of this and now look elsewhere to nourish my need for numinous in things like philosophy, art, music, relationships, etc. When I was younger, I used to naively think my identity was a "Software Engineer"; now looking back I chuckle at that outlook on life. On a final note, I would argue that more people joining our profession is a _good_ thing. It will create more jobs, increase demand and we end up with a stronger workforce. I don't think gatekeeping a field yields to a healthy outcome.
mikestew 5y ago
...once you get younger than that you’ll find that there are a large and growing minority of people who are very much in it for the money alone without any particular interest or affinity for computing That was true 35 years ago, and without the metric butt-ton of money being paid now (though programming has always paid well within my lifetime). I've worked with those folks. The reason you might not see it is because they either left the field they hated, or worse, they stuck around long enough to become managers of what they don't understand. it’s important to realize that we’re not really the professional of child prodigies that it once was. Mmm, I don't know that it ever "was". Ignore the Carmacks, Wozniaks, et. al., of the world and you'll find that most folks holding programming jobs had the standard four year degree (because you were unlikely to get hired in 1985 without one), working on internal LOB apps.
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  Unlikely to get hired? Not in my experence; not in 1985. A healthy fraction of the folks working in Silicon Valley were musicians! Certainly not many were degreed in computer science because very few were back then. So what brought them to Silicon Valley? For a great many, love of the machine.

by dpeck 5y ago

kk6mrp 5y ago

It feels to me like most people no longer find fulfillment in their work, regardless what it is. It really seems like almost everyone is in it for the money and could care less about the lack of craftsmanship.

pradn 5y ago
A lot of that seems like it comes from the company or industries not seeming to care about the worker: bad work environments, precarious jobs, stress, working on something commercially useful but not otherwise meaningful.
cma 5y ago
It is hard to imagine e.g. Google devs are enthusiastic about manipulative ads or blocking parts of Linux from developers in a software lock-in scheme.
Matrixik 5y ago
I liked tinkering with computers all the time before I started working as software engineer. But after over one year of working I started wanting everything to just work so I don't need to do anything with it...

gampleman 5y ago

Perhaps this will paradoxically be a good thing. I have for a long time been wondering if or to what extent are the reports of ageism in the industry well founded. If it turns out that hiring older developers gets you a much higher likelihood of getting someone who cares, this might change matters significantly (assuming of course that there actually is a problem in the first place).

notreallyserio 5y ago
I expect this to change radically as the entry level 6-figure crowd gets older. Speaking for myself, my ability to care about my work is inversely proportional to my retirement account balances, and I want out asap. Software development and the internet in general isn't fun any more and there are things I'd rather do.

v77 5y ago

I'm in my 40's and my graduating comp sci class was the biggest in history at that time because of the money people were making in the first dot com boom.

dpeck 5y ago
There was a bit of a downswing in CS degrees around the first DOTCOM bust, a lot of folks left programs at 2nd tier colleges and moved to adjacent but less “software” and “subject to outsourcing” like industrial engineering, electrical engineering. I didn’t exactly have a broad view at the time, but it seemed like top ~20 Comp Sci programs were largely unaffected and kept growing the whole time.
ryandrake 5y ago
Not sure how it is today, but for me in the mid-90s, there was a lot of interest in software and computer degrees, but the curriculum was sufficiently difficult to filter out the posers. I went to a huge state school, and our first year Comp Sci class was, not exaggerating, an auditorium-sized lecture of 1000+ students dreaming about becoming a Microsoft Millionaire. Most of the students didn't make it through hello_world.c. We also had requirements like Linear Algebra, Matrix Theory, MOSFETs, Linear Systems, and Signal Processing. The electives were all very tough, too. By the time we graduated, there were about 30-40 of us. So, there was a lot of interest, but most didn't actually graduate with the major.

3pt14159 5y ago

That's true, but they also often leave. I've taught three[0] people a little younger than me software that all wanted to do it for the freedom and financial security and two of the three transferred out of software to something else in tech like product management. It really bummed me out too, because it was the two women out of the three. Their lives are still markedly better than before, but I want more women in actual software. [0] Well, more than that, but the others gave up on the first week or two.

MathCodeLove 5y ago
I don't understand this weird fetishism with getting X demographic into software/tech. Naturally I don't think that any demographic should be restricted from entering the field, and everyone should be equally encouraged and provided the same opportunities, but more and more I see these pushes for trying to pump the numbers of specific demographics. If someone wants to join the industry, great. If not, also great. I think that to an extent these movements do more harm than good. Women should absolutely be made aware that tech is a viable career path for them as much as anyone else - yet it seems that as of late there's a sort of societal coercion that mimics that historically seen in gender dominated industries like welding for men or nursing for women.
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
  It’s hard to know if an environment is hostile to you or not if there are no examples of safety. For example I would hesitate to join a magic the gathering group if I didn’t first check that they’re friendly to newbies. Especially because I know magic the gathering can vary in experience and that a group that isn’t friendly is not an outlier. If I think about it this way I can understand why a woman might not want to join a company with no other women engineers; how is she supposed to know she’ll be treated with respect, and won’t be pushed to something like management or product, if there are no examples to go off of? It likely worsens broadly if a woman knows exactly 0 women who are engineers as she grows up and considers a career for herself. She might not know any engineering is a viable path.
  - 5y ago

Mezzie 5y ago

Agreed. I spend a lot of time on TikTok (my main interests tech-wise are HCI, digital discovery, and social computing so it's like catnip) and a LOT of younger people are going into tech for the money. I'm 33 and I started programming in the 90s (I was raised by two geek parents a la Larry Page who were supportive), so I'm sort of in-between the two 'generations'. At age 37 and above, pretty much everybody is either a career switcher (in which case they've considered things that aren't money) or started before developing got big. I say 37 because that was old enough to already be coding and brought INTO the money with job offers in the dot com era. (I had a couple of offers from people who didn't believe I was 11/12, and I knew some people who were 16-19 who were leaving school to take REALLY well paying jobs none of us ever expected.) After that, it was well known that coding could lead to a lot of money, and as the sector continues to grow and other opportunities to escape poverty shrink, it's pretty inevitable that people end up in coding for the money. Especially since that's how we teach them: All the tech courses are about employment, not playing. Kids don't learn tech as a joy or a tool to make their lives better, it's just another corporate hoop.

gonehome 5y ago
I’m 31 and at least in my age bracket most of the people I was in CS with weren’t the money crowd. I’d believe it’s true now (I don’t really know), but it’s likely more recent than the OP thinks.
- Mezzie 5y ago
  Post 2008, I'd say. I was a 2010 graduate, and the change between 'do what you love' and 'College is for MONEY' was like a culture bomb going off.
  - gonehome 5y ago
    I think the real calculus should be do something that interests you, but also consider ROI and if education cost is worth it. Most of the people I know with the worst financial outcomes overpaid to study stuff they didn’t care much about (and isn’t marketable or often even valuable) because they thought it was what they were supposed to do.

ryandvm 5y ago

What I always tell people thinking about a software engineering career is that, yes, it's great money but I strongly advise only doing it if you actually like working with computers. Otherwise it's going to be a nightmare. Working as a software developer without a passion for coding is kind of like doing math homework every day for the rest of your life.

silicon2401 5y ago
> Working as a software developer without a passion for coding is kind of like doing math homework every day for the rest of your life. I disagree. I coded for fun once, as a kid, and have never felt the need to do it again. If I never coded again, I wouldn't even notice because I my passions lie elsewhere. But working as a software developer is still tolerable because I'm just sitting at a desk, typing on a computer. As long as I don't have meetings...
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Are you above 35?
  - handrous 5y ago
    Not that poster, but I am over 35, and I hate computers. Fucking around with computers without being paid to do it is just about the last thing I'd want to do. They're miserable time-sinks unless you've got a strong need for something only they can do, or you just like tinkering with them for the sake of it. Which, I did enjoy once upon a time, but not anymore, and I don't have any hobbies that really need computers beyond some light use of existing software, and even those are mostly just nice-to-haves. Everything else I might use a computer for that'd require real work to set up handily fails the XKCD software ROI chart.
    - pbourke 5y ago
      I feel lucky that at 44 I still get a thrill when something runs as expected for the first time or when tests go all green. I still enjoy working with software in the general sense and learning new things in my areas of interest. Organizations, however, and the environments that they create (both human and software) are a different story ...

toto444 5y ago

And that's great. High wages means the market signals a shortage of workforce. That more people of lower productivity fill the gap means the market works in a healthy manner.

paganel 5y ago

> For developers who are ~35 and up, almost 100% true I'll come up with one of the few exceptions to the rule, i.e. me. I'm in my very early 40s and I went in it for the money 20+ years ago, I hadn't even played with a computer as a kid or as a teenager for the simple reason that my parents couldn't afford to purchase me one (and I wasn't really thinking of becoming a computer programmer back as a teenager, I found the work boring). Pretty soon though I discovered that I liked this, I even, in a way, avoided a career path that would have brought me into larger companies so into management (I think it's harder to remain a computer programmer in a larger company once you pass a certain age, I can't explain the reason for why that happens). Either way, I'm almost 100% sure that no-one can spend 15-20-30 years in this job if they don't like it, i.e. only for the money alone, at times it can be really draining on one's mental condition.

jjav 5y ago

> For developers who are ~35 and up, almost 100% true, once you get younger than that you’ll find that there are a large and growing minority of people who are very much in it for the money alone without any particular interest or affinity for computing. Just to add, during the dot.com boom there was a brief spike of people coming into software purely due to the hype of riches without much interest in software development. Thankfully the dot.com boom was relatively brief and it crashed hard, so from what I saw then most of those people got disenchanted right away (by the time they graduated the crash was happening) and changed careers. This time the boom has been going on for basically a decade, so it is becoming more common and lasting.

swat535 5y ago

I see nothing wrong with this. Very few people truly have a passion for their work and for most , it's just a means to an end. This has been true for all other "high paying" professions such as law and medicine. One of my best friends is a lawyer and he happened to mention that no one really gets into law because to fulfill some higher purpose.. Further, I don't think it really has an impact on the quality of the work they produce, you don't need a spiritual awakening to build good systems. You just need to be vigilant and gain experience. As an older engineer (is mid thirties old?..) I've grown out of this and now look elsewhere to nourish my need for numinous in things like philosophy, art, music, relationships, etc. When I was younger, I used to naively think my identity was a "Software Engineer"; now looking back I chuckle at that outlook on life. On a final note, I would argue that more people joining our profession is a _good_ thing. It will create more jobs, increase demand and we end up with a stronger workforce. I don't think gatekeeping a field yields to a healthy outcome.

mikestew 5y ago

...once you get younger than that you’ll find that there are a large and growing minority of people who are very much in it for the money alone without any particular interest or affinity for computing That was true 35 years ago, and without the metric butt-ton of money being paid now (though programming has always paid well within my lifetime). I've worked with those folks. The reason you might not see it is because they either left the field they hated, or worse, they stuck around long enough to become managers of what they don't understand. it’s important to realize that we’re not really the professional of child prodigies that it once was. Mmm, I don't know that it ever "was". Ignore the Carmacks, Wozniaks, et. al., of the world and you'll find that most folks holding programming jobs had the standard four year degree (because you were unlikely to get hired in 1985 without one), working on internal LOB apps.

JoeAltmaier 5y ago
Unlikely to get hired? Not in my experence; not in 1985. A healthy fraction of the folks working in Silicon Valley were musicians! Certainly not many were degreed in computer science because very few were back then. So what brought them to Silicon Valley? For a great many, love of the machine.