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From a lorry driver to Ruby on rails developer at 38
- game_the0ry 3y ago> I decided to join Flatiron School. If you couldn't secure a job after completing their course, you didn't have to pay them anything. This is key. I went to a boot camp as well, one of the ones that required an admissions interview, which was legit difficult for a newbie. The boot camp model is actually very good if implemented well. Of course, there is corruption and grifting, and a lot of innocent people regrettebly lost money. So if you are considering a boot camp, do one that is difficult to get into and has an income share agreement.[1] [1] Income share agreements can be sketchy too. Sometimes, if you get a job that is not related to tech (retail job, for example), they will ask you to pay back.
- macintux 3y agoThe recent discussion around BloomTech/Lambda School makes me very wary about income share agreements. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067939
- citizenpaul 3y ago> Income share agreements can be sketchy too My exp with things like this is they tend to overwhelmingly be highly exploitive and target vulnerable people. The biggest clue is that almost none of these types of places will publicly provide whatever the arrangement is. You usually have to jump through hours of hoops to even find out the details because they don't want the information getting out due to what I just wrote. On the other side its a really quick filter. Can you send me the details now? Not until you come to our onsite 4hr (brainwashing)meeting, Nope! moving on.
- ornornor 3y ago> On the other side its a really quick filter. Can you send me the details now? Not until you come to our onsite 4hr (brainwashing)meeting, Nope! moving on. Wait until the graduates discover what interviewing is like in tech…
- kgf1980 3y agoI went the opposite way (in the UK) and moved from development (mainly C#) to lorry driving (everything from 12T rigids to 44T artics) however in my free time I’m enjoying developing (some RoR, some Golang) more than when I was paid to do it. Although I’m working more hours (average 50-52 hours a week compared to 38-40), I’m also much better compensated doing HGV driving than I ever was as a developer (although that may reflect more on my skills/level as a developer than anything else)
- gcbirzan 3y agoIronically, in an industry that highly regulates working times...
- kgf1980 3y agoYes, work is covered under both the Working Time Directive (which I’ve opted out of the night work limit and the 48hr working week) and the EU Drivers Hours rules - work are hot on infringements for exceeding working hours but more so on breaches of driving hours or insufficient rest hours.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoI am consistently enjoying myself more when doing coding side projects, than anything at work. I think that's just ... sort of normal when your profession and your hobby are the same thing - when you don't have any boss except yourself.
- kgf1980 3y agoI think for me it’s not having a time pressure - if it takes me 2 weeks spending 2 hours a day to implement something there’s no issue when it’s just projects for myself (I’ve basically written a PWA for tracking my pay, hours, rest time etc which I use every day, and implement a new feature I decide would be useful when it comes up, so kind of the ultimate dog-fooding)
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- RomanPushkin 3y ago[flagged]
- foobarbaz321 3y ago[dead]
- rekoros 3y agoSometimes I wonder what kind of a world we'd be living in if places like Flatiron School and the various bootcamps taught Elixir instead of Ruby. Also, "lorry" is such a great word, too bad there's no use for it in the US.
- sosodev 3y agoMy guess is that world would be indistinguishable from ours. There is nothing wrong with Ruby.
- rekoros 3y agoElixir wouldn't exist without Ruby, so I have nothing but gratitude. My question angles more toward learning functional programming first, and I doubt it'll ever happen at bootcamps (though - my understanding is that's exactly what happens at Berkeley/MIT with Lisp/Scheme in CS101 (I'd argue with decent results)) - so it's very much a hypothetical.
- ativzzz 3y ago> I'd argue with decent results Is it decent results because of functional programming? Or decent results because those colleges select for the people who generally have the most intellectual aptitude and you could have them write Cobol on tape for CS101 and they'd still be great
- rekoros 3y agoI don’t know, but I doubt that they’re so smart that they’re the only ones who “deserve”, somehow, to be blessed with functional CS101. I heard that it’s a special form of torture, since those CS programs must be hard, but I don’t really buy it.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoWell, it's Open Courseware, so you can find out for yourself if you're so inclined.
- boguscoder 3y agoYou say Lorry and post a picture with left sided wheel, hmmm But seriously, great story, way too many people dont have courage/confidence/financial backup for such a large career shift
- kwhitefoot 3y agoIt's still a lorry.
- skort 3y agoIt's great to see people being able to pivot their careers later in life. That said, > folks overcoming challenges just to be on the same playground as everyone else This has the same energy as "Kids raise money to buy classmate a wheelchair" news articles, where sure it makes you feel good to see people doing good in the world, but completely ignores that the system we live in keeps certain people down on purpose.
- akira2501 3y ago> keeps certain people down on purpose. That's what makes it so pernicious. No one is being targeted and being kept down "on purpose." It's a failure to correctly orient priorities and to see that the balance of tax money is spent on improving individual citizens lives and outcomes. > It's great to see people being able to pivot their careers later in life. It'd be even better if we just paid them what they were worth so they didn't have to put a bunch of effort into moving sideways across the labor market like this.
- 77pt77 3y ago> the system we live in keeps certain people down on purpose. That's the main objective of the education system. To teach you that. If you are supposed to be "kept down" succeeding or god forbid excelling will be met with either resistance or extreme punishment. Sometimes covertly but many time overtly behind closed doors and with small groups of people.
- jmkni 3y agoI strongly object to 38 being later in life
- downrightmike 3y agoOver half the average lifespan for the USA average and male, slightly under if female.
- jstummbillig 3y agoUnless you want to jump from "early" to "late", that puts 38 decidedly in the middle.
- highwayman47 3y agome being almost 38 thinking it's not that old
- jarsin 3y agoAs you get older you begin to realize that age obsession is like gossip. It's for the low IQ folks. You're really not old until you reach 80's where stuff like cognitive decline and frailty are more likely to start showing up. I use to think 40's was old when i was younger, but if you think about it you have another 40 some odd years until your old. Thats way longer than most companies, marriages, careers etc last.
- tiptup300 3y agomuch like iq obsession, right?
- askonomm 3y ago80 is old? Where I'm from (Northern Europe) 80 is dead, not old. So given that you can't be old when you are already dead, old here is anywhere 60+, with 70+ being the last few years you have left (average life expetency is 76).
- seszett 3y ago> average life expetency is 76 Unless your Northern Europe is Kaliningrad or somewhere else in Russia, 76 is the average life expectancy for men and at birth (that's in the Baltics, the rest of Northern Europe has higher life expectancy than that at birth). Life expectancy is much higher than that at 50 or 60, and also higher for women. Generally, in the Northern and Western Europe I know, people with a "normal" life without special health problems don't seem very old at 60 or 70, and they expect to live to around 80 or more. Even in the US which is notorious for low life expectancy among OECD nations, the average age of death (from a quick Google search) seems to be 85[0]. [0]https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-45a57c5080b55f9bd53137dff6742aa0-pjlq https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-45a57c5080b55f9bd5313... (no source, date, or anything for this data)
- koinedad 3y agoAre Ruby on Rails positions still pretty popular?
- iimblack 3y agoIn my job search for remote USA roles it seems a little less popular than Django just bolstered by the GitHub and Shopify postings. Node, dotnet, go, and Java all seem more popular.
- Lio 3y agoYes, it's popular enough that you can find work pretty easily. There's less openings than for JS, Java or C# but then there are less Ruby developers. That's the same as it ever was.
- zdragnar 3y agoTrying to hire for it has been deeply unpleasant. Very few people actually have the experience they claim to have, and asking them basic programming questions that any senior developer should be able to talk about has roughly 80% of the candidates going straight to chatgpt and pretending the answer is theirs. I'm not talking leetcode stuff either, more like "what is polymorphism" or "what is refactoring". Maybe the whole industry has gone that way... but the smaller talent pool makes it a lot more obvious. Were it up to me, we would be using something else where I work, and not just because of the smaller talent pool (although that's probably the biggest reason). Many of the "delightful" and time saving things about rails either turn out to have relatively insignificant impacts for complex applications, or turn into sharp edges that slow us down.
- 1123581321 3y agoFor experienced developers, it helps a lot to know the names of companies that use Rails. Every time you see an unfamiliar company, learn a bit about how they used Rails, through the interview, if nothing else is available. We're to the point where we can ask nearly anyone fairly specific questions about their contributions depending on the history we see on the resume. (I am not saying to avoid talking to people if you don't recognize the company.)
- Havoc 3y agoWouldn’t mind a crack at programming but coming from finance world the salary math isn’t quite as easy as lorry driver. I’d need to land something pretty senior which isn’t credible
- datascienced 3y agoThe man in the article took a 66% paycut.
- tossandthrow 3y agoI have no idea about the salary level for lorry drivers, but a small curiosity: It is funny to read these treads, and then reading in another HN post that a guy was able to buy his first home driving laundry truck - and how his contemporary peers seemed to be jealous that they were not able to do such. It indeed seems like being a lorry driver is the easiest way to get started on the suburban life.
- zarzavat 3y agoThat low variance is double-edged. There is a cap to being a lorry driver, whereas for a developer you can make anything from under minimum wage to billions of dollars. Being a developer also has a higher status, which I don’t personally care about but I have found to be useful in life.
- badpun 3y agoYou can only make billions as developer if you start a company. Then, you're no longer a developer, but rather a business owner and operator - something that a lorry driver can do as well. Also, there's probably larger chance of success in starting a company in logistics than in software.
- intelVISA 3y agoPlus a failed dev can pivot to tech grifter, which is a useful fallback for many
- pratclot 3y ago[flagged]
- software_writer 3y agoAuthor of the original post here. I have no affiliation with either the Flatiron bootcamp, nor the SuperByte company. But I know Pedro and he (and his story) is real. If you take a quick look at the rest of my blog, you'll quickly know that this was neither an ad for any bootcamp or company, nor an attempt to 'manipulate tech news readers'.
- mattmaroon 3y ago2024: the year where you write a touching piece about someone successfully implementing a late in life career change and the top comment accuses you of being a spammer. Only way it could be better is if he said it was all generated by ChatGPT. The internet has made us all so cynical.
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago... To lorry driver at 40? The commentary on ageism in our profession that 38 is considered ancient to pick up this profession and this is like a freak show exhibit?
- zxspectrum1982 3y agoI used to be a KDE developer. We had some interesting cases of community members who went into IT: a soprano turned community manager, a grandmother turned developer because she wanted to enhance some games for her grandchildren, etc. Good times.