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My motivational imperative is to create useful technology. But I'm curious what faster ways you know. Could you elaborate?

by X4 14y ago

fusiongyro 14y ago
Working in finance comes to mind. A job on Wall St. will easily pay 3-4x what other parts of industry will, and there will be yearly performance bonuses too, which are getting rare elsewhere. There are a number of certifications you can get from the insurance industry. A programmer with actuarial certifications can easily command 150K/year. Having certain unpleasant skills will also put you in high demand. Cobol, for instance, or Oracle. Oracle has a lot of certifications they offer, but in practice you'll probably be expected to have 5-10 years of experience too, so it's a hard market to break into. Once you're there, it would be surprising if you were offered less than 90K, and that would be pretty far on the low end. This industry is like every other: there are "fun jobs" everybody wants, like being a front-end developer at a startup in San Francisco, or being a game programmer. Because the supply of jobs is low compared to the demand for them, you can expect to be paid less and treated badly. If you want to make a lot of money, you should run in the opposite direction, towards boring unpleasant jobs that nobody seems to want: boring, high pressure jobs in big cities that are not technology hubs.
- X4 14y ago
  I totally understand you. Thank you for your substancial comment. Bonus: My nerd friends doing their Msc. atm. tell me "get a life" when they see what I do in my "free time". Many people enjoy boring stuff when they know that the boring stuff they learn can produce more boring stuff. Prime example: "Computers"
  - fusiongyro 14y ago
    Oh, I agree--I got very into databases, which most of my coworkers regard as "boring." But I found that there is considerable beauty in SQL, normalization is an art form, and performance tuning is tinkering that can go on forever. So I enjoy them quite a bit while most developers consider them nothing more than a dull "persistent store." All of the things I mentioned conceal gems like these within them. But before you can appreciate a concealed gem, you have to learn what gems look like and how to mine them, and except for gaming and web front-ends it does not happen automatically.
    - X4 14y ago
      Your coworkers were wrong, you were right (in the decision to explore it). Databases produce lots of more "boring" problems that need to be solved with even more boring techniques. The conclusion is that Databases are in fact a really interesting and endless field of research. hmm, dunno. I'm good at sysadmin stuff, software-development, webdev and graphic-design.

My motivational imperative is to create useful technology. But I'm curious what faster ways you know. Could you elaborate?

by X4 14y ago

My motivational imperative is to create useful technology. But I'm curious what faster ways you know. Could you elaborate?

fusiongyro 14y ago

Working in finance comes to mind. A job on Wall St. will easily pay 3-4x what other parts of industry will, and there will be yearly performance bonuses too, which are getting rare elsewhere. There are a number of certifications you can get from the insurance industry. A programmer with actuarial certifications can easily command 150K/year. Having certain unpleasant skills will also put you in high demand. Cobol, for instance, or Oracle. Oracle has a lot of certifications they offer, but in practice you'll probably be expected to have 5-10 years of experience too, so it's a hard market to break into. Once you're there, it would be surprising if you were offered less than 90K, and that would be pretty far on the low end. This industry is like every other: there are "fun jobs" everybody wants, like being a front-end developer at a startup in San Francisco, or being a game programmer. Because the supply of jobs is low compared to the demand for them, you can expect to be paid less and treated badly. If you want to make a lot of money, you should run in the opposite direction, towards boring unpleasant jobs that nobody seems to want: boring, high pressure jobs in big cities that are not technology hubs.

X4 14y ago
I totally understand you. Thank you for your substancial comment. Bonus: My nerd friends doing their Msc. atm. tell me "get a life" when they see what I do in my "free time". Many people enjoy boring stuff when they know that the boring stuff they learn can produce more boring stuff. Prime example: "Computers"
- fusiongyro 14y ago
  Oh, I agree--I got very into databases, which most of my coworkers regard as "boring." But I found that there is considerable beauty in SQL, normalization is an art form, and performance tuning is tinkering that can go on forever. So I enjoy them quite a bit while most developers consider them nothing more than a dull "persistent store." All of the things I mentioned conceal gems like these within them. But before you can appreciate a concealed gem, you have to learn what gems look like and how to mine them, and except for gaming and web front-ends it does not happen automatically.
  - X4 14y ago
    Your coworkers were wrong, you were right (in the decision to explore it). Databases produce lots of more "boring" problems that need to be solved with even more boring techniques. The conclusion is that Databases are in fact a really interesting and endless field of research. hmm, dunno. I'm good at sysadmin stuff, software-development, webdev and graphic-design.