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Personally, when I started as a fresh young grad happy to put in 2x hours for 0.5x pay I would look at some of the older guys and say 'I never want to end up li
by brc 18y ago
Personally, when I started as a fresh young grad happy to put in 2x hours for 0.5x pay I would look at some of the older guys and say 'I never want to end up like that'. I still feel that way. 'like that' refers to a bitter, cynical attitude born of two decades in the cube farm, navigating endless rounds of layoffs, restructuring, business-management fads and other nasties.
The key is to keep your skills up to date and avoid the sticky-trap that is management roles. If you drift into hands-off management, the meetings-and-flowcharts current will swiftly take you away from the technical shoreline and you won't be able to get back. It takes a conscious effort to stay a technical person in most companies, and you'd better be prepared to be looked down upon from other people who go into management roles.
Of the people I started working with as fellow grads, I'd say that less than 10% are still actively writing software of any kind. I nearly gave it up several times, but I'm glad I've stuck with it, because you can be so much more creative in code than with management.
- myth_drannon 18y agoBut the point is that you never sure what is the next thing the management will decide to use . Sure if you young you can spend your lonely nights and weekend hacking Clojure or Scala but in the end of day your boss will decide on retarded Java framework bla bla technology and all you hours were just for nothing. And anyways when you have friends,girlfriend/wife and kids it becomes very difficult to spend enough time jumping from one cool tech to another. Some of my non-comp-sci friends and some programmer friends say that software development is like prostitution the older you get the less money you make until you are discarded , unlike for example accountant who starts low but steadily reaches some status . All of these "rockstars" and start-up founders can be imagined as elite prostitutes who just look better and do it better for more money of course, can retire early and may be score a picture on tabloid with some politician and then make a million bucks (EXPOSURE). In the end we are just slaves of capitalist system whatever we admit it or not ( most of the time our brainwashing won't allow us to do it)
- tsbardella 18y agoawesome post! for use of "prostitution" and "capitalism"
- brc 18y agoThe silent point I was getting at was not to stay in dead end jobs. Keeping your skills up to date doesn't mean learning new tech in your spare time while pounding out COBOL at your workplace : it means making sure the projects and technologies you're working on are current and on trend with the future. If this means moving jobs every couple of years, then do it. If it means leaving the cube farm and starting out on your own, even better.