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That's because programming is an entry level job. No, I'm not trolling: I'm quite serious about that. Engineering has almost always been an entry level job; co

• kuni-toko-tachi 12y ago
  I agree with this 100%. Good engineers are problem solvers, and as you grow older, you gain the wisdom that relative to the value that you bring to a business, the compensation will never match. It's unfortunate when you see younger software engineers who are incredibly smart technically and dedicated, but don't apply those same problem solving skills to their career. They become exploitable, and wind up making other people rich off their hard work.
  • exelius 12y ago
    Exactly. Once you get older, you start to realize that there are business frameworks that work just like software frameworks! An MBA and a CS degree are a powerful combination. In fact, if there were more engineers with MBAs, I doubt the MBA would have a reputation for being somewhat clueless about practical matters.
    • kuni-toko-tachi 12y ago
      Describing jobs as for a "Javascript Ninja" and offering perks like free Mountain Dew illustrate a distinct targeting of younger people, and are obvious ploys to trade trinkets to engineers in exchange for their work which generates actual value which is skimmed out of their pockets.
    • youngtaff 12y ago
      I've got an MBA and a HND in CS (slightly lower than a degree) and it makes for an interesting combination. Some days I'll sit down and work with other devs on code even write them some examples to illustrate what I want, and then the next I might be talking to senior business people from our customers. I didn't do my MBA until I was in my 30s and had already been a CTO, biggest thing I got from it was the ability to think differently - literally turn an argument around to see it from the other side, and a lot of friends who done various masters degrees say similar things
• thewarrior 12y ago
  Your comment makes an interest contrast with edw519s which is the most upvoted one in this thread.
  • exelius 12y ago
    I think we're both right. He seems to have gone the independent contractor route - which is a perfectly legitimate career path for a rock star developer who wants freedom. It's also incredibly lucrative - independent contractors can easily make double what someone working at a company can while charging half of what contractors from professional services firms do. But again, there's only so much market demand for that; and I would have trouble believing that more than 10% of his peer group at age 30 went that way. This is more typical to what I've seen: someone started out as a developer writing back-end code, but noticed that it was more difficult to deploy the code consistently than it was to write. So they started helping out the tech ops team with that, until it became most of their job. Then the tech ops manager quits, and the company needs a replacement. The back-end developer was doing the job anyway; and it's a pay raise, so why not. Now they notice that the real reason it's so hard to deploy back-end code is because the servers are never patched, so they work on a process solution to make sure everything is consistent. The work is still technical in nature, but it's becoming much more process-oriented. Maintaining a technical skillset is hard. Not many people have the energy to keep it up throughout their 30s when they're having children, taking care of sick parents, etc. So you'll see a lot of people gradually move to the business side - which isn't hard to do when you have an engineering mindset that helps you solve hard problems. It's also often a pay raise anyway.
• ep103 12y ago
  Couldn't you say this about every industry though? I feel like I could have read the exact same post, with the word engineer literally substituted for any other job name, and it'd still read the same. Is that a fair assessment, or is my experience just limited?
  • Anderkent 12y ago
    Hm, I don't think it's strictly every job, but it's a common syndrome. Say for example a surgeon - in my mental model he moves from being an assistant during ops to leading op teams or research. I might have a completely wrong model how surgeon careers progress, though :P But in general it makes sense for experienced people to move into managerial roles where they can leverage their knowledge on a meta level, rather than purely object level work.
    • judk 12y ago
      A surgeon isn't even ready to be the lead hand-on surgeon in am operation until ay east age 30, after years of apprenticeship.
    • walshemj 12y ago
      Been done read up about the Chief Programmer Team model which was doing software dev using the same paradigm as a surgical team.
• GFischer 12y ago
  Well, that is one of the two branches you can take, and probably the most financially sound one (plus it can be rewarding if you like that kind of thing). The other is to become a specialist (as in, an expert in something). It's not as common, and most companies don't offer a dual track (and when they do, it can be a trap) The one thing you don't want to take is to get stuck (the "one year's experience 30 times" edw talks about), and I see lots of people getting stuck. I'm kind of stuck myself but I think I'll be able to transition into business soon.
• artmageddon 12y ago
  > I saw the game for what it was early and got out of engineering before I hit 30. What did you jump into afterward?
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • exelius 12y ago
    I went and got an MBA and jumped into consulting. Because I worked for a number of startups before that, my niche started out being helping big companies foster innovation internally. At this point, I'm more on the marketing/product side of the equation, which is extremely interesting in my mind. You really need a tech background to do product for anything but retail goods these days anyway; and in the media products space I work in, it's almost mandatory. Net result is I took on a bunch of debt to go back to school but my salary is much higher now and I have a lot more control over my destiny. I don't regret it for a second.
    • porker 12y ago
      > I'm more on the marketing/product side of the equation, which is extremely interesting in my mind. You really need a tech background to do product for In this context, what would you define as 'product'? I'm curious as I hear it mentioned and it sounds fun, but conjours up mental images of inventing the next Gilette razor.
      • exelius 12y ago
        It can be :) What you're talking about is the typical CPG (consumer packaged goods) model: a product manager would be responsible for selling that product, identifying a market, etc. The work isn't really all that different, but CPGs don't usually require much deep knowledge. IMO, product in tech companies is a much more exciting role because you get your hands dirty with creating the product. Let's say I'm the product manager for Facebook's News Feed. I would work with designers, developers and marketing folks to determine the features of the product. For example, I could say "Hmm, let's show more ads to people between the ages of 18 and 29 than we show to people between 13 and 18". We would test the hypothesis either through focus groups or A/B testing and determine if users are like/hate/neutral on it, and if they're like/neutral and it provides more money, it's now a feature in the mainline product. The role is slightly different at different companies (product managers at Google are expected to write a little code and lead engineering teams, for example) but the core tenet of the job is answering the question of "What should the product be?" Product management is the central role at any startup for the first few years. A good product manager is worth their weight in gold. A great product manager can make you billions. For me, it's the perfect mix of creative, technical and business disciplines. You have to have the vision to see what the product can be, the technical chops to know how to get it done, and the business sense to know what levers you should be pulling at any given time.
• InclinedPlane 12y ago
  There is a common trope floating around which says that some developers are 10x more productive than others. This has led to a lot of questioning of whether or not that is actually true in practice, what it means, whether it's possible to become a "10x" developer, and so on. The truth is that it's looking at the problem in the wrong way because it relies on the underlying assumption that development is like factory work, and somehow cranking out more code, or whatever measure you want for productivity, is more valuable. The truth is actually far more extreme. Some developers are orders of magnitude more productive than others. The work they do is simply that much better and more valuable. This should be unquestionably true as there are several examples of very, very small development teams (sub 5 person sized) who have churned out incredibly valuable products. You can chalk some of that up to luck, especially in the case of games, but not all of it. The fact is, building software well, building software that works, that does something valuable for users, that is free of major defects, that is designed in a way so that it can be maintained and extended easily, and so on, those things are not just about how many lines or function points a developer creates. But those things can add millions or even billions to the value of the end-product, and they can be done just by one person. Software is not factory work, nor is it strictly just engineering. The most important part of software development is a creative, artistic endeavor. And like all works of creativity the end result has an enormously wide variation in quality and value. If you're doing very "shallow" software development (e.g. pumping out CRUD apps or CMS backed sites or what-have-you) then years of experience may not do a whole lot for you. If you have the opportunity to take on meatier dev work then experience is more than just learning some tricks and being knowledgeable in the frameworks and toolsets of the day, it's about deep skills. About how build things well, and right. How to communicate effectively. How to write truly self-documenting code. How to wrangle the complexity of the problem space and the implementation space while mediating for the user in a way that makes sense to them. And so on. Some devs in some jobs just keep adding to their skilsets as time goes on.
  • abc_lisper 12y ago
    :) I almost thought you were saying there were no 10x developers. I agree with you 100%
  • Too 12y ago