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As an MIT student... should I not become a programmer? I do feel like I'm nearing the peak of my programming ability, and now would be the time to switch to a f

As an MIT student... should I not become a programmer? I do feel like I'm nearing the peak of my programming ability, and now would be the time to switch to a field with more "lock-in". What would that field be? Medicine? Mechanical engineering? Consultancy?

brlewis 11y ago
As an MIT alumnus at age 47, here's my advice: If you love programming, keep programming. If you don't love it, do something else.
- reuven 11y ago
  This 44-year-old alumnus concurs. At the same time, I've been doing more and more training, and less and less day-to-day development, over the last few years. Not only do I enjoy it, but I find that my long-term perspective and experience helps me to explain things to the younger and less experienced developers. That said, it's pretty amazing to see what today's kids have done before they've even finished their first college degree. It's a bit intimidating... until I demonstrate that I can still debug things faster than they can. :-)
  - danielweber 11y ago
    I'll pile on, too. Professor Robert Rose had some great advice for me as a freshman: as an MIT student, you can probably succeed at whatever you want, enough to enjoy life. So pick a field that gives you personal satisfaction. Money is valuable and ego-boosting, but when you hit your 30s you will realize that enjoying your workday is much more important than maximizing your paycheck. (But there are also easy ways to increase your paycheck. If you can become better than a potted plant[1] at negotiating, you can boost your salary.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3289750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3289750
    - hga 11y ago
      All tenured MIT professors must be taken with a grain of salt on career advice. They got tenure by being #1 or #2 in their sub-field, as well as a number of other things like being adequate teachers, so the selection bias is extremely strong. In general Professor Rose is generally right, but there are a lot of exceptions, and he's also much older than us, his experiences might not hold for the America/world of today and the future.
sokoloff 11y ago
If you love programming and are good at it, it is the best field there is, bar none. You'd be a fool to turn away from it for a lifetime grind with epsilon better prospects. I'd do my job for half what I get paid; I just don't have to. As for nearing the peak of your ability (assuming typical undergraduate age and experience): BWAHAHAHA! You'll be even better than you are now in 5 years, and again 5 years after that. Only then might you consider that you're near the asymptote. These will be "not small" qualitative differences, in my prediction. Come back and read this 5 and 10 years from, please. :) (context: MIT '93; I just started my 45th orbit of our star.)
- sanoli 11y ago
  > If you love programming and are good at it, it is the best field there is. I read this and thought, he's right. Then I thought, this is actually true of pretty much any activity. Hadn't thought of it this way.
  - Chinjut 11y ago
    Yup. Hacker News is full of silly "programming exceptionalism", but programming is not all that fundamentally different from any other vocation. Go to a site for, say, doctors, and find people singing many of the same paeans to medicine that are here presented as specific to software engineering. People in many lines of work think that their field is the one thing truly worth doing.
    - gohrt 11y ago
      I love baseball and I'm good at it, but it will never pay my bills. I am on a minor league team and I program to pay the bills.
      - enraged_camel 11y ago
        That's probably because sports can't really be considered vocations except by those who play them professionally. Minor leagues aren't really professional level.
codingdave 11y ago
A student feeling like they are nearing their peak of ability is more likely to just be reaching the point that, 10 years from now, you will consider to be simply a base level of competency.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  Seconded, especially with regards to skills at working in team structures, with things like version control.
  - SamReidHughes 11y ago
    Version control? That's, like, not the hard part.
    - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
      Well, I'm assuming that someone can learn all the other parts on their own, whereas the best practices surrounding versioning, patch management, code review, etc are things you really only learn by working on a large team (usually in a real job).
    - danielweber 11y ago
      MIT is theory-heavy and practice-light. I didn't learn databases or professional languages or version control in any of my classes.
      - peter_l_downs 11y ago
        I think the idea is that you can learn things like that pretty easily on your own, especially once you've had experience learning "harder" things in classes.
hikz 11y ago
I do feel like I'm nearing the peak of my programming ability I'm very interested in what kind of projects you have done that made you feel like that. Sounds very interesting.
- mcguire 11y ago
  hikz, please stop dripping sarcasm on my desk. It's going to make my popcorn soggy.
hga 11y ago
As a 54 year old alum: Unless you've been seriously programming for a number of years, with a fair amount of that in teams, including face to face ones, you're probably not nearing your peak. I'd suggest reading The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master (http://www.amazon.com/The-Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman-Master/dp/020161622X http://www.amazon.com/The-Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman-Ma...) and judge where you are in the range from journeyman to master. If you're looking for "lock-in", i.e. be easily employable past your ability to fake looking under 35, I'd suggest getting a job with a serious security clearance, which can be a trick, or specialize in one of the fields that respects grey hairs like embedded (but only so much depending on the sub-field, e.g. Detroit car companies at least in times past recruited heavily from Course 6 because they too got rid of their older EEs and programmers). If you goal is to really work for yourself, and you think you can eventually bill at a rate 5-6 times the income you want to receive---maybe talk to some professors who make a lot of money on their one day a week dedicated to that, albeit they do it with MIT Professor on the CV---yes, that's a very good way to go. But hard for most people. See e.g. this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9499561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9499561 which points out you have to compete on quality, not price, and a couple of HN contributors who've written a lot about that. Medicine: in a county, or the developed "West", where people by and large don't directly pay for their own medical care, and those who do pay are looking at a rapidly graying population, well, it's a field you ought to run screaming from, unless it's your calling. Don't know about MechE and so on, in general you need to talk to older engineers, the people who run the department, professors, etc., of course adjusting for selection bias. If you haven't already identified a calling, well, you have a lot of options, especially if you're strong at math. Especially before the 2008 crash, a lot of EE strong and therefore math strong EECS graduates would get initial jobs in finance with their proven math chops, which if they were smart got them in a good financial position to do something they really wanted to do later.

brlewis 11y ago

As an MIT alumnus at age 47, here's my advice: If you love programming, keep programming. If you don't love it, do something else.

reuven 11y ago
This 44-year-old alumnus concurs. At the same time, I've been doing more and more training, and less and less day-to-day development, over the last few years. Not only do I enjoy it, but I find that my long-term perspective and experience helps me to explain things to the younger and less experienced developers. That said, it's pretty amazing to see what today's kids have done before they've even finished their first college degree. It's a bit intimidating... until I demonstrate that I can still debug things faster than they can. :-)
- danielweber 11y ago
  I'll pile on, too. Professor Robert Rose had some great advice for me as a freshman: as an MIT student, you can probably succeed at whatever you want, enough to enjoy life. So pick a field that gives you personal satisfaction. Money is valuable and ego-boosting, but when you hit your 30s you will realize that enjoying your workday is much more important than maximizing your paycheck. (But there are also easy ways to increase your paycheck. If you can become better than a potted plant[1] at negotiating, you can boost your salary.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3289750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3289750
  - hga 11y ago
    All tenured MIT professors must be taken with a grain of salt on career advice. They got tenure by being #1 or #2 in their sub-field, as well as a number of other things like being adequate teachers, so the selection bias is extremely strong. In general Professor Rose is generally right, but there are a lot of exceptions, and he's also much older than us, his experiences might not hold for the America/world of today and the future.

sokoloff 11y ago

If you love programming and are good at it, it is the best field there is, bar none. You'd be a fool to turn away from it for a lifetime grind with epsilon better prospects. I'd do my job for half what I get paid; I just don't have to. As for nearing the peak of your ability (assuming typical undergraduate age and experience): BWAHAHAHA! You'll be even better than you are now in 5 years, and again 5 years after that. Only then might you consider that you're near the asymptote. These will be "not small" qualitative differences, in my prediction. Come back and read this 5 and 10 years from, please. :) (context: MIT '93; I just started my 45th orbit of our star.)

sanoli 11y ago
> If you love programming and are good at it, it is the best field there is. I read this and thought, he's right. Then I thought, this is actually true of pretty much any activity. Hadn't thought of it this way.
- Chinjut 11y ago
  Yup. Hacker News is full of silly "programming exceptionalism", but programming is not all that fundamentally different from any other vocation. Go to a site for, say, doctors, and find people singing many of the same paeans to medicine that are here presented as specific to software engineering. People in many lines of work think that their field is the one thing truly worth doing.
  - gohrt 11y ago
    I love baseball and I'm good at it, but it will never pay my bills. I am on a minor league team and I program to pay the bills.
    - enraged_camel 11y ago
      That's probably because sports can't really be considered vocations except by those who play them professionally. Minor leagues aren't really professional level.

codingdave 11y ago

A student feeling like they are nearing their peak of ability is more likely to just be reaching the point that, 10 years from now, you will consider to be simply a base level of competency.

eli_gottlieb 11y ago
Seconded, especially with regards to skills at working in team structures, with things like version control.
- SamReidHughes 11y ago
  Version control? That's, like, not the hard part.
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    Well, I'm assuming that someone can learn all the other parts on their own, whereas the best practices surrounding versioning, patch management, code review, etc are things you really only learn by working on a large team (usually in a real job).
  - danielweber 11y ago
    MIT is theory-heavy and practice-light. I didn't learn databases or professional languages or version control in any of my classes.
    - peter_l_downs 11y ago
      I think the idea is that you can learn things like that pretty easily on your own, especially once you've had experience learning "harder" things in classes.

hikz 11y ago

I do feel like I'm nearing the peak of my programming ability I'm very interested in what kind of projects you have done that made you feel like that. Sounds very interesting.

mcguire 11y ago
hikz, please stop dripping sarcasm on my desk. It's going to make my popcorn soggy.

hga 11y ago

As a 54 year old alum: Unless you've been seriously programming for a number of years, with a fair amount of that in teams, including face to face ones, you're probably not nearing your peak. I'd suggest reading The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master (http://www.amazon.com/The-Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman-Master/dp/020161622X http://www.amazon.com/The-Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman-Ma...) and judge where you are in the range from journeyman to master. If you're looking for "lock-in", i.e. be easily employable past your ability to fake looking under 35, I'd suggest getting a job with a serious security clearance, which can be a trick, or specialize in one of the fields that respects grey hairs like embedded (but only so much depending on the sub-field, e.g. Detroit car companies at least in times past recruited heavily from Course 6 because they too got rid of their older EEs and programmers). If you goal is to really work for yourself, and you think you can eventually bill at a rate 5-6 times the income you want to receive---maybe talk to some professors who make a lot of money on their one day a week dedicated to that, albeit they do it with MIT Professor on the CV---yes, that's a very good way to go. But hard for most people. See e.g. this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9499561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9499561 which points out you have to compete on quality, not price, and a couple of HN contributors who've written a lot about that. Medicine: in a county, or the developed "West", where people by and large don't directly pay for their own medical care, and those who do pay are looking at a rapidly graying population, well, it's a field you ought to run screaming from, unless it's your calling. Don't know about MechE and so on, in general you need to talk to older engineers, the people who run the department, professors, etc., of course adjusting for selection bias. If you haven't already identified a calling, well, you have a lot of options, especially if you're strong at math. Especially before the 2008 crash, a lot of EE strong and therefore math strong EECS graduates would get initial jobs in finance with their proven math chops, which if they were smart got them in a good financial position to do something they really wanted to do later.