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Jun 07 '22
Even if you have genuine interest in the field 90% of the time you're working on something you have no interest in.
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u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC Jun 07 '22
You even end up paying a premium to work on things that you're interested in. Look at the depressed salaries in the games industry, for example: they know that there are tons of people who would literally do that job for free if it meant being credited in their favorite game, so they get away with low salaries and awful working conditions.
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u/ZBlackmore Jun 07 '22
You can also look at it like you’re being paid a premium for working on things you aren’t interested in.
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u/tobleronavirus Jun 07 '22
Sure, you can, but you shouldn't. It's 100%jusr companies extorting people's interests for profit.
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u/rndmcmder Jun 07 '22
True. I love coding and solving brainteasing challenges. My job as a software engineer consists about 5% of coding. The rest are boring maintainance tasks, cleaning up after idiots who carelessly break systems that millions of users rely on, jumping hoops to satisfy some corporate demands and attending useless meetings.
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u/dirtfork Jun 07 '22
I'm giving up the secret sauce here, but if you like doing small programs to solve discrete problems rather than maintaining a large codebase for a single big program .. look into network engineering. I spent a miserable decade being a developer (because I chose a job to make money when I was 18 and liked coding in high school.) Had a random fortuitous lateral move into networking and found heaven. I get to write small automation programs that make me look like some kind of God to my non-dev-background peers, do command line puzzle solving all day long (well... As long as I'm not being interrupted for support tickets) and my hackiest hackjob pales in comparison to the cluster fuckery I've seen in the field (did I mention I get paid to travel to random places to plug cords in, do a handful of cli commands then turn around and go home?)
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u/SignedTheWrongForm Jun 07 '22
did I mention I get paid to travel to random places to plug cords in, do a handful of cli commands then turn around and go home?)
To each their own. This would infuriate me.
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u/awrylettuce Jun 07 '22
5% coding, 50% writing and reviewing documentation, 40% useless meetings, 5% useful meeting
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u/patenteng Jun 07 '22
I don’t know. I like the process. I couldn’t care less what impact the end result will have. Maybe I’m different than most people.
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u/tryexceptifnot1try Jun 07 '22
I am with you here. I actually find gluing horrible legacy systems together with automation and wringing another 10% efficiency out of something to be interesting puzzles. I could care less that it's purpose is some boring internal HR function. I still had to find a way to shrink the memory footprint of some process so it worked on existing hardware.
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u/Avedas Jun 07 '22
I've never cared too much about what product I'm working on. As long as the problem space is interesting enough that there's room to learn and grow, it can be whatever. I'm not a product manager.
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Jun 07 '22 edited Jun 07 '22
I have to disagree with you on that one.
Once you start making serious money you have ability to chose your employer. And often you have funds to start your own business or join one as a partner.
So there is nothing stopping you from working on what interest you.
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u/SholayKaJai Jun 07 '22
I had genuine interest in the field but I spend most of my time managing dependency issues and resolving vulnerabilities. The programming in my programming job is a misnomer.
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u/rk06 Jun 07 '22
What! You have no interest in writing emails, nonsensical meetings, and debugging hairy bugs!!
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u/Miami_Beach_Man Jun 07 '22
Yep. Plus the higher up I get as a PO the further away I get from the day to day tech stuff that goes on, which sucks
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u/Etherbeard Jun 07 '22
I think most things are this way. I used to frame houses, for example, and building a house is an interesting project and can be very gratifying, but a huge portion of that job is just moving material around, which is physically taxing and boring. I built cabinets, and fabrication and installation parts are great, but most of the job is sanding, which is one of the most boring activities a human can engage in.
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u/xenover Jun 07 '22
50-50
I was on the computer all the time anyway and liked playing around with software and hardware as a teenager.
Then I found out developers get paid well so it was an obvious win-win.
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u/ricardomargarido Jun 07 '22
Same here. Got into hardware and software after bricking my desktop with virus and my parents saying I either fix it or it's thrash. Never touched a line of code until uni and now there is nothing else I rather do.
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u/BooBear_13 Jun 07 '22
That was my first project too! Rebuilding and upgrading the family computer so I could play WoW.
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u/Lv_InSaNe_vL Jun 07 '22
I was the same way as a kid and teenager but I decided to go into the IT/sysadmin and looking at my developer friends paychecks it makes me feel like I made the wrong decision sometimes...
But God damn I feel like you guys spend 80% of your working hours in meetings or discussing some random feature and that makes me remember why I love my job so much haha
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u/Ryuujinx Jun 07 '22
Learn some python, learn ansible+terraform, congrats you're now a devops engineer, go make a bunch more money.
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u/ProfessionEuphoric50 Jun 07 '22
I feel the same way as a new IT grad. It seems like everyone is hiring developers and at great salaries and it makes me wish I took CS instead. Then I remember how frustrating I found coding. It's not like IT work pays badly, especially if you specialize yourself, but wow developer salaries go up quick.
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u/ano_hise Jun 07 '22
Same for me but I'm currently a student. I'm very interested in that field but I don't really want to sped that much time in front of a computer.
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u/MLG_Obardo Jun 07 '22
Take meetings you don’t need to be active in on the phone, if you go in to an office make semi frequent trips to visit friends in the office and you’ll be fine. If you’re working from home take semi frequent trips to do some chore you’d otherwise do after work.
I spend most of my time doing something other than active programming. It’s either meetings, debugging or investigating the software or testing or some kind of “paperwork” with regards to version control and on and on the list goes. Granted I’m a junior dev, but I have found the job to be about 15% actually programming.
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u/ano_hise Jun 07 '22
I could do that. But I should not get too immersed like I always do.
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u/olssoneerz Jun 07 '22
Came in wanting to create video games. Left becoming a boring old web dev. Ill wipe my tears with these $$$
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Jun 07 '22
currently on the aspiring-game-dev to boring-old-webdev pipeline myself. college is absolute hell but i think about all the money i'll end up making in the future and it makes it juuuust a smidge bit better
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u/Zederikus Jun 07 '22
Same here but salesforce instead of web, the games industry is just still young and volatile, rarely hires entry level
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u/Wildercard Jun 07 '22 edited Jun 07 '22
I always wonder if those very-narrow fields - Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, COBOL, so on - are worth the tradeoff of locking yourself into one environment. Like, if I'm a Python dev, it doesn't take that much to switch to a Golang-based job. Java and C# might as well be the same language. But in my (jesus fuck thank god) short internship with Microsoft Dynamics, I felt the noose of future prospects tightening.
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u/barjam Jun 07 '22
I worked at a video game company and also on boring web dev. Code is code and work is work. I didn’t get any more satisfaction working on game stuff but I did get paid a lot less to do it.
Take the highest paid coding gig you can find and play with game stuff as a hobby.
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Jun 07 '22
Yeah I came from an electrical engineering undegrad thinking maybe I'll get into game industry...but seeing how badly they seem to be treated I'm happy to just do a small game as a side project for fun while getting paid decently with less stress
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Jun 07 '22 edited Jun 07 '22
I'm 23, 1 year experience as a full stack dev. How do I shift my job with a resume of flask, python, angular, springboot to C++/Unity/etc.? (Deleted literally because I wanted to ask for advice as a newbie, not show off my youth or something whatever is being made fun of.)
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u/shedinja292 Jun 07 '22
Depends on how you learn but I would say work on a Unity/unreal project from start to finish for about year.
Having 2+ years of work experience compared to 0-1 should significantly help your job opportunities since I often see work experience grouped like (0-1), (2-4), (5+)
Having a small portfolio and experience to answer interview questions helps you have a chance in a competitive games industry
Most importantly it makes sure you enjoy Unity/C# or Unreal/C++ before trying to get a job out of it
Lots of people are suggesting you just do it as a hobby, this is usually because the game dev industry has high competition which in turn requires higher experience to get hired. If it’s your goal don’t be disappointed if you can’t get in soon, just slowly build up your experience and portfolio
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u/Frolicks Jun 07 '22
You could start by working on progressively more complex projects in r/INAT to build a games portfolio
I'm not in the games industry tho. I'm 21 and started college as a games major but now I'm graduated with a cs degree and a webdev internship ;__;
These days I'm hoping I could just develop on vrchat / Roblox as a creatively outlet
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u/MVIVN Jun 07 '22
Meanwhile, here I am learning to code in my 30s with the hopes of becoming a web dev because I think that’ll be my dream job, but to someone else it’s something they had to “settle” for 🙁
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u/olssoneerz Jun 07 '22 edited Jun 07 '22
Hey! I wish you the best with your journey! Never too late to get into webdev. If its any consolation; I didn’t “settle” for it, I chose it after I realised I wanted to that over game dev.
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Jun 07 '22
Toooooo relatable! I try making web text based games in my spare time to fill the gapping hole in my gamer heart
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u/BigHead3802 Jun 07 '22
I chose tech bc i have genuine interest in leaving my country legally
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u/dashid Jun 07 '22
Computing wasn't my first choice, but it was the stable career choice. Add in the fact that I loved tinkering with computers, it wasn't a tough call to make. Get paid well for doing what I enjoy? Sure!
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u/GeePedicy Jun 07 '22
I heard by someone that students of other majors describe computer science as money science.
Then again, most non-STEM majors are described as grass science, as you mostly see them lying on the grass.
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Jun 07 '22
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u/rztan Jun 07 '22
Journalism? Jobless
Medicine? Toughness
Engineering? Lifeless
those were some of the jokes within my friend group.
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u/ZaMr0 Jun 07 '22
My city where I went to uni had two universities in it and doesn't matter what degree you took, if you were in the worse university you got taunted with unemployment on every night out.
You'd have sociology students from the good one taunting medicine students from the worse one lol.
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u/ForceGoat Jun 07 '22
If I could get paid more doing internet marketing or something easy, I'd switch to that. No one ever gets called on Saturday morning because of a "marketing emergency. "
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u/CoffeePieAndHobbits Jun 07 '22
True story.
Actually "Marketing Emergency" sounds like a great title for a B-movie. Coming soon to Netflix! Lol /s
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u/WallyMetropolis Jun 07 '22
Depending on the particular field, marketers often put in crazy hours and work in high-pressure, short and frequent deadline environments. But if they're driving revenue they can also get paid quite well.
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u/ZaMr0 Jun 07 '22
I started working in marketing and since it's a relatively small company my responsibilities quickly shifted to project management and some graphic design. Way more stress and random out of work calls than when in marketing but way more satisfying of a job. You'd be surprised how unfun marketing can be unless you have big budgets to play with.
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u/barjam Jun 07 '22
You would be surprised lol. I moved from development into senior management and the other groups have their fire drills too.
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Jun 07 '22
Got called in the morning to fix an issue regarding a campaign we were starting. Some guy fooled around with the files and made a mistake.
Answered that I am not working today and that I can't fix it for them. Of course, a little bit later they text me saying that they got it fixed.
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u/mcquiggd Jun 07 '22
It's actually frustrating to be genuinely interested in programming, but then working in the industry, It sucks the pleasure out of everything.
It's typically reduced to morning Standups where everyone gives inaccurate status updates and then spends the day trying to do what they said they have already done.
Agonisingly long Refinements where assorted Business people ramble on at each other, obviously incapable of articulating what it is that they actually want, and Developers are forced to attend instead of actually working. Usually they are followed by messages on Slack, with Business people asking the Developers if they have made any progress on coding... in the last 1.5 hours....
Sprint Planning - where the Business people ask Developers to agree to the badly defined and certainly impossible.
Next we move on to actually looking at the code, which bears no resemblance to anything which has been discussed in meetings. There are no familiar terms used in the code; everything is named in some sort of long-dead language that nobody understands. Everything is called a Service, as if moving code into something called a Service makes it better. It doesn't do what the Business people think it does. It is written in many styles, with most of the code being attributed to people who left the company a year ago. The tests do not actually test business logic; they test that some code exists.
Then we have Code Reviews - where developers are pitted against each other in a virtual Fight Club, over whether a line of code could be expressed with fewer characters and become more obtuse if they adopted the latest language features.
The first rule of Code Review Fight Club:
Never validate that business rules or acceptence criteria have been implemented correctly. Only fight over syntax.
We then spend two or three weeks attempting to hold on to our sanity, only to face the Sprint Review, where the Scrum Master desperately asks people to think of something positive, and glosses over the fact that nothing ever changes.
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u/FVMAzalea Jun 07 '22
That sounds very dysfunctional and also very much like my last job. But that’s not all jobs!
My current job is very developer-driven and basically the number one rule told to all the business people is “leave the developers alone”. We get to make almost all the major decisions about things (except high level prioritization of what projects we’re going to work on, and we have input into that). Our meeting culture is that meetings are only held unless absolutely necessary, always have an agenda sent in advance with pre-work items so that attendees are prepared to discuss them in the meeting, and that meetings start precisely on time, even if not all attendees are present, and never go late (most end early). We are empowered to spend some time making our code better and getting rid of legacy stuff, and our code reviews are substantive, not syntax fights.
It’s really great.
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u/elitegroup02 Jun 07 '22
+1 to that.
Where I work now, my boss hates meetings. He'll do anything to get out of them.
Our dailies last 3-5 mins when someone has something to say, but will happily last 1min if everyone says they're fine.
We get our tickets sorted and environments ready before even looking at them, and while this used to be done by our team it is now being migrated to another set of people, so that we literally only have daily meetings to mention stuff that blocks us.26
u/OopieStu Jun 07 '22
I physically cringed when you got to sprint planning. 2 hours of torture :’)
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u/mcquiggd Jun 07 '22 edited Jun 07 '22
It seems to always be the same...
At one company, I managed to negotiate that only the Backend and Front end Leads needed to attend such Scrum rituals with me, and that actually worked out quite well.
With a smaller group of people, we had a more honest conversation, and I admit I have no time for idiots any more, so I can be quite brutal when people in the Business side are not doing their jobs. I stated that every request from the Business had to come through me.
We managed to find a way of working that made everyone's life easier, and I customised Jira to force people to enter proper descriptions of what was required, and I rejected any Issues that I felt were not defined properly.
It was more work for me, but the end result was certainly worth it; get the Business people to think before they hold meetings, and to come prepared with the information that the Development team will need.
I have suffered far too many meetings with Business people simply turning up, unprepared, not aware at all of what the Business process is, or where it needs to be, and thinking they can just dump their problems on a Development team.
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u/Azhais Jun 07 '22
Imagine having enough time for organized code reviews. Ours are usually a race to see who can hit approve fastest without looking at it at all
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u/CookedBlackBird Jun 07 '22
I took a year off to do some hobby game dev, one of the best choices I made. It was so much fun digging into OpenGL and setting up these complex graphics pipelines without having to write a design doc, estimate timelines, etc.
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Jun 07 '22
You should put that in a blog post, this is far too good for Reddit.
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u/mcquiggd Jun 07 '22 edited Jun 07 '22
Perhaps I will... I've been doing this for 30 years+; typically I lead teams, and when I can, I try to shield developers from this kind of stuff.
I try to negotiate how the Business people approach definition of requirements, as in my experience that is the number one cause of projects failing.
A project rarely has a technical problem that causes a lot of pain, but it is common to have major issues due to rushed deadlines and business requirements not being communicated correctly - that typically leads to Production issues, temporary fixes that become permanent, disjointed coded, etc.
Another problem is lack of management accountability - developers are always held responsible for errors in their code, but managers are never held responsible for failing to manage.
I could tell some stories about major companies that appear competent on the outside, but are completely dysfunctional on the inside. I recently worked with a major European manufacturer of electric cars, a competitor to Tesla, and I can say that they are not able to give a definitive price for a specific configuration of car.
Nobody in the Business - the people who define what rules should apply to prices - knows what the price should be for one of their cars in any given market. I was asking for reference values to test our calculations against, and I could not get an answer, despite 6 months of asking. Instead, we had urgent fixes to introduce to Production, when customers in a specific market complained about being charged too much. They probably lost a fortune in charging too little - nobody looked into it.
I raised an issue that costs for AWS in Development and Staging were 10 times the costs in Production, and the lead of the "platform group" simply said "yeah, we don't check that". They had no monitoring, cost alerting, anything, on any of the environments. Nobody was in charge. They didn't do anything about it.
Another company I joined as a country Lead, with a development team that was hired, and I was responsible for leading the development tasks of the group. The only problem was my boss refused to let us work on anything. The company could not decide on a strategy for the next phase of their core product, and so, we had nothing to do. I became involved in board-level decisions, made suggestions for several months, to try to unblock work for the team. I was still asked for progress updates, on something we were not allowed to work on. The team gradually left for other jobs. In the end, I left too.
At a US company, I was hired as a Staff Engineer, and promptly given responsibility for two projects "that could not fail". That company was a complete joke - essentially three payment service providers in the US and Canada, who had started as mom and pop outfits, and had unexpected success back in the 90s, and were bought out by some venture capital firm. They process about 4 billion USD per year.
This bunch of clowns couldn't even tell me what language their code was written in, or where it was located so I could look at it. Nothing was documented, and nobody wanted to share any information in writing - everything had to be over a video call, and not recorded. I had calls with one of the Directors who was using an iPhone to run his part of the company, just doing meetings when walking his dog, or renovating his house, or shopping in Walmart.
I was expected to unify these three disparate companies for a compliance deadline within 3 months. The CTO was ex-military, but not in a good way - he would shout at people in meetings, loved to humiliate people, and had an unnatural distrust of cloud hosting. Everyone was scared of him, including the Directors.
They attempted to replicate Azure, using their own data centre, and their biggest "success" was spending 100k on consultants to set up an Elasticsearch / Kibana cluster in their little data centre, that was basically an old factory. Then that had connectivity issues, so we ended up having to migrate that to Azure - and they literally shifted VMs... it was unbelievable, they could have just used Application Insights, and hosted Elasticsearch.
At the same time, I had to go through agony trying to get a decision on which API Management product to use, having multiple meetings with vendors including Microsoft, MuleSoft, Google, and then having some jackass in the company - who should have been doing this themselves, but wanted a scapegoat - second guess me or add a requirement they hadn't previously raised.
On one occasion, I managed to get a decision on cloud hosting from my boss, the IT Director, and he even called a meeting of c50 people to announce it. He started out by informing people of the decision, but by the end of the hour-long meeting - in which he was the only person talking - he managed to convince himself that he should wait for the scary CTO to approve it. And so his announcement became that he had not made a decision. It was just bizarre. Nobody knew what was going on.
That all happened in the first three weeks - when I got paid, I simply did not turn up for work after the Christmas break, and just ignored them. They were damaging my reputation with their incompetence, and damaging my sanity with their idiocy.
That post I made above, is a fair description of 90% of projects I have worked on.
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u/CT101823696 Jun 07 '22
Code reviews are primarily for making sure coding standards are met. Found a bug or code that won't work, great! But the focus is reviewing code, not acceptance criteria.
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u/Dx2x Jun 07 '22
Sprint retros, where non-technical people give their opinions on how developers can do their job better.
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u/WesleySnopes Jun 07 '22
This is something that keeps me from moving to a different city. Currently, I'm the entire department. I only have meetings with the owner. All the code is mine and I don't have to explain anything to anyone except whether it's ready or not.
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u/MVIVN Jun 07 '22
As someone learning to code (in my 30s) in the hopes of pursuing an exciting and more lucrative career as a developer, reading this made me depressed 😕 I guess the grass really isn’t greener on the other side after all… sounds like the same kind of bullshit I’m dealing with in my non-programming job is the same bullshit you’re dealing with, just translated into a different context.
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Jun 07 '22
I wanted to be a weed strain tester with some judging the skills of new porn actresses on the side when I was growing up, but IT just paid more and definitely had more openings.
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u/Akul_Tesla Jun 07 '22
I chose tech because I don't wish to anger roko's basilisk if that is not one of your reasons for being in tech it should be
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u/chawmindur Jun 07 '22
Unless one is so stupid that getting into tech would be considered a hindrance to the basilisk's development
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u/Gamiac Jun 07 '22 edited Jun 07 '22
Roko's Basilisk is one of the stupidest ideas ever. You have to believe very specific things for it to even make sense, and most of them are practically speculation.
Specifically, the idea that a copy of you IS you. Not a copy of you, but literally YOU. If you don't believe that, or don't care about your copies getting infinitely tortured for all eternity, it ceases to function.
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u/QuinticSpline Jun 07 '22
It was invented to troll a very specific group of Highly Refined Transhumanist Intellectuals who like to smell their own farts. And in that it was a wild success.
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u/bric12 Jun 07 '22
Eh, the basilisk can torture some copy of me if he wants to. Not my problem.
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Jun 07 '22
Yeah, the whole fucking thing doesn’t make sense to me. Who gives a fuck if some AI tortures a copy of me? Literally doesn’t matter. And since it doesn’t matter, why the shit would a future AI waste energy by torturing a copy of me?
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u/KobeJuanKenobi9 Jun 07 '22
I have a genuine interest in tech but I would not have pursued it if it didn’t pay well. I could’ve always done tech as a hobby while working in accounting or something
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u/InvisibleWrestler Jun 07 '22
Entry level tech jobs don't even pay equivalent to the rent here in India. Even higher salaries are barely enough for people with families.
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Jun 07 '22
[deleted]
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u/InvisibleWrestler Jun 07 '22
It's probably just the population. It looks like many Indians are in IT. Coz there are many Indians on the planet. With IT / Software they're more visible internationally.
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u/JellyPUMPS Jun 07 '22
Image Transcription: Twitter
Warren James Day, @warrenjday
Did you choose tech because it pays well, or because you have a genuine interest?
The Only Nicholas Hunt-Walker in Existence, @nhuntwalker
I have a genuine interest in being paid well
I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!
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u/Ron-Swanson-Mustache Jun 07 '22
I almost never go with quoting the Joker, but....
If you're good at something never do it for free.
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u/BeardXP Jun 07 '22
Them: Did you choose tech because it pays well or because you have a genuine interest?
Me: Yes.
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Jun 07 '22
Wanted to be a game dev. Went to college for a Game Dev course. The course had little to no game dev-related projects and was just a run-of-the-mill software dev course. The final year project wasn't allowed to be a game. Dropped out halfway into final year. Course and how it was taught killed my love for coding. Spent a few years doing general labor work. Did a media studies course during covid. Then decided to try out a coding course after that. Currently in that and have rediscovered my love for coding. Programming is where the money is but damna re so many coding courses absolute shite and only their cause its easy money for the course providers.
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u/Odd-Refrigerator-425 Jun 07 '22
Was the actual degree you pursued in Game Development or something along those lines?
I cannot fathom offering a Game Dev/Design degree of some variety and then telling your students they can't make a game. Like what the hell?
If it was actually a CS/IT degree and they said "No games", that's one thing. But...
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u/SPSK_Senshi Jun 07 '22
You guys are getting paid well?
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Jun 07 '22
I wasn't. Until I stomped on the floor and demanded a raise or I'd leave. 50% raise in one year.
You have no clue how much you're being robbed. Stand your ground and get what you deserve.
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u/scandii Jun 07 '22
I would not stay at a company that had the ability to raise my wage by 50% but didn't.
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u/StopTheMeta Jun 07 '22
Europeans be like: Oh yes, I made a whole €2k this month.
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u/Boese_kroete Jun 07 '22
The salaries in europe really depend on the country you live in. In germany or france 2k per month would be ridiculously low for a (entry Level) developer position, while in slovakia this would be a decent income.
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u/microwavedave27 Jun 07 '22
Salaries in the US are insane when compared to mostly everywhere else. Still would never move there.
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u/Grandgem137 Jun 07 '22
I chose tech because I can Google stuff without being judged
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Jun 07 '22
I fucked up an interview by answering this question honestly
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u/halcyon400 Jun 07 '22
Nah, it's a dumb question to ask in an interview because it forces people to lie. If you were asked that question, you're probably better off somewhere else.
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u/LOLBaltSS Jun 07 '22 edited Jun 07 '22
I started off as a hobbyist, but the last decade of sysadmin work (six in MSP) beat that and even the basic will to live the hell out of me.
Edit: I ain't going to Budd Dwyer it, don't worry.
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Jun 07 '22 edited Jun 07 '22
Tbh everyone I know who chose it because it pays well is bad.
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u/Odd-Refrigerator-425 Jun 07 '22
And?
Most companies don't need mission-critical Google tier developers.
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u/OneFanFare Jun 07 '22
Hey guys I found this cool hack:
let money = 0;
while (true) { money++ }
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u/Andubandu Jun 07 '22
At some point, that will add one to money and you’ll be in debt
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u/Glugstar Jun 07 '22
Amateurs. If you can't even spend billions on stupid stuff before the number switches to negative, what are you even doing with your life?
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Jun 07 '22
I chose tech because I liked gaming and computers and I was kinda good at some basic IT.
BUT after working as a dev for a few years I now absolutely despise it. Unclear requirements with impossible deadlines and waaay too many stakeholders at once can ruin your fun very quickly.
So moved onto being a Product Owner/ Scrum Master and Im now 1000 times happier. I earn the same as I did when I was a dev, but my work-life balance is so much better.
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Jun 07 '22
I did a physics degree. Have you seen the career path for physicists? Considering how great you have to be to even get in to the field, the pay and conditions are absolutely awful. Distinctly average programmer pays a lot better.
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u/Scottybt50 Jun 07 '22
Started out doing a general mixed-subject science degree and then followed my interest and ability in IT. Got good grades so ended up majoring in CS and Maths, had an interview on campus and got offered a job halfway through my final year. So the job sort of chose me.
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Jun 07 '22
I wanted to become a medical researcher, but I never did very well in most of the natural sciences; biology or chemistry. I felt it was more because the lack of pedagogic support surrounding these subjects, more than an impossibility from myself of learning them. I'm a pretty smart guy and I believe I could have done it had many circumstances been different.
I settled on being a successful and skilled IT-engineer instead. It doesn't pay very well in my case, but neither would the alternative and even so, I enjoy other good benefits like being allowed to work the way I want.
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u/wafflepiezz Jun 07 '22
I wish I chose tech when I was little instead of business sigh
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u/topredditbot Jun 07 '22
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u/JuliusStingray Jun 07 '22
I work on videogames, its so obvious that being able to afford food is not one of my priorities 
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u/agangofoldwomen Jun 07 '22
I had a genuine interest in being a teacher but that was in direct conflict with my genuine interests of affording food and rent on a consistent basis.
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u/cr0ft Jun 07 '22
Neither, I just didn't have any aptitude for much anything else. Big bucks.. yeah sure, I wish...
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u/TomaszA3 Jun 07 '22
Nobody works for fun. If we didn't need to work, we would be doing our own thing at home and have fun with it.
Job is only for money in 100% of cases.
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u/grodon909 Jun 07 '22
I disagree. If I won the lottery or something (and finished my current training) I feel like I'd still work, just far fewer hours. While I would love to spend a few weeks or months at home catching up on games and shows, I don't think I could go my whole life without some kind of regular work.
I know a lot of doctors who could definitely retire at their age, but instead choose to keep working because just chilling in retirement 24/7 is boring.
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u/ZaMr0 Jun 07 '22
That depends, some people enjoy having power and responsibilities and that usually comes in form of a job. Can't do that while sitting around at home with unlimited money, you need some activity that would technically be working.
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u/613codyrex Jun 07 '22
Highly dependent on who you are and what you do.
A lot of graduate level education people do the work for “fun.” No everyone ends up at a dead end job they hate 24/7.
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u/harbourwall Jun 07 '22
It can overlap though. If I didn't get paid for my job and didn't need to get paid then I'd probably do it as a hobby if they'd let me. I've been lucky to get the jobs that I want to do rather than just for the cash. Until the interest wanes or the project goes off in a different direction. Usually could get more pay elsewhere doing something more drudgy, but I don't want to live my life like that.
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u/AmazonSlave123 Jun 07 '22
Sounds like somebody has never had a good job.
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Jun 07 '22
I have an objectively good job. Great pay, a good amount of time off, and in general good benefits, but I still wouldn't do it for 5 minutes longer if I didn't have to. The problem with having a job for me is it's not a choice, and I feel like I'm not in control of my own destiny.
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u/JCharante Jun 07 '22
Working can be fun though. Balance it with pay but it feels like an rpg to me
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u/scandii Jun 07 '22
a consultant nearing retirement told me something about a decade ago, and I agree with it to this day:
there are two types of people, those who work to live and those who live to work.
there are a lot of people that find great enjoyment in their work. if that's not you - perhaps you're not working with something you find fun, or alternatively, the thing you find fun is not monetisable.
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Jun 07 '22
What I have a real passion for is napping, walking in the woods, and daydreaming. Hard to support a family with that.
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Jun 07 '22
Oh idk. When I was in college, I know the vast majority of people who were there only for the money usually dropped out.
I feel like usually it's more just you aren't interested in whatever specific project you're doing at your company, not a general lack of interest
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u/enby_shout Jun 07 '22
I had to do a tech project in high school, no programming expierence heard a thing called python, sure. pig latin converter should be fine.
only thing I could concentrate on for more than 12 minutes.
turns out I have adhd. but programming was a special interest regardless
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Jun 07 '22
People who do computer science in college just for the pay alone, and have no interest in the skill/mastery of it by itself, are basically guaranteed to always be mediocre at best. A hot take, I know.
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u/RealFunnyTalk Jun 07 '22
It's true, I'm mediocre at best, but prolific. I would never call myself a programmer and insult actual ones. I don't like it, I have no interest, but I'm making money hand over fist four years out of grad school.
Now, do I wake up every day dreading work and constantly think about doing anything else? Yes. Will I do anything about it? Not as long as money is still the best way to survive.
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u/icywind90 Jun 07 '22
Most people have neither interest nor good salary from their job. You are lucky if you have one of those things
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u/CharismaticWarrior Jun 07 '22
I had a genuine interest when I started.
But I gradually lost it by being forced to "collaborate" with people who have no idea of what they are doing and do it only for the pay.
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u/Substantial-Length-5 Jun 07 '22
them dont pay well and i dont have interest, i do this so i can buy food
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u/Endarkend Jun 07 '22
My genuine interest in tech is the reason I burned out of the sector 3 times before I was 30.
My genuine interest in getting paid is why I went right back in every damn time.
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u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC Jun 07 '22
I chose to do tech as a hobby because I have a genuine interest.
I chose to do tech as a job because I have a genuine interest in retiring at 35 so I can do tech as a hobby.
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Jun 07 '22
Retiring at 35? I see the “retiring at 45” trope is already outdated, huh? Meanwhile normal people will be working until they are 70+
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u/eric-price Jun 07 '22
I started because I was interested. Twenty five years in I do it because I couldn't make this money doing anything else.
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u/Manach_Irish Jun 07 '22
But, but, but .. I was assured by management in their last town hall that pay is not the only metric relevant to working in IT. TBF they forgot to mention the unpaid overtime.
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u/Aksds Jun 07 '22
I really enjoy programming, not enough to do work after hours and not be paid, but I do like it.
I also like money.
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Jun 07 '22
I didn’t choose tech. I majored in instructional psychology in college, but I learned a little bit about programming in one of my minors. Twice I was hired as an instructional designer and twice as soon as I started they told me that their programmer had quit, so could I please fill in until they hired a “real” programmer? So I read books (this was back in the days when the internet was in its infancy, so we still read physical books to learn about programming) and taught myself. It has now been nearly 25 years and I still have not spent even a single day doing instructional design. Now I would call myself a full stack developer. I can do everything from install physical or virtual servers from scratch, to harden them, to install, configure, and optimize software like web servers and databases, to do both DDL and DML in both relational (Oracle and Postgres) and non-relational (many) databases, to writing server side code and more recently Lambdas, to writing Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS front end code. I would say that tech chose me instead of the other way around.
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u/lofeeisonspotify Jun 07 '22
could someone explain how you get started in this field? and what do the costs of schooling look like?
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u/JoeKlemmer Jun 07 '22
For some of us, tech chose me. I ended up backing into the industry while trying to go a different way in life. Now, 40 years later, I'm still here.
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u/DeafHeretic Jun 07 '22
I was a EE tech and had not chosen s/w eng.
I was working on a team that tested the performance of wireless data WANs (meteor burst) in the field. They were collecting, collating and analyzing data by hand (signal strength strip charts & printed on paper data), when I recognized that this could be automated faster and easier.
So I asked for a computer, an A->D interface board and some time to write some code.
I found that I enjoyed it, and went from there on to writing software full time.
So my first motivation was really the job. More stability, more mobility (able to move from job to job) and better pay - but primary was what I was doing.
The last 20 years before I retired in 2020, the pay became a motivation equal to the work.
Anymore, I won't do an coding without being paid.
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u/SheepShroom Jun 07 '22
I figured out how to play around with HTML and CSS as a teen girl. I had a lot of fun with it and knew computer-related jobs paid well. I debated between careers like web developer and programmer for a bit.
I wanted a comfortable life, but I didn't know exactly what I was getting myself into. I found I liked solving problems no matter how frustrating it can be sometimes, and that working back-end made more money. Well, now I'm full-stack anyway. Part of my choice was that I could get an Associate's degree from my community college and get hired with low debt. I made my choice that way.
I'm now pregnant, WFH 4/5 days of the week, and work for an insurance company that is the top in its industry. My industry is backed by federal policy, and promotes from within due to us having special industry knowledge.
I don't get paid like a Californian, but my pay is great for Iowa (insurance capital of the US), and I'm only in my second year in this career.
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u/Ilyketurdles Jun 07 '22
Looking to possibly leave Google in the near future and my family members don’t get why.
<Insert mr krabs meme here> Money
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u/DontGiveACluck Jun 07 '22
Love using my brain to solve logical problems and being paid for it, but hate being in front of a computer screen in my free time. I work in tech because I get to do the former, while being paid well enough to do the latter.
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u/thundercat06 Jun 08 '22
Always was into computers.. Tinkered in coding here and there but building computers and networks was more my thing. So I went to college to be a systems admin.
Worked a software and network support job for a startup which also included some QA work for their flagship product.. Software Director thought I had vision in how the software could evolve and offered me an opportunity to learn to code professionally. The 15% pay raise to learn to code was kinda a no brainer with a newborn at home. At first the learning curve sucked given deadlines.. But once it clicked I got that rush and that enjoyment of creating solutions and solving the puzzles.
18 years later.. I must admit, that rush has pretty much waned. Software jobs continue to pay better than systems jobs in my region. So as long as it continues lucrative, I will keep going.. But I am certainly looking at what the next step will be. Because I know I do not want to be in code full time much longer. management?? architect?? back to hardware?? DevOps?? SecOps?? drive truck??
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Jun 08 '22
Fun fact: when I started my particular specialty did not pay well. It was more “this is the best paying job I can find as a college dropout where I can still spend all day on irc.”
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Jul 04 '22
I'm extremly new to programming (doing it for about 2 months), I'm still just learning, already crushed HTML, CSS (TailwindCSS as my framework) or atleast so says my friend whose developed smart systems for one of Europes largest tech companies and am currently learning JS and React.
Why did I decide on programming (specifically Front-End in my case)?
Well:
It's super easy to learn, even to the average person.
I genuinly enjoy learning it and seeing what I can make, how I can solve different problems, how I can use different resources or save time by using libraries and components and implementing source codes from templates online etc. (I completly quit gaming since I started learning, wiped my laptop clean and only have VS code and Node.js installed rn)
I want to be able to go to a caffé, sit down and work. Or a beach, or a resort yk... freedom and no office and no crowds which flare up my social anxiety for little to no reason.
"Do what you love and you won't work a day in your life"
Money is damn great in the field
To the point of money, if I can find a job I can work remotely in USA, I'd split my time between home and USA and if I do that, if I can land a job that pays me 60k a year for a start I would be making 11x my countries national average salary every month and would be able to easily afford insane cars, luxury vacations, penthouses and finance my start ups easy as cake.
Kids, if you are not in IT already, choose IT. I wish I chose IT back in High School and stuck with it back in 2018, I would have been writing this from my 8,000sq/ft mansion on the beach right now.
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u/gahma54 Jun 07 '22
people who chose it for pay are typically the engineers that are bad and offer no creative solutions to anything, just ctrl c, ctrl p their way to mediocrity
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u/_Azurius Jun 07 '22
I studied CS because I love all things STEM and I've been tinkering with programming for years before even starting programming class in school.
I don't enjoy coding so much I do a lot of it during my free time - mostly just private projects to keep me busy - but I enjoy it enough to be eager to learn new things and do it as a job. But I also enjoy the money I get, soooo...
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u/Krem3Soduh Jun 07 '22
Actually why I avoided tech, seems like most people I know are only making 50-80k
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u/[deleted] Jun 07 '22
Computers and programming was always my first choice. Until i started getting paid…