[HN Gopher] Do you want to be making this much money when you're...
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Do you want to be making this much money when you're 50? (2012)
Author : Tomte
Score : 30 points
Date : 2021-07-28 18:05 UTC (55 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (yosefk.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (yosefk.com)
| zwieback wrote:
| I'm 55 and still a programmer. However, in my job I also do other
| stuff like mess with sensors, cameras, motors. Early on in my
| career I realized I loved programming but not in a pure SW
| company.
|
| I did make the conscious decision to never become a manager of
| any sort, that's really hard and I wouldn't be very good at it.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Some of this isn't necessarily true.
|
| There can be health risks. This is a very sedentary job with a
| lot of eye strain and stress.
|
| There can be legal risks, like with HIPAA or even other more
| basic things.
|
| You do generally need a college degree for most places to even
| consider you.
| sombremesa wrote:
| TFA is commentary, the real article I was looking for is the
| first link in TFA.
|
| The original question isn't about money at all.
|
| In any case, what I want to be doing when I'm 50 is rather
| irrelevant. When I was 10 I wanted to be a pilot, but that desire
| went away before I turned 15.
| reidjs wrote:
| https://prog21.dadgum.com/154.html
| mikestew wrote:
| Still choosing shitty places to work when I'm 50? No,
| hopefully I have exited that phase in my life. Or did the
| author mean something else when they typed "doing this"?
| reidjs wrote:
| I wish I read this article in 2012. I enjoyed programming, but
| never considered it a career. It was my passion, I didn't have
| any expectation or desire to make money from it.
|
| "passion burns out, whereas greed is sustainable"
| mikewarot wrote:
| The thing that scares me about jumping into programming today is
| that you realistically can't know all the layers any more. My
| programming experience was writing a program, and a few libraries
| that went with it, from scratch, in Turbo Pascal.
|
| I knew how my code worked, and the run time libraries were simple
| enough that they really never caused any issues. I also spoke
| with most of the users of the program, personally.
|
| Now you're expected to write "apps" that run in some random
| mobile platform, with almost no feedback when things break.
| You're depending on layers upon layers of abstraction to make
| everything work, it's like building on sand.
|
| On the other hand, as pointed out, it's like that in other
| occupations as well.
|
| We programmers do have a choice, however. It doesn't have to be,
| though. We could simplify things and remove some of the cruft.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| There was always some layer of abstraction. It's just the ISA
| is a more elegant abstraction than a mobile platform is.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > with almost no feedback when things break
|
| It was kind of like that back in the days of "shrink-wrapped"
| (even if it wasn't really shrink wrapped) software, too, though
| - I remember trying to debug problems that were specific to a
| particular environment on remote computer users computers
| before the internet. At least with apps you can build in some
| sort of telemetry.
|
| But yeah, things are way more complicated than they used to be,
| and it takes a lot longer than most people appreciate to go
| from zero to productive.
| oconnor663 wrote:
| I think there's a lot of truth to this, in that it's good to
| understand all the layers below you. But there's also some
| truth to the opposite: Did anyone ever really understand all
| the layers, or even most of them? Even if you knew all the
| details of how your microchip worked (weren't those details
| usually proprietary?), you might have wanted your code to work
| on other chips, or even on future versions of your current
| chip. At some point, we always have to close our eyes and
| abstract away parts of the problem behind the contract we
| believe those parts will follow.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _you realistically can 't know all the layers any more_
|
| This has always been true. What you percieved to be the case
| was an illusion. To paraphrase myself1: Imagine someone who
| started with soldering, electronics, radio, and circuits, and
| is just beginning with computers. They would probably feel the
| exact way you do; that they used to know "all the layers", but
| that it's somehow becoming too large for them. Knowing "all the
| layers" was an illusion for them, as it was for you.
|
| > _almost no feedback when things break._
|
| This, however, is absolutely crucial. Fast feedback loops,
| however and at whatever level they are implemented (REPL, fast
| development iterations, TDD) are essential to knowing that what
| you are doing is actually accomplishing anything and not just
| doing cargo cult coding.
|
| 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19113359
| wil421 wrote:
| Not sure I want to be programming forever but I'd like to manage
| software engineers until I retire. Hopefully in the near future
| I'll be able to do it and my boss recently asked if I still
| wanted to manage people.
|
| Still love programming and will continue to do some python
| programming around the house and tinkering with my Raspberry PIs
| but I'll probably say adios to JavaScript.
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