The attitude presented in the article is indeed typically American -- but not for the reason I think you intended.
The quintessential American quality is the belief that every person has the right to control their own destiny. Fuck, it's right there in the first sentence of the first document declaring this country's independence.
Americans are often seen as greedy relative to our European counterparts. But you have to remember that there's a different social contract over in the USA -- if you fall, you're on your own. Therefore, money is seen primarily as a means to self-determination.
Now, this all gets fucked when you throw in consumer culture on top of it, but the desire to accumulate large sums of money is not uniquely American -- but we're damn good at it because the cultural message we get sent early on is that once you're an adult, you're on your own. If you want to control your destiny, you'd better learn how to make money.
But notice that the author's main complaint wasn't about money -- it was about all the wasted opportunities where if he had more power (in the form of a management role) he could have had more influence on the outcome of situations he was involved with. The loss of self-determination is the big gripe -- and the entire reason I hit the eject button from engineering early in my career.
For example, I've always found the argument that certain voters (commonly poor white working-class) who vote for small-government are voting against their own economic interests to be rather interesting from a psych perspective. I'm a libertarian so I don't put much faith in the idea, but I think that issue could be traced back to the concept of locus of control. Voting for larger social spending might benefit them financially, but it also means accepting the belief that control over their life is externalized.
The alternative--that control is internalized or even just the perception that it's internalized--is likely more palatable psychologically as a core self-evaluation, with a more beneficial influence on other CSEs (neuroticism, generalized self-efficacy, and self-esteem). That leads to better life satisfaction, and can contribute to later economic success according to the research.
Reality is a lot more nuanced than that, but perception is absolutely fundamental in terms of how it can affect personality.
But tech is not a meritocracy. [1] [2]
Accepting that you have less control over your life may change some of your outcomes, but I doubt it would completely crush one's spirit.
I've accepted that I'll never flap my arms unaided and fly like a bird. I'm not depressed because of that realization. It's a known limitation of my life, and I can live with it, and I won't spend my weekends practicing my flapping and running skills. It actually helps me focus on areas I can affect change... such as building a jetpack.
Knowing which things are outside of your control should help you realize what is and is not within your ability to change, and then you can figure out how to make the most success given which variables are mutable or immutable.
You mention research about one's perception can affect later economic success; I'd be very interested in a reference.
[1] http://istechameritocracy.com [2] http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/02/06/272...
But it should be, and the issues laid out in your links detail failures to reach that ideal.
We can do better. That does not mean we stop trying or abandon the ideal that you should be known for your works above all else.
But just like any other institutional problem (racism, sexism, etc), it does no good to simply ignore it while it negatively impacts you. Instead, acknowledging your current situation, and working to make it better, is key.
Some people say it is, others say it isn't. Neither use a lot of data in their arguments.
Then you add questions of if who is chosen for promotion is sane, if what products a company chooses to focus on is sane, if what products the market chooses to make popular is sane. None of those are optimal in the sense that the "best" thing wins out. Marketing (of a product or self-promotion) and being in the right place at the right time dominate each of those steps.
So how on earth would you take that and get a meritocracy out the other end?
The second part of your comment is less relevant, as I think most "tech" people would say that e.g. promotions (management), product development (marketing) and the general market dynamics are highly "non-tech". But in many of these areas, people do try to choose the best - at least as far as marketing is concerned, companies dislike wasting money and choose to promote those people/products that they expect will produce the most profit. Companies' "profit", of course, doesn't correspond to a person's "merit" ("profitcracy"?), but the basic mechanism is the same.
2. Being good at self-promotion is a merit. Some have it and some not. You could not define merit as just technical skills.
Not many here would agree with you, on both sides of the table. Whiteboarding skills often do not translate into ability at a job.
> Being good at self-promotion is a merit. Some have it and some not. You could not define merit as just technical skills
Sure, but you're starting to beg the question. All systems are meritocracies if merit is defined at being successful within that system.
While Europeans seem to have come to the opposite balance of concerns on independence.
- providing the illusion of locus of control
- disassociating people/society from nature
- homesteader mauled by a bear = heroics!
- getting mugged in the city = decadence
I hope that I am able to pass a sizable estate to my children and grandchildren, so that they will not be dependent on banks, universities, and employers that will charge them outrageous fees in time and money just so that they may have a hope at a normal middle-class lifestyle. True independence for ourselves and our posterity should be the goal for all of us. For most of human history, it has been; these days, we are confused and pretend that being enslaved to usurers is the ideal.
No. Having an in-demand skill is a tool to obtain and keep independence. It's not independence itself. There are many people out there with high-demand skills who still find themselves unhappily slaving away in a job where they must do someone else's bidding for 40%+ of their waking day. Once they have the property and assets to make that an optional activity that they can leave at any time, they are independent. Having the ability to go find a new master if you get fed up enough with your current one is good, but it's not really independence. Independence is the freedom to control how you spend your days, and unless you're debt-free, own your living space outright, and have a consistent, sustainable source of food, you don't have the option to not work.
> If they don't have skills that contribute to society, they are irrelevant.
Define "contribute to society". I think you're being way too exclusive here. There are ways to contribute to society without being part of the industrial workforce. Just ask the big bosses, who, incidentally, are the ones pushing this narrative that life is meaningless without their patronage. You don't have to be a professional to make a meaningful contribution. In fact, I would argue that being a good parent has a far greater positive social effect than being a good professional.
>And guess what, if your children decide not to use those banks and universities, and don't get jobs then they may be "independent, but they are also dead weights.
A bank provides people with very little actual value, so I'm not sure why you included it. I will be immensely pleased if my children can go their whole adult lives without having to pay a cent of usury. It's a massive hidden tax on the middle class, making every major purchase cost about 2-3x its sticker price.
If you think about it, you'll see that much of our industrial culture is based on guaranteeing this effortless income to usurers, and I want to break that cycle for my children. This is also a large part of why the media wants to promote negative images of independent wealth; they're trying to protect their dirty income streams and reinforce their position as a hidden cost that people just accept as an implicit requirement.
Of course the children of independent people should be taught to do something useful with their time and lives. I think that by and large, they are. You don't hear about that because it doesn't please the massive indentured population to hear about it on TV, but if you look around, you'll see that it's generally true.
And in the age of welfare, you don't have to be independently wealthy to be a layabout or a loiterer. It's no longer an exclusive privilege, so providing a decent estate that will allow your posterity to have its freedom and control its own destiny is not really any more dangerous to individual productivity than not doing so.
>I agree that people should have access to enough money to realize their potential, but not more than that.
I absolutely do agree that too much money in the wrong hands is a recipe for disaster.
To respond to your point about contributing to society, I totally agree that parenting is among the most important contributions you can make to society. But I don't think that you can be a very effective parent without the wold view provided by interaction with both people and knowledge. And this interaction is very difficult to find outside of the university and workplace setting. As a parent you should absorb as much knowledge and experience as possible so that you can pass that on, and your children can build on that rather than wasting time re-learning it.
Finally, you are right that welfare allows people without money to live while making basically no contributions to anything. But is not a comfortable life. Anyway my point was less that you shouldn't give your children money because it will make them Deadbeats, and more that you should try to get as much value from each dollar as possible and I don't personally believe that giving all of your money to your children is likely to be the best way to achieve that.
I apologize for my formatting. Writing this on a phone.
True autonomy is its own discipline.
The problem with gaining power is that you now have to steer into the maelstrom of human foibles for a living. "The Turks pay me a golden treasure, yet I am poor! Because I am a river to my people! " - Auda abu Tayi in "Lawrence of Arabia".
No, people pursue power for status, not for autonomy.
Big money is a different ballpark and I don't think that's what most people want. I think they just want to be comfortable in doing what they want to do.
The advantage of big money isn't just charities and companies - it's having your time back, since you're not tied to getting an income from it.
Between rent, student loan payments, health insurance, bills, and car loans, and food, I think we maybe have $500 left to throw around each month. If we were paying against a mortgage, that would basically be zero.
The most financially effective way to be a programmer is to work remotely for someone who pays SF or NYC salaries and live in a moderate COL area.
I've always seen the rental income requirement you stated phrased as "monthly income must be at least 3x monthly rent", in case the 40x thing threw anyone else off (40/12=3.33).
I've recently seen 45x monthly in Manhattan and LIC (Queens).
And, as a sibling comment stated, it depends on location. I think $80k is right for most areas of the country. If you live in NYC, SF, LA, or another place with really high cost of living, adjust accordingly (which is probably like 2.3x).
You may not be able to afford a house in the area you want, but you can certainly afford a home. Here's one with a mortgage for $89/mo.
http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/207-1st-Ave-W-Gackle-ND-58...
Two people can easily live on $40-50k in most areas. Eliminate all the unnecessary expenses like $150+/m in phone payments, $50+/m for cable, etc.
for the $80k number.
In case you haven't seen it, there's another paper that argues the opposite: more money does make you happier (but only if you know how to use it). http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/danielgilbert/files/if-mone...
I make more than $80k and I can certainly say that I was less stressed before I took a huge pay cut. On the other hand, I like my job more so I guess I might actually still be happier. All else being equal though, if I made more I imagine I would be much less stressed..
I think the OP wanted control over building/shipping/creating products. Not life comforts, house, food on the table, free time. His goals would not be helped by a middle-class income, but more control over the products he was building.
And even deeper down, it's a means of survival. The safety net here has pretty much disintegrated since it began to be dismantled in the '80s. A lot of people in the US haven't saved enough for retirement considering this new reality... they haven't even saved enough to get them through a few months of unemployment. There's a loss of hope in rural America now in places where it can be very tough to find decent paying work. It's starting so show up in a decrease in lifespan and in many ways it's very similar to what happened in Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed. The drug of choice there was/is alcohol. Here it seems to be prescription opiates (in addition to alcohol).
These situations are not even remotely comparable.
The fraction of Americans who abuse opiates is tiny compared to the percentage of Russians who abuse alcohol.
As a rough approximation, about 2.5 million Americans have an opiate abuse issue in 2016[1], out of a population of 319 million. This is about 0.8% of the population.
Statistics from the Soviet Union are hard to find due to the government's indifference to the problem, but even official news sources -- which routinely greatly underreported the true magnitude of social problems -- put alcohol abuse rates at 19% of the population.[2] Also note that the amount of drinking you have to do to be considered "abusing" alcohol is far, far greater in Russia than in the US.
[1] http://www.asam.org/docs/default-source/advocacy/opioid-addi... [2] http://alcalc.oxfordjournals.org/content/34/6/824
People just don't have enough to do otherwise.
So you don't think you have this right? I believe you have the right of opportunity, but not of outcome.
I learned what this guy learned pretty early on: If you are an employee (developer or not), you will be paid to do things you are against and people less intelligent and experienced than you will be making decisions for you at some point...and you can't do anything about it.
This is the sole reason I started my own company. I was sick of being forced to go down a path of failure..after every attempt to do otherwise was ignored.
After our failure, management never wanted to look bad, so they almost always picked someone to blame. Sometimes it was me or my team, sometimes someone else. Speaking up about it meant you weren't a 'team player' and you would probably be on the chopping block during the next round of layoffs.
I was able to survive most layoffs because I learned how to play politics, but at the cost of never feeling satisfied with my job.
I've had my own company for 5 years and I don't regret a thing. It was the best decision I ever made.
"I just have to say this: So typically american"
Really? I was thinking it was typically Chinese. My wife's family is from China and they pretty much all try to one up/compare each other in terms of assets, money, or jobs.
"If you want to control your destiny, you'd better learn how to make money."
This message is pretty truthful. The more you rely on someone to support you (the government, friends, family, job), the less control you have over your life. Money gives you the ultimate power and freedom to do what you want.
Regardless of your culture, this doesn't change. If you have more more money, you will always have more options/freedom.
I do think I have this right; as an American it is the #1 thing that makes me an American. It's why we ignore the rules we don't like. It's why we lust for power and for money, lest some other person beat us to the punch and have power over us.
And while no rational person thinks they can control every factor that goes into their own outcome, we at least want to have some influence. If you're an engineer and your company goes belly-up because your marketing guy was a moron and you didn't have the power to make him listen to your ideas... that's the position many Americans strive to avoid.
> Really? I was thinking it was typically Chinese. My wife's family is from China and they pretty much all try to one up/compare each other in terms of assets, money, or jobs.
I feel that this no longer an American trait. 30 years ago, yeah, but with the whole backlash against the 1% and the hipster movement where bankers making $500k/yr dress like homeless musicians... it's not as cool to flaunt money anymore (unless you're a musician; then it's just part of the whole consumer culture thing because you're selling a life of luxury to poor people...) My household income last year was over seven figures, but I live in a house worth less than half of that and drive a 5 year old base model Subaru. Once money buys you autonomy, it's not really worth much (and that's a modern American perspective that's backed up by research).
> Regardless of your culture, this doesn't change. If you have more more money, you will always have more options/freedom.
I absolutely agree. But the single most important value that America was founded on is self-determination: the idea that each person is in control of their own destiny. Outside forces may get in your way, but it's your obligation to figure out how to get around them. American business culture is the same way: if you want to limit your chances of being fired through no fault of your own, you should probably get more power so you're higher up on the decision making chain.
I may be assuming too much, but in most don't really believe this.
For example, I'd wager you firmly believe you have the right to a safe and secure society such that you are relatively confident you will no be randomly murdered in your sleep with no consequences for the murderer.
This is exactly a right to the outcome of a minimum level of security in your person and property.
If you do hold this belief then you believe in right of outcome in society. Though you may not agree with others what outcomes we should be guaranteed.
Do you have a right to a "safe and secure society"? I'm not really sure precisely what that is or how it is achieved, but that sounds an awful lot like a privilege.
For example, you most certainly do not have the right to be guarded in your sleep by armed guards. Nor do we all possess the right to be guarded in our sleep by armed guards.
This is a right of outcome. The outcome of not having violence committed against your person or property.
Rights of outcome vs rights of opportunity are a false dichotomy. All rights are a right for some specific outcome and are considered violated when that outcome does not occur.
Building up soft power is something anyone should do if they care about their work. Building big things means collaborating, and collaborating means persuading other people when you're right and recognizing when you're wrong. Do that and you become a leader, regardless of your position on the org chart.
My guess is that this fellow felt like his having set aside his leadership position in a role should simultaneously have given him instant authority and at the same time allowed him to shrug and ignore problems he saw but wash"the directly responsible for.
Control is an illusion, you infantile egomaniac. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099371/quotes)
But it's really easy to over-estimate that control and your ability to wield it. If the Peter principle is accurate, and people are promoted to their level of incompetence, then it also indicates that people assume their level of competence is higher than it actually is. And then you get project failures, screaming managers, and lots of lost money.
"Power is only given to those who are prepared to lower themselves to pick it up" - Ragnar Lodbrok, "Vikings".
... and then took nearly a century to getting around to the idea of not owning people. There are a lot of caveats to that American belief.
The only other activity that does that is Civ, and no-one is going to pay me to play that ;)
If 10x assets is what drives you, more power to you. For me, being happy right now is more important that any imagined future happiness that a fat bank account could provide. And let's be honest, you can still make a pretty decent salary as a developer.
You might be dead tomorrow; you might as well enjoy today.
"You might be dead tomorrow; you might as well enjoy today."
This is not a bad way to live, but as I get older I am increasingly aware that there will be a day when I'm dead tomorrow. And for that reason I'm increasingly less interested in spending time in the state where "time shifts, and before I know it hours have passed." Instead I want to fill those hours with real-time concious, experienced enjoyment. Because I can't live them again.
Being in the zone and cranking out great code still feels good, but only at the time. Which I guess makes me conflicted or something.
Thank you for making me think about this.
Then I remember how lucky I am. I started with next to nothing, worked through college, and now basically get paid to play with computers all day (something I would have done for free anyways). I get to travel and have other amazing experiences. Biggie said it best, "when I was dead broke man, I couldn't picture this".
One of the reasons I think programmers always end up in this existential plight is that we are successful enough to have time to think about it. When I was young and worried about eating or having enough money to put gas in the car so I could get to work or school (or even having a car) I never thought about these things.
I remember moments from my college days that I can pinpoint to the year they happened. That thing that happened sophomore year? I know it happened sophomore year because I did it with my roommate at the time.
But nowadays I'll watch a movie on Netflix thinking it came out just in the past year or two, only to discover it came out in, say, 2007 or worse 1997.
A close friend of mine's daughter just turned 16. I remember her birth like it was yesterday. But the intervening years... not so much.
I think having kids, which I have not done, might slow time down a bit. Travel helps too.
Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer.
When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place.
That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know that is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty...
Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning. My picture of my father on that evening in 1976 is, in other words, twofold: on the one hand I see him as I saw him at that time, through the eyes of an eight-year-old: unpredictable and frightening; on the other hand, I see him as a peer through whose life time is blowing and unremittingly sweeping large chunks of meaning along with it.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1
It's a paradox best expressed by the old adage: the days are long, but the years are short.
Before having my daughter, days were fast, weeks were faster, and years slipped through my fingers. Time goes faster when you daily routine is always more less the same, and that is more difficult with a child.
I find that if you hang around long enough and pay attention, you start to see the shape and patterns of your life. Not an original or profound observation, but it can be surprisingly easy for many of us to defer thinking about such things. What you gain from this you pay for with time, though.
In a similar experience to yours, I watched The Matrix with my son recently and was shocked to discover that it was released in 1999 - but I think of it as a recent thing. Holding my niece when she was a newborn baby and showing her Christmas tree lights, and now she's making an independent life in a big city.
In my experience, and as others have commented, having children doesn't slow time down. You're so busy with them for so long, and they rush towards their future so fast.
I'm reminded of a phrase that Sam Altman used: The days are long but the decades are short [1].
[1] http://blog.samaltman.com/the-days-are-long-but-the-decades-...
Speaking from firsthand experience, it seems to do just the opposite.
So I also struggle with this exact same problem, i.e. some thing which I feel is recent is actually 5/10 years back. I am trying to work on it, so far not so successfully.
Nope. Makes it go even faster, and you remember even less.
The days are long the years are short.
Have you noticed that now more than never before there is plethora of amazing libraries, frameworks, language, tools, platforms, clouds, etc. that are easily available to use and if you like to build stuff WHY NOT CREATE YOUR OWN THING and come up with your own ideas and build them instead of continuing working for one company probably using the same software stack? Why limit yourself? have you entertained a regret like this?
I ask this, because I'm in the same boat as you and this is my small regret though I'm working on the side, slowly, to build my own thing in the free time that family and my day job allows it.
Cheers!
What he says about missed opportunities, and working for idiotic management, that's the big thing here. You work your ass off, the management does dumb things, so the thing you're working on never really pays off, in money or fun.
The fact that his sister has 10x the assets is kind of an insult after injury kind of thing.
Its important for management to understand the difficulties and decisions made by a development team to properly create a roadmap for the business. I think the author is expressing that the lack of respect for the programmers opinions can be detrimental.
IMO it is essential in today's world to have competent engineering management in the room whenever any major product decisions are made.
The problem that really bugs me as well as a lot of others is perhaps more deep-seated - that the popular kids from high school really do win anyway and become your bosses, and stories like Steve Wozniak or Bill Gates where smart, technical people can get ahead of the incompetent but very personable charlatans are becoming less and less common. That confidence / arrogance really are enough to succeed (many do work hard but so do the majority of technical workers too with almost none of the rewards) in the eyes of US society is a lingering thought.
> You might be dead tomorrow; you might as well enjoy today.
Just for this remark I wish I could have upvoted you more than once.
This is something that those that live for the job, without paying attention to family and friends seem to forget.
And yes, Ican relate to the article; I've seen (I still see) junior managers who can barely tie their shoes make more money than excellent engineers with 25y experience, but that's the way the world is...
Basically 'engineer'/'programmer' is a calling for some; it is for me. People for whom this is not a calling will never be /really/ good at it (for one thing, they don't spend their spare time doing it!) and eventually gravitate out of it.
But the ones for whom it is a calling, well, sod the money, give me some nice project/people to work on/with and I'm happy.
Or, do that but also get the money by going consulting. That's what I do for the last few years. It's quite exciting being a 'mercenary' in a way, and you can dissociate yourself from the companies/products and focus on the engineering.
The past is just a memory, the present moment is so fleeting that it cannot be grasped, and the future hasn't happened yet:) I think being in a flow state is about living with this fact, in the moment, as it is, without all the mental overhead that is past and future. You're not 58, you are brand new, right now, just as you are.
My very first paid project was designing the PA audio system in the Lille (france) metro. It was a fancy Mac SE/30 with a IEEE GPIO card. That was driving two big Revox Tape machines, and was playing one, rewinding the other etc. Occasionally it would also play a digital audio file (w000t!).
It was all in Pascal at the time, and I had a whooping 4MB of ram. System ran for well over 10 years!
On my first internship after high school while waiting for university applications to come out was done in Clipper and Access/Visual Basic. Also starting OS/400 backup jobs.
Not the set of languages that I already enjoyed most, but it kept myself busy during the Summer.
I can't imagine having done anything else. Sure, many other careers sound appealing. But software has been stimulating and sustainable while affording me a managable level of stress and downtime as needed. (Try doing that as a physician or veterinarian, both careers that I once considered).
That said, I sympathize with the OP's frustrations. Software jobs usually imply a rather flat hierarchy, with little opportunity for advancement other than leads or principals. Any further rise in responsibility requires that you leave tech behind and spend your days in meetings. Not for me.
However if you work in R&D without a PhD, I've found a severe glass ceiling (especially at larger companies). In general, no advancement beyond lead staff for you. If I'd known that 10-20 years ago, I would have handled that differently (get a PhD, work at smaller firms, or leave R&D). The road not taken, I guess...
It's hard to beat the feeling of having a computer make your life easier. There's a triumph in it.
Screw that. I'd never work for a place like that.
I've been programming professionally for 25 years, still love it! http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/
Also, it's easy to forget that being a SW developer today has a lot going for it - especially the demand. At least here in Stockholm, if you are good at what you do, you can pick and chose where to work. So no reason to stay at a place where you are not happy. http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/08/5-reasons-why-software-dev...
To me the 'my sister has 10x the assets' is like saying 'my sister is going to be ok in her retirement years, while I hope I'll be able to keep working for as long as I need to', but maybe I am reading that through the lens of my concerns/fears
Quoting:
"Though as for that the passing there/Had worn them really about the same/And both that morning equally lay"
The poem states that the two roads are basically the same.
Further points of interest...
"I shall be telling this with a sigh/Somewhere ages and ages hence:/Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference."
The author knows his own folly: that he'll look back and say it was an important choice, that he picked the path that was more special. When of course in fact he did no such thing. It's a poem about how people self-aggrandise and think their choices more important and better than they are.
Of course, no-one ever actually reads anything other than the last two lines, so the point of the poem ends up being missed. Which is ironic, given the actual message.
Fun fact: the poem was written with Edward Thomas, a good friend of Frost's, in mind. Frost said of Thomas:
"No matter which road you take, you'll always sigh, and wish you'd taken another."
Thomas was invariably lamenting how he should have taken the other option in any case where there were two things to choose. Which sheds a little light on the humour in the poem.
> "No matter which road you take, you'll always sigh, and wish you'd taken another."
There's no disagreement here. It's the same interpretation of the poem.
In my experience, most (not all, but most) of the people who have a lots of money acquire it by working long days and having little free time. They also have little freedom because they are so tied to their job.
Again, everyone with lots of money doesn't have this problem, but in my experience most of them do.
Reality is, some choices really do effect our lives and don't lead to the same place.
From my standpoint, I do not regret anything. I learned from these experiences because I love to explore and am not afraid to fail along the way.
I see so many that seek advice when they have the power to take action themselves. So much time wasted really.
In contrast, I fear that once I try management, it will be hard to move back to being a developer.
How easy / hard was it for you to return to being a developer?
I've always been quite active with side projects and moved back into development after about 5 years being in management. It went OK. Everyone was younger than me, stuff had obviously changed and I was out of my comfort zone for sure, but it was a successful transition. If I'd not been so into development on the side (i.e. constantly writing tools and apps with new technologies), I feel it would have been pretty difficult to switch back.
Today I am very much hands on and I make it known that writing code and designing is my passion.
Personally, I'm glad I got our of management and back into the nuts and bolts side of the house.
The problem is being able to influence things in a creative way.
I'd rather be the captain of my small pirate ship than a cog in giant battleship. But I'm in my mid 30s now, maybe that will change when I get to 40.
Doesn't work that way. Please start today.. don't hope for a things changing in 40s as it will come to your very very fast.
Only way to make sure his creative decisions are actually implemented.
Half the time I spent as a producer I was worried about the fact that I wasn't doing any programming, and my skills were atrophying.
Production had some real perks in comparison, being able to meet a lot of people I admired, going on business trips, etc, but I got frustrated with only trying to cajole developers to add certain features that I thought would make the game better, instead of being able to dive into the code and add the feature myself, and iterate until all the kinks came out of it.
You'd be surprised how many times you can say "this game is too hard, you have to make it easier" or "the text in this UI is too small, you need to make it easier to read" and developers still won't do it, or will only tweak it marginally to say they did it, instead of sitting down and actually trying to make the game easier.
And then the game comes out, and it gets blasted by critics for being "too damn hard".
If I were in that position today I'd be a lot more specific, but I can only iterate when they give me a new build, which usually takes days. I can't change a variable and rebuild it in 30 seconds like I could as a developer.
That isn't the job of a producer or manager. Maybe quality assurance or testing? It sounds like you were micromanaging them.
If I were in that position I would try to educate them about what makes a game hard and how hard games should be. I would educate them about typography. I would not tell them what to do. They must find the solution themselves.
Hm, I'm violating my own advice with the paragraph above. :)
As a developer, I hate it when somebody gives me too vague problems "game is too hard" or too detailed assignments like "make the font size bigger". I need an accurate problem description with all requirements. If it isn't accurate, my solution will probably miss the point. If I haven't all requirements I will probably violate some of the unspoken rules.
We were a bit more specific than 'make it easier', I just have a vague memory exactly what we said because it was 8 years ago and a lot has happened since then.
And we were a super small company. I had to wear many hats; overseeing QA was one of them.
Micro-managing is an extreme term, and I don't think we were. We weren't telling each developer what their tasks were for the day, we were communicating with their project manager and saying which bugs or features had what priority, and by the way we played the build and we think the font looks too small, could you please increase the size, it's okay if the UI takes more space, please remember not everyone will be playing this on HD tvs, thank you.
And I was playing each build to do some internal verification that the bugs they say they fixed did get fixed, yes. Personally I think it's better the publisher knows what's going on with their own game (keep in mind, the developer didn't pitch the game, they were hired) than blindly trust that everything is going the right direction, until it's time for a milestone payment and "holy shit, that's nothing like what we asked for! you don't get paid until it's fixed!"
TL:DR: There was no road less traveled by they were equally the same, but he fooled himself into think he made a special choice.
Just some poetry discussion. "The Road Not Taken" is considered the most misunderstood and misinterpreted poem. (It was great to make freshmen tackle this poem in freshmen Theology Class. Then we went on to most misinterpreted scripture verse :)
So, in the end, while he was very clear in the present that the two roads were identical with no real reason to take one over the other, later in life he knew he’d once again fool himself, this time successfully, by instead remembering that one road was “less traveled by” and that this influenced his decision, when in fact he really decided on a whim. http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/09/robert-frost...
My favorite is short example:
In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike. Matt. 5:45 (NLT)
Rain in a semi-arid agriculture area was a good thing. People read it and think God sends bad things to also. So when something bad happens people will quote this verse.
I also like the Prodigal Son (It really is the Parable of the Older Brother). People miss the main point and think it is about bad children coming back to the Father (Its a side point) The main point is the Older Brother was mad that the Father was nice to the bad son.
If he had gone into leadership, he might now be looking at examples such a notch, who got rich from dev work without becoming a 'manager' - at the same time indie dev startups are very competitive.
I guess you have to balance risk and reward. If you focus on the best examples of an option, you have to also compare it to the risk (how many fail).
A well-paid manager saying, "But I could have made more developing Minecraft!" might as well complain, "But I could have made more if I won the lottery!"
If high compensation is the goal, being a manager is simply a much more straightforward and reliable path than being a programmer.
Which means job that used to be either low-demand, low-paid, or (usually) both. Otherwise demand has to keep rising, because without barriers, an increase in pay will cause a delayed increase in supply (as people are attracted to the field) which then meets the demand, or at least evens it out, reducing pay in turn, unless demand keeps increasing.
My own 2$ ameteur micro-economic theory there :-)
Anyway, the point is this; Is hard to predict which jobs will pay well when you start on that path. well paid jobs now might be lower paid by the time you and every other chaser-of-the-dollar goes into the same field, increasing supply, pushing down pay. The opposite can happen too.
Builder/labourer might not be seen as too lucrative in the past, yet in some times it certainly has been. And I wonder how many BAs actually fail to get high paying jobs?...
Yes, there may be micro-fluctuations where every company is suddenly scrambling to hire the latest flavor of the month (e.g. data analyst is now data scientist). These are hard to predict. But you know who will reliably earn more than the data scientist in three years? The data scientist's boss.
> But you know who will reliably earn more than the data scientist in three years? The data scientist's boss.
I'm not 100% sure of this. There will be a boss in the chain that earns more, but actually I suspect that this isn't always true, given one assumption - the boss, as a job requirement, has to have a good knowledge of DS (maybe an ex/senior DS?), in which case this barrier ensures management will get higher pay - otherwise they'd just stay/go into in DS.
Picking the wrong career path is entirely possible. Some people absolutely love technical problem solving, he doesn't mention it at all. For all we know it's worthless to him and just something he has to do to earn a cheque.
I do think you might be on to something with
>Maybe he would have been terrible at that kind of work.
though. He makes it sound like in 1994 he signed a document stating that assassins should murder him if he ever tries to manage anyone. I find it hard to believe that if he was good at managing people and influencing decisions that he would have went the rest of his career unable to break back in to management. Convincing people to give him the job is part of the needed skill set!
My experience is that companies (many, perhaps most) are falling all over themselves to give senior programmers a shot at managing people.
That is what socialism->communism was about in my country. We have to suffer just a little more and then we'll get there. Guess what. We never got there.
My job is easy (for me), requires little from me and very occasionally is worth getting out of bed for. I'm probably one of the lowest paid people here. But, I take lunch when I want, I wear what I want, I have a situation that is somewhat flexible (not because the employer wants it to be and actively dissuades it, but because my co-worker and I will mutually look out for and cover for each other). The benefits are bad. Treatment by management ranges from indifference to overtly hostile for the most part.
I'm not a programmer and would put myself somewhere in the middle satisfaction wise. The money sucks but I've had worse jobs and the time off (2 months a year), while unpaid, is great.
$.02, my ultimate point was not worrying where your next meal is coming from is a luxury most people don't have - so worrying that you're not doing something fulfilling becomes a secondary concern at best.
Going by the trends you will likely live long.
>>and what is your old days worth if you broken in your youth trying to be safe when you are 50?
Far more worth than being 50, out of cash or very little of it, competing with a impossibly competitive new generation. Living in perennial fear of layoffs, making ends meet and having a roof above your head. All the while watching your peers who made sound investments already retire and having a gala time now.
>>I'd rather work, as some do, 3-4 hours every single day for the rest of my life, than 12 hour days for 10 years and then compensate my lost youth, health and relationships with yachts or whatever money could buy.
Retirement has rarely meant turning into a vegetable these days. Retirement only means financial freedom to do what you want. Imagine how valuable your relationships will be when you spend quality time with your friends and family, instead of running into old age expecting help from everyone starting from family, friends to government.
>>That is what socialism->communism was about in my country. We have to suffer just a little more and then we'll get there. Guess what. We never got there.
As a Indian who lived through socialism I can tell scores of people 'got there'.
I know people who suffered for many years, retired and then died within a couple of years. Don't be so sure you will live 30-40 years after retirement. You can never tell.
Of course, you could just be repeatedly implementing the same thing with slight variations for years so minimal repetition in learning but maximal repetition in doing.
Lifetime earning potential is almost never linear.
It's so hilarious that he calls himself a "programmer". With 30+ years of experience, you're a software engineer, an architect, and best of all, a consultant.
Then you charge 5x the normal rate of a salaried engineer, work normal hours, and start accumulating real assets.
He needed to put down the technical books, read a book about personal branding and then he could have had his cake and eaten it too.
Might as well add "Rock Star" to the list of meaningless drivel.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with describing yourself as a "programmer" when that is indeed what you've been doing for the last 30 years.
The world needs less people spewing streams of hype to describe their own self importance, not more.
There is an issue with calling yourself a "programmer" when one of his main complaints is the lack of monetary return on his career. Don't choose a commodity title if you want a higher than average return on your time.
I'd personally rather have someone show me the real work they've done to convince me that they knew what they were doing, rather than giving themselves a meaningless title to convince me how good they are.
There are plenty of "Software Engineers" and "Architects" out there that couldn't program their way out of a wet paper sack.
Fundamentally our disagreement is on the importance of the title. Yes, I will concede that there are some people who will be impressed by it, and maybe even be a bit more likely to hire you because of it.
I just don't think that's a good thing.
I know too many people who have been burned by others who used such language, who actually didn't know what they were doing, and as a consequence others who did know what they were doing lost their jobs, and the company spent millions to try to recover, or just plain went out of business.
The title does the initial framing of expectations, that's it.
There's always going to be idiot consultants. And anyone who doesn't properly vet any candidate is likely to get their expectations crushed.
I'm talking more about the title and language that frames the career.
There's a big difference between "I'm a programmer with 30+ years experience. My last project was a rewrite of my employers checkout API."
vs
"I'm a consultant specializing in Ruby on Rails. For my last client, I rewrote the entire checkout process that supports $400 dollars in transactions. I decreased the time it took to process the initial check out by two seconds. With that increase in checkout speed, I provided an additional 10% lift in revenues."
Both could be describing the same process, but with the latter much more in line with the prospective client's goals.
My point is that the title should not frame the expectations at all, because so many people plaster "Software Engineer" or "Software Architect" on their resumes that the terms have become mostly meaningless (assuming that they ever had any real meaning in the first place), and in many cases are an indication that the person thinks more highly of themselves than they should.
I also think that describing the term "programmer" as a "commodity title" gives it an unnecessarily negative connotation. Despite what marketing people think, it is a perfectly valid description of what many of us do, and does not at all necessitate thinking of a person's skills as "run-of-the-mill".
This is dream which happens only when you are asleep. In real life an older person is less energetic, less enthusiastic, can't do weekends, has health issues, has responsibilities, has family commitments etc etc.
Young people work insane hours, they do that for cheap, they show up on weekends and are more flexible in general.
In most cases. Like in everyday cases experience doesn't pay well as you think. Even in professions like medicine and law that is true.
The assumption that experienced people get paid well applies for a minority few people who for nearly all practical purposes are an exception to the whole rule.
This is complete nonsense. The best and most productive engineers I know are in middle age or beyond. In addition to raw technical ability--which does not decline in my experience--they have a level-headedness about making decisions that is rare to find in younger people. It's a critical success factor, especially for complex projects.
>Young people work insane hours, they do that for cheap, they >show up on weekends and are more flexible in general.
Your assumption that income is directly related to your output is wrong. Making better, more qualified decisions is one way to differentiate yourself as you get older. Another is to quantify your output; maybe you do less programming but the pieces you do write can provide the company with a million+ lift in revenue?
Or you position yourself as writing a cleaner implementation, without having to rewrite 3 or 4 times to get it correct (ehem, those "energetic" youngins).
Company's pay for experience all of the time; and when it can be tied directly to increases in profits/revenues, you're way ahead of the game (especially ahead of any Jr. programmer that just blindly pumps out code).
That's funny. I'm from the US and when I got to that line, I found myself assuming the author was an immigrant or foreigner.
Talking publicly about financial success isn't something I associate with people natively from the US. Certainly, among the people I grew up around, it would be considered unconscionably tasteless to do so.
Look on the bright side. I can do all the programming I want at night and on weekends, in fact I technically have more time away from work to do it, than at work, and most employers consider "learn at home" to be mandatory, but your average nuclear engineer, infectious disease researcher, forensic accountant, or organic chemist is pretty much screwed in that regard.
For decades I've been expecting capitalization to freeze out home computer users by making everything too expensive for hobbyists yet cheap for a company to afford (think of the example of CNC milling machines, or electronics), and the cloud comes close to ruining hobbyists, but you can still pretty much keep up with the bleeding edge at home in programming, if you want.
I learned long ago never to chase the money. Do what you enjoy and you will never work a day in your life. Obviously, life is never quite this simple and in any job you will have periods when you do not enjoy some aspects, but the point is, do what makes you happy, follow your bliss.
Of course there is another point to this the author does not seem to be considering, just because you go into management, does not mean necessarily you will be good at it, or be prepared to do the things that might be needed to get ahead. For example can you fire a friend just because it is what is best for the company? You get good managers and you get bad managers. Good managers can make a lot of money but there is no guarantee he would have made a good manager.
If your goal is to build software products, how do you make the biggest impact?
This feels like the question the author is answering with his observation that, as a programmer, you rarely have the clout to make the decisions necessary to drive the best product (or any at all) to market, outside of intentionally writing back code.
This also has SO much to do with OPs lifestyle / propensity to save. "The millionaire next door" goes a long way in explaining how even lower income households can accumulate much more wealth than many high income earners with simple lifestyle differences.
Most readers consider “The Road Not Taken” to be a paean to triumphant
self-assertion (“I took the one less traveled by”), but the literal meaning
of the poem’s own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation.
The poem’s speaker … has already admitted that the two paths “equally lay /
In leaves” and “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” So
the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled.
The two roads are interchangeable.
> I came to a fork in the road and took the one less traveled. Perhaps now I realize why.
He seems to disagree with Frost that the road less traveled is the one worth taking, judging from the title and overall tone of the post.
But everyone get it wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10071717
> I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
He is imagining this despite the first three stanzas being about how similar the two roads are, how equally traveled, and how he regrets that he'll only be able to take one. He knows he's making the choice at random, and knows that in the future he will remember otherwise.
Very much the in the same theme as the Monty Python gag:
CROWD: We are all Individuals!
GUY AT BACK: I'm not.Turns out being a programmer is a very portable skill, and good ones get paid well. Life isn't so bad.
I imagine if I'd spent the last 10 years in management I probably wouldn't have changed jobs and be just as frustrated, just in a different way.
But let's not get carried away here, the OP (and I) might have been pretty poor management material after all.
This remark would be considered highly offensive and racist if it were uttered about most nationalities.
Would you say that to appraise the sentiments of, for example, a Jew? Of course not. Everyone would rightly condemn you for it.
One point here is that it's seemingly OK if it's not derogatory plus one is talking about one's own group. Another point is there's a continuum between nationality and culture, and it ought to be OK to point out that something is specific to a culture, and American specifically is very likely to be used to label a culture and not the people as in a bunch of guys and gals with specific genes. This is not to say that one ought to agree with grandparent's views on American culture, just that those views probably aren't racist.
BTW I personally try not to say this sort of thing since people might be offended all too easily, so I guess I agree with you in that way.
That gave me pause as well. Work 10x as hard for 10 assets? Not worth it for everyone.
'Harder' is subjective.
Programming is 100% beyond a doubt harder. My brain is mush at the end of a good day of programming.
Making doors? Physically tired but mentally fine.. and I find the physical side was easier to recover from.
So I get the door making -> programming is "harder" and I make about 10x the money.. but I would not say it was 10x harder, maybe 1.3x harder.. so clearly programming is a better job for me than door making.
So have I, and I come to the opposite conclusion. Does my anecdote trump yours?
As mindless as work like that tends to be, there is a kind of zen quality to it. I think the trick now is to find a hobby that lets me turn off the left side of by brain for a while to do something so simple, yet satisfying.
In my opinion, our brains have a way of painting the bad old days in a nostalgic light. I would posit that if you were forced by circumstances to chuck boxes for 8 hours a day with company-specified arrival and departure times plus company-specified breaks, you would not relish it. But that's just my opinion.
That's one reason why Frost's poem is misinterpreted, due to American belief in destiny.
I got sick at a similar time as the big IT death. I took time off to study organic chemistry and biochemistry. The subject really bored me in high school, but it really interested me after reading a pile of books.
I always felt a lack because I never studied something related to reality, just about abstract symbols. That I got a chance to go back to uni to study a second subject, real science, makes me feel grateful.
(And regarding 10X assets -- it was probably one of the worst decisions in my life if you consider only money. :-) )
You had a much better saying at your disposal "The grass is always greener on the other side". Alas, you chose not to use it and now we don't know how your comment would have turned out, had it made sense.
These are both perfectly valid ideas and thoughts and I don't see why anyone has to be wrong.
And without this attitude we wouldn't have the things we have today. Trust me, Gates, Jobs, and a slew of others who built our modern world didn't do what they did for fun. They did it for (mostly) money. The same way the successful people in revolutionary fields today are doing so for money.
We can't have progress if we sit back and just judge everyone as "greedy" and expect good things to happen. Without these attitudes we wouldnt have the internet, the mobile revolution, commercialization of space, or the upcoming robotics/AI revolution. Maybe this guy should have migrated to management. Lots of people do and they're happier there. Not everyone is cut out to be some salty bad-ass coder until retirement. For most people this stuff is just a job, not a religion, and as people get older their social skills, wisdom, etc increase and many of them simply find being a manager or a mentor to be a more fulfilling use of their time. Society recognizes this and pays accordingly.
There's nothing wrong with the profit incentive as a motivator. In fact, competing in a capitalist technological market is one of life's few meritocracies and has paid humanity back in so many ways, its probably impossible to understand how vast the changes its brought us truly are. This conversation and everything you take for granted in your life right now would have been impossible without it. So maybe layoff with the holier-than-thou attitude?
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173536
You chose one option out of many, and the others may no longer be a possibility. However, the writer's unhappiness does not spawn from his inability to be successful at what he does, but what the never-manifest possibility of what could have been. Maybe he would have been terrible at that kind of work. That doesn't matter, because in his head, he had the skills but made a bad decision. Instead of looking at what he has achieved in his life and career as a programmer, he is pondering what could have been in a reality that is not, never was and never will be.
This kind of thinking leads one astray.
>My sister started as a programmer 30 years ago but jumped into management [...] My sister has 10X the assets I have.
I just have to say this: So typically american.