Re:Ask HN: I'm 23, and I dislike my job as a software engineer
by rurban on Monday September 12, 2016 @12:29PM
(#12481089)
I'm 53 and trained in a lot of other professions.
I worked as an architect, which I didn't like too much, esp. the low pay. even if I was highly successful, been on national TV and press, exhibitions, ...
Then I got into more technical jobs, like surveying, civil engineering, stage design, movies and also a lot more SW jobs. They were much more interesting and I got paid double.
Then I settled as SW developer in a big internet company, which was nice for a few years, but then I took a big risc with a B2B SW project which failed. Then I worked in knowledge engineering and mechanical engineering (support Formula 1 teams with their engine testing, I was basically a virtual Formula 1 "test driver"), which was nice I guess.
But in the end getting back from mixed engineering jobs to sole SW engineering made most fun. Now I'm writing compilers.
For the Formula 1 e.g. I wrote a C++ cross-compiler for an unknown platform, for which we only guessed what it was in reality (it was a blackbox with custom PCI boards), but it was successful and eventually helped this team win a couple of championships. (the unknown platform was 10x faster than the others). But technically it was as simple as stripping g++ from all virtual RTTI calls and IO.
Writing my own compilers and now also improving the libraries and VM's around makes a lot of fun, and has a lot of impact. E.g. planning a JIT. It's not as dangerous and has not a high budget as high speed controllers for high speed cars, with 10-20 PC's and a lot of custom real-time HW involved. (For which I also planned a JIT for a Visual Basic like real-time scripting language, but would have never been allowed to actually do it).
But you are much more independent, have much less stress and much higher pay.
SW engineer is the top job. Esp. in the USA.
I worked as an architect, which I didn't like too much, esp. the low pay. even if I was highly successful, been on national TV and press, exhibitions, ... Then I got into more technical jobs, like surveying, civil engineering, stage design, movies and also a lot more SW jobs. They were much more interesting and I got paid double.
Then I settled as SW developer in a big internet company, which was nice for a few years, but then I took a big risc with a B2B SW project which failed. Then I worked in knowledge engineering and mechanical engineering (support Formula 1 teams with their engine testing, I was basically a virtual Formula 1 "test driver"), which was nice I guess.
But in the end getting back from mixed engineering jobs to sole SW engineering made most fun. Now I'm writing compilers.
For the Formula 1 e.g. I wrote a C++ cross-compiler for an unknown platform, for which we only guessed what it was in reality (it was a blackbox with custom PCI boards), but it was successful and eventually helped this team win a couple of championships. (the unknown platform was 10x faster than the others). But technically it was as simple as stripping g++ from all virtual RTTI calls and IO.
Writing my own compilers and now also improving the libraries and VM's around makes a lot of fun, and has a lot of impact. E.g. planning a JIT. It's not as dangerous and has not a high budget as high speed controllers for high speed cars, with 10-20 PC's and a lot of custom real-time HW involved. (For which I also planned a JIT for a Visual Basic like real-time scripting language, but would have never been allowed to actually do it). But you are much more independent, have much less stress and much higher pay. SW engineer is the top job. Esp. in the USA.