I am a programmer. I am pretty good at algorithmics. I love implementing something out of a published paper. I love to navigate the math. I can't sell that though.

I just used to say I am a computer vision expert, because in the ton of things I can do, this is a relevant domain.

Recently, advances in deep learning made half of the computer vision field obsolete. I just read some cutting edge DL papers, linked that to the things I know, and now I am a deep learning integrator.

I was taught in engineering school that my craft is learning and problems solving. I sell it as knowledge and expertise but the truth is that I am constantly learning in the domain I sell as my specialty, which is what everyone who is decent at anything actually does.

Hi Iv. I'm looking for help to implement a computer vision paper. Can you contact me, please? Sorry about the message here, couldn't find a way to send directly. [email protected]

> Also I've noticed a lot of sub-fields like computer vision or self driving cars where there's a great deal of nerd interest but very little actual employment.

I'm strongly convinced that the less (nerd) sexy a field is, the more money there is in it for a good programmer.

The crappy programmer working conditions in the gaming industry is one example supporting this theory.

It's the same supply-demand issue as any other field. There is no money in writing poetry, but plenty of cash writing ad copy.

>In fact, I have a feeling that computer programming is the stick that's holding the entire STEM tent up---if not for programming as a consolation prize you'd have a whole lot of physics and chemical engineers making lattes at starbucks---and further that web development is the stick that's holding the programming tent up.

I swear, I repeat this comment in almost every news article posted about how "We need more STEM graduates" and "The STEM job market is super hot right now".

Yeah, programming is. I know so many graduates of a BS in math, physics, chemistry, biology, ecology that just couldn't find satisfactory employment. They either got a second, mostly unrelated degree (in management or something more industrial) or are working at a mostly unrelated job.

Even in traditional engineering disciplines, while it's easier to get at least OK employment the demand just doesn't seem that strong compared to CS. I have many friends that graduated with civil, mechanical, or chemical engineering degrees (in at least one case, an MS) who are vastly overqualified for their lab tech or drafter positions.

I have a strong background in mech engineering and robotics. Yet, for the two years I worked in that domain, I never had a single recruiter contact me out of the blue. Now, my mostly amateur computer skills somehow landed me a "tech" (read: IT) job. In the 2 months since I've changed my current title on linkedin, I've had 3 recruiters contact me.

There is a difference in engineering and programming. An engineer uses programming to solve an engineering problem. If all you can do is program, you're just not as valuable. Programming is one of many tools I use in my every day job as an engineer.

I think this goes back to being an expert in a "domain". Being able to apply programming to that domain is far more valuable.

Quite possible but since everyone uses the term "engineer" without any context or specific qualifications, we should expect any distinctions to dissolve as people realize total morons are using it too.

* I have a bachelors in electrical engineering from a top ranked school.

We used to call ourselves programmers. Then it became sexy to say developer. Now it is engineer. (Since you pointed out, it means something different to everyone, so its meaningless).

The future will be a new snazzy term. Same job, different title.

Software development is not engineering.

My point wasn't really the distinction between engineering and programming, but between everything IT-related (red-hot job market) and all-other-STEM related (not so hot job market): sciences (chem, bio, physics, math) and traditional engineering (civil, mechanical, chemical, electrical)

'The big danger is "owning" some domain that falls out of fashion'

That is part of the reason for the high pay. There is always risk associated with specialization. You can't become an expert without specializing in something, but if you specialize in the wrong thing your effort may not be rewarded.

> There is always risk associated with specialization

That might be the reason people demand higher pay, but it wouldn't be the reason why companies pay the higher pay. They pay it because there's a scarcity of people, and/or because they get some multipled value back. No company cares if I've specialized in the 'wrong thing' - they just won't hire me.

That’s an important “or”. It’s not always scarcity, it’s often the perceived value. CEOs are just one of many examples where the pay is not at all because of scarcity.

Are there really that many people capable and willing to work as CEO? From my experience there are never enough good managers.

I meant to add 'perceived' on value, and the 'scarcity' aspect can play in to the perception of value too.

Agreed. See my dad. An expert on systems running AIX and HPUX. There are not a ton of those around anymore. In the 80's and 90's he told me he would get multiple offers all the time. People fighting over him. Today, he has to fight to find jobs. Luckily he just needs to get by a few more years until retirement.

As a computer vision person - the jobs are there. The reason it doesn't look like much employment is that there aren't that many of us relative to the hoardes of web developers. Part of the problem is that the bar is high. Most jobs require a few years of practical experience, a research degree, or both.

It's the classic example of complaining that there are no jobs, while the industry complains that there aren't enough talented people. I get a few recruiters pinging me weekly and I'm not looking to move jobs - their story is always that there is a huge demand for good people.

I think the CV job market is unlikely to get much better, at least in terms of numbers of positions available. On the other hand, it's a stable job market that isn't going anywhere. The pay is already above average and it's not likely to go down because of the experience required. There's no shortage of applications and it's not dependent on a particular language, toolset or hardware. Virtually every big factory in the world employs some kind of machine vision system, for instance. And pretty much every computer vision deployment has to be modified for the application.

There are much easier ways to make money though. If you want to be a wealthy programmer, get on the web/app development train and accept that you might need to pivot every couple of years.

You can switch domains.

This is kind of unrealistic but very easy to say. I have changed domains but that was because I wanted to move into the domain of my interest i.e. embedded and also was young and wanted to feel the breadth. After investing almost 5 years of my life in it and endless reading and doing things things in my field I am considered an expert. Now the embedded field in my country is in a steep decline and I am at a cross roads. All the so called "new" tech does not seem to entice me at this age as I can go very deep into my embedded field. On the other hand I know that if I don't jump ship I would be jobless pretty soon. This makes me very bitter in choosing CSE education as my peers in medical have way more stability in their domains than me.

I don't know man. There's enough use-cases to make both boats float. Just gotta find it.

By sinking your precious time invests sure. But you won’t be able to claim you have 20 years of experience in X anymore, you will be a newbie for awhile. That, and your PhD is already in something else...your papers are already published in other conferences....it can be a problem trying to move from say PL to ML.

Sure, but those are the trade-offs. You don't get the reward without taking on a bit of risk.

It's a little ironic to hear talk like this, since around here I hear a lot of "sorry your coal mining job is going away, but you need to get with the times and train for something relevant". Same thing applies here. If you pick a programming specialization that eventually falls out of favor, buck up and learn a new one. Maybe that'll mean a pay cut for a bit as you ramp up, but that's just how it works.

I don't think it's unreasonable for people to expect that they should be able to work in a field for the majority of their careers. Retraining is not an efficient use of ones productive years.

I think that if someone chooses engineering then he must love to learn. For me it would be too boring to do the same thing for my whole life, I always try to learn more languages, more paradigms, architectures and whatever. I can jump in the code of a different team and be immediately productive. Usually I suggest and implement small changes that have a large impact on the maintanability of the system as soon as I start to grasp it as a whole. I couldn't ever do it if I stayed in the same field, in the same environment, for all my life. I think that if someone expects to work in a field doing the same thing for the majority of his career then probably should not choose engineering.

But you are doing the same thing. This is the frustration. I've worked in several languages with various tools and it's very common to just be learning slightly different syntax to approach a problem in the exact same way (and then eventually maybe you'll reach a higher plane where you approach it in a way somewhat characteristic of the tool, but still not fundamentally different). Technologies that really change the way you work or think about problems are few and far between, and most of the algorithms and data structures you'll use most of the time in typical applications were discovered in the 1970s. It's not a big deal to pick up a new tool on the job, but I have a hard time motivating myself to spend free time learning yet another MVC framework or whatever.

It's a different story, I guess, if you go into a completely different type of programming from what you're used to (say Web apps to embedded programming), but I don't think that's necessarily easy.

I think it is unreasonable to expect that, especially in a field where even a decade ago people were saying “50% of the skills on your CV become obsolete every 18 months”.

If people were saying that a decade ago they were wrong.

Looks like a lot of people, net, agreed with the claim: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4417...

This comment seems to be more about putting all your eggs into one basket than the idea that every technology is going to die in a few years. Most of the popular production languages today are 10+ years old, for instance.

Not every technology, but rather random technology from the set of things-which-currently-look-good-when-seeking-work.

Important difference.

For example, at one extreme, all tech lasts exactly three years; at one of several other extremes, 50% of tech is eternal and the rest lasts exactly 1.5 years.

Maybe it’s not unreasonable, but unrealistic?

Huh? Those sentiments (retaining is hard, retraining is necessary) aren’t incompatible.

I don't think getting a PhD is an especially good maximize-earnings plan.

I think wall street is still the best option to make a lot of money.

In which case, there is a credible argument that a PhD is integral to income maximization.

I think so if you want to quant..

I wouldn’t disagree with that :).

In theory. I'm sure everybody knows, but at times you might 1) lose willpower 2) find yourself in an unknown climate all of a sudden (say going from old codebase to nodejs..) that makes the learning curve very steep

This is why you market yourself/your business as specialising in a particular domain, but you study good fundamentals and general principles, which you then apply to your current domain(s) of interest using whatever development tools are of use in that domain.

Straight up coding is such a pop culture that some subset of good principles are unknown or misunderstood by each successive hip new movement, every one flawed in a different way to their predecessors, but doomed to make similar mistakes by lack of experience. The flaws easily extend into "best practices" around any given tool; and then you stick out like a sore thumb for recognising what should be done, but everybody else cargo cults the orthodoxy.

It's a bit more involved than this. Current market doesn't really follows fundamentals. I dug into advanced theory quite a bit and that won't help me peanuts when trying to unfold what people mean with their patterns and ways. Quite the opposite some times, angular 1 for instance, it was a bit insane what they assembled.. unlike anything fundamental if you ask me.

I suppose I would argue that developers with a lot of experience and good knowledge of fundamentals might well steer clear of a great deal of the unnecessary complexity and short-lived tooling in today's web development world.

It’s good to see I am not alone it felt like everyone was taking crazy pills when angular came along heralded as the greatest thing in web development and anyone pointing at the foundamental issues was suddenly a pharia around here

Is this easier for someone who was a "domain expert" in an obsolete domain than for a programming generalist? i.e. could a programming generalist also "own" a domain in a couple years?

I was surprised several times, and have since stopped being surprised, that someone who was immersed in a technology for years, loved it intimately, and knew every wart on its asshole, so to speak, and loved it anyway, the person you know as the guy who's really into PHP or the guy who's really into Oracle or the guy who's really into jQuery will not flail when the company abandons that technology. I would always worry, and think to myself, "Man, using PHP at least we have Tom. I'm not sure upgrading to a better technology is worth losing that kind of expertise. And what will poor Tom do now? PHP is his whole life." And of course six months later Tom knows every wart on the asshole of Node and React/Redux. Tom was an expert because he had an ability to take an obsessive interest in something and create his own expertise. Non-technology domains are similar, with one caveat. Somebody who is a master of a customer domain got that way by being able to take an interest and being able to empathize with customers, get them talking, and keep them talking. They can apply that to a new domain and get up to speed with terrifying speed. The caveat is that some people have domain knowledge from working in a field for years before getting into software development, and they can't replicate that experience in a new domain.

Can't upvote this enough. In my experience, if you have the capacity for the occasional obsessive voracious burst of knowledge acquisition, there's no limit to the amount of technology cycles you'll be able to surf, and you'll always be able to sell your expertise and get good work. I feel bad for the calmer more balanced people who don't have that manic streak, who leave work at work, they'll always be at a disadvantage.

I'd like to think I'm becoming Tom here, right down to the techs you mentioned. I also went through git, apache httpd, bash, and Ruby phases.

My philosophy is that if PHP keeps the lights on, I better really know what it is, where it's going, what are it's limitations, because it would be pretty scary not to.

Plus once you learn a language or a database well, the next one is easier. The trick is knowing when it's time for the next one.

easy to switch , not easy to own.

If by "not easy" you mean "a couple of years", sure.

Don't mistake what I'm saying. I'm using the word "own" rhetorically. Obviously there will be no point in your career where you are likely to be the world's leading expert on computer vision. What you're aiming for is to be the leading expert that is available to employers within a reasonable amount of time at the level of compensation you're hoping for.

It's a spectrum.

Obviously, if you invest heavily in a discipline and it is decisively obsoleted, that's a setback. I'm just saying it's not an insurmountable setback, and I'll add here that it's still unlikely to leave you behind the pure generalists; in the process of building expertise and accomplishment in cryptography or OS kernels or whatever, you're likely to become a pretty far above-average software developer as well.

An LOB programmer could work on computer vision side projects for a couple years and probably put together a neat portfolio of work.

But the few people who are really hiring people who "own" CV want PHDs with a relevant thesis and you're not going to get one of those working weeknights after the kids go to bed.

Meanwhile people pursuing PHDs have no idea if their area of research is going to be hot in industry when they're done.

Granted, a lucky few people who follow the autodidactical route may find themselves authors of a really popular OSS project. Or they may be able to luck or maneuver themselves into a position at their current employer working in a capacity that future employers will see as "relevant industry experience." Obviously this is hardly a sure thing and if they plan it wrong or just get unlucky they're not going to have a nice outcome.

In the specific case of CV, a programmer looking to move into that area is probably doing themselves a disservice if they just apply for jobs that are actually looking to hire computer vision specialists.

There are so, so many businesses out there that could benefit from CV, but they don't realize it. Maybe they're spending a ton of money on off the shelf OCR software that isn't great for their needs. Maybe they're spending a few hundred thousand dollars a year manually organizing and classifying documents when they could automate it.

These companies won't be hiring someone to own CV for them, because they don't know they need it. They might not even know what computer vision is. And they won't care about whether you have a PhD or a relevant thesis. They'll care about whether can can demonstrate that you can solve their problems and save them a pile on money.

Granted, finding companies with these types of problems is perhaps not something that a typical LOB programmer knows how to approach. And if they see themselves as just a LOB programmer, it might stay like this.

If they make an effort to get to know people and network outside of the usual tech circles, they might just find it possible to position themselves as solvers of specific types of problems - problems to which CV happens to be the best solution.

I know that's not a path that'll work for everyone. But it's one path that leads from 'LOB Programmer' to 'Someone who makes lots of money doing development with computer vision'.

If you want to convince me that computer vision is a bad domain to specialize in for journeyman programmers because it takes post-grad education to get a job, that'll be a quick and easy argument.

As a counterexample, though, most serious work in cryptography (for instance) is done by grad students, but the best jobs in crypto are not automatically going to grad students.

Either way: if your goal is to maximize lifetime earnings, I think dedicating your career to "programming" is a bad call.

I'll have to defer to your knowledge of the market for self-taught cryptologists. My understanding is that most journeyman programmers working in security are in Burb Suite Operator positions.

My point isn't that becoming a subject matter expert isn't a good way to supercharge your earnings for a few years. I agree with you there.

Clearly, a guy with lots of experience with and deep knowledge of the Oracle database could do pretty well for himself 10 years ago. A person with lots of experience with and deep knowledge of OpenStack could do the same five years ago.

My point is that it's not a good, safe or stable way to ride out the last half of a 30+ year long career.

My further point is that demand for lots of these specialists doesn't appear to be particularly elastic, and therefore "become a subject matter expert" is not a universally applicable bit of career advice for every LOB engineer worried about ageism: if everyone successfully took your advice there would be a whole bunch of unemployed crypto experts.

I see the miscommunication here.

It's not my claim that simply by moving to a specialized subfield of programming that you'll instantly quadruple your salary and future-proof your career.

Obviously, you're going to start in some domain speciality as a commoditized practitioner and, with effort, move yourself to more elite ranks of that subfield.

My point is that it is better to work on that problem --- of being an elite in a specific domain --- than it is to be an elite at the general problem of building reliable software.

(It's "Burp", by the way.)

> Clearly, a guy with lots of experience with and deep knowledge of the Oracle database could do pretty well for himself 10 years ago

A guy with lots of experience and deep knowledge of databases in general, though, would do pretty well for himself both 10 years ago, and today. Even better if he worked on some database himself. Really, that's what owning a domain means: you don't want 10 years of experience as a _user_ of some technology, you want that experience as a _builder_ of said technology.

There's a difference between being an Oracle expert and being a database expert. If all you know is Oracle, yes you have a problem. If you understand database theory and implementation and can apply it to RDBMSs and NoSQL databases of various kinds, you are set for life.

Management is always the safest path.

One of the reasons people are switching from Oracle is that the DBA's are so damn expensive.

"If you want to convince me that computer vision is a bad domain to specialize in for journeyman programmers because it takes post-grad education to get a job, that'll be a quick and easy argument."

Are you sure about that? I mean sure, if we're talking someone who wants a deep learning research project to improve the metric for recognizing human faces from 99.7% to 99.78%, then we're talking about PHDs.

But there are plenty of "simpler" problems that one can work on, and plenty of more engineering-oriented problems that one can work on. Lots of companies just need to apply semi-standard techniques to problems that are specific to their business, and nothing more complicated or research-y.

Once you've learned how to master a domain, mastering the next one is easier.

I was thinking that the domains would be broader things that are not likely to fall out of fashion or change faster than an individual can keep up. Things like “security” or “networking.”

Yes. More generally, it should be "the sort of thing you can imagine investing a career in". Does anyone really plan to invest a career in building expertise in Golang (for instance), outside of the small group of people who actually work on the language itself?

(Being a PL design & implementation expert --- not "having very good taste in PLs"! --- seems like a defensible position in the market, except perhaps that there are a lot of people who want to work on compilers and you're competing with a healthy pipeline of them.)

Computer vision has very little actual employment? That's just not true at all. I want what you're smoking lol.

If you think Web Programming is where the interest is at, you haven't been searching "data analyst" on the job boards

Maybe in SV and other tech centers.

In "flyover country" and the midsize college town I quite enjoy living in, indeed currently returns only a handful of BI-related postings for search terms like data analyst. Web developer returns tens of postings.

I'm speaking from a UK perspective. I should have mentioned that.

Agree. I think it is financially irresponsible for yourself and your family if you don't have a plan to transition yourself out of programmer job. It is okay if you are financially secure or independent, you can do whatever you want. But seriously, have a plan.

I'm not against having plans, but to have no other option than to transition yourself out of programming? That's an absurd way to look at aging in a technology field.