You may want to consider looking into academia. Everyone knows the pay isn't as good, but that can be an advantage. Academia loses (or never gets) a lot of talented engineers due to the pay, lack of fancy perks, etc. There actually are perks though. Also, for some, the sense of personal fulfillment depending on the field or project you're working on can be of significant value (just not monetary). There's also the fear that academic jobs are solely dependent on grants, which is true in some cases, but there are positions that are funded by the institution itself. Also, I wonder how much more "job security" the typical person really does have in industry. Regardless, It's something to think about.
Re:35 Over 35
by _hardwaregeek on Friday August 02, 2019 @12:52PM
(#20594438)
What kind of academia? Because the traditional PhD -> post-doc -> prof track is absolutely not a good place for work/life balance. Or are you talking about being a programmer for a university?
The job market for professors in CS right now is great. No need for a postdoc and only a few pubs will get you multiple offers from R1 univerisities in the US.
(I'm a CS prof.)
Re:35 Over 35
by _hardwaregeek on Friday August 02, 2019 @01:25PM
(#20594787)
Wow, that's incredible. I didn't get that impression from the CS PhD students I've met, but I'll take your word for it. But you'd still need a PhD, no? And grad school is definitely not a great place for work/life balance.
Grad school (and tenure-track) isn't considered great for work/life balance, but it seems mostly self-induced. If I had limited myself to 40 hours a week in grad school I think I would have been just as successful.
Anyone I know that wanted a tenure-track position did get one (and had options). I graduated from an unranked department and had a positive experience on the market.
Yes, I was referring to programmer (or related) for a university.
My experience with academia was sheer poison. My advisor lied, accused me of cheating with no evidence, and patented the ideas his students generated. Appreciate the comment but... No.
Re:35 Over 35
by ChuckNorris89 on Friday August 02, 2019 @08:08AM
(#20592370)
Did you move to Germany/Austria/Switzerland by any chance?
The colleague you described who has no life except work rings very familiarly with my time there.
In my experience, wherever I went, there was always a no-lifer on the team(no kids/wife/girlfriend, no sports/hobbies) who used to answer emails after midnight and push to git on a Sunday hoping to get that pat on the back from the managers. Career advancements were difficult as at your performance review he would be used as the benchmark.
No actually, I just really like the language and the nations that speak them. Could imagine perhaps living there someday (I'm a sucker for Fachwerk architecture, if nothing else!) Though I hear it's hard to make friends, which is an issue since I'm already old, as discussed.
I live in Ireland, which was one of the easier places re: visa, cultural integration, language, etc. and it's been pretty good to me all things considered.
Re:35 Over 35
by JansjoFromIkea on Friday August 02, 2019 @06:44AM
(#20591945)
Surely the tradeoff here is that, provided a company treats you okay, you're more likely to stick around than that colleague (if he's that driven then he's surely constantly looking for new opportunities?) and an employee with a few years knowledge of the codebase is generally worth a lot more than a super skilled newbie.
Depends on the area though, I guess. Video game companies seem to have a preference for working people into the ground.
Oh, I left the video game company. It actually wasn't a bad gig, tbh.
Re:35 Over 35
by hahamrfunnyguy on Friday August 02, 2019 @06:40AM
(#20591924)
Cut down your work week if you can afford it. If you can't afford it, change your spending and saving habits so you can afford it in the future. With the spare time you can focus on interesting pet projects or an interesting side hustle.
That's the plan. Just bought a super cheap house to help enable this.
Government agencies require developers, and it’s full of older coders at least in my country (Sweden). Lots of benefits such as long vacations. Only problem is they move slow as all hell and they have decades of legacy, which drives the younger developers away because they want to move fast and break things.
Unfortunately I don't think it matters that much. Maybe at one point you could live an alternative life in the seedy part of town if you didn't have kids. But there aren't many alternatives any more.
In my early 20's I was in college. Graduated in 2008 in to the recession and was lucky to have _any_ job. Spent all of my nights learning coding.
In my mid-late 20's, starting in 2011, I finally got a crappy job with a pay cut in tech (sort of) doing ad operations. I worked hard and spent the evenings getting better at Java so I could use the Dart For Publishers SDK to automate things I hated doing at work (inadvertently helped the company make about a million extra bucks that year, I later realized).
In my early 30's, I got married, changed countries, became a Technical Account Manager, studied Python and German in my free time, and eventually became a dev for a video game company.
In my (our, now) mid-30's, we had a kid, and now I spend my free time on that and house repair, etc. I still like coding but after dinner, bath, bedtime stories, maybe 15 minutes chatting with the spouse, and then other chores, I'm going to bed (before anyone asks, I watch 0 TV and do very little by way of social networks).
I have a colleague who's in his late 20's, no kids, and he's on Slack all. the. time. He talks about stuff he worked on (for work, not for hobbies) over the weekend. I don't think I produce as much as him, to be honest. Makes me a bit anxious about where I stand - hard to compare my 40 hours to effectively his whole life.
I think I need a plan B.
(Related discussion - and the article is 10 years old so the young'uns then are getting in to their 30's now) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9361580