Re:How to get rich without being lucky (2019)
by WalterBright on Saturday May 22, 2021 @05:38PM
(#27250486)
> Software development barely existed as a career option and you almost certainly needed a degree to land a job.
I graduated in 1979. Both statements are quite incorrect. Software was paying well at the time, and was remarkable as more than a few in it had no degree, and certainly not a CS degree.
I had a friend who barely knew anything about software, but was fairly motivated. He was offered $40k in 1980. At the sane time, I was making $28k with a PhD in Physics working on lasers. We were young guys, it ruined our relationship.
Re:How to get rich without being lucky (2019)
by WalterBright on Sunday May 23, 2021 @02:59PM
(#27257569)
I don't know what things are like at Microsoft today, but in the 90s they had not only developers with no degree, they even had dev leads with no degree.
Microsoft only cared about competence.
Re:How to get rich without being lucky (2019)
by devoutsalsa on Saturday May 22, 2021 @08:13PM
(#27251387)
I have a college and graduate degree. At a previous job, on my team of 6, I had 50% of the higher education degrees :)
Re:How to get rich without being lucky (2019)
by mcguire on Saturday May 22, 2021 @04:35PM
(#27250033)
"When I graduated from engineering grad school in 1981, my highest offer was $27K and that was a sector (oil biz) which was pretty high-flying at the time."
Hey, I remember that! My mother was retired from the bank she worked at for 40 years when the oil biz blew up in the late '80s.
Inflation was brutal around 1980. (~14%)
Software development barely existed as a career option and you almost certainly needed a degree to land a job.
When I graduated from engineering grad school in 1981, my highest offer was $27K and that was a sector (oil biz) which was pretty high-flying at the time. That's about $80K today which is certainly not nothing but probably on the low end of what a lot of software developers expect. (I had the good timing to go back to grad school--which had been in the plans anyway--just as the oil biz was entering one of its cyclical downturns.)