tomreece

This made me laugh out loud. You're fearless!

Nope, south east US. Trying to be vague here for privacy.

The offer was 20k more than my base salary already. Asking for even more seemed crazy to me. I have controversial opinions on how much money developers make already, probably stemming from my imposter syndrome. Asking for more money did not make me comfortable. If they had offered, I would have had to reconsider. I expected more of a conversation after I declined, but it didn't happen.

How Software Companies Die - Orson Scott Card

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/jokepg/joke_19970213_01.txt

Did you read the post? I LOVE programming. I HATE programming for someone else as a career.

For fucks sake.

> The author is clearly an idiot.

Wow. I didn't realize Hacker News folks were like redditors.

The 65k comes from the fact that I had to pay tuition and living expenses. My family is from a small town. The nearest college was 2 hours away (Indiana University). 15k a year adds up fast.

I honestly didn't NEED the education, I think if I spent 4 years teaching myself I would have been just fine. I just felt that I needed the degree to get my foot in the door anywhere. Maybe I was wrong, but do you dispute that?

I don't understand why this discussion is about entitlement. I thought this was the american dream? You work hard, you make something of yourself. Things go your way. Things are going well enough my way, but I'm not happy. I don't want it.

Hell, give me a lobotomy and erase my education from me. In return, absolve me of my student loans. Let me start over and try again. I can't even do that because I'm in so much debt that switching careers is not even feasible. I have to program to pay these loans. I wouldn't survive without a programmers salary, but I don't even want the money. That's the part that kills me.

I didn't know if I'd like testing or not. But I thought I would try something new. Comparing my daily work with the coders around me, I still think I'd pick testing because they literally just glue too many shitty api's together into an AngularJS application.

> Just knowing that you can quit, if you're not happy, changes how you interact with your employer.

I think if I KNEW this, I'd have a significantly different perspective on things.

At my last company I had the opportunity to write some code to fetch data from an api and display messages on 15 Daktronics signs for a bus transit station. That was cool and pretty low level for me, because I had to send bytes to this sign according to a certain protocol defined by their poor documentation.

That project could have been a blast, but it was put off until the last minute and then rushed and then the signs were hung at the transit station before we had a chance to interact with them and toggle some switches inside so we had to do that on a ladder in the cold oh and by the way my test sign was not exactly like the sign that was actually installed. So as usual, another project ruined by rushed managers who didn't involve me sooner and just started buying stuff and doing things.

Awesome story friend. I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors!

Excellent.

I often feel like I'm surrounded by programmers who just come to work every day, write as much good enough code that they can, and then go home. They seem really happy. I want to be like them. But my care gets in the way. My desire to question why we do things the way we do only to be told "that's just how it is" is difficult to hear and only frustrates me further. The happy people around me don't seem to ask questions, they just do.

Thanks for the advice. My first job was full stack Java backend (SpringMVC) and jQuery hell front end. Second was full stack, Python backend, AngularJS front end. My new job is writing Protractor tests for multiple AngularJS applications.

I enjoy writing Python. Javascript isn't that thrilling to me. Not super excited by the countless FooJS libraries and Promises and async everything. In Protractor if I want to get the text of an element in the DOM, that's a promise. I mean come on? .getText() should not return a promise. I'm not a Javascript expert, so this will sound whiney-ish, but I think Promise hell is a thing just like Callback hell is.

I don't want more money. I want to be happy.

Some of those people make just as much money as I do once you factor in the fact that they don't pay a huge chunk of it to student loans.

Step-father-in-law is a truck driver, makes only slightly less than money than me.

Indeed it is. Haven't I accrued debt, worked hard, and earned the right to be in a job I should be happy at? I deserve that. So do you and so does every body else.

They're all making glorified crud apps, stuff that I could make solo. I'm not excited by it.

This is my third try at improving my situation, each time the money has increased and is helping me pay that debt off. So I'm getting closer on that front, but I don't want the money. I want to be excited to wake up every morning and go build something amazing.

I picked all three. The first was a medium sized startup (90 employees, mostly sales, only 5 devs). The second was a small startup (15 employees, 5 devs). My current job is a huge hosting company with like 3000+ employees in my location.

Third. I've only been at it for 6 years now. I'm 27. I'll correct the title for you to be "Older, Tired, and Bitter"