Hacker News Reader

Comment by 49531 | Hacker News Reader

I worked in landscaping and then as a custodian making $7/hr before I started learning to code. Working as a programmer has transformed my life. I've got a lot of autonomy in my days, I enjoy solving technical problems, I get to work from home and see my 2yr old grow up.

Yeah it sucks when your manager puts heavy deadlines on your team, or having to do things you don't necessarily agree with, or navigating corporate politics, but at the end of the day it's the best. I don't come home physically exhausted, I don't make shit money, and if I ever end up in a job I don't enjoy, I am able to find a new one fairly easily.

I think it's easy for programmers to hate life sometimes. Most people who are good at this line of work started doing it because they enjoyed it before it was making them money, that's how it was for me. Sometimes I miss haphazardly stringing code together to make something fun, but at the end of the day being a programmer has made me feel fulfilled.

View on HN

I joke with programmer friends that we should become gardeners instead. I guess the appeal of physical labor is you get to leave work at work.

I've enjoyed working in national security and defense. It's a laid-back environment and I can leave work at work without feeling stressed.

What a world we live in. Defending the security of a nation = laid-back, no stress. Writing yet another CRUD backend for a mobile app = crazy hours and ulcers.

I mostly agree that the environment in government contracting is pretty laid back. We definitely have surge times, but generally we're focused more on getting things done correctly over fast. I think there's also a good understanding that people aren't as effective when they work over 40 hours/week for consecutive weeks.

Having been in government, this seems to be the opposite of what I've seen. Makes me think it is fully a byproduct of culture, independent of the work done.

Woah, can you expand on this? Are you a contractor or a government employee? What makes it laid back? Are the deadlines just more reasonable?

I'm a full-time employee. Managers and government benefits are a pretty big part of it. Work hours are very flexible (some roll in at 6am, others 10am), lengthy vacationable time, etc. Like morga3sm said, we want to do things correctly.

It has its downsides of course: getting a TS security clearance can be stressful, but that goes away afterwards; not being able to tell your SO what you do other than high-level stuff; career advancement and progression can be a long process and you basically know where your salary is going to go when you first start (because it is standardized); and so on.

I find that incredible (in a good way!) My idea of govt organizations was strict dress code, clock in at 8 AM on the dot, leave at 5 PM sharp, unknowable bureaucracy above your head.

Yep, that was my idea at first too! But in the summer I see people in flip flops and shorts :-) Execs still wear suits, but us lowly engineers not so much.

It depends on the contract. For the most part, the scrutiny of government auditors ensure that you actually can't work more than 40 hours in a single week. Sometimes the contract also ensures that the work cannot be done outside of a government-controlled facility.

So if you're the actual do-the-work peon instead of someone in any of the several tiers of useless middlemen, you work regular 8 hour days, get 10 or 11 paid holidays, and when you get home you are simply done with work until the morning of the next workday. It does not matter much if you do your job well or do it poorly, because there are so many other people working on it that you will never get recognition for a job done well, nor will you get any blame for doing it poorly, so long as it does what it says on the box.

The deadlines also vary by contract, but as every layer of middlemen adds its own padding, it wouldn't be remarkable to have two years to develop yet-another-CRUD-app with zero scalability, compatibility, or interoperability requirements.

No one doing the actual work is a direct government employee, because the uniform pay schedules are completely incompatible with industry norms. The government employees are simply there to make sure the contractors do what is required.

The net result is that you can get all your work done in just 2 hours and look busy for 6, or amble through it at a sloth's pace, gold-plating everything, achieving 100% test coverage, using ordinary software as a teaching lab for industry best practices, and such.

There are plenty of downsides, of course. The work is never glamorous, and you never really have much say in what you do or how you do it. You have zero job security, as you could be out of work if the wind changes direction in Washington, DC. The codebase will always be complete garbage when you are first introduced to it. The unimaginative and slow environment is not stimulating, so you absolutely must have a hobby or side-project that can engage you mentally outside of work.

> There are plenty of downsides, of course. The work is never glamorous, and you never really have much say in what you do or how you do it. You have zero job security, as you could be out of work if the wind changes direction in Washington, DC. The codebase will always be complete garbage when you are first introduced to it. The unimaginative and slow environment is not stimulating, so you absolutely must have a hobby or side-project that can engage you mentally outside of work.

These are the same downsides you see in the private sector.

> For the most part, the scrutiny of government auditors ensure that you actually can't work more than 40 hours in a single week.

Have yet to encounter a contracting environment where is is true. In fact, I was explicitly told that since I was salaried I was expected to put in whatever work it took to make deadlines, despite only putting 40 hours down on my timecard. Considering the facility I worked in had a DCAA office embedded in it I find it hard to believe the government did not know this was going on.

Oh, how delightful. Call the government ethics hotline and inform them that your employer is defrauding the government. You might get a nice bonus out of it, in theory.

In reality, whistleblowers always get screwed. You would have to extensively cover your own ass, and gather evidence that absolves you, specifically, of wrongdoing first.

If you are reporting time worked as anything other than the actual number that you were working, that is illegal. So alternately, start reporting the actual hours worked. If your employer makes an issue of it, tell them that you will need a signed, written copy of any order they give you that instructs you to violate the law.

If you get fired, you can retaliate by getting someone sent to jail.

I haven't worked there in almost four years, so that would be hard to do at this point. Even if I was, part of what sustained this is that we were a classified program, so only cleared auditors could access the full information.

Furthermore, our government customer didn't care as long as they got their deliveries on time and as cheaply as possible. I know in theory a program office can't lean on DCAA, but in practice (especially considering the clearance situation) I don't know if the PO would obstruct such an investigation. After all, from their POV getting what they want for less is not fraud.

I consider it likely that they're still doing it after four years. Even so, you can still report what happened four years ago.

The DoD inspector general hotline is (800) 424-9098 or http://www.dodig.mil/hotline/hotlinecomplaint.html .

The GAO fraudnet hotline is (800) 424-5454 or https://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/fraudnet.cgi .

Are you in SIGINT? If you're not in SIGINT, I agree with everything you've said, otherwise my experience has been pretty different likely because I'm in SIGINT. Most of us are employees and the work can be pretty satisfying and rewarding, especially when you can see the effects and/or results when you're just a small cog in the machine.

It's possible we're in different countries, though :-).

11 or 10 paid holidays? Do you mean that's the total number of holiday days you get in an entire year? Does that include public holidays?

The federal government has exactly 10 federal holidays: New Year's Day, MLK Jr. Day, Washington's Birthday, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day. Government controlled sites are closed on those days. That means contractors can't work at such a site on those days. Rather than requiring their employees to work elsewhere, contractor companies often just concede that their employees can get a holiday too, and most of them even make it paid time off.

Some companies observe different holidays, such as by adding Christmas Eve and the day after Thanksgiving, and removing Columbus Day.

There is no such thing as public holidays in the US. Some days are bank holidays. Some days are school holidays. Some days are federal holidays. But there is no law that requires any employer to give all of its nonessential employees paid time off on any particular day. The only sort-of-exception is that an employer can't prevent someone from voting on Election Day, but that does not have to be paid leave.

Wal-Mart, for instance, has only 5 paid holidays: Easter, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas. (Note that Easter is always on a Sunday, a time when many people already have a day off from work.) And if you get holiday bonus pay for working on those days, your hours are rumored to be cut afterward to compensate.

Some companies are also generous enough to allow 80 additional hours of paid time off every year, to be used as either sick leave or vacation days.

To me as a US English speaker this meant public holidays, since we normally call the other type of holiday "vacation". He probably gets at least 10-15 of those as well.

I have a good friend who lives in Alabama and works for one of the many DoD contractors.

When he leaves work at 5pm he actually can't access his work email. Nobody can send him anything from work on an unsecured line.

When he leaves work at 5pm on a Friday, nobody can contact him about work related things until he is on site at 8am on Monday morning.

He's a senior level unix admin. That can't ever be paged. I'd say that's pretty okay.

Depends on the company and facility situation. I worked for several years in such an environment, but the facility was open 24/7. You could be paged at any time for critical issues, but of course would always have to come in to find out what it actually was. Not being able to bring work home just led to the expectation that you would spend more time in the office.

Yeah, that and a lack of responsibility sometimes attracts me. My whole career (+15yrs) has basically been in industries where things are not allowed to go wrong. Some days I wish I was a lumberjack or maybe a programmer in an industry where you don't kill people or cost millions of dollars with a bug... But at the end of the day I can't stop myself from programming and I want to work on things that make a difference, so I'll leave the wood-cutting to my spare time.

Odd that you would pick lumberjack as an example since that is a job where mistakes frequently do kill people.

Yeah, I know, I realized that as I wrote it, but I guess I like to be out in the woods and do some heavy labor.

A bit of a simplification maybe, but as a lumberjack there are N+2 moving parts you need to care about, the saw, the tree and N coworkers in the proximity (N < 10) (if there's a moose and I catch it with my falling tree, it doesn't count as an accident, it counts as a bonus). With software there are thousands of moving parts and you can be pretty sure that no matter the amount of testing and code-reviewing, the parts will move in new unexpected ways once they reach the customers. Besides as a lumberjack when you leave work you leave work. You only have to worry about not killing someone during your working hours.

It wasn't landscaping but, I worked in a shop where the supes were often abusive. That isn't always true.

The appeal of physical labor? People only do physical labor because they are either unlucky or simply lack the knowledge to choose another path. I don't expect that to be the popular perspective on "PC" hacker news but that is the real world for you. Show me a gardener who wouldn't want to make 6 figures instead of breaking their back day in and day out for close to if not minimum wage? Appeal? Yeah right.

I disagree with your POV.I would rather say that everyone likes a change.Most of the programmers have very active lifestyle where they pursue physical labour based hobbies.To bring in an age-old platitude , "Everything is good in moderation" .You have extremes like a person who decided to leave programming to become a farmer[1]. And several other examples like this exist.What you need to understand is the satisfaction which comes from making things. I love programming solely because of my ability to create. Infact I feel that it is the ability to create that would drive any job.A skilled artisan pursues his interest because of the satisfaction he obtains from his creations.The same goes for us programmers. It comes down to the fact of skilled labour possessed by you.And if you really think that blue collar workers earn less,then you are quite mistaken[2].

TLDR; its the passion for creation which drives any job.As a programmer having things setup in hours or weeks and then seeing your product being used by a percentage of the 3 billion people[3] who use the www.It brings a hell load of satisfaction in me.

[1]:http://hello-world.io [2]:http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/plumber/salary [3]:http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/

I see your POV but simply don't think it's realistic. Not to mention the salaries you linked are, as far as I can tell, lower than most 'white collar' jobs.

Most gardeners, plumbers, construction workers etc. are NOT artisans. They are just normal people trying to get by as best as they can with the means that they have. They often have lower level of education etc. etc. This is the real world. Not to mention that most programmers don't actually like programming... it's just the myth perpetuated on these (and other alike) boards. These are 90% of programmers that aren't on HN etc. They just don't care. They don't love programming at all - it's just their job.

This passion for creation is great - but it's simply too idealistic. Most people hate their damn jobs and hate it mostly because of how exhausting it is to make not very much money.

You are right. But... I'd be a gardener. If it paid me the same I make now. At least for 3 months a year?

I worked at Lowes in college hauling lumber and I miss it dearly (rose colored goggles and all). I was in the best shape of my life, I didn't think about work (lumber?) at home. It was a simpler life.

I wonder if you'd have enjoyed it as much if you weren't as young as you probably were at the time (late teens/early 20?)

That sort of work can really wreck your body as you get older.

Last summer I discovered I particularly like gardening. I think I'd be a gardener too if it paid the same.

I guess its something that grows on you as you get older.

Ive toyed with the idea of buying a little house in south europe, cut my expenses, work IT part-time/remot and have some land to grow stuff on.

> I think I'd be a gardener too if it paid the same.

this is exactly my point

I would absolutely do labor, if it paid the same, as long as it wasn't the most basic (e.g., digging ditches) labor.

I worked at a car wash (vacuuming, drying cars, etc.) for 9 months when I was 15, and I loved every minute of it, despite the fact that it was very laborious. I had many jobs in the year before that, most of which were inside without much labor, and I hated each of them.

Then, I framed houses (first 3 months were basically just carrying things around and making cuts for others) for a year when I was 16, and it was a blast, as long as it was warm outside. However, what was not a blast was making $7.25/hr. I felt great though, super healthy from all the lifting, walking, climbing, etc. The only non-monetary negative was cold weather; swinging a hammer in the cold is no bueno for anyone.

I also did landscaping at 17... for one day. I'm not going to lie. Landscaping is mega hard work, and the 3 Mexican men I worked with put me to shame in less than 6 hours, despite my frequent visits to the gym and +10 years of youth I had on them.

Now, I write code. I love it, but I absolutely hate being in a chair, and standing while I type is not appealing to me. I work out for 45 min every day at the gym after, but it doesn't make up for all the cave-dwelling I do.

In summary, I think that labor is usually really rewarding, even when you feel pooped at the end of the day, but certain labor jobs push the envelope a bit too far to be called "rewarding".

If you could make 6 figures, I think a decent chunk of people would prefer it to doing office work and making 6 figures. Anyway, the point is that some amount of physical labor as part of your daily life helps make you feel less like a slug. And for some people having that labor not strictly be exercise is compelling.

I used to landscape - and if it were practical, I'd go back to it. There was a lot about that work that was very satisfying. I wouldn't give up on programming, but it would be something I did just for fun and/or side profit.

Do you know people who do that kind of work? I spent three years working with a decent sampling of them. Sure, some feel that it's drudge work and that they're stuck doing it for lack of options. They get through their day doing the minimum necessary - you can find those types in our field as well. But a lot do take real pride in what they do, and in doing it well.

Of course many if not most would take an office job for more money if they opportunity were there - but that doesn't mean none of them derive pleasure and satisfaction form the work they're doing.

I'm not quite saying that it's not possible to derive pleasure and satisfaction from physically laborious work. I am saying that it's a very pretty picture that's far away from real life to claim that that's normal. Most people do not like their job. Most people don't like their job as PROGRAMMERS.

What fantasy world is everyone living in that they love their jobs and derive pleasure from it? What 1%'s of gardeners are we talking about here? I assure you 99% of them would rather not be gardening.

It's very likely if you are doing a physically laborious job you are making very little money, struggling to feed your family, give your kids the spoils they want, your wife is mad that you can't take her on vacation etc. etc.

I don't know about gardening, but I've certainly sacrificed financially in order to be able to farm. When you consider the huge capital costs, you have to love it. Anyone who doesn't love it would be far better off selling out.

Granted, it isn't that physically demanding. The biggest amount of labour I find is repairing/modifying equipment, and that comes with interesting problem solving challenges, which my programmer mindset tends to enjoy.

Still, I can see why gardening would be seen as appealing.

> your wife is mad that you can't take her on vacation

Why would anyone get mad about that? My wife is a grown adult, she can pay for her own vacation. Farming is my vacation.

> Why would anyone get mad about that? My wife is a grown adult, she can pay for her own vacation. Farming is my vacation.

All I can say is that you are incredibly lucky if this is a true statement.

The gardener example is extreme, but not all physical labor is minimum wage. I have friends that have traded their cushy 6 figure knowledge worker jobs for more down to earth jobs where they work with their hands. From what I can tell, they have traded short term monetary gain for long term happiness, and it definitively has its appeal.

and the realities of the job economy is exactly why "not PC"?

of course physical labor does not pay as much, as long as the pool of workers is significantly larger. Doesn't mean that some folks would choose another career path if other fields would pay as much as software engineering does.

This is an extremely narrow view of the human experience.

I've made this point elsewhere. But I consider this the realistic view that comes from a good amount of experience and simply using my eyes.

You say narrow - I say broad. For most people the 'job' they do is just a thing that brings money in. They have no feelings towards it - it's just a thing they do. They are more concerned with their family, their relationships in general, how they are going to support their kids, how are they going to pay their damn bills etc. etc.

Under this condition I find it hilarious for someone to justify -- sitting from their computer screen with an IDE open on the other monitor no doubt -- the fantasy happiness that can be had from doing a lower paying and physically more challenging job. I don't know gardening, but I do know construction, intimately, and imagine that gardening as a profession is not too entirely different. Most people who do these jobs are not doing it for some fantasy happiness. They are doing it out of necessity.

This must be a common joke amongst programmers. We often joke that we should all become potato farmers. Being outside, watching things grow, working with something physical. I totally get the appeal.

I actually got fired once because I didn't work crazy hours. Now I work at another company where it's much more laid back. I don't do any work when I get home or on the weekends.

> I think it's easy for programmers to hate life sometimes.

This is almost entirely due to a severe lack of perspective.

Definitely agree. Try taking a job that pays minimum wage (if you have one), or work in a shop, as a builder, or find friends who have to work all hours to survive and you'll realise how damned lucky you are.

No. Just because "it can be worse" doesn't mean someone doesn't have the right to be unhappy. It's a totally specious argument. "Your kid died? Well, what if BOTH your kids died? You have a lack of perspective..."

Yes, they would no doubt prefer their high-paying job over a minimum wage job. But that doesn't mean that they no longer have any right to be unhappy with their lives. This is exactly the point of the hedonic treadmill[1]. There are happy people with rough jobs and unhappy people with great jobs.

[1]The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.

> "Your kid died? Well, what if BOTH your kids died? You have a lack of perspective..."

Glass half full vs glass half empty. The hedonic treadmill has nothing to do with it. It's about being thankful and making the best of things. That's the antidote.

However you look at it being a programmer in today's society has the potential to give you an amount of choice and wealth enjoyed by very few other industries. You can make your own luck by simply being motivated enough to learn, and the initial outlay to create a massively profitable business is tiny compared to many other fields. So make the best of it. You could work for 3 months a year and do what you love for the other 9.

Are you really telling me you can't make that work? It is about perspective.

Yes, I am not arguing the objective benefits of our occupation.

I'm saying that having a job like this doesn't mean you ought to be happy, anymore than being rich means you ought to be happy, as is well known.

I have a side question, did you end up pursing a CS/Engineering degree? I'm trying to get a dev role and have a business background and looking for some advice on getting in.

The majority of the CS degree isn't very useful to dev work. Most of what you'll use in your day job you'll learn on your own, or on the job. A CS degree is mostly academic, and also mostly a sampling of a bunch of different domains to whet your appetite.

However there are a few topics I consider essential... operating systems, algorithm runtime/performance, data structures, basic software engineering/design patterns, memory management (seriously, everyone should have a course in C or C++) and functional programming (like Haskell).

Even hacking away at a PHP or Node server, there are times when a bit of knowledge of Big-O runtimes can save you from creating a script that never finishes.

I have a similar background in that I was primarily self-taught before finding a paid apprenticeship that lasted almost a year and then being employed as a consultant by the company.

If you can afford it, I'd recommend pursuing a formal route. It exposes you to a lot of ideas and ways of thinking that are hard to get in practice. After having programmed for around 4 years now, I often wish I'd studied CS.

In lieu of that, I think Udacity's nanodegrees programs are probably a good way to end up in a paid position relatively soon.

(I'm assuming you're looking to break into web programming. I can't speak for other areas.)

I eventually want to purse the formal route and do a part time BSc or perhaps get a MSc, for now I need something to pay off loans

I'm self-taught and I got my first job through going to user groups and scoping out what was going. Second job was with a much more difficult problem domain, but I'd taught myself some CS from textbooks during my first job so in the interview I came with lots of examples of work (both day job and freelance) and piped up about CS topics where I knew about them, and admitted when I didn't but stressed that I wanted to learn. I beat several other people to the job even though I was the most junior.

A lot of devs even at a mid or higher level have little curiosity for the theory side of things, and eventually you'll run into problems that require knowledge of it, so being enthusiastic (and a bit self-starting) in that area pays dividends in my experience even if you're not the most experienced dev going for a job.

The only caveat is that both were/are small companies, so no HR apparatus to go through.

I can give you a little advice from seeing some non-degree-having peers make it.

Have some idea what you're doing. Talking the talk is great, but you must be able to walk the walk. Apply to everything that sound like you can/want to do it, even if you don't technically meet the requirements. Those are mostly for HR pre-filtering since HR doesn't really know what they're talking about in 99% of cases - they're just looking for keyword hits.

Great thanks. I've built stuff before and have been learning/coding for the past ~4 years so I don't classify myself as a complete beginner.

When applying without a CS background how tough are the technical interviews? Do they tend to expect more or are they more lenient and look more at fit and ability to grow?

> When applying without a CS background how tough are the technical interviews?

It's very rare, in my experience, to be asked a pure CS question in the interview. For some positions you may be silently expected to have some degree of familiarity with CS concepts, for other - especially entry-level - positions you don't need CS knowledge at all.

Being able to produce working and good looking code is all most companies want from fresh employees, I think. It's unfortunately still hard to find people with that skill, but if you have it you can learn everything else.

In short: apply everywhere, go to interviews and don't be afraid. You'll be pleasantly surprised (I hope).

Depends where you're going. Top companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc are looking for people who can pass some tough CS questions, whereas more standard corporate or mid-stage startups are going to be a bit more lax. I've seen everything from "parse this integer from a string without your language's built in parse function" to "build a small database schema using ER diagrams" to "write us a P2P chat server with a central login server".

I interviewed a referral once, this kid had written a couple of trivial android apps in notepad, which was something at least. But when I drilled down he really didn't understand anything he was doing with respect to the build (ie didn't know what the classpath was), didn't know anything about basic collections, didn't know tools like eclipse, version control. He claimed to be eager to learn, but no one has a full time dev to spare teaching anyone intro classes on this stuff.

So, from my perspective, if he would have known the tools, basic concepts, and had taught himself more, he would have been a hire. Otherwise, he just wasn't self starting, and really wasn't eager to learn, or he would have come with more ability.

In that kind of situation you can basically do a contract to perm internship kind of thing, point them at resources, and see if he's fully competent to be junior at the end of the contract. Not everyone can afford this of course, but sometimes people don't even know what they should be learning, but will gobble up knowledge if pointed in the right direction. A weapon waiting to be aimed, if you will.

I had a friend who started his CS degree at the same time I started learning on my own, and he is just about to graduate while I've been in the field for about 2 years now. So it worked out for me to not seek a degree.

He's also a vastly different person than I am, writing code is not a passion of his, while it is of mine. I'd be writing code whether or not it was my job, while he'd rather be doing other things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com