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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

As a manager I’d probably advice against picking programming unless you love it.

That is the dirty little secret of our industry. You need to do your day job AND on your own time, keep your skills up to date, and/or work on open source and/or write a blog or something. There was a post on there the other day on how keeping up to date with k8s is a full-time job in and of itself, well you need to do that - and a bunch of others - in your free time, in the full knowledge that what's hot today might turn out to be worthless in a year or two.

People on the outside, even those aspiring to get in, I don't think fully realize the commitment of those making the headline salaries in this field. Just as you won't make it as a banker unless you LOVE making deals, so much that you'd even do it for free...

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Yes, the occasional expectation that you should have a blog to make you a decent developer annoys me. I am pretty poor at writing and don't have a lot to say that I want to broadcast to the world. Answering Stak Overflow questions suits me better as a way of demonstrating that I know something.

a way of demonstrating that I know something

It's the expectation that you need to demonstrate it at all, is the problem. How many lawyers sue people for fun so they can blog about it, how many doctors do surgery at home and stream "live cutting"?

We have created a treadmill that we can't step off

I think this is largely a myth. I don't have any of my work in a public space. In my area I'm in the top 5% of the salary range. Maybe this is more prominent in silicon valley? I've personally never even been asked for any kind of portfolio.

to be fair, the bimodality in the population of lawyers/doctors is an "are you in or out" system that comes from the generally outdated and arduous graduate credentials for these careers administered by bureaucratic boards. medical school, law school, and so on, are all extremely costly investments of time and capital for a shot at attaining that professional certification, and there's generally little recourse if you continually fail.

"software developer," as a label, doesn't signal that kind of credentialing (although something like advanced degree might), so our labor to differentiate ourselves goes elsewhere. i don't want to imply that this isn't a problem for our profession, but the amount of "wow we software engineers have it so difficult" sentiment in this thread seems high

"software developer," as a label, doesn't signal that kind of credentialing (although something like advanced degree might)

A degree from a well-known school and a few years at one or more prestigious companies is an equivalent. Let's imagine a hypothetical developer who graduated from MIT then spent 3 years at Google. He or she would be as "credentialled" in the sense of the piece of paper opening doors as someone who'd gone the law school route and passed the Bar. That person will pass every resume-screen and get invited to an interview for the rest of their careers with just those two names listed.

> You need to do your day job AND on your own time, keep your skills up to date, and/or work on open source and/or write a blog or something.

Not just that! Don't forget about attending a dozen conferences a year, doing talks, and local meetups.

>Not just that! Don't forget about attending a dozen conferences a year, doing talks, and local meetups

You don't really need any of that.

Ultimately, you just need to pass the interview.

Sure conferences and tech talks might help give your resume some more visibility and likeliness of getting hired. Similar to having a couple toy projects, but many top tier companies adhere to a set of standards in their hiring process where they won't let you bypass their DS&A interview because you gave a tech talk.

Agreed. I don't have a Github, contribute to open source projects, go to conferences or meetups or any of that stuff on my off-time. When asked about it in interviews I tell them about the kind of projects I've done, and that's pretty much it. Its a straight forward agreement, I'll give my time and expertise (C/C++) and you'll pay me a fair amount. I'm not going to act like my life is all about programming because that would be a totally sad life in my opinion.

Outside of the SV bubble, the (entirely subjective) impression that I get is that there is much less bleeding-edge/buzzword-based hiring. There's still a fair amount, especially at medium- or small-sized B2B/sales-driven companies without engineering involvement in hiring, but it's much less epidemic.

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