How computer programming became the worst choice of career | Hacker News Reader

How computer programming became the worst choice of career

efinancialcareers.co.uk

47 pointsabunuwas103 comments

People who don't earn much think they chose badly because they're not getting rich. People who chose jobs that pay well think they'd be happier in something more creative. People doing creative work wish they'd chosen something more stable. Practically everyone thinks they chose the wrong job. Most of them are right in the sense that they might actually be happier doing something else, but also most people could chose 50 different careers and still not find one that suits them.

Without wishing to go all "internet philosopher", none of us is introspective enough about what makes us truly happy to know what we actually want. We define "happiness" by looking at other people and being envious of what they have - if only we had what some other person has we'd not be miserable any more. But everyone is doing that. It doesn't work. Read some Michel de Montaigne or Immanuel Kant and figure out what you want out of life, and then get it on your own terms.

Reminds me of this verse from Gensis:

> By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.

In other words, work will always be work.

Reminds me of the intro to Bioshock

eat arbys

Some context might be helpful. In that verse, god is literally cursing Adam and Eve for eating the forbidden fruit. The author of genesis is not making some prosaic observation of human nature.

There may be some truth to the idea that work will always be work. But it certainly has nothing to do with a curse from a supernatural being for eating a forbidden fruit.

But if you look at what "eating the forbidden fruit" was meant to symbolise, i.e. self realisation, then it does speak to the point made by the first poster. Once you have theory of mind you realise that other people have it different experience than you do; some better some worse.

So then you could argue that happiness then comes from meta meta cognition; other people have it different from you, but you don't always realise the problems those others have. You come to the realisation that you can't control everything; you change what you can to make things better, and accept what you can't.

A lot of happiness thinking centers around focusing on achieving something, having the right job, “I’ll be happy when...”

But like that doesn’t work because we keep moving the goal post on ourselves. There will always be “one more thing” until I’m happy. Happiness is found in the journey to achieve these things.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

Whenever people complain about their pay, like the author, I always ask them what they want to buy. Most people don't have an answer ready - they just believe in some general sense that they will be happier with more money. Sometimes they say stuff they could afford already, other times it's something that really requires time, rather than money.

Any specific recommendations for de Montaigne or Kant?

I've not read any of their essays directly because I'm a frontend developer rather than a philosopher, but Sarah Bakewell's "How to live: A life of Montaigne" is a very good introduction to Montaigne's philosophy. I've only read parts of Critique of Pure Reason by Kant but it is fairly approachable. Most of what I know of philosophy is from things like https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/

> People who don't earn much

It's very, very important to note that the author is not a person who "doesn't earn much".

Looking at Figure 6 at https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor... it looks like UKP 55k/year is around the 80th percentile for "professional occupations". The only groups that earn more than that on average (median? not clear) are various senior managers, doctors, lawyers, pilots, and train drivers (the latter surprised me). Being at 70k in two years would put the author -- a lowly programmer -- on a level with "information technology and telecommunications directors" (emphasis mine).

For whatever it's worth, the "finance and investment analysts and advisers" the author envies are listed at 37k, which is less than "programmers and software development professionals" at 44k.

The problem with looking at salary is that the fact you're in the 80th percentile doesn't mean much if everyone you know is in the 90th percentile - you're still going to feel like you're badly off.

Additionally, if you earn in the 80th percentile, you probably live in a high cost of living location, so your disposable income is not necessarily 80th percentile too.

Pay satisfaction is relative to your surrounding so if your pay is in the lower range of your peers/coworkers then you will feel badly paid no matter how much you earn relative to the general population.

I suspect he has an understanding of what his co-workers are paid at his company so he feels under paid.

I understand that the author isn't satisfied with their pay. But that doesn't mean that they are in fact paid badly. By any measure other than the author's feelings, they are paid pretty well.

Yea.

I am a programmer and sometimes think of what else I could have done.

I remind myself I don’t hate my day to day, and often enjoy it.

I remind myself that many other careers are available to me as a hobby since I can afford cameras, paint, whatever. I also have the time to do it.

Many of the other careers don’t afford this.

> Read some Michel de Montaigne or Immanuel Kant and figure out what you want out of life, and then get it on your own terms.

Get some hobbies! They can be really great. Reading, of course, can be one of them. Here's a good list to try out:

https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/hobbies-for-men/

I initially thought this article was satire - poking fun at how easy programmers really have it on balance. But no, it’s just a contentless, envy fuelled moan from a position of privilege.

Take a step out of the FAANG-SV-HN salary distortion field for a moment, and the London financial one too for the matter, you will clearly see that 55k is a great salary in the UK. Far more than the average.

If you picked a career that you don’t innately enjoy because you thought it would make you rich, and it’s not, then that’s on you.

It is possible for a programmer and a janitor to both not like their jobs and voice their opinions online about why.

Yeah but one of the two is in the position to easily change careers while the other isn't.

Which one?

I think that misses the OP’s point. They point to the lack on “innate” or intrinsic value in the job. In other words, the article seems to be selecting the wrong metric in determining a career choice that is meant to maximize happiness

Indeed; £55k is well over median UK income. I’m quite a senior software engineer in the UK and I don’t earn anything like that — forget about £70k! That’s because I don’t work in finance and I’m fine with that. The hedonistic treadmill is not worth getting on, imo.

Exactly, I'm currently at 56k and while I'm looking at getting paid more because there is room to do so it's fascinating to me that this person who is in top 10% in term of income think they are doing a job that pays badly...

£55k is not a great salary in the UK for a middle class professional with a degree and >5 years of experience.

Lawyers, doctors, dentists, accountants, front line sales, and even some nurses earn comfortably more than that - never mind MPs, many of whom are both clueless and useless and still manage to earn more than £80k base before expenses.

Some blue collar workers - mostly trades - can also earn a lot more, especially for contract or high-availability work.

Of course it's not a great salary compared to someone who works a checkout, stocks shelves, or talks to customers on the phone.

But qualifications and experience should matter at least a little.

If every lawyer, doctors, dentists, etc... earn more than that， He might have a point, but I doubt it.

Every career has underdogs, even presidents.

He could probably go freelancing and earn a whole lot more.

I earned a lot more as freelancer when working in The Netherlands compared to permanent employee. And I feel in the UK it's probably much the same situation. In The Netherlands it's quite easy as freelancer to earn say 100.000 EUR a year and probably more. If you're a bit smart with taxes, you can have a very good standard of life, you'd be in the top 10% for sure.

And even better: just do this a few years, save money and then move to some country with lower standard of living. You could probably retire before reaching 40 years of age if you started freelancing in your early 30s and be careful with your spending (if your single). With a family (children) the situation would be a bit more complicated.

And yes, you could try to make some site or app to earn additional income outside of your job.

Yep, it is what I did (from the Netherlands) and it works well. I moved to South eu: quality of life, IMHO, is far higher even while it is cheap to live here, especially if you do not want to be in a popular city (which I never wanted). I moved when I was little over 30.

"going freelance" is just as simplified as the other comment of "simply moving to the US".

How quickly does the mind go from "my career is stagnating and finding better jobs can be hard" to "this is the worst choice of career". One of them is a valid concern, the other is a gross exaggeration that people who actually have bad jobs would laugh at.

The guy who is complaining about having to learn new technology is complaining about not making enough money?

I would never hire him.

People, when picking a career in college, still seem to believe that you can have a 9-5 job for life. I know quite a few university bank employees (ubs, Barclay's, etc) before and/or now still in London who are not programmers; sure they make more, faster after uni, but they work stupid hours. And get kicked fast if they kick up a fuss.

The expectation that things are like what you were told by parents or grandparents maybe needs adjusting. You are not hireable with this attitude, it is not a programmer-only problem.

I tend to agree, but there's been two competing posts on HN today, one about attracting developers like ants to honey with exciting new technology and the other about avoiding hype and delivering products with stable tech.

If i were a lawyer, I'd go to school once, and reap benefit form that education as an assets and build on it with experience. Software is not like that. Yes school is an asset, but it dates, and so does experience when the market moves constantly.

Again I'm not complaining, but it's a thing.

The problem is that there are a lot of technologies that are simply insufficient or bad. jquery is critically insufficient. A lot of one way databinding frameworks are merely insufficient. The reason why react and the VDOM won is that it's literally just client side html rendering with the exact same flow as a server side html template. VDOM is merely an implementation detail that makes this type of client side rendering efficient enough that you can trigger it all the time, no matter how trivial the interaction is.

Although I personally dislike React itself and rather use preact I consider the API itself to be pretty solid and definitively worthy of building a career on top of it that would last at least 10 years. Above a certain level of sufficiency any change in framework/language is just churn.

I consider PHP to be critically insufficient because you have to force people to learn Lavarel otherwise they get the stupid idea of writing an old school apache PHP app. It also has some stupid warts that provide no value. Overall it's not meeting the level of quality necessary to build a career on top of it. The only benefit it provides is that once you learn all the warts its merely ok.

Java is also insufficient because it is missing very simple features. The foundation is solid but the details just aren't there. Getters and Setters shouldn't be a thing. They only exist to please certain frameworks and some theoretical futureproofing. Replace them with properties (that automatically generate getters and setters) and end the discussion right there. It's really sad how much effort it is to write a small data class in Java. I have a small project where I chose to use groovy simply because I had to define 30 data classes. With Java 50% of the codebase would be getters and setters to please the serialization library. Groovy is mature but it's not exactly popular, since people who don't want to use it are forced to use it (Gradle).

The software industry isn't mature. That's the reality. There are lots of established but insufficient solutions. There are lots of sufficient but not established solutions. React is right in the sweet spot. PHP is clearly insufficient. Java is insufficient but close. Modern languages and frameworks rarely get traction and are replaced all the time. Groovy is something that you could in theory build a whole career on but the jobs aren't there.

Await with promises vs monadic promises is also a point of contention. The only thing that everyone agrees on is that raw callsbacks should be wrapped in a promise or future, but whether a promise is supposed to be used as a monad (chain of .then calls) or whether its supposed to be used via special compiler support is still open. I honestly don't know. I would go with await because C# has adopted it with great success but it's also not something that can just be added to an existing language without rebuilding the entire ecosystem and thus causing it to be a bad career choice.

Well I would never hire you either.

This industry is even fuller of unemphatic know-it-alls quick to judgement than disillusioned programmers.

you always hear this about the UK.

It seems like generally speaking, science and engineering lacks prestige over there compared to being a lawyer or banker?

Possibly due to the “two cultures” problem combined with the English class system.

I have no idea if this is accurate or not, and the English class system is pretty opaque to me.

I'm sure there's a small section of society for whom this statement is true, but I think most people of my generation in the UK take the American view that it's the money that counts. There are probably more extremely high-paid banking and lawyer jobs in the UK than there are programming jobs though

right, but why is that the case?

I honestly don’t know but it seems like some kind of different attitude towards technical work could be one explanation.

Yes this is very true I believe, engineers are still 'just nerds'.

I work in the exact same industry as him and earn considerably more. As always coding jobs are not fungible and finance coding jobs are not fungible either (a .net back office programmer is not going to earn the same as a front office quant dev doing C++).

I should know, I worked my ass off to transition from one to the other via a startup (which I sold shares in for $500k) and tech firm.

I didn't just accept my initial job was the end of my career (my first job I was on £19k, first finance job £24k or so), I made things happen in spite of being set back massively due to serious issues at uni which was not my fault (long story).

So unfortunately my sympathy is zero. If you don't like it, work at changing it, or shut up.

Also the idea that programming is not in demand is truly laughable. I interviewed 200+ people throughout my career. Trust me the issue is not on the demand side.

Programming is becoming more like factory work. You are expected to continuously produce at a certain pace and quantity. But, as programmers know, things are constantly changing and are expected to keep up. It's stressful and challenging.

From my point of view the fix is for programmers to create their own side project early on with the goal of making it a full time job.

I don't see the industry changing. I see the situation getting worse for programmers. As the number of people trained as programmers gets larger, companies will have more people to choose from while paying less and expecting more. So, the programmers have to change and adapt.

I guess this is why it's "the worst career". In other "professional" careers, salaries generally keep pace, or even far outpace inflation, and one's standing (and salary) within the profession generally improves with experience.

With programming, it seems as though salaries are set to decline, and skill experience is constantly eroded as new technologies (and cheap pools of labour) become available, and then there's rampant ageism.

It's somewhat like being an athlete perhaps - if you haven't made it big when you're young, you're looking at declining prospects, which is stressful and depressing.

That article is very specific to the author's case, and to be sincere, it seems to be most because of the author's fault than the career he chose. He says coders are badly paid and it is getting worse but this is not true for many regions and niches. For example, a backend Java Programmer specialized in Commerce Platforms (Hybris, SFCC, etc) earns very well in Latam because naturally after the pandemic there is a rush after the online channel and we have a shortage of professionals. I'm sure the same just applies to different programming areas and regions around the globe. Another great advantage of the coder profession is that you can do it from anywhere in the world, so if you make the effort of learning which country/job pays the best (and accept english speaking coders) you can live in a place with low living costs earning a very decent salary (I mean, director level salary). I met many coders in Brazil that work for companies in the US and earn 5x what a local company would pay for the same job/skill. So it is just a matter of better exploring the options you have and lose the neighborhood job mindset. It's not the career it's you.

Exactly! Here in Mexico having a programming career is guaranteed to give you a good income an QoL. So much that in the past 5 years we've had lots of lawyers, accountants, designers and people from other backgrounds fall for the developer bootcamps

I never got into this career for its earning potential, but because I just always loved programming. Somehow I've ended up in a FAANG making a lot of money, but the actual "programming" (writing code) portion of my job is small. I feel like there's some paradox there, but really, I just want to complain on the Internet. If you asked me at 10 what I wanted to be when I grew up it was "computer programmer" and here I am, though I took a very zig-zagged path to get there (no degree, and half a philosophy BA for example). And I'm living far from where I grew up and my parents and brother, because this is where the work is. etc.

So I'm not sure how much sympathy I have for this article. I kind of understand the tone, but frankly, my dad was a machinist, another kind of skilled labour job and until he got a job teaching it, he was miserable and mistreated and I got to see, growing up, what real blue collar sweatshop work was like and what real job dissatisfaction, underpay, severe long term unemployment, etc. was like.

The money I make is nice now, and I have a nice life, though I feel trapped. Maybe I can retire early and make skis and walk in the woods with my dog more.

I can easily see how someone could end up in such a mental trap despite having chosen a career that is arguably one of the best paid one for something that's not requiring a top level education.

My first employer was a service company selling programmers to big companies to do routine maintenance and evolution job. They would staff you in really boring departments, doing really uninteresting job, and would happily keep you in that same situation for years if the client was ready to pay. I could have stayed there, learning nothing, being employed to the minimum of my abilities, and wake up ten years later once the end customer didn't have any need for that particular skill anymore.

It's one of the most dangerous situation to be in, as a developer. You feel comfortable, you earn a decent pay, and then wake up one day in a state of crisis, realizing you're now completely obsolete and on a precarious situation.

Luckily for me, people close to me had warned me of that kind of trap very early, and so I stayed there only for a year then moved on to a start up (where i could work on great tech and great problems with great people, and being paid for that).

> happily keep you in that same situation for years

happily keep you === happily stay

I've seen many people who turn into programming as a job, mainly because they think they'll make more money if they switch career, to find out that it's not for them after a few years. While I have no personal gripe against them personally (my gripe is with gov initiatives and the plethora of coding schools), and I generally encourage everyone to learn something about programming so that they feel more control about technology they use, working as a programmer / developer is definitely NOT for everyone, that is if you're interested in not having to switch careers (again) after a few years. Working as a programmer for the long run requires passion, which is a cliche, but there's some truth to that. Basically you have to enjoy it, and not just be in it _only_ for the money. I don't think this is a special trait to this professing, but I've never worked in anything else to know.

One should identify professions where a little bit of programming can provide value and then offer them a simple platform based on Javascript that lets them achieve simple business goals. Deployment should be trivial, not require maintaining servers and the results of the program should be easily accessible to relevant members of the organization. I am not sure which shape this sort of platform would take. It wouldn't be far off from Google spreadsheets where you can write arbitrary Javascript but that's just a starting point. People should be able to click a simple app together over the course of a single day and write code for the interactions.

I know that this is very similar to no code platforms but I personally don't see the need to avoid code. The value is in avoiding the need to maintain a wide variety of skills that are merely a side effect of creating and deploying an app. Having a solid foundation in programming and databases but not in all the other skills that make software engineering "engineering", is where I see the most value.

For someone who only derives value from programming, the need to learn CSS, HTML, what version control is, what testing is, how to deploy software, learn a backend framework, learn a frontend framework etc is just a barrier to entry for these individuals.

I worked in finance for 5 years, passed all 3 CFA exams, and was ready to start studying for the GMAT to get in a top MBA school. Decided to take a hard right and learn programming instead.

I loved studying finance, but didn't like working finance jobs. Finance is getting more automated anyways, here's an excerpt from the front office salary link that's in the OP's article:

> As banks try to automate as much as they can, and as trading takes place electronically using computer algorithms, human beings are becoming far less plentiful in the front office. Goldman Sachs, for example, famously replaced the 600 equities traders it had in the year 2000 with electronic trading systems. Now, Goldman says it only has two actual human traders left.

I love working with code. Finance spreadsheets were a bore for me. Complex Scala codebases are a delight.

Programming has been an awesome career for me and the flexibility has enabled me to live a completely different life.

I can kind of relate to the author. Here in Spain, programming salaries are way _way_ further from those in the UK, let alone the US. The average wage for a senior developer is around 35k€ to 40k€ (roughly 48k USD). The technologies are the same, the working hours are the same, heck I even have to read, write and speak English on a daily basis even tho I'm in Spain, but the salaries are nowhere near.

What's even funnier is that the technologies I work with are not that common. In comparison, finding a C++ developer with good knowledge of Linux internals (e.g. me) is much harder than finding front-end web developers, but the former are getting paid way less than the later.

The difference with the OP is that I've analyzed the situation and I know that, if I want to improve my financial status, I have to move abroad or start freelancing, but I prefer the current stability I have. Not sure about the future tho.

I’ve worked with programmers in Spain and have limited salary information. They are definitely much lower compared to, say, New York. However, cost of living in Madrid was nowhere near New York. For example, I could get a beer and ham sandwich at Museo del Jamon for about 2€. Compare that to paying $15 for a salad.

Sure, the cost of living is way lower, but given the ability of working remotely for companies abroad, there shouldn't be such a large gap. I think (and hope) it's a matter of time for most developers to realize how many opportunities there are for working remotely with better economical conditions, and along with that local businesses will have to up their game as well.

If I had to guess, he is likely a front-end engineer and I can kind of sympathize with some of his gripes because I've dabbled with front-end/full-stack work myself (benefits of working at a small company and getting to wear different hats) and it seemed absurd to me how much churn there is in the field and how much extra effort you need to put in to remain relevant from an employability standpoint. If your place of employment still uses 5-10 year old tech (and that would be perfectly reasonable) the skills you develop at work aren't necessarily making you more attractive to current employers. Even though I was never going to be a full-timd front-end developer, I couldn't fathom having to put in the extra effort outside of work just to keep up with developments and the latest and greatest in the field while trying to manage a healthy work-life balance.

That being said, I don't think that is really the issue here for this person. It reads as someone who has no real passion for programming or his craft and went into the field for perhaps the wrong reasons. I love coding and software engineering. I've loved it ever since I was a child and started with GWBASIC. Even though I went down a different path and ended up with a PhD in Physics, I ultimately couldn't be happy without coding in my life and I ended up self teaching myself almost everything I know and making a career switch (ML Engineer + SWE) and I simply can't imagine doing anything else. I'd still choose this path even if I earned half my salary because I enjoy what I do. But I felt exactly like the author in my prior career which over time felt more and more like a grind and something I did just to maintain the status quo and help support my family.

The person who wrote the article just needs to make a switch to something they are passionate about, or something that they are equally dispassionate about but provides more compensation (don't recommend that trade-off personally). His issues have very little to do with the field of computer programming itself.

Based on title I was thinking of ageism and no matter how much you like the job your career (the series of jobs you do) will end one day and you are forced to move on to a role with more responsibility or be undervalued on the job market because of your age. Nope, not even that, the article is about a guy who is applying to terrible companies.

When I was 20 I was extremely worried about ageism and how I will have trouble finding jobs 20 years in the future. I found a lot of potential investments that will help me once that day comes. It's just a matter of putting in enough capital and since the job is paying well it's just a matter of switching companies regularly and staying employed for 20 years.

Contrast this with low paying jobs with no hope of building equity. It's not even close.

I don't like the title either. It suggests there would be some stats to back up the claim. Instead it is just a single person lamenting their career choice. I am sure that person can be found within every career path.

The author suggests he may get a 15k pay rise in the next two years. To me, and probably to most people in the world, that seems quite good. The detail lies in their cost of living and standard of life compared to their peers. The author mentions that the front office staff are getting paid more handsomely. I wonder what those salaries are in comparison.

I sympathize with the author around interviews but I feel they, along with the rest of us, should vote with our time and not do silly interviews that you have to study for. Let those companies starve for developers.

If you’re a programmer and tired of being a cost center then work at a company where software is the product not a cost of doing business. Then you’ll find the company is focused on growing you and your team instead of trying to minimize your effect on the bottom line.

Programming is a cost center even at a software company. It's a form of production. The goal is to reduce its cost while increasing quality and quantity.

Programmers don't like to hear this but what the software designers do is what costumers ultimately see and pay for. For the most part is what differentiates one software package from another with in a group type.

I can certainly sympathyse with those vibes, when I was just starting I was really happy to spend extra time outside work, was happy to see all the new frameworks,etc.

Now its all starting to rub me the wrong way, I thibk the culture we have around it is unhealthy

It's interesting how the vast majority of comments focus on the salary part when the author actually only lightly touched that subject and mostly covered a completely different subject.

Does that tell something about the readers? ;)

The salary is just so much easier to quantify

The constant learning just to stay up to date? Isn’t that part of the other professions too?

> The salary is just so much easier to quantify

He only briefly mentioned that though and it was not the main point.

> The constant learning just to stay up to date? Isn’t that part of the other professions too?

Depends on the profession of course, but generally speaking, no. No other profession changes every five minutes (exaggerated of course), even IT did not up until 10, 15 years ago.

As I mentioned already, the OP might have simplified things, but overall I agree with him.

Not sure how it could be read that salary was lightly touched in the post. Most of the paragraphs mention salary, pay rises, comparing pay to other jobs, doing unpaid work to keep up (though this bleeds into the other subject), etc.

"pay" appears twice in the article, "salary" exactly once.

The author did touch the salary topic, but it is not the main point.

£55k is average for someone in the South outside of London. In London you can add £20k to that, and maybe another £10k in the City. (At least you could until recently.)

The answer is contract work. If someone can dodge IR35 rules and call themselves a "consultant" or a "solutions architect" they'll earn a lot more for almost identical work, with the useful option to leave gracefully if a project is toxic and on fire.

The other answer is to leave the UK. Engineering jobs pay much better in some EU countries, and engineering gets a lot more respect as a profession.

Engineering jobs pay much better in some EU countries

Which ones? £55k is a pretty decent salary ( 75-85k is a very high salary) for a developer in basically all EU countries I've looked at.

engineering gets a lot more respect as a profession.

But only if you are an actual engineer. Developers without the degree aren't, in my experience, given much more 'respect' outside the UK compared to the UK.

> much better in some EU countries

In which EU countries do you earn a lot more than EUR 64,000 on average?

as a software dev? germany, norway, switzerland, denmark, ireland

Switzerland and Norway in the EU?

Germany and Ireland are the same as the UK

https://www.payscale.com/research/DE/Job=Senior_Software_Eng...

https://www.payscale.com/research/IE/Job=Senior_Software_Eng...

Denmark appears to be slightly higher but Denmark is also more expensive than the UK.

Overall far from the alleged big difference.

aha EU pass holder here so in practice for job seeking I kind of include both Switzerland and Norway, but technically it is not EU

one thing is what is on payscale another is what you see on the payslip, 60k+ in DE is not hard to get for senior dev

Still not EU and both examples are high-expense countries where wages naturally are higher too, but that does not solve the problem.

And as for Germany, it shouldn't be 60+, but rather 80+ to match the expectation of being significantly more.

The suggestion of moving simply is flawed.

you can get 80+ in Germany in big cities.

what problem are you solving? no, you cant get rich by coding as an employee, anywhere. you can try to sweat your balls as a contractor + do tax magic and have a 'decent' living, or start a company and make a product - very risky.

as job coders are 21st century factory workers, its not on lawyer/doctor/accountant level.

We are talking about average here and 80+ is not average. The whole point was the the suggestion of moving would be a pointless exercise.

> as job coders are 21st century factory workers, its not on lawyer/doctor/accountant level.

Fair enough, but this proves the author's point. Development used to be on such a level and has steadily declined.

> Fair enough, but this proves the author's point. Development used to be on such a level and has steadily declined.

I agree, I know a few "old timers" and they seem to have it better in the early days. I guess this is the case with all human activity, over time it becomes optimized as know-how spreads to more people.

The best professions long term are those where gate keeping is employed (license, nepotism, high creativity, people able to perform at top 1%), short term profession gets a boost from being "the new thing", which programing is not anymore.

I'm not someone who will claim the free market solves everything. But in my experience, a programming career gives programmers a wonderfully diverse labor marketplace. You can pretty much make your career what you want it to be.

Mine involved doing zero unpaid overtime ever (or no more than say 30-60 minutes here and there). Mine involved doing zero training for puzzle-based tests. Mine involved being paid above average salary compared to many others where I live. And mine involved only enjoyable, hobbyist practice of my craft in my spare time. When I landed in jobs that didn't suit me well, I moved to a different job.

There may have been a rogue weekend where I got a little work in, or a couple of nights where I was running through tutorials in a language or framework that work needed, so it wasn't primarily my curiosity getting me to try it out. But by and large, I've been paid handsomely for being efficient, adding efficiency to organizations, and I've learned what I needed to on the job while enjoying what I do.

Personally, I couldn't ask for me, though others certainly can and do expect more from their career and from themselves. If you want to be richer than me, you couldn't live where I do (or you'd have to be more attractive to remote-first employers that also pay higher salaries.) So the work you put in tends to reward you, though perhaps the Pareto Principle applies.

Now, I can attribute some of my satisfaction in this line of work with timing - getting into web application development in at the turn of the century meant that demand exceeded supply and it was an employee's market. But more so, I think, can be attributed to my flexibility, adaptability, willingness to accept change and move (change jobs) to where I could get what I wanted from my career.

Perhaps where you live and when you live, software cannot give you the career you desire. If that's the case, choose what to change. You cannot change the point in time we are in, but there are certainly software fields that are growing and paying well, so maybe location has to change, or you must seek out more desirable remote positions and make yourself a fit for them. If that isn't what you're willing to do, then perhaps the field is wrong for you, and you must make a bigger change.

I'm feeling kinda weird about this. Programming is a craft, it's specific set of skills which enables you to develop computer software. If your intent is to sell your skill eg. time to employer then you are probably never going to be "rich". I think that software development have one of the lowest financial barriers to go into own business even as a freelancer. This attitude makes author think that it's his "worst choice". Obviously not the fact that he have clearly above the average salary.

> If you want to stay employable as a programmer, you need to keep up to speed with new techniques and new languages.

Hi, I've been doing C on Unix for 30 years, with a digression into C++ on Win32 along the way and some C++ on Unix.

("Unix" includes GNU/Linux).

All of it has been mostly new development, or new development in the context of legacy code, not maintaining legacy code.

If you have to keep learning new languages, it's because you jumped on the language-of-the-day wagon in the first place.

I jumped on the "close to what makes tech work" wagon.

Would you mind commenting on your current salary range and location? I've decided I want to stick to C++/Python on Linux for my tech stack, as I've grown to hate the current state and pace of web development.

£70k ($92k) seems like a pretty good salary to me? Probably quite a bit more than median income in both the US and UK, no? Doesn't seem like the worst choice of career even as experienced by OP, if we're talking about that in terms of income, which the OP largely is.

While the center of the short essay on it's surface is about income, I suspect, maybe, the real dissatifaction is that the author simply doesn't enjoy their job on the day-to-day, they find it unpleasant?

Why is this even posted here? There is no real name on it, it spews one false and/or provocative statement after another without trying to provide any proof.

In some countries is one of the safest way to get a job. Trying other careers may get you more free time, but it could be too much free time because you can't get a job at all. I'm not sure about if its a good long term strategy, but you need to survive the present to reach the future.

And you can get outdated in other careers too, there are a lot of advancements all over the field, and a lot of it is related to IT (i.e. data processing).

Computer programming is a lot like many other technical professions, many people can do it. It’s unfortunate that a profession which was seen as essential to the technological revolution, now is a race to the bottom to find the cheapest programmers who will work the longest hours. I’m in sales, and it is painful to see so many good programmers get pushed out as soon as they hit 45 years of age.

Edited for grammar and spelling.

Judging by the name of this site, and other articles on it, I'm guessing that _maybe_ this author works in banking or finance, and that this may be a major factor in why they do not like their job.

Regarding the need to keep learning - for some people that is a big part of the attraction, not a downside. Sure, it's not for everyone, but saying that it's a generally bad career choice is a bit of a stretch.

I don't like the headline. But the article does explain why he feels it's the wrong career choice for himself. I can understand many of the reasons he cited, but many can be refuted. For example he can double or triple his salary by moving to the USA and working for a FAANG company. He can also choose to work at companies that view programmers as a valuable resource than a cost center.

"moving to the US" is a very generic statement. For starters, one can't simply move but needs to fulfill the immigration requirements, one of which is employment which one has to first find.

So no, it's not as easy as you may make it sound like.

For most people, moving some ten thousand kilometers away from friends and family isn't really an option.

I agree that the author isn't saying anything much, but "just work somewhere else" also isn't a very strong point.

A lot of people are taking the writer's content at face value and biting. Could it be that this guy is just really bad at what he does, and as such he couldn't get a well-paying job? He even gives us a hint:

> Personally, I've already spent months doing unpaid work on testing sites, and yet I'm still stuck in the same place.

That part is really weird. "I've been told I have to waste my evenings waving dead chickens over a pentagram to get ahead; I've been doing that for months and nothing happened." Maybe waving chickens over pentagrams doesn't actually do anything.

If the article was posted a couple of days ago - how does its page have comments from a couple of years ago?

Personally, I've already spent months doing unpaid work on testing sites, and yet I'm still stuck in the same place.

Have others encountered this? I have not but I do wonder if the hiring process is becoming more demanding / time consuming.

Maybe the author needs a coach or needs to network more.

You see; I am also confused by this. The author chooses to work for free, and yet complains about his pay relative to the amount of time he must spend doing cognitively taxing work.

In my 10 years as a professional software engineer I have seen this same thing happen time and time again. My colleagues devalue themselves constantly by working for free.

If you earn $80k a year as an engineer, you rate is roughly $38.46 per hour if you work 2080 hours in the year. Let's say you opt to work an extra 30 minutes a day (very often the case for many devs who work into their lunch break); that equates to an extra 130 hours of work per year for free. So what you're actually doing is earning $80k a year for 2210 hours, or $36.19 per hour. That's roughly ~6% less pay for your time for working an extra 30min a day. Now imagine what happens when you work those extra 30mins + a few weekends here and there. The total percentage of your salary drops significantly as a result.

Say no. Don't work for free.

It seems like author took too much of the responsibility, like 10X dev. Its better to take less responsibility with slightly above average salary and get more of personal time.. this reminds of a story about fish finding for ocean from a movie Soul

I agree with the article's author. He should definitely go to another field, programming is not for everybody. You need passion in the first place and then you need the will to see through with the passion. From his rant he seems to lack both.

I don’t agree. I am very passionated about programming and love learning about new stuff. But I can understand you could feel trapped. For example, when you have kids and are in a demanding job, or are in any other way responsible for other things, there are only so many hours in a day!

So often a programmer’s merits seems to be measured by what they do outside their working hours. Do you value an accountant on the work they do during the weekend?

I have 2 kids and I do freelancing for 13 years now. My wife goes to work and I often talk to clients while my kids are also doing online school nowadays. I don't feel trapped at all, on the contrary I have total freedom. Like I said, programming is not for everyone, who feels trapped should change fields.

There are ways to make programming an excellent career. I've found quite a few of them - some more lucrative than others, and some more creative than others. I don't think author of this article is on their way to finding any of them.

“worst choice of career” rings of hyperbole. For many it’s a ticket out of their current career. For all their flaws, boot camps and Lambda School are popular for a reason.

This article just reads like sour grapes.

If you are not utilizing your skills to make something that can earn for you, like some tools or app anything.

people who say programmers need "passion" in this field always strongly smells of gatekeeping to me

> How I thought I would make a huge buck while doing nothing and found out that I'm wrong

Fully agree with the author.

Even if he might have over-simplified things, the bottom line is true.

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