What’s the goal?
We make so much money very early in our careers that it’s very easy to lose track of what the end goal is.
I was programming for free for years. Then I was programming for practically minimum wage for a few years. Now I'm programming for a nice salary. I get paid to wake up & do what I want
I did a lot of sysadmin so it was a lot of individual unix servers and different kinds of integration problem solving getting printers or networks to work or rigging up weird edi's over modems or ftp etc, getting some bespoke backend software to talk to some weird machine where nether the OS, nor app, nor apps language, nor wierd machine vendors provided that last bit of help needed to connect them together, mini-proto-HA by just making a better more redundant ordinary server,.. basically "IT rigging"
That was for me all just great fun. But now 99% of that is just cloud services and they are all soul sucking to me, probably more because of the corporate environment they get used within more than the tech itself, where you and everyone else are hardly treated any different than the machine. Everything is so managed that I don't feel like the modern tools are expressive and empowering like the old tools. Everything is services with predefined limits and potentials based middle of the bell curve assumptions about what people need vs languages and hardware where you rigged up your own interesting solutions to each new problem.
So I too now play with arduino/esp32 toys and open source projects for fun, and am pretty glad I already made enough money that it doesn't matter that no one would pay me for this.
And yes, some projects I get from clients are soul sucking, but I chose them fully aware of that, hence the balance heavily in my favor in terms of hours. I get back my soul after was sucked this way :).
The project I'm working on now, would make a lot of Fortune 100 companies green with envy, and I'm doing it for free.
That's highly depending on your industry and country(s) you are in. In Singapore you can live a relatively OK living, but it is far from rich. In India unless you are working for FAANG your bring home will be good, but far from "so much".
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To answer the question in general. I think programming definitely give you good enough money, and for most of the applications we build we definitely are going to make the world slightly better daily.
no you won’t
what you will be doing instead is help make some stakeholders richer (and they don’t give a F about making the world better)
if you really want to try make the world better, then start volunteering and start helping those in need
Yes and no. Some of the issues can be solved by volunteering, but some of the technical progress have to done by software.
maybe we should stop lying to ourselves and admit that what we're doing is not something special, will most definitely not make the world better and in many cases makes things even worse (social media and advertising industry)
don't believe companies when they tell you you're working on a very important problem that will change the world
this is all made to distract you from the fact you're being exploited for profit
To solve hunger, one needs food. Farmer produce food, great. They solve the hunger issue. But without transportation and cold chain, the food produce by the farmer can feed only those living close by. Are those working in the transportation and storage industry not doing their bits for making the world a slightly better place?
Transportation, and cold chain, needs computer and software in many different parts of the system to work in harmony. And that's where we programmer contributed. Are you saying you rather carry the food yourself from the farm to those who need it?
In today's world, yes many are currently being exploit for profit for sure. This will have to be solved differently. However, this flaw does not diminish the fact that we as human are living in a better world than the last century.
So yeah I expect wages to crash in the next 10-20 years. I think most high earning young people now will likely find middle age much more expensive than they thought, esp if tech bubble never reflates, Bay Area housing falls in value and wages get cut.
The end goal for me is to find a nice niche and dont get greedy.
I don’t agree with developers being overpaid because the knowledge we need at a high level is ridiculous.
I do agree that there’s too much money in tech though.
Grab it whilst you can I guess.
Why?
My first goal is to make that software good enough and useful enough to create an engineering-only company like Hwaci, the company that does SQLite and Fossil.
If I succeed at that, I'll see about trying to pull in enough money to retire early and do charity work through my church.
But I have another goal for while I'm still in industry. I want to change our industry such that it is a professional industry, with a code of ethics, to where we create software that serves users, not our employers or government.
This means fighting against slurping up user data, serving ads, and other ways that software disobeys users in favor of obeying its creators. I even created a Twitter account to show some of those things. [1]
Yes, that means an uphill battle against basically all of Big Tech, and I don't expect to win. But if I make people think about it, I'll take that as a win.
But regardless, I feel strongly about it because users depend on us to make software that will serve them. If we don't, no one will.
Uncle Bob Martin talked about this. [2] (That link starts at a good point, but the whole talk is worth watching.)
So that's my goal: make good software and change the industry for the better. Lofty, yes, but I'll be satisfied by completing one of those goals.
> We make so much money very early in our careers
I'm very far from making a lot of money so it's not a problem at all.
> I’m very far from making a lot of money
The software engineering career is a ridiculously “fast paced”. career. 5 years experience in programming is the equivalent to 20+ years in another industry. There’s very few industries where you can make a 200k+ salary in your 20s.
If everything goes well I will be rich, and maybe one day go back to my home country to do politics, do business as well there, building the country.
The end goal, hmm, if possible, maybe I want to be the president.
step 2. get physically active, probably lots of backpacking and camping to serve two purposes:
1. better my body/mental/emotional health and
2. slow down and get bored enough to rejuvenate creative inspiration
To be clear, I'm definitely burnt out. At this point I don't see any way out besides ER. There just aren't jobs out there that use my skills without demanding 30-70 hour weeks.
It's definitely a bad situation but every job I've had ends up like this so I dunno, feels like my only option is to get out ASAP. (And FWIW I'm well in to middle age.)
I now program for a living.
My hobbies also include learning new languages/frameworks/libraries, playing with frontend for my personal site (I'm not a frontend dev in $DAY_JOB) and reading on the history of computing (although I have non-programing hobbies).
When I'm retired I'll probably keep on doing it.
I don't know if there's an end goal. I guess this is not just for programmers. I imagine many chefs are the same way. Cook for a living, cook at home, read books about exotic foods, make a nice meal. That's pretty much it.
I've read some time ago a discussion on how people that code most of their waking hours are an "unfair" competition to programmers that just want to do it 9 to 5. Believe me, I'm no competition. I'll be probably reading on how to make nice SVG flowers in Forth at 1am.
And I don't think it's unfair any more than for automechanics or woodworkers or anything else.
If you're only in IT because it's seen as paying well, I can't express how little sympathy I have for that complaint.
Really just think about that, it's unfair that I spent a million hours figuring out how to get tech to do things instead of going to parties I wasn't invited to by those same people, and they didn't, and now I know how to do things and get paid for it, and that's unfair?
Unfair would be if you want to talk about the uneven distribution of the luxury and opportunity to spend a million hours playing with IT stuff. Not everyone has or had the access to the toys and the time to play with them, but you can say that about everything else also, like every musician or artist.
Is it unfair that their favorite guitarist really loved playing and practing 24/7 all their life? It's so unfair they can't just punch in somewhere at 9 and punch out at 5 and not e en like guitar or be very good at it, and still be a rock star?
The difference is I have never taken more than a two week holiday or a break from work. Whereas younger generations seem to drop out of the workforce. This is something I can't fathom as I track my pension and investments on a weekly basis, I'm literally working to retire in relative luxury.
People tell me I may not make it and I should live more for the now, but I fear being old and still having to sit at a desk more. By 60 I want to have f#ck you money.
I say this as someone that has "made money"; meaning, a substantial amount to retire if I want to, I enjoy the psychological safety that continuing to earn income provides. That said, I'm doing that on my own terms, and I've fully steered away from an employee/boss relationship to business partnerships.
Every time I reach a goal I move the cheese. I think I'm still getting better. But I'm also realizing the potential to pursue previously unknown goals. It is part of an ongoing discovery process that is not limited to engineering.
If I had a lot more money, I would probably pursue my goals differently but I don't think I would stop pursuing them.
There's stuff I don't like about the job - estimates, daily stand up, other meetings, investor-oriented development. Nearly all of that is gone with retirement.
The work isn't so much for money, but getting opportunities to practice building things better as an individual. I don't need to retire early; the work gives me practice and lets me meet plenty of mentors from different fields.
In the meantime, its fun making stuff and this is a growth industry where interesting things happen.
But the path to FIRE is hard, can you put away a decade of your life to "work" to retire? When should you start? Are you too late?
I also enjoy this line of work because it is more liberating, if in a right environment. It's fun to learn, it's amazing to be paid to learn and even better. I'm not aware of any other career progression which leads to as much freedom and independence that IT/Tech/Software has done for all of us.
For me, it's about the journey, more than the destination, but I still like completing all my projects. Part of the joy, is watching my work being used (and, sometimes, abused) by others.
It’s difficult to do this when there’s belly’s to fill.
Of course, don't do open source if you don't enjoy it - because I doubt the time spent is optimal for getting the most money, but if you do enjoy it then it can very much help increase your income indirectly.
It is not hyperbole to say that some of the software I've written has saved many lives. Others tend to use a lot more hype to describe its impact than I would.
I honestly don’t know why I’d ever stop. I just try working with people I like or people who have good intentions.
Then again, I also really enjoy writing and teaching.
It’s a thing that I like to do or come back to. If somehow I jeopardize that, my life will have a hole in it because I would lose one of the things I really like.
Career is a trajectory. A mission. Way way more than your current employment.
Also, if you enjoy your work enough, your description becomes unfair. You do not feel it like sacrificing life in order to pospone living.
Also, that suggest that there is some hedonistic way to live there that is also easily disappointing.
Humans needs challenges and responsibility to channel their energy. Who doesn't have it, manages to find it in the form of problems (or even psychopatologies).
My passion is in fitness. I want to be active in my 60-80s (weight lifting / marathon running shape). I ultimately want to help others do the same and lead a better quality of life through their old age.
but, not the only one.
The only reason I do any job is because the structure of our society demands I earn money to survive. I must spend my time doing what someone else wants me to do if I want food, shelter, water, comfort, etc.
My only goal is to wake up every morning and be able to spend all of my time as I choose to spend it. I will still occasionally create software, as I enjoy doing so. But mostly I will do other things.
your goal as a employee is to make the stakeholders rich
if you disagree, start your own business and own your IP
if you cannot, stay a peasant for ever