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Comment by bowsamic | Hacker News Reader

What about it would you like to avoid? I don't understand the fears that people have in this thread. To me this sounds like the Platonic ideal of a programming job.

EDIT: I'll reply to my replier here because /u/Dang rate limited me (again), though I must commend him for letting me have one more comment than usual before he pushes the button ;)

> I would say the ending -- the part where you are unemployed and unable to support yourself in your old age because you invested decades of your brainpower into a highly specialised, non-transferrable skill.

I would contend that such a person, unless very reckless with finances or extremely underpaid, should have enough money saved up to make what is mentioned there very unlikely. That said, I know some high-income earners struggle to not blow their entire bank account each month

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I would say the ending -- the part where you are unemployed and unable to support yourself in your old age because you invested decades of your brainpower into a highly specialised, non-transferrable skill.

I should think that years of specialized C++ work in hft environments would have come with impressively high pay… in which case one could retire early and self study anything for fun, not hope to find a job for financial reasons.

Ideally, yes! Unfortunately, there is such a thing as being young and not knowing your own worth / not knowing how to negotiate / not having a manager who looks out for your career growth.

Understood.

In that case, if web development is your interest, then you have many possible paths.

The primary choices are full stack, backend, or frontend.

Obviously full stack is most flexible because you can theoretically do it all. But keeping up with so many technologies simultaneously is really tiring.

Take a look at Phoenix framework. It is a fantastic way to get started, and it will grow with you into just about any future project need. Plus Elixir is an excellent language built on top of the incredibly powerful Erlang ecosystem.

The web stack might give you more transferable skills but how did you calculate the trade off vs the 50% pay cut? Was the salary not actually very high and at a low ceiling compared to web work - i.e. you expect your salary to soon exceed what you made working in HFT? Or was there a serious risk of layoffs happening far in advance of your retirement? If the goal is to support yourself after retirement, are you saying in certain circumstances halving your salary 10 years into a tech career ultimately optimises your entire-career-earnings?

It wasn't such a purely material calculation. Less stress, more time to spend with family and friends, learning more things and doing something that you know actually adds value to the world -- those things matter.

That's mostly the guys fault and not the jobs fault.

Even in a bad code base you can start making things better, apply modern techniques and learn new things.

Also most of the skill you gain there is transferrable. E.g. just because you have to work with some legacy PHP project, it doesn't mean that you would suck at creating modern applications in JS. It would just take a couple of weeks to get use to it.

Making things better and applying modern techniques don’t map to a feature story. In the environments being discussed you’ll have to wait for a cadre of architects and program managers to convince the C levels to commit to a multi year, millions of dollar effort to have any hope of improving a code base.

You don't have to rewrite everything, to start fixing things.

Must be nice to live in your world of being treated as a professional.

'So your story ran over again help me understand where we can improve your work flow'.

> Even in a bad code base you can start making things better, apply modern techniques and learn new things

All th bad codebase I've seen were a result of fossils who are still with the company gatekeeping anyone from fixing their code.

A few years ago, I had one architect stubbornly refuse to use source control, rejected all PRs that didn't use his homegrown buggy C++ libs for strings, refused to let anyone do the http server bits unless they used his C++ server and so on.

If there isn't a gatekeeper, you wouldn't have the bad codebase in the first place.

I've got to disagree. not every contributor is making the code base better. I'm in a situation where we are such a small team that there really is no gatekeeper, and we only require one approve per pr...and I've come back from vacation to some monstrosities that I have to look at with no time to fix. After a pairing session with a a fellow developer, where I took the extra effort to refactor something along the way, probably an addition 15 minutes of effort...she quipped- no wonder it takes you so long to finish your stories sometimes. I mean, that's not why- I'm ADHD, so my lack of productivity sometimes is invariably due to a day where I forgot my meds or didn't get a full nights rest.

> "just because you have to work with some legacy PHP project, it doesn't mean that you would suck at creating modern applications in JS"

I disagree; working on a legacy PHP project isn't just opportunity cost (failing to sharpen your knife), it's actively harmful (leaving the knife in salt water, accelerating the rust).

Shouldn't you have ample savings, a private pension and social security?

? In the US? Maybe not. I'd bet a lot of hot shot young programmers think it will be gravy for ever.

Start saving now.

Being good at C++ is very much a transferable skill.

I'm sure he could learn STL (standard C++ library) in a fraction of time it would take someone else to become proficient in C++ in general.

It is a transferable skill. But not one many people want to pay for except in very niche areas these days. So if you are out of a job expect to grind for awhile trying to find someone to hire for C++. Unless you have network connections then you might be ok. Being good at C++ only goes so far, you have to have skills in techs people are willing to pay for. Not many companies are willing to wait while you skill up in their stack unless you are willing to work jr but they will not hire you anyway because 'you will jump ship'. Its not great.

that part is a complete fiction. People who have a lot of experience in the embedded world or performant but esoteric codebases are highly thought after. Even if the literal job isn't transferable, the skills for sure are.

My mother was a COBOL developer and didn't work for 20 years because she stayed home. She recently returned to her old bank she worked for because they are dragging people out of retirement as they can't find anyone else. She earns more than I do now.

People are crazy to give a job like that up for generic web dev work.

Most of my early programming work was with C and C++ (after I left academia, where it was mostly Fortran). I am, simply put, a better programmer for it, objectively so when compared to my peers who've never touched it, at basically every place I've worked at since (including a FAANG-level company, currently, where I'm mostly writing in go and python). At least, that's the feedback I get from them.

I think it's fair to say this skill difference is largely from that work in the C family, where I learned a number of different paradigms for design and development in that world, with all its footguns and low-level "gotchas". It has always been easier for me to parse and understand others' code, identify subtle bugs, to use debugging tools, and to identify some optimizations by examining the code that others might spend days using profilers to find.

Some of that would come with engineering experience in general, regardless of languages used, but not all of it, but I picked these skills up faster and earlier in my career, thanks to that early work. Skill with C++ is definitely transferrable, in at least some cases.

Are you aware that rate limiting is not something a moderator goes around doing to a single person, but instead a server managing its own workload?

Hacker News has per-user configurable posting rate limits. Moderators use them.

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