If I Were Starting a Software Engineering Career Today

Jobs don't fall out of the sky, but generally, agreed.

I have 30+ years of IT in my resume. The skillset sheet is a whole 2nd page, by itself. This isn't because I'm Wile E. Coyote, Supre-genius, but after 30+ years, if you're not an moron, you pick up a wide variety of skills.

As a simple example of OSes I know or have worked in, to various levels, *nix, all versions of Windows, OS/2 WARP, Novell 3.x-5, Motorola AIX, SCO Unix, VAX VMS (just a touch), Cisco IOS, and many obscure IoT CLIs, like Microtik, Sophos XG, or more obscure stuff like the AT commands to open and close valves on an LCMS (an instrument used to analyze compounds) and I'm likely missing some.

As you may be able to tell, I started a long, long time ago, in a world where 110/300 bps access to another computer over phone lines was the internet and Compu-serve is where the chatrooms were. In fact, I still remember my compu-serve ID and password, not because it's useful, but the weirdest shit sticks sometimes.

Haha yeah text communication can be dicey. What are you taking courses for?

Work that doesn’t pay particularly well and can be hard on your body. This is a huge departure.

lol?

It's so much better to work for 1/2 as long for 3x the salary than twice as long for 1/3 of the salary.

There's plenty of minimum wage job for the foreseeable future as well; but being employeed 24/7 is not the metric to optimize here.

Is this a joke comment? Those people work twice as hard as me and get paid half of what I do.

This sentiment gets expressed a lot on Hacker News, but I really wonder how many people saying this are actually familiar with these careers. I was the first person in my family to ever go to college. My dad, both grandfathers, all of my uncles, my brother-in-law, most of my cousins all worked or work in skilled trades. Aside from the physical demands which can and do tend to eventually beat you up (my dad's knees barely work at this point), sure, it's stable and reliable work, eventually, once you've become senior enough in your union. But it takes a while to get to that point, and it can be very hit or miss depending on where you live and local economic conditions. The GFC and Covid were both devastating. My brother-in-law got addicted to heroin and did a stint in prison, largely because his entire career field effectively disappeared in 2009 and 2010 when commercial construction just stopped happening everywhere in LA and Orange counties. Nothing to do that would pay him for two years.

And even at the senior end, unless you're a contractor owning your own business employing other skilled tradespeople, the money is still at best half what I earn to lay in bed all day typing on a laptop.

I've spent the last 20 years now in cushy, easy jobs giving away thousands of dollars at a time to the rest of my family because of the general unreliability of their income streams working in skilled trades.

I hated how as a developer the requirements weren't understood, written down or changed weekly, completion was extremely hard to achieve, and I always ended up in crunch time redoing work (weekends and evenings). So I became a BA.

As a BA I hated how there was no communication regarding schedules or scope or active client management and everything ended up in crunch time. So I became a PM.

As a PM I got loaded down with too many projects to effectively manage and got no support from management. So I became a Development Manager.

As a development manager there was no support from senior management, good PM's were rare, developers were still getting abused (evening and weekends) and I had to pick up the slack. So I became a President.

As a president, I had to oversee ridiculous metrics and play financial games with shareholders that only cared for extracting as much money as possible from the company. And constantly try to straddle a line between looking out for myself or others, especially in terms of my own compensation (every dollar I take is 1 dollar less to retain talent or add to the team).

So I quit.

So just work at a B2B company rather than a B2C company?

I've only worked at B2B companies my entire career and I've literally never once seen anyone "engaging in practices that abuse others for profit."

Maybe you are looking everywhere but the wrong places. There's never been a better time to work in software if you care about FOSS, accessibility, companies with purpose other than profit etc. If you surround yourself with money oriented peers, of course that's all you'll see.