From a lorry driver to Ruby on rails developer at 38

If you don't mind me asking how much were you earning as a developer and how much do you earn driving lorries?

Other people are doing the fun/interesting stuff, project managers, product owners, scrum masters, etc etc are doing all of the fun interesting figuring out/thinking, and then it's just your job to code it.

When you work on side projects, you get to wear all of those other hats and it's way more rewarding

But I use my table saw because I want to build certain stuff. Maybe a cabinet or something. You would never catch me using my table saw or programming “just for fun.”

And if I’m not enjoying what I’m building, it’s not like the tool will somehow make it enjoyable.

I enjoy being left alone with podcasts for the first 4-6hours of my shift and music for the rest, I tend to talk to the office 3 times a shift - once when I get my keys, once to find out what (if anything) is getting loaded for a second run and finally to hand my keys in - all in all 10mins interaction with “management” over a 10hr shift suits me fine.

Time wise, taking my Thursday shift - I’m booked at Heathrow airport to deliver at 7pm, if I’m 30-45mins late there’s no issues, but I generally leave to get there at 1840 so even if roads are bad I’m still “on-time” - after that I have a collection (anytime after 1900) which has to be at the customer (2hrs drive) by 0200 and I’m generally there by 2200 - I am lucky in the company I work for leave plenty of time for everything including breaks, I know other places run you around and try to get 10hrs work done in 8.

In terms of time for license, I had 4 days training for my rigid (anything over 7.5T with a trailer upto 750kg) with test on the last day which I passed first time, I then drove them for 6 months for my current employer and then again had 4 days training and test on the 5th for artics (anything over 7.5T with a trailer over 750kg) which I passed first time (thanks in part to driving rigids for 6months and being generally confident with the size etc of the vehicle)

No spouse or kids which probably helps and is why I don’t mind picking up overtime and extra shifts

The main reason is that most drivers were Eastern European and since freedom of movement ended it has become significantly harder for them to come and work as freely as they could before. Covid is also a factor afaik.

Though I otherwise agree with you that developers (or rather white collar careers in general with the exception of certain finance roles) are not particularly well paid in many instances in the UK.

From my experience that's in line with people doing "body rentals" for agencies under threat of being deported or because they couldn't find another job.

I think he could have doubled that with a bit of work on resume / negotiation skills.

Sure, still lower than US but life in the UK is way cheaper, so it works out unless your earning potential is mid-high 3 digits.

(I've always loved that narrative for its optimism. In reality if you have a modicum of self-restraint you can save more money on a US salary than most people are making on a European salary, and tech tends to have excellent healthcare.)

This statement really depends on whatever part of the USA you're in and what kind of work you do.

> No $200k TC interns out here.

I haven't seen that yet, but I think an SF-based intern (if they were paid for the whole year) would make roughly $120k. There are plenty of people living in the Bay who haven't lived there 10 years who comparatively take home very little.

All that to say, I don't think we need to dice up and turn the developer market against itself. We've all been affected by wage stagnation, the rising cost of metros, and the threat that we must live in them or else. Labor movements are good for all laborers, etc etc etc

Unlike professions like plumbers, however, IT personal is becoming increasingly easy to come by. And since they never really formed unions, the so called golden days are over for a lot of IT professionals. Maybe excluding hardcore IT operations, networking and at least for now developers.

I wouldn’t be able to earn what I do as a truck driver though. Maybe half with more hours? Interestingly enough I didn’t get there by being rewarded for any work. I got there by switching jobs.

It's the geopolitical west that's largely stuck in this situation, but IIRC that has been the case for a while now - when I was considering emigration around eight years ago I noticed that the salary differences are not as huge as I thought and in some places (like Germany) it's just a job like any other.

In the end they had a shortage of nearly 100,000 drivers and had to massively incentivise new entrants to the industry. It's a complete outlier as far as blue collar vs white collar jobs in the UK/EU for the most part.

https://www.bbc.com/news/57810729

That said, overall the EU is paying somewhere around €80-120k for Senior Developers in the HCOL areas and as low as €45k in places like Spain. Overall, individual Contributor salaries outstripping even minor middle management is rare below architect or principal outside of FAANG.

This leads to the situation the commenter above identifies - that fairly vacuous softer-skill based IT Roles like Scrum Master or ART or Release Manager out-earn the median Engineer and are seen as a viable alternative for motivated people.

It’s true that living anywhere near the Sydney metro is unaffordable though, even on a 180k salary.

Interviews have always been tough for development positions in the US, whether it's a 60k out of college position in the Midwest or more senior position for a coastal company making the big bucks. It is possible to get lucky and not have to be whiteboarded, but much of the time an applicant is getting grilled.

Although it's obviously objective, I completely agree when comparing to a country like India. However, I'm not so sure it's as huge of a difference as what you are implying when comparing Western countries to non-coastal US developers. I've long since graduated, but if I were still in school and not too far into a CS degree I would probably drop out and be an electrician or plumber, freelancing application development on the side if I still had the energy.

It is funny to read these treads, and then reading in another HN post that a guy was able to buy his first home driving laundry truck - and how his contemporary peers seemed to be jealous that they were not able to do such.

It indeed seems like being a lorry driver is the easiest way to get started on the suburban life.

There isn’t a huge amount of accessible data in the private small co space though so there isn’t anything to quant. It’s all bespoke small data stuff.

For now that’s paying the bills and I’m messing with tech in free time. Python rust k8s homelab etc.

My question angles more toward learning functional programming first, and I doubt it'll ever happen at bootcamps (though - my understanding is that's exactly what happens at Berkeley/MIT with Lisp/Scheme in CS101 (I'd argue with decent results)) - so it's very much a hypothetical.

I discovered the Elixir runtime (BEAM) a few years before Elixir was created (we were using the Erlang language then), and for my specific use cases, when I understood the principles of concurrency, error handling, and introspection in BEAM, it caused quite an epiphany. It was also scary, because I had to unlearn pretty much everything I knew :)

From a purely esthetic perspective, I find that pattern matching and tail recursion-enabled programming patterns are more concise, easier to comprehend, and are less error-prone than those offered by the more mainstream languages that don't have those features.

In my experience - and I'm not a particularly great programmer, so it was welcome - I found that I produced code with signifcantly fewer dumb errors when I no longer had access to imperative programming paradigms and was forced to come up with more "functional" solutions.

I don't believe that functional programming is inherently more complex than what we learn in school/college/work with conventional languages. My question really stems from the idea of learning functional first - and I do wonder what that would look like.

Ruby shines where you need to just pull some off the shelf libraries and get something together. you save on developer time but your devops setup needs to be a bit more complicated to handle scaling issues which will come sooner. That said, ruby is a lovely language to work in for the most part.

Havign said that, I personally think elixir is the winner for reliability and maintainability. yes, there aren't as many libraries for elixir and they don't have the same level of "drop in and use" functionality that ruby has. elixir's ecosystem's whole approach is to make everythign standardized lego pieces so there's a little but more work up front.

Once you are actually writing your own code however, i find there's less bugs as immutable data structures eliminate whole classes of bugs you find in ruby. Its not as air tight as a fully typed language but I do get descent warnings at compile time to catch plenty of low hanging fruit when it comes to runtime errors. to be sure, you definitly have to think differently about how you code as you haev to think in a more functional style.

Of course elixir's real claim to fame is going to be a combination of concurrency and performance. elixir's metaprogramming happens at compile time and in my experience, elixir systems just run faster than the equvalent ruby code. at my startup, all scaling conversations end up being around pushing postgresql and optomizing our queries. We have yet to really hit the ceiling of our api server.

Ecto, phoenix's db library, is just a better abstraction for database interaction than activerecord. it doesn't try to shoehorn database queries into objects. database records map to elixir records and you write queries using a set of macros that map pretty cleanly to sql with easy escape hatches if you need to use soe nonstandard sql. The result is that we don't spend much time tryign to debug how a db query in elixir maps to the output sql. its easy to tell at a glance. of course this does require that you actually understand how sql works.

lastly, if you want to build anything on top of websockets. there's no comparison. elixir is just better. comparing ror to elixir in terms of websockets is like comparing a cesna to an f16.

(I am not saying to avoid talking to people if you don't recognize the company.)

Some blame the layoffs.

I don't think so.

Before GPT, it was a struggle for devs to appear articulate in the domains that they reference on their resume.

Possessing exceptional writing abilities was a definitive competitive advantage.

It's no longer. Now everyone can sound like an expert and craft a pretty good, customized, concise cover letter.

The whole process needs to move to video-based cover letters. It's as simple as that.

I'm a senior developer at least in years, even writing my first Rails application when it was at version 0.6. I had to look this one up. And it seems the internet doesn't even share a consensus of what it means. Attempts to define it are all over the place.

The non-tech definition seems to relate to tech most as to what people usually refer to as interfaces. In fact, one definition for "polymorphism" that I came across – which I dare say was the most reasonable of the bunch – asserted that interfaces are a formalization of polymorphism. I assume this matches your expectations.

Given that, when would using the word "polymorphism" ever be useful as a senior developer? In Rails land, if you truly needed to communicate the concept to other developers (which is dubious), you're probably going to speak to duck typing instead. That is far more practical.

Wait until the graduates discover what interviewing is like in tech…