Tarucho

Parkinson is also not a black and white thing. I have bodily tremors due to my depression, can I self diagnose parkinsons and start giving advice? Would you approve?

Problem is the author, as most people that say they are depressed self-diagnose. And gives advice. How would people react if author self-diagnosed cancer and gave advice on how to cure it? Depression is disabling illness, why such lightly take?

First thing first: did the author had clinically diagnosed depression? Or was a self-assessment?

What would people think if bloggers start giving advice on how to sort out cancer because they felt some lump in their leg, self-diagnose and decided to cure it with massage? Or giving advice on how to cure cirrhosis because their liver hurt for a couple of weeks. But with depression, for most, it's fine.

The author was doing 45 minute HIIT routines while being depressed. Go figure.

I find this kind of articles infuriating. All this narcissistic talk about how they handled it and whatever, signaling how they are above all that (the disclaimer at the bottom does not qualify, we are not that retarded).

After 30 years of suffering treatment resistant bipolar depression I just find all this diminishing of clinical depression really disgusting and paternalizing (did some editing here, I don't have anything personal against the author)

Yes, we depressed people are so retard. We don`t understand how exercise or clean eating benefit us, we cannot organize our lives, we like to suffer...and lose jobs...yeah, of course.

What are your long term objectives? What are your short term ones? Have you tried career counseling or coaching?

It`s all about where you want to go. Then when you reach there, you can move to jobs where you can do the same but for more money or for more interesting conditions.

For example: a friend of mine wanted to be an engineering manager. She worked for 10 years with this objective in mind. At year 8 she become one, but in a sucky place. Now at year 10 she is still an engineering manager but in a place that pays more. Her next objective is to find an engineering manager position with both good pay and interesting work.

The article has quite a few heavy statements and lots of predictions.

Who signed it? I cannot find it.

Smalltalk failed because at your typical enterprise there rarely is any incentive to do better than doing pseudo procedural code in java/c#/python/whatever which in smalltalk is possible but hard.

The next step for enterprise programmers is being a PM or an analyst or nowadays an Scrum Master.

We are treated like low tier because in most software companies we are low tier. In command and control structures value is given by position not by contribution. We might be expensive but still low tier. The rockstar programmer, etc. are just silly lies they told us.

Programming is not so much a career but a sequence of interrelated jobs leading somewhere.

So, go after the things that interest you, learn them well, and try to manage your way into the related market with whatever you have at your disposal. The computing market is pretty forgiving with failed attempts, not so much with lack of motivation.

Play by the rules in the interview game. If you want to get into somewhere and they do X at the interview, train and do X to the best of your abilities even if it makes no sense.

And be approachable, make as much contacts as you can. This is a contact-based market.

>> people like people like themselves

And it happens both on the positive and the negative. Nasty people tends to bring more nasty people on board.

"Skin in the game" being the game changer.

>I think programming is slowly bifurcating. We’re growing into two disciplines.

It has always been like this. The distinction used to be: base software developer vs applications developer.

Base software developers went to work on operating systems, databases, web servers, etc.

Application developers worked on business software.

And most decent business software development shops kept a couple of devs with decent knowledge of base development just to go for when the needs got technical.

I´m not in the US. Why has college got so expensive there lately?

Could it be higher education is becoming a thing for the upper class?

Here in South America companies don´t wan´t devs with more than 5/6 years of experience. If you manage to find work with 10+ years of experience or after age 35 is because the demand for devs have grow to a point where they cannot fill all the vacancies with younger ones.

I thought of becoming a business analyst but analysts seem passé nowadays.

>What I do know is that junior people are complaining that there are only jobs for senior devs and seniors are complaining that all the jobs are for juniors.

But when you ask those juniors, a "senior dev job posting" is one that requires 3-4 of experience.

Maybe the poster is in another country. I live in a third world contry where most work is grunt off-shored work. Most positions here are for devs with 1-3 years of experience, and there are loads of them. If you are more experienced and want a good job you need to work remote with an overseas company.

In my case I found that for most web dev jobs I needed to learn the libraries thoroughly or live in constant stress because I was always getting behind my expected velocity.

I find most frontend libs code too convoluted to be able to understand what is happening just by taking a glipse at the code.

In contrast I've doing backend in .NET since 2008. To catch up with the latest releases I need at most a couple of weekends a year and probably less.

·Saying "there is no such thing" does not make it true. What are you? 10?

·You should be able to look whatever you want, even old.

·I`ve been in lots of situations where the first thing the hiring manager asks is the candidate age and drops the CV as soon it finds out is older than 35.

And what age range?

The theories are endless but the root cause remains the same. Management sees Devs/QAs as low grade disposable workers. The fact that anyone with a 2-day certificate and some contacts ends up managing dev teams is not because they duped management but because management didn´t care at all from the get go.

A rainbow progress bar? Were the usability engineers on vacation at the time of development?

Everything passes. After some time users will forget this scandal and will continue using Facebook as before.

Why do you think they have a pessimistic attitude?

I´ll use myself as an example.

I started coding professionally at 23 (I´m 43). For years I pushed myself to be the best coder I could. At 35 I got laid-off. After that I just got sucky jobs were I´m treated like they have me there as a favor (and I work with the latest, and I´m, even with the pessimism, a top performer).

A coworker of mine that thought that coding was a losers job, coded for some months and went to work as a B.A and later as a PM, nowadays is an engineering manager which earns way more than me and is treated way way better. His whole programming experience is an 8-month part time stint with Winforms. And sadly he is not the exception...

In most places devs are being had.

what do you mean by consulting? going through agencies? freelancing?

Ok, but dev managers are also managing people digging trenches, not people in life and death situations, and they don´t face the same problems devs face. And they tend to be more "self important" than devs.

The author case is somewhat special because he is more accomplished that the average senior dev.

But in the general case the problem occurs because software development is seen by those in power as factory/production work. For most companies we are expensive factory workers. And factory workers rarely get hired past 35 and rarely survive past that age unless there is an union involved.

My experience is in an offshore market in South America. I guess in other countries the situation is different.

Is Scrum the problem? Or is that tech, which has become high status in the last 6/7 years is starting to attract the kind people that went to make a management career into more prestigious areas and they are starting to manage us in the same way they manage these other areas?

20 years ago, friends which worked in non-management positions in hr, accounting, finance, etc envied the freedom I had being low-level worker. Nowadays I just follow orders and work on tickets as they do.

She should not worry. After 1.5-2 years of 60-hour workweeks at McKinsey she will be qualified to get a comfy 40-hour work-week management position at a software company and will make us devs work 60-hour work-weeks until she retires us at 35 because who needs that much experience to program a computer. And unless this is in FAANG, we will get paid as seniors the same she did as a junior.

>Author here, I don't actually know

Why are you writing authoritatively about something you know you don´t actually know then?

GUIs are one of the domains where object orientation shines. The ability to express in code a set of physically bounded widgets with visual a representation that matches their state is probably a biggest win for OOP. FP, I guess its not that intuitive.

Basically an article from a dev trying to portrait herself as a good prospective manager by writing about things that have been repeated ad-nauseam.

>The services of a good leader is an important gap that development teams desperately need filled. However, very few managers know how to properly serve software development teams.

And of course the author knows.