triplee

Scott Hanselman

No. You shouldn't be ashamed of ANY language or technology, as long as you feel it's appropriate for doing whatever problem is put in front of you.

Also remember that at various times, PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, COBOL, ColdFusion, literally anything made by Microsoft, Java, and countless other languages that solved plenty of interesting problems and both led to people getting paid but also improving and creating other things have been laughed at.

As a converse, plenty of people have made absolute garbage in any number of open source frameworks, "sexy" languages du jour, etc. either because they were working alone and didn't think they needed help or what they were working on wasn't remotely suited to the tool.

Ignore the haters. It's usually gatekeeping coming from lack of confidence and fear of real competition due to years of poor attitudes in our industry on what makes a "real programmer".

On the flip side -- remember your total compensation package. If you work a 60+ hour week, that higher salary broken down to an hourly and compared to the 8 and skate 40 hour a week job suddenly isn't so high. Also compare PTO and other benefits, especially considering "unlimited PTO" often offered by many fast paced places is usually a lie. There's often other benefits in big places that aren't directly salary, but pay off in other ways (discounts, better health care, etc.) And there's the added non-financial benefits of lower stress.

There are pretty big cons to the bigger corporate world, B2B, etc., but money isn't as big of a difference as it first appears.

Literally everything you just said, and I can't say I could really have said it better. Also -- a fair amount of federal/state govt. and some contracting roles for govt. fit the bill here too. Certain very large nonprofits as well.

I like this idea. I HATE the homework, because one look at my resume tells you that even if half of it's true, I've been around the block and can pick up anything that doesn't actually require specializing in it since 2000 when I started working professionally out of college (as opposed to co-op jobs where I also did IT).

And very little in IT fits that bill.

IT hiring processes are part of the reason I took a sabbatical in 2016. I didn't have time for all this homework plus networking and interviews all for finding a new job on top of a new baby and a stressful day job.

Of my four eventual job offers, yes four, so I was clearly in demand, only one even had homework, and it was a short online logic quiz, not even coding. Everything else was phone/in person interviews.

Screw your homework. If you really need it, this article has a good mitigation plan.

At this point, get whatever experience you can to determine what you would like, and frankly, the contacts you make will be as helpful as the experience. It's an internship, you have time, and at a small enough future employer, you may have to cover multiple roles.

Yes, software pays more now, and data science (let alone data engineering) is still maturing and figuring itself out, especially at junior levels. Your current background will help with data science, but doing software for an internship won't hurt you in the future if you want to do data science.

Having a programming background helps with data work, some of which is programming directly and indirectly to talk to data engineers/software engineers, and vice versa, a math and data background is super helpful in attacking software problems in many areas.

If you feel like picking the wrong thing now at a young age will scar you forever, you're doing it wrong. In this whole industry, things change constantly, and you will have to reinvent yourself and learn with it. If you don't like it, you can always switch specialties, or even generalize a little more broadly.

Reference: I've been in IT for the better part of 20 years, much of that as a web development generalist, and now I'm doing data engineering. ~75% of the skills overlap.

Wow, for once I was an early adopter! I started around like age 22, hardened at 30, and started rage quitting at 35.

I didn't actually like my job again until age 38 when I found the right employer, because I got picky.

Yes. Next question.

OMG Becky, really?!

First off, yes this piece raises some important ideas, but also misses the point of the comic, which isn't about smugness. It's boiling down the importance of something complicated to point out AT LEAST one reason to shut it down.

Second, this is the kind of thing I could pull up and show any of my non-tech relatives. Nitpicking does not help anyone.

A couple months shy of 40.

It's harder to keep open two accounts on the same news site (one for myself, one for a short term gag account) and actually keep them straight without giving away the game. Mentally hard, not technically, since that's just two browsers.

I was way overworked on a way overrun project and since I was one of the most senior ICs, being pushed into leadership due to literal lack of actual managers for a while due to turnover and family leave.

That wasn't great, but it was managable because everyone understood our circumstances. When I went on my own family leave as my daughter was born, and came back to new management, I shouldered a lot of blame for the project because I was the last one left (it was a series of bad technical decisions from before my time) and still overworked despite having a newborn at home.

After finally going live, even when I warned them it would be a bad idea, I was in charge of the horrible production website. I gritted my teeth and left when my daughter was 9 months old, with no job in sight because I just needed a break.

Best decision I ever made. They fired my problematic boss 3 days before I left (he was one of the new managers, not good at managing or doing his technical work) and it took months to get the production site working. No idea if the next phase went through or not.

I had a nice five month sabbatical with my family and educational projects while I interviewed. It ended up with four job offers, and I'm thrilled with the ones I chose.

The best to maximize income? One of those places in middle America or Alaska that pay people to live and work there. Work remotely on something boring so that you can spend the rest of your time investing your savings. Live in a small part of your house and rent the rest out to people if you can find tenants.

I mean, if we're JUST talking about maximizing income here and not anything else, this is the way to go.

Revive? How do you think I got here in the first place?

RSS isn't all that dead since some of us olds never stopped using it.

Well that's downright horrifying. An article from somewhere else notes some categories beyond not only criminals, but ethnic profiling for potential separatist groups, etc.

This is some straight up Minority Report business.

Modeling yes, which makes sense given that it's a tabular math tool.

Using it to handle all the pricing structure for a few thousand clients on the other hand is another issue by having underwriters plug in values that they got from an online application, though, not so much.

It's on everyone's computer in the office, and doesn't require internet or training outside of your non-tech specialty.

Also, there's a TON of .xlsx files in the wild with years of business knowledge and processing. Everyone uses about the same 50% or so of Excel, which is captured in Google Sheets and any other spreadsheet. It's the extra 20% that everyone else uses -- and it's a different 20% for everyone -- that causes the issue of entrenchment.

Cleaning my 22 year old's play area (which is basically the entire apt). And the entire laundry and dish process.

My expenses for work.

Telling people on the internet that they are wrong.

This. I'm transitioning from being a full stack web dev (because that's basically impossible now) to being a data integration developer.

Old school ETL grew up along with the ML folks to be sophisticated, and essentially another tech. stack that looks like back end programming. Figuring out how to move data around reliably and quickly and clean it up in process is an unsexy job that's in really high demand. Using code (often JS) to pull out data and do mockups for the BI people before they plug in their fancy dataviz tools and do the pretty stuff is a lot like front end programming, and also not sexy, but in high demand.

Evergreen. I've been doing this professionally since 2000, with coding going back to the mid 90s when I was in school.

I'm at a client site that is still rolling things from their MAINFRAMES into web apps. I know some old LISP programmers that are freaking out that major systems will die because the youngest person on the team is pushing 60 with no code or programmer replacement in site.

There's always a long tail, and always something new coming out.

At my day job, I'm working on a project moving retirement and pension data out of a 30+ year old mainframe system into a replacement system that is still being built in .NET/Angular.

As a side project, I'm working on building a class to teach people ETL using whatever data integration tool we choose (currently Talend, but want to keep it agnostic). It's meant to be tailored to complete newbies as well as people coming from other backgrounds (software, BI, etc.) as part of a bootcamp.

Note that I'm a full stack dev. who got pulled into the data world as I've done so much of it, and am currently interested in bridging the gap.

Glad to see more going into this, but it's definitely not the end of this scam. My father just got hit, and they were calling him (he didn't answer because I told him not to) on Friday of last week.

This is an international scam, and multiple federal and state agencies in the US are looking into it, glad to hear other governments are too.