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What job do people take way too seriously?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Programming. People treat it like a career, but fact is that unless your really good at it, your not going to make any money from it. I've found programming to be far more like art than work anyway.
Maybe I'm biased since I recently started working as a software dev, but you don't need to be really good to get a job as a programmer. I'm evidence of that.
Or any job. You underestimate how much any job is just being decent enough rather than amazing all of the time.
Yes I am fully aware of that. My point was that programming is just like any other job unlike what the guy I responded to seems to think.
Reading this, I'm not able to interpret what emotion applies here.
Edit: How do I upload a gif without it turning into a giant webm player view? I had to hot link that to get it to not be annoyingly huge.
Sorry I typed this in a hurry. I just disagree with the statement and tried making a joke.
I got the joke, my response was in extension to it :)
damn dude know your audience, you're on Lemmy lol
Not sure where you're from, but here in the states, if you have a basic ability to code from a bootcamp or even self taught with a portfollio, you'll pretty easily get hired making anywhere from 45-55k a year. And after about 2-4 years, you'll pretty easily be making 70-90k sometimes more depending on where you live.
Professional software developer here. It’s definitely a career. I do agree it’s like art, it requires you to fit stuff together like a puzzle to get it to work. But I don’t think that makes it less of a “serious” career - there’s a lot of money in the field and as the world gets more and more invested in computing it’s become a very in-demand skill.
It is a career, for sure. It can be hard to get into, but I’ve been in the industry for a long time and I have worked with people who have been paid a developer’s salary for years who were unbelievably bad at their jobs.
I used to manage a software team - once I was trying to explain something to a coworker and asked them to write some code to loop from 1 to 10 for me, and they couldn’t do it. I even prompted them by saying “you know, write a for loop” and they said that they kinda knew what for loop was, but they wouldn’t know how to write one. I asked them to give it their best shot, just write the word “for” and then see what flows from there, but they were just not able to proceed. I explained how to do it to them, and then they asked me what an int (integer) was… but I had already explained what an int was the day prior. This person had an honours degree in computer science.
I’d say there are a lot of developers who are barely competent at copy/pasting code from stack overflow until it works. Maybe 10-20% of the people in SMEs are that. The majority are pretty decent, but kinda lazy. Then there are the incredibly competent and hard-working people who are like gold dust. A really good developer who isn’t a complete drama king/queen, has good communication skills and just gets on with their work instead of getting sucked into personal pet projects is incredibly rare.
I'm sorry but there's just no way that anecdote is true. I refuse to believe it.
Honestly, if anyone else had told me this story, I'd assume that they were either exaggerating or that they were being an asshole to the other person in a way that made them shut down and not really want to engage with them, but it's as near to an accurate recollection as I can make it. I've taught programming to people from all walks of life, from 13 to 60+ years old, I've mentored quite a lot of devs, I've taken kids from "yeah I'm interested in computers, I like playing games" to senior developers, and while I'm sure that my teaching style may not be perfect for everyone, I've never once heard any complaints that I made someone feel stupid, belittled or like they couldn't make mistakes. I always encourage people to be as honest and open about what they do/don't understand because if someone says "I don't get it" I can explain something in another way that might make it click. But yeah, that day when I had just been through the whole for-loop thing and he asked me about integers again, it was as close to just completely exasperated as I've ever been with mentoring someone. It was a surreal, groundhog day feeling, like I was sisyphus, and my boulder was explaining to a computer science graduate what a whole number was.
Are you sure you managed the team? I'm joking, but how did this person get through an interview, let a lone survive so long working as a dev?
Haha, it’s a fair comment - it’s a team I inherited, it wasn’t my hiring decision. I don’t know what the interview process was like before me, but I’m guessing it was a very old fashioned “where do you see yourself in 5 years” affair.
I’m pretty sure that they just muddled through by copy/pasting stuff seemingly at random and tinkering until it worked. Which can be a good way to learn, for sure, but it’s not really what you want from a professional developer, full time.
The guy who managed the team before me didn’t believe in object oriented design, and not in a cool Haskell way, in a really old fashioned “I can do everything with batch scripts” way. The team was using a programming language that was so old that they were using dosbox to compile it because the compiler was a 16-bit application.
Name the language, mate. This sounds a bit too insane to be true.
Yeah, it was called DataFlex. The vendor has released new versions of it called Visual DataFlex (VDF) and then renamed VDF back to DataFlex, but this language was what we called “character mode” DataFlex. It’s still used by the company as their main data entry application even today and a lot of their processes still are written in DataFlex. A lot of the work that my team did was rewriting a lot of the old crap in C#, but there was just so much of it built up over the decades.
I sucked balls at programming and made six figures.
Mate Im dogshit at programming and make plenty of money at it.
You can still use programming to leverage your current position.
If you work admin in an office and are able to automate a bunch of workflows with some simple scripts, you'll have more leverage when salary raises start to get discussed.
Will your code be at the level a professional programmer would produce? Probably not, but you're not competing with one.
Even better if you keep schtoom about it and automate your work from home job allowing you to just chill for most of the day.
Upvoted for use of British English word “schtoom,” a Yiddish loan word. I always thought Yiddish loan words were an American thing, thanks for the learning opportunity.
Hell the ability to write a basic sql SELECT statement alone opens a lot of doors.
proceeds to learn sql
By the way, SQL, sequel, or squeal?
(personally, I use sequel)
Can you please define that? Being the Internet, some define it as US$1 or US$250,000.
Depends where you live, and what the job market is like. The demand for programmers goes up and down over the years, with various tech bubbles growing and popping. There are some job markets during high demand times when any programmer with any level of skill can get a good job, can name their own price and make good money, but at other times there is oversupply of programmers, thousands of graduates apply for every entry-level job, where hirers have the advantage, they can name the price and pick only the best of the best. I've personally seen both situations in my career.
I will admit, once you get a few years of professional experience on your resume, your chances of landing a good job and making good money goes way up. And yes, it definitely can be a career.
It can be like an artform if you let it be. Or it can be rote and robotic. There are choices in how you express your talents, and how you approach given problems. Lots of people make money from good art anyway.
That’s why I switched sides. From programming myself to developing functions and writing requirements which someone else can implement into code. :)
I could do some programming (did embedded C), but surely I wasn’t the very best in it. So now I’m the guy who defines what a small (but essential) part of SW has to do which will run in hopefully a few million cars in a couple of years. :) Much more fun (and money).
What's your job called? I'm nowhere near your field, and am curious about y'alls org charts.
Business analyst I guess.
Maybe if you are a freelance programmer working out of a coffee shop...?
What crack are you smoking? There are thousands, probably millions, mediocre coders making 200k total comp+.
How did you come to that insane comment?
They took a few community college "video game programming" courses and got nowhere with it.
I consider programming skills a very valuable skill that unlocks many career options, but if your job is morning but pure programming, yeah most people are not cut out for it.
In an interesting and challenging field, yes, you need to be really good at it because everyone wants to do it. But if you are willing to work on anything, like an ASP.NET Web Forms site built in 2005, that the business is entirely dependent upon to function in even the most basic capacity, with more technical debt than anyone would ever care to deal with, and no time allowed to refactor, you can make quite a nice living.
Skilled work often is an art.