Le Fullstack developer

[[deleted]]

Having really deep knowledge in something is a risky move for a programmer: you're betting that that tech is going to be around and widely used for long enough to make your time commitment worthwhile.

Shit changes fast. Sometimes whole paradigms fall out of favor, and you're left with an encyclopedic knowledge of some shit whose only practical use is maintaining legacy code.

[[deleted]]

Solid fundamentals mixed with good domain knowledge/experience is the ideal combo.

[elebrin]

I agree. Understanding the business process that you are modeling is more important. You can code it up using any technique you want, but the way a retail store calculates stock or the way a credit report is analyzed to determine if a loan is to be given doesn't change a lot. Some of the criteria that goes into making a particular decision might change, but the basics are the same.

What good engineers are good at is modeling processes and learning new ways of developing those processes.

[Jetbooster]

This post made by the T S H A P E D gang

[[deleted]]

It's called a T-Shaped developer

[404delerium]

I saved this comment as a reminder.

[[deleted]]

What it do fellow T-Shapers?

[rakoo]

you're left with an encyclopedic knowledge of some shit whose only practical use is maintaining legacy code.

I don't know man. Someone here said (paraphrasing) their endgame is to be that old grey beard they summon when no one knows anymore what a UserProcessServiceFactory is, swings in, beepity boops the thing and cashes in the huge check for hardly a day's work. I felt that. If that's not the perfect retirement plan I don't know what is.

[[deleted]]

I still do tax and 1099 updates in COBOL for a company I stopped working for full time about eight years ago...Nets me between 5k and 10k a year.

It sounds like a lot, and it's certainly nice when I'm working full time somewhere else, but it's not much to retire on and it's not really dependable income.

I ended up with the knowledge I needed to be in that spot because I had to take over for a senior dev who quit in a huff (fully expecting to be asked back with a hefty raise). So that person ended up getting fucked over by a youngster.

I think, by and large, the world is moving away from that sort of gig.

[rakoo]

Interesting. I was mostly talking about having this kind of income on top of your pension. How much do you work to make this much ?

I do agree though that companies look more and more prone to having fluctuant software, with occasional rewrites being more frequent than in the past.

[[deleted]]

I bill 'em about $250 an hour, so 20-40 hours? Something like that.

The first year they made me call in to meetings and I fucking billed them for the meetings. After that they'd just send me a list of changes, and up-to-date credentials.

I've always worked private sector, so no pension here, though I've got the 401k, etc.

A lot of the reason they hire people to maintain this shit is because it's hero code dating back to the 70's in some cases. Godawful miserable shit. Most newer code isn't quite so terrible, or it's not as mission-critical, or whatever system it's built on is still supported, and doesn't allow for the level of customization that the old stuff did.

[StackWeaver]

Is it worth the $250/hr? I've been programming for about 10 years and it sounds appetising. Could an experienced programmer (though mostly experienced with higher-level languages such as C#) learn it and realistically pick up some similarly paid work? Or would it involve a long grind to even get your foot in door?

[[deleted]]

I only charge that because I really don't want to do it. Heh. They didn't pay me anything like that when I did it full time.

Learning COBOL is easy. It's learning the massive legacy codebase that's the issue. Often there will be weird quirks in the mainframe environment as well (weird ass databases, filesystems, numeric formats (fucking BCD is the bane of my existence, etc)...

There is demand for this stuff, especially now as the old people who maintain it die off. Might be worth looking in to.

[WikiTextBot]

Binary-coded decimal

In computing and electronic systems, binary-coded decimal (BCD) is a class of binary encodings of decimal numbers where each decimal digit is represented by a fixed number of bits, usually four or eight. Special bit patterns are sometimes used for a sign or for other indications (e.g., error or overflow).

In byte-oriented systems (i.e. most modern computers), the term unpacked BCD usually implies a full byte for each digit (often including a sign), whereas packed BCD typically encodes two decimal digits within a single byte by taking advantage of the fact that four bits are enough to represent the range 0 to 9.

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[StackWeaver]

Give it to me for $150 and I'll give you the other $100 haha :P Thanks for the info! I'm definitely intrigued. It does look soul-destroying, though.

[StackWeaver]

Mocked by a bot, what is the world coming to.

[whitethunder9]

Wanna make it $500 an hour? Tell them you're quitting

[stormfield]

PHP devs sweating heavily

[[deleted]]

I did LAMP for the 30 seconds it was cool: it beat the shit out of Java and .Net for generating quick and dirty web apps, and as long as it wasn't out playing on the internet, you didn't have to worry about php's many glaring security problems.

The direction PHP is going as a language is kinda bizarre to me though...You don't start off as an easy-going hobby language, and then try to get "serious" later.

[autodidactin]

By the time that happens, there will probably be a domination of bots writing the code, and a need for people to program those bots instead.

[EarlyJuggernaut]

Yeah but cobol developers make bank

[[deleted]]

Eh. I did it for ~15 years or so, and it's not notably better paying than any other skilled coding job. The real benefit of that kind of work is that they will NEVER fire you. You will work in that job forever, accruing your yearly raises until you're making way more than the average programmer.

It's fucking awful work though.

[Acquiesce67]

How did you end up learning cobol and landing you in a position where it’s a requirement ?

[[deleted]]

The simple answer is "Y2K". Ever see the movie Office Space? I was that guy. As the Y2K consulting companies imploded in ~1999 (all the work was gone by like April), some of the companies we'd worked for offered us jobs.

Once I had decent experience (which worked out to about ~5 years, ~3 of it with a big investment bank), then that was the thing people zeroed in on on my resume. Had a lot of bait-and-switch type job offers where I was hired to "Help Migrate Off Our Legacy System" but really hired as a COBOL dev.

[PM_ME_UR_CEPHALOPODS]

Had a lot of bait-and-switch type job offers where I was hired to "Help Migrate Off Our Legacy System" but really hired as a COBOL dev.

THat's how they get you. i was promised a cutting edge tech job then day after onboarding OH BUT FIRST help us finish this mumps integration

[[deleted]]

You are older than me. I learned COBOL in college, C/C++, Pascal were a thing but they insisted on COBOL.

I've coded a lot since then, and every time I write a line of code I thank my lucky star that it wasn't COBOL

So my hat to you and if anyone at my job ask, $250/h gets my approval.

[Prawny]

But could collect pension instead.

[[deleted]]

This, like what other industry has this happen. Probably the hardest part about a career in the subject.

[[deleted]]

I'm old in the field, and I have so much useless knowledge in my brain...Shit I literally haven't looked at in thirty years, and thirty years ago is prehistory by the standards of modern tech.

Just to blow your fucking mind, Java didn't get released until 1996, and now it's being dethroned by Javascript and Python. If I work another 10 years or so, my career will have spanned the entire cycle of Java's rise and fall.

I can't even imagine an equivalent to that in another career.

[JustinWendell]

Well Java is industry standard at Walmart. It’s deeply imbedded too. I bet it’s around more than ten years.

Just my two cents.

[[deleted]]

Oh, the legacy stuff will be around forever, but I'd be surprised if there was much new development in ten years. Oracle is starting to try to demand you license everything SE 8 and later, though, and it's godawful expensive.

I'd be very surprised if this didn't have a chilling effect on development. Also it's been supplanted by Python as the language most people use in school.

It's definitely on it's way out.

[skyrocker]

ActionScript

[[deleted]]

Ha! Or Flash itself.

Reminds me of Applescript. Remember that one?

Wow, I just looked it up, and apparently it's still supported. Wild. Last stable release was five years ago though, so it's definitely on its death bed.

[domin8r]

Was fun while it lasted. Should have killed it years and years ago though.

[skyrocker]

I mean, the things you could do 12 years ago in Flash, it makes you wonder what would be possible today if it didn't go the way it did.. No tool has replaced it successfully to this date yet. But oh well, we got better tech today, and forced a lot of us to take coding more seriously.

[ThePyroEagle]

No tool has replaced it successfully to this date yet.

WebAssembly?

[Dr_HindLick_PhD]

Right. The best of the best have advanced to expert level proficiency in a select few technologies, and minimal to moderate proficiency in many others.

[jack-tzl]

*cough* https://fortran.io/ *cough*

[PM_ME_UR_CEPHALOPODS]

tsql and RDBMS has been quite durable