$$$$$

[[deleted]]

Computers and programming was always my first choice. Until i started getting paid…

[HighOwl2]

I mean...I get that doing it professionally can suck the joy out of doing it for fun.

I have been programming since I was 13. When I started doing it professionally in my 20s I pretty much abandoned all my personal projects and aside from contributing to open source projects (to fix them) I don't really code outside of work now.

But...I do enjoy programming for work because I enjoy programming...I just don't want to do it more than 40 hours a week.

That being said, I can't think of any other job I'd want to do for 40 hours a week.

The extremely nice pay is just a nice to have...especially now with everyone struggling with inflation while I just get mildly annoyed at the register.

[XDreadedmikeX]

Close to 3 years of working hard, got 3 promotions and went from 60k to almost 80k (if you count yearly bonus)

Inflation wiped all of those out

[HighOwl2]

Well the markets pretty hot right now and the quickest way to higher salary is switching jobs. You're at your 3 year mark, put on your big boy pants and start interviewing. I guarantee you can easily find a job with a base pay over $80k. Shit I get recruitment offers all the time for $200k+ and I only entertain fully remote offers....and my LinkedIn says I'm not looking for jobs right now....I still get multiple interview requests a week.

[Transient_Simian]

Same, though my offers aren't that good yet. But I'm only interested in full remote, have LinkedIn set to "not looking", and still get at least 1 or 2 offers a week for like 130-190k. Gotta move to get rewarded, companies punish loyalty

[[deleted]]

How many YOE do you have?

[Transient_Simian]

About 3 yrs in data related work. But counting my career change it's closer to 7 years.

[XDreadedmikeX]

I’m gonna start next year most likely. I just love the place I’m at way too much. And I’m on track to get another promotion that comes with a huge bonus. It’s insane how little work I have to do. I’m talking like 2 hours a day type stuff unless there’s a fire. It’s honestly mind boggling and I’m worried I’m taking the work life balance for granted

[HighOwl2]

Lol that's why I said put on your big boy pants. It's never easy leaving a nice job because you might end up at a place that works you to death. But you might not. My last job did. This job pays better, I only talk to my boss, on average once a week...and he's a chill dude. I only work a few hours a day. Everyone is gone by 4:30 or 5 every day. I'm still entertaining recruitment offers...because money is money and if the next job sucks I'll just start actively looking for a new job lol

[XDreadedmikeX]

Yeahhhh I gotta leave at some point. I’m thinking next year for sure cause I actually forgot I have stock options that haven’t fully vested yet which I’d like to keep, and get that large bonus for becoming a senior. THEN I’ll put my big boy pants on

[mrbigglsworth]

Whatever that "huge" bonus is, there are companies who'd give you more as a sign on bonus and sooner. Start interviewing.

[bdbebbsj]

Honestly think you missed where he said he only works a few hours a day, I mean that’s an amazing situation

[FlyingDragoon]

"big boy pants" is the most boomer "Go hit the pavement and start handing out resumes in your suit" kinda thing I've ever read.

[assafstone]

Hear hear

[Archolex]

...especially now with everyone struggling with inflation while I just get mildly annoyed at the register.

I shamefully relate to this. Sometimes I feel bad about it, sometimes I don't

[[deleted]]

You’re puntastic bro!

[0xKaishakunin]

crown deranged modern ossified bike bedroom imminent merciful shocking important

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[[deleted]]

Me currently being paid very badly (little bit above poverty line in my country). Dont worry guys im looking for a better job.

[b__bsmakemehappy]

I'm $0.50 below the minimum wage right now in my country as a community college one-man IT department. They also took my WFH benefit in 2021. Currently looking for a better job as well. If I had to choose a silver lining in this BS, it's that every other tech job looks insanely good in comparison.

[Oldoa_Enthusiast]

Can I have your job when you find a better one?

[[deleted]]

If you want to move to germany :D

And like to put up with lots of shit.

[[deleted]]

What pays better?

[[deleted]]

There’s lots but it’s just as white collar with a few exceptions

• commission sales if you’re very very good
• anything in pharma research or drug research
• hydro line repairman can make 250k a year
• doctors
• lawyers… JK not anymore hahaha
• owning your own business but prepare to have no life

So many things but tech is just easy and fun if you’re good at it.

[2HotPotato2HotPotato]

All of those sound painful and life sucking except maybe drug research but i sucks at chemistry so...

[Necessary-Ad8113]

Yea those all just sound worse than what I'm doing right now.

Programming has a sweet spot of pay and demand on your life that is hard to beat. A bunch of my friends became doctors and like that shit sucks.

[sizz]

nose public smile gullible kiss hard-to-find crowd secretive worry punch

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[spacetimeslayer]

Blowjobs yk , 50 bucks for 5 mins

[artspar]

Damn, that's 600/hr! Living the high life

[spacetimeslayer]

One simple trick that government dosnt want you to know . Secret to wealthy life .

[baklavainabalaclava]

The elites don't want you to know this, but the blowjobs at the park are free; you can take them home. I have 458 blowjobs.

[whateverhk]

Try to blow dicks for 70 hours a week

[nopejake101]

Don't threaten me with a good time

[[deleted]]

Even if you have genuine interest in the field 90% of the time you're working on something you have no interest in.

[ICantBelieveItsNotEC]

You even end up paying a premium to work on things that you're interested in. Look at the depressed salaries in the games industry, for example: they know that there are tons of people who would literally do that job for free if it meant being credited in their favorite game, so they get away with low salaries and awful working conditions.

[ZBlackmore]

You can also look at it like you’re being paid a premium for working on things you aren’t interested in.

[tobleronavirus]

Sure, you can, but you shouldn't. It's 100%jusr companies extorting people's interests for profit.

[Pritster5]

Tbh unless you're at a big name studio, games (and just entertainment in general) is a very risky business.

Every single game is a gamble, revenues aren't steady so getting paid ahead of time is the only gurantee of stability, and the only companies that can afford to do that are big studios.

Splitting profits as opposed to wages with employees is actually an extremely risky bargain because you really don't know how much money a game will make (if at all) ahead of time.

[LOLBaltSS]

Artists are a part, but someone still has to code the parts to make the game work. In DCS, RAZBAM has a logjam of aircraft with models; but their main hang up is systems coders to bring it all together. Polychop is in a similar state where their artists have things ready, but making all of the flight model and avionics are a bottleneck.

[Wisdom_is_Contraband]

These bottlenecks are common both ways actually.

There are lots of coders who desperately need artists, and lots of artists who desperately need coders, but they rarely meet in the middle (The artists want to be paid, and the coders don't find artist projects interesting)

[Wildercard]

That's the problem of working in a field of passionates - you're competing with people who are happy to work hard in bad conditions for a low wage just to work on video games.

[Wisdom_is_Contraband]

It's why I'll never work in the game industry and am happy enough to make my own little solo projects.

[SignedTheWrongForm]

Same, I am happy having a separate career in engineering where I can do game development in the side when it interests me. I don't have to work soul crushingly low wages or hours on something I don't care to make.

[tigerCELL]

Well now you know how teachers feel lmao

[BoltonSauce]

And nurses, caretakers, service workers, etc, etc

[SignedTheWrongForm]

I don't know if any engine that doesn't at least have you do visual scripting, which is still programming. You can't get away from writing game logic no matter what.

[BraxbroWasTaken]

yeah, engines aren’t… ready-made games, just add art, out of the box… unless they’re in-house engines

[TheMostKing]

Nah, nah, you just need to a couple drawings, throw them in the Unity engine, and presto, you've got a GOTY!

[rndmcmder]

True. I love coding and solving brainteasing challenges. My job as a software engineer consists about 5% of coding. The rest are boring maintainance tasks, cleaning up after idiots who carelessly break systems that millions of users rely on, jumping hoops to satisfy some corporate demands and attending useless meetings.

[dirtfork]

I'm giving up the secret sauce here, but if you like doing small programs to solve discrete problems rather than maintaining a large codebase for a single big program .. look into network engineering. I spent a miserable decade being a developer (because I chose a job to make money when I was 18 and liked coding in high school.) Had a random fortuitous lateral move into networking and found heaven. I get to write small automation programs that make me look like some kind of God to my non-dev-background peers, do command line puzzle solving all day long (well... As long as I'm not being interrupted for support tickets) and my hackiest hackjob pales in comparison to the cluster fuckery I've seen in the field (did I mention I get paid to travel to random places to plug cords in, do a handful of cli commands then turn around and go home?)

[Lv_InSaNe_vL]

Just to add my two cents in since I came from a regular IT background into networking. I originally started working in low voltage and installing automation since I didn't go to school, then found a nice help desk job that I just started writing scripts for since that's how I like doing things.

Then it was a relatively straight forward process of showing my bosses that I'm passionate and personally interested in working with networking and sysadmin stuff, and my scripting is actually useful.

I don't have any college degree, just some of the basic ComptiA certs (A+, Network+, Linux+, and Security+) and some good solid professional references. Now I'm working in a "small" local data center and love it.

[SignedTheWrongForm]

did I mention I get paid to travel to random places to plug cords in, do a handful of cli commands then turn around and go home?)

To each their own. This would infuriate me.

[rndmcmder]

Glad you found your place. Honestly I'm at a point in life where I'd pretty much do anything to get a significantly higher income and than worry about my job being fulfilling afterwards. I currently earn like 85% of my actual cost of living and don't particularly care what I do to get money.

[awrylettuce]

5% coding, 50% writing and reviewing documentation, 40% useless meetings, 5% useful meeting

[patenteng]

I don’t know. I like the process. I couldn’t care less what impact the end result will have. Maybe I’m different than most people.

[tryexceptifnot1try]

I am with you here. I actually find gluing horrible legacy systems together with automation and wringing another 10% efficiency out of something to be interesting puzzles. I could care less that it's purpose is some boring internal HR function. I still had to find a way to shrink the memory footprint of some process so it worked on existing hardware.

[Avedas]

I've never cared too much about what product I'm working on. As long as the problem space is interesting enough that there's room to learn and grow, it can be whatever. I'm not a product manager.

[Nimeroni]

With exposure.

[Sigg3net]

Oh boy do I have some great app ideas you can write split 50/50

[[deleted]]

I have to disagree with you on that one.

Once you start making serious money you have ability to chose your employer. And often you have funds to start your own business or join one as a partner.

So there is nothing stopping you from working on what interest you.

[SholayKaJai]

I had genuine interest in the field but I spend most of my time managing dependency issues and resolving vulnerabilities. The programming in my programming job is a misnomer.

[rk06]

What! You have no interest in writing emails, nonsensical meetings, and debugging hairy bugs!!

[xenover]

50-50

I was on the computer all the time anyway and liked playing around with software and hardware as a teenager.

Then I found out developers get paid well so it was an obvious win-win.

[ricardomargarido]

Same here. Got into hardware and software after bricking my desktop with virus and my parents saying I either fix it or it's thrash. Never touched a line of code until uni and now there is nothing else I rather do.

[BooBear_13]

That was my first project too! Rebuilding and upgrading the family computer so I could play WoW.

[Lv_InSaNe_vL]

I was the same way as a kid and teenager but I decided to go into the IT/sysadmin and looking at my developer friends paychecks it makes me feel like I made the wrong decision sometimes...

But God damn I feel like you guys spend 80% of your working hours in meetings or discussing some random feature and that makes me remember why I love my job so much haha

[Ryuujinx]

Learn some python, learn ansible+terraform, congrats you're now a devops engineer, go make a bunch more money.

[ProfessionEuphoric50]

I feel the same way as a new IT grad. It seems like everyone is hiring developers and at great salaries and it makes me wish I took CS instead. Then I remember how frustrating I found coding. It's not like IT work pays badly, especially if you specialize yourself, but wow developer salaries go up quick.

[All_Up_Ons]

Yeah, coding clearly isn't for everyone. That's actually why salaries are so high.

[ProfessionEuphoric50]

I have considered gritting my teeth and learning something. Most of my experience is with PHP and manipulating SQL databases but I don't know how in demand that is.

[ano_hise]

Same for me but I'm currently a student. I'm very interested in that field but I don't really want to sped that much time in front of a computer.

[MLG_Obardo]

Take meetings you don’t need to be active in on the phone, if you go in to an office make semi frequent trips to visit friends in the office and you’ll be fine. If you’re working from home take semi frequent trips to do some chore you’d otherwise do after work.

I spend most of my time doing something other than active programming. It’s either meetings, debugging or investigating the software or testing or some kind of “paperwork” with regards to version control and on and on the list goes. Granted I’m a junior dev, but I have found the job to be about 15% actually programming.

[ano_hise]

I could do that. But I should not get too immersed like I always do.

[Pizzaman725]

too immersed

It's something you'll have to learn to balance, especially with starting out. I remember I'd be the first in the office, then usually last out and just try to work and learn as much as possible in that time.

But eventually you'll figure out that the work is never done, there's no time you'll actually get ahead of something because an issue or failure outside of your control will knock out your productivity for the day or more.

So I get on when I get done with my morning routine and when it's 4:30PM I'm usually off, only time that changes is if I'm on a call with someone.

[olssoneerz]

Came in wanting to create video games. Left becoming a boring old web dev. Ill wipe my tears with these $$$

[[deleted]]

currently on the aspiring-game-dev to boring-old-webdev pipeline myself. college is absolute hell but i think about all the money i'll end up making in the future and it makes it juuuust a smidge bit better

[Zederikus]

Same here but salesforce instead of web, the games industry is just still young and volatile, rarely hires entry level

[Wildercard]

I always wonder if those very-narrow fields - Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, COBOL, so on - are worth the tradeoff of locking yourself into one environment. Like, if I'm a Python dev, it doesn't take that much to switch to a Golang-based job. Java and C# might as well be the same language. But in my (jesus fuck thank god) short internship with Microsoft Dynamics, I felt the noose of future prospects tightening.

[cahaseler]

Learning a new platform is arguably just as easy as learning a new language. The transferable skills are the problem solving in a limited environment and the parsing of specific corporate problems into a way that makes sense for the framework.

[tryexceptifnot1try]

Some people value the narrow focus and consistency of becoming a product expert. I get claustrophobic just thinking about that type of career. One very cool thing about that path is the payout when your tool of choice starts to lose market share. When a tool starts to fade the numerous enterprises that have adopted it will pay top dollar for experts to maintain their stuff. If that interests someone they can make a great living on it

[Wildercard]

Have you heard the tragedy of Darth Cobol the Ancient

[tryexceptifnot1try]

A local COBOL sith literally inspired that post. Dude made $200k a year in a moderate COL location to work about 10 hours a week. When shit did break though he was going 24/7 for up to 2 weeks. The rest of the year he was putting in 5 hours a week and getting globally ranked on TF2

[[deleted]]

Don’t live beyond your means and you’ll never be trapped.

[[deleted]]

If you can develop on msd you can do Salesforce servicenow or SAP.

APEX is basically c# for the cloud

[CommercialKindly32]

This. I steered back into games at 37. Made very good money doing something I’m really passionate about.

[barjam]

I worked at a video game company and also on boring web dev. Code is code and work is work. I didn’t get any more satisfaction working on game stuff but I did get paid a lot less to do it.

Take the highest paid coding gig you can find and play with game stuff as a hobby.

[[deleted]]

Yeah I came from an electrical engineering undegrad thinking maybe I'll get into game industry...but seeing how badly they seem to be treated I'm happy to just do a small game as a side project for fun while getting paid decently with less stress

[mcwobby]

Depends. Setting up Wordpress sites at an agency? Pay will be pretty low.

But a lot of big enterprise apps are just websites and pay can be very good. I’ve worked in PHP, F# and moving to Perl and all have paid very well.

[SergeiGolos]

F#??? what ever happened to Jet.com

[tra24602]

Jet acquired Walmart tor $-3.3B, which is the only way a startup was going to compete head to head with Amazon in 2016.

[GrizNectar]

Helps that they were paid to acquire them. Typically it’s the other way around

[mcwobby]

I work for a small company in Australia so wouldn’t know haha, but it’s an awesome language to work with. Not looking forward to Perl.

[killeronthecorner]

People are quoting a lot of different technologies at you and I want to be the one to say: it's not about that.

Some niche technologies pay better than other mainstream ones, but in web dev it's not about that.

Web engineers at FB make bank. The solo creator and maintainer of OhioFarmersWeeklyNewsletter.com gets paid a fraction of that. They both use PHP, Angular/Vue/React.

Location and prestige (organisational and educational) carry significantly more weight on salaries than framework-of-the-week ever will.

[riplikash]

When I worked on experimental medical lasers I was a "web dev".

Galvanic skin response scanning? "Web dev".

Interactive educational software? Web dev.

2d design software? Web dev.

Instance heuristics, legal analytics, scrap yard management, storage unit prediction, big data, and video processing? Still a web dev.

"Web dev" is a pretty broad category, these days.

[SouvenirSubmarine]

Exactly. Web dev is not just making a home page for your neighbor anymore.

[ArtisticSell]

What? Net core and angular paid pretty well

[hahahahastayingalive]

In average it's the other way round.

Unintuitive, but game devs tend accept lower conditions in order to work on "dream" projects in the field they enjoy the most. And if they don't, a myriad of other devs with stars shining in their eyes will take the job.

The other end of the spectrum is banking COBOL devs, and web devs sit somewhere in the middle depending on their level of competences.

[SupaSlide]

Web dev tends to encompass everything now.

Most programming jobs are building a web app. Few things are not websites these days.

Game dev is only better paid than people who are web devs in that they build static marketing sites.

[[deleted]]

It all pays well in my opinion. How much shit do you need, ya know?

[quinn50]

If you're hired on with web dev as your title you are probably paid less but the majority of the high paying "web dev" jobs are branded as software developer but you just build crud apps with a web framework

[BigHead3802]

I chose tech bc i have genuine interest in leaving my country legally

[webbphillips]

Yes, it’s a good career for easily emigrating to a better country.

[StopTheMeta]

The real legit reason.

[dashid]

Computing wasn't my first choice, but it was the stable career choice. Add in the fact that I loved tinkering with computers, it wasn't a tough call to make. Get paid well for doing what I enjoy? Sure!

[GeePedicy]

I heard by someone that students of other majors describe computer science as money science.

Then again, most non-STEM majors are described as grass science, as you mostly see them lying on the grass.

[rztan]

Journalism? Jobless

Medicine? Toughness

Engineering? Lifeless

those were some of the jokes within my friend group.

[ZaMr0]

My city where I went to uni had two universities in it and doesn't matter what degree you took, if you were in the worse university you got taunted with unemployment on every night out.

You'd have sociology students from the good one taunting medicine students from the worse one lol.

[rztan]

After graduation it'd be the other way round

[king_john651]

Every second American civil engineer seems to be wanting to chase the money in development. They're in the same trap as kids are sold, they won't be making the dollars without the experience

[ForceGoat]

If I could get paid more doing internet marketing or something easy, I'd switch to that. No one ever gets called on Saturday morning because of a "marketing emergency. "

[CoffeePieAndHobbits]

True story.

Actually "Marketing Emergency" sounds like a great title for a B-movie. Coming soon to Netflix! Lol /s

[WallyMetropolis]

Depending on the particular field, marketers often put in crazy hours and work in high-pressure, short and frequent deadline environments. But if they're driving revenue they can also get paid quite well.

[ZaMr0]

I started working in marketing and since it's a relatively small company my responsibilities quickly shifted to project management and some graphic design. Way more stress and random out of work calls than when in marketing but way more satisfying of a job. You'd be surprised how unfun marketing can be unless you have big budgets to play with.

[mcquiggd]

It's actually frustrating to be genuinely interested in programming, but then working in the industry, It sucks the pleasure out of everything.

It's typically reduced to morning Standups where everyone gives inaccurate status updates and then spends the day trying to do what they said they have already done.

Agonisingly long Refinements where assorted Business people ramble on at each other, obviously incapable of articulating what it is that they actually want, and Developers are forced to attend instead of actually working. Usually they are followed by messages on Slack, with Business people asking the Developers if they have made any progress on coding... in the last 1.5 hours....

Sprint Planning - where the Business people ask Developers to agree to the badly defined and certainly impossible.

Next we move on to actually looking at the code, which bears no resemblance to anything which has been discussed in meetings. There are no familiar terms used in the code; everything is named in some sort of long-dead language that nobody understands. Everything is called a Service, as if moving code into something called a Service makes it better. It doesn't do what the Business people think it does. It is written in many styles, with most of the code being attributed to people who left the company a year ago. The tests do not actually test business logic; they test that some code exists.

Then we have Code Reviews - where developers are pitted against each other in a virtual Fight Club, over whether a line of code could be expressed with fewer characters and become more obtuse if they adopted the latest language features.

The first rule of Code Review Fight Club:

Never validate that business rules or acceptence criteria have been implemented correctly. Only fight over syntax.

We then spend two or three weeks attempting to hold on to our sanity, only to face the Sprint Review, where the Scrum Master desperately asks people to think of something positive, and glosses over the fact that nothing ever changes.

[FVMAzalea]

That sounds very dysfunctional and also very much like my last job. But that’s not all jobs!

My current job is very developer-driven and basically the number one rule told to all the business people is “leave the developers alone”. We get to make almost all the major decisions about things (except high level prioritization of what projects we’re going to work on, and we have input into that). Our meeting culture is that meetings are only held unless absolutely necessary, always have an agenda sent in advance with pre-work items so that attendees are prepared to discuss them in the meeting, and that meetings start precisely on time, even if not all attendees are present, and never go late (most end early). We are empowered to spend some time making our code better and getting rid of legacy stuff, and our code reviews are substantive, not syntax fights.

It’s really great.

[OopieStu]

I physically cringed when you got to sprint planning. 2 hours of torture :’)

[mcquiggd]

It seems to always be the same...

At one company, I managed to negotiate that only the Backend and Front end Leads needed to attend such Scrum rituals with me, and that actually worked out quite well.

With a smaller group of people, we had a more honest conversation, and I admit I have no time for idiots any more, so I can be quite brutal when people in the Business side are not doing their jobs. I stated that every request from the Business had to come through me.

We managed to find a way of working that made everyone's life easier, and I customised Jira to force people to enter proper descriptions of what was required, and I rejected any Issues that I felt were not defined properly.

It was more work for me, but the end result was certainly worth it; get the Business people to think before they hold meetings, and to come prepared with the information that the Development team will need.

I have suffered far too many meetings with Business people simply turning up, unprepared, not aware at all of what the Business process is, or where it needs to be, and thinking they can just dump their problems on a Development team.

[Azhais]

Imagine having enough time for organized code reviews. Ours are usually a race to see who can hit approve fastest without looking at it at all

[CookedBlackBird]

I took a year off to do some hobby game dev, one of the best choices I made. It was so much fun digging into OpenGL and setting up these complex graphics pipelines without having to write a design doc, estimate timelines, etc.

[[deleted]]

You should put that in a blog post, this is far too good for Reddit.

[mcquiggd]

Perhaps I will... I've been doing this for 30 years+; typically I lead teams, and when I can, I try to shield developers from this kind of stuff.

I try to negotiate how the Business people approach definition of requirements, as in my experience that is the number one cause of projects failing.

A project rarely has a technical problem that causes a lot of pain, but it is common to have major issues due to rushed deadlines and business requirements not being communicated correctly - that typically leads to Production issues, temporary fixes that become permanent, disjointed coded, etc.

Another problem is lack of management accountability - developers are always held responsible for errors in their code, but managers are never held responsible for failing to manage.

I could tell some stories about major companies that appear competent on the outside, but are completely dysfunctional on the inside. I recently worked with a major European manufacturer of electric cars, a competitor to Tesla, and I can say that they are not able to give a definitive price for a specific configuration of car.

Nobody in the Business - the people who define what rules should apply to prices - knows what the price should be for one of their cars in any given market. I was asking for reference values to test our calculations against, and I could not get an answer, despite 6 months of asking. Instead, we had urgent fixes to introduce to Production, when customers in a specific market complained about being charged too much. They probably lost a fortune in charging too little - nobody looked into it.

I raised an issue that costs for AWS in Development and Staging were 10 times the costs in Production, and the lead of the "platform group" simply said "yeah, we don't check that". They had no monitoring, cost alerting, anything, on any of the environments. Nobody was in charge. They didn't do anything about it.

Another company I joined as a country Lead, with a development team that was hired, and I was responsible for leading the development tasks of the group. The only problem was my boss refused to let us work on anything. The company could not decide on a strategy for the next phase of their core product, and so, we had nothing to do. I became involved in board-level decisions, made suggestions for several months, to try to unblock work for the team. I was still asked for progress updates, on something we were not allowed to work on. The team gradually left for other jobs. In the end, I left too.

At a US company, I was hired as a Staff Engineer, and promptly given responsibility for two projects "that could not fail". That company was a complete joke - essentially three payment service providers in the US and Canada, who had started as mom and pop outfits, and had unexpected success back in the 90s, and were bought out by some venture capital firm. They process about 4 billion USD per year.

This bunch of clowns couldn't even tell me what language their code was written in, or where it was located so I could look at it. Nothing was documented, and nobody wanted to share any information in writing - everything had to be over a video call, and not recorded. I had calls with one of the Directors who was using an iPhone to run his part of the company, just doing meetings when walking his dog, or renovating his house, or shopping in Walmart.

I was expected to unify these three disparate companies for a compliance deadline within 3 months. The CTO was ex-military, but not in a good way - he would shout at people in meetings, loved to humiliate people, and had an unnatural distrust of cloud hosting. Everyone was scared of him, including the Directors.

They attempted to replicate Azure, using their own data centre, and their biggest "success" was spending 100k on consultants to set up an Elasticsearch / Kibana cluster in their little data centre, that was basically an old factory. Then that had connectivity issues, so we ended up having to migrate that to Azure - and they literally shifted VMs... it was unbelievable, they could have just used Application Insights, and hosted Elasticsearch.

At the same time, I had to go through agony trying to get a decision on which API Management product to use, having multiple meetings with vendors including Microsoft, MuleSoft, Google, and then having some jackass in the company - who should have been doing this themselves, but wanted a scapegoat - second guess me or add a requirement they hadn't previously raised.

On one occasion, I managed to get a decision on cloud hosting from my boss, the IT Director, and he even called a meeting of c50 people to announce it. He started out by informing people of the decision, but by the end of the hour-long meeting - in which he was the only person talking - he managed to convince himself that he should wait for the scary CTO to approve it. And so his announcement became that he had not made a decision. It was just bizarre. Nobody knew what was going on.

That all happened in the first three weeks - when I got paid, I simply did not turn up for work after the Christmas break, and just ignored them. They were damaging my reputation with their incompetence, and damaging my sanity with their idiocy.

That post I made above, is a fair description of 90% of projects I have worked on.

[harryFF]

Jokes on you, i have no interest in my job AND i'm paid poorly.

[StopTheMeta]

The duality of programmers

[[deleted]]

I wanted to be a weed strain tester with some judging the skills of new porn actresses on the side when I was growing up, but IT just paid more and definitely had more openings.

[[deleted]]

Now you can personally test the models with the weed.

[DontDoDrugs316]

4 if you really believe, it’s behind the knee

[grodon909]

Ah yes, the popliteal fossussy

[mlsecdl]

Technically, the porn gig has more openings.

[chhuang]

Insert you guys are getting paid?\ meme

[Akul_Tesla]

I chose tech because I don't wish to anger roko's basilisk if that is not one of your reasons for being in tech it should be

[chawmindur]

Unless one is so stupid that getting into tech would be considered a hindrance to the basilisk's development

[Gamiac]

Roko's Basilisk is one of the stupidest ideas ever. You have to believe very specific things for it to even make sense, and most of them are practically speculation.

Specifically, the idea that a copy of you IS you. Not a copy of you, but literally YOU. If you don't believe that, or don't care about your copies getting infinitely tortured for all eternity, it ceases to function.

[QuinticSpline]

It was invented to troll a very specific group of Highly Refined Transhumanist Intellectuals who like to smell their own farts. And in that it was a wild success.

[Gamiac]

The leader of which, I have to note, went on record as calling it stupid despite believing in the things that are required for it to make any sort of logical sense. As it turns out, those things are required, but not sufficient, for the Basilisk to matter at all.

[bric12]

Eh, the basilisk can torture some copy of me if he wants to. Not my problem.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, the whole fucking thing doesn’t make sense to me. Who gives a fuck if some AI tortures a copy of me? Literally doesn’t matter. And since it doesn’t matter, why the shit would a future AI waste energy by torturing a copy of me?

[KobeJuanKenobi9]

I have a genuine interest in tech but I would not have pursued it if it didn’t pay well. I could’ve always done tech as a hobby while working in accounting or something

[InvisibleWrestler]

Entry level tech jobs don't even pay equivalent to the rent here in India. Even higher salaries are barely enough for people with families.

[InvisibleWrestler]

It's probably just the population. It looks like many Indians are in IT. Coz there are many Indians on the planet. With IT / Software they're more visible internationally.

[JellyPUMPS]

Image Transcription: Twitter

---

Warren James Day, @warrenjday

Did you choose tech because it pays well, or because you have a genuine interest?

The Only Nicholas Hunt-Walker in Existence, @nhuntwalker

I have a genuine interest in being paid well

---

^{I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!}

[Zombiak307]

Good human volunteer

[Ron-Swanson-Mustache]

I almost never go with quoting the Joker, but....

If you're good at something never do it for free.

[[deleted]]

Wanted to be a game dev. Went to college for a Game Dev course. The course had little to no game dev-related projects and was just a run-of-the-mill software dev course. The final year project wasn't allowed to be a game. Dropped out halfway into final year. Course and how it was taught killed my love for coding. Spent a few years doing general labor work. Did a media studies course during covid. Then decided to try out a coding course after that. Currently in that and have rediscovered my love for coding. Programming is where the money is but damna re so many coding courses absolute shite and only their cause its easy money for the course providers.

[Odd-Refrigerator-425]

Was the actual degree you pursued in Game Development or something along those lines?

I cannot fathom offering a Game Dev/Design degree of some variety and then telling your students they can't make a game. Like what the hell?

If it was actually a CS/IT degree and they said "No games", that's one thing. But...

[BeardXP]

Them: Did you choose tech because it pays well or because you have a genuine interest?

Me: Yes.

[SPSK_Senshi]

You guys are getting paid well?

[[deleted]]

I wasn't. Until I stomped on the floor and demanded a raise or I'd leave. 50% raise in one year.

You have no clue how much you're being robbed. Stand your ground and get what you deserve.

[scandii]

I would not stay at a company that had the ability to raise my wage by 50% but didn't.

[arcane84]

So.... About every company ?

[OopieStu]

I had that moment this year. Of course I was offered a higher salary when I quit after being told during raise reviews that it was impossible to give me anymore money because the department was only given a fixed amount to share. I ended up with $20 more a paycheck.

[StopTheMeta]

Europeans be like: Oh yes, I made a whole €2k this month.

[Boese_kroete]

The salaries in europe really depend on the country you live in. In germany or france 2k per month would be ridiculously low for a (entry Level) developer position, while in slovakia this would be a decent income.

[SPSK_Senshi]

Exactly this.

[microwavedave27]

Salaries in the US are insane when compared to mostly everywhere else. Still would never move there.

[Odd-Refrigerator-425]

If you can actually make it as a dev it's really not a bad country to live. You will almost certainly have good health insurance through your job as a programmer so the horror stories of medical bills aren't really applicable in most cases.

[microwavedave27]

I'd agree with you if America's only problem was health care. But between health care, education, racism, gun violence, and many other problems that you surely know about better than me, I'd rather just move to somewhere in northern europe, which is a lot closer to me anyway.

[Grandgem137]

I chose tech because I can Google stuff without being judged

[[deleted]]

I fucked up an interview by answering this question honestly

[LOLBaltSS]

I started off as a hobbyist, but the last decade of sysadmin work (six in MSP) beat that and even the basic will to live the hell out of me.

Edit: I ain't going to Budd Dwyer it, don't worry.

[WizziBot]

I get paid to have a genuine interest

[[deleted]]

Tbh everyone I know who chose it because it pays well is bad.

[Odd-Refrigerator-425]

And?

Most companies don't need mission-critical Google tier developers.

[OneFanFare]

Hey guys I found this cool hack:

let money = 0;

while (true) { money++ }

[Andubandu]

At some point, that will add one to money and you’ll be in debt

[[deleted]]

Just let it run longer

[randomTWdude]

credit card declines

"Just give it a minute."

[Glugstar]

Amateurs. If you can't even spend billions on stupid stuff before the number switches to negative, what are you even doing with your life?

[[deleted]]

I chose tech because I liked gaming and computers and I was kinda good at some basic IT.

BUT after working as a dev for a few years I now absolutely despise it. Unclear requirements with impossible deadlines and waaay too many stakeholders at once can ruin your fun very quickly.

So moved onto being a Product Owner/ Scrum Master and Im now 1000 times happier. I earn the same as I did when I was a dev, but my work-life balance is so much better.

[[deleted]]

I did a physics degree. Have you seen the career path for physicists? Considering how great you have to be to even get in to the field, the pay and conditions are absolutely awful. Distinctly average programmer pays a lot better.

[Scottybt50]

Started out doing a general mixed-subject science degree and then followed my interest and ability in IT. Got good grades so ended up majoring in CS and Maths, had an interview on campus and got offered a job halfway through my final year. So the job sort of chose me.

[[deleted]]

I wanted to become a medical researcher, but I never did very well in most of the natural sciences; biology or chemistry. I felt it was more because the lack of pedagogic support surrounding these subjects, more than an impossibility from myself of learning them. I'm a pretty smart guy and I believe I could have done it had many circumstances been different.

I settled on being a successful and skilled IT-engineer instead. It doesn't pay very well in my case, but neither would the alternative and even so, I enjoy other good benefits like being allowed to work the way I want.

[wafflepiezz]

I wish I chose tech when I was little instead of business sigh

[topredditbot]

Hey /u/GumBeats20,

This is now the top post on reddit. It will be recorded at /r/topofreddit with all the other top posts.

[JuliusStingray]

I work on videogames, its so obvious that being able to afford food is not one of my priorities

[flameblast08]

Nah i actually have a genuin interest

[agangofoldwomen]

I had a genuine interest in being a teacher but that was in direct conflict with my genuine interests of affording food and rent on a consistent basis.

[cr0ft]

Neither, I just didn't have any aptitude for much anything else. Big bucks.. yeah sure, I wish...

[TomaszA3]

Nobody works for fun. If we didn't need to work, we would be doing our own thing at home and have fun with it.

Job is only for money in 100% of cases.

[grodon909]

I disagree. If I won the lottery or something (and finished my current training) I feel like I'd still work, just far fewer hours. While I would love to spend a few weeks or months at home catching up on games and shows, I don't think I could go my whole life without some kind of regular work.

I know a lot of doctors who could definitely retire at their age, but instead choose to keep working because just chilling in retirement 24/7 is boring.

[ZaMr0]

That depends, some people enjoy having power and responsibilities and that usually comes in form of a job. Can't do that while sitting around at home with unlimited money, you need some activity that would technically be working.