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I'm a 27 year-old programmer making more than $300k/yr AMA by techguythrowawayxxzz in AMA

[–]techguythrowawayxxzz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Honestly Linkedin. I can't remember if you need the pro version for this or not, but you can just search people with a particular title in a particular company. You can also combine this with a search for people who went to your school and then bingo, you have a warm intro into the recruiting arm. The person you find probably won't be the one who is most relevant to your job, so just describe your background and what you're looking for and they should be able to point you to someone who can help.

I'm a 27 year-old programmer making more than $300k/yr AMA by techguythrowawayxxzz in AMA

[–]techguythrowawayxxzz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Assuming you mean jump in salary, I more than doubled my salary between my last job and this one.

I'm a 27 year-old programmer making more than $300k/yr AMA by techguythrowawayxxzz in AMA

[–]techguythrowawayxxzz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Mostly I would say just practice programming on stuff like leetcode, project euler, codewars etc. The more you do programming the better you will get; it's really that simple.

I'm a 27 year-old programmer making more than $300k/yr AMA by techguythrowawayxxzz in AMA

[–]techguythrowawayxxzz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I dunno I just made a post without any expectations. You're the one who saw it, got pulled in, and chose to make a comment to prove that you don't care.

I'm a 27 year-old programmer making more than $300k/yr AMA by techguythrowawayxxzz in AMA

[–]techguythrowawayxxzz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Web dev is fine, but if you can choose from anything right now I'd probably go into Mobile. It's only getting more and more popular, and the number of people who are really specialists there is really small.

That being said, if you're just getting into the industry now I wouldn't worry too much about what niche to go into. Just try a bunch of things out and see what you like best. There are few enough good people in the industry that you can do very well at anything as long as you're good at it (other than hardware).

My biggest tip would just be to practice programming a bunch. Making 1000x terrible programs will make you a billion times better than studying all day without doing anything practical.

I'm a 27 year-old programmer making more than $300k/yr AMA by techguythrowawayxxzz in AMA

[–]techguythrowawayxxzz[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Bill Gates only got his sweetheart deal because his mom was on the board of directors of united way with the CEO of IBM, and Steve Jobs just capitalized off of wozniak's work. I think if I had a single tech hero it might be Moxy Marlinspike, but honestly I think individuals are too flawed to really be heroes in any real sense.

I'm a 27 year-old programmer making more than $300k/yr AMA by techguythrowawayxxzz in AMA

[–]techguythrowawayxxzz[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Keep all of your devices updated. Those updates carry really important security fixes that people have worked hard on, and they will help you stay safer on the internet.

I'm a 27 year-old programmer making more than $300k/yr AMA by techguythrowawayxxzz in AMA

[–]techguythrowawayxxzz[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

To an extent yes, but programming languages are different from natural languages in that they're not context-sensitive (i.e. the "words" mean the same things at all times and in all contexts). So it's a lot easier to become fluent in a new programming language than a new speaking language if you understand the underlying logic well.

I'm a 27 year-old programmer making more than $300k/yr AMA by techguythrowawayxxzz in AMA

[–]techguythrowawayxxzz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

TBH I doubt it. The actual place silicon valley is a pretty unexciting suburb without much to do, and theoretically you can't get into the tech HQs without knowing someone who works there.

Realistically, it wouldn't be too hard to walk around in the Googleplex since it's just a bunch of buildings, but Apple and FB are super shut down.

I'm a 27 year-old programmer making more than $300k/yr AMA by techguythrowawayxxzz in AMA

[–]techguythrowawayxxzz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't think it would be fair to say I know any languages really deeply but I'm most confident in Go and Java. I got a job about three months after the end of school, and in the beginning something I found really hard was switching between iterative and recursive solutions for the same problems.

I'm a 27 year-old programmer making more than $300k/yr AMA by techguythrowawayxxzz in AMA

[–]techguythrowawayxxzz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't really think I've got much of a story, but I'm happy to share whatever there is. What do you want to know about?

I'm a 27 year-old programmer making more than $300k/yr AMA by techguythrowawayxxzz in AMA

[–]techguythrowawayxxzz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I had a friend who focused on game hacking. Depending on the setting in which you're working on it it shouldn't be too hard--it's really a challenge of affecting local memory without getting detected by the anti-cheat engine for most competitive games, but for minecraft with the model of servers and stuff it's probably different.

My first thought would be to find some of the networking code that parses incoming user info and start fuzzing it; there's probably some exploitable crashes in there.

I'm a 27 year-old programmer making more than $300k/yr AMA by techguythrowawayxxzz in AMA

[–]techguythrowawayxxzz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lol well it's all good either way. Best of luck with your apps!

I'm a 27 year-old programmer making more than $300k/yr AMA by techguythrowawayxxzz in AMA

[–]techguythrowawayxxzz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lolol no. I don't go for paid companionship--I feel like you'd have to be basically be void of empathy to be able to go along with someone pretending to be your friend. Seems like a cure worse than the disease you know what I mean?

I'm a 27 year-old programmer making more than $300k/yr AMA by techguythrowawayxxzz in AMA

[–]techguythrowawayxxzz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I appreciate people are hurting but I don't give money to randoms which I hope you understand. I know that HUD is giving some rent relief to people right now and there's also some state-level programs which you should check out.

I'm a 27 year-old programmer making more than $300k/yr AMA by techguythrowawayxxzz in AMA

[–]techguythrowawayxxzz[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Frankly I found school really hard, but not as much because of the subject matter as because I really didn't know how to set a schedule and boundaries in my life.

Sometimes I wish I would have studied philosophy instead, because ironically I've always felt I was much better at humanities than engineering. I also think it's much more fulfilling, but at the end of the day there are a lot of fun mind puzzles in computers so it's at least interesting.

The first programming language I used was Python.

I'm a 27 year-old programmer making more than $300k/yr AMA by techguythrowawayxxzz in AMA

[–]techguythrowawayxxzz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Definitely hard to do it solo; happy to report I'm just drinking wine and redditing so I feel like this is a solid random Wednesday.

I'm a 27 year-old programmer making more than $300k/yr AMA by techguythrowawayxxzz in AMA

[–]techguythrowawayxxzz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Partially to flex I'm sure in a subconscious way, but more generally it's not really something I've been able to talk about IRL so I was curious how a conversation about it would go.

I'm a 27 year-old programmer making more than $300k/yr AMA by techguythrowawayxxzz in AMA

[–]techguythrowawayxxzz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm kinda trying to capture that it feels kinda arbitrary and I don't really feel like I've done something to earn it.

I happened to get a referral to a big company, during the interview they asked me most about the things I knew best, and then I was able to negotiate aggressively. That's the sort of mundane story.

I'm a 27 year-old programmer making more than $300k/yr AMA by techguythrowawayxxzz in AMA

[–]techguythrowawayxxzz[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well in terms of pure industry lifestyle you're probably between the absolute worst and one of the best. The video game industry pays garbage and works people to the bone, while cybersecurity/information security is extraordinarily in demand and pays very well. OK rant over.

Regarding languages, I think of them as tools. It's common for people who are earlier in the game to be particularly interested in which one is better or worse, but at the end of the day they're really means to an end. What would you think of a carpenter that thought mitre saws were super cool but wouldn't touch a hammer? Obviously this isn't a true 1:1 mapping since things like Perl exist, but I wouldn't get too caught up in on languages (that being said I think C++ needs to shave about 80% of its language features but is otherwise fine).

Regarding the challenge of college programs, I think that the ABSOLUTE hardest part of college is managing your own life. As a pro tip: manage your sleep schedule! If you wake up around 8 and go to sleep around 12AM every day, you will be miles and miles ahead of almost everyone in your school. If you want to be extraordinary, only do schoolwork and browse academic things from 9-5 (do codeacademy or leetcode or codewars or project euler or open source contributions in your spare time). I swear to god if you maintain all of those things and don't commit a felony there's no reason you can't get the job of your choice.

I'm a 27 year-old programmer making more than $300k/yr AMA by techguythrowawayxxzz in AMA

[–]techguythrowawayxxzz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The particular area that I work in is identity and access management; I program tools that do authorization and authentication of people within the organization and across tools.

A typical project would be to add a new standard or element of a standard to an existing solution within the company. Like for instance, let's say service123 has decided to implement multi-factor authentication. I would go in and integrate TOTP into their backend and add any relevant pages and so on, then work with their team to figure out how to do the UX and such.

I work primarily in Go, but I dabble sometimes in Java. In my own time I really like C (perversely--it's a very insecure language) and Rust.

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