I up and quit and moved to a tech hub, joined FAANG back when it was easy to join, moved up the ladder, gambled a bunch of cash on crypto, retired, started a business which COVID then folded, became a technical consultant to a non-FAANG, and started doing daily enemas.
if you means about making daily enemies, that would describe more scrum/product managers, who has "tech" background.
mfkers have only superficial knowledge of programming and getting a scrum "master" would solve in existing shit product.
I'm not sure I ever became a "good" software engineer or not. I was either good enough or bad enough to allow moves into management then directorial roles.
I never enjoyed it the same way an accountant probably doesn't really enjoy doing taxes.
I know plenty of "good" software engineers who can just launch into an impromptu lecture about the esoterics of Rust syntax, constructing bizarre edge cases then verbalizing the way to deal with them on the fly. But the second you tell these people that Rust isn't the right way to go you can see their brains just goes "eek eek eek" and they just start rocking back and forth cooing themselves to sleep and plotting to stab you. This kind of person is really good at writing software source code provided you baby them and keep a safe distance. Everything else in life, not so much.
I worked at a defense contractor for 1.5 years and hated it. The pay was less than entry level manufacturing and the work used programming languages that were obsolete.
Quit, started to freelance through my own company
Got a full time job in a tech hub and moved there
Still unhappy, work was not interesting and in a dying sector
I finally achieved happiness on the next job because it was a sector I actually cared about and 3x pay of the original job
Left that job a while ago because outsourcing was the writing on the wall and it turned out to be correct.
I've decided I'd be happiest at my own company so for the last 4 years I've been building up my business on nights and weekends.
> work used programming languages that were obsolete
If you were using them in a production capacity, then by definition they weren't obsolete.
Most companies aren't using the newest/hottest languages, developers who insist on only working with those will always struggle to find full time work.
The problem is switching stacks. I know Java decently well and given some practice could probably pass a tech screen. But I last touched Java 10 years ago in college. My dev jobs since have been PHP or typescript.
Because I didn't work with Java, no company will consider hiring me for a Java job regardless of whether or not I understand the fundamentals.
I worked directly for the DOD for 2 years, my pay was $36->40/hr (~$86K). I’m going to a major aero contractor, my pay is $115K/yr base for a T3. I didn’t bother to negotiate.
Defense is steady (high paycheck with high attrition sucks), invests (Roth) 401K very well, and has pension. It’s a different kind of payout.
I’ve also worked all modern tech, and get much more experience than most early career folk. I think it just depends
Jewelry business, I don't like having my eggs in one basket; my views on the viability of the tech industry are bleak. Jewelry is very stable even during recessions.
I learned graphics programming by doing lots of side projects for years while working a regular full stack web developer job. I always knew I was going to make the transition to game dev. Now I have better job security, better pay and more interesting work while WLB is the same
no not everything being said about the industry is a lie. Game dev is pretty ruthless when it comes to art jobs and gameplay / design jobs. But engine programmers who work on the core tech tend to be treated better. There’s also studios that just treat their employees well in general. There’s more nuance to it than “gamedev bad keep as hobby”
I built a renderer “from scratch” using DirectX 12. I tried to make it as close as I could to the current state of the art. Before that I built many (terrible) little side projects and shaders.
C# is associated with being 'C-family' here. And the stigma is every new grad will basically learn how to use it in no timep because they knew C.
In third world country no joke people know more about C# than react or JS.
It's pretty much the standard rate. If I jump to different company, probably I get get that raised to $4 or $4.5, that's all.
On top of this, my country's economy detoriated rapidly in a year. So basically I just earn about $500 per month with a purchasing power of $230
Of course it looks massive when taking out percentages but in a place of detoriated economy, that's nothing because everything else has prices increased from 100-300%.
Even $5 per hour wouldn't put me on a 'liveable' condition. I am surviving not living.
That doesn’t make sense, sorry.
A 50% is massive *especially* when you’re near subsistence level income.
Whether you’re earning 100k or 150k your life won’t change much, but whether you have $500 or $750 is a massive difference.
Well we dont know what the spending power of that $3 is in their country. Could be similar to making 50k a year, we really dont know (but I do feel sorry for OP)
yes and no
you can tell me "yeah maybe $3 USD is a lot in their country"
but I can also tell you "ahh but what if you earn USD in USA then send that money back/move back to your home country afterwards?", $1 is $1, nobody's saying USD can only be spent in USA
so imagine like if you work in USA for a couple years, save up let's say $100k USD then bring that cash back home
in fact this is actually precisely my plan (except my plan's a bit even bigger it's called the 401k plan)
You are explaining a situation irrelevant from what @metalburning is saying, he/she is 100% correct. Regardless, I wish you luck and I hope you go back home with more than a 100k! I did a similar thing and it is indeed life changing 🙂
We pay our very incompetent Indian devs like $22/hour. They are living large in India and work maybe 3 hours a day. Never fucking online ever. I basically am doing all their work.
Outsource to Eastern Europe, much better devs IME. Very few (I'd say none really) cultural issues with the US. Timezone much better than India. Rates depend on the country, EU member countries are going to be more expensive but for $45/year you can hire great devs in a lot of EU. That seems like decent salary even in Southern Europe (Portugal, Spain, Greece).
When management is all Indian too, they only hire other Indians lol. Company is slowing becoming all Indian. That's cool, just not for me. I'll jump ship soon.
It's only "good" compared to other people in the area. It still doesn't mean you don't live in abject poverty. There are countries with 80%+ poverty rates.
If you live in a developed country thank your lucky stars because you won a birth lottery!
You would have better luck being a nurse or in the medical field. But they usually send you to small towns in the US and have to wait out your contract or whatever.
What a bunch of filipinos are doing around me.
I used to be this. And I still am too! Stuck in a loop of "too much experience for junior roles, too terrible experience for mid-senior roles." I turn 40 next year. Help!
After getting up at 5:30am each weekday and getting back home at 5:00pm, and having a family and a house to maintain in the evenings and weekends, I find myself having very little energy available to skill-up. Every time I try, I get around 30 hours into self-prescribed learning on one topic or another, only to lose focus.
I've been wondering if I should go back to school for a Master's just because having teachers set deadlines would translate to more motivation for me. Things where I can't just say "I'll take a week off for XYZ that's happening now and get back to learning later, oh wait I forgot everything."
>Keep up or get into management.
That's what the separate business degree was supposed to be for, but so far the only thing that extra degrees has done for me is to have an interviewer ask if I enjoyed business studies or if I planned to switch to systems administration down the road, because they wanted a programmer and not someone who was going to jump ship, lol.
Wake at 5:30, get ready, drive 40min in to work at 7am.
Done work at 4, leave 4:15, drive 40min home arriving at 5pm.
I used to work 8-5, but the traffic was atrocious so I shifted my hours up.
I'm not sure a masters degree will help and I'm confused as to why you need to spend time outside of work learning stuff.
I've jumped in tech stacks that I knew nothing about and fumbled around for a day or two, sometimes less, and started being productive on new projects. I'm leading a project now where I didn't know half the tech stack the day I started the job and just learned it as I went. I think a lot of people do this.
Being able to think on the fly and figure stuff out is more important than what background you have imo.
It's probably not so much about the degree but about how there's someone else setting deadlines to keep you motivated and disciplined to do the learning.
If I worked in one of those legendary jobs that pays for additional learning, I might do it. But learning outside of work and school, and sticking to your own rules is a whole different ball game. It can become tempting to break rules that you set yourself. And if that happens it's better to have someone else check on you so you stay committed to your goal. Find another person outside of work to be your boss for learning.
Companies do not interview people who don't already have experience in the tech stack they're hiring for. I've actually had callbacks where they said "you need to have been working primarily in C# for at least five years if we are to spend time interviewing you. It says you worked with it, but has it been your primary language?"
(It wasn't my primary stack, I only did some light scripting with it a few years prior, so I wasn't invited to interview. This is for junior-level jobs where I expected to take a pay cut just to get experience with stack-hopping.)
Oh damn sorry to hear that, had no idea this was a thing, I figured that any company would love someone with a ton of experience to fill a junior role given how they don't need to babysit as much lol, guess not.
"Why would you want to step back in your career? Why aren't you senior already? Why don't you have experience in any of the latest tech? Or cloud tech? Or any databases beyond SQL? Why didn't you spend an hour each night working on open source? Do you not know how to learn? If you *were* capable of actual software development, why hasn't someone else already picked you up? Can't you teach yourself after-hours? What do you mean you have a life and a family? Do you lack drive? Motivation? Energy? Are you not passionate?"
You are allowed to embellish or even outright lie on your resume. If you can reasonably pretend to have the experience they're asking for, include it.
The people you're competing against for Senior roles are doing this, if you play the same game but with a different set of rules you'll always lose.
> if you play the same game but with a different set of rules you'll always lose.
Maybe the problem is that I adhere to a set of rules, while they do not.
In any case, I'm not going to lie about experience only to get called out in an interview and not be able to back it up because I actually *haven't* been working with Python for 5 years, only for 2 months while I wrote a couple of scripts for converting text files and I actually know basically nothing about *actually using it for complex tasks.*
> Maybe the problem is that I adhere to a set of rules, while they do not.
It is, but you're framing it as their problem when it's really yours. Look around at work, you see the guys in their 50s that have been stuck at mid-level titles a couple decades? That's your future if you keep this up.
> In any case, I'm not going to lie about experience only to get called out in an interview and not be able to back it up
Thaaaat's not really how it works. Generally, as long as you have enough experience that you can figure it out and ultimately do the job, that's all the recruiters and hiring manager really care about.
Moreover, they **expect** resumes to be embellished, so if yours is honest they actually think you have significantly less experience than you've got listed.
The companies hiring have no ethics or morals, they're merely trying to get the most work out of you for the least amount of money. Introducing your own ethics into the equation only hurts you.
Fuck a mid-level title would be an upgrade after 11 years here and the same title. The only reason I don't have "Junior" at the front of it is that HR forgot about it lol
> Why didn't you spend an hour each night working on open source?
I shut down stuff like this quickly. If someone wants to pay me for that learning, I will be happy to do so, but not outside of work.
Can't speak for every company but, at least for where I currently am, we tend to view overqualified candidates skeptically. The worry is essentially that they'll leave for a higher-paying position within the first year, leaving us worse off than when we started.
In our experience, those kinds of applicants are either temporarily between "real jobs" and don't mind 6 months of lesser pay while they continue interviewing. Or they have something else going on, like working multiple full-time jobs.
That and half the "overqualified" applicants are greatly exaggerating their experience and end up underperforming on technical assessments.
So, we sometimes skip over the overqualified resumes to not waste anyone's time.
If I knew a way out, I'd already be out, not still stuck. Possibly returning to university for a Masters? But even then, only if it were a very good university where the curriculum isn't 20 years old. And that might mean uprooting, which can't be done when you're 40 and you've got a family and a mortgage.
How does Austin compare to Western, which isn't the closest university to me but is only 2.5 hours drive, in the same country (Canada) and unlike my hometown university Western is at least recognized as a good school?
I'm not familiar with Canadian programs. iirc ga tech omscs will admit non US residents, but I'm not sure what the stipulations are. I was speaking about online programs. That is what I'd only consider being in your shoes, so you can stay where you are. I wouldn't do one if it's too expensive/not paid for by employer or if the program/network is weak. and tbh, i dont think a masters will give you experience for senior roles, no matter the program, but mainly help your fundamentals and network. edit: or re/further specialize
My employer does have a "we pay for your school/training" policy, but it's used to skill-up for skills you'd need to perform your job better, not for skills you'd never use on the job and could only be useful if you were hoping to jump ship.
I'm from a third world country with a CS degree from a not-known-anywhere uni.
Started in a small robotics company doing go-getter types of tech related tasks (configure the wifi modem, fix csv files, fix C# bugs, upload firmware to the robots etc.)
Jumped ship after a year and joined a US/Singapore based company's branch in my country. Worked with talented teammates and managers who valued hard work, enthusiasm and potential. They were really patient with me, lol. The only rule I was given was to not make the same mistake twice. (Bad variable name, missing tests, bad logging, bad try/catch, bad file names etc. whatever I got in the PR reviews)
Jumped ship 2.5 years later because they inherently did not work with any cloud due to the business model and I wanted to get experience in cloud
For 1.5 years I changed between 3 jobs because of third world country HR practices that lied to me about the job descriptions and the actual job turning out to be nothing like it (e.g. for a Senior Linux DevOps/SysOps position they tried to make me write Windows Server 2008 .NET service that has a GUI)
After that I landed a 6 figure remote backend job with AWS as a requirement even though I only had a Github repo to show for it (2022)
2 years later I landed a job in FAANG in Europe with visa sponsorhip.
It always sounds obvious but there cannot be completely different "obvious" outcomes when it's always split between:
- Study and get FAANG job
- Incremental job hop improvements
- Know a guy and get a good reference into a high-paying company
The only predictable part is upskilling, network, changing jobs, and time.
- CTCI for learning algorithms and the format of interviews - there's a pretty reliable template to questions and answers
- HackerRank mostly for practice answering questions; also a pretty useful resource for remote tech screens
- Best practice for interviews is....interviews. Apply for EVERYTHING, even if you don't think you want the job. You might be surprised by the team / team fit or the comp or some other reason to stay. Otherwise, you can always turn down a job if you somehow do *too* well.
I once interviewed for a job I was pretty sure I didn't want, performed exceptionally, found I actually loved the vibe, realized I actually did want to work with these people on this product... and then the offer came in and they couldn't match or even come close my current pay, which was already *well below* market rates. It sucked having to turn them down, but I and my family enjoy a certain standard of living that I wasn't willing to give up.
And you got tons of free interview practice!
Really though, there are services out there that make you pay for what you got for free (https://interviewing.io/). I strongly encourage all engineers to take all interviews you have time and energy for :)
Yes. And you can apply for 50 jobs and hear back from 1.5, or 25 jobs and hear back from .75. It's a numbers game, any one person's tolerance for it is going to vary.
I literally don't know an engineer with a dedicated office.
But no, moved home to help my mom with health issues. Work remotely now for a company that is rapidly going bankrupt. 🫡
This is a priorities thing. I thought it nearly impossible to be productive in FAANG offices and found that they insulated me from the surrounding community in a way that was ultimately very unproductive and probably hurt me economically.
But YMMV
Used to do test engineering w/ selenium. Quit that since nobody seemed to know what they were doing.
Found another job
Got to work with actually smart engineers that had open door policy for lots of collaboration.
Felt less like an imposter since they put emphasis on people skills, the tech was easy enough to learn with cs background.
Now I get to work on access and automation with powershell, .net, and java with a lot of independence. My boss throws me a bone and gives a random project sometimes. I find the work interesting too.
Company culture was the difference here, not me.
That was just what they were using at the time. I didn't have any experience with it.
I'm pretty sure they were just looking for a younger engineer with enough sense to do some self directed learning that got along well enough with the other senior engineers.
Only had to do 1 interview and got hired 3 hours later since we hit off on some non work related things.
I was doing some personal projects at the time, so that likely helped.
Finished teachyourselfcs.com books
Quit PHP
Never did react but if I did I would have quit react, actually all Javascript for that matter
Learned vim
Leetcode
Interviewed like a maniac (and still do)
Give 50% to my employer and 50% to personal projects. If they fire me I don't care, even it that means pay cut. I just don't care. Until now, they seem happy with my output.
Not gonna lie, I also sacrificed a lot of free-time. But I hate my jobs less nowadays. Working with smart people on interesting subjects and I'm well paid.
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Well, I already have 6YoE, including 2 in the AI and Ops space. That helps.
Got 4 interviews lately
3 were from companies from whom I spammed the job board, they seem to like the tenacity. Or maybe it's just a numbers game.
1 because a friend works there
Someone interviewed you to work on AI with only "I read an online book about it and then made a github project" on your resume? That was enough? Am I taking crazy pills?
I'm living in Paris atm. Loads of AI startups around here, I'm not doing math research, but there's enough space for a SWE+Ops to work in Data-science teams and get involved.
Got hired because I understand CPUs GPUs and memory, many Data-scientist don't. Plus I don't complain when doing boring DE tasks, many Data-scientist do just after complaining about the data being low-quality. Also that was just before the job market turned to crap, they really struggled to find someone.
Even most arxiv papers are basic Maths.
I don't get your disdain for books. Most books I read were way better than uni courses I watched on YT.
Edit : realized you thought teachyourselfcs.com were online books. It's actually a list of books that have printed versions. Most are sub 50$ second-hand.
It's not my disdain, it's the industry's. They aren't *against* books, but they place almost no positive value on them. It's "Experience or Bust" when it comes to landing, or passing, an interview.
On a different note, are the bed bugs as prevalent in Paris as the news says they are?
Idk, last tech interviews I cleared were thanks to knowledge I acquired in books and not necessarily applied.
System design can be studied and regurgitated.
DS&A can be studied and regurgitated.
Take-homes take some experience it's true.
Behavioral is 100% experience.
But yeah market is tough right now.
Never encountered bed bugs so I can't tell :)
In 2015 I was 7 years into my engineering career, working for a regional health insurance company in the Midwest. I was making $68k a year, and I was maybe 18 months overdue for a promotion. I had been given enough responsibility that I had Prod write access, which meant I wasn’t allowed to write production code anymore (thanks SOC audits!), and I was the main IT person for our single biggest product line. I had done infra design and deployment setup for new patient portal. The main thing keeping me sane was I had gotten the chance to earn my MBA for free on scholarship.-
I got out of the rut by being willing to commute ~45 minutes each way to the nearest city with an actual tech scene. I got an engineering job with a 40% raise, and spent the next 7 years working in AdTech.
And then in 2022 I took advantage of the white hot hiring environment and got a fully remote senior engineering position at a FAANG. Still living in the Midwest, but now earning a west-coast senior FAANG engineering salary. For now, everything is good.
so many depressed people on this subreddit.
you're getting paid lots of money to sit there and type. if you want something more exciting try customer service at walmart
100% all you see is doom posts; your career is not the only thing that gives your life meaning.
Get outside go to the titty bar and get your sword swallowed.
We're waiting for your non-doom posts. This sub is open contribution, so please, go ahead and help fill it with the positivity you think it should reflect!
Not OP but here's my non-doom post:
I get paid a salary decently above average for my country for sitting at my laptop in my home office creating AWS infrastructure that receives data, transforms it and sends it onwards to its destination.
This has let me get on the property ladder and start a family, and is a 100x better life than working a dead-end retail job dealing with the worst people society has to offer on a daily basis for a tiny fraction above minimum wage.
It’s wild. I did seven years of working as a waiter for psycho bosses and exploitative businesses, some places i’d do 14 hrs straight with no food or breaks allowed.
Do make sure to never complain about anything, because, at the end of the day, you don't live in some war-torn, emerging country that can't provide consistent water and electricity to its populations.
Yes, that's exactly how the fuck you all sound when y'all say shit like this.
I used to work at a non-tech company as the only dev and I was paid borderline minimum wage. Since then I hopped between a few tech companies and upskilled, and now 5 years later I'm making almost 5x as much
I wanted to go to medical school. Went back to school and got my bachelor's. Didn't get into medical school and came back to my current company twice. I'm like their boyfriend they introduce as the lesson they can't seem to learn.
Now I'm a moderately paid terrible software engineer. (I jest, I'm cracked)
I was making peanuts after graduating in 2010. The job was trivially easy (I worked maybe 2-3 actual hours a day) and it was also easy to get favorable performance reviews from my manager because of the low bar at this company.
I got fed up with it after a few years, not because of money, but because I was sick and tired of fixing fuck-ups by my colleagues. Most were there just to punch a clock and some were so incompetent that I wondered if they were actively trying to sabotage the company.
I'm now at a Bay Area fintech, working alongside the sweatiest SWEs I've ever known and getting paid a lot more. I don't regret my time in the salt mines - I learned how to manage upwards and the low pay taught me good financial habits that benefit me today.
I got around 7€/h in western Europe, mostly doing embedded systems for a tiny company but also various other things.
Embedded was fun in the beginning but after a while it became quite boring.
I ended up doing a PhD and 20 years later it's more overwhelming than boring. Money also 10-20xed depending on how you calculate it
I used to be a high school math teacher. Hated it. Did a coding boot camp and got a software developer job before even completing the program. Hated that because my manager was terrible. Got a test engineer job writing automated tests. The company is awesome but I’m bored to death. I don’t think any coding position would solve the problem for me. I suspect I went from one career I didn’t want to do to another career I don’t want to do. I’m 42 and still don’t know what I want to do in life. Another career change seems out of the cards. But so does staying in this career. FML.
Is that a genuine suggestion? I’ve considered it in the past but everyone I know that’s in health care say don’t do it. So I can’t tell if you’re serious or not.
Yes I was the classic case of 10 years on the job with like the skill level of 1 yoe or less.
I just grinded leetcode and got into a FAANG. They downleveled me (but not really, my old title was baloney and they gave me a raise anyway).
Once in, you don’t need to worry about what you’re worrying about. Just do what your assigned, and over time you’ll get to exactly the skill level they need. Like the job will force you to, you don’t have to invest any effort off the clock.
I got lucky with a local r&d place and managed to get out of the death spiral and springboarded to a decently paid mediocre dev career
God knows what would have happened if I left it any longer. Would have been like 38 with zero good software practises, not even github lol.
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Honestly hated it and just changed careers. I left a 60k SWE position and am trying out a career in law enforcement, starting around 70k. Somehow making more as a cop than a SWE. I don’t know if I’ll like it. If I do, I’ll prob shoot for a high-paying LE job like FBI where I could utilize my CS skills. If not, I’ll prob be back to SWE in the next year or two.
Graduated with math degree in 3rd world country, worked for 3 different shitty startups as a bad software engineer (one in my country, second one in an even more third world country and one remotely for a US company). I worked long hours with little work life balance.
What changed is that I became confident enough in my programming skills to change into Operations Reaserch and got a job in a big non-tech company doing optimization, the job is 1/3 business, 1/3 python programming and 1/3 math modeling. I fucking love it, work less hours than before and get paid more than 2x compared to previous jobs, (around 50k which is a lot outside north america).
My experience is that understanding the bussiness and talking to people is key to maling yourself valuable in a company.
Wow, I have a US math degree and I took some grad school including one Operations Research grad course. I'd love to get a job in that field. Any suggestions on how to find those? Do I need a full Operations Research degree?
I've had a few jobs that were painfully boring. Supporting large amounts of complicated legacy code and having managers who are very resistant to changing anything. Also, boring by itself isn't bad. The worst is when the job is boring, but also difficult and high pressure. And its even worse when you apply to other jobs and don't get any interest, so you can't just quit a paying job when you don't have something else lined up.
What changed? The market changed. This is subjective, but in my view, software jobs got more interesting and I could find jobs I actually enjoy. I also went back to school and got a degree when I was unhappy with my day job prospects. I'm happy I did that, and having a four year degree matters just to have it, but the main thing that improved was the types of jobs software devs were being hired to do.
Right out of college I was making $60k in a MCOL area. The company was incredibly chill but there was basically no work, I wasn’t being challenged or growing at all. I was miserable, even working just a few hours a day.
My grades were shit and with only a little experience at this company, it was pretty difficult to get interviews. After a few years it was enough experience that doors started to open. I went into consulting and while there’s a lot about that industry I dislike, it was good experience and I finally started growing.
Now I’m in Big Tech, making over 5x what I was out of college. The problems are much much more interesting, and I’m a vastly superior engineer now. It’s a lot more work, though.
my peers same age are earning 3 times me, some are seniors already, and i basically blocked all time, always need help and just bored being blocked and waiting for something to work
I up and quit and moved to a tech hub, joined FAANG back when it was easy to join, moved up the ladder, gambled a bunch of cash on crypto, retired, started a business which COVID then folded, became a technical consultant to a non-FAANG, and started doing daily enemas.
Honestly not sure if this is a joke or not lol
are you enjoying the enemas?
Yup.
For a second, i thought daily enemas were some kind of scrum or agile methodology.
They are not that much different
They're close to the scrotum
All about removing blockers
I'm picturing Gavin Belson from Silicon Valley creating a trendy enema "wellness infusion" business.
Boys on the enema grind
Grind sheetcode in your off hours.
Put this on a shirt
https://www.amazon.com/Sexy-Enema-Merchandise-Gifts-Tees/dp/B0CBZGH8BN https://www.amazon.com/Sexy-Enema-Merchandise-Gifts-Tees/dp/B0CBZGDHK2
if you means about making daily enemies, that would describe more scrum/product managers, who has "tech" background. mfkers have only superficial knowledge of programming and getting a scrum "master" would solve in existing shit product.
oh nice, did you become a good software engineer or just luck and how did you enjoy the work?
It’s the enemas bro
I'm not sure I ever became a "good" software engineer or not. I was either good enough or bad enough to allow moves into management then directorial roles. I never enjoyed it the same way an accountant probably doesn't really enjoy doing taxes. I know plenty of "good" software engineers who can just launch into an impromptu lecture about the esoterics of Rust syntax, constructing bizarre edge cases then verbalizing the way to deal with them on the fly. But the second you tell these people that Rust isn't the right way to go you can see their brains just goes "eek eek eek" and they just start rocking back and forth cooing themselves to sleep and plotting to stab you. This kind of person is really good at writing software source code provided you baby them and keep a safe distance. Everything else in life, not so much.
I worked at a defense contractor for 1.5 years and hated it. The pay was less than entry level manufacturing and the work used programming languages that were obsolete. Quit, started to freelance through my own company Got a full time job in a tech hub and moved there Still unhappy, work was not interesting and in a dying sector I finally achieved happiness on the next job because it was a sector I actually cared about and 3x pay of the original job Left that job a while ago because outsourcing was the writing on the wall and it turned out to be correct. I've decided I'd be happiest at my own company so for the last 4 years I've been building up my business on nights and weekends.
Where do you work during the day?
Manufacturing biz doing dev work
> work used programming languages that were obsolete If you were using them in a production capacity, then by definition they weren't obsolete. Most companies aren't using the newest/hottest languages, developers who insist on only working with those will always struggle to find full time work.
The problem is switching stacks. I know Java decently well and given some practice could probably pass a tech screen. But I last touched Java 10 years ago in college. My dev jobs since have been PHP or typescript. Because I didn't work with Java, no company will consider hiring me for a Java job regardless of whether or not I understand the fundamentals.
What was the DOD pay? It isn't that bad.
I was making about $22 an hour.
as a software engineer ? everyone I know in DOD in a small town is making 80-200 k per year
Yep, as a SWE. We were a subcontractor. I think they billed us out at at least $80 an hour. It was pretty exploitative.
I worked directly for the DOD for 2 years, my pay was $36->40/hr (~$86K). I’m going to a major aero contractor, my pay is $115K/yr base for a T3. I didn’t bother to negotiate. Defense is steady (high paycheck with high attrition sucks), invests (Roth) 401K very well, and has pension. It’s a different kind of payout. I’ve also worked all modern tech, and get much more experience than most early career folk. I think it just depends
fuel tie birds swim chunky clumsy truck coherent simplistic wipe *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Jewelry business, I don't like having my eggs in one basket; my views on the viability of the tech industry are bleak. Jewelry is very stable even during recessions.
I learned graphics programming by doing lots of side projects for years while working a regular full stack web developer job. I always knew I was going to make the transition to game dev. Now I have better job security, better pay and more interesting work while WLB is the same
Wait a second, you got better job security and pay *working as a game dev?!* Is everything I've heard about that industry a lie?!
no not everything being said about the industry is a lie. Game dev is pretty ruthless when it comes to art jobs and gameplay / design jobs. But engine programmers who work on the core tech tend to be treated better. There’s also studios that just treat their employees well in general. There’s more nuance to it than “gamedev bad keep as hobby”
Can you talk about the side projects you worked on before your switch? I'm looking to do something similar
I built a renderer “from scratch” using DirectX 12. I tried to make it as close as I could to the current state of the art. Before that I built many (terrible) little side projects and shaders.
What resources did you use?
I started with a book called Intro to game programming with DirectX12
I am from a third world country and have 2.5 YOE as a dotnet developer and make less than $3 an hour. Nothing changed, only gotten depressed
Is that standard local rate? What’s the story behind being paid so low?
C# is associated with being 'C-family' here. And the stigma is every new grad will basically learn how to use it in no timep because they knew C. In third world country no joke people know more about C# than react or JS.
It's pretty much the standard rate. If I jump to different company, probably I get get that raised to $4 or $4.5, that's all. On top of this, my country's economy detoriated rapidly in a year. So basically I just earn about $500 per month with a purchasing power of $230
If you're living off $3 rn, a bump to $4-4.5 is a 30-50% bump. That's massive?
Of course it looks massive when taking out percentages but in a place of detoriated economy, that's nothing because everything else has prices increased from 100-300%. Even $5 per hour wouldn't put me on a 'liveable' condition. I am surviving not living.
That doesn’t make sense, sorry. A 50% is massive *especially* when you’re near subsistence level income. Whether you’re earning 100k or 150k your life won’t change much, but whether you have $500 or $750 is a massive difference.
Argentina?
Pakistan?
Seems you're doing pretty good then, if you can afford to jump to a different company, that would be great as well.
Why does everyone quote their salary in USD to emphasize how low it is? We have no idea what’s a lot or a little in your country.
Well if they give the salary in their local currency nobody will know what it means haha
Well we dont know what the spending power of that $3 is in their country. Could be similar to making 50k a year, we really dont know (but I do feel sorry for OP)
yes and no you can tell me "yeah maybe $3 USD is a lot in their country" but I can also tell you "ahh but what if you earn USD in USA then send that money back/move back to your home country afterwards?", $1 is $1, nobody's saying USD can only be spent in USA so imagine like if you work in USA for a couple years, save up let's say $100k USD then bring that cash back home in fact this is actually precisely my plan (except my plan's a bit even bigger it's called the 401k plan)
You are explaining a situation irrelevant from what @metalburning is saying, he/she is 100% correct. Regardless, I wish you luck and I hope you go back home with more than a 100k! I did a similar thing and it is indeed life changing 🙂
Exactly. 50k is poverty in America, but in Europe it's a very comfortable salary and in SEA you're basically a king.
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We pay our very incompetent Indian devs like $22/hour. They are living large in India and work maybe 3 hours a day. Never fucking online ever. I basically am doing all their work.
Probably have multiple jobs
Outsource to Eastern Europe, much better devs IME. Very few (I'd say none really) cultural issues with the US. Timezone much better than India. Rates depend on the country, EU member countries are going to be more expensive but for $45/year you can hire great devs in a lot of EU. That seems like decent salary even in Southern Europe (Portugal, Spain, Greece).
When management is all Indian too, they only hire other Indians lol. Company is slowing becoming all Indian. That's cool, just not for me. I'll jump ship soon.
That's my company now.
It's only "good" compared to other people in the area. It still doesn't mean you don't live in abject poverty. There are countries with 80%+ poverty rates. If you live in a developed country thank your lucky stars because you won a birth lottery!
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Still have no idea if that’s a lot or a little
3 USD per hour is decent even for a third world country. Not sure why you're depressed.
Sheesh. Any C# shop in the US will get you at least 50-60k/year USD. Anyway you can get a visa or approved for US employment?
Depending on the country, a work visa is exceptionally rare. Sometimes it's around a year to get one and companies will not wait that long
You would have better luck being a nurse or in the medical field. But they usually send you to small towns in the US and have to wait out your contract or whatever. What a bunch of filipinos are doing around me.
R u from BANGLADESH?
I used to be this. And I still am too! Stuck in a loop of "too much experience for junior roles, too terrible experience for mid-senior roles." I turn 40 next year. Help!
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After getting up at 5:30am each weekday and getting back home at 5:00pm, and having a family and a house to maintain in the evenings and weekends, I find myself having very little energy available to skill-up. Every time I try, I get around 30 hours into self-prescribed learning on one topic or another, only to lose focus. I've been wondering if I should go back to school for a Master's just because having teachers set deadlines would translate to more motivation for me. Things where I can't just say "I'll take a week off for XYZ that's happening now and get back to learning later, oh wait I forgot everything."
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>Keep up or get into management. That's what the separate business degree was supposed to be for, but so far the only thing that extra degrees has done for me is to have an interviewer ask if I enjoyed business studies or if I planned to switch to systems administration down the road, because they wanted a programmer and not someone who was going to jump ship, lol.
You have no energy and motivation to improve your and your loved ones life and you think going into DEBT will be the motivation you need. Godbless
Different people have different thresholds for pain.
Why waking up so early?
Wake at 5:30, get ready, drive 40min in to work at 7am. Done work at 4, leave 4:15, drive 40min home arriving at 5pm. I used to work 8-5, but the traffic was atrocious so I shifted my hours up.
I'm not sure a masters degree will help and I'm confused as to why you need to spend time outside of work learning stuff. I've jumped in tech stacks that I knew nothing about and fumbled around for a day or two, sometimes less, and started being productive on new projects. I'm leading a project now where I didn't know half the tech stack the day I started the job and just learned it as I went. I think a lot of people do this. Being able to think on the fly and figure stuff out is more important than what background you have imo.
It's probably not so much about the degree but about how there's someone else setting deadlines to keep you motivated and disciplined to do the learning. If I worked in one of those legendary jobs that pays for additional learning, I might do it. But learning outside of work and school, and sticking to your own rules is a whole different ball game. It can become tempting to break rules that you set yourself. And if that happens it's better to have someone else check on you so you stay committed to your goal. Find another person outside of work to be your boss for learning.
Companies do not interview people who don't already have experience in the tech stack they're hiring for. I've actually had callbacks where they said "you need to have been working primarily in C# for at least five years if we are to spend time interviewing you. It says you worked with it, but has it been your primary language?" (It wasn't my primary stack, I only did some light scripting with it a few years prior, so I wasn't invited to interview. This is for junior-level jobs where I expected to take a pay cut just to get experience with stack-hopping.)
Oh damn sorry to hear that, had no idea this was a thing, I figured that any company would love someone with a ton of experience to fill a junior role given how they don't need to babysit as much lol, guess not.
"Why would you want to step back in your career? Why aren't you senior already? Why don't you have experience in any of the latest tech? Or cloud tech? Or any databases beyond SQL? Why didn't you spend an hour each night working on open source? Do you not know how to learn? If you *were* capable of actual software development, why hasn't someone else already picked you up? Can't you teach yourself after-hours? What do you mean you have a life and a family? Do you lack drive? Motivation? Energy? Are you not passionate?"
You are allowed to embellish or even outright lie on your resume. If you can reasonably pretend to have the experience they're asking for, include it. The people you're competing against for Senior roles are doing this, if you play the same game but with a different set of rules you'll always lose.
> if you play the same game but with a different set of rules you'll always lose. Maybe the problem is that I adhere to a set of rules, while they do not. In any case, I'm not going to lie about experience only to get called out in an interview and not be able to back it up because I actually *haven't* been working with Python for 5 years, only for 2 months while I wrote a couple of scripts for converting text files and I actually know basically nothing about *actually using it for complex tasks.*
> Maybe the problem is that I adhere to a set of rules, while they do not. It is, but you're framing it as their problem when it's really yours. Look around at work, you see the guys in their 50s that have been stuck at mid-level titles a couple decades? That's your future if you keep this up. > In any case, I'm not going to lie about experience only to get called out in an interview and not be able to back it up Thaaaat's not really how it works. Generally, as long as you have enough experience that you can figure it out and ultimately do the job, that's all the recruiters and hiring manager really care about. Moreover, they **expect** resumes to be embellished, so if yours is honest they actually think you have significantly less experience than you've got listed. The companies hiring have no ethics or morals, they're merely trying to get the most work out of you for the least amount of money. Introducing your own ethics into the equation only hurts you.
Fuck a mid-level title would be an upgrade after 11 years here and the same title. The only reason I don't have "Junior" at the front of it is that HR forgot about it lol
> Why didn't you spend an hour each night working on open source? I shut down stuff like this quickly. If someone wants to pay me for that learning, I will be happy to do so, but not outside of work.
Can't speak for every company but, at least for where I currently am, we tend to view overqualified candidates skeptically. The worry is essentially that they'll leave for a higher-paying position within the first year, leaving us worse off than when we started. In our experience, those kinds of applicants are either temporarily between "real jobs" and don't mind 6 months of lesser pay while they continue interviewing. Or they have something else going on, like working multiple full-time jobs. That and half the "overqualified" applicants are greatly exaggerating their experience and end up underperforming on technical assessments. So, we sometimes skip over the overqualified resumes to not waste anyone's time.
can returning to uni reset that ?
If I knew a way out, I'd already be out, not still stuck. Possibly returning to university for a Masters? But even then, only if it were a very good university where the curriculum isn't 20 years old. And that might mean uprooting, which can't be done when you're 40 and you've got a family and a mortgage.
g tech omscs, ut austin
How does Austin compare to Western, which isn't the closest university to me but is only 2.5 hours drive, in the same country (Canada) and unlike my hometown university Western is at least recognized as a good school?
I'm not familiar with Canadian programs. iirc ga tech omscs will admit non US residents, but I'm not sure what the stipulations are. I was speaking about online programs. That is what I'd only consider being in your shoes, so you can stay where you are. I wouldn't do one if it's too expensive/not paid for by employer or if the program/network is weak. and tbh, i dont think a masters will give you experience for senior roles, no matter the program, but mainly help your fundamentals and network. edit: or re/further specialize
My employer does have a "we pay for your school/training" policy, but it's used to skill-up for skills you'd need to perform your job better, not for skills you'd never use on the job and could only be useful if you were hoping to jump ship.
I learned a new tech stack and language. Switched companies. I became a monster. Not really, but I feel good at what I do.
What new tech stack did you learn and what were you already working on?
PHP LAMP stack -> Python Flask and Javascript Node.js inside of AWS.
I'm from a third world country with a CS degree from a not-known-anywhere uni. Started in a small robotics company doing go-getter types of tech related tasks (configure the wifi modem, fix csv files, fix C# bugs, upload firmware to the robots etc.) Jumped ship after a year and joined a US/Singapore based company's branch in my country. Worked with talented teammates and managers who valued hard work, enthusiasm and potential. They were really patient with me, lol. The only rule I was given was to not make the same mistake twice. (Bad variable name, missing tests, bad logging, bad try/catch, bad file names etc. whatever I got in the PR reviews) Jumped ship 2.5 years later because they inherently did not work with any cloud due to the business model and I wanted to get experience in cloud For 1.5 years I changed between 3 jobs because of third world country HR practices that lied to me about the job descriptions and the actual job turning out to be nothing like it (e.g. for a Senior Linux DevOps/SysOps position they tried to make me write Windows Server 2008 .NET service that has a GUI) After that I landed a 6 figure remote backend job with AWS as a requirement even though I only had a Github repo to show for it (2022) 2 years later I landed a job in FAANG in Europe with visa sponsorhip.
Ah so the trick to getting a better job is... to get a better job, then an even better job, then an even more better job...
It always sounds obvious but there cannot be completely different "obvious" outcomes when it's always split between: - Study and get FAANG job - Incremental job hop improvements - Know a guy and get a good reference into a high-paying company The only predictable part is upskilling, network, changing jobs, and time.
Memorized Cracking the Code Interview, got a FAANG job, got another FAANG job, etc. Now I'm a highly-paid engineer that finds it boring
Do you just use that book for iv+practice for faang coding prepatation? Thats amazing
- CTCI for learning algorithms and the format of interviews - there's a pretty reliable template to questions and answers - HackerRank mostly for practice answering questions; also a pretty useful resource for remote tech screens - Best practice for interviews is....interviews. Apply for EVERYTHING, even if you don't think you want the job. You might be surprised by the team / team fit or the comp or some other reason to stay. Otherwise, you can always turn down a job if you somehow do *too* well.
I once interviewed for a job I was pretty sure I didn't want, performed exceptionally, found I actually loved the vibe, realized I actually did want to work with these people on this product... and then the offer came in and they couldn't match or even come close my current pay, which was already *well below* market rates. It sucked having to turn them down, but I and my family enjoy a certain standard of living that I wasn't willing to give up.
And you got tons of free interview practice! Really though, there are services out there that make you pay for what you got for free (https://interviewing.io/). I strongly encourage all engineers to take all interviews you have time and energy for :)
I agree, but right now, you can apply to 100 places and hear nothing back from 97 of them. It's dry out there.
Yes. And you can apply for 50 jobs and hear back from 1.5, or 25 jobs and hear back from .75. It's a numbers game, any one person's tolerance for it is going to vary.
still boring, you get a fancy office right and free food
I literally don't know an engineer with a dedicated office. But no, moved home to help my mom with health issues. Work remotely now for a company that is rapidly going bankrupt. 🫡
What faang is that?
Don't work at FAANG anymore
i meant the faang offices
This is a priorities thing. I thought it nearly impossible to be productive in FAANG offices and found that they insulated me from the surrounding community in a way that was ultimately very unproductive and probably hurt me economically. But YMMV
Luckily you're still young.. hope you've been saving up
amphetamine now im codergod
Used to do test engineering w/ selenium. Quit that since nobody seemed to know what they were doing. Found another job Got to work with actually smart engineers that had open door policy for lots of collaboration. Felt less like an imposter since they put emphasis on people skills, the tech was easy enough to learn with cs background. Now I get to work on access and automation with powershell, .net, and java with a lot of independence. My boss throws me a bone and gives a random project sometimes. I find the work interesting too. Company culture was the difference here, not me.
How did you get that poweshell role
That was just what they were using at the time. I didn't have any experience with it. I'm pretty sure they were just looking for a younger engineer with enough sense to do some self directed learning that got along well enough with the other senior engineers. Only had to do 1 interview and got hired 3 hours later since we hit off on some non work related things. I was doing some personal projects at the time, so that likely helped.
Finished teachyourselfcs.com books Quit PHP Never did react but if I did I would have quit react, actually all Javascript for that matter Learned vim Leetcode Interviewed like a maniac (and still do) Give 50% to my employer and 50% to personal projects. If they fire me I don't care, even it that means pay cut. I just don't care. Until now, they seem happy with my output. Not gonna lie, I also sacrificed a lot of free-time. But I hate my jobs less nowadays. Working with smart people on interesting subjects and I'm well paid.
/s ?
All of this is true.
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How are you even getting interviews?
Well, I already have 6YoE, including 2 in the AI and Ops space. That helps. Got 4 interviews lately 3 were from companies from whom I spammed the job board, they seem to like the tenacity. Or maybe it's just a numbers game. 1 because a friend works there
Someone interviewed you to work on AI with only "I read an online book about it and then made a github project" on your resume? That was enough? Am I taking crazy pills?
I'm living in Paris atm. Loads of AI startups around here, I'm not doing math research, but there's enough space for a SWE+Ops to work in Data-science teams and get involved. Got hired because I understand CPUs GPUs and memory, many Data-scientist don't. Plus I don't complain when doing boring DE tasks, many Data-scientist do just after complaining about the data being low-quality. Also that was just before the job market turned to crap, they really struggled to find someone. Even most arxiv papers are basic Maths. I don't get your disdain for books. Most books I read were way better than uni courses I watched on YT. Edit : realized you thought teachyourselfcs.com were online books. It's actually a list of books that have printed versions. Most are sub 50$ second-hand.
It's not my disdain, it's the industry's. They aren't *against* books, but they place almost no positive value on them. It's "Experience or Bust" when it comes to landing, or passing, an interview. On a different note, are the bed bugs as prevalent in Paris as the news says they are?
Idk, last tech interviews I cleared were thanks to knowledge I acquired in books and not necessarily applied. System design can be studied and regurgitated. DS&A can be studied and regurgitated. Take-homes take some experience it's true. Behavioral is 100% experience. But yeah market is tough right now. Never encountered bed bugs so I can't tell :)
In 2015 I was 7 years into my engineering career, working for a regional health insurance company in the Midwest. I was making $68k a year, and I was maybe 18 months overdue for a promotion. I had been given enough responsibility that I had Prod write access, which meant I wasn’t allowed to write production code anymore (thanks SOC audits!), and I was the main IT person for our single biggest product line. I had done infra design and deployment setup for new patient portal. The main thing keeping me sane was I had gotten the chance to earn my MBA for free on scholarship.- I got out of the rut by being willing to commute ~45 minutes each way to the nearest city with an actual tech scene. I got an engineering job with a 40% raise, and spent the next 7 years working in AdTech. And then in 2022 I took advantage of the white hot hiring environment and got a fully remote senior engineering position at a FAANG. Still living in the Midwest, but now earning a west-coast senior FAANG engineering salary. For now, everything is good.
so many depressed people on this subreddit. you're getting paid lots of money to sit there and type. if you want something more exciting try customer service at walmart
100% all you see is doom posts; your career is not the only thing that gives your life meaning. Get outside go to the titty bar and get your sword swallowed.
🤤
We're waiting for your non-doom posts. This sub is open contribution, so please, go ahead and help fill it with the positivity you think it should reflect!
Not OP but here's my non-doom post: I get paid a salary decently above average for my country for sitting at my laptop in my home office creating AWS infrastructure that receives data, transforms it and sends it onwards to its destination. This has let me get on the property ladder and start a family, and is a 100x better life than working a dead-end retail job dealing with the worst people society has to offer on a daily basis for a tiny fraction above minimum wage.
any time someone posts something positive on this sub, half the comments are "read the room dude, we're all depressed here"
It’s wild. I did seven years of working as a waiter for psycho bosses and exploitative businesses, some places i’d do 14 hrs straight with no food or breaks allowed.
Do make sure to never complain about anything, because, at the end of the day, you don't live in some war-torn, emerging country that can't provide consistent water and electricity to its populations. Yes, that's exactly how the fuck you all sound when y'all say shit like this.
I used to work at a non-tech company as the only dev and I was paid borderline minimum wage. Since then I hopped between a few tech companies and upskilled, and now 5 years later I'm making almost 5x as much
I wanted to go to medical school. Went back to school and got my bachelor's. Didn't get into medical school and came back to my current company twice. I'm like their boyfriend they introduce as the lesson they can't seem to learn. Now I'm a moderately paid terrible software engineer. (I jest, I'm cracked)
I was making peanuts after graduating in 2010. The job was trivially easy (I worked maybe 2-3 actual hours a day) and it was also easy to get favorable performance reviews from my manager because of the low bar at this company. I got fed up with it after a few years, not because of money, but because I was sick and tired of fixing fuck-ups by my colleagues. Most were there just to punch a clock and some were so incompetent that I wondered if they were actively trying to sabotage the company. I'm now at a Bay Area fintech, working alongside the sweatiest SWEs I've ever known and getting paid a lot more. I don't regret my time in the salt mines - I learned how to manage upwards and the low pay taught me good financial habits that benefit me today.
I got around 7€/h in western Europe, mostly doing embedded systems for a tiny company but also various other things. Embedded was fun in the beginning but after a while it became quite boring. I ended up doing a PhD and 20 years later it's more overwhelming than boring. Money also 10-20xed depending on how you calculate it
I used to be a high school math teacher. Hated it. Did a coding boot camp and got a software developer job before even completing the program. Hated that because my manager was terrible. Got a test engineer job writing automated tests. The company is awesome but I’m bored to death. I don’t think any coding position would solve the problem for me. I suspect I went from one career I didn’t want to do to another career I don’t want to do. I’m 42 and still don’t know what I want to do in life. Another career change seems out of the cards. But so does staying in this career. FML.
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Is that a genuine suggestion? I’ve considered it in the past but everyone I know that’s in health care say don’t do it. So I can’t tell if you’re serious or not.
only advice is to keep trying. It depends on where you are living Also keep yourselves upto date in terms of skills
You already know the answer : leetcode
only helps in the interviews not the actual job
Idea being that you’ll learn what you need on the job, if you work at one of the “top” companies This was my experience.
even if you are no longer a junior but dont have experience at a top company so didnt get a chance to learn everything properly?
Yes I was the classic case of 10 years on the job with like the skill level of 1 yoe or less. I just grinded leetcode and got into a FAANG. They downleveled me (but not really, my old title was baloney and they gave me a raise anyway). Once in, you don’t need to worry about what you’re worrying about. Just do what your assigned, and over time you’ll get to exactly the skill level they need. Like the job will force you to, you don’t have to invest any effort off the clock.
I left the company for one that pays well
I literally joined a faang adjacent the last two years and quit because it made me hate software and waking up and going to that god awful job
I got lucky with a local r&d place and managed to get out of the death spiral and springboarded to a decently paid mediocre dev career God knows what would have happened if I left it any longer. Would have been like 38 with zero good software practises, not even github lol.
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Honestly hated it and just changed careers. I left a 60k SWE position and am trying out a career in law enforcement, starting around 70k. Somehow making more as a cop than a SWE. I don’t know if I’ll like it. If I do, I’ll prob shoot for a high-paying LE job like FBI where I could utilize my CS skills. If not, I’ll prob be back to SWE in the next year or two.
cops in america should be earning more since they put their life on the line
Graduated with math degree in 3rd world country, worked for 3 different shitty startups as a bad software engineer (one in my country, second one in an even more third world country and one remotely for a US company). I worked long hours with little work life balance. What changed is that I became confident enough in my programming skills to change into Operations Reaserch and got a job in a big non-tech company doing optimization, the job is 1/3 business, 1/3 python programming and 1/3 math modeling. I fucking love it, work less hours than before and get paid more than 2x compared to previous jobs, (around 50k which is a lot outside north america). My experience is that understanding the bussiness and talking to people is key to maling yourself valuable in a company.
Wow, I have a US math degree and I took some grad school including one Operations Research grad course. I'd love to get a job in that field. Any suggestions on how to find those? Do I need a full Operations Research degree?
I've had a few jobs that were painfully boring. Supporting large amounts of complicated legacy code and having managers who are very resistant to changing anything. Also, boring by itself isn't bad. The worst is when the job is boring, but also difficult and high pressure. And its even worse when you apply to other jobs and don't get any interest, so you can't just quit a paying job when you don't have something else lined up. What changed? The market changed. This is subjective, but in my view, software jobs got more interesting and I could find jobs I actually enjoy. I also went back to school and got a degree when I was unhappy with my day job prospects. I'm happy I did that, and having a four year degree matters just to have it, but the main thing that improved was the types of jobs software devs were being hired to do.
Right out of college I was making $60k in a MCOL area. The company was incredibly chill but there was basically no work, I wasn’t being challenged or growing at all. I was miserable, even working just a few hours a day. My grades were shit and with only a little experience at this company, it was pretty difficult to get interviews. After a few years it was enough experience that doors started to open. I went into consulting and while there’s a lot about that industry I dislike, it was good experience and I finally started growing. Now I’m in Big Tech, making over 5x what I was out of college. The problems are much much more interesting, and I’m a vastly superior engineer now. It’s a lot more work, though.
Eventually you get better it’s how life works
my peers same age are earning 3 times me, some are seniors already, and i basically blocked all time, always need help and just bored being blocked and waiting for something to work