const_voidWhat job do people take way too seriously?
SethranKadaProgramming. People treat it like a career, but fact is that unless your really good at it, your not going to make any money from it. I’ve found programming to be far more like art than work anyway.
Lettuce eat lettuceNot sure where you’re from, but here in the states, if you have a basic ability to code from a bootcamp or even self taught with a portfollio, you’ll pretty easily get hired making anywhere from 45-55k a year. And after about 2-4 years, you’ll pretty easily be making 70-90k sometimes more depending on where you live.
Maybe I’m biased since I recently started working as a software dev, but you don’t need to be really good to get a job as a programmer. I’m evidence of that.
Reading this, I’m not able to interpret what emotion applies here.
jtkSorry I typed this in a hurry. I just disagree with the statement and tried making a joke.
I got the joke, my response was in extension to it :)
Or any job. You underestimate how much any job is just being decent enough rather than amazing all of the time.
Yes I am fully aware of that. My point was that programming is just like any other job unlike what the guy I responded to seems to think.
Depends where you live, and what the job market is like. The demand for programmers goes up and down over the years, with various tech bubbles growing and popping. There are some job markets during high demand times when any programmer with any level of skill can get a good job, can name their own price and make good money, but at other times there is oversupply of programmers, thousands of graduates apply for every entry-level job, where hirers have the advantage, they can name the price and pick only the best of the best. I’ve personally seen both situations in my career.
I will admit, once you get a few years of professional experience on your resume, your chances of landing a good job and making good money goes way up. And yes, it definitely can be a career.
It can be like an artform if you let it be. Or it can be rote and robotic. There are choices in how you express your talents, and how you approach given problems. Lots of people make money from good art anyway.
OliverThat’s why I switched sides. From programming myself to developing functions and writing requirements which someone else can implement into code. :)
I could do some programming (did embedded C), but surely I wasn’t the very best in it. So now I’m the guy who defines what a small (but essential) part of SW has to do which will run in hopefully a few million cars in a couple of years. :) Much more fun (and money).
What’s your job called? I’m nowhere near your field, and am curious about y’alls org charts.
Business analyst I guess.
orizuruYou can still use programming to leverage your current position.
If you work admin in an office and are able to automate a bunch of workflows with some simple scripts, you’ll have more leverage when salary raises start to get discussed.
Will your code be at the level a professional programmer would produce? Probably not, but you’re not competing with one.
Hell the ability to write a basic sql SELECT statement alone opens a lot of doors.
proceeds to learn sql
By the way, SQL, sequel, or squeal?
Even better if you keep schtoom about it and automate your work from home job allowing you to just chill for most of the day.
Upvoted for use off British English word “schtoom,” a Yiddish loan word. I always thought Yiddish loan words were an American thing, thanks for the learning opportunity.
I consider programming skills a very valuable skill that unlocks many career options, but if your job is morning but pure programming, yeah most people are not cut out for it.
In an interesting and challenging field, yes, you need to be really good at it because everyone wants to do it. But if you are willing to work on anything, like an ASP.NET Web Forms site built in 2005, which the business entirely dependent upon to function in even the most basic capacity, with more technical debt than anyone would ever care to deal with, and no time allowed to refactor, you can make quite a nice living.
any money
Can you please define that? Being the Internet, some define it as US$1 or US$250,000.
It is a career, for sure. It can be hard to get into, but I’ve been in the industry for a long time and I have worked with people who have been paid a developer’s salary for years who were unbelievably bad at their jobs.
I used to manage a software team - once I was trying to explain something to a coworker and asked them to write some code to loop from 1 to 10 for me, and they couldn’t do it. I even prompted them by saying “you know, write a for loop” and they said that they kinda knew what for loop was, but they wouldn’t know how to write one. I asked them to give it their best shot, just write the word “for” and then see what flows from there, but they were just not able to proceed. I explained how to do it to them, and then they asked me what an int (integer) was… but I had already explained what an int was the day prior. This person had an honours degree in computer science.
I’d say there are a lot of developers who are barely competent at copy/pasting code from stack overflow until it works. Maybe 10-20% of the people in SMEs are that. The majority are pretty decent, but kinda lazy. Then there are the incredibly competent and hard-working people who are like gold dust. A really good developer who isn’t a complete drama king/queen, has good communication skills and just gets on with their work instead of getting sucked into personal pet projects is incredibly rare.
I’m sorry but there’s just no way that anecdote is true. I refuse to believe it.
Honestly, if anyone else had told me this story, I’d assume that they were either exaggerating or that they were being an asshole to the other person in a way that made them shut down and not really want to engage with them, but it’s as near to an accurate recollection as I can make it. I’ve taught programming to people from all walks of life, from 13 to 60+ years old, I’ve mentored quite a lot of devs, I’ve taken kids from “yeah I’m interested in computers, I like playing games” to senior developers, and while I’m sure that my teaching style may not be perfect for everyone, I’ve never once heard any complaints that I made someone feel stupid, belittled or like they couldn’t make mistakes. I always encourage people to be as honest and open about what they do/don’t understand because if someone says “I don’t get it” I can explain something in another way that might make it click. But yeah, that day when I had just been through the whole for-loop thing and he asked me about integers again, it was as close to just completely exasperated as I’ve ever been with mentoring someone. It was a surreal, groundhog day feeling, like I was sisyphus, and my boulder was explaining to a computer science graduate what a whole number was.
treadfulI used to manage a software team - once I was trying to explain something to a coworker and asked them to write some code to loop from 1 to 10 for me, and they couldn’t do it. I even prompted them by saying “you know, write a for loop” and they said that they kinda knew what for loop was, but they wouldn’t know how to write one. I asked them to give it their best shot, just write the word “for” and then see what flows from there, but they were just not able to proceed. I explained how to do it to them, and then they asked me what an int (integer) was… but I had already explained what an int was the day prior. This person had an honours degree in computer science.
Are you sure you managed the team? I’m joking, but how did this person get through an interview, let a lone survive so long working as a dev?
Haha, it’s a fair comment - it’s a team I inherited, it wasn’t my hiring decision. I don’t know what the interview process was like before me, but I’m guessing it was a very old fashioned “where do you see yourself in 5 years” affair.
I’m pretty sure that they just muddled through by copy/pasting stuff seemingly at random and tinkering until it worked. Which can be a good way to learn, for sure, but it’s not really what you want from a professional developer, full time.
The guy who managed the team before me didn’t believe in object oriented design, and not in a cool Haskell way, in a really old fashioned “I can do everything with batch scripts” way. The team was using a programming language that was so old that they were using dosbox to compile it because the compiler was a 16-bit application.
Because the compiler was a 16-bit application
Name the language, mate. This sounds a bit too insane to be true.
Yeah, it was called DataFlex. The vendor has released new versions of it called Visual DataFlex (VDF) and then renamed VDF back to DataFlex, but this language was what we called “character mode” DataFlex. It’s still used by the company as their main data entry application even today and a lot of their processes still are written in DataFlex. A lot of the work that my team did was rewriting a lot of the old crap in C#, but there was just so much of it built up over the decades.
Skilled work often is an art.
I sucked balls at programming and made six figures.
damn dude know your audience, you’re on Lemmy lol
exoplanetaryProfessional software developer here. It’s definitely a career.
I do agree it’s like art, it requires you to fit stuff together like a puzzle to get it to work. But I don’t think that makes it less of a “serious” career - there’s a lot of money in the field and as the world gets more and more invested in computing it’s become a very in-demand skill.
Vendetta9076Mate Im dogshit at programming and make plenty of money at it.
What crack are you smoking? There are thousands, probably millions, mediocre coders making 200k total comp+.
How did you come to that insane comment?
How did you come to that insane comment?
They took a few community college “video game programming” courses.
Chaotic EntropyMaybe if you are a freelance programmer working out of a coffee shop…?
PrettyBlackDressBeing a general manager at any retail outlet
it’s actually a blue collar job where they do quite a bit of physical labor, at least the good ones. I have more respect for that then a lot of white collar jobs.
You probably shouldn’t decide how much to respect someone for what job they do. Unless they do like a really sketchy or immoral “job”, like a hitman or a scammer or something.
I think the only reason to respect someone is for what they do.
What better measure is there, even if job is only part of that, better to form my opinion of people for what they do rather than the traditional historical measures.
A persons actions are important, but so are personality and motivations. A job isn’t “what someone does because that’s who they are as a person”, it’s the thing that they do because they need to pay their bills. It’s one thing that you know for sure that they have ulterior motives for - money.
I respect people for how they act towards me and others. Are they generous, or selfish? Do they admit when they’re wrong, or do they double down on it? When they have power over others, are they cruel, or are they kind?
This is way more important than what job someone has. Often, what job someone has only gives you a guesstimate as to how wealthy their parents were, and little beyond that.
Disagree, I think that the way someone decides to spend their time says a lot about them. Sometimes you just need to work for money, I get that, but often times people just do whatever they fell into because they’re too lazy to chase their dreams or do something actually beneficial for society
Dogshit take tbh
Clearly touched a nerve
Yes, gaslighting idiocy tends to touch a nerve when people are trying to have a good faith discussion 🤷
I think I’m being pretty reasonable. If anything, I stated my opinion and I’m being attacked for it. I’m not trying to play victim, but all the feedback I’ve gotten from this comment is hostile
I think I’m being pretty reasonable
Really? You think THIS is being reasonable?
because they’re too lazy to chase their dreams or do something actually beneficial for society
let me clue you in: it isn’t. It’s judgmental and makes unfair victim-blaming assumptions. It’s no wonder that people react with hostility to such a presumptuous and scornful take on people just doing their best to get by.
I clearly state that sometimes people gotta work just to get by and I respect that. But for many of us, especially here on lemmy who tend to be older, this isn’t the case. I get that it’s a touchy subject, no-one wants to be told they are lazy or that they’re living their life wrong, but I believe that there’s some truth to it. I don’t know what the sollution is, but I think admitting to it a society is the first step.
Because they need money to survive, and their parents can’t help them financially sp they cant get a degree in whatever field, even though every position in the field requires it?
I mention that sometimes this is the case and there’s nothing wrong with that. But you don’t necessarily need a degree to do meaningful work or to chase your dreams, just effort.
FullOfBallooonsOh god 100%.
This isn’t a matter of life or death, Nicole. This is a Disney Store in a mid-tier mall.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Assistant General Managers are even more serious and the sales people pick on them all the time.
Assistant to the General Manager.
Don’t you mean assistants TO the general manager? 😉
“Influencer”
BlizzardThe question was about jobs.
🇸🇵🇪🇨🇺🇱🇦🇹🇪🇷“Influencer” is a “job.” They didn’t mention getting paid.