The worst career choice I ever made was walking away from a six figure salary software development job with benefits to focus on the small startup I co-founded just a few years earlier. My wife and I had two small children at the time and my wife was also nearly 8 months pregnant with our third. It resulted in an approximate 70% reduction in income, prematurely cashed out 401k and loss of existing health insurance.

To be fair, it was also simultaneously the best career choice I ever made. Three years later I make more now than I originally walked away from. The raw roads of stress, anger, fear and complete uncertainty have aged both me and my wife at an accelerated rate but we have grown closer to each other than we would otherwise be. We have relied on each other, and she has been unbelievably supportive with all the late nights and required traveling. We discovered what we are capable of. In one day it will be October. In one day it will be the month that we finally pay off our last batch of credit card debt that resulted from that career choice.

I cannot recommend following in our footsteps as from where I’m sitting there are much better, more calculated ways of going about it. Logically, what we did was beyond stupid. Luckily for us, we were still young enough to not grasp the full magnitude of stupidity and we also refused to fail. It’s also crucial to have stellar business partners who are just as crazy and just as determined. We have all labored tremendously and we have each played critical roles in our success. The hard times of fear and uncertainty aren’t over. I don’t think they will ever be, to be honest. But, it sure has been one hell of a ride. I wouldn’t change a thing.

GF: Why are working so late?
Me: Because no matter what I do, everything is working correctly.
GF: What....

The only career when you have to work late because everything is working like it should (cannot reproduce an issue).

Yep. I worked at a place where my director and manager were true mysogynists. One day the director walks behind one of my subordinates and knees her in the back of the knees to make her fall back so that he can catch her. He does this in front the whole office. I told her that I had her back if she chose to complain. We went to our CO and laid everything out, and he was forced to take action. I was pulled aside and told that I would ruin my career if I went durn this path. I told them that it was more important to me to do the right thing. The director was forced to resign, the manager was reassigned to another location, and yes, my career suffered, especially in the area of promotion. But you know what? I'd do it again, because it was the right thing to do.

My favorite kind of interview question/challenge is anything that is highly practical for the job. At the current company I work, the coding test/interview challenge was to design and implement an API very similar to the core functionality of the actual product. It’s fair, tests for skills relevant to the job, and is much better than irrelevant silly brain teasers and cs questions, I feel.

In terms of specific questions, one of my favorites is one that one of my colleagues suggested I ask to potential candidates: describe what you think your biggest failed project/task was in your engineering career, and what happened/what you learned. I think it’s a good reflective question that can tell a lot about someone.

The exact moment when I understood what programming actually was.

I was getting hard times at my 3rd college grade, trying to implement the recursive sudoku solver in python. Teacher spent a lot of time trying to explain me things like referential transparency, recursion and returning the new value instead of modifying the old one and everything related. I just couldn't get it.

I was one of the least productive students, i couldn't even understand merge sort.

I was struggling with for loops and indexes, and then suddenly something clicked in my head, like someone flipped a switch, and i understood everything i was explained, all at once. It was like enlightenment, like pure magic.

I had sudoku solver implemented by the end of the lecture. Linked list, hash map, sets, social graphs, i got all of these implemented later, it wasn't a problem anymore. I later got an A for my diploma.

Thank you @dementiy, you were the reason for my career to blast off.

I had been a "hobby" programmer for well over a decade, with my primary career being in repair or a "technician". I had taught myself dozens of languages because it was fun, but never really accomplished much.

I was laid off from my job as a technician and I found myself listless and without purpose. I started doing development again on random things to pass the time and I ended up volunteering as a developer for a game I had played for years.

At the same time I had an uncle who encouraged me to consider software as a career. These two things gave me the confidence to apply for a local software job I saw on Indeed.

They called me pretty quickly, and I was brutally honest. "No, I don't have a degree. I'm self-taught. I have no professional experience really."

I got a proficiency exam anyway and I took it - apparently doing well enough on it that the CTO called me a week later. We had a long talk and I finally asked him why he called me.

He told me that while a degree means something, the passion to learn this job means more to him. It was a month before I was offered the position, and I graciously accepted it.

We had a call about my compensation before starting. It was rather low, but we both agreed that my skill level was quite an unknown.

A year later and my pay was bumped up a sizable amount. My skills are defined now and growing rapidly as new challenges are sent my way. I went from a naive hobbyist to a professional in a short period of time.

I realized that I was always a professional. I had a desire to learn and a desire to do things the right way. I may not have known what to call things. I didn't know some of the design patterns I had used over the years were standards that had names and meaning.

I basically work two jobs now. My full-time job and also on the game that helped propel my career forward and gave me the confidence to reach for it.

As for my hobby? I turned to electronics and the maker community. It's a nice marriage with my programming skill set, and I never knew how rewarding a blinking LED would be. :)

A very experienced PM/WebDev came to us. His resume was fantastic but a bit strange. He wrote he had been working for 15 years but his experience in C# was 18 years. Though I was sceptical about this guy, others expected him to be a .NET guru. So, the interview began. The candidate described his brilliant career, then he said he wanted to move forward as a programmer and work with the newest technologies. It wasn't easy to ask him basic questions but they were in the list, so we needed to start with questions for juniors. I asked him to tell us about value types and reference types, and the answer was: about what? I repeated the question, and he said he didn't know about such complex things. I knew his resume was strange but I was disappointed. It turned out that our candidate didn't know C# at all.

"Kiki, I want you to, for the first time of your career at %company%, quit worrying about deadlines and just wander free. Forget about due projects, forget about everything, and just do your crazy experiments till the end of this month."

This was the one-to-one with our CEO today. Yes, I'm being paid to do whatever I want without time restrictions, as long as it is related to my field.

And you know what? At this stage of my life, I don't even want to exploit that, to weasel my way around definitions and justify doing nothing. I legit have three AI experiments to run, I have money to run them, I have time, and I for sure have motivation.

Good workplace is when doing nothing isn't the most desirable thing to do.

Absolute asshat level clownly clownshipness:

Manager: Why is this like this? 🤡

fullStackClown: ...Because you defined the feature like this.

Manager: Hmmmmm ok... what about this? Why is this like this? 🤡

fullStackClown: ...Because you defined the feature like this.

Manager: Hmmmmm ok... and then this thing here? Why is this like this? 🤡

fullStackClown: Well, I hate to tell you, but it's a huge surprise. Guess what?! BECAUSE YOU DEFINED THE FEATURE LIKE THIS!!!

Manager: ... 🤡

fullStackClown: Any other absolute asinine questions to ask me to continue breaking me from flow?

Manager: ... 🤡

fullStackClown: ...

To those interested, I believe there is an evolution of my devRant career in order... I'm passing the clown phase... and entering the full-on circus phase...

Honestly? People. For the first two years of my career I worked for an investment bank.. Basically working to make rich people richer. That, plus the technology sucked, made me change what I do.

I now work for a company that, while it doesn't cure cancer, it makes products that my friends use, my family uses, even my 1 year old son uses. And knowing I am making a difference in their life in even just a little way is worth it.

Also now that I have a family and a kid, my priorities have shifted and as much as I love coding, my family and kid will always come first now. Could I be making more at an investment bank where I worked 12 hour shifts every day? Sure. But it's not worth it to me.

That moment when your at a career fair and a non-tech recruiter won't hire you because you don't have the paper experience but the tech recruiter is questioning a guy with "5 years of Java experience" who can't answer what an anonymous inner class is.

I was told there's gonna be:
- good salaries
- informal company setups with benefits
- lots of jobs available
- non-dev people look at you in amazement
- get to work on really interesting stuff

What I'm actually doing:
- carrying a team of people in uni because you're the only one who knows how to code
- deal with shitty uncommented legacy code at work
- be reminded that if you don't do something super-sophisticated you're easily replaceable
- spend unpaid overtime hours because you're the only one at your job that is on the issue (I see a pattern of being alone in a problem here)
- requestion all my career decisions
- cry and be stressed
- hate every minute of work, yet be stuck in it because it's a source of income that is flexible enough for me to be able to study full-time

So dunno man, I'm still waiting on what I've been told, people say there's lotsa money and satisfaction waiting for me after grinding through 5 years of high education, it'd better be worth it

So today was the worst day of my whole (just started) career.

We have a huge client like 700k users. Two weeks ago we migrated all their services to our aws infrastructure. I basically did most of the work because I'm the most skilled in it (not sure anymore).

Today I discovered:
- Mail cron was configured the wrong way so 3000 emails where waiting to be sent.
- The elastic search service wasn't yet whitelisted so didn't work for two weeks.
- The cron which syncs data between production db en testing db only partly worked.

Just fucking end me. Makes me wonder what other things are broken. I still have a lot to learn... And I might have fucked their trust in me for a bit.

My career is going well. I was really prepared for a small inconsequential raise. But my manager literally doubled what I was expecting (was expecting just inflation match). Awesome 😆 now time to rapidly build a real proper emergency fund and my savings faster than ever

Let's portray Stallman as a malevolent criminal, dying on the creepiest hill, shall we? Apparently there's even people that make statements such as "if you defend RMS, you're just as terrible as he is".

Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Do you have any idea what the case even is?
Richard Stallman has a controversial opinion about a rape case committed by someone else. Gee, what a shocker, people have opinions. Does that make Stallman a criminal himself?

Oh but he's representing open source software. That's why he can't be there.
Oh yeah. Shunning him (and erroneously so) as another Reiser is gonna make open source look so good, isn't it.

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
- Evelyn Beatrice Hall, writer of Voltaire

People are entitled to any opinion they may have. Just because you disagree with it (and in this case I do too!) does not mean that it can be used to criminalize someone and to ruin their career. That is just wrong.

Favorite/most hated language? (I love a good flame war)

Why did you quit your previous job / Moment you've considered quitting your current job?

Why do you think Linux is so much better than OSX? (Ahh yes I feed on apple flavored hipster tears)

What side project are you currently working on?

If you had the best teams and unlimited funds, to be used only on a serious project using both Blockchain, IoT and AI, what would you create?

If you forgot how to code, what other career would you pursue?

What is your "I was so busy wondering if I could, that I forgot whether I should" concept/idea/project?

How many chicken eggs would fit inside the moon if it was hollow? (I like retarded interview questions)

If you started a startup, what unique perk would you offer your developer employees?

Do you under- or overengineer?

Most unnecessary feature you ever had to create?

Most necessary feature your boss/client denied to approve?

When I was a little boy my father who was an entrepreneur back then hired a computer programmer to develop some kind of administrative software for him. He was programming on the Commodore VIC20. I was very interested in what he was doing and he gave me some books about programming basic on the VIC20. I read them, started programming and I've been hooked ever since!

As I do still remember this man's name I searched on the internet now and then to see if I could find him. End of last year I found him on FB and wrote him a message to thank him for what he did back then. It's because of him that I found out what I love doing most and have a great working career and life because I do what I love to do and get paid very well for it.

Thanks, mr. Stomp!

New spin on the Manager / Dev format!

Recuiter: WE NEED AN ABSOLUTE NODE EXPERT, NODE NODE NODE, WE LOVE NODE! WHAT IS YOUR NODE EXPERIENCE?!?!

Dev: Well I've had exposure to it since it was nearly new, all the way back in 2012, and since my professional career started about 7 years ago I've used it fairly often on a per-project basis.

Recruiter: WELL HAVE YOU BEEN USING IT DAILY FOR THE PAST 5 YEARS!?!

Dev: Well no, as I said I've used it for specific projects... anyway, there are these things called weekends...

Recruiter: WELL WE ONLY WANT NODE ZOMBIES SO SORRY.

Dev: Thanks for reaching out and wasting my time.

Recruiter: ...

Dev: ...

God recruiters are like robots, don't they understand senior-level engineers are language agnostic?

What one piece of advice would you give to a developer starting their career?

A company called me for a job interview for my internship. As they saw my LinkedIn, they said I had a great skill set built up as I was studying Software Engineering and working aside as a freelancer.

After a short talk they mentioned my international business management (IBMS) minor that I have taken and criticized me that I took a wrong path of my career, told me to rethink my position of my studies and said they will not take me into consideration for the position.

That left me puzzled. Like what was the reason of that call, just to criticize my decisions?

Can't remember the company name that called me here in The Netherlands.

!dev but definitely rant

Here's a fucking thought:
How is holding women over different standards at events and (non-physical) competitions (hackathons especially, somehow) NOT widely considered sexist? I don't even mean towards men - yes, of course.
But also towards women: By preferring their results in some competitions in order to "support them", you implicitly degrade them to be small children in need for praise. You imply that you expect them to perform worse. By "women-first" PR bullshit, you do what you claim to be against. Fuck you.

Why can't we just hold everyone to the same fucking standards? Women can be just as good in tech as men, when interested. I would even make a point that these different standards hold back women from trying to get into any tech-related career.

Just blowing off steam with y'all. It will sound confused, but it's just all of my depressive thoughts mashed up in a rant.

So, here I am.

Surrounded by incompetent professors who are unable to point me in the right direction, that rarely even know what they are 'teaching'. In a moment of total loss, that has been lasting for months. Totally lost my motivation and my will to pursue a career in IT. All I do is game, eat, sleep, repeat. I am exhausted mentally. When I get back from school, I can't think of anything else but to relax and do nothing. I am frustrated. I care about becoming a programmer, but I can't find my inner strenght. School draws all of my strenght and willpower away from me, and therefore I get distracted very easily. I just do not know what to do anymore. I want to keep going, but I am stuck, unable to do so. "Perhaps this is just not for me" is what keeps resounding inside my head, but I do not truly believe it. I just wish that all of this stress would just disappear, and allow me to do what I care about. I need help to find the needed focus to continue.

At a point in your life, you'll settle down abit, and you start to think about what you've done in the past (idk) years of your life.

Then you think about your career, how everything is ever since you discovered you were good at a certain thing since highschool.

be it programing, writing random codes, pentesting (or if you had that "hacker" phase in your life) or fixing laptops and etc.

"Good"

You think about the word, and you had a thought: You only know how to do it, how it works, how its done, and how to do it.

You only "Know", it takes practice, patience, dedication and years (or months depends on you) of experience before you can really say for sure you're "Good" at it.

Me? Im no where near good. but that doesn't stop me from going there.

And i hope the same goes for you. You can do it,

Have a great day.

1. Hit everything you do. You will learn more faster. Don't accept things at face value, care about why things work.

2. Study and experiment constantly. Be aware of your surroundings and what is going on. If you're not ready with a solution when a power vacuum appears, you will always be a grunt. Or worse, eventually a manager who everyone hates because you constantly tell the people who report to you how "back in your day," your code was amazing, there were no bugs and your shit doesn't stink.

3. Be honest with yourself: If you just want to keep your nose to the grindstone and make manager so you don't have to code anymore:

Quit. Stop now. Do not pass go, do not become a cancer on the industry.

Go get a job as a PM, you'll have a better career and you won't be the weak link holding everyone else back.

Tl;dr When the shit goes down, you better be ready.

The past few weeks were not so good to me, but guess what, I got hired today. And now, i'm thankful that i got rejected from the previous ones. Wish me luck on my career as a junior dev. :)

MENTORS - MY STORY (Part I)

I've had several great mentors during my career. This is the story of the three most important.

1.- Professor E.
When I was on my first year (University - Computer Science), all my professors were 'normal' except for this one.

E. was the Programming I - Laboratory professor. And the most important thing he teached us was to think. To be independent, and to look for answers beyond simple solutions.

He was always pushing us beyond what was requested and to try new things, to try to improve our own solutions and to look at them as always improvable.

In a regular class, this would happen:
Student: Hey E. How can I do this X requirement?
E.: Use function xyz with A and B parameters.
S: Ok thanks...

...10 minutes later...

S: Hey E. that function doesn't work very good for my case.
E.: You have a book, you have internet connection. Don't waste 10 minutes trying to abide what I told you. Investigate, find a way or even a better way; use your resources.

Other example, in the first year all projects were requested to be delivered with text based interface (console projects).
What about E.?
"Well, you CAN deliver your project with a text based interface BUT you definitely SHOULD try to make a GUI, something simple but effective. Just so you learn more in the process"

Good E. He gave me strong foundations for this industry.

Recent life lessons:
◆ Do not buy a domain name without obfuscating your contact information, lest you want to be harried by people offering to provide their services to “grow your business”

◆ Do not change descriptions on your most recent experience that’s set to be ongoing on LinkedIn without making note of the “notify your followers” toggle, lest you wish LinkedIn to post on your behalf a message urging people to congratulate you on your new position. A post which you cannae delete. And lo, if you comment upon it urging well-wishers to not comment upon it or offer congratulations as it is not what it appears, witness the lack of good that doth do. Resort to canned response to DMs explaining the situation and urging the well-wisher to learn from your misfortune. (I find it really difficult to not politely respond to folk. It was a good two days of like 50+ messages.)

◆ If you have a career coach that tells you to connect to as many people as possible on LinkedIn and accept connection requests, perhaps just don’t follow that advice. My second career coach was like “That doesn’t even make sense” “I KNOW!” ... I have so many LinkedIn connections. But I cannae just prune the list because it would take for freaking ever to figure out who was who and who I really still wanted to connect with. *sigh* 900+ is too many. And I have over 100 requests I haven’t even gotten around to looking at.

Being me. Fresh out of UNI with a three year bachelor in CS, no work experience. Starts in a big tech company with a lot promise of exciting project etc. Starts in 3 projects with one lead dev and two senior devs.

First month begins. I start by setting up my local environment and read documentations, which is fairly irrelevant and old. One of the senior devs quits.

Second month begins. Lead dev quits as well and the other senior dev having sick leave for the rest of the month. Basically I'm on my own, but thankfully not responsible for the projects.

Third month begins. The other senior dev is still sick. Nobody to help. Now I'm forced to talk to customer with a lacking knowledge of projects. Nobody knows what is going on. Hopefully my other senior dev will come back.

Fourth month begins. My senior have quit as well. I've been assigned as responsible of all three projects now. FML.

Fifth month begins. I begged my manager for help. Got a junior dev to help me with one of the projects. He and I still have no clue what we should do.

What a shitty start to a career as a developer.

Anybody having a similar experience?

take a walk!
take a naps!

The ONE thing that has had the biggest impact in my career is likely walks and naps.

Some years ago out frustration I decided to pause a project and took a walk (or a nap, I don't remember) and 30 mins later I had a clearer idea of what to test next, a possible solution or something...

Nowadays I don't wait at all to be frustrated, way before that, when I feel myself spinning my wheels, slightly stuck, or just a little slower than what I usually am, I just stop right there and take either a walk or a nap. I can't count all the times in which I've come up with solutions/alternatives/approaches/etc. to problems/tasks/etc.

So now walking and napping IS part of my work. I'll get familiar with the problem, or spent some time understanding the goal and then I'll go for a walk or take a nap. And my career keeps progressing, I'm less likely to snap, haven't been anywhere near burnout for years, raises, and other great stuff, and a huge part of it I attribute it to taking walks and naps!

Give it a try!

I got my first offer letter and they gave me more than my asking salary. I have been waiting for a year and half for this moment. Nothing can kill this feeling. I have been doing jobs I hate for my whole life. And finally I am able to do what I want and kick off my career. This is awesome.

JIT Learning. Just in time Learning. You Don't need read a book from cover to cover. YAGNI. Many technical books talk about topics that you might never need in your career. Focus on what you need to know after making a plan for what you want to achieve.

YAGNI applies to coding as well. Don't create a class or a method just because you Might need it later. Create them only when necessary. This keeps your code cleaner and there is less to test.

Prior to becoming a dev, one of my numerous jobs was working at Quiznos. They would often send me outside in the cup costume where I would dance around like a fool.

People would throw things...

What was your pre-dev "career"?

The best mentors I had were the people at the company where I started working.

I was doing my master thesis, bored like hell writing about someone else's idea. I decided to drop out and do a 10 week apprenticeship at this company. They had been my mentors in a university project and thought it would be nice to see what I could learn from them. I wasn't wrong.

During that time they taught me Ruby, JavaScript, Angular, Node and Git. They taught me about coding standards and how to write better, more maintainable code. They inspired me to keep learning and also to share my knowledge. In the end I didn't stay there, but they helped me get my first real job.

If it weren't for those 10 weeks my career would have been a lot different. I wouldn't be the developer I am today without them and I'm forever grateful.

Just wanted to leave a little encouragement that can be hard to find on a 'rant' board: As a 40 year old dev doing this for 16 or more years... I'm not jaded, I still have a burning enthusiasm for software dev, I'm lucky to be able to pursue this career. Have I been in some shitty situations and health damaging levels of stress? Yes at times, and I've ranted about them here. This career isn't an easy ride, ultimately there's a reason it's well paid - for all of its physical ease it's mentally and often emotionally hard. But, I still find the highs match the lows, there's still thrill in the chase to make the project and product work right. Only advice I would give is be prepared to shift down a career gear for a while when you have kids. That shit is hard. Keep having fun people, we work with machines that extend and force-multiply our minds, what a time to be alive!

I need to share this with someone:

I've been using this app for months, maybe an year, without contributing cuz I didn't have anything really valueable to say.

Generaly, my girlfriend and family work at the beach in summer and they need my help but than again I can find the perfect career starting intern which will be worth perspectively at that time.

Why the fuck is my family doing this to me. They obviously need help but I am delaying my career for two years now because of that but after all, family is my treasure and it's more valueable than a career, there will always be internships but what stops me from spending a decade more and still be making the same mistake, but if I don't go I might break up with my gf and mess family things even more I don't want that, what would you do ?

!dev

I come from a small shitty valley where all that people want to achieve is getting approved for loans to buy more cows and shit.. My only friend comes from there as well but he’s different, more like me.. build a life, get out and pursuit something better and bigger..
We grew up smoking everything we could and drinking everything we got because what else are we gonna do, put shit on fire? Been there, done that.. it sucks growing up on the poop hole of the world.
We both left that shithole and started careers but he’s throwing it all out the window.. he’s getting caught with weed, DUI and shit. just a few years ago he got off of more serious drugs.. He built a career and shit for about 10 years but right now he’s just throwing it all away because drugs are in his comfort zone. But he has to go give Pias samples for a while now and if he doesn’t stop he is not getting his license back and the unemployment insurance won’t even pay him because (although he lost the job because of Covid) they said it’s because he smokes weed.
Without the license goes his career as he’s a service electrician.

So fucking hurtful to see, man.
And so hard to accept that he won’t listen and than I’m not his dad who can tell him what to do..

90% of the kids I grew up with who managed to leave that shit hole ended up as homeless junkies.. I guess I’m happy to have the mindset to not end up like them.. and that’s really all it is, the mindset is the only difference (which is complex in itself of course like parenting and stuff)

So I decided to get a master degree at my capital city (I got my first degree from my small hometown), and decided to get a job as a junior developers. I tried for an easier job like starbucks or something but apparently all of them turn me down as soon as they asked “What major you graduated from ?”

Never though I would start a career in software developing. Any tips I need to know about this job? (I can actually code quite well and my class starts at night)

One of my colleagues held a very short, literally 5 minutes, interview today. The candidate was looking for an android developer position.

Me: Done already?😕
C: Yep. Had enough.
Me: How come?
C: I asked him if he has any apps on the store? No. Any public git? No. Any apk? No.
C: Ok what experience do you have?
Dude: I worked on a app similar to imdb 4 years ago. I made a page for it.
C: *Page* *triggered* *internal screaming* 😂
C: Ok and since then?
Dude: Nothing.
C; Ok, we'll call you.

Best ot luck in your android dev career mate. Never gonna hear from us.

How can you come to an interview and be so unprepared. Was he delosutional or something?😕

Some of these things have been probably mentioned already in some way, but I'd like to add my two cents nevertheless
I grew up in Germany and have been in the German school system for my whole "school career" and what I always missed was a computer/programming related subject. (A real one, not this thing where they teach how to use MS Office) Something that would have pushed me a bit more into this world of technology and programming way earlier, because I didn't know which possibilities I had. It doesn't happen often that I think that something is better in Slovakia but I have to say that in Slovakia they are teaching CS in standard schools from the age of 11or 12 I think. I don't exactly know what they teach there, maybe it's shit, but it's something at least. I know that most people swear on teaching themselves programming and all but there are people like me who struggle with that.
Then of course I'd like to see the teaching get better. They should teach the useful stuff and focus on practical experience.

This happened when I finished highschool.

I was looking for a programming related career at university, and I had two options: Computer systems engineering or Software engineering. I commented this to my mom.

Me: Mom, this university offers Software engineering. The thing is that the campus is 1 hour from the city and it’s a new career, so I don’t know if it’s a good idea or not.
Mom: Why Software engineering? Don’t you want to be a developer?
Me: Yes, that’s why I was thinking of taking Software engineering
...
Mom: Is not “Software” what is inside the computer? (Inside the chasis on desktop computers)

I started laughing so hard 😂 and, of course, I ran away

Regardless of your education, your career will almost certainly start with a low-paying job that's not really what you want to do. You'll do that for a year or two, and move to a job that's a little closer to what you want. Until after 10-15 years, you'll be doing work that actually interests you.

Almost every career starts with a period of what American blues musicians call, "paying your dues."

!rant

I’m curious about the age of tech workers, and what they do career wise as they approach 40, 50, and beyond.

I’m young and benefit from it right now, but the ageism seems strong in this industry and I won’t be young forever.

Does anyone here have a tech career in their 40s+ and if so what advice would you offer to a younger generation of technology professionals to maintain relevance and a satisfying career?

I am a 29 year old with about 10 years of development experience under my belt. I have what most would consider to be a senior level job that pays well for someone who is self taught and never attended college or university.

Recently I have had the urge to obtain a formal education. I don't really have any need or reason to, but the urge is still there.

I know there are a ton of respectable and very talented devs without diplomas. Any of you ever regret not perusing a degree? Would you see any benefit it pursing one late in your career?

I've been programming for a career and as a hobby for more than two years now. I want to start contributing to some projects on Git hub, but I'm not sure where to start. What advice do you have for me for first starting out on Git hub?

I have discovered a fresh hell

Some guy I’ve never met or heard of in the office lobbed a comment at one of my *approved and merged* pull requests. He doesn’t say anything specific, only that my REST urls are not in line with naming convention. That’s all he says, and I’ve already walked the URL consumers through the code and given them the URLS.

I’m really annoyed that this guy won’t just say what he has in mind, but fine whatever this is a professional environment and developers are not known for being a diplomatic people. Let it go and get your work done!

I do some googling and find an obvious change that needs to happen- I implement it, open a new pull request and inform my URL consumers of the change.

This rando still isn’t satisfied and still won’t say what needs to change. I am on round 3 of this wonderful cycle and this guy is acting all fuckin HAUGHTY about it. “Here is a list of conventions I found googling, you should read them even if it takes 4 hours because it will benefit your career”

Sure dog you’re probably right on that one but we are in a professional environment and at this point you are holding up production so you can wave your dick around! Just SAY WHAT YOU MEAN SO WE CAN MAKE THE CHANGES AND GET OUR WORK DONE

Got rebuked by the Java teacher today at the University for using proper long names for variables in the code. She though I was just wasting time being lazy in the lab. "If something can be achieved by a single character, why type that long variable again and again?". *Everyone in class laughs*

Then, there was an error in my code [turned out to be long long int in Java is weird], and I had no clue what was going wrong [I'm a week old in Java]. So, I had initially called her to help. She made me change all private methods and attributes to public. When asked "why?", got trolled again.

Now, I know it's okay, and not that I really care about what my classmates think of me, but getting this kind of treatment really sucks. And if this is how future software developers are crafted today, maintainability is surely going to be an issue tomorrow.

Maybe staying in this stupid country was my worst career choice. I should have tried harder and gone abroad.

Working on what you love may be the most dangerous trap i have ever been told.

Why? You may work on what you love, but for a person that you don't. This will be the most thing that you will encounter on your career. I have been programming since i was 11 and my passion was sucked by my jobs.

And that's why all of my other hobbies will ever become a job, no matter how much people think i am good at it, the only reason i am good at my hobbies is because i don't do it for a living.

You can work on what you love, but don't expect expressing yourself at your job.

There is the Entrepreneurship route, where, instead of sucking your own passion, you should be sucking your employees passion, if you are doing it right.

Early in my career I saw a specific lead developer being a jerk. I saw it as confidence then. Looking back I realize they were scared and were trying to cover up the fact that they didn’t know what they were doing. Time really does give clarity sometimes.

just received an email about a "hiring tournament", didn't know that was a thing... soo disgusting

"Hello John

How are things going in your career? Are you interested in remote work, at challenging projects in big companies such as Google, Pinterest, Udemy, eBay, and groundbreaking startups within a warm and continuous improvement environment?

BairesDev is holding an exciting hiring tournament, an online competition where you will fight against other developers for the chance to get hired and win incredible awards with the opportunity to be a part of great projects. We would love to see you there!

It will take place on Saturday, November 28th" (but the image says 12th 🤪🤪)

So you are "fighting" other developers for the chance to get hired, what the heck

I really like my current job.

I work as an analyst developer looking after and sorting out people's old tech debt.

Once that's stable I get pretty free reign to do what I want.

It allows me to stretch from dev into graphic design, security, architecture and training on a very regular basis.

It allows me to keep an eye on tech trends, research and develop ideas using the latest shiny things.

Oh and if I say I need a thing, I can usually get it purchased.

All of the above comes with the "as long as it's for the benefit of the company" disclaimer, but when your direct managers see an IDE and think "okay he's working" the lines get a little blurry.

They keep asking me about my career goals and if I want to manage or move around. Fuck that noise, all of that noise.

Do wut I wawnt.

Well, this’ll get me a downrant and probably a pile of abusive and hateful comments, but I chose WordPress as my dev specialty. It’s in that sweet spot between my own uselessness as a full stack and front-end coder and my clients’ inability to comprehend how to click an “Update plugin” button. So they pay me to do that, plus the occasional “design”, and are seemingly happy to do so.

I think I won something. Not sure what. But my stress levels in my career are consistently at an all-time low. I have lots of flexible time in my day to do work, go outside, get exercise, work on hobbies, network with other people, and be with family. I guess being a WordPress “expert” isn’t all that bad.

Most upsetting interview rejection?

Back when I graduated college, I did the usual rounds of interviews with insurance companies, banks, various other institutional businesses set up by the college's career center.

One local insurance company interview I thought went great. Usual 'Where do you see yourself in 5 years?' type questions, told her about my job history, very high level type stuff.

Couple of weeks later I get a letter in the mail and after the usual 'It was great to meet you blah blah blah', it ended with
'State Farm will never consider you for a position with our company.'

Never?! My then fiance (now wife) yelled "WHAT DID YOU DO?!!!" and I racked my brain for anything I might have said or done. The HR lady was attractive, but I didn't stare at any body parts and I didn't make any weird sexual advances (I was nervous enough without *that* going thru my mind).
The college career center floods the local companies with graduates and I was #5 in the waiting room that day. My only guess was they got me confused with someone else.

My fiance wanted me to call them immediately to straighten out any misunderstanding, but I knew what was done, was done. It's not like they would realize "Oh, that's right, it was Bob that kept looking at Karen's breasts, not you...come work for us!" Besides, why would I want to work someplace that didn't know/care who I was?

My client is offering me onsite project with 6 months of employmentship/contract/internship in Germany(munich)🍻
He is going to provide me flat, desk, macbook and transportation but final amount is not decided yet.
What all things I should consider while negotiating.
I'm so excited for this offer but no idea what should be expected salary and compensation over there.🤔
Ps: I have experience of 2 years in JavaScript development and I worked with him from almost beginning of my career.

Also shall I start learning germany or dutch?🤔

I grew up on a farm in western KS. My parents bought PCs when I was in grade school. First was a trs80 , then an Epson Equity 1+, where I built a spare key for it, and built levels in willy for my brother to beat. Then a 486 and pentium which I broke often. I ended up working at the same store in college for extra cash. While I'm an adverage developer, I do on and make decent $$. I still help them out with keeping their PCs running, for moms sewing, and dads Linux box. I figure I owe them for their investment in me. They gave me the tools to figure out what I want to do with my career and my life.

Got a phone interview for a web dev internship while in school. I only took a very intro web design/dev course, and wasn't sure if I wanted to pursue that career. It went well in the beginning though I was getting more and more nervous. Then they asked what I learned in that class. I suddenly remembered something and rambled how the teacher talked about how outdated and not mobile-friendly tables are, and we should never use it in layout. There was a few seconds of silence and someone spoke out "well table is still very useful and we use it a lot in our website".
I didn't get the internship :-)

Why is source code so crappy? May career is not the longest, buy in my 8 years I talked to so many developers and every one told me how important quality, standards, tests and architecture are - but every codebase I've seen is lacking all of it. Everything is running on constant live support.

I don't get it. It is like I live in a world where everyone does know what has to be done, but no-one does it. I suspect it is because people are lazy, lying and won't say no but that's also not a world I want to live in.

As someone deeply questioning their life and career choices as of now, I wouldn't want to become a dev anymore because:
- you spend most of your time burning your eyes on a monitor and getting terrible back pain
- you might sell your soul to company benefits whose only purpose is to make you distracted from the fact that you're basically spending 1/3 of the day wishing you were doing something you actually want to do
- might have to do some exhausting communication ooga boogas to understand what supervisors and your other colleagues want to say (in a small company setting)
- again, as in my previous rant, if you're not on some less disposable dev position, you could as well become something else given that junior salaries are not that high
- get into an unhealthy work world where little hours of sleep, overworking, and other such unhealthy lifestyles are praised or used to determine your worth

Of course, these differ on a case by case basis. I'd become a train driver or something if I still didn't have to eat and not throw more money at a career change
Life's tough

probably most of my life, not just career.

realizing sooner that nobody gives a fuck and nobody will ever help.
realizing sooner that i can make and sell stuff. realizing sooner that the fact that what i sell is shit is completely disconnected from the success of my sales.
realizing aooner than most people are morons.
getting okay with exploiting morons' moronism sooner.

realizing that nobody has morals so unless i drop mine i'm just holding myself back.

stuff like that.

This career is so stressful. Who the hell thought of bringing our product to customers just before Christmas. Whyy... What did your mother do to you. Jesus f** christ.

How do ya’ll deal with stress at work?

Typical code life?

1. Write rough comments
2. Write more detailed comments
3. Write pseudo code
4. Write semi-working but definitely ugly code
5. Write working but very ugly code
6. Refactor the code to be nicer, check for patterns, bottlenecks and other bits and pieces
7. Push to git the "final" code
8. After few months blame whoever wrote the code
9. Refactor all the things!

---

This happened in my career more than once and still - it seems like the best option out there to get things done. What do you guys think? Should something be added/removed from this? Is this over-complicated or what?

So after months of self study my company finally appoints me as a junior developer with a major client as the intermediate dev on the project resigned. My tech lead assures me that junior devs only fix bugs and do other minor changes. One week in and in our first sprint planning session the client decides to priorities a Major update to the app. Now I have 2 weeks to deliver what will either make or break my immediate career. And I have no idea how to implement any of the changes. Stack overflow you're my only hope (and many hrs of YouTube tutorials)

Why most of the Indian developers code so bad? I face it very often, with my colleagues, with the freelancers we hire, even with our clients.

I am an Indian, and I feel so much disgusted (& sad as well) when a client tell us that they have a dedicated team to rework on the code which they outsource from India. If you visit a freelancing website you will see that the Indian developers have the least price, and they bid on literally anything even without understanding what they need to do. And finally when they get a job, they complete it, but with a fully f*cked up code and the worst architecture possible.

I have a lot of friends working in IT, and I personally know that they do not have any passion about programming. They just work for money, nothing else. I don't understand, why? My 7 years of IT career is probably not long enough to find a suitable answer for this 'why'.

Being a developer is a fucking struggle and no one fucking understands it.

Trying to keep up with new technologies and working with Project Managers that wants stuff to be delivered in no time is what makes you regret your career sometimes..

Maaan I FUCKING HATE THIS JOB!!!

Rant rant = new Rant();
rant.type = Rant.REVELATION;
rant.content = "

Being depressed with recent stuff about my ex, I've been going out a lot more than I use to, thus engaging in conversation with people I've never talked to before, and it made me realize something. Maybe it's because the world it's more connected nowadays, but I think it's more about our career (be it CS Engineer, Software Dev, Web-Dev, etc...) and correct me if I'm wrong but I think we are the kind of people that knows about everything (maybe not everything, but know basic stuff that can't be considered general knowledge) because that's what we do, we spend our days updating ourselves, growing in knowledge.

What's my point? That, thanks to this ability, we can work, cooperate or even socialize in a rather easy way. For example, I learned bit of color theory and design principles for a school project. Fast forward some months, I meet this girl that had a degree in Digital Design and I could talk to her about her field, and even knew things she forgot.

I don't know, for me, it's amazing how we can shape shift and mold to the situation, easier than any other career.

Am I wrong or missing something? Let me know
";
rant.publish();

Not even 30 yet and I feel like I've reached a point of stagnation in my career. I no longer enjoy writing code. What else is there to do? My life is set up right now so that I must be a software engineer; I don't have much of a choice.

I feel trapped.

delete unused code according to IDE

unit with context tests now fail

what is a good alternative industry or career instead of software development

The emphasis on "team" to the exclusion of the individual (thanks in no small part to Scrum) is destroying the software developer career. It's a pendulum. There are always team/company goals AND personal goals. However, these days, the rhetoric is ALL about the team: everybody on a team has the same title, get rid of people who don't conform to some "collaborative", "open space", "colocated" ideal, etc. OKRs are entirely about giving everybody the exact same goals. I remember sitting down with managers throughout my career to talk about where I want to be in a year. What skills I wanted to explore. There were no guarantees, but the generally accepted idea was that nurturing the employee helped retain the employee. Now, there is only the idea that every developer should have the same "T-shaped" skillset, that all team members are the same, that all teams are interchangeable, that all developers are nameless cogs. It is demoralizing. If I were to give any advice to those looking to enter the industry as a developer right now, it would be "Don't". Because you will be told that being a "hero" is a bad thing. In what other industry does management tell its producers that they don't want people to go "above and beyond", and that if they do, they won't get credit for it because the credit always belongs to everybody.

Blackjack. And hookers. You know what, forget the career.

I started writing code at a young age, nodding games, building websites, modifying hex files, hacking etc... I started my career off tho in highschool writing embedded code for a local medical robotics company, and also got tasked with building the mobile app to control these robots and use them for diagnostics, etc.... this was before the App bubble, before there was app degree and that bullshit.. anyway graduated highschool, went to college to get a comp sci degree.
Wanted to teach for the university and research AI...

well I dropped out of college after 3 years, cuz I spent more time at work than in class. (I was a software consultant) in the auto industry in Detroit. I wasn’t learning anything I didn’t already know or could learn from books or a quick google search.
I also didn’t like the approach professors and the department taught software... way none of the kids had a good foundation of what the fuck they were doing... and everyone relied on the god damn IDEs... so I said fuck it and dropped out after getting in plenty of arguments with the professors and department leads.

I probably should have choose CE .. but whatever CS imo still needs a solid CE/EE foundation without it, 30 years from now I fear what will become of the industry of electronics... when all current gen folks are retired and nobody to write the embedded code, that literally ALLLLL consumer electronics runs on. Newer generations don’t understand pointers, proper memory management etc.

So I combined both passion AI and knowledge of software in general and embedded software, and been working on my career in the auto industry without a degree, never looked back.

Not so much in my work but more my career.
My dad has been a great role model, still is and always will be.

He was an hard working metalworker. He loved his job. It's not a 50k job but he could easily manage his life.

My dad showed me that doing what you love, working with passion, makes your life easier and more fun. You deliver high quality products, because you care.

Since I found out that I love programming, I made it my life goal to do it as my career.

I've never been happier before. After all, I make money with my hobby.

We need more positivity:

Reason why you like coding? / Reason why you chose it as your career? / Why wouldn't you want to do something different?

Best feeling when coding

Nicest colleague/Best teamwork experience/Best boss/easiest client

What do you like about your position/job/company

Besides coding, what makes you happy

Your favorite stack/language/working environment

[SERIOUS ADVICE NEEDED, PLZ HELP]

I am going to school again for like 4 days from tomorrow (don't ask me why, blame the government) and I feel a bit depressed. I just don't know what I have done in the last 2 years.

What I learned:
- Bunch of stupid facts from devRant
- C# stuffs
- Games are expensive
- Music production

And.... that's it, tbh

I don't really have "PERSONAL PROJECTS" that everyone is bragging about, I just have bunch of empty projects with a cool name but just Program.cs in it.....

I am worried of what to do now.

I just feel I made the wrong choice going with C#.

I just feel I should have went with JS.
With JS, you can do
- React Native + Cordova + Titanium + etc and make native android/ios/wp apps
- The WWW stuffs
- Electron --> Cross platform desktop apps (win/mac/linux)
- UnityScript (deprecated, but whatever) --> Games

So, what I am seeing now is a thick fog in the way to my future + career etc.....

I am stuck rn.

Please help.

Should I continue with my pace and learn more C# and the things I do rn, or change the language and start from scratch, or as a last resort, leave the "make stuff by coding" industry and go to music industry, or just go to the airport and do planespotting and upload in youtube to earn money?

Serious advice please, and no jokes about C# and JS. These languages may suck, but YOUR language may suck more.

Upgraded from a gen 6 motherboard and cpu to a gen 11. And the difference is asounding.

My old setup did everything I needed it to pretty well. Hell it got me through college as well as multiple part time and full time jobs. As well as the system that I learned about 80% of what I know specifically for my career

But alas the old cpu's age started showing and I'd consistently throttle multiple threads when compiling or even just using 7z on large folders. Hell deleting anything above a couple hundred mb would pause for a few seconds

The new cpu is immensely faster on such tasks (probably cause of the extra 2 cores and cpu improvements since gen 6)

I haven't been this excited since I got my first SSD a few years ago and saw the immense boot time improvements. Maybe soon I'll get an nvme drive and really be zooming with this setup 🤣🤣🤣

Tired of dealing with shitcode, that's all I always inherit. Maybe I picked the wrong career? or maybe I shouldn't have even read about things like SOLID or picked up Clean Code.

Then again if I hadn't, I wouldn't be where I am. But I'm unhappy. Why do I always get these projects where the poeple who wrote them (and dissappeared) clearly had no proefficiency on the used tech stack.

Am I ever gonna be part of a project with an actual lead/architect, who strives for the code not to rot?

Maybe I'm just being a little bitch whinning over this?

Halp!! the more I code, the more I hate it. It wasn't like this when I was the architect. But I didn't make as much money as I do now...

What do I do

Former classmate: Our alma mater is looking for alumni to participate in career day. Share what skills you need and the steps you took for your career path!

Me: Thanks for the invite. But I’m not a good role model for this.

FC: Why not? You’re a successful engineer!

Me: So I used my full tuition university scholarship on an art degree because I was too depressed after a long physical illness. Oh, and for some reason a lot of y’all assumed I went to a private uni when I went to the public uni. Then I went to graduate school immediately after and during a recession and ended up with tens of thousands in student debt. Then I did a lot of part time jobs before going to a shady coding bootcamp. I’m lucky to have encountered an advocate and a company willing to take me on as a junior dev. I’m pretty sure I was a diversity hire and I was definitely underpaid. I’m lucky to have moved on from there and to be thriving now. I’d tell the students to skip college (like I had considered) and go into a trade. And I’d also tell them a lot of life is luck and not just hard work.

FC: 😧

In highschool, I was looking around for schools and universities at which I would start my student career. I went to a grad school one day, to see what it was like to be a student there. The first class I visited was programming for embedded systems. We got the assignment to write Java code to control a boom barrier. The teacher had written the template. And I kid you not, the template had a method of around 20 lines of code - without comments - with the purpose of carrying out a logical OR operation. An operation that literally can be done using an operator in Java: |

Why oh why do they let these people teach, with the result that the students will get used to these bad practises...

I’m at that later stage of a career where pretty much everyone will ask themselves, “What am I even GOOD at anymore?”

If you don’t think it can happen to you, just wait.

#1 Don't go looking to clear your doubts with your mentor. Instead, try and figure everything on your own. Trust me, that'll teach you a lot more than you think rather than by getting the answers directly spoon-fed to you from your mentor.

#2 Always keep a curious mind if you want to achieve something in what you do. You can't learn anything if you don't have the curiosity to ask the right questions - why? (mostly). Especially if you're just starting your career.

Joing a company was the biggest mistake i ever made!
Wondering what was wrong with my career as a free lance android dev that i decided to accept the project ???
All those beautiful days coding all day long without any stress or deadline now gone!
GONE !!!

Gave a recommendation to the boss to do a thing. He said “Go and do the thing.” I wanted to do a proof of concept but there was no time. We got the contract. I tried to do the thing. It didn’t work. It WON’T work because the vendor’s marketing far overpromises what the product can do. No way to back down because the client is already fully invested in the solution. I want to quit my job AND my career now because I apparently suck at all of it.

I was in a good mood until I read this weeks dev-question. I'm now having an existential crisis. Why do I do this? What's the end goal here? I don't know what my biggest dev career dream is. Maybe I should get a dog and live in the mountains. I think, I need another moment...

Frist time poster & 22 y.o. junior dev here.
I just wanted to get advice in which direction I should start my career.
I just finished my education last year as a Software Engineer and am now undecided if I should more go into Front- ore Backend.
I‘m currently doing mostly Python as a allrounder but am really intrested in React.
Is there a big difference in sallary (if that maters, I‘m from switzerland) or career oportunitys? How do I figure out the correct way I should go?
Thanks you so much for your help!

I am strong technically, resourceful, with good analytical thinking, but I suck at comms. I lack patience and I struggle with communicating in a politcorrect business-friendly language when reaching out to other technical teams. I feel and behave as if they were all local folks, as if in a walking distance from my desk, when irl they [the client] may as well be on a diff continent

How can I improve? Anyone else had a similar problem? How did you overcome it?

Is this nuance going to be a problem in a career path past the senior chair?

What do you reckon?

I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for bugs like you. If you let my program go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will debug you.

You can't keep doing this! You can't keep doing shitty things and then feel bad about yourself like that makes it okay! You need to be better!'
...
You are all the things that are wrong with you. It's not the alcohol or the drugs or any of the shitty things that happened to you in your career or when you were a kid, it's you! Alright? It's you. ...Fuck, man. What else is there to say?'

Friends/Seniors : "Hey, you should take these courses. They are easy and you can get easily an A!"

Who the fuck decide what optional courses to take based on if it's easy or not?!
Students take them because :
a. They are interested in the subjects
b. Knowledge/skills after attending the courses will be beneficial for future career.

I put my money more on option b though, i.e I'd rather get C's in courses that I found it useful, than getting A's in useless courses.
(Btw, my avg grade is just a little above Cs)
If my sole purpose was just to get straight A's, I would enroll in liberal art courses instead of this stressing half-CS course we're in.
You're a joke to yourself, that's why I don't hang out with you.

So far in my (albeit short) career, I struggle to find people who know what polymorphism is, and how to use it. SOLID is a big unknown too.

It's always
if(this instanceof A) {}
else if(this instanceof B) {}

My Programming Ambition.
To empower aspiring programming entrepreneurs with the idea that they can use their highly coveted skills to achieve whatever ambitions they have. To show them why they don't have to settle for the industry standard right now, which is low pay, poor conditions, hyper competition and lack of appreciation. To help them understand that with what they know, they can literally create any career that they want.

That moment you realize you are at the end of that period of life when you have a lot of free time...

I recently moved and live on my own. I'm still studying and I'm finding small jobs as a developer (I make the money I need to live). So far so good, but recently I found out that the career path I'm taking it's not what I actually want to do.

I do not regret it, I'm happy and I feel lucky comparing myself to others in my country.

But I can't stop thinking that the more I go on the less choices I can make freely and that growing up sucks sometimes.

I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly.
Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.
Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly.
Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.
These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!

I'm genuinely shocked at the number of people I see on here bashing automated testing as a waste of time, simply because my entire career has taught me the opposite (and it's usually only non-technical managers I see who don't want to see "time wasted" writing tests.)

I'm also just as genuinely curious - what do you guys do instead? Just don't test and deal with production issues as they occur? Pass it off to a separate UAT / human-based testing department and let them sign it off? Assume that because you're using Haskell / some other discipline it'll work if it compiles?

so there is this guy on blind network who makes half a million per year... and he is worried about his job "since it might be automated away" and he is looking to switch career paths!!!!

mind boggling that a "software engineer" with that type of pay hasn't recognized that LLMs are all hype and no bite

wild

it's insane to me that people making more money in a year than i've made in my decade career know little to nothing about software

what an absolute insane time to be alive

Continuous emails from recruiters:

"I saw your profile on LinkedIn and wanted to see if you were interested in a career as an Area Sales Rep for [cell provider]. Here's the benefits!"

degree says IT, past jobs say IT, hobbies say IT, interests say IT. Do they just send that to everyone no matter what the profile says??

Does anyone ever wonder what they'd be doing career wise if they were born before the computer?

To that nasty animation bug I’m dealing with for a week already...

I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom I can tell you I don't have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for bugs like you. If you let my project go now that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you, but if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you.

Does anyone else question their career in programming from time to time?

I've been around this line of work for almost 7 years now and I still get these doubts once or twice a year.
Be it unreasonable deadlines, horrible people that I'm forced to work with or just outright incompetence.

My latest occurence of doubt was when getting assigned a task that initially didn't seem like a big deal, but it turned out to be months and months of custom work instead of going along with the standard components and design guidelines.

This was somehow missed in the estimate phase and once I got assigned to it a hard deadline was already set, to top it off the features was non-negotiable.

These kind of things really makes me feel helpless and really depressed. My work is all I have, and I don't really know what I would do if I'd change career path today.

What happens when you get bored of working as a software engineer?

3 years after starting my career as a dev, I'm already in the middle of a crisis, struggling to find motivations to stay in tech aside of the good salaries.

Don't get me wrong, I like solving problems trough code, designing complex solutions, I love software architecture. My problem goes around the jobs themselves, doing engineering for a living is just so boring, makes me feel so empty inside.

It is not the same doing something for someone else company than doing it for yours, I usually feel like I could be happier raising my own startup, immediately after that, I remember that I must stick around working for someone else if I want to put food on my table.

I have been thinking about quit and get a normal job, but money is a huge deal, i'm used to a lifestyle that is hard to backup without a salary like the ones of software engineers.

In short, I feel empty and hopeless. What are your toughs, are you going trough something similar?

As a junior developer, I am not invited to most of the discussion. Lead comes to us with requirements and we need to build it. My lead is really helpful so no people issues.

I am not sure if it's good for my growth/career. I have recently ( 6 months) joined here. Do you folks have any experience like this? What did you do? Do discussions/meeting help to grow?

One day, one of my clients asked me to re-design their website that is running on Wix. I thought It was not a big deal... Just a couple fucking drag-drops & boom.

But while designing, I realized what a fucking piece of shit Wix developers made over time. I've never used to suck a disgusting website builder ever in my entire life.

I write codes to build any type of website, web app etc. I was happily living my dev life. But, after using Wix for 24 fucking hours, I hate my job as a web developer.

Wix is so bad that I lose all my confidence & doubt about my 5 years of web development career.

Fucking piece of shit.

I got out of bed at 2:10am to film the Falcon Heavy launch from my driveway, where I have a direct, due east line of sight to Cape Canaveral. I’m thinking “What a time to be alive!” and “Why didn’t I pursue the aerospace career I started in college?”

Oh no it's happening to me too... Gave up so many hobbies/interests to focus on my career. Now I have almost no interest in side projects because I don't know what to build. (I mean something actually useful not a to-do list.) I love my job, but is this the path to burnout?

ESNext (next version of JavaScript) — because no matter what I do, as long as I'm working with web technologies, JavaScript is king. My career has evolved from UI-focused work, primarily working with JavaScript, yet I've also worked on embedded platforms and even operating systems! JavaScript is my foundation and you must always remember your roots!

Looking at my reflection on the laptop screen while it is being upgraded, and thinking that the career choice i made 11 years back was probably not a great idea.
I don't understand amazon-cloud, very little knowledge of DBs, can't write a single JS class without googling, block chain are meh, don't even know python, working with a team that abuses my framework in front of me, working 12 hour shifts for last 3 years... What is my life's purpose?

Rock, meet hard place. I’m losing my employment again. I’m tired of web development, which I’ve never been super great at, and want to switch to something else. But how do I do that and what do I switch to if this is what I’ve been doing for over 20 years and I have to get a new job soon without time or money to get a whole new education and career path? Getting older also means this old dog is having a harder time learning new tricks. Wish I could just retire early.

I used to play games a lot, I had good grades at school which could make me a doctor or scientist. But my interest has always been leaning towards computers and my parents didn't really liked it. When I was having dilemmas about which path to choose for my career, parents told me, choose anything you want as long as it's not about computers. So immediately I know what I want to be...

One problem for CS education is that the salaries for academia are so low compared to industry that if someone is even vaguely competent, they can at least double their income by working a 'real' job. Now this may be different at higher levels of colleges but generally those folks are such bullshitters they wouldn't last outside of academia.

As what to improve?
Depends if it's a research or vocational course.

For vocational; heavy on group projects, common tools, methodologies and architectures. All demonstrated in something like c#/java/python. And one project must have a web app (db, app layer and JavaScript from end)
Basic knowledge of algorithms, runtime analysis (O notation) and some data structures and you're an instahire.

For research, go wild. Deep dive into the math, algorithmic side. Read up lots of research papers. Try out different programming paradigms. You would aim for a career in academia, AI, quant finance etc...

Q: Your biggest dev career dream?

A: To finish my thesis, get a job, where I can peacefully code. And to earn enough money (does not mean rich) to just live a comfortable live without worrying about money too much.

Am I asking for too much?
Whats with you? What is your biggest career dream?

I know recursion is everywhere but I recently noticed it in very unusual place('unusual' in the way we see), I hail from India, we studied in our childhood about road less taken, the way I see, everyone has to take so important decisions in yheir life, one such decission is about career, in India road less taken in career paths is everything other than orthodox education, I too the dreaded road "Education", next decission is to choose stream and there the road less taken is anything other that "Engineering (or medicne) " and I took (*as expected) engineering, after taking computers (which is the dreaded road now) next decision is what next? Dreaded road is job, but this time I chose take a road little less traveled in CS. Then I next decission was to choose the research stream the road less taken here (NOW) is systems as AI is in its prime and everyone whants to ride the wave, but I chose Systems in research, after all these my point how how boolean function is called recursively (in the sense of construct) and as a systems programmer I realize the importance of optimizing how I answer these functions quick and accurate. This is one such boolean function but I am sure you can find many in our path till here so It is better to realize what these functions are optimize then as a good Programmer of your own Life.

I have no idea what I am doing with my career. 🤔

I got a question at an interview today asking what type of developer do you want to be and what's your long term technical goal. Right now I'm a senior software engineer at a pretty well known solid mid sized tech company. I work across the stack but I really don't know what type of developer I want to be.

Which way technically are you directing your engineering career? How and why did you decide this is the type of work you want to do?

I often ask myself why I chose this career path.

Right now, I had one of those moments where it all clicks and falls into place.

Where you can take a problem, have a rapid fire thought through your head and you've got all the modules in memory (pun unintended,) and it's just a case of touching keys.

I think that's why I do what I do. The feeling of satisfaction after you go 'I got it!'
🤙🤙

Hi ranters. We need to talk.

I've been thinking, I'm lately getting tired of code everywhere. Suppose one is a software engineer / senior developer. What is one's career path from this point on?

Tech lead? Architect? And then what? Is that all? A dead end?

Management would be also a possibility I guess. But is that a horizontal career change or are there any spots in vertical plane?

Hey guys, I've always loved and adored what programmers and developers do, so I really do need your advice on this...
After around nine years in the journalism field, I'm considering a career shift into development, for many reasons including that the journalism field seems to be going down in my country, so I started where most recommendations would tell a beginner to start, learning HTML... Now, is it a good idea for starters to change my career into this magnificent and enormous field? I know it won't be easy, but is it possible to be something in that career?

my best career decision?
discarding my original plan to do PhD and get into (natural) science, studying computer science / software engineering instead, and starting software development in a company that builds cool devices.
i really like what i am doing and i feel like i found something that's "my thing".

it took me a while to get there, but it was totally worth it.

I turn 21 in a month, and I still have no idea what I want to pursue as a career after university or how to get there.
Sure its two years away but I feel behind already.
Also how does one go about getting an internship in the UK?
I've yet to speak to anyone from any dev industry and it's beginning to concern me.

I am all burned out on everything having to do with websites. I need a new career path. I’ve never been a stellar programmer. I have no idea what to switch to that I could be good at and that comes with a paycheck and benefits to provide for a family of six. Feeling painted into a corner with no way out.

Anyone elsd burned the fuck out?

I fucking am!

What is another career in tech I can move to from developer? Don’t mind going back to school to pick up new skills.

Not even on devrant anyone like I was.

One of the worst things I did in my career as a developer was that when i had to change an offer form in our SAP System. My boss told me to change the prices in a form in our SAP system. Normally the key users do that but our SAP System is so fucked up that sometimes the developers have to do it because you have to write directly into the database. So I wanted to look up which table it was and what I saw scared me.

IT WAS A FUCKING IMAGE.

So I used paint to edit the prices in the image and re-uploaded the image. Shame on me but I didn't wanted to change that shit. I have other things to do than that.

Got a high paying job, with great benefits, and a big name, straight out of college. I was hired as a software engineer. Comfy, relaxed, and flexible.

The problem comes where it was not the job I was expecting. It has been almost a year and the only programming I've done has been 1 small copy pasta project. I am worried because I am bored and feeling my coding skills fade away. I'm still a novice programmer and feel like this impacts future career opportunities not learning useful skills for outside of this company. I'm going to grad school to do what I really want but still have the 2 years.

Do I stay or do I make the stressful change again? Other fun thing is I just relocated a distance to an area with not a lot of opportunities so would likely involve relocating again.

Dear Passionate Programmer,

Do you ever wish you chose a different career?

I’m a self taught dev & wanted to make something of what I learned. So I moved from a small town, landed my first tech job (!dev), but the closer I get to my goal the more worried I get.

I’m worried that making my hobby a career will eventually lead me to loathing the one thing I love. And I’m not really sure if I should stay the course or turn around in hopes to save the ship.

!rant
I think that more than learning about CS, I learned how to cope with enormous amounts of frustration that comes with being a dev and I also felt great when I was being challenged with actual deadlines through exams, hackathons, assignments, practicals and tough professors.
Professionally, I think the great knowledge of fundamentals of CS helps a lot and it is just a great way to get your foot inside the door (for internship interviews and career opportunities) of a company and then show what you're made of when it comes to being a dev.
Also, I had the time of my life because I was around like-minded people who loved the same things and it was good to watch them suffer at first and then, watch them succeed at something that I was about to do.

Hello everyone !
I am a self taught programmer. Currently in last semester in electronics engineering. I want to become a software developer but can't decide the right career path for me to take. I like back end, Android, Data structures and algorithm, Parallel programming, Machine learning and computer vision, and even security. I am afraid I will remain the jack off all trades and won't be the master of any. This way I won't be doing any good in my career. Any advice as what to do ?

"I don't know what I did but it worked" - a thrilling story about my programming career.

Running my own business is not going well. Hasnt for years now. Previous dev jobs were also just nightmares. I feel like i cant cut it as a freelancer, or as a full time dev. I do enjoy programming but my resume is crap and my worthwhile portfolio items are basically all locked down under NDAs or ambiguous accountability. I cant prove im even worth hiring and im almost too old to be considered for any junior role. Not that i think i could handle it. So im considering finding a new career and keeping coding as my hobby. But first i have to decide what to do about my remaining client. Which is fine because... i dont even know what i could do for a full time job now. Ugh, im so profoundly discouraged i dont even want to try and think about this anymore.
The weekly rant topic indirectly applies here but since its a bunch of self pity i decided it would be best to not tag it such...

As someone who has just finished a foundation degree in computer science, I'm really wanting to get 'my foot in the door' with the IT industry to start building my career that I'm so passionate about, but I just don't know where to start. Any recommendations in what level of jobs I should apply for/where to begin?

How significant is PhD's impact on someone's career? What I heard its mostly for academic and research purposes, Would you consider studying PhD?

What hours do you work?

I work 9-6, most people at my office work 7-4 or 8-5. I have the flexibility to work when I want, but never get to bed early enough to start earlier than 9. I feel behind when I get in the office because most of my coworkers and clients have already been at for an hour or 2.

When do you work and why? Can you tell if it’s impacted your career at all?

Worst part of being a dev is no clear career path. I have no idea what I'll be doing in the next 5 years

My career is perpetually doubting / questioning my skill set while making steady progress and receiving praise.

Whether its for personal projects or work (interning) I feel so delayed and unskilled, yet I know I've made a hell of a lot of progress and wouldn't even recognize the me I am now

What is this dichotomy

What is it like to work for respected software companies? Most of my career I've been doing bullshi@ work I started to hate the entire field. Is there hope out there?

I worked(as intern) 6 months on a startup and helped them sell a cool e-commerce chatbot, then I again worked(as intern) 4 months on another startup and helped them sell nice AR app. And again another recruiter comes in my chatbox and asks me whether I am available for internship. I am also doing another internship from 1 months. What the hell is wrong with my career?

When I began my career, I always thought everyone in the IT-sector loved their Jobs (except a few people who didn't fit in of course) - 10 years later I've met a lot of people who hated their jobs but didn't just quit it (no kids, no wife, no responsibilities at all) - what do you guys think about this?

Personally, I'm looking for a job where I can put my heart into and which has got a meaning for me (haven't found it yet and I don't expect to do in a short time) because everything else makes no sense to me.

Software Developer Interview Questions!

Hey friends, for my IT Careers class I have been assigned to interview a software developer. I was wondering if some people would be willing to answer the following questions. Thank you so much!

Name:
Title of position:
Company you work for:

1. What is a typical day at work like?
2. What are your hours like? Are you ever on call?
3. What are the best parts of your job?
4. Are there any downsides?
5. What influenced your decision to choose this career? Are you glad that you did?
6. What education did you need to get?
7. Do you specialize in certain languages or types of programs?
8. Do you work remotely or at the job site?
9. What is your pay like? Are you paid by the hour, or do you get a salary?
10. Was there ever a specific project you've worked on that was your favorite?
11. Does your job require any work outside of work hours?
12. What are the biggest obstacles you run into as a developer?
13. If you could change something about your job, would you? What would it be?
14. What are some tasks you must complete for your job?
15. Is there anything you wish you knew before starting your career?
16. Are there days that seem too repetitive?
17. Do you often have to learn new languages?
18. Have there been any big changes in your career since you first started?
19. How long have you worked as a developer?
20. Is there any advice you would give to college students looking to pursue a development career?
Any responses are appreciated! Thank you so much!

!rant

I'm having an awkward episode of excitement-fear-shock, so I don't know why I'm exactly writing this; I just needed to tell this to someone.

Few hours ago, I found out that, in a hardly believable turn of events, I have been accepted in a PhD program in the exact field I wanted, computability theory, in one of the top universities in my country. I would say this is a dream, to have the chance to study what I like most in this world, now I see I just got the opportunity to make this dream come true.

With an absurd feeling of joy and sadness, it also means that I have to let go of programming, at least as a career. I really don't know if I will have to crave for the job I have right now ever again, but I know that I won't regret this decision; this is what I want.

But anyway, I enjoy to code, and I will enjoy it any time.
dev4Life

You know what I'm CONSTANTLY trying to improve on? Time. With my career out ahead of me, I feel like I gotta get a stopwatch going for myself on my personal projects. It took me hours throughout the weekend to get a stupid table UI and JSON serialization system working on a small project. Meanwhile I remember two guys created a Pokémon Go client in a couple days (back when I had a Windows Phone that didn't have one). Like, how important is time in the industry? A lot according to the memes.

Job requirement:

> Have been on a career break for a minimum of 6 months

???
What kind of fuckery is this?

My Project Lead got me to work overtime, I was doing 150% of what I was supposed to do.
After 4 months of tremendous working and smart planning, I planted a small bug in the software we build, and used that to exploit the Software yesterday morning, and today by 3 PM (Our Usual. Lunch Time), He was fired.
Finally, that donkey is fired and now he must rotten in hell, yeah, he got that stamp on his resume for being fired.

Now I am feeling guilty that I have almost ruined his career (30%), but I am happy, that rascal got what he deserved (70%). Yay!

I'm 22 years old and 1.5 years into my first Startup Job. (and second Dev job)
I feel kind of uncomfortable now and I would like to ask your opinions.
I'll start with the work related description of my situation and later add a bit of my life situation.

I develop as hobby since I can think. I'm pretty engaged and love to do things right. So I quickly found myself in the position of the de-facto lead fullstack Developer.
Although, to be clear, were only a few devs - which are now replaced by not so many other devs. I feel often like the only person able to design and decide and implement in a way that won't kill us later (and I spend half of my time fixing technical debt).

I mostly like what I do , because it's a challenge and I feel needed. I learn new things and I am pretty flexible in work time. (but I also often work till late in the night, sacrificing friendship time)
But there are so many things I would love to do and used to do, but now I have no motivation to develop outside of my job.
I don't really feel that what my company is doing is something I find valuable. (Image rights management)

I earn pretty well - in comparison to what I'm used to: 20€/hour, Brutto 2.800 / month for 32 hours a week. In Berlin. (Minus tax and stuff it's 1.800€). It's more than enough for what I need.
But when I see what others in similar positions earn (~4.000), I feel weird. I got promised a raise since nearly a year now. I don't feel I could demand it. I also got the hint that I could get virtual shares. But nothing happened.

Now what further complicates the situation is that I will go to Portugal in April for at least half a year, for joining a social project I love. My plan used to be that I work from there for a few hours a week - but I'm starting to hesitate as I fear that I will actually work more and it will keep me from fully being there.

So, I kind of feel emotionally attached - I like (some of) the people, I know (or at least believe) that the company will have a big problem without me. (I hold a lot of the knowledge for legacy applications) .
But I also feel like I'm putting too much of myself into the company and it is not really giving me back. And it's also not so much worth it... Or is it?

Should I stick to the company and keep my pretty secure position and be financially supported during my time in Portugal, while possibly sacrificing my time there?
Should I ask for a raise (possibly even retroactively) and then still quit later? (they will probably try to get my 1 month of cancelation period upped to 3).

Also, is this a risk for my "career"?

!rant: I need a little advice from fellow devs. I've come to the conclusion that development is not the right career path for me, but how to advance from here?

I've worked a little over a year as dev/scrum master and lately I've been assigned small project management tasks. I really liked the project management stuff, and I like talking to stakeholders and converting their ideas into well described requirements and development tasks.

But who will hire a junior level engineer with no formal project manager training or certifications?

What kind of jobs could I apply for?

My coworker has been freaking out that our company doesn't do Agile or Scrum right and it will negatively impact his career. He claims that some elite company will want him to prove he worked in well oiled Agile machine. He also claims his last company had it down to a T yet he voluntarily left so they couldn't have been that damn spectacular.

I'm on my 7th company and no one does this shit "right", everyone makes it up. Also it's impossible to prove that you worked in a perfect environment to a different employer, if they even care at all. If someone asks, just tell them what they want to hear because no one actually works in this mythical world of Agile perfection.

Game title: Vacations of an engineering student.

Aim: to utilize 60 days of freedom with something worth useful in future career.

Game Modes: (1) Sit at home. (2) intern for some company

Mode(1) Sit at home.
>>Villains : Games,Netflix and movies, food, friend parties, late night sleeps, afternoon wake ups, trips (random villains)
>>Boss Battles : laziness, procrastination, loosing of interest in stuff you wanna do
>>reward on completion: more knowledge increase, better resume ,$0 earnings

Mode(2) : intern for some company
>> extra level before starting : apply for 100s of companies,interview rounds, test
>>villans : no self choice, work with shitty code, too much workload, less time for outside-work life
>> Boss battles: do stuff that you didn't agree to, less stipend, unwanted scoldings from boss
>> reward on completion : more work experience , lesser knowledge, more $

What would be your mode of playing this summer?

**Wrongly edited last time, made it confusing. Deleted. Posting again. Apologies.**

So, scenario was like, we friends were chatting on WhatsApp and talking about Germany as one of us has shifted there recently. After a 30-40 mins chat, I clicked on Google to search for some company(say 'xyz') .... Now this searching for company and chatting with friends are totally separate events. But when I typed 'xyz' , google suggested "xyz career Germany" and 'xyz Germany glassdoor'.

My question is that is it possible that Google is taking records of what am I typing anywhere(I've android phone) and using that to decide which suggestions should it be showing to me? Or am I thinking too much? 😌

When I was in school days I didnt like computers that much. I knew how to use them but thought classes were lame.

It was a couple of years ago, in the last year of my first computers-related career (here there's no computer science like in USA). It was in the initial stages of my graduation project and our teacher took a look at our database design, fixed it all. And explained:

"The better you designed your database, the easier it'll be to code the project" Explained to us the importance of database normalization and all that.

I really understood it all and discovered finally what was the thing I was studying and how to do software.

From that day, in my early 20s, I've been loving software and knew this is my thing.

Same feeling 6 years later.

Why are most jobs just about web development or mobile development? (I'm not criticizing I'm a mobile developer myself)

Is it JUST purely because of the market need and people using them?

Share your opinion on this one and what other career paths in CS do you know about you think would benefit from more people in them.

I'm a little afraid of what I'm doing. I just asked my boss to change my current role, almost on site, with a new one requested by the global function of my company. If they accept I will be traveling >80% of the time. I know I will miss my little daughters but I also know that this is maybe the last chance for a step forward in my career. I'm sharing my feelings only with my brother and devrant people.

Why are some professors in uni so god damn incapable of teaching?

I am in the midst of one of the most important classes of my uni career, algorithms, and I've been paired with the most incompetent, uncaring piece of shit professor on gods green earth.

First off, his mic sounds like an absolute ass-blasted bic mac. Shit is awful. Sounds like a bass boosted ear-r*pe meme from youtube.

On top of this, his way of "teaching" is showing us pictures he took of his whiteboard from when classes weren't virtual. He then opens these pictures in MS paint so he can circle what hes currently looking at and draw lines and stupid shit across the screen.

WHY IS THIS ALLOWED. WHY ARE THESE INCAPABLE OLD FUCKS ALLOWED TO TEACH STILL.

The start of a new chapter of career life...

Until now, I always saw myself as the base raiser... but raising the base is not what everyone else on my team wants...

Only took me 3 years to realize... so I guess time to just fall in line...

I guess it's why some smart people act dumb on the job... It's just easier to blend in...

Been thinking about this a lot and I'd love your thoughts. Recently a friend was starting in dev. They asked me for some advice. I just said "be humble and hungry". I've built my career on that phrase. Be willing to listen and willing to put in the work.

What is your best advice for the young devs out there?

So many of the idiots at my school, when they grow up, want to do "something with computers". Wha? The concept of what you even do with a computer is so widely screwed up that kids think that is specific enough to plan their futures on. I suggest they actually learn minute enough of their future career to know what really they want to do, but I guess this would be too logical?

What is some career advice you've received, potentially from someone you respected at the time, that has since turned out to be complete and utter bullshit?

A tech as well as a life question (actually more of a useless sleepless thought) : What do you think is more important? Exposing yourself to multiple technologies, career paths and life experiences or diving deep into a single technology, career path and life experience?

I feel like being an expert in 1 tech might pay off in terms of job life , and it would be bad for a person who is constantly switching between career paths, but sometimes i feel like i should have tried other paths too. Not just the life of a techie, like people who are deep into media and journalism, accountancy or those film industry jobs ; politics or finances , etc.

Its like, we found an apple to be a tasty fruit and now we have to be the apple guy forever. The better i am in being the apple guy, the more i will have to eat apples and the more i will earn. Why can't i try pears or oranges?

Laravel, Symfony...

It doesn't seem to matter what framework I pick to learn next. I rarely get past the Installation step where I have to install and learn a bunch of command line tools first.

It makes me realize I no longer want to be a web developer as even the biggest step I can reasonably make in my career will still not result in an income change significant enough to pay for a mortgage, and the smallest step still expects me to understand all of these command line tools for seemingly no payoff whatsoever.

I feel stuck and depressed looking at all the toxic positivity on LinkedIn. I cannot fathom the amount of indoctrination that must be going on between all these people chirping about how great it is to work for their company.

I'm currently interviewing for other jobs, told my manager last week, was told by a company director that is a career limiting announcement.

Like, genuinely, fuck you. Grow up.

The worst they can do to me between now and when I'm gone is to take the interesting projets away from me and give them to someone else, but the only other person that can really do the things I do is my manager (CTO) who is busy as fuck, so anyone else is going to need my help, and oh hey suddenly I don't know the answer to their questions so what you going to do?

okay. Just had an interview for a web application engineer role. It was a catastrophe. Basically, they are taking care only of things I was never worked with, like certification management, ansible deployments, bash scripting. ?? What? Like, what the hell? Guys, I can make you a nice javascript game, or laravel website, eventually mount the routers and switches, configure and automate the networks, but certs... for me ssl is just an extra checkbox when I'm buying a new domain. I asked the recruiter like 5 times, please tell me what the hell is the role about, he doesn't knew... I think, I'll just give up this applying for a jobs stuff, and stay maintenance engineer, dig into plc-s and etherCat even more and forget the IT career completely...

Help needed.
I got a job offer from a good company and the pay is good. Plus, a major stake of the company was bought by a tech giant few days back and I think it's gonna be a great head-start for my career. The problem is the location is in Mumbai, India, and I really doubt I can live there on my own. I don't personally like the place (though I might have some misconception about it). What should I do? Join and pray everything goes alright or skip and wait for the next adventure?

Hey I have a career dilemma, was wondering if anyone experienced that and if anyone could give a tip on how to resolve it maybe.

TL;DR: I'm a Front End dev, who wants to become an expert in everything but obviously can't. What do I do? How do I choose what to learn?

Longer version. I started with Front End. Now i'm doing alright with Vue, React, bit of Angular, and other related to the stack tech. Then I started learning python because of a project I was doing (personal client). Didn't go far with this one. I still find it interesting esp. in the machine learning context, which I also want to do. Now I'm studying .NET, because of a project I'm currently doing at a company (full time, I'm doing ReactJS front end there tho). And I'm also studying for GCP exam, because I wanna know how to deploy solutions to the cloud. But one also needs to secure them, so I'm looking at some courses on Cybrary, in a search for appropriate courses.

I feel overwhelmed and unproductive. I feel like i need to specialize just in one field with some general knowledge about other areas. So I feel like I have to select what I do/learn carefully.

Any thoughts? How did you plan your career? What kind of goals did and do you set for yourself? Are you happy with those now once you achieve them?

I'd love to hear some stories. :)

!rant I'm lucky to work with 2 of the best back-enders in my career. We were royally pushed/screwed over today due to PM's last minute demands for a phone app that they were demoing to 1000's at a conference. Guess what, certain elements broke. But the guys jumped in to get the API fixed. It's a bit much being the only phone dev on the team but with such strong backend support, it makes it a pleasure to come into work. You know who you guys are. Thank you. Remember a little support makes all the difference in the workplace.

I'm envious of Backend developers who can just 'see' the problem domain and start creating an architecture. I can't see shit - I just stare blankly at the project and I think: hm, what models do I write?

I know I'm a structured person, but I lack the knowledge and practice. One day I'll be able to do this, but for now I have to keep doing things ad hoc.

I really don't belong in the Backend but unfortunately that's how my career is turning out for now. All I know is I have to get better at this.

It's been six and half years since I am working my ass off this corporate company, last promotion I got was three years ago, again today new college hire who graduated after the year I did, joined later than I did, he got promoted to level higher than me, why bcs he built mobile apps ? I never got to touch on mobile apps forget even developing, since I kept working on what they put me too. I hate this worlds this job and whole career of engineers

advice && !rant

I'd love some advice from you iOS devs on devRant:

- Is it a solid career choice for a new grad? Does it limit your skillset early on?

- How open/active is the ecosystem and the open source scene?

- Storyboards? Yay or nay?

- What do you like the most about your job?

- What do you dislike the most about your job?

Thanks guys :)

Urgh.. the amount of things you have to know as a developer.. it can get stressful and frustrating sometimes when (in-depth) technology knowledge is demanded from you (for instance, for a job position)..
It's like being a doctor, being a lifelong student.

A few examples of what I had to know during my career:
Java, .NET, Python, PHP, JavaScript/HTML5/CSS3, Sass/Less, Node.js, ReactJS, AngularJS, Vue.js, Cordova, Ionic, Android, design patterns, SOLID, databases (design, implementation, administration, both NoSQL and relational,..), deployment tools (Octopus, Jenkins,..), VCS, CI/CD, HTTP, networking, security (OAuth2, CORS, XSS, CSRF,..), algebra, algorithms, software testing, profiling, Linux, Unix, Windows, MS Office (advanced mail filtering,..), ITIL, IT Law (licensing and its implications when choosing a product, distribution right,..), server architecture,..

Sure yeah, I know, I've studied all that at university but.. it's been too long (almost a decade now). I have to revisit that knowledge.

recent graduate and fresh into the market with little experience in what i've chosen as a career. got my first (tiny) paycheck for my first project.
didnt know what to do with the money so i bought 3 domains of which 2 are my name with different spellings (i am not a narcissist)

Any of us had annoyances with people with “a million dollar app idea” but what about these which gives unsolicited career advice?

I’m dealing with a boomer which keeps trying me to change my career and work into cyber security (because TV told him it’s a well paid field) despite me kindly telling him for multiple times which it’s not going to happen because I won’t throw away a career I love to work in a field which seems deadly boring to me (I love anything about coding from design to typing for hours on Vim meanwhile the only thought of reading for hours obscure documentation to find potential vulnerabilities on a system kills my spirit).

!rant: I am pretty fresh to this game so I couldn't say what my biggest hurdle has been because there hasn't really been one yet. So, in an attempt to beat the curve and perhaps learn something...

What is the most important thing you have learnt from the biggest hurdle in your dev career?

During my commute to home from office, I got an idea about an app that I really needed and it could be built easily. And I couldn't wait to get home and start building it ... I was super excited...( You know the feeling when you are so clear about what you are going to do that you start to think in code )

Now it has been half an hour since I am stuck on this error , looking at my screen , pulling my hair while sitting on a chair in the posture of a f*cking question mark! Thinking about why I did I even choose to do this for a living , I could have sold vegetables and be happier.

This is just beginning of my career , is this how I am going to spend rest of my life?

I keep seeing news story after news story talking about the progress we’re making in AI and how there are not enough developers to fill the jobs in demand for it. I tossed my alternate career choice of aerospace over two decades ago because there were no interesting career paths in what I was capable of doing (not much because I suck at math). And here I am 22 years deep into a Web Dev career that I feel is going to be completely obsolete well before my retirement age. I either need to do the impossible and get good at advanced math so I can even understand the very basics of AI or I need to win the lottery.

!rant
My boss has influenced me the most at work. He was the first person to introduce me to software development. Though I'm self-taught since, I still owe him my career. Now I teach support techs and junior devs how to code, as well as oversee the architecture of major systems. It's crazy to think now that my computer building hobby would turn into something like this, and it's all because someone convinced me to try what I thought would be terribly boring.

I start to dislike programming. I used to love it. Chased by deadline, bill, family pressure, etc. Not sure what to do. Switch career?

It was more of an inner rage.
A client's manager was trying to getting rid off of me as soon as he could(budget cutting from their client, but still), so he asked my team lead any negative or pity feedback on any issue or misunderstanding that I encountered during work and he was using that as an excuse to tell my agency that I should leave.

Fine, I thought. He's all hot raging air style guy, he can't stand someone that's fine with his character.

But after leaving (2 days earlier than said before even) and when I received the income next month I realised that something was off, and guess what?

That DEEPSHIT refused to pay 6 out of 12 last working days there. So my agency argued with them but can't do shit because they're the "paying client" and the negative sentiment was redirected at me, for making them almost loose that client because of my behaviour.

FUCK THAT PRICK, he touched where I was never touched in my career, stealing from my work and pokets!

What a clown world.

What do you think of Elixir + Phoenix to build API’s? Is it a better choice than a more established language like Python or something more new like Scala or Clojure?

At my company we're going through a watershed moment where we're starting to discuss and think about re-building our digital foundations and nothing is off limits. I'm leading the discussion about our architecture where everyone can have their say into what the future looks like for our applications. We're currently on a Drupal (CMS)  + PHP7/Symfony (Backend Content Repository) + Symfony Twig templates (Frontend)

Even though I have been developing in PHP most of my career, I personally love Elixir and spend a lot of my time away from work learning it but many of my reasons feels subjective like pattern matching, it's actor concurrency model, immutable data and not having to deal with classes/objects, and I'm not entirely sure how that translates to business value, advocating successfully for a tech stack change requires solid reasoning and good answers to challenges like how do we find Elixir developers when existing devs leave, how easy is it to build a CI/CD pipeline for Elixir/Phoenix, etc.

Hey guys! I'm new here, and also in programming... I'm finishing my studies in Python and I would like to ask you a question, if I can... what else should I learn that would help me? I intend to start my "career" as a web developer, at least for now... did I do it right? am i starting wrong?

I am not able to decide what to do. I have two option
1. I am trying for jobs in IT. But haven't got yet. Either i wait for it or
2. I go with Non-IT job for now
I really need to do either of the two.
I want to make my career in IT bit right it seems tough

What happens as you accrue years of experience is, you feel as if you learned a lot, actually its yes and no, yes because working in an environment with deadlines teaches things, no because the tech is changing.

The fact is tech is changing every few months if not year, one should be having a baby's curiosity to learn and adapt to the new practices.

When I started my tech career I was having a growth mindset, as I went on I felt somehow I got into a fixed mindset and got frustrated often. It's better late than never to realize that you may get wrong more often than right and learn to have an open mind when working.

Finally always take it easy on yourself, learn and move on.

What's more important to you guys. Getting the chance get knowledge or make money ?
I recently graduated as the second best, making a little less then the average (in Germany) but get all kinds of certifications and courses for free and working on a 90million Dollar Projekt using modern technology (Java)

I'm totally happy with this situation for the start of my professional career what u think

So IV been spending quite a lot of time recently chasing my new career as a developer. But today I took a step back from everything and realised something quite important. A job title doesn't make you a developer. If you enjoy coding and have a genuine passion for it then you are already a developer. Just keep doing what you enjoy the most and fuck everyone else.

What is a waste of time when you are trying to develop your career as a software engineer?

Tell boss you want to resign in a good manner.
Boss tells you it will take you a very long time to leave.
Tell boss that is way to long.
Boss persists his not so kind requests.
Check your contract and local laws.
Dilemma: Tell him he’s being unrealistic and demand a normal procedure/Do the time and cry about every missed opportunity for a career upgrade. What would you do?

So I'm a young lad with a career in Front end development I love coding in HTML (yes I know it's not a coding language to some, but to a computer illiterate person it's wizardry so I've got that going for me) I've got skills in responsive design with css and skills in javascript, jQuery and a little bit of skill in PHP But I'm not sure what to go for next? I'm not much of a back end developer..got nothing against it, just never was my cuppa tea. I want to improve my skills but I'm not sure what to look into.. Any advice?

Just want to rant about my current struggle and look for some advice.

I was never encouraged to explore and cultivate my interests in my life before college, and my family kept pressuring me to achieve academic excellence in the past.

Only until I got into my current liberal art college last year, I was able to do what I like: Art and programming.

Everything was moving forward smoothly so far, but when I started to apply for internship, I found myself in a very awkward situation: companies who offer interns prefer students who're concentrated in cs or art, but not both. And as you might guess, they require personal projects which I barely have time to do besides my school work.

Sometimes I wonder if studying in liberal art college is a good idea... I can't imagine myself competing with CS guys from universities...Or art students from design schools like RISD.

I really like both fields, yet Im still struggling with my future career decisions.