I am based in Bulgaria and I recently had my first experience with a potential Swiss employer. It was rather unpleasant. After I went through 5 interviews we discussed my rates (as a remote consultant). I received a low ball counter offer which was about the half of what I usually charge. This quickly became a racist rant and a senior manager at the company tried to persuade me by saying that with the money they offered I'll "live like a king" in Bulgaria. Needless to say I politely declined because I would much rather work with people that value my work. I was really surprised that such unprofessional attitude came from Swiss company, but apparently it's not so uncommon judging by the blog post.
As a developer in Switzerland, I'm unfortunately not surprised.
Maybe Swiss firms have a real arrogance problem (not all, but many). If it makes you feel any "better", your country of origin is not the reason (I get comments like that while living in Switerland too).
They are mostly just clueless. Large Swiss firms even more so (Swisscom being the main offender).
EDIT: To clarify, I got lowball offers with some other bullshit reason like "but it'll help bootstrap your career". As if my multiple years (15+) of career in international companies doing a good job (as developer/architect/senior) was not enough for their position, somehow.
The Swiss also have a real ageism issue. When I worked there, I had a good friend who was Swiss that got fired. He was in his 50s at the time and the attitude was that nobody that age should be coding. He was a very good developer, but couldn't get hired because of his age. He started a web development company. The key to his success was that when he met with clients he presented himself as "the boss" with his crew of young developers. Back at the office, he was that crew of young developers. He told me that if his clients thought he was the one developing the code, they'd never have hired him.
Yeah, that's supposed to be good business sense: you pay less money for the same amount of work. In truth though, you get what you pay for, always. Software works the same regardless of who writes it, where they live, or how much you pay them, so if you pay less for a piece of software you'll just get a piece of software that's worth less money.
It's exactly for this reason that big corporate software is generally shite: because they try to get it at a discount by paying low wages to consultants whom they think they can afford to underpay because they live in a poor part of the world (hint: India). Then they end up with horrible messes of software that nobody wants to work with, at which point they have to pay more money anyway to convince anyone to fix the mess.
It's just people thinking they're so smart when in fact they're short-termist and dumb.
Do not be surprised, I've interacted with hundreds of companies, many are run incompetently by people unqualified for the position and who have no integrity or morals. Maintain your composure and move on, if you're not being turned down now and again for being too expensive, you're too cheap...
Saying 'you will live like a king' is not the smartest thing. He should have said:
'Please consider that your local living costs are much lower than in Switzerland. We incorporate those differences in our offered rate like every other company does. Thanks for your understanding.'
So the tone was—yes—unprofessional, the attitude not. And even if this attitude is debatable, you have to allow the other party to express reasons for a lower offer in a negotiation.
Sad as it may be your being based on a low income country was probably one of the main reasons they approached you. And it is quite universal so I wouldn't attribute it to unprofessionalism. From company's point of view it makes perfect sense to outsource to the best quality/price ratio.
As a developer over 40, my biggest challenge is actually that the management has come to expect weekend work and late nights as the norm. As someone with a family , I can't put in those hours every day and every weekend. Single programmers who can put in those kind of hours are rewarded and those who cant are singled out for ridicule or "performance concern chats with manager".
Projects have gone agile and they have not accounted for the unexpected shit that happens, low level functional designs seem to have fallen out of fashion and the deliverable deadlines have become ultra aggressive.
And the mangers' attitude is that "they can shake any tree and it rains qualified programmer resumes". Here in Toronto, there is a company called Allegis and all major employers post their developer job here. The headhunters are plugged into Allegis and they call you based on keyword match. Have you ever seen poor people huddled outside HomeDepot, hoping to be picked up? Thats what it like to be a developer searching for a job in my town. Most enterprise dev jobs are focused on a very narrow set of skills; so it doesn't matter how good you are with designing solutions or algorithms you know -- what matters is do you know java/c#/angular(new) ? And thats all that matters for Allegis keyword match. You are probably thinking I can learn more technologies ; what I am pointing out is that enterprise s/w development process is based on the fundamental principle of getting barely skilled people who can put in the hours and keep their mouth shut. But these jobs pay a lot more than startup jobs and have a lot more security.
I'm 41 and a dev (and manager and bunch of other roles when needed, but most my days are spent with software/hardware dev) and sure, it's all true what this article says, but there is no real personal advice there besides, as others said, just 'don't do everything, but do everything'.
So some unasked advice from a 40+ then which I wish I was told when I was 17 or something: a) believe in yourself; learn from others, but if you have strong opinions or think something is wrong then voice it even though others (are supposed to) have more experience b) fast typing and making long hours are irrelevant c) get out there and mingle with non coders a lot.
All of these 3 points (I learned them at different stages, in order of appearance above; c I only started doing 3 years ago) made me never having to need a job as such, always worked where/when I wanted, always made enough money and usually have enough spare time to do whatever while still performing.
Funny, but those of us not living in the Bay Area do mingle with non coders a lot. It's actually hard to find coders to mingle with. When I visited Palo Alto for example it felt weird. On one hand it seemed great at first, hearing discussion on databases or JavaScript on the street from total strangers. On the other hand it felt like a bubble, like an echo chamber. I actually heard this guy saying he liked some girl and wanting to ask her out with the pretext of raising money for his startup. I was like "on what planet am I?"
Age is an issue with software devlopment. Early forties is not old at all, realistically you will likely be working for another 20 years unless you've already made significant money. In many professions such as law you're only getting started at 40. If in software it's an achievement to reach that milestone than something is wrong.
It may be obvious (i.e. general networking effects), but what dynamic let c) give you work and freedom? Please elaborate.
As a coder who really dread interacting with people (especially non-technical people) in the context of work, I'd like to know how this advice would change my life.
I'm 36 and really want to develop (c). I have decent social skills but I have no idea how to find non-coders to mingle with. Where does one start? Meetup groups? Cycling groups? Creating art and showing it?
"you were, are and will be a software developer, that is, a relatively expensive factory worker, whose tasks your managers would be happy to offshore no matter what they tell you."
this is exactly my experience. writing software really doesn't require any great creative mind or cleverness. i'm a pretty mediocre programmer. i got roped into programming as a kid by, first of all because i wanted to make video games, but then once i'd dipped my toe in i found learning new, exotic (seeming) ideas and making clever solutions to problems was a lot of fun in and of itself. but i can think of only one time i got paid to do anything that felt like that: working on a tetris game with bombliss, without the official tetris rules. the rules of tetris are surprisingly deep and refined, in case you didn't know, so that endeavor was utterly insane and disastrous, which was the general character of the company i was working for. but still, it was a lot of fun playing physicist from the tetris universe, trying to infer the rules through experimentation.
to write software, once you have the skill down, is really just about doing the work. it doesn't require any insight, unless you intend to write good software, but no one cares about good software. no cares about the software at all. they have things they want to do, and the software, the making of it, is, if anything an impediment. so is the person making it.
While it probably confirms a lot of fears around here, this comment is pretty hyperbolic. That is to say, it captures the lowest lows (replaceable cog) and some of the highest highs (experimental physicist in Tetris universe). But most of us are not really suffering under those conditions, except (critically!) in an imagined way.
> it doesn't require any insight, unless you intend to write good software, but no one cares about good software.
This last statement is demonstrably false. Many people care about good software. Just like they care about good cars, good vacations, good hot dogs.
But still, grumpy developers will upvote this and believe in it. They then become a self-fulfilling prophecy. They see threats that don't exist, then at some point they call out those threats and in doing so cash in their chips.
I've seen many smart developers miss great opportunities in doing this. They could be learning to make their own terms and push back, taking advantage of high demand. Instead they become a plumber, landscaper, or Ph.D., thinking the grass really is greener over there. Well, maybe so. But that mentality has not changed, so what are the real chances?
And you might realise there are shitty dev jobs with poor prospects out there, that bill themselves as more than they are. The whole "passionate about my job" thing then becomes a little sinister.
There are different classes of dev jobs. The bad ones pay little and lead to less, and will usually come painted with BS. The "passionate" dev will be happy with whatever they get, and they'll get very little to be passionate about - in-house housekeeping all the way.
But at least the market is good enough now that you can always realise this later and try to fix things. When the gravy train begins to wain, you might be stuck with what you have...
I'm really sorry for you, there ARE better places to spend the majority of your life if you feel this way about your job. I'm a developer turned manager, I care deeply about the code we write. My Boss (Director of Engineering) and his Boss (CTO) care about the code we write. Hell even our CEO cares, though for different reasons. Good well designed code is not easy and it does take creativity. If you don't work for a place that allows you some measure of that, leave. It's not an easy skill to learn and there is a huge amount of demand, we do not have to deal with crappy environments.
I'm really sad this is the top comment here. It doesn't need to be this way. For reference I'm been a developer for over 15 years and I know why some developers feel this way but they shouldn't have to and don't have to.
You're describing the lower tier jobs in an industry of disposable software. There are software jobs out there that do value experienced and skilled developers.
I grow weary of hearing about "white privilege". I likewise grow weary of any of today's politically correct messages: women in combat, bathroom bills, work quotas, transvestite rights. It's all BS.
I grew up a military brat. We didn't have a lot of money. I wore hand-me-downs, had iron-on patches on my knees. My family could not afford to send me to college, so I served in the military to get the GI Bill and worked my own way through college.
I'm over 40, in IT and no one ever gave me hand out in relation to any job or education.
Like an earlier poster said, I'm under no obligation to do anything. I believe in hard work. No one should be given a free ride because they are black, homosexual, female, whatever. Work your ass off to get where you want to be. Full stop. No one is under a moral or other obligation to get you in the door or ensure fair play. I'm not an asshole to people, but everyone has the same opportunities. I realize the military is not for everyone, but young men especially can really benefit. You can do a four-year hitch and have your college paid for. If you like it, you could re-up as an officer and the sky is the limit.
The problem with people today is they have a sense of entitlement that is misplaced. No one owes anyone anything other than moral decency: please, thank you, that kind of thing. Work hard, play hard. Life is better without handouts. You have a sense of fulfillment when you pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
I liked the post, and empathized with some truths in it. I saved up and bought a used Commodore PET in 1977 at age 13. I taught myself assembler, c, basic, and went on to buy a Vic-20, C-64, Amiga 1000, Amiga 500, Mac PowerPC, NCR 3125 (386 pen-based tablet in 1995 or 1996!), and then read up on AI in the 1980s - Neural Networks, GAs, GP, Expert systems, Fuzzy Systems, Chaos, Complexity, etc... I was using Minix on my Amiga before Linux on my PowerPC, and I have dual-booted since, but Windows is also in my repertoire.
THEN, I gave it all up and became a welder at an animatronics company that made window displays, stayed in the entertainment field designing stage machinery, special effects, and so on. My last job was at a water show diving and fixing hydraulic and electrical systems as a senior manager and show manager (not in the US, since a senior manager would not be caught dead in the water!). I have now aged 51 years 11 months, getting heavily back into neural nets, livecoding graphics and music while living in East Java, Indonesia. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY as a contrast.
All I can say, and what I bestow on my older two children (I just fathered a baby girl a year ago), is that I left the fast track to the huge salary to do what I wanted, and that always kept me happy, and busy in a good way. I read books until I don't understand them, and then go back and forth to others until I do, and I stayed physical, and avoided 'desk job' ailments of most people my age. I have grown to know it is time, time with family and friends that money buys you. And if you have food, a roof over your head and some toys, you don't need the other $25K to $100K per year, or what have you. No, there is nothing new under the sun, but I have miles to go before I sleep...
A question - you are looking for 'fun' in a job and, at the same time, consider programming fun - haven't you been able to find a programming job you like?
"That means that you she or he gets 100 KCHF per year, but she or he are actually creating a value worth over a million francs. And of course, they get the bonuses at the end of the fiscal year, because, you know, capitalism. Know your worth. Read Karl Marx and Thomas Piketty. Enough said."
While neither Karl Marx nor Thomas Piketty have a great track record when it comes to economic policy prescriptions (Dean Baker's opinion on this might be interesting for people who share much of their world view with all three of these economists), will they teach me to better negotiate based on my "knowledge of my worth"? I rather doubt that they will, given that the punchline of much of their writing is that worker compensation necessarily trends towards the subsistence level over time, r>g, etc. etc. Certainly if the point is to "know your worth" in the sense of being able to negotiate a better compensation, a better source ought to be available.
Separately, it's an interesting turn of events that fairly politicized economists' writings are now recommended reading for computer programmers. The next logical step is a recommendation to join a political party (certainly joing the political party would help one's career in the USSR where Marx was required reading for people entering the professions.)
a nice piece on understanding self and the pursuit of a rewarding life in tech or code or whatever (with real examples from said life) diverged in a wood of political lecturing garbage.
I think that misses one big point here; and a point that I live by: Don't waste your neurons and time.
Time is the most precious thing you have, so don't waste it learning stuff you won't need. Even if it's shinny. Resist, and for the things you do need, don't become an 'expert' -- pick the things you NEED and scope it well. Then hop along on the new tech that came around...
I always see any new thing I take on as an investment, and I try to make it pay down the line...
I didn't use to do that, and I'm an expert in a few tech that I had fun learning, but have absolutely zero relevance today. See, I can write Altivec code without the scalar version for example. That was useful for about 2 years...
This is where luck comes in. If you wait until something is super popular then you lose the advantage of being one of the first people that understand the technology when it goes into production. Also sometimes you may learn something that never pays off but later it feeds into something that does. I spent a lot of time learning Common Lisp and could never apply that knowledge at work until functional programming became more mainstream and Scala/Clojure became acceptable languages for production.
I had the same initial reaction but if you think it through not having your visa renewed effectively comes down to being fired, i.e. the company terminating their dealings with you.
Doesn't make it better (at all), but it's essentially just the threat of firing albeit with more weight behind it for the visa workers. Not the company calling the visa office about you or holding on to your passport, etc...
Not for Gastarbeiter. You're supposed to work, pay all taxes and GTFO before you can legally claim any benefits, while still being despised by unemployed locals for "stealing" their jobs.
Did I just stumble on slashdot? I much prefer the discourse on HN but the reaction to "PC culture" and "White privilege" is basically the same everywhere.
It has never been supposed to mean anything about an individual, and yet that is ALWAYS how it seems to be taken. We (as white and or males) can't help but see things from our individual perspective and take offense at the implication we ever had anything easier than anyone else.
I agree with others in the thread, we just need to throw away the word white privilege and come up with something else because it has been totally poisoned. I'm not saying there aren't overzealous "social justice warriors" that haven't contributed to the misunderstanding of the word.
Just remember, when people use the word white privilege, THEY ARE NOT REFERRING TO YOU AS AN INDIVIDUAL FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.
This is a clue that perhaps your terminology is loaded, inflammatory, and should be changed.
I find that there's very little value in reasoning about race as a collective, since it's usually just a (overly) reductive variable for socioeconomic status, upbringing, or environment. If you mean those things, say those things. Attaching a racial modifier to a term and then expecting members of that race to not feel described or targeted by it makes no sense.
(And that goes double when that term is used, often, as an attack, not in the thoughtful way you describe, but that is a rant for another time.)
Because privilege is based on looking at only a subset of the group. A subset that changes to push a narrative. For example, white privilege often involves some concept related to being given leniency in legal matters. Less likely to be stopped, less likely to be arrested if stopped, less likely to be charged if arrested, and less likely to be convicted if charged. And statistically, that is all good and fair. But then male privilege discussions almost never include that the reverse happens when you look at gender (and to a much greater degree than race).
Also, while perhaps not originally meant to be applied to an individual, that is the common experience with it. It is further compounded by picking only certain areas for privilege to matter and being very stereotyped. For example, one white privilege is going to a school where the majority of the student body was the same race. Except that isn't always true.
While the wording behind privilege is extremely toxic and needs to be done away with, much of the ideas behind it are what directly led to that toxicity to begin with.
>THEY ARE NOT REFERRING TO YOU AS AN INDIVIDUAL FOR THE LOVE OF GOD
---Disobey authority. Say “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” and change jobs.
Challenge authority, but don't be an ass about it. Simply try to help them understand that you are doing them a favor by challenging them. Perhaps say, "Do you mind if I weigh in on that?" If they aren't interested in your opinion still follow up with "I understand you've thought about this, but I've also given this a lot of thought and I also have a lot of experience around this and I've seen it be a problem before."
> "Ok, let's make a rails app"
> "Oh, I need rails first"
> "Oh, I need rbenv first"
> "Oh I need brew"
> "Oh I need xcode tools"
As a Rails dev, this made me chuckle, yes, I've put a lot of hours into troubleshooting dev setups. But this is the wrong example. All of these are installed with one line on the terminal. And really, there are far simpler web stacks to pick up without even having to leave Ruby. Sinatra on system Ruby works just fine. All you do is 'gem install sinatra', open up a text editor and go.
Really, the complexity you have to watch out for is the complexity you impose yourself. Choosing the wrong tools for the job or the wrong abstractions. For many applications, Rails is overkill.
This was a good read - I'm a dev over 40 and much of this rang true. I think there's a lot of great advice in there. One standout for me was "Be prepared to change your mind at any time through learning. " - something that I think we should all aspire to.
In an email exchange I had with C.A.R. Hoare a couple of years back he said:
Paradoxically, I have been working on shared variable concurrency, using a partially ordered trace semantics. Until I retired, I was too frightened to tackle anything so difficult.
I found the advice to be quite a mixed bag, but um, having just turned 42, the OP knows very little about being a developer after 40. The article is about what he learned as an under-40 developer.
Warm fuzzy nostalgia aside, this article seems to amount to "Learn everything, read everything, do everything, don't bandwagon, Apple is pretty cool. The other stuff is OK too, if you like that sort of thing. Learn Node. PS. Don't harrass people".
It's an amalgamation of every Medium tech-post ever.
I guess the real message is: believe whatever the mainstream audience believes at the time. You can't really go wrong with always agreeing with whatever the current thought bubble agrees with - and be quick to change your opinions if the herd is moving. When the author saw the derision against Steve Ballmer, and the favor Apple was getting, he made the clear choice to jump ship. And because he was part of that popular herd jumping ship, it worked very well. Follow the wind.
It's actually a pretty good point and is a decent way to always remain relevant. You can't be left behind if you're always on top of the latest thought trends.
EDIT: A missing piece the author points out too: don't be an early adopter of a thought trend (Point 1: Forget the hype). Only jump in when it becomes mainstream. If you adopt something before it becomes mainstream, there's a chance it can fail. If you wait until it is mainstream, but get in just as it becomes mainstream, you get the benefit of being an early adopter and the benefit of never being on the unpopular viewpoint.
> It's an amalgamation of every Medium tech-post ever.
Very well summarized.
While I enjoyed this post somehow, maybe because I was thinking of the good old times, I didn't feel comfortable reading: I found his views having a touch of an ubiquitous negativity and slight frustration. I disagree with many of his points. And I miss one clear message.
[+] [-] toddkazakov|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tribaal|10 years ago|reply
Maybe Swiss firms have a real arrogance problem (not all, but many). If it makes you feel any "better", your country of origin is not the reason (I get comments like that while living in Switerland too).
They are mostly just clueless. Large Swiss firms even more so (Swisscom being the main offender).
EDIT: To clarify, I got lowball offers with some other bullshit reason like "but it'll help bootstrap your career". As if my multiple years (15+) of career in international companies doing a good job (as developer/architect/senior) was not enough for their position, somehow.
[+] [-] bwanab|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|10 years ago|reply
It's exactly for this reason that big corporate software is generally shite: because they try to get it at a discount by paying low wages to consultants whom they think they can afford to underpay because they live in a poor part of the world (hint: India). Then they end up with horrible messes of software that nobody wants to work with, at which point they have to pay more money anyway to convince anyone to fix the mess.
It's just people thinking they're so smart when in fact they're short-termist and dumb.
[+] [-] tudorw|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greenspot|10 years ago|reply
'Please consider that your local living costs are much lower than in Switzerland. We incorporate those differences in our offered rate like every other company does. Thanks for your understanding.'
So the tone was—yes—unprofessional, the attitude not. And even if this attitude is debatable, you have to allow the other party to express reasons for a lower offer in a negotiation.
[+] [-] naivepiano|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eps|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manishsharan|10 years ago|reply
And the mangers' attitude is that "they can shake any tree and it rains qualified programmer resumes". Here in Toronto, there is a company called Allegis and all major employers post their developer job here. The headhunters are plugged into Allegis and they call you based on keyword match. Have you ever seen poor people huddled outside HomeDepot, hoping to be picked up? Thats what it like to be a developer searching for a job in my town. Most enterprise dev jobs are focused on a very narrow set of skills; so it doesn't matter how good you are with designing solutions or algorithms you know -- what matters is do you know java/c#/angular(new) ? And thats all that matters for Allegis keyword match. You are probably thinking I can learn more technologies ; what I am pointing out is that enterprise s/w development process is based on the fundamental principle of getting barely skilled people who can put in the hours and keep their mouth shut. But these jobs pay a lot more than startup jobs and have a lot more security.
[+] [-] tluyben2|10 years ago|reply
So some unasked advice from a 40+ then which I wish I was told when I was 17 or something: a) believe in yourself; learn from others, but if you have strong opinions or think something is wrong then voice it even though others (are supposed to) have more experience b) fast typing and making long hours are irrelevant c) get out there and mingle with non coders a lot.
All of these 3 points (I learned them at different stages, in order of appearance above; c I only started doing 3 years ago) made me never having to need a job as such, always worked where/when I wanted, always made enough money and usually have enough spare time to do whatever while still performing.
[+] [-] bad_user|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iorrus|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soft_dev_person|10 years ago|reply
As a coder who really dread interacting with people (especially non-technical people) in the context of work, I'd like to know how this advice would change my life.
[+] [-] votr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pasquinelli|10 years ago|reply
this is exactly my experience. writing software really doesn't require any great creative mind or cleverness. i'm a pretty mediocre programmer. i got roped into programming as a kid by, first of all because i wanted to make video games, but then once i'd dipped my toe in i found learning new, exotic (seeming) ideas and making clever solutions to problems was a lot of fun in and of itself. but i can think of only one time i got paid to do anything that felt like that: working on a tetris game with bombliss, without the official tetris rules. the rules of tetris are surprisingly deep and refined, in case you didn't know, so that endeavor was utterly insane and disastrous, which was the general character of the company i was working for. but still, it was a lot of fun playing physicist from the tetris universe, trying to infer the rules through experimentation.
to write software, once you have the skill down, is really just about doing the work. it doesn't require any insight, unless you intend to write good software, but no one cares about good software. no cares about the software at all. they have things they want to do, and the software, the making of it, is, if anything an impediment. so is the person making it.
[+] [-] themodelplumber|10 years ago|reply
> it doesn't require any insight, unless you intend to write good software, but no one cares about good software.
This last statement is demonstrably false. Many people care about good software. Just like they care about good cars, good vacations, good hot dogs.
But still, grumpy developers will upvote this and believe in it. They then become a self-fulfilling prophecy. They see threats that don't exist, then at some point they call out those threats and in doing so cash in their chips.
I've seen many smart developers miss great opportunities in doing this. They could be learning to make their own terms and push back, taking advantage of high demand. Instead they become a plumber, landscaper, or Ph.D., thinking the grass really is greener over there. Well, maybe so. But that mentality has not changed, so what are the real chances?
[+] [-] Chris2048|10 years ago|reply
I read this: http://quantjob.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-to-avoid-quantdevel...
And the description of being "sucked in" to a "housekeeping IT" rang scarily true. Match with this phenomenon: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B64WFyuCIAAjq3u.png
And you might realise there are shitty dev jobs with poor prospects out there, that bill themselves as more than they are. The whole "passionate about my job" thing then becomes a little sinister.
There are different classes of dev jobs. The bad ones pay little and lead to less, and will usually come painted with BS. The "passionate" dev will be happy with whatever they get, and they'll get very little to be passionate about - in-house housekeeping all the way.
But at least the market is good enough now that you can always realise this later and try to fix things. When the gravy train begins to wain, you might be stuck with what you have...
[+] [-] jaegerpicker|10 years ago|reply
I'm really sad this is the top comment here. It doesn't need to be this way. For reference I'm been a developer for over 15 years and I know why some developers feel this way but they shouldn't have to and don't have to.
[+] [-] willtim|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nucleardonuts|10 years ago|reply
I grew up a military brat. We didn't have a lot of money. I wore hand-me-downs, had iron-on patches on my knees. My family could not afford to send me to college, so I served in the military to get the GI Bill and worked my own way through college.
I'm over 40, in IT and no one ever gave me hand out in relation to any job or education.
Like an earlier poster said, I'm under no obligation to do anything. I believe in hard work. No one should be given a free ride because they are black, homosexual, female, whatever. Work your ass off to get where you want to be. Full stop. No one is under a moral or other obligation to get you in the door or ensure fair play. I'm not an asshole to people, but everyone has the same opportunities. I realize the military is not for everyone, but young men especially can really benefit. You can do a four-year hitch and have your college paid for. If you like it, you could re-up as an officer and the sky is the limit.
The problem with people today is they have a sense of entitlement that is misplaced. No one owes anyone anything other than moral decency: please, thank you, that kind of thing. Work hard, play hard. Life is better without handouts. You have a sense of fulfillment when you pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
[+] [-] eggy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neotrinity|10 years ago|reply
Great to see u made yourself a good life in east java.
My grandpa lived in Solo and my dad in Jakarta.
I tried so much to move there. But couldnt make it.
I am still stuck at the hamsters wheel in London. Hopefully i can get a fully remote job and then move to Indonesia. I can only dream !
/dream
[+] [-] lgieron|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] B1FF_PSUVM|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] yosefk|10 years ago|reply
While neither Karl Marx nor Thomas Piketty have a great track record when it comes to economic policy prescriptions (Dean Baker's opinion on this might be interesting for people who share much of their world view with all three of these economists), will they teach me to better negotiate based on my "knowledge of my worth"? I rather doubt that they will, given that the punchline of much of their writing is that worker compensation necessarily trends towards the subsistence level over time, r>g, etc. etc. Certainly if the point is to "know your worth" in the sense of being able to negotiate a better compensation, a better source ought to be available.
Separately, it's an interesting turn of events that fairly politicized economists' writings are now recommended reading for computer programmers. The next logical step is a recommendation to join a political party (certainly joing the political party would help one's career in the USSR where Marx was required reading for people entering the professions.)
[+] [-] lintiness|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buserror|10 years ago|reply
Time is the most precious thing you have, so don't waste it learning stuff you won't need. Even if it's shinny. Resist, and for the things you do need, don't become an 'expert' -- pick the things you NEED and scope it well. Then hop along on the new tech that came around...
I always see any new thing I take on as an investment, and I try to make it pay down the line...
I didn't use to do that, and I'm an expert in a few tech that I had fun learning, but have absolutely zero relevance today. See, I can write Altivec code without the scalar version for example. That was useful for about 2 years...
[+] [-] justinhj|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daxfohl|10 years ago|reply
tldr: Banal, overconfident advice on the subject of a software career, devolving into political rants at times.
[+] [-] febed|10 years ago|reply
That was an eye-opener. For some reason I thought Switzerland was a worker's utopia with the relatively higher salaries.
[+] [-] ramblerman|10 years ago|reply
Doesn't make it better (at all), but it's essentially just the threat of firing albeit with more weight behind it for the visa workers. Not the company calling the visa office about you or holding on to your passport, etc...
[+] [-] african_cheetah|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bbv-if|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NormlOverrated|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] okreallywtf|10 years ago|reply
It has never been supposed to mean anything about an individual, and yet that is ALWAYS how it seems to be taken. We (as white and or males) can't help but see things from our individual perspective and take offense at the implication we ever had anything easier than anyone else.
I agree with others in the thread, we just need to throw away the word white privilege and come up with something else because it has been totally poisoned. I'm not saying there aren't overzealous "social justice warriors" that haven't contributed to the misunderstanding of the word.
Just remember, when people use the word white privilege, THEY ARE NOT REFERRING TO YOU AS AN INDIVIDUAL FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.
[+] [-] Karunamon|10 years ago|reply
This is a clue that perhaps your terminology is loaded, inflammatory, and should be changed.
I find that there's very little value in reasoning about race as a collective, since it's usually just a (overly) reductive variable for socioeconomic status, upbringing, or environment. If you mean those things, say those things. Attaching a racial modifier to a term and then expecting members of that race to not feel described or targeted by it makes no sense.
(And that goes double when that term is used, often, as an attack, not in the thoughtful way you describe, but that is a rant for another time.)
[+] [-] Lawtonfogle|10 years ago|reply
Also, while perhaps not originally meant to be applied to an individual, that is the common experience with it. It is further compounded by picking only certain areas for privilege to matter and being very stereotyped. For example, one white privilege is going to a school where the majority of the student body was the same race. Except that isn't always true.
While the wording behind privilege is extremely toxic and needs to be done away with, much of the ideas behind it are what directly led to that toxicity to begin with.
>THEY ARE NOT REFERRING TO YOU AS AN INDIVIDUAL FOR THE LOVE OF GOD
Yeah, if you ignore all the other times.
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] alexandercrohde|10 years ago|reply
Challenge authority, but don't be an ass about it. Simply try to help them understand that you are doing them a favor by challenging them. Perhaps say, "Do you mind if I weigh in on that?" If they aren't interested in your opinion still follow up with "I understand you've thought about this, but I've also given this a lot of thought and I also have a lot of experience around this and I've seen it be a problem before."
[+] [-] barnacs|10 years ago|reply
That aside, a lot of the more generic points make sense.
[+] [-] vinceguidry|10 years ago|reply
As a Rails dev, this made me chuckle, yes, I've put a lot of hours into troubleshooting dev setups. But this is the wrong example. All of these are installed with one line on the terminal. And really, there are far simpler web stacks to pick up without even having to leave Ruby. Sinatra on system Ruby works just fine. All you do is 'gem install sinatra', open up a text editor and go.
Really, the complexity you have to watch out for is the complexity you impose yourself. Choosing the wrong tools for the job or the wrong abstractions. For many applications, Rails is overkill.
[+] [-] groundCode|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shipintbrief|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgrahamc|10 years ago|reply
Paradoxically, I have been working on shared variable concurrency, using a partially ordered trace semantics. Until I retired, I was too frightened to tackle anything so difficult.
Definitely life after 40, 50, 60, 70, ...
[+] [-] isxek|10 years ago|reply
I started my career as a software developer at precisely 10am, on Monday October 6th, 1997... I had recently celebrated my 24th birthday.
[+] [-] eggy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ljw1001|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ry_ry|10 years ago|reply
It's an amalgamation of every Medium tech-post ever.
[+] [-] RyanZAG|10 years ago|reply
It's actually a pretty good point and is a decent way to always remain relevant. You can't be left behind if you're always on top of the latest thought trends.
EDIT: A missing piece the author points out too: don't be an early adopter of a thought trend (Point 1: Forget the hype). Only jump in when it becomes mainstream. If you adopt something before it becomes mainstream, there's a chance it can fail. If you wait until it is mainstream, but get in just as it becomes mainstream, you get the benefit of being an early adopter and the benefit of never being on the unpopular viewpoint.
[+] [-] greenspot|10 years ago|reply
Very well summarized.
While I enjoyed this post somehow, maybe because I was thinking of the good old times, I didn't feel comfortable reading: I found his views having a touch of an ubiquitous negativity and slight frustration. I disagree with many of his points. And I miss one clear message.