1. It's unnatural to be hunched over at your desk all day typing made up words into a computer. Like what is this "public static void main(String[] args)" shit? Instead of learning computer languages I could have learned human languages and been able to unlock so much culture, history, and knowledge. 2. No stability. SWE is like walking on a razor wire. Once you are fired, laid off, or trying to look for a new job, have fun re-studying stuff from your undergrad from 10+ years ago! No one cares about what you worked on at your actual job, just whether you can compute some stupid thing from an array in O(n). A 50 year old has no proof that he/she is competent. No license, exam, or well-accepted standards mean you start from scratch every time. The exception is if you have some niche but then you are limiting the kinds of jobs you can take on. Every year an army of kids graduate from college ready to take our jobs. They are fresh from algorithms & data structures and willing to work long hours for promo. 3. No prestige. In fact, telling others you are a software engineer is negative prestige. 4. No feeling of direct impact. Doctors and lawyers meet the people they help face-to-face. We software engineers type magical words into a computer that lets it do something -- great, who cares! It's all made up 0 and 1s. I laugh whenever I think that Meta famously uses "impact" for perf. None of you have impact. No one cares about the meta verse, or increasing ad sales by 1%, or improving page loads by 2%. There's a reason FIRE is so popular among software engineers. None of us want to be here! Just make some money and get out! Whenever I meet an upper-class, attractive, sociable man/woman who is a software engineer, I just think wtf are you doing here 😂😂 TC 380k
Software Engineering is the most honest profession.
Where im from, Honesty gets you pipped.
the hell? what about medicine, nursing, social work, teaching? SWEs are garbage self entitled
Company name checks with personality
You can be high at work and still get high TC without worrying about anything
How?
True or imagine being hungover as a doctor lol
You should try a blue collar job and then say that SWE is a bad career
In case you don't know, you could try and look at the hourly rates that plumbers, electricians, and HVAC technicians charge, even in LCOL areas. They make out really well. And more power to them!
1. Get a standing desk. 2. Right, imgine having a higher degree that provides you with a broad spectrum of potential high paying job opportunities. 3. You must be one hell of a boring person if all you can contribute to a conversation is your job title expecting that it will make you an interesting person to be around. 4. Apply for jobs that deal with interesting problem where you can make valuable contributions.
This ^^
Ok.
Go fight in Ukraine It will help with prestige and posture And you will probably be healthy and prestigious as long as you live, however short that life will be
😆
For which side?
This sounds like the take of my first boss out of school about 15 years ago, who was previously a director at a F500. He was convinced that software was of lower value than “real business work” and could simply be outsourced to the lowest bidder. Well, the software for his startup was a flaming mess and he couldn’t retain anyone to work on it for more than a couple of months. Go figure.
If he was simply outsourcing to the low bidder, why did he need to retain anyone to work on it?
After realizing and accepting that it was in terrible shape, and that he couldn’t effectively manage offshored dev work to get what he wanted, he then hired locally for approximately minimum wage to try to fix it. Several times. It never did get fixed.
If your going into an interview and they are asking about DS and ALGO w/ 10+ years then you are at the wrong company. Yea kids graduate every year, but they have NO EXPOSURE to anything in the real world nor do they know best practices. That arguement is valid for all careers as well. FIRE is popular because people realize they dont want to work their whole life, FIRE is across all fields as well. You sounds like a 40 yo who lost their job and had a hard time finding a new one. OR you just are overthinking on a saturday afternoon.
In silicon valley and other major tech hubs, leetcode style interviews are a must for candidates irrespective of their years of experience.
Every major company I know of asks DSA questions for back end positions regardless of YOE. If you’ve ever interviewed people, you know how many people with seemingly strong resumes and who can talk a good game can’t actually code.
Oh one more thought. The vast majority of "high" TC SWE jobs are in extremely expensive areas that are only expensive because of "high" TC. This is like a Ponzi scheme! A doctor can have 500k TC even in an area where a massive house is 100k.
Where you get a massive house in 100k ? Nepal? lol 😝
Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Iowa etc etc