I had a friend doing mobile gamedev, making near unheard-of money for their then city of residence, had everything going well for them… except the job was soul-crushing and draining, eventually giving them severe depression.
When I was getting my first dev job, they said I’d be really sorry about doing outsource, and I just thought that out of us two, I’d be the really happy one, even making much less than them.
Might be a Linux thing, though.
Would you happen to know how that compares to saying “Fuck it” and going with a Java career for the relative predictability? I’m not asking for any particular reasons, just curious.
Doesn’t sood good at all. I’m sorry to hear that, friend. I really hope there’s enough upsides there compared to working at a more mature company for you.
How you liking it? How many years have you aged in the months working at your startup?
That’s the point - you have the expertise to make proper sense of whatever it outputs. The people pushing for “AI” the most want to rely on it without any necessary expertise or just minimal efforts, like feeding it some of your financial reports and have generate a 5-year strategy only to fail miserably and have no one to blame this time (will still blame anyone else but themselves btw).
It’s not the most useless tool in the world by any means, but the mainstream talk is completely out of touch with reality on the matter, and so are mainstream actions (i.e. overrelying on it and putting way too much faith into it).
Welcome, have fun!
Hate it when they squish the arrow keys though.
Definetly gonna write docs from now on.
Sure thing.
No, I’m not undervaluing anybody. I’m just trying to tell you that yes, if the field was less competitive, i.e. if much nor people were good at it, we’d see smaller median salaries.
I think it is comparable to the healtcare and medicine in the US, where being a doctor or a good lawyer pays you very well for exactly same reasons.
As for your example of being an engineer doing similar stuff as some programmer and being paid differently, well, no, the pay would be very comparable. I know several people doing programming work as stated by their job descriptions and contracts, both are paid less than a middle manager I know, because the duties they have to perform can be covered by a larger population compared to the duties that pay much, much more.
The situation you’re talking about is already the case, and the only reason people see IT salaries as too big is because the field and the work is perceived to be somewhat easy and simply (“Don’t you sit in front of the compute rall day?”), and while it can be easy in some regards (much easier and less physically demanding that being an first responder of any kind or working in a cargo or fishing vessel), but it’s not simple most of the time. Same reasons engineers are often paid more than technicians or mechanics - both are extremely important, neither is simple, but have different capabilities to match the supply and demand of their industries.
If anything, it’s not like we’re the execs signing ourselves monthly $400,000 as a bonus and doing actually fuck all because we have powerful parents, neither are we trust fund managers or anything similar. These are the people we should be turning against, not fellow workers that don’t have dozens and hundreds of millions of dollars.
Look, you’re framing it in a very bad way, and I’ll sound like a prick regardless, but I’ll try my best.
First of all, let’s ignore the “ordinary workers” as a group, because that’s way too vague to base anything off of. There are ordinary IT professionals that are just that in their field, ordinary, and there are exceptional people doing manual labor that the society doesn’t think much about.
As for the pay, I know it seems disproportionate or “too much”, but it really comes down to things like repetition, value generated, skill variety, scarcity, and adaptability. There’s plenty of programming jobs that anyone familiar with the white collar jobs would call dead-end, because they got you working with the same old and irrelevant stack basically keeping some old system on life support with occasional changes, and these often pay salaries lower or at least comparable to non-IT jobs, all because with these jobs, there’s very little to none that you have to learn, you don’t have to adapt, you don’t have to come up with creative, yet technically correct solutions all the time, and you’re very replaceable, so the company doesn’t feel like they should share more of their profits with you - they’re simply not that afraid to lose you.
Things like frontend, on the other hand, often pay higher salaries compared to the above, because not only you have to work in a rapidly changing environment over there and adapt to it successfully each time, but also use a greater set of tools, some of which you may be working with for the first time in yuyr life, and you’re expected to know how to transfer your skills from other tools and projects to properly use here. I know it feels like everyone is a developer these days, but that’s because we’ve always been a very prominent part of the Internet, especially more FOSS and privacy and anti-big-corps parts of it like Lemmy - there simply isn’t a way to supply the market with enough qualified developers to drive the salaries down.
No less important is the fact that it’s all on the actually wealthy people’s whim, because they feel like they can exploit other jobs much more easily than they can devs, who are cherished and valued to a point to have a lot of leverage and many options on the job market - it’s much easier to quit a shitty boss when you’re working remotely using your laptop and a few peripherals, making enough money to create a safety net.
As for decrease in pay to have more sensible deadlines… again, we have enough leverage and confidence to either influence the deadlines enough preemptively, or miss the deadline and make a lesson out of it. I still have all my skills and knowledge that are worth the money, despite having more time to complete a project.
Most importantly, I don’t really care about the deadline, nor does the majority of other salaried developers, because there’s really only so much you can force in a set amount of time - a team of 5 people can’t build a fully functioning copy of New York in 7 days even if they completely miss any sleep, food, water, and other bodily functions all while doing cocaine and other stimulants, and the same applies to any job there is.
change variable names
My code.
We do set the expectations as best as we can, but the people who have these expectations really don’t like that - to some, it’s like we’re offending them, and to many others, there’s almost always some other developer they either know or heard about (they never do, in fact) that, allegedly, can do whatever we’re being asked, but 10x cheaper and 100x faster, and he’s also at a lower expertise level so we should be happy to have the job in the first place, oh and also update the documentation in 4 seconds in a way that doesn’t take away these 4 seconds from the “main work”.
Many of us love their job, or at least are very grateful to be able to have it, but we complain for the same reasons other people complain - ridiculous and/or hilarious clients, colleagues, and employers.
Pretty much this.
It tends to depend on your branch, though, and in some fields, you really don’t need anything other than your code, because you’re not testing anything before it’s compiled anyway. For something like frontend development, on the other hand, having some extra screen space is a blessing, be it more monitors or just one bigger monitor, especially if you have the tools to easily manipulate the screen space, like automatic window tiling.
To take the frontend example further, when you have something like i3/DWN/sway or any other tiling windows manager (that’s on Linux), you can easily set up more “desktops” (workspaces), divided into tiles like the browser window (to preview the changes), your editor (to make the raw changes), and the developer tools of the browser you’re currently testing things on. Not like it’s impossible to achieve the same with any other tool that lets you create virtual desktops, but the less time and brainpower you use on switching tabs/desktops/workplaces, which you achieve by always being able to access everything you need at a glance, just kinda helps you enter the flow state - you just dissolve into the process completely because you stare at everything you need all the time.
The more you need to look at, the more you gain with these setups. The frontend example from above is a rather simple scenario, which is not too likely in this era, because you’re pretty much guaranteed to be using at least one framework, most likely with a live preview feature with real time output of the compiling results and errors. There’s no shortage of windows to open, all of which will be relevant and useful to your current task.
Either that or put some non-work related crap on the side to switch to whenever you get mad because you don’t get the result you wanted to.
i3 isn’t a proper DE, though, but I definitely would go with that with that little RAM.
For strictly DEs, I’d pick XFCE - it’s just lovely for what it demands.