Thread: I like programming, but unsure if I want a career

Originally Posted by MutantJohn

Are people seriously not excited about the idea of programming a traffic signal?

I am, because i feel like some are programmed terribly with no regard to the traffic pattern, would love to program a few intersections myself

If I had my time again, I'm too old for career change now, and I knew how things would turn out in the future, I would never have gone into programming as a career.

The wage rates especially for contracting are now the pits at least in the UK.

Fifteen years ago 40% of programming jobs required C or C++, paid up to £800 per day, and the work was literally endless. Sometimes you only worked for one employer in a year and the government at the time came up with 'disguised employment' laws commonly known as IR35 which killed off the long secure work. Contractors couldn't afford to take those jobs as their money was taxed at source by PAYE tax but you received no benefits such as holiday pay that a proper employee would get.

Work was plentiful in the nineties especially with all the Y2K fear. However it wasn't to last. Pretty soon companies began to wonder if they could use globalisation to cut IT costs and they discovered with the help of the government that they could. Some work was offshored, usually after being outsourced to a company like Accenture. Often the work was done in India at a rate that wouldn't pay for my lunch. The Indian coding houses grew and they started to send their workers to the UK for 11 month stints on what was known as the intracompany transfer. These ICT workers were paid much the same as a British coder but they received 3/4 of their salary as a tax-free living allowance, only paying tax and national insurance on the other quarter which was usually so low that it didn't incur and tax or NI and so saved the employer a fair bit over employing a British worker.

Now in the present day less than 4% of IT work requires C or C++, and contractor rates have more than halved, yet our expenses have grown with the cost of living going up rapidly over the last fifteen years. You are very lucky to earn £350 per day now, even in London working for banks and financial houses. That daily rate has to cover the costs of self-employment, an accountant, company taxes, void periods, holidays (there's no holiday pay for contractors). You end up lucky to be drawing an average wage out of your service company.

I could significantly outearn what I am earning now by being a plumber, or an electrician and have less worry.

And much in the same way, white men can no longer walk into a place of business and get a job just by having a heartbeat.

There's still high-paying programming jobs. They're just not in the hard statically-compiled languages anymore.

C++ is probably the best language. Not like I'm a fanboy. I didn't start off that way. I've actively been searching. It's the one with the least amount of suck.

But it's a giant pain the butt. You ever try to cross-compile C++? It's a nightmare.

It's a lot more cost effective to just use the higher-level languages. Look at Java with the JVM. Objectively awesome.

Point is, C++ didn't die but yes, it's no longer everywhere (and for good reason too). The market may not be as strong as it used to be because the supply has increased but that doesn't mean that good developers aren't in demand. I view crappy programmers as job security because I'll just be cleaning up their messes.

The point is the majority of jobs were freelance rather than employment.

Of course there is still high paid employment if you call 150k a year high pay for a software architect with 25+ years experience. I don't. Many professional jobs significantly outearn this whilst needing less experience and less intelligence.

Sure the market has moved largely to web technologies, LISPy languages, .net, objective-C and C# but these jobs are not paying anything like they used to mostly because about 80% of the work is offshored in the UK. There is also the massive cost of living to consider. Try buying a small family home in London for much less than half a million pounds whilst you're earning 30-40k a year.

I am still in demand, just not as much as I used to be and I can't command the rates that I used to get paid but this is less of a problem now as I paid off my mortgage 20 years ago when I was earning fantastic money. But new coders entering the market today won't have that luxury.

Oh, of course. I've basically acknowledge that I'm boned. But by the same token, I'm still happy coding. I love it. I feel like I'm finally starting to understand my skillset and my prowess.

Not to sound arrogant but I'm going to say something arrogant-sounding, I've noticed a strong difference in the way people code given their previous language experiences. The ones that know C++ seem a bit different than the ones that don't. Which isn't to say that you need C++ to become a good coder but I've noticed the good C++ coders write really good code in other languages.

Originally Posted by Hobbit

because about 80% of the work is offshored in the UK.

Becoming more and more that way everywhere. Makes me sick. There are a lot of very smart Indians, not trying to be unfair/racist here, but there are also a lot working out there with close to no talent/education/training trying to do way more than they are qualified for. See it in forums (here and otherwise) all the time, in fact just yesterday over at the PLCS.net forum, posted by maheshboobalan:

Dear all,,

we are trying to make an autonomous steering vehicle without human driver for farm fields...anybody help us...how we can control the steering of the vehicle..help us please

Feel like a lot of these offshore workers rely solely on forums to get their work done. Which isn't necessarily a problem, but when you have no idea what you're doing and you're trying to get someone else to do it for you, while taking work away from the guy who does know how to do it...you're just a leech on global society.

Thanks for everyone's answers, but I've decided that programming isn't worth my time.

Programming (whether it be websites, games, desktop software, daemons, system software, etc.) is highly complex business. Whether or not I'd be self-employed would make no difference: the time investment (and possibly money) is too great for any returns I'd expect. It would take me years to become very good, and even then I have little confidence that I could make any serious money since there are other factors when it comes to this (creativity, marketing, management, constant changing and constant learning), all of which involve more time and money. It's too much to work and not enough money for me -- or the potential to make big money is highly unlikely given my interest. Maintaining, creating, and constantly learning is worth far too much for me to ever pursue such an interest in the long-term. The work is obviously not my true passion, as you can see.

For these reasons, programming overall, I've decided, is not worth my time, business or otherwise.

That's sad to hear. But it's good to understand yourself. If you ever change your mind, I'm sure we'd all be happy to help you learn programming.