Why Most Programmers DON'T Last
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 มิ.ย. 2024
- If you want a lasting career in software development, you've got to be wiser than your average coder. There's a lot of advice that promotes short-term thinking around programming, and if you aren't careful you can burn your bridges before you reach the finish line.
In this episode, I share what I've learned about why most programmers don't last in their career. There are 8 laws to a lasting career as a programmer. If you follow these laws, you'll not only move ahead much faster than most programmers - you'll be able to develop software in a healthy way!
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CHAPTER MARKERS
0:00 Introduction
1:33 8 Laws to a Lasting Programming Career
1:52 1. Embrace the Imposter
3:08 2. Make Technology Stupid Simple
4:27 3. Buffer and Delay Commitments
7:21 4. Skip the Leveling Grind
9:29 5. Pick Your Battles
11:18 6. Always Be Networking
12:40 7. Know When You're The Code Monkey
14:27 8. Get Out While You Can
17:50 Episode Groove
#programming #coding #career - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
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Are you resisting short term thinking that many programmers fall for? How many of these laws of a lasting dev career do you follow?
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I love how passionate you sometimes become, for example with that part about estimating an extra 20% of time.
Regarding resisting short Term thinking: In the projects I worked on were usually so much wrong so that any attempt at thinking long term would begin with refactoring for a few sprints. But good luck make it happen as the Junior Dev!;)
I do. Main reason is how I would perceive someone who jumps from project to project, job to job if I was hiring. If I see that there is someone who has been working for one project for longer time, I know that guy is stable, can maintain position, people don't have problem working with him, he put enough work as nobody tried to get rid of him for this many years despite overflow of candidates and layoffs, he delivers etc.
That being said, even if I decide to not look for a new job actively while working at one company, I am open for interesting offers and I reevaluate each year or half a year, depending on how much I think I am worth and how much value I bring for company. If you work at same place for 5 years but you could be replaced with someone training for year or less, you are not irreplaceable. You need strong position before you start negotiations.
Thanks man, am grateful I found your channel. Just about to join job market.
@@fastjack2792You need to do 4 - Skip the leveling grind, and 5 - pick your battle. If you find yourself having a title that you are overqualified for, you have 2 choices 1. leave, 2. bite your lip.
@@cefcephatus With all due respect, I have not asked for your wisdom. Tell it to those who ask for it
Don't try to sell yourself on specific knowledge - sell yourself on the ability to solve problems in whatever language or framework is required because you understand how problem-solving works.
And prepare that 1 out of 12 “tech recruiters” may actually understand that. So solve your life with the law of large numbers. Statistically speaking only one out of twelve recruiters will actually somewhat understand what they are tasked to do. Only 1 out of 7 therapists are actually a match. Only 1 in 200 (~0.5%) of all humans actually know basic coding; making it hard to find a tribe. So it is really easy to get frustrated, question yourself and get angry at the majority. Do this instead: Leverage chance; don’t yell at it. It is all just input output
People who know the theory of problem solving have given us ChatGPT. All the people who did not,don’t try to teach anyone how problem solving works. The team manners who helped the stakeholders the most were the once who knew Navision/ SharePoint/SAP/WordPress by heart. And could center a DIV.
As he somewhat said in point #8, that only works if the company is able to understand that there is common knowledge across all tech, and that's often not the case. The average employer will look for specific knowledge
You know it doesn't work that way ...
If this was so simple would be great, but the real world just don't work that way, I think that the best advice that he gave was networking, without recommendations nowadays is almost impossible to get any job, then in the interview you can sell yourself as a problem solver that has some specific skills that can solve the company problems, probably you'll need to really talk about the problems the company currently have and how you'll solve them.
But without this companies will not hire you just say that you maybe is just some of this cheap generalist developers out there.
I've been doing this for more than 35 years. So much of what you shared resonates and I really appreciate your candor. One topic I think that would be worth adding to your list is about communication. Probably the worst change in our profession over the last 15 years or so is the dramatic increase in the amount of constant, mostly low-value communication we receive (Slack, Zoom, Email, Meetings, PRs, Corporate Training, etc). It's relentless and destroys focus and productivity. Developers have to learn to push back and set boundaries to protect their most valuable resource: their ability to concentrate.
+10
You just have to be careful how you do it. I set my teams status to Busy for extended periods of time and my manager got mad when he realized what I was doing. "No sir, I swear I wasn't setting my status to busy just to ignore your question of where an acronym came from so I could focus on this funky memory issue."
I got to watch that particular company corporatize in real time. When your most people focused team members jump ship due to overwork and politics, it's time to get out.
Fully agreed. I am approaching 27 years as primarily a c++ software engineer.
Im 6 months old in my office and everyone knows i hate meetings. In a another meeting im sure someones not gonna like that hehe way, nothing too confronting, and i really like that. Its spreading actually. A coworker who cant avoids them tells me its horrible, my boss cancelled one yesterday to "not develop meetingitis"
The online meetings almost put me to sleep.
As an engineer that has been in this business for over 12 years and I'm tired. I'll write spaghetti GOTO code if that is what who is paying me wants, I'm just tired of the corporate stuff and bizarre metrics.
As a slave* [...]
I'll consider myself in a position to give advice to those who pay me: What should we pick, and why should we do different to be more efficient. But if they instead want me to debug the same frontend for 2 years when I already have a proper fixed interface available just because the rest of the team doesn't want to fucking use what their framework literally sets up out of the box, I'll accept the pay for doing that crap until I find something better.
@@xamidi The world is not running because humanitarian. If it was, there is accounting transparent, every company suppose can't make more than 20x of what their cost running. If they earn more, they need to just run another "humanitarian project" to use that money. That would give them freedom, and their intent to give back to society.
No just now greedy company. It never about human / employee, literally if AI here, we should all started to work based on our believe to shape new generation of infrastructure and item, instead of grinding.......
It literally no benefit on individual
@@2dstencil847 I know that the world is running on modern slaves. That doesn't make it any reasonable.
@@2dstencil847 I know the world runs on slavery. That doesn't make it any reasonable.
The thing I'd add which is implied by many of these points, but which I think deserves to be a top-level realization, is that often the damage from overuse happens at the END of the effort, not the beginning. This applies to physical and emotional tasks. Almost always your best option to extend your career is NOT to put in over-the-top hours, it is to dial in a reasonable amount of hours, and then sort your efforts to pack the strongest efforts into those hours - and then stop. In fact, keeping yourself fresh can often allow you to access efforts which you didn't have the energy or focus for when you were putting in long hours.
Take weight-lifting as a comparable. If you workout past your body's ability to recover, you will plateau, and then you will start taking injuries and getting sick a lot. The same completely applies to programmers in the areas they work in.
This is especially true because some of the best opportunities for leadership or networking may come from volunteer work or side gigs, and if you're putting all your effort in your job you'll miss those opportunities.
And sometimes a little boredom helps you think creatively and outside of the box. It's hard to see the shore if you can't keep your head above water.
A classmate who graduated with honors in physics from Caltech _refused_ to do any classwork all day Friday. (I don't have the discipline to steal his idea. The stress of not feeling a sense of progress gets to me. But then maybe that is why it works: a renewal of a sense of urgency.)
@@cdorman11 Once I heard a presentation by someone who helped people deal with burnout, say for a PhD candidate. One of their approaches was to cut them down to a single hour a week for like a month, then bump them up to like an hour a day. And apparently it worked.
Anyhow, another option is to change venue for your "day off". If you work in an office, go to a coffee shop, or the library, or work from home. Some of my most productive time was when I would reliably spend a day a week working from home on yellow legal pads, with pages spread out all over the floor. Instead of spending the day tracking down C++ warnings or getting my code layout JUST RIGHT, I spent that day almost entirely at the 10,000-foot view, which often shifted everything else I did for the next week.
@@cdorman11 if you're feeling constant stress that things aren't going your way, then take a step back and think about what might be blocking you. Or see a counselor. If you're in school take some time to cultivate connections and relationships.
You're not living in the hunger games, grinding to meet somebody else's expectations is dumb. You'll get there and then find out it wasn't what you wanted.
Which gets to the problem with motivating yourself by stress. I did great in college, not because I was psyching myself out all the time, but because I was hungry and wanting to learn. Are you studying because you're afraid and think you gotta do it, or because you want to do it?
I am retired senior program analyst and was stuck on an old system for most of my career. After a couple years, I pretended to do exactly what I was told to change, but instead rewrote a lot of code to make it structured and easier to maintain. It only took a little bit more effort and time than rewriting spaghetti code. Better code made my job easier my remaining career.
Were you the only dev on the team? How’d you not get caught?
@@LukeDickerson1993I've conspired with others to design something right and keep our manager in the dark. Worked out well; in one case brought peace to a print program that had been barfing bugs every time it ran. Shout out to Alan Turing for the seed idea on that one!
@@jeffreyhotchkiss9451 you got balls man. id be afraid my coworkers would rat me out to my manager for proposing it. Maybe theres a way to phrase the proposal that isn't outright secrecy? Were your coworkers tired of the old system too?
I wish there were more devs like you in my hiring pool.
I feel like this is what happens were im at, some designer wants some feature and for some reason this "feature" requires refactoring like 10k lines lol
Another tip I learned was to thank people when someone tells you something you already know.
It makes people happier when they feel they helped you and you don't have to spend your time telling everyone you already know that or "yeah I was going to do that".
Ugh! On the flip side, if someone asks you a simple question that should have a short answer (if you actually know the answer) and you don't know, tell them you don't know, and then give them an opportunity to just leave the conversation if they don't want you to grasp at straws at something tangential - because they're sure they already know what you're going to tell them and their time solving this problem is better spent elsewhere.
For example, if someone asks you what the namespace is where the garbage collection API stuff is and you don't know, don't feel compelled to give them a random 10-minute explanation on how garbage collection works-that's not what they asked! You're just forcing them to either waste their time listening to you or to cut you off and be rude if they want their time back. Or maybe they're actually interested, but you should check first.
I have someone on my team who is more senior than me, however i can confidently say he is not more knowledgeable than me.
He is someone with a rather cocky demeanor who has a past of putting other people down. He hasn't done or said anything untoward to me, but what he does do is over explain simple concepts or things to me when I already know these things, and the original question was small and contextual about the product.
I can only feel that he is doing these things to assert his ego, and I don't really know how I'm supposed to respond other than cutting him short and telling him that I know.
Biting your tongue when someone is preaching at you about something you already know is hard but is good diplomacy. Next time they may tell you something you didn't know.
However, you have to be cautious. Sometimes it just encourages them. 😂 Thanks-and-run can work. (Sounds like something from "Curb Your Enthusiasm".) 😀
@@littlefluffybushbaby7256 I've decided to assert my dominance by successfully helping him every time he posts in the public channel 😋
But they must know im the GOAT, how would they know otherwise? lol
I appreciate the tip about telling them that the first thing you’re going to do is research to then be able to give an overall estimate.
I've been specifically told I'm a great programmer because I never ask for time to research. However, I think I still do what he says. I ask for a timebox after which I provide an estimate, or I estimate the estimate.
Yeah I thought this was very useful also
Is he implying that the customer is specifically paying for those hours? Can't see many going for that. Usually you have to hide this time, even working as a permanent employee.
Its not just in progamming industry
As a senior dev, number 7 hit home so hard! I've tried numerous times to influence strategy / product decision making only to encounter no real response or counter arguments to my points. Yet they have almost always gone ignored. A while ago it dawned to me that indeed we are just hired here to write code not to affect other parts of the business. Mind you this isn't something anyone will necessarily say out aloud, you just need to figure it outyourself kinda.
It's an important lesson to learn. Let the business guys do the stupid decisions, even if they are dead obvious. Nothing will convince them, not even the pain that follows. Just prepare yourself to abandon ship before it becomes too ugly. If managers want to ruin a company, they will find a way to do it.
Some programmers like being in that position because they don't care that much. They do their 9-5, clock out and not think about anything programming related until tomorrow. Of course if you are not like that, just find another position.
Something needs to change. Software engineers are trained to gather and understand and meet requirements, whereas these other roles aren’t. Product managers need to be kicked to the curb. There’s a need to efficiently gather and route feedback from end users and metrics to the dev teams and leadership, but it’s literally a routing function, not a management function. High level requirements should be made by leadership because that’s how companies work, but they should be adjusted according to that feedback from users, metrics, and also dev teams.
It's better to keep it simple and stick to your role. I might add my opinion sometimes but I'll never try to influence decisions that are outside my role as a programmer. I don't know why some devs think they have the skills and experience to weigh in on things that are outside their role. I guess it's different as a freelancer/contractor, which I am. I never feel it's my place to dictate to the client on non-code related topics. At most I'll inform them of how the decisions they're making will affect the complexity/reliability of the code. It seems like devs working for companies get an inflated idea of themselves and their importance.
On the flipside I can't stand when a non developer tries to dictate to me what I should be doing or how it should be done.
People get into programming for different reasons. What attracted me to software development was the fact that, if you're involved in the entire, or at least large part, of the process, it can be part art, part science.
Finding AND implementing interesting solutions to users' needs and problems is what I enjoy. I don't want to only be involved in implementing someone else's ideas, I want to be involved, at least to a small degree, in coming up with solutions to users' needs.
Job hopping can be good. I changed my jobs every 2 years or so and I've learnt a lot by working with so many different teams. It prevents you from sticking to just a single way of writing software and gives you a wider perspective. Also, it allows you to compare between companies what was good or bad. Example? Once I've heard an argument I shouldn't leave because "every company is the same". Turned out only their company was toxic and the next place was way better and my mental health improved.
They meant "every terrible company is the same" and I certainly agree.
To clarify, I'm not saying you can't leave a company after 2 years for legitimate reasons (like a better culture as you mentioned). I'm speaking against it as a general rule that you should just always do this. If you're at a good company, making good money, like the people, and growing there's no arbitrary rule you can't stay longer than 2 years - at least that I think is worth following. Now if you've been there 8-10 years? It's probably time to move on.
@@HealthyDev8-10 years is a really long time. If you’ve already been there that long, you may as well stay forever.
Job hopping every 2-3 years is a common tenure because it lines up with vesting schedules, project timelines, and doesn’t leave any red flag on the resume.
@@mecanuktutorials6476 a chain of 2-3 year stints is actually not good on a resume. If we don't like how we're treated like code monkeys, we only do a disservice to our industry by normalizing short stays.
@@HealthyDev in point 7 of the video: “know when you’re the code monkey”, you recommended either accepting it or moving on.
I don’t think it makes any sense to stay at another person’s company for 8-10 years unless there is a really good incentive to stay. In software, the incentive to find a new company is usually a better compensation package while the incentive to stay is being higher on the totem pole. With layoffs and the hustle/grind corporate culture, staying at a job for the totem pole position is silly unless you’re in a very safe position in government or something like that and the work culture is really lax. I don’t think tech companies (or any true capitalististic enterprise) is like that. Everyone is expendable so that loyalty to a corporation can land you in hot water if you get sucked too deep into the company’s proprietary nonsense and the business goes downhill. You really should be a free agent rather than a company man in this day and age. I’m surprised you hold the position that people should stay 8-10 years long in a company. I think after 2 years, you know more than enough about how the company operates and whether it is worth your time to stay or go. Staying 8 years when you know the company isn’t going anywhere due to poor leadership or bad loyalty incentives. Many companies offer RSUs to incentivize people to stay. Without that, there is literally no reason to stay except a false sense of comfort/familiarity. I don’t think you can have satisfaction of staying in a job without guarantees that your job is safe for 8-10 years. For example: a contract that lasts 8 years.
I personally endured 3 years at a toxic hell hole to save the resume. If I had to count down to 8 years, I’d probably have jumped off a bridge. That company didn’t reward loyalty either so many of the longest serving employees were leaving too (including people who had been there for 10+ years since it’s inception). The turnover of the place is often a better indicator of whether a place is worth staying at rather than arbitrary number of years like 3 or 8.
Point #8 - so true. They're only focused on what they need right now, and not looking at our wholistic experience and skills that most people don't have. You need to develop more skills than just coding, especially as you get older.
Yes, I have over 20 years of experience in the field, and that hit really hard... Coding-wise, with the abundance of information on the internet today and a lot less effort, younger people can pass 'senior' interview tests easily, and you're going to compete with individuals who will cost the company a lot less than you.
Very right, but to someone with strong asocial tendencies, this doesn't sound good. Management, consulting, presentations, this is all social stuff that is very hard for me.
@@marloelefant7500 I was like that at the start of my career, and improved by working in customer facing positions.
@@marloelefant7500Agreed with you. I didn't go into programming because I was a great people person or public speaker. I find it very difficult and soul crushing to do all those things, to the point where I'm periodically asking myself whether I should just quit the industry altogether. The problem is I have a mortgage and other adult responsibilities.
@@marloelefant7500you can stick to coding, just means you will hit a ceiling. I work with many Sr Engineers in their 40 and 50 that only codes. They made piece that they will stay on Sr. But not need to deal with the people factor. Works great for them as they are very happy at work.
20 years in. He’s on the mark. Except the switching jobs point. That’s questionable as lots of businesses do fail. Software dev has a ton of risk coming from all directions. Just a warning to younger ones be aware this might be a career for less than 20 years plan accordingly.
That 20 year shelf life prediction is nothing more than wild speculation.
If you are talking about AI here, that's going to be again another tool on our belt. Yeah, probably junior developer positions as we know it will disappear. We will be mostly reviewing pull requests generated by machines from a couple years from now, telling those agents what they did wrong and how we want those to be rewritten differently. As much as the current speed of evolution is insane, I think it's still reasonable to think that AI advancements will slow down eventually, as we hit some kind of barrier either with hardware scalability or through the limitation of the current models.
@ Honestly, if that's what becomes of software engineering, I'd have zero interest in continuing in the field. I suspect many or even most engineers would feel the same way. I'm not saying that my feelings or emotions are an argument against the AI train, just wanted to vent.
I do agree that AI advancements will slow or even halt, if only because the training data will dry up. AIs will be training on content that was generated by AIs. The well will be poisoned. Related to that, I am doing my part by removing my "private" content from places like GitHub into self-hosted so that my content cannot be used to train AI. I'd encourage others to do the same.
@download the models and figure out their capabilities and limitations. Smaug 34b runs with speed on a 4090, but there isn't enough vram to max out its 200,000 token context limit. Specialist AIs need to be made to be practical by paring down the training set to the bare minimum. As it is, a line of code can be 15 tokens or more. 50k lines of code would need a 750k context size for the entire project to be considered at once. Most local llms do 2k-8k.
A workaround is LSTM and persistent storage. The future is weird. I'm currently learning what it can do with deliberate practice. I got a 5000 word short story and a critique in about 3 minutes. It's good with prose, so it may be able to assist with marketing and documentation already.
AI will enable us to orchestrate extremely specific, highly efficient, and very stable applications for our particular business focus. Those applications can be enormous, but the AI will give us the ability to step way beyond our current abilities. Yes, there will probably be very little front-end web work in a few years. But those of us that have specialized industries will be able to accomplish amazing things while still staying in our small and affordable teams. I'm not sure I would advocate for a whole generation to get into programming at this point, but I think a small number of extremely talented and dedicated individuals would still benefit from the career opportunities. That would pretty much place programming back at the level it was before.
On networking, especially during layoffs, if you’ve retained your position keep reaching out and trying to help those that were laid off. Not only is it a kind thing to do - they will all eventually land positions at different companies and in turn, your network has now grown substantially.
Totally
help them in what way? genuinely curious
Thanks. Love the vids.
It's kind of insane how difficult this career can seem. I got my degree with a kind of naivety, pie in the sky, optimistic attitude and I was passionate. I loved doing assignments, side projects, talking tech with people, but the longer I do this the more it seems insurmountable, and it's actually quite defeating. I just want to write code. I hate politics, I hate the corporate grind, all this bullshit. I don't mind providing estimates, writing code, solving problems, communicating with managers etc, but everything on the periphery just feels absolutely soul crushing.
Hate to bitch too much, but that's my initial reaction. I want a long career (only been doing this about 5 years professionally now), but I just hope I can sustain it.
i feel the same man. i just want to beep boop type code, do my stories, deploy/submit the project. There's so many meetings, emails, and just general politics that fucking suck to deal with and take up so much time. Most of them have no impact on the deliverables so they feel like a drain to me. hate it.
I had this realization early on as well.
When I was a kid, I wanted to do nothing but be a studio drummer. I was good. Real good. And I had no interest in anything else. I slowly learned though that the most important aspect of succeeding a musician was mastering the abilityto deal with people - other musicians no less, which is the WORST... but thats another story. Then I learned I'd have to master tuning my drums, reading music, interpreting the desires of other people, sound engineering to work with the sound guys, stage freight, body conditioning (bc you get tired after long sessions), and an endless number of other things.
The reality I found is that no matter what you do, if you want to be of VALUE (and thats the point of any job), then you unfortunately have to engage with and master a lot of things that feel tangential to what you really want to do. Not one thing in this world can be done in a vacuum.
Sucks.
@@simpleandsuccessThanks so much for the reply. That really puts things in perspective. I guess we just need to do what we need to do to put bread on the table, and try to enjoy life as much as we can without burning out.
@@yura37meetings for the sake of meetings. Justifying estimates or extensions. A button isn’t just a fucking button sometimes lol.
Lol, we're all the same in this thread. I also played drums for the love of it, then found out how difficult and awful it was to work with other "professional" musicians.
I'm also at about 5 years in dev experience, and struggling with dealing with all of the people hiding in corporate hierarchy that are less than worthless and only serve to make my job harder by not contributing and sometimes actively sandbagging or talking behind everyone's back because they don't have any real skills and are insecure. It's exhausting to deal with those people in the corporate environment.
But also, I have worked a job in this industry where most of my coworkers were on top of things, and management cared about our ideas and was non-intrusive and the company itself was built on good values. This was a smaller consulting company, ~100 people, so just saying that a good company and work environment exists, you just have to work and look hard for it.
Im a junior dev and am in a super agile team so deadlines and hours are fully in my control for my projects - there is also a system of extra hours worked being logged and converted to leave.
As a newbie there is a lot of temptation to go above and beyond to prove myself as a competent developer - which is a good thing but I found myself getting close to the line of burning out, especially with being able to earn extra leave.
Being more aware of my exhaustion, taking better timed breaks and calling it a day before I get too exhausted has helped keep things sustainable and in fact optimises my work if I have a rested mind.
Great job. I think we overestimate how much people really are willing to reward us going above and beyond. I’m all for doing an excellent job. Anything beyond recognizable excellence has diminishing returns, at least in my experience.
I’ve been there too, about a year ago, just without the extra leave. It really helps to know when to stop so that you don’t get burned out and therefore keep your productivity up there, and in my case people were congratulating me and kept saying I do a good job but in the end that didn’t get materialised in the paycheck
I think this is a pretty easy trap to fall into at the beginning, wanting to do more, learn more and impress your colleagues
Honestly, if you're working 8 hours a day, this is well beyond the point of diminishing returns. So unless you *really* love the process, go hiking, or hit the gym, or spend some more time with your family. Your brain, eyes, hands, back, heart, etc will thank you for it.
How much are you making? And how long did you go to school? And how much did your school cost you? And what city are you in?
I feel like all that is relative
@@HealthyDev I work in hardware chip design. I made that realization last year. I remember putting in 12 hrs a day for a good 4-6 month. And then once the project was done, the extra bonus I got was basically 5$ extra every day. I rather just work 8-10hrs and they can keep their extra bonus lol. Also eventually stress caused me to go to the hospital and get a medical procedure done that ended up costing me a good 2k. Not a good trade off, even not for job security.
Interesting vid. 40+ year developer here. My "super power" is the proven ability to learn and apply new tech to design, develop, and deliver successful projects. Point me at the problem, I'll figure it out. I'm not afraid of the learning curve, I embrace it. Old dogs CAN learn new tricks.
27 year in myself.
I agree, the ability to learn is key!
And the drive to figure things out will take us far.
Yes, the trick is to resist the fatigue
That’s what I’ve been doing since 12 and it’s the only thing that works.
Agree, the power of learning new stuff beats everything else
Great tips. I have some more as well: 1. Alternate between heavily interrupt driven workflows and workflows where you ignore interruptions to do deep work. 2. When given something new to understand, document the low level thinking in a wiki document as part of the effort. It helps clarifies ideas and helps others at the same time. 3. Make time for decent exercise, good food and regular sleep. Because it is more of a marathon than a sprint.
After 14 years, one monday morning I looked back at my career and found no tangible thing that I've created, I felt distraught, depressed, I wanted to quit programming to go join the French Foreign Legion or buy some land to plant crop or work in construction lol, go on an adventure, get my hands dirty, to be in and feel the real world. However, after thinking about it for a few days I chickened out, I've invested too much of life already.
I’ve been there. I instead worked to maximize income from 8-5 then do a side gig renovating homes.
Wow i feel the same
I know it's not for everyone, but the only way I found to stay healthy in the industry is freelancing and finding the right customers... it takes a few years and some bad experiences, butt it's worth it
What kind of customers?
Me too.. currently freelancing but now i think every freelancers need to prepare for long term solutions
You want to find customers that
- trust you 100%,
- have significant budgets
- in projects where you are the most skilled technology expert
- in projects where you can learn and explore new techniques and technologies
I've been really, really wanting to do this. Just don't even know how to start. I'm tired of the corporate nonsense. I want to get in, do my job/project, and move on. But I don't want to work for a consulting company either, lol@@giuliogatto1955
The "pick your battles" thing is a good one. I feel like I've wasted time learning and trying to implement best practices, only for it to be hand-waved away because a more talented developer disagreed with me.
I don't mind doing it their way, but I wish it was clearer from the start that I shouldn't have bothered. Having said that, it was a really good learning experience.
@@luke5100 ooh I think I know that feel.
Some jealous seniors had this habit of discrediting my stuff - one of their maneuvers was by timing its implementation in a similar way.
I actually intervened by no longer submitting my big ticket work and ran away from the company.
Now their product s*cks a*s because it's missing my stuff.
That AAA-level game now has no matchmaking/queuing/team balancing and no +80% fps CPU optimizations. Good f riddance.
I guess this is why so many games s*ck these days. Yeah I'm still angry I do not normally swear.
Good thing I'm going the entrepreneur route now. I'd rather work alone.
What a rock solid list! Glad the mighty algorithm put you in my path! Also, sick riffs.
There's soo much truth to this. At my current company I'm a senior tech lead and upper management have complemented me more than once on my leadership of our squad. I have never recieved any compliments from upper management ever about my code.
hey man, thank you for all your videos. I am self taught, never had a mentor, and went straight into finance start ups usually as a solo developer. So I've never had good guidance. It is hard to have direction when you are responsible of everything and have no one to ask for advice, and your videos really help me look at things how I've never seen them.
I am in a similar position. I have been with small/startup companies for 20+ years and I struggle with the same issue. I'm now working for a consultancy and the jump was quite steep for me.
@@johanbasson7968 after 20+ years, do you consider yourself a computer scientist?
@@johanbasson79685 years into the career and the software lead in a start-up for the last 1 1/2 now. I know I enjoy my job now and all the "firsts" it brings, but I can't see myself doing the same thing in ten years. What were the things you lacked the most when you made the switch to consulting?
Bigger corps are worth experiencing.
@@johanbasson7968 somehow my comment got deleted... What was the hardest part for you switching from start-ups to consulting?
Wow, cool guitar passage at the end!
Many thanks for these high-quality videos.
I'm just a junior developer that didn't get his first job even, how did I get here?
Just wanted to thank you for your insightful videos! I've also been in the industry for a while, watching your video brought back many memories...
One of my friends got such a severe burnout she decided to be a life coach instead. So your number 8 is hitting hard. I also think about ditching the industry, but the sad fact is that I really have chops now and I enjoy writing dead simple, professional code. I have a number 9: stop normalizing unprofessional behavior of managements. Brutal transparency of scrum, but zero transparency about layoffs, business issues, underperfoming products. Or when people expect you to do 3 different skillsets, just because they pay decent wage. Long working hours and grind etc. There are numbers out there proving they are harming productivity and performance (and our sanity; which should have been good enough reason in the first); before their publication you could have deflected concerns, but now it is just unprofessional to keep burning out people. We gotta talk to each other, and find ways to support each other against bad practices.
Awesome tips, not just for coders but als for work in general. Great idea to also add the guitar riffs in the video, it helps enjoying the video better.
I'm 20 years into my software dev career. You sound like someone I'd enjoy working with! A true senior.
Can I ask what do you specialize in? Programs ext? And did you work for a lot of company’s in your career? Or one long career at one company?
How much do you make now? And what did you make early on?
This is a pretty amazing list. I have observed all of these. They've validated the things I've done right (and wrong). Thanks for making this. Point #8 is something I communicate to younger developers all the time.
Great stuff, thanks for sharing that. I was considering many of these things in my mind and it's great to know I'm not alone with these things. Wish you well!
I liked number 5. Yes pick your battles, and if you loose the fight just accept it and move on. Fight for things that matter, not trivia that you just need to accept. I often work with system and hardware engineers, and sometimes they make terrible decisions that have a big impact on software. The thing to remember is that if you like and respect these people normally then explain (calmly) why it sucks to do something some way, sometimes you get your way and sometimes the project is too advanced and the hardware/documentation is built or written and you just have to accept it and do things the hard way. If you do this then others will respect your opinion and you can have a good working relationship with your workmates.
This is really down to earth and useful advice. Definitely a lot better than the "be a great software developer with this one trick" videos out there. Also, awesome guitar playing!
Glad it was helpful!
The points you make sound very reasonable and it seems you lived through the pain to share those lessons with the rest of us.
I am going to start my full time development carrer this year and advide like this feels very valuable. Thank you.
You're very welcome! It's a great job if you can go into it with the right expectations. Wish I had 27 years ago ;).
The last 18 years of my career I've been working exclusively consulting roles, and a recurring theme across organizations is that estimates become deadlines... and I agree with you that a healthy buffer in estimating timelines is the way to go. Talking about how not to estimate, more than often I've seen inexperienced programmers that in their desire to impress take a totally unrealistic approach to estimating, only to end up burning themselves out. And I agree with all your points, every single one resonates with my own experience. Finally, let me just say that I love your shows, because they are so anchored in reality and are honest, which are rare commodities these days - thank you!
I think you are spot on. Also when there is budget cuts, the management is less likely to get cut. Even if you worked on some of the hardest pieces in the project but when that's done they don't need you anymore. The job market competition is really hard too because you are competing with other people who work on a project for 2-3 years then have to find something new because of the scenarios above. Imposter syndrome is also widespread in management too. I had interviewer asked me BS questions about version of the framework, they think it's like version 20 something when the latest is like 8. I don't find this in most of the developers but I school them once in a while. I also don't know everything either and sometimes get some of it wrong or confused.
I started programming professionally in 1989 (and started programming as a hobby in 1980). I'm just a few years away from retirement. Definitely some good stuff in there.
I don't see it as much these days, but back when I first started as a developer, a lot of people were going into it for the money and man, those were some really miserable folks. This is not a career for people who don't like programming. Keeping up with the technology for 35+ years is hard. I mean, I love this stuff and I started doing it when I was 10 or 11. I still do it as a hobby. But 35 years is a long time to keep up with the industry. I'm tired and ready to hang it up. I'll still do it on the side, of course, because it'll always be a hobby, but I'm ready to stop doing it for a living.
Hey, that’s my story!!
Even most dates are exact 😂
Getting with legs and arms into business when not hired for ownership is something I saw all over my way and I see with every new developer I work with. Very good points. I think maybe you should put more pressure on the last bit you mentioned - soft skills. With age, experience and AI it will be come more and more important to survive. Thanks for the video and the riffs are soo mint!
Really good advice. Maybe a follow up video on this on how to think when you see new stuff and handle it?
Great advice for long-term survival. Especially continual networking and keeping your resume focussed on the job requirements.
Great video! Very informative and well explained.
Really good advice. Thanks for this.
Valuable knowledge and good playing. Well done, thank you.
I was fortunate that for ~10 years I worked for a company where I was completely self directed. I worked on the projects I wanted to work on, work was done when I said it was done, not by some management driven schedule. My customers were all internal as I was working on frameworks and components so there were no issues communicating what was needed or how the work was progressing and what the best estimate for completion would be. And it was great. But companies change. A couple key people left, some stuffed suits moved in - and now I'm retiring in a couple months. Not interested in going back to being a drone or writing crap code.
Exactly, people dont appreciate how years of healthy life we have. Retirement when you are done with the nonsense and worked 25-35 years is the best option
That's the dream job.
@@itisWhatitis12345 Yes, it was. I was fortunate to have that opportunity, work with such good people, and for so many years. After those key people left I followed them to their new company, hoping I could recreate that same environment there. But that hasn't gone so well so come early May I'm calling it a career. No regrets.
That sounds like a dream now... I hate agile and clean code so much, when done right it's ok, but people are using it in wrong and toxic ways usually.
The nth law of a long-lasting career in software development that everyone ignores until it is too late is that you have to prioritize your health.
- Your eyesight will decline
- Your back will break
- Your neck will stiffen
- You will get hemorrhoids
- You will get RSI
- You will have digestive system issues
- Your mental focus will weaken
- Immune system will suffer from constant stress
- Your sleep gets destroyed
Take measures before things get too bad, because they certainly will.
Sounds fun to me
don't forget your hair will fall out!
Agree with every word here. I’ve a similar amount of experience in web dev, not always considered myself a developer. But now that’s my role at a senior level and a small agency. All these skills have been essential for me and what I look for in others in my team.
Been in electrical and software engineering for over ten years now. I think the one thing that I learned early was never to be one-dimensional, which you mentioned regarding "Get Out While You Can" discussion. The sheer change in opportunities when I did other things like writing essays online completely outside technical stuff and more related to things like business, society, and even politics (definitely not for everyone).
Further, this helps you see your code very different than those who ONLY build code. You'll see engineers making crazy feats of engineering, while in pain, and be able to meet them where they are while explaining what's happening to a client. And it is shocking how many can't do what I just mentioned, which often leads to so much suffering.
Love the content as usual and I really enjoyed the groove 🎶
Thank you sir. 🙏
20 years experience here, you're 100% spot on.
The point about learning the industry, the business, the customers, and taking on leadership, mentoring, presentation, and organizational duties, along with networking to where you want to be, is key. For a lot of us developers, those things are kind of out of our bailiwick, but that means that they're the most important skills we need to develop.
You may be stuck working in frameworks you don't like, fixing bugs in legacy software, etc., but there's still plenty of room to grow and feel good about yourself.
And also your point that you still need to be able to tailor your presentation to exactly whatever the current framework-of-the-week and oddball combo of techs a company is hiring for is unfortunately all too true too. So you need to still take at least a little time to make sure you can check all those boxes. It gets easier to learn enough to talk through those, but it'll never be easy. So sales and negotiation are also good things to try to learn/practice to be able to sell your experience and skills and knowledge while smoothing over any doubts about your ability to handle the proprietary tech combo.
Thanks for the feedback. Glad to hear this resonated with you too.
awesome, right on the details !
This video is truly exceptional! You address deeply significant issues and manage to explain them with remarkable clarity and ease. Your ability to break down complex topics into understandable segments is greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Funny enough, these videos just make me want to change industry entirely, even fairly young (mid twenties), as this industry just derives nothing but contempt in me for just about anything related to tech. I prefer a fair, less sugarcoated take on this necessities than people who just feel like they have a secondary incentive to sell you a course or false hope.
Money isn't even a concern, I'm already jaded about the state of things already, so just continuing onwards, I want out of this before rooftop jumping seems preferable.
Hang in there. I don't make these videos to scare people out of the industry. I actually want them to enjoy it by not going in with false expectations. At least in my career, once I was able to accept what I could and couldn't change, it was a LOT less stressful.
You'll learn, you'll never be able to change the industry.
Lasting long is about being able to identify a good job and staying there. Being good involves a non-toxic work environment and annual pay bumps that account for inflation, personal improvement, and changes to the market rate. Which requires you to have worked in a toxic environment / have a close friend who has, and to have several fiends of your approximate field and experience working at different companies who tell you and keep you up to date on their wage. You also want to be learning (on your own, but on the clock), want mentorship (until you're experienced enough to be the mentor), have a path for advancement (If your immediate supervisor has been there 10 years, isn't retiring, and your company isn't growing you'll have to kill him or leave to take his job) and work life balance issues need to be addressed over the long term (no routine call for unpaid overtime; hire someone already).
Thank you so much, great advices!
The last point you made was really good. I’m still learning software engineering but it’s important to pick up other skills aside from just leveling up as a programmer throughout your career
To be honest this video is very helpful. I recently came to similar conclusions and you literally made video few days later!
I decided to give up on learning new languages and focus only on general ideas like how to develop software. No frameworks specific crap, just general thinking process. I feel less stress and I even provide more value to team now due to my stronger knowledge about development in general.
Great advices here, thanks
How to learn about general software development? When everthing is about language x ,franework y
How did you go about learning the more general principles of software development? How did they serve you?
As someone "on the spectrum", my yardstick is whether it's important enough to litigate. If it's not important enough to sue over, don't complain. If you take that approach, you can at least get paid to leave. You can use the law to enforce your boundaries. If you have to ask yourself what people want to hear rather than communicate what you objectively observe, it's time to stop cooperating. I have been working in IT for 34 years. I once made an honest estimate of 100 weeks. Management was not happy.
Great points. This is a very useful vid not only for devs, but for people in sw development in general.
I hope these do have some value for people in any tech role I just know my experience is still biased towards dev roles so I typically position it that way.
Great video, Thanks!
fastest click in the west
We used to code everything by hand. Now AI codes for us, teach us, fix bugs and our productivity is much better. Sometimes it is easier to get addicted to so high productiviy and forget really how to code. Let´s see what the future will bring us. Thanks for the video!
Absolutely. The job is changing. But it's still needed, and we still have value.
So they glued a set of wheels to your shoes and then threw you on a faster conveyor belt. Congrats! You are such a happy fella! Soon they will strap a rocket on your back and drop you out of a plane and expect you to fly at supersonic speeds and you will probably be elated for a second or two. If you believe that any of that is to your advantage, then reality has just created a new layer of hell just for you. ;-)
Sir, I would like to know, is SWE or DE field still safe from AI?
@@angelsub9184 watch the video I did about AI. It's from a few months back.
Thank you for this video.
Thank you for this video and for your insights!
The introduction of Scrum or commites and wins was taking all the joy of being a software developer away from me. I think it is a very unhealthy way of working so I just resigned.
I disagree entirely. I have been programming for 53 years and the best way to stay energized is to avoid languages and toolchains you hate. I avoided COBOL, Java and other crappy languages, and used Modula2 (super simple, super clean) instead of C. Too many herd-following job protecting garbage programmers make our field disreputable.
I think this is pretty much spot on. Thanks!
Great video! #3 is a great point, I've seen so many folks (leadership especially) tank their credibility and later career because of missed commitments.
Business needs some level of certainty especially if you are selling software. In some industries the sales cycle is quite long and forecasting is essential to your go to market strategy.
Just the video I needed! Many thanks 👍
Sadly we are in the only industry I’m aware of where craftsmanship in the product we are building isn’t valued. Imagine hiring someone to build your house who can’t cut boards straight, doesn’t do the math quite right, but hell, they’ve slapped that house together quickly and the company is making record profits.
Awesome tips(and yams) I can relate to.
So indeed buffer your estimates and work smart, not hard. You get noticed and promoted for your team guidance and eg, fixing annoying but very visible issues management is complaining about for months.
Key for me is procedures and checklists that get a lot more done in a fraction of the time and energy. Being a wise guy on thing I can instead discuss with my tech lead/team and then learn on Udemy with their knowledge, has really hurt my career. After moving on from this everything goes a lot better and I get a lot less backlash from the team and mt
Having non programmers managing programmers is crazy and stupid, but highly exploitable if the programmers band together
Thanks that's an amazing list 👍
Thank you a lot, it's really helpful for me !
Absolutely spot-on advice to ensure longevity in this career and prevent burnout. Point 8 on getting out while you still can rings especially true. Many times especially around a couple of years into the industry, we tend to overly focus on technical excellence as though it's the sole important thing that nets us better jobs and opportunities, to the point that we neglect other people skills which are just as important and will serve us well later into our careers. Thanks for the timely reminder :)
Really valuable information/opinion ℹ️ saving to re-view few times to make compare to my current career as team lead.
Im trying to get into IT, not necessarily software development, but a lot of this sounds very relateable and I can only assume the same principles apply there as well.
great tips! appreciate the video. And sweet Jazzmaster guitar.
Thank you!
This was very helpful. I happened upon this video as an autoplay. I avoided computers growing up, hated them. Then maybe two years ago I found a Commodore 64 in the closet of a house I bought. It was retro so I checked it out. After replacing a chip I got it to work and it was rewarding. I read the owners manual and I loved how interactive it was, if you wanted the computer to "do" anything, you had to write the program...NEAT. This was my key into the computer world, and understanding how they worked into my life. I soon after built a new "gaming" PC and installed Linux on it. This is rabbit hole stuff, it has opened doors in my life and really only scratched the surface. I was wondering where this could go career wise. I run a CNC machine from 1996 at work and I really, really don't hate it. But I feel like I know now to avoid a career in coding at all costs. Keep my passion. This was so clear and straightforward that I may subscribe anyway just in case.
A lot of resonance here, especially to develop other sets of value added skills on top of our problem solving trainings. Agree that the longer you stay the harder it gets. Great video, well put. I didn't really sit down to think through all of your points throughout my 25-year career. All i did was when i was so frustrated on one job i went on selling out myself again elsewhere. Knowing I'm only going to repeat this process indefinitely early in my career, i tried to develop myself another skillset on financial trading, which was totally irrelevant to my day jobs, and it's been a struggle for decades just to master that skill while i keep my day job as a developer. Now i can say i totally agree with you that it worths to master at least one more skill set in the long run that can leverage on our programming trainings. Very well put video. Thank you
Love the Guitar. Excellent knowledge as well. I thoroughly enjoy troubleshooting and dissecting how something works. As a kid I used to build and fix Lego projects that were broken all the time. So for me it's less about learning a specific framework, language, etc. More so about doing something I enjoy, which happens to be programming, but also automation, and troubleshooting. Once you've run through a couple languages you realize, it's all the same more or less.
Nice video man! I really think that it could be healthy even for no programmers to listen to it ... Oh and after the second guitar brake, as the time was passing, I was waiting for the third one with eager! Good job!
Thank you!
@HealthyDev I've been developing for 30+ years and I had some college, but most of my knowledge has been on the job and certifications. All of the items you discuss are very true and thank you for sharing!! Good Job!!
Stumpled upon, myself being a systems developer for 26 years. Enjoyed that talk. Agree about the points, absolutely worth mentioning and absolutely relevant
Welcome to the channel! Happy to see another industry vet here.
You nailed one of the most important things on the head, keep it simple stupid. This isn't just about communicating and setting expectations for others by keeping it simple so they understand things quickly but it's also about riding your code so it's simple and stupid and boring. When I hear the word elegant or fancy or something like that in reference to code I know it's a bad code because it's overly complicated. Good code is almost always boring code but boring code is so much easier to deal with and you can get so much more done and you can please so many more people so much more easily.
All great things to keep in mind and they relate in other IT related fields of engineering.
Thank you for sharing
p.s.
Love your guitar interludes, very well placed.
Thank you! People either love or hate the guitar.
Thank you for this video. As a new software developer not even employed yet and having these tips before I start working is really good. Thank you very much!
Happy to help!
Thanks for sharing this advise! As someone who has been in the industry for almost two decades, I could relate to this video whole heartedly. I think everyone who is into software development should watch this video, especially the ones who are a decade in and are feeling lost.
The last part hit me hard! That's why I am coming back to where I come from - electrical engineering and security & CCTV systems. Plenty of work around, good money and no fear that work will be outsourced to India.
to be a great programmer you have to love solving puzzles and problems given the tools provided to you and you have to be passionate about doing so
This video deserves way more views. Sharing it with all my friends!
I love your content. It really feels like you care about the aspiring software engineers watching your videos. It doesn't feel like you're trying to sell us something, or just saying edgy shit to get views like a lot of other SE YT channels. I really appreciate that. Liked and subscribed.
Welcome to the channel! Glad to have you.
Hi Jayme, this video came at just the right time for me. I'm a self-taught developer with almost 9 years of experience, but I've struggled immensely in my career and made a lot of mistakes which have cost me dearly - from making rash decisions based on self-doubt to working with legacy tech for too long. I'm starting a new job next month, and getting extra support and mentoring from one of their senior developers. None of my previous roles offered me this kind of support, because no-one had time for me. The thing I find the hardest is knowing when it's ok to put forward ideas, and what ideas are the right ones to share. I completely agree with what you said at 15:00 too, I thought it was just me that was noticing that because I'm often being recommended to do the opposite. Anyway, keep up the great work and the great grooves! Love it!
Thank you for the feedback and encouragement! Hey, I've made almost 160 videos and still haven't shared all the ways I've messed up - it's a long list. It's part of learning and being a human. At least you've got the self-awareness to know when it happens and then learn from it! That's more than your average developer. Hang in there. 👍
20 years as a front-end dev, this hits the spot on every word and punctuation.
The "pick your battles" law is one that sinked in only very recently to me. It really saves a ton of energy.
Now, whenever I get a strong opinion about how things should be done differently, I start by asking permission to measure the variable I am trying to improve before even suggesting my "clever" new idea.
Trying to approach the unknowns with a data driven approach helps to settle these battles diplomatically.
Thanks for this! I'm a few years behind you in my own career and a lot of your advice in this video resonated with me. In hindsight I can't believe how much energy I wasted over the years nitpicking with other developers over frameworks and coding patterns that are all obsolete by now anyway lol.
Really helpful, thanks.
Dude you are super wise ! And I have been through this exactly as you described
Maybe wise in a few areas, definitely not in others. Thank you though! :)
Studying a CS degree in the UK and I am embarking on my final project and man the first few minutes were truth, forecasting and buffering !
I really like your guitar interludes
@6:14 *Delay Commitments*