This is maybe the only place in my life where some people are as left or lefter than me, so I’m curious on perspectives. I’ve been studying on my own with plans to pursue a competency-based degree online – if I prove to myself that I care enough to stick with it.
Given that by now I’ve become acquainted enough with two jobs to become jaded, I’m wondering how CS is (initial puzzle-solving thrill versus six years later). The tech industry can be rife with chud shit, and I doubt someone with little experience could jump straight into freelancing or working in a more solo capacity. But it’s an industry I’m wholly unfamiliar with.
My career experience (ignore these two walls of text if you don’t want any exposition):
Journalism: Don’t regret it, but solely because it taught me the valuable lesson that I won’t always know what I’ll actually want in life. Started as a super-lib and left a washed-out sucker. The average reporters I met were nauseatingly status-quo – either true-and-through bootlickers or too naive to realize themselves as free PR agents for people in power. There’s something about years of condensing complicated situations to a few grafs for laymen which rots your brain into an endless chasm of cheap metaphors, impotent virtue-signaling rage, and other cliche nonsense. Met a few good ones who felt trapped like I did, but my experiences with the industry and the average journalist I met were eyerolling. I’ve worked manual labor jobs where older men literally screamed insults at me, and they never treated me worse (in the ways that truly mattered) than journalists did. When you have no true allies, you don’t feel good, and you’re not making the world any better, it’s time to leave. Seriously, fuck journalism in the USA.
Education: There’s a certain comfort with privatization among many teachers I meet that bothers me, but the bedrock idealism of “My actions and words impact how a child thinks” is at least something capitalism can’t ruin completely. There’s also a fellow commiseration to the extent that many teachers know it’s a flawed institution, but we’re mostly in it together. Unlike journalism you at least find less eager bootlicking. I’ve considered getting my Masters and progressing since currently I’m just ESL-certified, which isn’t much, but I could still see myself teaching in some capacity as a lifelong career since I’ve had my fair share of bad days over three years and I’m still motivated enough.
I’m a senior engineer at a small division of a very large company in Silicon Valley. I went to a very good school, but pretty much anyone probably would have been able to get my job. My first boss went to Michigan and my other co-worker went to Wazzu. I think when you’re first starting out it helps to look at random smaller companies in established industries rather than just trying to get lucky at a start-up or applying to one of he big ones. Much more likely to have normal people.
As others have said, it’s very much a job. The number of times you’ll be solving “interesting problems” is low. But sometimes you do just get to zone out and bang out some not fancy but good code.
If you’re going to learn anything, I’d learn full-stack web development. Probably the least interesting thing you can do, but the most broadly applicable skillset. I’ve essentially pigeonholed myself at this point which greatly limits where I can go next.
I honestly haven’t run into a bunch of chuds in the office. The worst are probably a couple of weird libertarians. In my experience all my coworkers, American or otherwise, are libs. Lunchroom chat mostly sticks to talking about how much of a dumbass Trump is and people get quiet if I start going off too much at the Dems, but they usually don’t disagree, they just don’t want to care about politics that much.
Even if you’re working some start up, you’re in a corporate job. Idealism does not factor into it even a little, unless you end up believing in their corp speak. College seemed to hammer out idealism pretty quick, my instructors would straight up tell you that you’re better off just doing this for money, because your dream job probably fucking sucks.
I got into freelance stuff right out of college, because the tech sector fuckin loves the gig economy. It pays well, I’ve met 0 people left of Bloomberg, but most people above entry level will never talk about politics, so who knows.
I got into freelance stuff right out of college, because the tech sector fuckin loves the gig economy. It pays well, I’ve met 0 people left of Bloomberg, but most people above entry level will never talk about politics, so who knows.
Do you think it’s unrealistic to plan a CS career with no prior experience while getting to remain abroad? I left the US a few years ago and am not interested in going back, to the extent that I’d probably even abandon a good career opportunity if it meant I got to remain abroad.
Tech is amazing if you’re a young (<30) white or Asian male. If you’re only 1 of those 3 you can still make a very good living. If none of those 3, sorry to say but I’ve never seen or heard of a person like you in this field. But here’s the deal. No matter what your outward characteristics are, if you want to do something, if you enjoy it, don’t ever ever stop yourself from going out and doing it just because you don’t fit a profile. Just get out there. It’s indoor work with no heavy lifting.
Ok next up, how is CS after six years in the field? Well, I’m way past 6 years now, but when I was at 6 years I wasn’t even jaded yet. The standard corporate bullshit you’ll get with any job so I won’t mention it. I guess what I hate the most is all the layers of garbage that make up modern web development. All sorts of different partially overlapping frameworks that break in mysterious ways. Nobody knows what the hell is actually going on, they just shrug and blame a third party vendor. It was much better when you were just writing code against an operating system. If something broke, it was your own damn fault and you fixed it. And if people used to hate DLL hell, dear lord how I hate .Net Framework vs Core. Half the features twice as confusing and the things you actually need are only available in the version you’re not using.
I could be exaggerating how bad things are now. Web development is just my pet peeve. A lot of jobs use Java, might not be as bad.
The other terrible thing about this field is the way you get paid to ruin people’s lives. If you work in gaming, you end up writing more addictive gambling simulators. If you work on the web, you end up siphoning as much personal data as possible to sell out your own users. That’s in addition to writing a more addictive website to keep users staring at your shit for longer periods. If you’re not doing either of those things, good chance you’re working for a defense contractor (congratulations on the lake home by the way) so you have no soul by definition. If you’re able to swing something not in any of those hell holes, congratulations.
But that’s what modern civilization is all about. You only get paid if your work actively degrades other humans. Our job is to make other people rich, not to make the world a better place. But you left education knowing that already.
I rounded out 2 years in CS recently. I’m a defense contractor and it is hell. It was really hard for me to find work out of college so I decided to sell my soul to get my first 2 years. Working where I did helped radicalize me. Seeing my client up close and personal helped me realize how deep the rot is. I love to code because I am still young and new, but I can definitely tell that I will need to go back to school at some point to either work on content I enjoy or to teach. Everyone is a chud/lib or just politically illiterate and you take courses once per year that make you watch power points about china bad and how it is “us vs them.” If you can avoid defense contractor, but it’s reliable work. Shit isn’t going anywhere.
I was stuck with a defense contractor for my first year out of college and I’m very glad I got out. I got lucky with my next job because they would have happily taken a defense contract but never did (they did take an ICE contract, though) and by the time I left, they knew I’d quit on most government contractor projects. one of the perks of smaller companies is that you have more leverage even as an individual in an industry where collective bargaining is unthinkable and most of your colleagues are chuds. there are a number of small consulting outfits that will teach you valuable skills and are desperate for smart and capable people - you kind of need to know what to look for as a lot of places that fit that description are scam shops but if you can smell bullshit, I suggest looking in that direction as a path out.
I am definitely looking for a way out right now. The company I work at makes most of its money subcontracting to other companies, and my manager has made it clear that he has not intention of letting me leave the contract I am on to work on anything that would help round out my resume. “The client just likes you too much.” For now I am trapped on a project that uses a java backend and transcompiles java into javascript. I have this feeling that if I don’t leave soon, I will be stuck as a Java developer for the rest of my life because that is all I will be hired for. Thanks for your post, I appreciate it.
The big question is how much do you like programming? If you truly enjoy it, then it’s a fantastic way to get bread. For sure there’s a lot of the Office Space-esque bullshit, and with the invasion of this Scrum/Agile it’s gotten worse. But the peace and quiet moments where you can sip on coffee and bang out some code make it a good gig overall.
There’s an overwhelming amount of chud in the industry, this is true; but there is still plenty of demand for workers on interesting projects.
and I doubt someone with little experience could jump straight into freelancing or working in a more solo capacity.
Yes and no. You may not be able to jump into getting paid for your work right now, but you can always contribute to something like a github project. Working with people that are apart of a good github repo, can help you get your sea legs into how larger projects come together. I can’t think of an easier yet effective way to set oneself apart, than to have an active github (or gitlab, etc)
