15 years??? How the frakking fsck do you guys endure writing boilerplate, filing TPS reports, going to meetings, and listening to PHBs for that damn long?
I'm not even 1 year in and I'm already busy executing my plans for freedom (by starting my own business, for instance).
Then again, I guess I don't have a single lick of salaryman in my bones. Others may relish the thought of a holding down a comfy desk job and not having to make your own decisions about what to work on.
I hate to break it to you kid, but no matter what you do you'll end up writing boilerplate, filing reports, and listening to assholes spout nothing on a very regular basis. Thats how business works and why it can suck. Running your own business will likely mean you have to endure more of these life-sucking tasks (but only until you hit the big time, right?!). This isn't to say that we must all resign to this fate, but you're deluding yourself if you think that self-employment or startup work is all that much different at the end of the day.
Its hard to read your comments in this thread without thinking that, no matter how proud about yourself you are right now, you're exactly the type who will fall to attrition within a few more years of your career.
Maybe, but tech is an odd field in that there's so much money floating around, so plenty of "non-standard" approaches work better than elsewhere. Depends also on your needs: the bar for making $150k is much higher than the bar for making $50k. Heck, one of my college friends is currently traveling the world while doing part-time Ruby consulting and part-time tending to his passive income websites, with relatively low bureaucracy. It's not the big-time by any means, but also relatively independent. Tempting...
Definitely tempting, thats the dream for me. However, do you think he'll still be living that lifestyle for the next 2, 5, 10, 25 years? I'm working toward that dream every day, but its a purely temporal thing.
Even the $100k+ engineer salary talk around here isn't necessarily a realistic goal either. Sure, there's always been people making that sort of money but not to the extent that they do now. Is it a safe bet to gamble that you'll still make that money in their in positions? Is it a safe bet that salaries will keep going up at this pace, or that life will stay at a pace where you can afford to work so much?
Again these are my dreams and goals too. But its just not safe to walk around with blinders on all day.
"This isn't to say that we must all resign to this fate, but you're deluding yourself if you think that self-employment or startup work is all that much different at the end of the day."
The work may not be different. However, you have much more freedom in your choices and at the end of the day, your reward is much better for having to deal with boiler plates and life-sucking tasks.
I'm running a startup now and I've never felt like I've been wasting my life. I do, however, when I work for other people.
Yeah, exactly. It's not that I'm lazy. It's just that I want to do something meaningful and on my own terms. I have much more value to give to the world than I can express in a 40 hour a week coding job.
The interesting thing at least for me is that I find myself going full circle. Started coding on the c64 and Amiga then moved up the level of abstraction to java, ruby, javascript and now moving down to harder problems in javascript, c, c++. I figure since Moore's law is pretty close to dead, the cost payed for abstractions will start making older closer to the metal languages come back in fashion increasing the need for more "hard" knowledge in the next decade or so.
"I'm already busy executing my plans for freedom (by starting my own business, for instance)
Ah, one of my favourite fallacies. Hate to break it to you, but starting your own business more often than not leads you to have to do more things outside of your comfort zone or strengths, not less.
It's for this reason that businesses need...business guys, and also why tech people undervalue that need. It allows the engineers to engineer things.
I'm not even 1 year in and I'm already busy executing my plans for freedom (by starting my own business, for instance).
Then again, I guess I don't have a single lick of salaryman in my bones. Others may relish the thought of a holding down a comfy desk job and not having to make your own decisions about what to work on.