For me software dev is the perfect mixture of money and freedom. In fact, I am hard pressed to think of a profession that offers more personal freedom.
I don't make as much as my finance bro buddies, but they work A LOT. And they work year round. I work six-nine months at a time (maybe a year if the contract is right) then I take at least a couple months off.
If I was a career/full time guy, finance would probably be the better choice, but as someone who spends his life trying to maximize the life part: software really does it for me. It helps that I love doing it, for sure, but tbh finance is a complex, challenging field that's quite technical and mathy so it would likely be fun as well. Except for the people, many of the people are, uh, tough to be around. Not all, but many--still, tech bros aren't exactly the easiest either. Glass houses.
> In fact, I am hard pressed to think of a profession that offers more personal freedom.
As a translator in Eastern Europe, I feel like I have a lot more freedom than the software devs here. I can work as little as 2-3 hours a day and pay all my expenses and save for the future. The job is remote by its very nature, so it doesn’t matter whether I am in my own country, or I am traveling in Patagonia or Madagascar. I am able to dictate deadlines to my clients, I don’t have to work to their schedule. For example, If a job will only take me half an hour to do, I can tell the client that I can return it in one week, and in the meantime I can travel or whatever.
I do some coding as a hobby and occasionally visit the programming language etc. meetups in my hometown. The software devs there make around the same amount of money I do each month, but they complain of the 9 to 5 routine, office politics, and how unhealthy it is to spend all day sitting in front of a computer.
Here it's the opposite; i have a full degree in software engineering and over 13 years of doing it professionally, yet some Finance graduates, friends of mine, are earning much more (i.e. as CFOs of companies);
Sometimes i think i should have studied Finance instead!
The reason i do this (all software related activities) is because it's my real passion. I see many people engaging in "coding" bootcamps but only because of the market demand, not because they are passionate in any way about doing it, which is sad.
This is just about the only professional career I've heard of where people talk this way. Who goes into accounting because of their passion for bookkeeping and tax compliance?
This is just about the only professional career I've heard of where people talk this way...
In my experience: Nearly all doctors will at least claim it as part of the reason. Many (most?) lawyers. Most teachers. Most academics. All social workers. The list goes on and on.
In fact my first choice for counterexample would be your example - accountants. But in my experience they are often passionate about proving a helpful and necessary service, eve if they aren't passionate about the work itself.
Just because we don't feel any great love for spreadsheets doesn't meant nobody else does. I've only known two professional accountants but both enjoy what they do, not just the externality of providing the useful service. They like working with the numbers and rules. People called me weird at law school because I actually liked tax law. I'm fascinated by the interaction (aka train wreck) of public policy hitting financial ground truth. I would real tax cases and laugh out loud at some of the insanity. Just because something isn't popular or widely understood doesn't mean there aren't people who enjoy it.
Find it tolerable, maybe even like it? Sure. Show me someone who would do taxes on their own time for fun. I've sometimes heard it said that the main reason people decide to go into auditing or tax is they couldn't stand the other one.
For that matter, let's talk about a closer career to ours. How many people who are system administrators complain about relatives asking them for free consultations? Would that be an issue if they just loved configuring and troubleshooting computers so much? Even if you like computers a lot, what you get paid to do with them isn't necessarily fun.
Sure, I think I allowed for that possibility. But as noted, I was basing this on my own experience - I know multiple people in all of these professions. Unlike the others, none of the accountants have loved the nuts and bolts work in the same way many of the others did. Could just be sample bias.
Creative professions usually are like this. Also (more anecdotally) I find that quite a few researchers like doing some research during their free time (usually far less serious research of the form "applying techniques used in research on toy problems"). It's not uncommon, but then again, not all programmers spend their free time on more programming.
"Generally, the Real Programmer plays the same way he works - with computers. He is constantly amazed that his employer actually pays him to do what he would be doing for fun anyway (although he is careful not to express this opinion out loud)"
-- From "Real Programmers Don't use Pascal", a classic in programmer's humor.
My father and my brother are in accountancy. Obviously I haven't talked to every accountant on Earth, but if that's your standard nobody can ever think about anything.
Depending on the area, finance has many opportunities for "consultant" like work where a significant portion of your income can be commissions or performance based. This is where the real money is and the people I know that are successful in this make multiples more than me and my "big 4" programming job--even at their relatively small firms.
When I ask them, their passion tends not to be "finance" so much as "helping people" in various forms. Whether that passion is sincere or not is a separate argument.
Personally, that sort of incentive one of the major motivators that's missing from the pure software industry imo. When I worked in derivatives trading as a programmer, I made a good chunk of change finishing projects early, with high quality, etc. At my current position, there's no such obvious incentive. Promotions and solid bonuses could require years of this type of work as a prerequisite and may not even be recognized at all.
Various forms of financial planning was what came to mind. The predecessor to robo-advisers. The guys I know that are really killing it in this have a few dozen clients investing several million each with them. Their commissions from this sort of thing are large enough that they only need to have this occur a couple times a year to be well into six-figure territory.
I'd be quite passionate if I was doing finance only if it was my money and not have someone pushing me spend other people's money, I'd have to have a cushion tho.
I worked in finance for 6 years before switching to software. I worked almost 80 hours a week as a discretionary equities trader. I realized that it was starting to be eaten by the tech/data-driven styles, So I took up software so that I could get a more competitive edge. Now I work webdev at 50 hours a week. Those 30 hours a week is a lot more significant to me than the pay cut I took by not going back into finance. The great part about it is if I REALLY want to go back into finance, I have both sets of skills. It never hurts to gain skills in areas where you don't have a formal education.
This is what did it for me. The hours were too much and I was getting burned out. I was in IT consulting (fortune 100 companies) but on the finance side. The company was also pulling me over to join the consulting team but I knew that I needed more than a different role, I needed a different lifestyle. I took a pay cut and now work for small businesses handling webdev and internal tools. This allowed me to stretch some creative legs and navigate into a bit of advertising as well. Beyond that, I now get to spend more time with my wife, learning new skills, and growing in ways that I am more passionate about.
The transition doesn't come without heartache though, there are risks including job security and potential growth. No one has a crystal ball. I made a choice that felt more fulfilling in the present. Whether that was a smart choice or not 50 years from now - you'll have to ask me then.
Software eats finance because it’s making traditional finance jobs obsolete.
ML does not eat software in the same sense, because ML and software engineers generally do non-overlapping work. ML involves analysis, software involves synthesis.
There may be a day when ML automates software development, but it’s nowhere close yet.
At most, ML is merely dominating current hype among software-adjacent technologies (along with block chain).
Only genius-level people have any bright future in software these days; when you see what is being cooked in the labs of top companies, in 10 years software developers that missed the train on machine learning will be fighting for scraps in low-income jobs.
I do have that FUD, but then I check reality (jobs) and people are getting paid to do Java, C#, Cobol.. I think we have a few more decades! But you are right.
What do you mean by that? That machine learning will be able to distill vague, shifting requirements from non-technical businesspeople into functional software within 10 or so years? Or that all software development jobs will involve machine learning in some way?
Both to some extent. There will be much higher floor for software part that is not yet automatable by ML, requiring more skilled developers to do anything. And that development involves ML is happening already and in some areas is in more advanced stage.
What leads you to believe that in 10 years, we will have developed general artificial intelligence? Current machine learning algorithms are very good at deriving heuristics to solve narrow problems with well-defined, testable goal-functions - e.g. image classification, stereo cost calculation, optical character recognition - but code generation from business requirements is far too broad.
If you have any links to papers demonstrating anything close to what you are stating, feel free to post them.
Who said you need AGI to automate away a lot of what low-level software engineers are doing (majority in fact)? Automatable level will rise in time, moving more and more software engineers out of business if they don't adapt (because regular folks will be able to achieve with a piece of ML software what software engineers had to do for them previously). Advances might move in a form of a cliff, like what might happen to taxi drivers once self-driving cars are good enough and affordable. Not sure why do you think software engineering is immune to that.
How does ML help in that regard? I don't understand exactly what you're saying by "ML software". How does the regular user specify what he wants? By writing it in plain English with all its ambiguities, turning the "ML software" into a very fuzzy compiler that constantly tries to guess your intentions? Through some GUI or visual programming language, like we've had for decades but which have yet to cause a shortage of programming jobs?
We've been automating programming since the very beginning, moving from machine language to assembly to high-level languages to using libraries and frameworks (although making different libraries cooperate is sometimes just as labor-intensive as writing the functionality from scratch).
I've seen comments like his and I really don't know if I'm just ignorant or if the other guy is talking out of his ass. I see no way that machine learning as it currently exists could possibly perform the work of coders or any other human function that involves ambiguity and shifting requirements.
Depends on the level of standardization of "building blocks" in a given industry where software is needed. Most software engineers nowadays spend time mimicking what others posted on Stack Overflow and just gluing together different modules with not much thinking. There is a lot of opportunity to unleash ML there. One example - imagine you need to convert data from one supplier to another one's format. ML can identify which data columns looks similar and propose a conversion between schemes to an engineer, engineer just needs to approve it and make small changes if necessary. Algorithm then can learn from the adjustments and make them automatically in the future. As a consequence, you might not need to employ 3 people doing that, but only 1. So you won't get rid of humans completely, but boosting up one's capabilities by augmenting intelligence allows you to save cost and time. Next big thing is identifying which of these processes can be standardized and automated away in development. The pressure coming to rank-and-file developer will be substantial, given internal prototypes I've seen already.
I firmly believe this. If you arent brilliant, you arent writing real software, you are copying what other people are already doing. Any monkey can do that.
It was mentioned in the article about the lack of formal education (specifically within the field of study) within software development. I would be curious to see what this would be like for a HN audience? What is everybody's story of how they got to where they are?
I don't make as much as my finance bro buddies, but they work A LOT. And they work year round. I work six-nine months at a time (maybe a year if the contract is right) then I take at least a couple months off.
If I was a career/full time guy, finance would probably be the better choice, but as someone who spends his life trying to maximize the life part: software really does it for me. It helps that I love doing it, for sure, but tbh finance is a complex, challenging field that's quite technical and mathy so it would likely be fun as well. Except for the people, many of the people are, uh, tough to be around. Not all, but many--still, tech bros aren't exactly the easiest either. Glass houses.