HN Explorer

Ask HN: Now what?

3 points by throwaway487548 ↗ HN
Suppose that you have mastered CS as a hobby project. Let's say you have watched all the classic courses, like 6.001 2004, CS61A, Dan Grossman's Prog Langs, Programming methodology course by Gregor Kiczales, Scala courses by Martin Odersky, even the OCaml MOOC etc, etc. Basically, you have bootstrapped yourself to an equivalent of a major in CS (in a foreign language media) just for fun. Originally it was the way to practice English language.

Then you have realized that there is absolutely no market to this kind of academic, mostly theoretical, classic knowledge. You are supposed to have a top-tier CS degree from an Ivy league college to get one of these high paying job in the valley (not necessarily possessing even a half of CS knowledge I've accumulated) or to compete on an online sweatshops like UpWork for $10 a task (well, I am exaggerating a bit).

Of course, I know how wonderful it is to write an open source software for the benefit of humanity as a whole, or how to contribute to a top-tier open source project (hello all the guys who are submitting all these minor typo corrections and insignificant code reordering patches to ghc or golang to see their names in History) but I literally have no idea what should I program and why.

The positions for writing, say, fintech in Haskell for a startup in London or for improving Dotty in Geneva, or writing Erlang in Sweden are quite limited (related to a population of 7 billion) so you better to have an Ivy leagues credentials, indeed. There is, of course, no demand for top-tier functional languages on Upwork. (I won't even touch PHP or Java, sorry).

So, what next? Give it up and run some fast food joint and what not? Small business? The time of garage startups are long gone. To teach kids in a third world? Well, even this requires a diploma.

Is there some darknet marketplace where people really don't care who you are and how old are you as long as you are able to produce a high quality code?

5 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 25.6 ms ] thread
anoncoward111
When I was feeling very disenchanted with my customer service call center jobs after 8 years, I took a job waiting tables and painting houses.

After two months, the physical nature of the job went from awesome to horrible. Everything hurt.

I immediately went back to customer service with new gusto.

Good luck!

jstewartmobile
"The harvest is plentiful, the laborers few."

If you knew this stuff as well as you think you do, you'd have more ideas than time. The field is a disaster.

smt88
Do you have job experience? In my experience, academic CS knowledge doesn't produce "high quality code" that I want to pay for.

Good code is easy for teammates and future workers to maintain and collaborate on. Academics usually don't learn how to manage that part of it.

Also, you'd rather work in fast food than write Java?

What about C# or Python? There are lots of jobs for those. Elm, Erlang, Elixir, and Scala seem to be popular enough for you to find a job, too.

yesenadam
I know how wonderful it is to write an open source software for the benefit of humanity as a whole

I get the impression that you don't actually know that. Or you didn't mention what you wrote, anyway. I guess having ideas about "what should I program and why" involves learning about the world and what it needs. And not just learning about it at a distance, but getting involved. Good luck.