the strange part is that we believe software engineering is a lot more logical and less social and chaotic. Turns out it's not that different from car repair or plumbing, always dealing with fragile assumptions. It's indeed very toxic, it's like constantly lifting weights with the wrong posture.. you harm yourself, even though you could do the same amount of work, or more, if you were on a stable bench.
I don't really see what part of software development is toxic? For me, it's analogous to solving interesting puzzles with peers, except you also get paid for it. It sounds like we have a very different experience, so I'm interested in hearing why you feel that way.
I feel like it's entirely dependent on the environment people are working in. I've been in places that makes me feel empathy for both the articles author and the one you responded too. Constant grinds and battles for small gains, where it does feel toxic. However, I've also worked in places similar to what you described. It turns out, the place you work with and the people you work with are a whole lot more important then what you're working in.
It's my personal state in a company setting, I'm simply in pain, I can't think straight, I struggle with mundane things, I lost taste and desire to craft nice solutions.
Made me question my skills for a bit, until I realized that when outside my job, I enjoy reading/thinking about what I'd consider non trivial topics (parsing techniques, state machine minimizations, ...) and in these moments, it's nothing but joy, even when it's hard it's a positive feeling. And it yields long term enlightenment.
There's no such thing when you finally found why lib-a doesn't work well with lib-b anymore, or if lib-c will be compatible with the previous ones.
Now you mention 'solving interesting puzzles with peers' maybe my puzzles are not interesting and i can't rely on my peers to find interesting ideas :)
Also there were topics on how companies mis-apply agile development, which end up in this never-ending bug chase and cramming half features in an application. But based on conversations around me, it seems that a lot of people live in this average.
Social is the key word. The author presumes the end goal of programming is overcoming all sorts of technical obstacles to deliver a working solution in a problem domain. But who defines working? The stakeholders. Ultimately, programming work is about pleasing the product owner, manager, or users. The "power through the obstacles" approach arises when there is a communication breakdown between software engineer and stakeholder. Why should programmers expect to work until 2 AM but not plumbers or electricians? Granted, software projects are more difficult to estimate, but when other types of engineers run into obstacles, they typically go back to the customer to renegotiate. Software engineering would benefit more from improved communication than herculean efforts or early retirement.
I want to be doing “this” but with enough financial freedom to not care when things aren’t going my way in my career, freeing me up to focus on the fun parts.
Sitting in an air conditioned room mentoring engineers and writing code? I mean, it beats what most people did for the vast majority of human existence to survive.
... and it sucks that this is the most excitement you (or I) can muster. This means that our sense of agency is dead, along with the ability to innovate.
What should I be doing instead? The company I work for is paying me to learn and work on machine learning while mentoring software engineers. They’re also paying machine learning engineers and data scientists I can learn from. It’s hard for me to understand what better a situation I could have.
I'm sitting at my home office, able to play with my dog during breaks, while simultaneously having a lot of autonomy at my job. I love it, and would not trade it for anything. People seem to really get used to their way of living and lose perspective, then becoming unhappy. We've got it really really good.
Yeah, I'll take it all day long. I'm not even done with my first year of my first software engineering job so perhaps I'm full of optimism and hope. But in a previous life I was cooking on a line and moving tons of gravel with a wheelbarrow with my brother. I much prefer my situation now.
> Every age, every culture, every ethos and tradition has its own style, its own varieties of gentleness and harshness, of beauty and cruelty. Each age takes certain kinds of suffering for granted, patiently accepts certain evils. Human life becomes a true hell only when two ages, two cultures, and religions overlap. Someone from the Graeco-Roman world, forced to live in the Middle Ages, would have died a miserable death, just as a savage would in our civilized world. There are times when an entire generation is caught between two eras, two styles of life, so that it loses all sense of morality, security, and innocence. A man like Nietzsche had to endure our present misery more than a generation ahead of his time. Today, thousands endure what he suffered alone and without understanding.” — steppenwolf
As a bit of a stoic myself, I appreciate the appeal to the "some people have real problems" argument.
I think a big part of the frustration or unhappiness of some subset of this generation of software engineer who cut their teeth in "The Golden Age" is lamenting or longing for "what could have been...". Maybe it's our slow realization of Sturgeon's Law and wish that we would have discovered this seemingly universal truth ages ago. Software, being mainly a construction of the mind, has the potential to be truly great (and some is), yet the state is basically "All Software is Shit". Squaring the expectations of my junior self with the realities of my senior self is... disappointing.
As a fellow stoic, I’d encourage you to embrace the dichotomy of control, virtue and to seek inner growth. For instance, I have been focusing on mentorship, helping others grow.
I think what we actually want is to be the equivalent of a gentlemen scientist supported by family wealth or a patron, sitting in our study doing what interests us, corresponding with other smart people interested in the same topic, going for long walks thinking about hard problems. Even though we shouldn't complain, we can still strive for this.
I've really changed my perspective on this type of thing as I approach 50.
Great art is always made under great constraints. Software is no different.
It's always the weaker engineers that are constantly complaining about the things listed in this article. Complaining about all the "stupid code" and "stupid decisions" that were made before they arrived.
There is no realistic scenario where you can spend infinite time developing the perfect solution. And I say infinite because there is no amount of time that will allow you to achieve perfection. Perfection does not exist.
>Great art is always made under great constraints.
It's sad, the Mona Lisa never quite reached its peak because da Vinci didn't have a Jira board and a scrum master /s
Some of these constraints are not truly necessary and often stifling and once you've done work without them, you can't go back. Usually that's when you're older.
But like in art and so also in programming you can definitely strive for perfection.
There are plenty of writers, some famous, most not, who keep rewriting and rewriting because it's not perfect and still get annoyed because it's not good enough when published. Software generally is a job to make money : who give a crap if it's perfect; not your boss or your company clients. But personally, is another thing. I definitely have software that is perfect in my eyes. I don't care if others don't think so but I worked decades on it and using and updating it makes me happier than other things. I am well over 50 and I do not see this change for me.
There are well known examples too in software, for instance Jonathan Blow, who estimates stuff and then overshoots by a long shot because he does not like the result enough and Arthur Whitney who keeps rewriting his 'perfect' (in his eyes) software (k) to just a little perfect-er.
There is a large variety between perfect code and code people usually complain about. Not only weak engineers complain about crappy code and stupid decisions.
As I got more senior it wasnt the crappiness of the code that frustrated me as much as it was the intransigence people that created the circumstances that made it happen.
Im totally happy with crappy codebases I can fix, I just get fed up coz because management wants 34 new features delivered by next tuesday or a junior with an attitude doesnt want to pair or be trained to TDD.
I low key kind of like it when I describe a harmful archetype or toxic opinion online and somebody responds "b...b...but that isnt bad, that's me!"
In the end the companies that were like this "because there is no alternative" usually did suffer the consequences and the ones that werent reaped the benefits shrug
What you're describing as a harmful archetype is the job you've been hired to perform. The disconnect is between your self-image and reality. Refusing to accept that is intransigent.
It doesn't matter if you consider it good or bad - morals don't come into commercial software development. The closest you ever get is platitudes when it doesn't conflict with profits.
Morals aren’t always involved in commercial software development, and likely they never have been in any of your workplaces. However, I think it’s a gross mischaracterization to claim that morals and business don’t have any overlap. I work in the health tech industry, and I feel good knowing that patients benefit from using our device. I know I wouldn’t feel the same way if I was working at some fintech optimizing stock trading to the Nth degree.
I never said anything about morals. I just like having agency and have professional pride in my work. Perhaps you dont.
This has very little to do with capitalist realities. As I mentioned before, the saner the company was about this stuff the less likely they were to eat losses.
As an Artist and an Engineer, too many engineers are perfectionist in a reality where it doesn't exist. To the people here who quote artists and works of art as if they are "perfect"... you. were. not. there. It's only perfect to you in your perfection biased brain. Art is very much imperfect. Concessions were made, pieces restarted, plans changed. Creation is messy and painful. Art or Engineering.
OTOH, I'd say that software perfection doesn't exists because of all the slackers who accept their crap as "good enough", leading to enshittification.
On the most important level, software is either pefect or it fails.
ETA: I mean for functionality in the above. That's why I don't like web design: too many style choices. It's also why I stick to the commandline nowadays.
I'm curious what your career trajectory was like. I'm surprised that your experiences are so different than mine (see my comment below). In the early years, we had tons of time to just play around (e.g. Paul Graham wrote Hackers and Painters in 2004).
My theory is agile turned software writing into a production line, well it attempted too. Hard to fit experimentation into the everything must be a ticket process/mentality and endless ceremony meetings. Also I think the quality of developers decreased, not sure if agile caused this or it's some sort of work around for it.
Quality has definitely decreased, and I think it's the natural consequences of specialization. Most modern devs I've worked with (even/especially those from big tech companies >1B val) know their on particular niche well, but flounder when faced with a different kind of problem. They have a hammer, so everything is a nail. The power of modern infrastructure and orchestration systems has eliminated their need to understand the full stack in order to "deliver value".
From my POV, hacker culture is going away. Because it does not Scale in the way capitalists want it to scale. And the same capitalists are foaming at the mouth at the notion that they might be able to replace expensive engineers and developers with AI.
Our niche has been captured by global stakes, and those stakeholders are all too happy to believe that they can scale innovation without all of the previous "cultural baggage" that, IMO, is the only reason we have the systems that we have today.
I don't think hacker culture is going away, I think it's just drowned out by software eating the world in a capitalist economy. It used to be that software and computers in general didn't pay any better than any other white collar job, and were generally more arcane and less familiar to people, so only those of us with an inherent interest were drawn to it. I believe there are more of us than ever, there's just orders of magnitude more people drawn in for the money and power.
I certainly feel some nostalgia for the old days, but while I'm not thrilled by a lot of directions the internet has taken, I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a hacker in terms of tools available and what can be achieved by an individual or small group. Getting attention for your work is another matter, but distribution has always been hard, the internet making it easier to deliver bites just led to that much fiercer competition. The fact that there was a short-lived window where technical barriers favored hackers was just a coincidence of history, not a stable state that it makes sense to try to replicate.
I always understood that Agile was supposed to reduce the bureaucracy, not increase it. It seems to have been embraced, extended and extinguished by the sort of people who were pushing Waterfall in the previous era.
>Also I think the quality of developers decreased, not sure if agile caused this or it's some sort of work around for it.
I think it's mostly a function of developer quantity and the pervasive "anyone can do this" attitude. (My assessment: most people probably could, but fundamentally aren't comfortable using their brains the right way.)
> My theory is agile turned software writing into a production line, well it attempted too.
Right conclusion, wrong origin. Let me explain.
Business management theory has been rooted in the lessons learned from Ford manufacturing for over a century. This has worked well for industries which manufacture goods using physical resources, of which most qualify.
However, software engineering is not bound by those forces. Adding more developers to an effort does not shorten delivery nor increase productivity (quite the contrary, actually, and well documented in "The Mythical Man Month"[0]). But adding "line workers" to a factory, assuming sufficient raw materials are available, will shorten its delivery cycle.
Because assembly line workers have a quantifiable job, easily measured based on physical factors, and fairly easily scalable (assuming sufficient factory capacity).
> Also I think the quality of developers decreased, not sure if agile caused this or it's some sort of work around for it.
IMHO, there is no substitute for understanding the problem needing to be solved. No SDLC paradigm can make a developer which eschews this successful.
> Great art is always made under great constraints. Software is no different.
I don't agree that great art (or software) is always made under great constraints. If you have an intrinsic drive, having enough time can yield a compound return. For example, in research, the "publish or perish" mentality often forces people to focus on shorter-term problems rather than pursuing more ambitious, long-term breakthroughs.
When I think of "great art under great constraints", I think of the demo scene, not dealing with the legacy cruft in someone else's million-line codebase.
I think a huge part of the challenge is we all suck as a field.
Why does something new have to be invented or api need to be deprecated? Do we take into consideration all the things that will break? The docs, the online examples, do we give sufficient context as to why something is a solution or works-for-me and move on? Tech like docker and Java were supposed to simplify but did they actually fulfill their mission? I think I will write a book on this one day.
I moved to management but my heart is still in the code. And it weeps.
To me software engineering is an interesting and kind of inexhaustible field, but the longer I do it, the more familiarity I have with the problem space, and some parts of it can become routine (it's ok to do things the boring way). And so I don't experience it as a constant adrenaline filled racecourse — often it's just an interesting professional activity. And if I decide to get deeply emotionally drawn in some of the time, that's my choice, rather than a requirement of doing my job.
(Obviously, the job evolves a lot over time and will keep doing that, but it isn't always starting absolutely from scratch every time either.)
I'm 45 and I love it, no technology problem is unsolvable and frustration is usually caused by non technical people (e.g. feature changes halfway through a sprint implementation that's been planned and refined for a month previous).
If you're a person who gave up adapting and learning - "it's a young man's game" - then perhaps the OP has a point for his case, I've seen it often enough.
The 90s had COBOL programmers were out of work, the 2000s had VB6 programmers out of work, and my old bread and butter Java, is being abandoned in AI in favour of Python and TS.
But I love the fact AI is coming for my job, in fact I'm retraining for it, I learnt TS about 10 years ago, I can write C, and my Python 3 is passable.
It keeps me on my toes always, and imho as long as anybody, young or old trains on the frontier/edge you'll never be out of work. The minute you give up that edge... well.
I'm 50. Yes. "It's about trying to come up with a working solution in a problem domain that you don't fully understand and don't have time to understand." This has been my trick for staying engaged and excited about my work. Do try to understand the problem domain. It makes a world of difference in what you code, how you're perceived, the kinds of roles you can be promoted in to, etc.
I'm 52. I absolutely love building software find customers for it and building businesses on serving them. It's the most intellectually challenging and financially rewarding thing I can think of for myself. And programming is one of the joys of the job.
The reason I find it more enjoyable than others might, is because I have considerable autonomy on how I will build my software, on what timelines, and who I'll sell it to.
The real problem with software development is not the complexity of our tech stack. It's the lack of agency that most programmers are forced to live with.
I fully agree with you. After a few happy experiences in development, I started to work as a developer for an ERP service company. I was served functional spec that I had to implement. I only had to look at the technical of things, and I quickly became bored.
So I transitioned to a client-facing role which was more interesting in a way, but with too much stress and too much management to do.
Now I try to find my niche in between, staying client facing but still handling the technical tasks. I find it's a really interesting position, it's very efficient since it reduce the amount of necessary communication, and it's very satisfying.
Most of the things described there the inevitable results of using tools. The times it goes well and the tools work perfectly are great, but less interesting and memorable than the times you find bugs in them.
But if they're keeping you in the office until 2am then the problem isn't computers, the problem is terrible management.
I’m in my 50s. I still code and I still love it. I got hired into a FAANG in my 50s and I’m still better than most of my team. I told the recruiter I didn’t want to interview or work as a staff level I wanted to be an IC at the senior level despite my 30+ years of experience and I’m happy.
This past weekend I’ve been coding a couple of side projects that has been using OpenAI to classify a bunch of things and I’m still having a ton of fun.
I'd be curious to know the age distributions among SWEs at FAANG, but from what I see in my company, it seems to be centered around 30. My guess is that are very few people older than 50.
So maybe the world isn't as civilized as you'd hope too :) I'm curious about the legal implications too.
No referrals, I got contacted through LinkedIn and truth be told I had interviewed there a couple of other times in the years previous and was rejected.
It should be pretty easy to get a referral. Most people should be able to find someone who would refer them (acquaintance, friend of friend). I already referred alumni from my school just because they reached out to me on linkedin. It's just a form to fill... After that, you never know what the recruiters will do with that. Sometimes, the person you recommended gets contacted soon after. Other times it seems recruiters skip promising candidates.
I wouldn’t say it’s unique but usually people my age get hired at higher levels but I purposefully didn’t want that.
I studied my ass off, I did I think 400 LC questions and did many other interviews before this interview so I was at the top of my game. Systems design comes naturally to me, but also required practice. I arranged things so that I had all my interviews over the course of about 6-8 weeks and ordered them so that the companies I was least interested were at the beginning and the ones I cared about most were at the end. I also explicitly told them that I wanted to be interviewed at senior software engineer level, not staff or higher based on my years of experience.
This worked in 2021-2022 but I don't think it works these days because this is probably the second worst job market I've seen since the dotcom bust.
My story is almost the same as yours. Contacted out of the blue by a couple of FAANG (maybe after referrals from acquaintances, but not even sure), despite having little experience (started my career in academia). Took me a couple of attempts over the span of a few years.
Interestingly, first attempt at one of them, they said I was ok for IC4, but wouldn't hire me at that level with my seniority. I'm also glad I eventually started at senior level rather than staff (and I'm happy to stay at that level too).
I am 55. I expected to be replaced by less expensive remote developers decades ago. I'm still not 100% certain why it hasn't happened.
I feel incredibly lucky that I get paid quite well to do something that is reasonably fun. Which gets me through the days that really suck, like meetings.
I would love to find a way to retire and keep programming for something more useful. Do any charities need programming work? I ponder teaching sometimes, but I am not great with kids.
The comments in the article are all ‘glass half empty’ comments. Many of the issues listed are opportunities to innovate. Use them!
I’m 49 and just sold the first company I founded. I’m already building my next idea (although this time without financial constraint) and continue to work on my open-source projects.
I started coding as a hobby when I was 10 years old. I still love being a maker and the process of making. Now that I’m financially free and working on my own ideas, for my own reasons, it feels just like it did when I was 10 years old.
I have asked this question myself when I was younger, but I never had the ambition for some leadership role or to do something else than software engineering. Now at age 63, I am still a software engineer. Last year, I have started a new job as an embedded software engineer at a small company, and I am very much enjoying it, learning new things about electronics, clock domains, and how peripherals work (like I2C peripheral of the ESP32-S3). I am drawing flow-charts for the first time in my career and developing unit tests to make sure the software works as desired. I am learning many new things and I am enjoying it. I am still working on becoming a better software engineer.
I'm 56. By far the oldest person on my team and older than most of the managers and executives. I've done it all since starting with computers when I was probably 12. I work for small companies where they let me work largely by myself on large problems. I love the challenge of learning new things and am all over AI tools to automate out the redundant boring parts of the being a programmer.
I have been fortunate and successful and managed my finances. I don't even have to work if I don't want to anymore. I do it to keep my brain challenged.
But if I was stuck in a boring mundane programming job for a mega corp then I would retire in a second. I've never stayed at a company once it's grown too big. Middle management kills creativity and sucks the life out of your soul.
Loved this comment. I'm 46 and dislike my job at a mega corp, especially as compared to my previous startup job. There are way too many cooks in the kitchen on every halfway interesting project. But the mega corp job pays too much to leave. Do this for a few more years and I'll reach financial independence. Then I can go back to a startup or ... something else. Part of me wishes for the layoff and severance that more and more of my colleagues are getting. Sorry to be such a downer. Most days are enjoyable and I can tune out the mega corp nonsense.
The most important part of FIRE is avoiding lifestyle inflation, otherwise you're just treading water.
On the other hand I've also seen folks retire early and then return to big tech because they didn't have anything to retire to, i.e. you need to make sure you also have a life.
As someone who is currently in the “one more year” camp the hardest part isn’t knowing if you’ll have enough. I do. The hardest part is change. If you’ve spent your entire life working and saving, suddenly shifting to not working and spending can be a scary thought as weird as that sounds.
I used to think the OMY types were foolish or Chicken Little’s but now I kind of understand.
Just switch to not working and not spending. Find hobbies, or better yet, activities that help out your community or the people around you, that don't require a lot of financial outlay.
Right before my grandfather retired at 55 he studied ceramics and spent the rest of his long life doing pottery. Endless satisfying learning and experimenting with little capital outlay.
I will be 45 this year, just started a new job after being laid off 8 months ago, when I got a VERY good severance package, and I lived life to the max with my family. And I enjoyed every second of it, minus seeing my saving draining, even if everything was planned and I would not have part of those savings if I weren't laid off.
SO ideally I would try to work 10-12 years more and then retire, but not retire in the frugal FIRE way. I like to travel. I like to eat at good restaurant, or buy good groceries and cook them at home. I started playing drums and I will probably buy a better set in the future etc. I want to help my daughters going to university (we live in Europe) or finding their lives and be able to support them economically if needed.
So, as I write this, retiring in 12 years is probably a big utopia but... who knows?
I've known to greater or lesser degrees a few investment banker who largely retired very young. I'm sure their jobs were very stressful but they made bank and got out young and AFAIK never really regretted it.
In the end it's the mentality that matters.
In my very very humble opinion, there are no big differences, given the same economic landscape and possibilities for 2 individuals, when one obsesses over FIRE and another that obsesses over having to work and feeling bored if not working.
What you described seems the right balance, even if they overworked themselves too much for a few years. If they were able to pull the plug and enjoy life afterwards with family, hobbies, travels and pet projects, well, it was worth it IMO.
>possibilities for 2 individuals, when one obsesses over FIRE and another that obsesses over having to work and feeling bored if not workin
There are definitely individuals for whom work/salary is a means to acquiring a big enough pile to buy a nice house, travel, educate their kids, etc. I also worked with someone, who was by no means a workaholic, but didn't really like to travel, had a modest set of hobbies, and got bored around the house. So he mostly didn't take vacation and was very content to keep working.
I do want to retire, I just don't want to live frugally, or according to my own definition of frugality.
Maybe as others say I just need a big enough income for enough years.
I could live cheap if I was homeless. My cost of living is like 35k per year and I rarely go on vacations or do anything. I eat out about once a week. Bills, mortgage, and healthcare are just huge. After the mortgage is paid off the house will still cost half the mortgage in taxes and insurance
The economists are right, luxuries got cheap and necessities got expensive. Maybe I should buy a PlayStation.
>After the mortgage is paid off the house will still cost half the mortgage in taxes and insurance
After the mortgage, the house isn't necessarily cheap though a newish condo may not be as bad depending upon where you live.
But I figure my house is easily $15K or so per year for necessary expenses unless you're incurring major maintenance debt. And, for example, I just had a random spontaneous kitchen fire in the middle of the night and, even with good insurance and quick fire response, I'm sure I'll be spending a bunch of money out of pocket related to that.
Well, "just another year" can easily become the path of least resistance. And COVID threw something of a wrench into the works. I might have done things differently had I been able to do a bunch of travel a few years earlier. As it was, there wasn't much of an incentive to make the shift.
I don't have 15M, but I know that once I had a decent amount of money in investments I suddenly became more risk averse. The prospect of not having to work forever and/or monitor spending too closely is very alluring. The instability in the world right now is actually a good reminder that in some ways money is a false sense of security though and you've got to seize the day still.
I've always thought this was an extreme response to managing the fear of death. By postponing retirement with that much in the bank you're saying: who knows, I could live so long I could run out of money - a flattering thought.
If I could talk to those people I would say: like it or not, you're going to die, sooner rather than later. If you're 65 you'll probably die within 30 years: use that as your reference point. It's death that makes your savings excessive, since you'll die before you can use it. You'd be better off accepting this truth and spending some of it now.
If you’re only a couple years off financial independence I’d consider quitting that job now and doing something that will make you happy!
You’ll reach your goal either way, but you probably won’t regret it even if it takes a year or two longer - if you’re working on something more fulfilling during that time!
At least reconsider what options you have right now. You probably have more than you realise.
I was 4 years away from the financial number I had in mind while working for a big company. 2023 was a pretty miserable year and I got laid off in 2024.
The severance was nice (4 months of pay) but if you’re a few years from financial independence then that shouldn’t be what’s stopping you.
I wouldn’t have left on my own. And it wasn’t more tolerable I would have preferred to stay for 4 more years. But given what I had control over - it didn’t turn out too bad and I am not looking to return to a big company for the next few years - I’d rather semi-retire for 8.
When GE did pandemic layoffs I was smiling when I got the HR meeting on my calendar. I was also smiling when I got on the call. People offered me other jobs in the company...no thanks.
It’s a rough heuristic, but it’s not true. I’ve worked at micro managed startups where the CEO wanted to review every change, and giant companies where it’s me shipping a massive feature.
I saw a quote from (IIRC) the guy who worked on early font rendering in MS who said, "I stay with a company until it gets big enough to have an HR dept."
Yeah I'm at a mega corp and I'm 50.. I have started really hating my job the last couple of years.
I wanted to earn more and moved into an architect role. This was fine for a while, I really enjoyed smoothing our internal IT experience for our users and bringing all my technical expertise to the table. But then we got an idiot director who wanted to separate architects from technical work.
But now I no longer spend my time with the nuts and bolts but I'm supposed to lay out the work for the operations team. While not having any access to anything. This is a major problem because I learn by doing and Microsoft's documentation is often an outright lie. So my knowledge is withering away, I'm not happy because I'm not doing anything technical and I spend half my day with pencil pushers talking about policies and governance which I don't give any f### about.
And our security team has gone full BOFH and making everything purposely difficult without considering the user experience. In fact sometimes I think they forcefully want to make sure things are difficult for everyone because people associate difficulty doing their work with security ("if it's so difficult to do my job it must be impossible for an attacker to get into it!"). But many of the measures they put in place make no sense. For example for some systems I have to authenticate to the same MFA method 3 times in a row.
And we're now forced to log our hours in Jira (our new director thinks that just logging hours in Jira somehow makes us 'agile'). So I'm being much more micro managed by people who don't have any clue what I do. And just bitching to me about time spent on tasks.
But I'm kinda stuck now :( I wish I could just leave but I need the money :'(
I could have written this verbatim comment, but you saved me the effort.
We have "2FA" which becomes 3+FA on the most random stuff at work. So whatever you have to do for the day will contain lots of sprinkled arbitrary 2FA games. Sometimes you can check a box "cache this for a while", other times it's grayed out. Meanwhile, the actual applications we keep running are full of unpatched security holes, for .. reasons. So it is all theater, but my boss and bosses' boss (6 layers last I counted) gets to claim in some review that we are "encryption at rest" etc., so "all is well".
My development machine is unable to build executable files, because crowdstrike flags them as suddenly appeared malware. I have got a crowdstrike security exception for a single folder, where I can place my executables..
We have trouble interacting with web services, because the company web filter classifies web api URLs as "newly appeared/unknown website".
Our stratosphere one-way-communication management layer are clueless about these issues, as someone have explained to them we "just need to do git push CI/CD to the cloud".. News flash, 80% of our software is NOT cloud or web based..
I "manage" some of these issues, by unplugging the ethernet cable and instead work off wireless HotSpot from my company-provided smartphone,
but I am well aware that if the clueless management ever figures any of that out, it is no doubt firing offence :-/. But then again, a new job would be a breath of fresh air, I am unfortunately just paid too well for a cozy, if mindless, job.
You can change your need for large amounts of money. There are many efforts to keep you too overdrawn so you stay stuck in place. It turns out you need to use your freedoms to have their advantages. Consider what you truly want.
I'm not overdrawn. I don't have any loans. But I would like to buy a flat and those are really expensive. You also have to do a 30% down payment here. I'm saving money but against the rising prices it feels like I'll never get there.
I believe you don't see yourself as overdrawn and it's nice not to have any debt. This might be hard to read but I write it in sincere support. You write that you are 50 and a technical/software architect at a mega-corp. This implies that you should have a salary exceeding the majority of the population around you. As such, it is possible for a large portion of the population to live on far less money, showing that it is possible. I might suggest that you consider yourself overdrawn in that your future self hasn't been receiving enough of your income. You say you save but at 50, not having 30% means you haven't saved long enough or you are looking at higher cost accommodation than you should. I would personally caution you against a long term loan at this stage since that can hold you in place (i.e. in your unloved role). A mortgage is something that held my feet to the fire and still does though far less than it did. There are tools like You Need A Budget (YNAB) and others but you need to start asking what costs you are choosing that keeps you from reducing your expenses enough to make choose trade offs that let you feel happier and more free. As an architect you should be very familiar with the "all decisions involve trade offs and costs" mindset, just apply it to your finances.
Ahh by 'overdrawn' I thought you were referring to the overdraft facility on bank accounts. Which is basically a short-term loan.
I understand you mean overdrawn in the more psychological sense. In that case yeah I probably am.
So I'm making more than people around me yes. But here in Spain that's still not a lot.
And as far as saving, I've been moving around a lot and that tends to make that harder. I'm also very bad at finances. And I'm a bad architect too. I'm more of an engineer really. The problem is that that used to be the same thing at this company for a while.
I meant it to include your sustainable psychological load but I mean it more holistically. We have resources that are financial, intellectual, temporal, emotional, relational, and more. We make balancing decisions based off our relative value structures over those values.
Based off a quick search, it seems you should be looking at 1.5-4 times average. That would leave you with a minimum of 33% available for saving but you could live in a particularly high cost of living area or be subject to other factors. I have struggled to understand why the salaries across Europe seem to be on such a different scale and would have tried to move there if they were more comparable.
Please understand, I don't mean to criticize. I have been in similar situations and still particularly struggle with the constant pressure to detach from the craft to become a people manager (eh, hem... influencer). I've found that the most valuable asset to changing my relationship with money is self compassion and self love. After all, good money (and life) choices are about making tomorrow always better than yesterday and helping others on to the same path. What better way can we care for ourselves?
Anyway, I wish you the best and hope these comments might help you find your path to joy.
This sounds far more real to me than the original post. All the technical issues in the world don't bother me unduly, it really is the managers who make you hate work.
Money wise these corps are a system of their own, they pay enough to make you not quit. The more they pay, generally the more they suck.
Just need to wait till my 401k doubles one more time, my kids finish college, and the house is paid off.... just 10 more years
same. I am meh about my job but i get to wfh and fund my son's fancy preschool and fund my skis trips ( I am flying out to winter park in 2 hrs)
I have enough savings to retire back in my home country but i would continue working till the tech gravy trail stalls. I also have ski instructor level 2 cert so i can do that to keep me occupied.
Do you feel that your technical skills, people skills, or luck have helped you to avoid any ageist treatment you've encountered over the years?
Especially in scenarios where "deciders" are younger than you.
I want to be you when I grow up :-) (And I’m not that far behind!)
I don’t ever want to stop learning and building interesting things with technology, and helping people use that technology for productive and useful outcomes.
The thing I definitely don’t want to be doing when I’m 50, or even next year, is work for a large morally corrupt organisation or a tyrannical boss who’s values are not in alignment with mine. And I guess that also means not working for a company where the work implicitly takes priority over living a balanced life (as described in the article with the 2am working to a deadline fuelled by Starbucks).
I don’t mind working until 2am on my own projects - where I have the autonomy to decide to do that - but not “under duress” for someone else, not like that anyway. And not in a team where the culture promotes that, such that I might get absorbed in that way of working and fool myself into thinking that I have chosen to live and work that way (a mistake I’ve made in the past).
I think self-employment therefore is the way for me. I’m there now, not making as much as my previous employment, but not compromising my values as much either - and right now at least the latter feels more important than the former. I just get to build cool things with people I choose to work with. I think that’s sustainable.
I'm not much younger than you and almost everything you've written about your life applies to me too. Except for this sentence:
> I don't even have to work if I don't want to anymore.
I'm in awe of IT professionals who have really made good money. I worked in academia for most of my life, and have always been of the opinion that we are paid really, really comfortably. But to able to pretty much retire in my mid-50s? That's science fiction.
Apologies this comment got much longer than I intended.
Early in my career (before transitioning to tech startups) I worked almost exclusively with self-declared "old farts" and I got to be very comfortable with them. I'm 40 now, but ~10 years ago after I moved to startups I worked with a guy much like you who was quite the outlier on age! I'll call him David, though that's not his real name as I don't want to violate his privacy by posting this on the internet.
David was an absolutely amazing software engineer. He was (surely still is) a quintessential hacker that I'm sure has to be on HN somewhere. Endlessly curious, a keen follower of tech developments but able and willing to think through the implications and make good technology choices. He tried out everything and had great thoughts on it, even if he didn't use it professionally. Once I went slightly into management I had a couple of customer needs come up that really didn't fit with our main codebase and weren't the direction our product team wanted to go, but were legitimate pain points of our customers. In cases like that I try to think outside the box, but it's usually a solo activity with lots of people quick to say "no you shouldn't even think that way." In some cases they are right, but I've had enough (short and long-term) success stories to know that in tech startups we are often way too quick to say "no" to customer requests. Anyway, I mentioned it off-hand to David during lunch one day and he said he had some ideas. Two days later we were chatting after standup and he said, "oh, check out this prototype I built." He had whipped up a quick PoC with Hasura (before anybody else had ever heard of Hasura) and a pretty impressive Vue frontend (also early days of Vue). I was the devops/infra guy so we teamed up to get this thing deployed, and it ended up being a major boon for the customers who needed it, and it also worked as a fantastic trial for some new technologies. We didn't end up using Hasura but many of the other things (including the deployment strategy to our k8s cluster) did end up getting reused.
Without the deep knowledge and experience I doubt such a thing would have been possible. There were too many potential pitfalls for less experienced people that would have radically impeded the progress, but with his vast repertoire were trivial (like, properly handling decimals for currency which frequently bites less experienced devs, domain knowledge, security & compliance knowledge, and 12-factor app rules. All stuff most people learn the hard way).
On top of all this, he was also a good dude. The type of guy you wanted to have a conversation with. Endlessly humble despite his accomplishments, a great mentor to the younger people but also a recognition that he didn't know everything. Sought to know what he knew and know what he didn't know.
Anyway, I consider David an absolute hero. Such a unique combination of personality traits that make for a powerhouse of a dev.
I'm 57, a data scientist and just can't keep my hands off concrete problems, which means I need to write code as well. Although I enjoy good modeling most, right now AI makes even mundane parts of the work fun again.
I'm the same age and I'm an engineering manager. I never thought I'd be working for a big company and most of my career I hadn't but now I am. At least where I am I think the engineers have more or less equal contribution to killing creativity and sucking life out of your soul. There's a symbiosis there. I have to deal with engineers that over-complicate everything, make things drag forever, apply philosophies they don't really understand, argue about the dumbest things in code reviews etc. As was mentioned in one of the other comments, many people that are in software development today aren't there's because they like it or have aptitude (those things often go together), they're there because it seemed like a good career. There are still some great people though.
At the end of the day culture is created by the people. Big companies are the way they are because of a combination of people and the business. Management maybe has a somewhat bigger influence but it's really not fair to put the blame squarely on management. I've also seen big companies that were much better (mostly where I am now) and much worse. I've also experienced a pretty bad startup. A middle manager can have it worse because [they are] stuck in between- I often take care of a lot of crap for my team.
For my part as a manager I try to make things better where I can. I never stopped doing technical work. I have deep technical roots and a lot of startup experiences to draw on.
I've always lived frugally and have done well financially. I'm still working for the challenges and the money and maybe it's just inertia ;)
I'm 63, retired in 2017 when I was 55. I now work on projects that interest me in languages that interest me. As a senior senior I'm excited by AI in my editor, it's automating the boring parts and I mainly just get to think of solutions.
I'm loving it, I get to do the fun parts of my old job without the bad or boring parts. The main thing I miss? Office building cafeteria food, oddly enough. I don't even know if that's still a thing post-pandemic.
As for mega corps, I've worked in a couple, and although I've never served I compare it to doing the work and making the sacrifices for your platoon, not the whole army. You get to know your immediate team and are in the trenches with them.
Same for me. I am a couple of years younger. I have worked for mega corps. And they were soul-sucking places. Smaller companies pay less. But the work is a lot more fun. And everything I do makes a difference. It is very rewarding. I can see myself like Warren Buffet. Working at 94. Why would I retire if I am enjoying my work?
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadMade me question my skills for a bit, until I realized that when outside my job, I enjoy reading/thinking about what I'd consider non trivial topics (parsing techniques, state machine minimizations, ...) and in these moments, it's nothing but joy, even when it's hard it's a positive feeling. And it yields long term enlightenment.
There's no such thing when you finally found why lib-a doesn't work well with lib-b anymore, or if lib-c will be compatible with the previous ones.
Now you mention 'solving interesting puzzles with peers' maybe my puzzles are not interesting and i can't rely on my peers to find interesting ideas :)
Also there were topics on how companies mis-apply agile development, which end up in this never-ending bug chase and cramming half features in an application. But based on conversations around me, it seems that a lot of people live in this average.
I took it to mean that's the floor. That's a pretty good floor - it's up to you to do the rest.
It might even be a negative given how miserable software developers tend to be compared to those with much less comfortable jobs.
I think a big part of the frustration or unhappiness of some subset of this generation of software engineer who cut their teeth in "The Golden Age" is lamenting or longing for "what could have been...". Maybe it's our slow realization of Sturgeon's Law and wish that we would have discovered this seemingly universal truth ages ago. Software, being mainly a construction of the mind, has the potential to be truly great (and some is), yet the state is basically "All Software is Shit". Squaring the expectations of my junior self with the realities of my senior self is... disappointing.
We will never be satisfied if we only lament.
I think I’d be fired if I made a habit of this
Great art is always made under great constraints. Software is no different.
It's always the weaker engineers that are constantly complaining about the things listed in this article. Complaining about all the "stupid code" and "stupid decisions" that were made before they arrived.
There is no realistic scenario where you can spend infinite time developing the perfect solution. And I say infinite because there is no amount of time that will allow you to achieve perfection. Perfection does not exist.
It's true in art, and it's true in engineering.
It's sad, the Mona Lisa never quite reached its peak because da Vinci didn't have a Jira board and a scrum master /s
Some of these constraints are not truly necessary and often stifling and once you've done work without them, you can't go back. Usually that's when you're older.
There are plenty of writers, some famous, most not, who keep rewriting and rewriting because it's not perfect and still get annoyed because it's not good enough when published. Software generally is a job to make money : who give a crap if it's perfect; not your boss or your company clients. But personally, is another thing. I definitely have software that is perfect in my eyes. I don't care if others don't think so but I worked decades on it and using and updating it makes me happier than other things. I am well over 50 and I do not see this change for me.
There are well known examples too in software, for instance Jonathan Blow, who estimates stuff and then overshoots by a long shot because he does not like the result enough and Arthur Whitney who keeps rewriting his 'perfect' (in his eyes) software (k) to just a little perfect-er.
My favorite, William Gibson, is like that.
I was 50 when I first realized that I am an artist, too. Shame it took me so long to figure that out.
'The Art of Software Design and Implementation' ~ that's my niche.
Im totally happy with crappy codebases I can fix, I just get fed up coz because management wants 34 new features delivered by next tuesday or a junior with an attitude doesnt want to pair or be trained to TDD.
In the end the companies that were like this "because there is no alternative" usually did suffer the consequences and the ones that werent reaped the benefits shrug
It doesn't matter if you consider it good or bad - morals don't come into commercial software development. The closest you ever get is platitudes when it doesn't conflict with profits.
I work in healthcare and patient care occurs in spite of commercial software development, not because of it.
This has very little to do with capitalist realities. As I mentioned before, the saner the company was about this stuff the less likely they were to eat losses.
On the most important level, software is either pefect or it fails.
ETA: I mean for functionality in the above. That's why I don't like web design: too many style choices. It's also why I stick to the commandline nowadays.
From my POV, hacker culture is going away. Because it does not Scale in the way capitalists want it to scale. And the same capitalists are foaming at the mouth at the notion that they might be able to replace expensive engineers and developers with AI.
Our niche has been captured by global stakes, and those stakeholders are all too happy to believe that they can scale innovation without all of the previous "cultural baggage" that, IMO, is the only reason we have the systems that we have today.
Or maybe I'm just getting old too. Hard to say.
I certainly feel some nostalgia for the old days, but while I'm not thrilled by a lot of directions the internet has taken, I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a hacker in terms of tools available and what can be achieved by an individual or small group. Getting attention for your work is another matter, but distribution has always been hard, the internet making it easier to deliver bites just led to that much fiercer competition. The fact that there was a short-lived window where technical barriers favored hackers was just a coincidence of history, not a stable state that it makes sense to try to replicate.
>Also I think the quality of developers decreased, not sure if agile caused this or it's some sort of work around for it.
I think it's mostly a function of developer quantity and the pervasive "anyone can do this" attitude. (My assessment: most people probably could, but fundamentally aren't comfortable using their brains the right way.)
Right conclusion, wrong origin. Let me explain.
Business management theory has been rooted in the lessons learned from Ford manufacturing for over a century. This has worked well for industries which manufacture goods using physical resources, of which most qualify.
However, software engineering is not bound by those forces. Adding more developers to an effort does not shorten delivery nor increase productivity (quite the contrary, actually, and well documented in "The Mythical Man Month"[0]). But adding "line workers" to a factory, assuming sufficient raw materials are available, will shorten its delivery cycle.
Because assembly line workers have a quantifiable job, easily measured based on physical factors, and fairly easily scalable (assuming sufficient factory capacity).
> Also I think the quality of developers decreased, not sure if agile caused this or it's some sort of work around for it.
IMHO, there is no substitute for understanding the problem needing to be solved. No SDLC paradigm can make a developer which eschews this successful.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
I don't agree that great art (or software) is always made under great constraints. If you have an intrinsic drive, having enough time can yield a compound return. For example, in research, the "publish or perish" mentality often forces people to focus on shorter-term problems rather than pursuing more ambitious, long-term breakthroughs.
Why does something new have to be invented or api need to be deprecated? Do we take into consideration all the things that will break? The docs, the online examples, do we give sufficient context as to why something is a solution or works-for-me and move on? Tech like docker and Java were supposed to simplify but did they actually fulfill their mission? I think I will write a book on this one day.
I moved to management but my heart is still in the code. And it weeps.
(Obviously, the job evolves a lot over time and will keep doing that, but it isn't always starting absolutely from scratch every time either.)
If you're a person who gave up adapting and learning - "it's a young man's game" - then perhaps the OP has a point for his case, I've seen it often enough.
The 90s had COBOL programmers were out of work, the 2000s had VB6 programmers out of work, and my old bread and butter Java, is being abandoned in AI in favour of Python and TS.
But I love the fact AI is coming for my job, in fact I'm retraining for it, I learnt TS about 10 years ago, I can write C, and my Python 3 is passable.
It keeps me on my toes always, and imho as long as anybody, young or old trains on the frontier/edge you'll never be out of work. The minute you give up that edge... well.
The reason I find it more enjoyable than others might, is because I have considerable autonomy on how I will build my software, on what timelines, and who I'll sell it to.
The real problem with software development is not the complexity of our tech stack. It's the lack of agency that most programmers are forced to live with.
So I transitioned to a client-facing role which was more interesting in a way, but with too much stress and too much management to do.
Now I try to find my niche in between, staying client facing but still handling the technical tasks. I find it's a really interesting position, it's very efficient since it reduce the amount of necessary communication, and it's very satisfying.
It does not work for big projects though.
Most of the things described there the inevitable results of using tools. The times it goes well and the tools work perfectly are great, but less interesting and memorable than the times you find bugs in them.
But if they're keeping you in the office until 2am then the problem isn't computers, the problem is terrible management.
My side projects? Yeah I guess so. Not as sure as I was 5 years ago, but I need to do something when I'm older, no?
This past weekend I’ve been coding a couple of side projects that has been using OpenAI to classify a bunch of things and I’m still having a ton of fun.
That is unique isn't it? I'm kind of curious.
I'm programmer in 50's and want to switch industries to try something different. Any advice on the journey.
So maybe the world isn't as civilized as you'd hope too :) I'm curious about the legal implications too.
I studied my ass off, I did I think 400 LC questions and did many other interviews before this interview so I was at the top of my game. Systems design comes naturally to me, but also required practice. I arranged things so that I had all my interviews over the course of about 6-8 weeks and ordered them so that the companies I was least interested were at the beginning and the ones I cared about most were at the end. I also explicitly told them that I wanted to be interviewed at senior software engineer level, not staff or higher based on my years of experience.
This worked in 2021-2022 but I don't think it works these days because this is probably the second worst job market I've seen since the dotcom bust.
Interestingly, first attempt at one of them, they said I was ok for IC4, but wouldn't hire me at that level with my seniority. I'm also glad I eventually started at senior level rather than staff (and I'm happy to stay at that level too).
I feel incredibly lucky that I get paid quite well to do something that is reasonably fun. Which gets me through the days that really suck, like meetings.
I would love to find a way to retire and keep programming for something more useful. Do any charities need programming work? I ponder teaching sometimes, but I am not great with kids.
I’m 49 and just sold the first company I founded. I’m already building my next idea (although this time without financial constraint) and continue to work on my open-source projects.
I started coding as a hobby when I was 10 years old. I still love being a maker and the process of making. Now that I’m financially free and working on my own ideas, for my own reasons, it feels just like it did when I was 10 years old.
I’ll stop when I’m dead.
As someone who is not a status-seeking individual, I don't need to "see and be seen", and it pays well.
I feel fortunate. I get to solve puzzles with most of my time.
I am not doing it at my current job and nobody's complaining.
I have been fortunate and successful and managed my finances. I don't even have to work if I don't want to anymore. I do it to keep my brain challenged.
But if I was stuck in a boring mundane programming job for a mega corp then I would retire in a second. I've never stayed at a company once it's grown too big. Middle management kills creativity and sucks the life out of your soul.
This is always the plan. Then a few years go by, life happens and you say eh, a few more years of saving would really help me feel secure.
On bogleheads I’ve seen 65 year olds with 15 mil saying they aren’t sure they can retire yet.
On the other hand I've also seen folks retire early and then return to big tech because they didn't have anything to retire to, i.e. you need to make sure you also have a life.
I used to think the OMY types were foolish or Chicken Little’s but now I kind of understand.
Right before my grandfather retired at 55 he studied ceramics and spent the rest of his long life doing pottery. Endless satisfying learning and experimenting with little capital outlay.
SO ideally I would try to work 10-12 years more and then retire, but not retire in the frugal FIRE way. I like to travel. I like to eat at good restaurant, or buy good groceries and cook them at home. I started playing drums and I will probably buy a better set in the future etc. I want to help my daughters going to university (we live in Europe) or finding their lives and be able to support them economically if needed.
So, as I write this, retiring in 12 years is probably a big utopia but... who knows?
What you described seems the right balance, even if they overworked themselves too much for a few years. If they were able to pull the plug and enjoy life afterwards with family, hobbies, travels and pet projects, well, it was worth it IMO.
There are definitely individuals for whom work/salary is a means to acquiring a big enough pile to buy a nice house, travel, educate their kids, etc. I also worked with someone, who was by no means a workaholic, but didn't really like to travel, had a modest set of hobbies, and got bored around the house. So he mostly didn't take vacation and was very content to keep working.
Life is about tradeoffs. So short of getting rich, you are signing up for age 65 or 70. Why do you think will change?
The economists are right, luxuries got cheap and necessities got expensive. Maybe I should buy a PlayStation.
After the mortgage, the house isn't necessarily cheap though a newish condo may not be as bad depending upon where you live.
But I figure my house is easily $15K or so per year for necessary expenses unless you're incurring major maintenance debt. And, for example, I just had a random spontaneous kitchen fire in the middle of the night and, even with good insurance and quick fire response, I'm sure I'll be spending a bunch of money out of pocket related to that.
If I could talk to those people I would say: like it or not, you're going to die, sooner rather than later. If you're 65 you'll probably die within 30 years: use that as your reference point. It's death that makes your savings excessive, since you'll die before you can use it. You'd be better off accepting this truth and spending some of it now.
You’ll reach your goal either way, but you probably won’t regret it even if it takes a year or two longer - if you’re working on something more fulfilling during that time!
At least reconsider what options you have right now. You probably have more than you realise.
I was 4 years away from the financial number I had in mind while working for a big company. 2023 was a pretty miserable year and I got laid off in 2024.
The severance was nice (4 months of pay) but if you’re a few years from financial independence then that shouldn’t be what’s stopping you.
I wouldn’t have left on my own. And it wasn’t more tolerable I would have preferred to stay for 4 more years. But given what I had control over - it didn’t turn out too bad and I am not looking to return to a big company for the next few years - I’d rather semi-retire for 8.
Sounds like perfection, to me.
I wanted to earn more and moved into an architect role. This was fine for a while, I really enjoyed smoothing our internal IT experience for our users and bringing all my technical expertise to the table. But then we got an idiot director who wanted to separate architects from technical work.
But now I no longer spend my time with the nuts and bolts but I'm supposed to lay out the work for the operations team. While not having any access to anything. This is a major problem because I learn by doing and Microsoft's documentation is often an outright lie. So my knowledge is withering away, I'm not happy because I'm not doing anything technical and I spend half my day with pencil pushers talking about policies and governance which I don't give any f### about.
And our security team has gone full BOFH and making everything purposely difficult without considering the user experience. In fact sometimes I think they forcefully want to make sure things are difficult for everyone because people associate difficulty doing their work with security ("if it's so difficult to do my job it must be impossible for an attacker to get into it!"). But many of the measures they put in place make no sense. For example for some systems I have to authenticate to the same MFA method 3 times in a row.
And we're now forced to log our hours in Jira (our new director thinks that just logging hours in Jira somehow makes us 'agile'). So I'm being much more micro managed by people who don't have any clue what I do. And just bitching to me about time spent on tasks.
But I'm kinda stuck now :( I wish I could just leave but I need the money :'(
I understand you mean overdrawn in the more psychological sense. In that case yeah I probably am.
So I'm making more than people around me yes. But here in Spain that's still not a lot.
And as far as saving, I've been moving around a lot and that tends to make that harder. I'm also very bad at finances. And I'm a bad architect too. I'm more of an engineer really. The problem is that that used to be the same thing at this company for a while.
Based off a quick search, it seems you should be looking at 1.5-4 times average. That would leave you with a minimum of 33% available for saving but you could live in a particularly high cost of living area or be subject to other factors. I have struggled to understand why the salaries across Europe seem to be on such a different scale and would have tried to move there if they were more comparable.
Please understand, I don't mean to criticize. I have been in similar situations and still particularly struggle with the constant pressure to detach from the craft to become a people manager (eh, hem... influencer). I've found that the most valuable asset to changing my relationship with money is self compassion and self love. After all, good money (and life) choices are about making tomorrow always better than yesterday and helping others on to the same path. What better way can we care for ourselves?
Anyway, I wish you the best and hope these comments might help you find your path to joy.
Money wise these corps are a system of their own, they pay enough to make you not quit. The more they pay, generally the more they suck.
Just need to wait till my 401k doubles one more time, my kids finish college, and the house is paid off.... just 10 more years
I have enough savings to retire back in my home country but i would continue working till the tech gravy trail stalls. I also have ski instructor level 2 cert so i can do that to keep me occupied.
I don’t ever want to stop learning and building interesting things with technology, and helping people use that technology for productive and useful outcomes.
The thing I definitely don’t want to be doing when I’m 50, or even next year, is work for a large morally corrupt organisation or a tyrannical boss who’s values are not in alignment with mine. And I guess that also means not working for a company where the work implicitly takes priority over living a balanced life (as described in the article with the 2am working to a deadline fuelled by Starbucks).
I don’t mind working until 2am on my own projects - where I have the autonomy to decide to do that - but not “under duress” for someone else, not like that anyway. And not in a team where the culture promotes that, such that I might get absorbed in that way of working and fool myself into thinking that I have chosen to live and work that way (a mistake I’ve made in the past).
I think self-employment therefore is the way for me. I’m there now, not making as much as my previous employment, but not compromising my values as much either - and right now at least the latter feels more important than the former. I just get to build cool things with people I choose to work with. I think that’s sustainable.
> I don't even have to work if I don't want to anymore.
I'm in awe of IT professionals who have really made good money. I worked in academia for most of my life, and have always been of the opinion that we are paid really, really comfortably. But to able to pretty much retire in my mid-50s? That's science fiction.
Early in my career (before transitioning to tech startups) I worked almost exclusively with self-declared "old farts" and I got to be very comfortable with them. I'm 40 now, but ~10 years ago after I moved to startups I worked with a guy much like you who was quite the outlier on age! I'll call him David, though that's not his real name as I don't want to violate his privacy by posting this on the internet.
David was an absolutely amazing software engineer. He was (surely still is) a quintessential hacker that I'm sure has to be on HN somewhere. Endlessly curious, a keen follower of tech developments but able and willing to think through the implications and make good technology choices. He tried out everything and had great thoughts on it, even if he didn't use it professionally. Once I went slightly into management I had a couple of customer needs come up that really didn't fit with our main codebase and weren't the direction our product team wanted to go, but were legitimate pain points of our customers. In cases like that I try to think outside the box, but it's usually a solo activity with lots of people quick to say "no you shouldn't even think that way." In some cases they are right, but I've had enough (short and long-term) success stories to know that in tech startups we are often way too quick to say "no" to customer requests. Anyway, I mentioned it off-hand to David during lunch one day and he said he had some ideas. Two days later we were chatting after standup and he said, "oh, check out this prototype I built." He had whipped up a quick PoC with Hasura (before anybody else had ever heard of Hasura) and a pretty impressive Vue frontend (also early days of Vue). I was the devops/infra guy so we teamed up to get this thing deployed, and it ended up being a major boon for the customers who needed it, and it also worked as a fantastic trial for some new technologies. We didn't end up using Hasura but many of the other things (including the deployment strategy to our k8s cluster) did end up getting reused.
Without the deep knowledge and experience I doubt such a thing would have been possible. There were too many potential pitfalls for less experienced people that would have radically impeded the progress, but with his vast repertoire were trivial (like, properly handling decimals for currency which frequently bites less experienced devs, domain knowledge, security & compliance knowledge, and 12-factor app rules. All stuff most people learn the hard way).
On top of all this, he was also a good dude. The type of guy you wanted to have a conversation with. Endlessly humble despite his accomplishments, a great mentor to the younger people but also a recognition that he didn't know everything. Sought to know what he knew and know what he didn't know.
Anyway, I consider David an absolute hero. Such a unique combination of personality traits that make for a powerhouse of a dev.
At the end of the day culture is created by the people. Big companies are the way they are because of a combination of people and the business. Management maybe has a somewhat bigger influence but it's really not fair to put the blame squarely on management. I've also seen big companies that were much better (mostly where I am now) and much worse. I've also experienced a pretty bad startup. A middle manager can have it worse because [they are] stuck in between- I often take care of a lot of crap for my team.
For my part as a manager I try to make things better where I can. I never stopped doing technical work. I have deep technical roots and a lot of startup experiences to draw on.
I've always lived frugally and have done well financially. I'm still working for the challenges and the money and maybe it's just inertia ;)
I'm loving it, I get to do the fun parts of my old job without the bad or boring parts. The main thing I miss? Office building cafeteria food, oddly enough. I don't even know if that's still a thing post-pandemic.
As for mega corps, I've worked in a couple, and although I've never served I compare it to doing the work and making the sacrifices for your platoon, not the whole army. You get to know your immediate team and are in the trenches with them.