13 ms·

What’s the end goal for you programmers?

• ed-209 4y ago
  Live a balanced and meaningful life now, via programming, rather than deferring satisfaction/contentment for some imagined future. If I retire some day, it's a bonus but I'm not waiting to be nearly dead to begin living in earnest. In other words, retirement is not a significant milestone when life is the journey rather that a destination.
• waffles2021 4y ago
  I don't think there is an end goal. Programmers do seem to have an abundance of Ego, so maybe best to keep that under control? Personally, seniority comes with opportunity. If you keep stretching and learning, you can work in pretty much any industry you want.
• ramesh31 4y ago
  I ask myself this question every day. I'm pretty sure the answer is not to be slinging Javascript when I'm 40. Maybe I'll just buy a goat farm.
• xavor 4y ago
  Retiring before dying.
• sebastianconcpt 4y ago
  It took me way too much time to realize that, whatever is to be done, career should be absolutely sacred. Please note that I'm choosing the word sacred as a language figure but without any exaggeration.
  • theandrewbailey 4y ago
    Sacred means 'set apart and worshiped like a god.' Treating your career like that is setting yourself up for massive disappointment. You should be working to live, not living to work.
    • sebastianconcpt 4y ago
      Work is not career. Work is what happens at a given day of your career. Also, if you enjoy your work enough, your description becomes unfair. You do not feel it like sacrificing life in order to pospone living. Also, that suggest that there is some hedonistic way to live there that is also easily disappointing. Humans needs challenges and responsibility to channel their energy. Who doesn't have it, manages to find it in the form of problems (or even psychopatologies).
  • DanUKs 4y ago
    How? It’ll be very difficult to make working with algorithms for fintech company, sacred.
    • sebastianconcpt 4y ago
      Dominating the know how of some algorithm gives you a power that can be quite satisfying. Still, that is not career. The tasks at your work are things that happen at a given day of your career. Career is a trajectory. A mission. Way way more than your current employment.
• inphovore 4y ago
  Conduction of will through technology for the manifest actualization of what-so-ever pleases.
• gerad 4y ago
  How about “make the world a better place?”
  • DanUKs 4y ago
    100%. Very Elon Musk BUT even Elon himself had looked after his own and made his own millions before trying to tackle that.
    • kojeovo 4y ago
      Why does making the world a better place make you think of Elon? I think of something much smaller scale. Helping my community, elders, people around me. Something at a much smaller scale where I get 1-1 human interaction out of it. My passion is in fitness. I want to be active in my 60-80s (weight lifting / marathon running shape). I ultimately want to help others do the same and lead a better quality of life through their old age.
  • daltont 4y ago
    "Make the world a better place" is an primary element of Ikigai: https://www.mindtools.com/blog/whats-your-ikigai/ https://www.mindtools.com/blog/whats-your-ikigai/ but, not the only one.
• jstx1 4y ago
  No end goal - just want to work on things I enjoy working on and make as much money as possible while doing it. It's kind of a strange question - which careers have end goals anyway? > We make so much money very early in our careers I'm very far from making a lot of money so it's not a problem at all.
  • DanUKs 4y ago
    So what’s the point? You want to work forever? There’s no goal to retire early and just enjoy life or start your own company? > I’m very far from making a lot of money The software engineering career is a ridiculously “fast paced”. career. 5 years experience in programming is the equivalent to 20+ years in another industry. There’s very few industries where you can make a 200k+ salary in your 20s.
    • jjoske 4y ago
      You seem to have an answer in mind, perhaps instead of attacking everyone who has different goals to you, you explain what you what your end goal is.
    • oxff 4y ago
      Regular people will not retire anymore is my guess.
      • DanUKs 4y ago
        The thought of writing JavaScript in my 60s is a painful thought.
• rc_mob 4y ago
  Retire early is always the goal
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• oxff 4y ago
  People generally work now so that they don't have to work later.
• toolz 4y ago
  step 1. retire early (which to me just means becoming financially independent) step 2. get physically active, probably lots of backpacking and camping to serve two purposes: 1. better my body/mental/emotional health and 2. slow down and get bored enough to rejuvenate creative inspiration step 3. hopefully discover a way to help people that I'm passionate about and utilize all my free time and resources pursuing that passion
  • kojeovo 4y ago
    You're gonna work on 2 only after 1?
    • toolz 4y ago
      for some parts of it, yes. I keep my body and emotional health in check and even do well for the most part, but I don't worry about my mental health all that much - I optimize for output with only modest regard for my mental health right now.
      • davidkuennen 4y ago
        Becoming physically active and pursuing a healthy lifestyle actually increased my output.
        • powerhour 4y ago
          Given enough contiguous blocks of time I could see that. Unfortunately my only option is to save and retire ASAP.
          • kojeovo 4y ago
            What do you mean - you don't have 30 mins per day to go walk / jog? Does it not worry you that you may never able to actually retire and have bad physical health on top?
• __s 4y ago
  This might surprise you, but some us enjoy programming I was programming for free for years. Then I was programming for practically minimum wage for a few years. Now I'm programming for a nice salary. I get paid to wake up & do what I want
  • DanUKs 4y ago
    That’s great at your parents house but when you have kids to feed and a mortgage to pay, doing it for free is off the cards, no matter how much you love it.
    • unnouinceput 4y ago
      I would never stop programming. It is a joy for me to do little utilities that makes my life easier. Even with billions of dollars in bank account I would still hack away at an ESP32 to stick it in a flying helicopter toy for example. And lucky for me this field is highly dynamic, I would never get bored learning new technologies. For me programming is like a kid with his shiny toys, every day another one. And I am pretty sure plenty of programmers feel the same way.
      • ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
        I can relate.
      • Brian_K_White 4y ago
        Makery stuff is still fun, but the work stuff used to be fun and now is not. I did a lot of sysadmin so it was a lot of individual unix servers and different kinds of integration problem solving getting printers or networks to work or rigging up weird edi's over modems or ftp etc, getting some bespoke backend software to talk to some weird machine where nether the OS, nor app, nor apps language, nor wierd machine vendors provided that last bit of help needed to connect them together, mini-proto-HA by just making a better more redundant ordinary server,.. basically "IT rigging" That was for me all just great fun. But now 99% of that is just cloud services and they are all soul sucking to me, probably more because of the corporate environment they get used within more than the tech itself, where you and everyone else are hardly treated any different than the machine. Everything is so managed that I don't feel like the modern tools are expressive and empowering like the old tools. Everything is services with predefined limits and potentials based middle of the bell curve assumptions about what people need vs languages and hardware where you rigged up your own interesting solutions to each new problem. So I too now play with arduino/esp32 toys and open source projects for fun, and am pretty glad I already made enough money that it doesn't matter that no one would pay me for this.
• phantomathkg 4y ago
  > We make so much money very early in our careers that it’s very easy to lose track of what the end goal is. That's highly depending on your industry and country(s) you are in. In Singapore you can live a relatively OK living, but it is far from rich. In India unless you are working for FAANG your bring home will be good, but far from "so much". --- To answer the question in general. I think programming definitely give you good enough money, and for most of the applications we build we definitely are going to make the world slightly better daily.
  • ushakov 4y ago
    > for most of the applications we build we definitely are going to make the world slightly better no you won’t what you will be doing instead is help make some stakeholders richer (and they don’t give a F about making the world better) if you really want to try make the world better, then start volunteering and start helping those in need
    • phantomathkg 4y ago
      > if you really want to try make the world better, then start volunteering and start helping those in need Yes and no. Some of the issues can be solved by volunteering, but some of the technical progress have to done by software.
      • ushakov 4y ago
        of course, but the type of software that can make the world better and solve some of the world's problems (like hunger and climate change) is not the software the majority of the people on HN are working on, me including maybe we should stop lying to ourselves and admit that what we're doing is not something special, will most definitely not make the world better and in many cases makes things even worse (social media and advertising industry) don't believe companies when they tell you you're working on a very important problem that will change the world this is all made to distract you from the fact you're being exploited for profit
• rr888 4y ago
  Developers in their 20s are definitely overpaid. Whether this will continue will be interesting to see. Currently I see so many people trained in other fields becoming developers I'm almost worried about the future of the economy. Social Media, online retail, advertising - just how many people really can work in these fields? So yeah I expect wages to crash in the next 10-20 years. I think most high earning young people now will likely find middle age much more expensive than they thought, esp if tech bubble never reflates, Bay Area housing falls in value and wages get cut. The end goal for me is to find a nice niche and dont get greedy.
  • lezojeda 4y ago
    >Developers in their 20s are definitely overpaid Why?
    • spacemanmatt 4y ago
      The 5 or 10 years experience they might have is pretty thin unless they have had extremely good mentoring. It takes more than a senior project and a few years as a junior dev to be worth much. I consider junior devs incubation projects. Some of them turn out nicely.
      • lezojeda 4y ago
        But many people think they're worth that. I don't think there is an intrinsic "worth" for each developer, demand is high, supply is low, that's why salaries are high.
        • spacemanmatt 4y ago
          Well, I believe that as humans they are worth enough to eat, live, and enjoy life, at the very least, but from a surviving-in-capitalism perspective they can't pull their weight for a while in most cases. I'm not arguing against hiring and paying juniors a living wage, just noting that it takes a while and some diverse experience to get most of them over the hump, so to speak.
• rootsudo 4y ago
  This is a great question - it depends, for me it is FIRE. But the path to FIRE is hard, can you put away a decade of your life to "work" to retire? When should you start? Are you too late? I also enjoy this line of work because it is more liberating, if in a right environment. It's fun to learn, it's amazing to be paid to learn and even better. I'm not aware of any other career progression which leads to as much freedom and independence that IT/Tech/Software has done for all of us.
  • kojeovo 4y ago
    Most people started working on FIRE seemingly during a bull run. Wonder how it's going now..
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I just like making useful stuff that helps people, and is a joy to use. For me, it's about the journey, more than the destination, but I still like completing all my projects. Part of the joy, is watching my work being used (and, sometimes, abused) by others.
  • DanUKs 4y ago
    I love the idea of this but you read so many stories about the owners of open sourced projects not making a penny, whilst millions use their work and benefit financially. It’s difficult to do this when there’s belly’s to fill.
    • toolz 4y ago
      I doubt any maintainer of a sufficiently popular open source project isn't making a lot of money in tech. Open source can open a lot of doors for employment opportunities and greatly increases your marketability to demand higher wages. Of course, don't do open source if you don't enjoy it - because I doubt the time spent is optimal for getting the most money, but if you do enjoy it then it can very much help increase your income indirectly.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      I don't really care. The stuff I write actually has a fairly significant impact on people's lives. It is not hyperbole to say that some of the software I've written has saved many lives. Others tend to use a lot more hype to describe its impact than I would.
• gonzo41 4y ago
  I want to create so much tech debt that it becomes alive and starts creating it's own tech debt. In the meantime, its fun making stuff and this is a growth industry where interesting things happen.
• immigrantheart 4y ago
  Make a lot of money, then maybe create a business. If everything goes well I will be rich, and maybe one day go back to my home country to do politics, do business as well there, building the country. The end goal, hmm, if possible, maybe I want to be the president.
• pg5 4y ago
  I want to be able to wake up every day and spend most of it making music and some of it working on personal software projects. How to get there I do not know.
• brightball 4y ago
  I like learning stuff and solving problems. And getting paid for it. I honestly don’t know why I’d ever stop. I just try working with people I like or people who have good intentions. Then again, I also really enjoy writing and teaching.
• podviaznikov 4y ago
  my end goal related to programming is to never stop loving it(over long period of time). It’s a thing that I like to do or come back to. If somehow I jeopardize that, my life will have a hole in it because I would lose one of the things I really like.
• muzani 4y ago
  I just want to build software once I retire. Ideally shiny things with little commercial potential or incredibly high risk. There's stuff I don't like about the job - estimates, daily stand up, other meetings, investor-oriented development. Nearly all of that is gone with retirement. The work isn't so much for money, but getting opportunities to practice building things better as an individual. I don't need to retire early; the work gives me practice and lets me meet plenty of mentors from different fields.
  • spacemanmatt 4y ago
    Same. At some point I'd love to figure out ways to get entertainment/game software built without sacrificing a team.
• spacemanmatt 4y ago
  I like things that work, and I like making things that work. Coding has been a thing I do when I need to, but using the skill to investigate existing code has been the dominant practice. Every time I reach a goal I move the cheese. I think I'm still getting better. But I'm also realizing the potential to pursue previously unknown goals. It is part of an ongoing discovery process that is not limited to engineering. If I had a lot more money, I would probably pursue my goals differently but I don't think I would stop pursuing them.
• kojeovo 4y ago
  My dream is to have something like a performance institute, both mental and physical. I come from a war torn country and MDMA / Psychedelic (etc) research is proving to be very powerful for healing trauma and providing mental health benefits in general. I would love to help people with that. I'm also very active, I was a former bodybuilder then powerlifter who has now gotten into running ultra marathons. I have a few friends who are also into this and we chat about how we can get better all the time. We have home gyms but it would be nice to have a single facility. I also think it's super important to be active as you age, so I would love to help people on their old age active journeys. I think the niche that may get a foot in the door on this dream is helping my parents, expanding to their friends / other older people, and then getting to a point where I can include more serious athletes as well.
• anon261114 4y ago
• sshine 4y ago
  Build it and they will come.
• Apreche 4y ago
  The goal of capitalism is to escape capitalism. I supposed this qualifies as retire early. The only reason I do any job is because the structure of our society demands I earn money to survive. I must spend my time doing what someone else wants me to do if I want food, shelter, water, comfort, etc. My only goal is to wake up every morning and be able to spend all of my time as I choose to spend it. I will still occasionally create software, as I enjoy doing so. But mostly I will do other things.
  • ushakov 4y ago
    100% this your goal as a employee is to make the stakeholders rich if you disagree, start your own business and own your IP if you cannot, stay a peasant for ever
• rvieira 4y ago
  Before becoming a professional programmer, I programmed. I now program for a living. My hobbies also include learning new languages/frameworks/libraries, playing with frontend for my personal site (I'm not a frontend dev in $DAY_JOB) and reading on the history of computing (although I have non-programing hobbies). When I'm retired I'll probably keep on doing it. I don't know if there's an end goal. I guess this is not just for programmers. I imagine many chefs are the same way. Cook for a living, cook at home, read books about exotic foods, make a nice meal. That's pretty much it. I've read some time ago a discussion on how people that code most of their waking hours are an "unfair" competition to programmers that just want to do it 9 to 5. Believe me, I'm no competition. I'll be probably reading on how to make nice SVG flowers in Forth at 1am.
  • Brian_K_White 4y ago
    To me that seemingly irrelevant reading/doing is all still enhances the daytime facility. And I don't think it's unfair any more than for automechanics or woodworkers or anything else. If you're only in IT because it's seen as paying well, I can't express how little sympathy I have for that complaint. Really just think about that, it's unfair that I spent a million hours figuring out how to get tech to do things instead of going to parties I wasn't invited to by those same people, and they didn't, and now I know how to do things and get paid for it, and that's unfair? Unfair would be if you want to talk about the uneven distribution of the luxury and opportunity to spend a million hours playing with IT stuff. Not everyone has or had the access to the toys and the time to play with them, but you can say that about everything else also, like every musician or artist. Is it unfair that their favorite guitarist really loved playing and practing 24/7 all their life? It's so unfair they can't just punch in somewhere at 9 and punch out at 5 and not e en like guitar or be very good at it, and still be a rock star?
• Brian_K_White 4y ago
  Once you are doing a job that you see as being in any way productive and adding to the world (vs parasitical) and of course can live on it, then that is already the end goal. The only other goal is just family and get as many years of that state of being as possible.
• tmountain 4y ago
  Pretty simple. Live a life that I enjoy. So many people have a binary view of work; meaning, "I am working" or "I am not working". For me, it's about working the right amount, having the quality of life I desire, living where I want, and having the flexibility to do the things that I want. I say this as someone that has "made money"; meaning, a substantial amount to retire if I want to, I enjoy the psychological safety that continuing to earn income provides. That said, I'm doing that on my own terms, and I've fully steered away from an employee/boss relationship to business partnerships.
• nurettin 4y ago
  I thought that the entire goal was to retire early and do whatever you want after. Did that somehow change over the past 30 or so years?
• ghoward 4y ago
  I am not working in industry; I'm such a loner programmer that I struggle in industry. But since my wife likes her work, I have space to write the software I want to write. My first goal is to make that software good enough and useful enough to create an engineering-only company like Hwaci, the company that does SQLite and Fossil. If I succeed at that, I'll see about trying to pull in enough money to retire early and do charity work through my church. But I have another goal for while I'm still in industry. I want to change our industry such that it is a professional industry, with a code of ethics, to where we create software that serves users, not our employers or government. This means fighting against slurping up user data, serving ads, and other ways that software disobeys users in favor of obeying its creators. I even created a Twitter account to show some of those things. [1] Yes, that means an uphill battle against basically all of Big Tech, and I don't expect to win. But if I make people think about it, I'll take that as a win. But regardless, I feel strongly about it because users depend on us to make software that will serve them. If we don't, no one will. Uncle Bob Martin talked about this. [2] (That link starts at a good point, but the whole talk is worth watching.) So that's my goal: make good software and change the industry for the better. Lofty, yes, but I'll be satisfied by completing one of those goals. [1]: https://twitter.com/software_crimes https://twitter.com/software_crimes [2]: https://youtu.be/ecIWPzGEbFc?t=3557 https://youtu.be/ecIWPzGEbFc?t=3557
• nextweek2 4y ago
  I'm GenX and have an outlook different from my younger peers. I work hard 60-80 hours a week to earn as much as I can. Programming is something I do well but I'm happiest outside in the woods or on water. The difference is I have never taken more than a two week holiday or a break from work. Whereas younger generations seem to drop out of the workforce. This is something I can't fathom as I track my pension and investments on a weekly basis, I'm literally working to retire in relative luxury. People tell me I may not make it and I should live more for the now, but I fear being old and still having to sit at a desk more. By 60 I want to have f#ck you money.