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How many of you Lainons work in, or have a job related to programming? I've recently taken up an interest in programming and I see a lot of different opinions. I'm wondering if I should pursue programming as a hobby or actually look into a career. What's it like? Does it pay well? Is it interesting? What kind of people do you work with or skills do you need?

Web Dev Apprentice (or intern?) here, been working at a small company for 1 year now. Obviously I barely have any experience but there's still some things I've learned so far. What I realized is that the smaller the project the less planning is required, so me being pretty in-experienced I get the smaller projects which are more or less 8 hour a day grunt-work. Like migrating data over to a CMS, programming modules to read stuff from databases, maybe even fetch stuff from APIs or even do a bit of research. I still enjoy it alot, though. Larger projects usually are really stressful due to all the planning that goes into them along with the back and forth messaging with the customer that goes on. These are just my experiences by the way, it's probably totally different from company to company. As for people: Finding the right company and colleagues can be a challenge. A friend of mine started at a company where they programmed Unity Assets (??). He barely got paid anything and his boss used to message him with work related stuff at 2AM. That company went bankrupt shorty after. Anyways, I've had the luck to find some skilled and patient people I could learn alot from so far. I personally don't see the point behind having programming only as a hobby. It's so time consuming that you might aswell just make it your job. If you're someone who spends all day on programming side-projects, just go for it.

>>2276 >Does it pay well? I'm in my early 20s and I make 3x the minimum wage. I was no where near top of my class at college either. >Is it interesting? I think that's a polarizing issue. Either you are the type of person who enjoys solving problems or you're not. For me, when I did my first programming course in high school I thought fuarrrk YES I WANT TO DO THIS AS A CAREER. If you don't find programming interesting now I don't think you ever will. That doesn't mean you can't be a good software engineer though. Most people in this world don't particularly like their job, which has its advantages. >What kind of people do you work with(?) White and Indian males. Mostly introverted nerds but you do get the occasional extrovert football fan. You will typically have lots in common with the people you work with and it will be very easy to talk to them. I work in firmware so I never need to talk to non-engineers. If I am doing my job right, the customer doesn't even know that I exist. >(What kind of) skills do you need? General skills are problem solving and persistence. Communication is also important. I don't mean starting conversations with strangers in bars kind of communication. I mean you need to be able to express your ideas to other people so that they understand you: through spoken words, written words and code. If you want to be above average then being able to learn things quickly is essential. You need to have that drive to learn more. Not just copy and paste code from the top ranking stackoverflow answer. Read all the answers. Then click on all the links. Then read the official documentation. Then download the source code and read that. Then... (you get the point). Other skills may depend on the specific industry and type of programming you want to do. The maths you need for writing firmware is different to the math you need for writing 3D games for example. > I'm wondering if I should pursue programming as a hobby or actually look into a career. Doing it as a hobby definitely helps you do it as a career. Create a Github account and push your code to it. Even if it is dopey soykaf no one cares about. The fact that you can point to a public repository full of hobby projects you've done will give you a massive boost when you start applying for jobs. Hope this helps.

>>2289 What kind of math do you use in the firmware job? What applications or frameworks do you use to develop?

software intern. The work is terrible compared to working on personal projects, and I no longer have the energy to learn on my own like I used to.

>>2290 >What kind of math do you use in the firmware job? Binary arithmetic is the main thing. Is the 3rd bit of this int set? Set bits 3,4,5 in one instruction without touching any of the other bits. How big is 0x99? Will it fit inside an int8_t? What about a uint8_t? How much information can you gather just by looking at raw bytes in a logfile or hexdump? 0x4C 0x61 0x69 0x6E 0x00 Your thought process should be: Nul terminated C string. ASCII values. First letter capital. Second letter lowercase 'a'... It's not hard but it's also not the kind of thing you encounter outside of low level work. >What applications or frameworks do you use to develop? Languages: Everything is C. Occasionally C++. Ada if you work in military or aerospace. Most companies I've seen use high level scripting languages for testing purposes so you need to know at least one of those (and learn others as requested). So far I have had to use Perl, Python, TCL and Scheme (Guile). The last 2 were from an oddball company though, the first 2 are the dominant players. Tools: For editing most people I have worked with use Vim or Emacs. Some people use Sublime or Eclipse with the C++ plugin. Use whatever works for you. For version control most companies use Subversion, Perforce or Git. Like with scripting languages, as long as you know one decently well you will be able to learn how to use the others when you need to. For platform, sometimes embedded toolchains are Windows only (like Keil) but when companies have a choice they typically prefer Linux in my experience. There are certain pitfalls you need to be aware of as well with low level work. Things like manual memory management, concurrency, RAM usage, CPU usage, code space (size of your compiled code in bytes), execution time, energy consumption. These are all things you literally no one gives a soykaf about suddenly becomes important in the embedded world. Using 10Kb less RAM could save your company 10cents on a component that they put into 500,000 devices and suddenly you are talking about real money. Or if you receive a hardware interrupt and your code does not manage to process it within 100 nanoseconds then something bad happens (like the aeroplane crashes and people die). There is also a much higher standard of quality required, firmware especially. It's not like building a website where woops, there's a bug, let me just fix that quickly and push to production. Once your code has been compiled and flashed into ROM for thousands of devices, you can't fix it anymore and a serious enough bug can wipe out the company overnight.

>>2296 What about the security side? when I see writeups about embedded devices firmware reverse engineering, or if I reverse engineer them, there're TONS of bugs and backdoors. Have you ever been asked to introduce a backdoor in some part of your code?

>>2315 >What about the security side? You are correct it's horrible. When I talk about quality I mean in terms of ensuring the product does what the customer needs and expects. Security falls a little bit outside of that because someone typically needs to take a device outside its normal operating parameters and fuarrrk with it a bit to trigger a security vulnerability, which regular customers (especially business customers) don't do and therefor don't notice or care. For the most part, we get away with it because there is no real profit in hacking most embedded systems, they don't hold any valuable data, the processors are too weak to do any work like mine bitcoins or crack hashes and they're typically not connected to the internet. That equation is changing now that dumbasses are connecting their kettles and toasters and everything else to the internet. However I'm not sure it will matter. In the end of the day it's all about money and security has never had any real impact on that. How many CVEs are filed against Windows every week? How much money does Bill Gates have again? Exactly. >Have you ever been asked to introduce a backdoor in some part of your code? I am using Tor but I'm still not going to go into my personal experience. Some backdoors are required by law though. The United States has a soykaflist of countries it doesn't like and we have `#define`s in our code to change the way parts of it work when we build images for a products being sold to such a country. That's not really a secret.

>What's it like It purely depends on where you are working, Programming job culture varies from company to company. >Does it pay well? I can live on my own and buy all the luxury that I want provided I know how to budget, people tend to be jealous of how much I earn, I probably earn more than 5x average (with my skillset, not specifically everyone in my field has my salary). >What kind of people do you work with or skills do you need? You normally have to have a functioning brain to be able to code and come up with a solution, an above-average thinking to be able to create a good solution. I work with all kinds of people regardless of background, you need to be a team player first and foremost because you would need to help and ask for help from your peers if you need to get a project done fast. As for advanced skills, you need at least some good abstract thinking skills to be able to think on a higher-level.

In my first programming job, my boss was a micromanaging polak, I had a Indian coworker, underpaid and overworked. I quit Second job was with a Indian manager at first, but I got another one who is a bro to this day. I had a lazy asian coworker, lots of dumb bitches in the office, overall very mediocre-tier company and I stuck around for almost a year. Overall I think it is hard to find a 100% great company, probably none exist, but if you have a good manager and decent coworkers, you'd be surprised how pleasant the work environment can be. Pay for software engineers in my big american city (not silicon valley) is probably 70-110k for the vast majority of software engineers, but for most engineers it's a slave job since we're overworked in salary positions. If you're lucky, you won't be a java/c# enterprise crud monkey. If you're really lucky, you'll use a functional language and not some soykaf that breaks down in production like ruby/python/javascript/etc. There was only 1 person I've ever worked with terrible body odor, but he was also a fat fuarrrk so maybe that was related. Mostly, it's not interesting work. It's just work. Sometimes it can be interesting but that's not normal. Just like with every other job.

>>5022 another lainon here. Whats with age to start programming? Im 22 yo, zero experience in this, can i start my IT carrier or its too late?

>>2276 Hey Lain, I don't know if my situation is the norm but I figured maybe you'd like to hear from somebody who has been around for a while. I'm almost 30, I've been doing various types of development professionally for about a decade (not including school or personal hobbies). I started out writing a lot of C and Common Lisp for more traditional enterprises, these days I mostly work in large-scale Xen configurations (AWS, Azure, data centers using Xen in general). Most of that coding is Ocaml, Python, and a little Haskell. I've also gotten to try my hand at Scala working with Spark, and of course have picked up things like Lua where needed. I also do some programming for embedded devices but this is mostly still just C, I don't do any cool VHDL type prototyping. >whats it like? just like any other job :) you might work with a big team, small team, or alone. all of those come with challenges. In big teams I had to always be aware of branching and merge conflicts! All alone I have to manage my time effectively! >does it pay well? that depends more on the company I think than the work. I didn't get paid very much in my earlier days, but these days I am in the 6 figure range (just at the bottom, I am not rolling in dough). >what kind of people do you work with? all kinds of people. the idea that programmers are all mole-ish neck-beards is a misconception. most programmers I know are very articulate, well-kept people with a whole array of hobbies. Just think about who you might work with in any other office and those are the same people. >what skills do you need? well, aside from programming I'd recommend: * thoughtful organizational skills * the ability to put aside ego for compromise * the ability to take criticism as means to better yourself * a genuine appreciation for style and form * the ability to take your thoughts, and translate them into a laundry list format. * the willingness to try, be wrong, try again, still be wrong, search and search, be wrong some more, knowing that once it is right, you will feel amazing. * the ability to recognize preference as nothing more. there is no 'best' tool or language. all is a means to an end.

>>5039 I don't suppose you work at Citrix?

I have an internship where I work 20 hours a week programming a CRM for this small company. I really enjoy it so far. The people are nice, and the work is pretty easy (it's C# and I won't be the only developer once these other guys are done working on another project).

>>5037 Never too late to start a career in programming. Just build your Portfolio/GitHub Profile, get involved in Open-source Projects to be able to learn the modern Software Development Life Cycle (usually AGILE) and coding at the same time

I have a job "Software Engineering Intern" with one of the contracting companies in Rocket City which, as vague as it is, is actually precisely accurate We just do various things The pay is fabulous The work is interesting and fulfilling aside from tiny existential twinge whenever we're working on defense-related stuff I'm just using the "skills" I developed from being a kid interested in computers >Operate a computer >can into Linux >troubleshooting, >100 IQ mode >thinking about how systems could go together Interestingly the "daydreaming" I always do with regards to computer systems has been about the type of thinking required to step outside of my box and be helpful around the office >couldn't we just route this through localhost since <X> is running on the same machine to reduce attack surface? >can this be set up <this way>, for more redundancy and less cost? >I found out how to automate <thing> because it's a PITA to do manually etc I'm hoping not to have to study computer engineering in college; right now I'm underway with a Physics degree but I might add in some electrical engineering classes just out of interest

>>2276 I had the great luck of landing a programming job last summer (currently first-year CS in uni) at a fairly large tech company. As a young and inexperienced scrub, my experience probably doesn't mean anything to you but: >Does it pay well? I made decently good money for being straight out of highschool. Tech tends to pay well these days >What kind of people do you work with? I worked with people much older than I, which led to a bit of imposter syndrome/feeling of not really fitting in. So make sure you fit into the company culture when deciding to work somewhere, if you have a choice. (For me the choice was spend my summer doing something useful and getting paid, or probably wasting all of it on vidya). >What skills do you need? Be able to use a computer obviously. Write well-designed code, and be able to improve it with feedback from code reviews. Be able to use Google or your search engine of choice (this is important - I consider this my only true skill). >What's it like?/Is it interesting? It was interesting at first, but it actually got really boring really fast. I never thought I could possibly get bored of programming but somehow I did. It actually makes a difference that someone else is telling you what to work on, instead of you choosing yourself. So I guess be warned when transitioning from hobby programming to career programming.

>What's it like? I am a junior software developer using C++ for a smallish company that is quickly growing. It is okayish, but it is really starting to annoy me at how terrible this company is at software development. It just tends to frustrate me now. >Does it pay well? The pay is okay, It no way close to silicon valley pay but livable. >Is it interesting? The project is pretty interesting, it is not one of those boring CRUD projects. It is one of those challenging problems that can benefit from using Computer Science knowledge. Only problem is how terrible we are at it. >What kind of people do you work with? A variety of people, it actually pretty diverse. They all seem pretty nice. >skills do you need? Basic programming knowledge, algorithms, data structures, and other various things. It probably not too difficult to be seen as good at this company.

I'm a web dev intern. It's a pretty fuarrrking cool job. You get to create some complex soykaf for the world to access.

>What's it like? Software engineering is a tool. Half of your day is spent using your tool, and half your day is discussing how best to put everyone's work together. Don't go into software engineering if you don't like the latter. >Does it pay well? My total comp for this year will be ~170k. >Is it interesting? It's fine. It's work. You're not going to find work fun and interesting, that's why it's work.

My major is theoretical CS or computer science with heavy focus on math and no real software engineering No its not the kind of math that's applicable to daily life I'm the worst programmer in the department of CS No internships but trying to get a research position I don't think I'll ever be employable

>>2296 Your job sounds super interesting. What's it take to get a firmware job? Do you get fresh grads coming into your company to work on your department? I ask because I notice alot of jobs are for web dev, I don't find many firmware jobs.

>What's it like? Third world code monkey (you know, the kind you get your stuff outsourced to). > Does it pay well? Pay is soykaf. Unpaid overtime mandatory. > Is it interesting? fuarrrk no. Unless you enjoy the drudgery of writing data entry programs in C# and fixing peoples' unfinished code. > What kind of people do you work with and skills do you need? It's a really low bar judging by the people I work with. It's amazing they can "program" while being almost entirely computer illiterate. ...I wish I went to law school.

>>5459 >It's fine. It's work. You're not going to find work fun and interesting, that's why it's work. dunno if thats how it gotta be

>What’s it’s like? I work for a small company writing C++. Mostly it’s OK. The things I like is problem solving and that there isn’t a lot of red tape in the company. The things I don’t like is dealing with legacy part of the application. Some parts of the application ware written by people that don’t work in the company any more, and there either broke and need fixing or are over complicated and for some reason we need to change it (of course we need to do it ASAP) . Also I hate deadlines (we manage to ship the product in time, most of the time, but it’s stressful). >Does it pay well? Yes. Money is not a problem for me. >Is it interesting? Sometimes it is interesting, sometimes it’s boring (we don’t have a QA team so we have to do our own tests and that is the boring part). >What kind of people do you work with? All kinds of people. Sometimes even lazy people, and those are the worse because they will try to pretend they do something but they only surf the web. It’s a shame that the boss doesn't evaluate their work like check what did they committed to the repository (if they commit only a few lines of code after a week, and there are bugs in that code then I know they just slacked for an entire week) . Mostly there OK. >What skills do you need? Ability to communicate with others. Logic thinking (sometimes you can simplify the flow of a program if you will think about it). >>5108 >It was interesting at first, but it actually got really boring really fast. I never thought I could possibly get bored of programming but somehow I did. It actually makes a difference that someone else is telling you what to work on, instead of you choosing yourself. So I guess be warned when transitioning from hobby programming to career programming. I see what you mean. Sometimes I would really like to write something cool as a side project but the problem is that after 8 hours of work as a programmer I’m too tired to write something on my own.

>>5676 It depends. If you're lucky you can get a job that you enjoy but at the end of the day somebody has to clean the toilets and there's no good reason it shouldn't be you or me.

Just don't get employed by a budding startup. Our CTO has no experience and has no idea how functional companies run, is too nice to enforce good practices, and takes on too much to improve anything. Our CEO is completely detatched and tries to cram trendy soykaf we don't need down our throats. He doesn't know how a company is supposed to run either, we have this mishmash of waterfall and Agile that he thinks is Agile that doesn't work. Our employees are so green that they don't even know that you need to write unit tests, even the more "senior" guys. All of our code is an ad-hoc mess. Of course we have no onboarding process to change all of this because of our CTO rockstar.

>>5682 true, i mean i make around $10 an hour and i dont really enjoy my job either so im definitely not trying to act like ive got it all figured out lol. i just dont want people to accept monotony. strive forward towards fulfillment, wherever that may be or whatever means you may use to get there.

>>5670 Lord help me

>>2276 Intern here too, working under a systems dev team writing device drivers and whatnot in C/ASM. >What's it like? >Is it interesting? I'd say it feels like a good balance between work that is challenging and keeps you learning and work that is interesting. There's always something new coming up for me to do, and there's no prouder feeling than heading down to the lab and seeing a driver you wrote running on real time bare metal in a production fab. >Does it pay well? Pretty good for an internship, make around 55k a year. Don't have my degree yet but if I did I'd make more. Was told they'd take me as a full time fully paid worker if I finished school, so that's something on my to do list. >What kind of people do you work with or skills do you need? Systems devs seems to be full of mostly older guys (40-60), and I landed in a really comfy team of programmers. Shoot the soykaf with them a lot on smoke and lunch breaks, and it feels good knowing that there's always someone more experienced around if I need to ask a question about a concept or for criticism on code reviews.

>>2320 >Some backdoors are required by law though. The United States has a soykaflist of countries it doesn't like and we have `#define`s in our code to change the way parts of it work when we build images for a products being sold to such a country. That's not really a secret. Dear lord.

How often do you use UML in work? My uni has a class on it, but everything in it seems useless to me.

>>2276 I want to be an actual developer, but I'm in QA automation now at a mid-size company in NY. I used to be the sole dev at a small insurance company; there were some nice opportunities there but the bull and crap pay I had to put up with wasn't worth a lot of it. One thing I want to do is be able to summarize myself like >>5039 one of these days with all sorts of things I've done or tech worked in, but all I can say about myself is I work with .NET (C#), JS, and Python with desktop applications and sometimes do minor DB things with SQL/SSMS and MS SQL Server. >What's it like? I honestly think it's really enjoyable. A lot of people don't like qa or think it's beneath them, but there's a lot of thinking that isn't just programming or math that goes into it. >Does it pay well? Considering I don't have a STEM degree and this is my second job in general, it pays pretty decently. Not even close to real dev money and ~11k short of what my friend in devops makes. On the other hand, I don't have a lot of stress, my coworkers are great, the company is flexible for a number of things (movement, time off, work from home once you get enough trust built up, etc), and I've got incredible benefits. >Is it interesting? I think there's a lot of cool stuff to do because my company treats the separation between dev and qa a lot like the SDE/SDET division for microsoft, where qa is internal software dev + testing and not just mindlessly clicking or writing click scripts with some python module like pyautogui. Some days I don't have any tickets sitting in jira so I'm allowed to browse the major programmer outlets (HN/Lobsters) and use my pluralsight account. Another day I'm writing some new functions for one of the test suites, another I'm trying to find out why some test is breaking (did one of the devs change something in the code behind or was it as simple as a UI element being renamed?), another I'm debugging an internal product, another I'm adding features to that internal product. It gets lonely sometimes because some days the only talking I'll do is morning pleasantries/standup/goodbyes for an entire day, plus I'm the only person under 30 on the entire team, so there isn't a whole lot to develop workplace pleasantries with outside of star wars/star trek. >What kind of people do you work with Almost all male: white, asian, indian. There are two women on my team: one works partially for another team and another's been out on maternity leave for the past few months. I haven't encountered any people who fit a stereotype, surprisingly; all of the non-contract indians on the team are immigrants or children of immigrants. The ones I work with all have the usual accent and pronunciations (Vs as Ws, i.e., "version" becomes "wersion") but they're well rounded in social and intellectual aspects. They're all minimum a decade+ older than me with wives, grown kids, and all the troubles that come with being an adult. I think there are some younger people around my age working in dev and hardware, but from the conversation snippets I've heard they either talk football or "geek chique/cred" like minecraft and the popular AAA games that are being advertised to them. There aren't any true neckbeads/reclusive sysadmins, but there's a strong introvert presence at the company. >[What] skills do you need? I think the biggest skills necessary for parts of the industry that aren't hardware or low-level are communication skills, a willingness to do things someone else's way, and being proactive (not reactive or inactive). Most people (not all, some really have it bad) who make sob stories about their job or their lack of one usually fall into one of those categories, and being proactive combines a whole laundry list of other skills; cliche skills such as "thinking outside the box" and more traditional skills like being able to gauge a social situation and react to it. On the note of doing things someone else's way, playing ball with your team and your managers/directors goes a long way to putting a positive image of yourself in their minds. Sure, you might want to do things the Libre/Lainchan/Gentooman/"I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU+Linux" Way, but needless friction over tech serves nobody and creates stress for everyone involved. People can will remember that you're easy to work with if you present yourself as such, but they'll just as easily remember if you're a horror to work alongside.

>>5773 It is. I work in what is probably the most enterprise-y (read: likely to use UML) industry in the US and it's still pretty rare. You bust out some soykafty online UML editor every now and then when an architect decides to ruin your day by trying to "help". That that point you have to half ass some soykaf because apparently they don't have the software required to open the code in architect-land. But that happens maybe a few times a year? A lot of people just delegate it to the lowest ranked sucker on the team and get on with their life. You definitely don't need a class to figure it out, I can't remember what any of the symbols mean, I just look up a cheat sheet legend thing every time I have to do it.

> My job I do "backend" web development for a startup that is on the verge of going public. What that really means is that I do a bit of everything related to our web services / applications - DBA, sysadmin, backend, frontend, QA, internal tooling, system architecture design, etc. > hobby vs. career? If you love it as a hobby, have great passion for tech, and an iron stomach, its a great career. A lot of folks are getting into it for the money, which is a viable choice - but you could make similar money being highly skilled in any field. Most people don't realize how much knowledge and experience it takes to break into the industry - let alone rise through the ranks. Go on reddit and look at how many college grads are disappointed with their programming job or can't find one. If you find yourself playing with languages / tech just for fun or because they are interesting - there's a good chance you will make it if you apply yourself. > What's it like? 95% of the time it's awesome. 5% of the time it's complete and utter dogsoykaf. I get to work on interesting tech, with incredibly intelligent people, and together we have a blast building products that are flat out amazing. When we are burnt-out we play ping-pong or just chat about cool tech, vidyagames, or whatever. > What kind of people do you work with? On the dev side - pretty much everyone is high functioning autism. Which, if you are "one of us", is a very good thing. It's like being in enlightenment era Europe. Everyone of these guys is incredibly interesting to talk to, because we all know so much about such a variety of topics. Discussions are deep, fast-paced, and occasionally inspiring. Working with this team is probably the best perk of my job. >Does it pay well? Fairly well. I get compensated better than 95% of people I know, and I have no formal education. I could be making about 50% more than I currently do - but its not worth it to change to a workplace where I'll potentially be working with a lame team. Is it interesting? Never a dull moment. I've had boring gigs before - but that's pretty rare. More often, the bad gigs aren't boring - they're frustrating. The soykaftiest jobs in this industry aren't the boring ones - their the ones where you end up working for or with people that disgust you. Sometimes its customers, sometimes its managers, sometimes its coworkers. Such situations are usually far from boring, but can suck the life right out of you. > what skills do you need? We need people that can jump in and figure soykaf out. Having a programming background is helpful, and experience certainly counts, but the number one thing we look for is a person who is willing and able to dive right in to something, do some research and get results. Basically, we need problem solvers. I'd much sooner hire someone who automated their dead end job with a few dozen scripts, or built a rickety SAN using junkyard parts than someone fresh out of school. The kind of person who sees a problem and finds a solution, without anybody telling them to do it, or offering any compensation.

>>2276 >a hobby or actually look into a career Jump in for the hobby, stay for the career. >What's it like? Tough to find a good place and circumstances. But somehow I've ended up being a very important senior developer and I work from home. >Does it pay well? Extremely. >Is it interesting? Depends on management, colleagues and also on you. >What kind of people do you work with Random sample, though only two female direct colleagues so far in my career (5 years). The fewer the better, though, they break my focus. >[what] skills do you need? There are only about two kinds of required skills: a/ critical and logical thinking, b/ communication. It's as basic as this. As for knowledge, personally I've learnt a soykafton about computer internals and how things work, so that's what I need in addition to being able to write program instructions in a certain programming language, or several. Otherwise it varies. As a junior, they'll expect you to be learning a lot of their stuff. Stay humble and absorb all information. As usual, don't be afraid to fail and seek advice when it's available. Basically, assuming that you're not completely hopeless, learn some popular programming language and go job hunting. Degrees are optional as long as you have something to show. You're bound to find _some_ place to take you in. So many actual devs are really dense.