The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Suppose you are a 40 year old software engineer making 120k/year, and you somehow magically get banned for life from practicing the profession. You have decent savings to live off of for a bit and to supplement a smaller income for a while. What would you do? If you're so inclined, be specific and like narrate out a life plan.
Silly question, but why are you only making 120k/year? How long have you been in the industry? That's like entry-level for software engineers these days.
Has your time in the industry taught you anything about management at all? If I were you, I'd try to leverage your experience to become a tech lead. But maybe you could tell us more about why you don't want to be in the software industry anymore?
Where do you go, and what do you study, to make more?
I learned programming for a year, and since then have been working as a software developer (in crypto) for two years, and that's what I make. No degree or anything but I still think I can do better.
Well, I may not know too much about those answers, since I've had a relatively sheltered career. But I'll tell you what I think I know.
I did my undergrad at a school that has a pretty well-known CS department. And even though I wasn't too serious about pursuing a software career at the time, I had to choose some major, so I chose CS. And that ended up being a good decision. I don't think this makes me a better coder than most others in the industry, but the fact that I have the degree from a big name, it probably did well for me. It got me in the door of big tech, where I was able to work my way up to a nice salary. In big tech, you get your bosses to invest in your career, not just see you as a tool for getting work done. It's a growth-oriented culture, and managers are first and foremost judged by their managers on how well they grow their reports.
Other than making me look good, I mean, maybe also the universities taught me more about algorithms and theory, too. In your year-long programming learning, how much did you learn about how to analyze programs, think about algorithms, runtimes, space usage, different types of languages, etc? It's possible that that sort of in-depth thought about the theoretical nature of programming may be something else that's desirable about people who studied CS in college. Computer Science really is a separate thing from software engineering, and it's possible that you learn to think about code on a slightly different level. I'm not sure, because I don't really know what it's like to not have learned CS first.
The degree totally helped me, but you don't need it in big tech. They're not elitist, if you can show that you have the skills. If you don't have the degree, then you'll need like 3 to 5 years of industry experience, during which time you've amassed many stories where you've shown that you're hard working, methodical, you understand software, you care about the team you're on, and you're capable of making tradeoffs and decisions. Think about all of the times that you've personally done something that helped change the course of a project, or helped someone out, or made some sort of decision, and write them down and rehearse them for your interviews. If you have that, then you must also study Cracking the Coding Interview, and can absolutely get a high-paying job in big tech.
Also, you don't have to work in big tech to get a high paying job (though I know less about how to do this). But I think a lot of it comes down to, once again, you showing that you're methodical, smart, and hard-working, in much a similar way as above. And you can be hired as a tech lead for a smaller company. But once you're in a smaller company, there's usually less room for growth in salary (without simply leaving and going to another company), because the smaller companies are usually more focused on the bottom line instead of focusing on the growth of their employees.
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