Software development is taxing on your brain the same way physical labor is taxing on your body. It’s depressing, soul sucking work. You’re stuck inside, staring at a screen for 8+ hours a day.
If all jobs had the same salary, benefits, career path, etc, there is no way I'd trade software development for a job involving strenuous physical labor.
I would. I enjoy working on software, but honestly, the most satisfying job I ever had was a janitor, cleaning office buildings. Seriously. The job was at night - I'm a night owl. The job was performed almost entirely in solitude - I hate people LOL. I could listen to music all night and it never interrupted my work. No meetings or drawn out decisions. No "case of the Mondays". I worked my butt off physically, but at the end of my shift, my brain was still totally fresh. I used to look at it like I was getting paid to exercise because the work was so physical. I slept like a damn baby when I was a janitor. But, most of all, I really enjoyed cleaning: coming in at night, looking at a total disaster area, working my butt off, then leaving just before dawn with everything looking spotless. I took pride in it.
Kinda funny how most of the software projects I work on now are around hygiene, cleaning up old code and dead configs, stuff like that. Once a janitor, always a janitor.
Oh yeah, the worst thing about being a janitor isn't the pay. It's being treated like shit by literally everyone. People can be assholes, especially when they're talking to the janitor.
There's a surprisingly large number of jobs, but making even middle class income is difficult unless you're one of the dozens of people that get a staff job with the government or win the academic lottery and get a tenure track position.
I would. Imagine getting paid to be outdoors in the sun getting exercise. Imagine not having to spend an extra hour each day in a crowded gym doing boring repetitive movements because your sedentary job would ruin your body otherwise. Imagine not having posture and back problems at age 30. Imagine having the output of a hard days work be a physical object you can point to your son and say “see? I made that”.
> Imagine getting paid to be outdoors in the sun getting exercise.
Combine that with - imagine being outside when it's cold, windy and raining - and you still have to do an 8 hour shift in those conditions. At minimum, it sounds like a fast-track to arthritis (a painful and non-curable condition that will plague you for the rest of your life). Or, imagine doing hard, physical labor for 8 hours in sweltering heat, which makes other human people avoid going out at all.
If you are an American SWE or have a corresponding salary, you pretty much only have to work for 10 or so years before retiring, assuming you learn how personal finance works and learn to live without a fancy car or any status-related possessions.
Heck you could do it in 5 years if you are a FAANG employee.
I’m not sure you could do it in 5 years at a FAANG even if you saved every penny (literally zero living expenses.)
Because if you start a career at 22, that means you retire at 27, and have to have enough saved up for something like 40 years before social security kicks in. That’s a long time to be living off of savings. Can you have enough that you can live off the interest in your investments? Depends. You’d need near-zero-risk investments because you don’t want to get wiped out at the next recession (they happen every 10-ish years) and those tend to have low yields.
Source: I’m 10 years into a faang and I have a bunch saved up, but I’m still in my 30s. There’s no way I could retire now with my wife and kids depending on me, the amount I make on the interest of my investments isn’t nearly enough and is too risky.
I'll admit 5 years was hyperbolic and unrealistic, perhaps something reserved for the most promising workers at those FAANGs. But if you are 10 years into your FAANG career, you should be earning at minimum in the 300K net/210k take home range, and have done so for years. At this point you must be trading freedom for creature comforts or status goods if you are not financially independent.
What’s financially independent mean at age 35? Say you saved 200k every year (which isn’t even technically possible given that the typical tax rate for 300k means a smaller net than that.) You have 2 million in the bank. Can you live off 2 million for 30 years (social security age) while supporting a family as the sole earner, for that long? You gotta be really confident in your investments to take that plunge.
Well it depends on your personal circumstances. As per the 4% rule, you can definitely live off $80K with a family. That's above the US median wage by a large margin. You could live on $40K too, which is terrible if working but completely different if not. Again, this will depend on what you value in life.
Think about what not having to work actually means. There's a list of advantages that is too large to properly enumerate. Being able to see your children. Eating correctly and cheaply. Engaging in intimate relationships with vigor, time and energy. Being in great health. Fixing maintenance problems yourself. No career forcing you to live in a particular place. Traveling inexpensively when you want. Less obesity, stress and copium. Have hobbies and self-actualization. All of this in years that still qualify as your prime instead of when your body is failing you. The same salary when not working is like operating in a different world.
And ironically this would also give you the time to pursue entrepreneurship or any number of money-making ventures if you are so inclined. Heck, just go part-time if you miss it. If you are a FAANG person you can have a higher salary than people's full time.
Most people will not have that opportunity. I certainly won't, barring some miracle. But you have it. What will you do when you retire at 55 and realize that pretty much all of the really healthy years of your life have been spent in an office? Great, you've got a comfy retirement but it's too late.
The premise is you only need about 20-25 years of expenses saved up and have like a 90+% success rate given history. That's what the FIRE ideology started with. Anything beyond 25 years is security/luxury. For a single person not having others depend on them and willing to locate away from any expensive mega-/metropolis, FAANG did make that doable in 5-10 years.
> The premise is you only need about 20-25 years of expenses saved up
What happens in 20-25 years, if you’re 35 now? Your net worth hits zero right when you turn 55-60, and have years left until you get social security? All so that you can live with zero luxuries for the best years of your life, and have no family to pass anything onto?
I’m sorry but it just seems like a huge misplacement of priorities to me, to forego so much potential to retire that early.
To me, the priority is the ability to simply say “fuck off” to my boss if I’ve had enough one day, and have enough saved up to absorb the mistake, if it turned out to be one. Having that fallback in the back of my mind means I’ve basically already won, I’m just racking up the score until that day comes. But until that day, there’s zero reason not to continue banking everything I have. Deciding “that’s probably enough, I should walk away now” at age 35 seems like one of the biggest mistakes you can make. 50? Maybe. 45? Maybe not. But 35? Huge mistake IMO.
I'll walk back on the five years FAANG claim as I was venting a bit. But let's say you earn $200K (you'd start with less but end up with more at the 5 year mark), $135-165K take home, $105K if you save 70% of your salary. If we count compound interest, investments, stocks, healthcare savings due to generous SWE contracts, you could definitely achieve freedom if you wanted to with the 4% rule. It would require abandoning some luxury, but even on 30% of your take home salary you would have a decent lifestyle, more than most make total. And then you'd be in a position to do what you want, be as healthy as you need to be, no longer a need to buy things to make you forget about your servitude. You could travel on the cheap with longer flights because you would have time to do so.
Let's say I'm wrong, and it's more like 15-18 years. Well, that's still much much much better than what most people get. You can have decades of your life back. How much of your freedom are toys and consumption worth?
Ok, but then you'd have spent your entire unrecoverable youth working for a FAANG. I realize this doesn't bother some people, and I don't understand that.
Devs can get by working few hours a day, some barely do any work at all
Not sure how others here feel, but I have to say that when I've found myself in situations where there isn't much work to be done I find it utterly soul destroying.
Always feel guilty doing anything else in down-time when I'm billing a client and so sometimes end up sitting in a weird stand by mode, feeling like I'm somehow being lazy.
It's not lazy. If I go for a walk I'm actively thinking about projects. I have solved many problem by just clearing my mind and taking breaks.
Building software should not be paid by the hour. It's a weird thing.
If I can build a piece of software in 10 hours, and another dev needs 40 hours....it seems kind of odd to pay the slower less resourceful dev MORE for a slower delivery?
So I consider taking a walk to clear your mind part of work for sure. I also consider reading HN or other engineering news/continued education sites to be part of work. And taking a coffee break to chat with co-workers about whatever (back when we worked in an office), including big-picture stuff and non-work related stuff, sure, that too.
That's all part of work when you do this kind of work. You can not just write code 8 hours a day, indeed, it's impossible, and if an employer tries to make you work that kind of sweat-shop environment (sometimes it seems like that's the actual goal of some Scrum implementations), it won't actually get them your best or even most productive work.
But there are people on HN who say that they literally spend the majority of their day the majority of days just doing things that are not work at all. I dunno, watching TV, running errands, riding their bike, mindlessly social media'ing, playing video games. Like they only spend a few hours a week on anything related to work at all.
I agree with GP that for me that's utterly soul-destroying, I end up feeling useless and unmoored. (The other day on the radio I heard someone reference a study that busy-ness to life satisfaction graphed as an upside down U, if you have too little free/leisure time you are unhappy, but people with too much are unhappy too, there's a sweet spot in the middle. Perhaps that's what we're talking about here).
But maybe different people are different.
Or maybe in new remote world, if you spend that time on projects you find rewarding (writing poetry, I dunno) instead of just goofing off, then it's not really "leisure" anymore, and you won't have that problem. If also you don't have any ethical problems with it (maybe your employer is awful and deserves to be drained of money), or just worry about getting caught.
Yep. Same here, at my level of experience can deliver work in high-quality at a fraction of time required for a junior. Instead of burn-out, use the extra time to enjoy other things and keep learning/improving.
Dev work is not digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screw driver, but it is forcing your brain to do things brains were never meant to do in a situation they can never make better, ten to fifteen hours a day, five to seven days a week, and every one of them is slowly going mad.
You might be surprised to learn that for every dev working “few hours a day” or barely doing anything at all, there is another engineer doing all their work for them - usually in a constant state of fending off burnout due to having to do other peoples’ work in addition to their own.
That other engineer is actually a problem. He is accomplishing nothing by grinding 8+ hours a day and will burn out, most deadlines are bullshit.
Nobody can sustain that much work for a long period of time.
I would much rather be a good well rounded reasonable dev than someone doing others work. That is a huge red flag. Every dev should be responsible for THEIR work, not their team mates. Unless of course they are doing code reviews.
Arbitrary deadlines are bullshit but I never mentioned deadlines. At the end of the day, people get paid to do a job and businesses earn revenues by doing things. Someone needs to do those things, and if these hypothetical developers "barely doing any work at all" aren't doing it, someone has to at the end of the day or everyone is going home.
Is it? In my career, over 20 years by now, I've not seen that one often. When it happens, management has to be on vacation too, as it's not that hard to see that someone is doing all the work. I have seen this continue just once. It had to do with the place having very poor pay. Management wasn't firing the slackers because that's all they could hire at their rates. The hard working engineers just weren't wise enough to realize that they could often do a bit less work for a lot more pay somewhere else.
What is more common is that effort levels are similar within the same department, but wildly different across companies. I've worked at places where people considered themselves slackers when they were doing 60 hours plus on call time. I've also worked at others where entire teams did about 2 hours of actual work a day, and the rest was spent on long lunches, ping pong and retro consoles.
I think the trick is to give and take. And maintain teams that give and take.
Sometimes I need to take my foot of the gas. But I also appreciate that, when I do, someone else has to pick up the slack.
When I encounter teammates who only take, take, take, and never give, either they leave or I do (depending how much influence I have over their employment)
The trick is that everyone is both in my experience. I had weeks where i worked barely 10 hours (well, a week actually, but in my defense, the onboarding was shit), including meetings and mails. Most of the time once i understand what i have to do (and that can take some time), i'm around 20 to 30 hours. But i know i can whip myself and work 45 full hours (legal duration in my country is 35), as i did during august when the team was on vacation and we had a lot of fires to tend to, for two weeks.
I'm a long time paramedic who has seen more people die than I care to remember.
some days I'd rather be an order picker at Amazon. It's a lot easier to clock out and not bring work home with you. I might actually make more money at Amazon, to be honest.
Not to mention the perverse association you develop with the computer being a requirement for getting work done. My dopamine is so tied to ticking off boxes by finishing computer work that tasks like cleaning the kitchen have an empty feeling.
My son in law was visiting the other week and asked me about my tech job. I told him that it is like taking a calculus exam everyday of the week, where I am not exactly sure what the course material is that day, or that it is a chapter I have not seen yet.