I love how passionate you sometimes become, for example with that part about estimating an extra 20% of time. Regarding resisting short Term thinking: In the projects I worked on were usually so much wrong so that any attempt at thinking long term would begin with refactoring for a few sprints. But good luck make it happen as the Junior Dev!;)

I do. Main reason is how I would perceive someone who jumps from project to project, job to job if I was hiring. If I see that there is someone who has been working for one project for longer time, I know that guy is stable, can maintain position, people don't have problem working with him, he put enough work as nobody tried to get rid of him for this many years despite overflow of candidates and layoffs, he delivers etc. That being said, even if I decide to not look for a new job actively while working at one company, I am open for interesting offers and I reevaluate each year or half a year, depending on how much I think I am worth and how much value I bring for company. If you work at same place for 5 years but you could be replaced with someone training for year or less, you are not irreplaceable. You need strong position before you start negotiations.

Thanks man, am grateful I found your channel. Just about to join job market.

@@fastjack2792You need to do 4 - Skip the leveling grind, and 5 - pick your battle. If you find yourself having a title that you are overqualified for, you have 2 choices 1. leave, 2. bite your lip.

@@cefcephatus With all due respect, I have not asked for your wisdom. Tell it to those who ask for it

And prepare that 1 out of 12 “tech recruiters” may actually understand that. So solve your life with the law of large numbers. Statistically speaking only one out of twelve recruiters will actually somewhat understand what they are tasked to do. Only 1 out of 7 therapists are actually a match. Only 1 in 200 (~0.5%) of all humans actually know basic coding; making it hard to find a tribe. So it is really easy to get frustrated, question yourself and get angry at the majority. Do this instead: Leverage chance; don’t yell at it. It is all just input output

People who know the theory of problem solving have given us ChatGPT. All the people who did not,don’t try to teach anyone how problem solving works. The team manners who helped the stakeholders the most were the once who knew Navision/ SharePoint/SAP/WordPress by heart. And could center a DIV.

As he somewhat said in point #8, that only works if the company is able to understand that there is common knowledge across all tech, and that's often not the case. The average employer will look for specific knowledge

You know it doesn't work that way ...

If this was so simple would be great, but the real world just don't work that way, I think that the best advice that he gave was networking, without recommendations nowadays is almost impossible to get any job, then in the interview you can sell yourself as a problem solver that has some specific skills that can solve the company problems, probably you'll need to really talk about the problems the company currently have and how you'll solve them. But without this companies will not hire you just say that you maybe is just some of this cheap generalist developers out there.

Amen! The amount of stupid shit I get sucked into on a daily basis is unreal, or the urgent, everything-is-a-five-alarm-fire DMs I get from my boss on Teams that make me shit my pants lol

+10

You just have to be careful how you do it. I set my teams status to Busy for extended periods of time and my manager got mad when he realized what I was doing. "No sir, I swear I wasn't setting my status to busy just to ignore your question of where an acronym came from so I could focus on this funky memory issue." I got to watch that particular company corporatize in real time. When your most people focused team members jump ship due to overwork and politics, it's time to get out.

Fully agreed. I am approaching 27 years as primarily a c++ software engineer.

Im 6 months old in my office and everyone knows i hate meetings. In a another meeting im sure someones not gonna like that hehe way, nothing too confronting, and i really like that. Its spreading actually. A coworker who cant avoids them tells me its horrible, my boss cancelled one yesterday to "not develop meetingitis"

This is especially true because some of the best opportunities for leadership or networking may come from volunteer work or side gigs, and if you're putting all your effort in your job you'll miss those opportunities. And sometimes a little boredom helps you think creatively and outside of the box. It's hard to see the shore if you can't keep your head above water.

A classmate who graduated with honors in physics from Caltech _refused_ to do any classwork all day Friday. (I don't have the discipline to steal his idea. The stress of not feeling a sense of progress gets to me. But then maybe that is why it works: a renewal of a sense of urgency.)

@@cdorman11 Once I heard a presentation by someone who helped people deal with burnout, say for a PhD candidate. One of their approaches was to cut them down to a single hour a week for like a month, then bump them up to like an hour a day. And apparently it worked. Anyhow, another option is to change venue for your "day off". If you work in an office, go to a coffee shop, or the library, or work from home. Some of my most productive time was when I would reliably spend a day a week working from home on yellow legal pads, with pages spread out all over the floor. Instead of spending the day tracking down C++ warnings or getting my code layout JUST RIGHT, I spent that day almost entirely at the 10,000-foot view, which often shifted everything else I did for the next week.

@@cdorman11 if you're feeling constant stress that things aren't going your way, then take a step back and think about what might be blocking you. Or see a counselor. If you're in school take some time to cultivate connections and relationships. You're not living in the hunger games, grinding to meet somebody else's expectations is dumb. You'll get there and then find out it wasn't what you wanted. Which gets to the problem with motivating yourself by stress. I did great in college, not because I was psyching myself out all the time, but because I was hungry and wanting to learn. Are you studying because you're afraid and think you gotta do it, or because you want to do it?

As a slave* [...]

I'll consider myself in a position to give advice to those who pay me: What should we pick, and why should we do different to be more efficient. But if they instead want me to debug the same frontend for 2 years when I already have a proper fixed interface available just because the rest of the team doesn't want to fucking use what their framework literally sets up out of the box, I'll accept the pay for doing that crap until I find something better.

@@xamidi The world is not running because humanitarian. If it was, there is accounting transparent, every company suppose can't make more than 20x of what their cost running. If they earn more, they need to just run another "humanitarian project" to use that money. That would give them freedom, and their intent to give back to society. No just now greedy company. It never about human / employee, literally if AI here, we should all started to work based on our believe to shape new generation of infrastructure and item, instead of grinding....... It literally no benefit on individual

@@2dstencil847 I know that the world is running on modern slaves. That doesn't make it any reasonable.

@@2dstencil847 I know the world runs on slavery. That doesn't make it any reasonable.

Were you the only dev on the team? How’d you not get caught?

@@LukeDickerson1993I've conspired with others to design something right and keep our manager in the dark. Worked out well; in one case brought peace to a print program that had been barfing bugs every time it ran. Shout out to Alan Turing for the seed idea on that one!

@@jeffreyhotchkiss9451 you got balls man. id be afraid my coworkers would rat me out to my manager for proposing it. Maybe theres a way to phrase the proposal that isn't outright secrecy? Were your coworkers tired of the old system too?

I wish there were more devs like you in my hiring pool.

I feel like this is what happens were im at, some designer wants some feature and for some reason this "feature" requires refactoring like 10k lines lol

I need to work on that. I’m conscious of it, and I know I should just grin and bear it, but it must be a little bit of lingering ego that they haven’t fully beaten out of me yet lol

Ugh! On the flip side, if someone asks you a simple question that should have a short answer (if you actually know the answer) and you don't know, tell them you don't know, and then give them an opportunity to just leave the conversation if they don't want you to grasp at straws at something tangential - because they're sure they already know what you're going to tell them and their time solving this problem is better spent elsewhere. For example, if someone asks you what the namespace is where the garbage collection API stuff is and you don't know, don't feel compelled to give them a random 10-minute explanation on how garbage collection works-that's not what they asked! You're just forcing them to either waste their time listening to you or to cut you off and be rude if they want their time back. Or maybe they're actually interested, but you should check first.

I have someone on my team who is more senior than me, however i can confidently say he is not more knowledgeable than me. He is someone with a rather cocky demeanor who has a past of putting other people down. He hasn't done or said anything untoward to me, but what he does do is over explain simple concepts or things to me when I already know these things, and the original question was small and contextual about the product. I can only feel that he is doing these things to assert his ego, and I don't really know how I'm supposed to respond other than cutting him short and telling him that I know.

@@lunaeclipse3621 that describes my direct manager. I’ve heard it referred to as “infantilizing,” where they basically treat you like you’re an idiot even though you may actually be more knowledgeable and experienced than they are. That’s what I meant up above when I said sometimes I just have to grin and bear it. It’s really hard not to want to stick up for ourselves. We worked hard to achieve the skill and knowledge we have, and it sucks when somebody undermines that, even if they aren’t doing so on purpose

Biting your tongue when someone is preaching at you about something you already know is hard but is good diplomacy. Next time they may tell you something you didn't know. However, you have to be cautious. Sometimes it just encourages them. 😂 Thanks-and-run can work. (Sounds like something from "Curb Your Enthusiasm".) 😀

I've been specifically told I'm a great programmer because I never ask for time to research. However, I think I still do what he says. I ask for a timebox after which I provide an estimate, or I estimate the estimate.

Yeah I thought this was very useful also

Is he implying that the customer is specifically paying for those hours? Can't see many going for that. Usually you have to hide this time, even working as a permanent employee.

Its not just in progamming industry

It's an important lesson to learn. Let the business guys do the stupid decisions, even if they are dead obvious. Nothing will convince them, not even the pain that follows. Just prepare yourself to abandon ship before it becomes too ugly. If managers want to ruin a company, they will find a way to do it.

Some programmers like being in that position because they don't care that much. They do their 9-5, clock out and not think about anything programming related until tomorrow. Of course if you are not like that, just find another position.

Something needs to change. Software engineers are trained to gather and understand and meet requirements, whereas these other roles aren’t. Product managers need to be kicked to the curb. There’s a need to efficiently gather and route feedback from end users and metrics to the dev teams and leadership, but it’s literally a routing function, not a management function. High level requirements should be made by leadership because that’s how companies work, but they should be adjusted according to that feedback from users, metrics, and also dev teams.

It's better to keep it simple and stick to your role. I might add my opinion sometimes but I'll never try to influence decisions that are outside my role as a programmer. I don't know why some devs think they have the skills and experience to weigh in on things that are outside their role. I guess it's different as a freelancer/contractor, which I am. I never feel it's my place to dictate to the client on non-code related topics. At most I'll inform them of how the decisions they're making will affect the complexity/reliability of the code. It seems like devs working for companies get an inflated idea of themselves and their importance. On the flipside I can't stand when a non developer tries to dictate to me what I should be doing or how it should be done.

People get into programming for different reasons. What attracted me to software development was the fact that, if you're involved in the entire, or at least large part, of the process, it can be part art, part science. Finding AND implementing interesting solutions to users' needs and problems is what I enjoy. I don't want to only be involved in implementing someone else's ideas, I want to be involved, at least to a small degree, in coming up with solutions to users' needs.

Yes, I have over 20 years of experience in the field, and that hit really hard... Coding-wise, with the abundance of information on the internet today and a lot less effort, younger people can pass 'senior' interview tests easily, and you're going to compete with individuals who will cost the company a lot less than you.

Very right, but to someone with strong asocial tendencies, this doesn't sound good. Management, consulting, presentations, this is all social stuff that is very hard for me.

@@marloelefant7500 I was like that at the start of my career, and improved by working in customer facing positions.

@@marloelefant7500Agreed with you. I didn't go into programming because I was a great people person or public speaker. I find it very difficult and soul crushing to do all those things, to the point where I'm periodically asking myself whether I should just quit the industry altogether. The problem is I have a mortgage and other adult responsibilities.

​@@marloelefant7500you can stick to coding, just means you will hit a ceiling. I work with many Sr Engineers in their 40 and 50 that only codes. They made piece that they will stay on Sr. But not need to deal with the people factor. Works great for them as they are very happy at work.

They meant "every terrible company is the same" and I certainly agree.

To clarify, I'm not saying you can't leave a company after 2 years for legitimate reasons (like a better culture as you mentioned). I'm speaking against it as a general rule that you should just always do this. If you're at a good company, making good money, like the people, and growing there's no arbitrary rule you can't stay longer than 2 years - at least that I think is worth following. Now if you've been there 8-10 years? It's probably time to move on.

@@HealthyDev8-10 years is a really long time. If you’ve already been there that long, you may as well stay forever. Job hopping every 2-3 years is a common tenure because it lines up with vesting schedules, project timelines, and doesn’t leave any red flag on the resume.

@@mecanuktutorials6476 a chain of 2-3 year stints is actually not good on a resume. If we don't like how we're treated like code monkeys, we only do a disservice to our industry by normalizing short stays.

@@HealthyDev in point 7 of the video: “know when you’re the code monkey”, you recommended either accepting it or moving on. I don’t think it makes any sense to stay at another person’s company for 8-10 years unless there is a really good incentive to stay. In software, the incentive to find a new company is usually a better compensation package while the incentive to stay is being higher on the totem pole. With layoffs and the hustle/grind corporate culture, staying at a job for the totem pole position is silly unless you’re in a very safe position in government or something like that and the work culture is really lax. I don’t think tech companies (or any true capitalististic enterprise) is like that. Everyone is expendable so that loyalty to a corporation can land you in hot water if you get sucked too deep into the company’s proprietary nonsense and the business goes downhill. You really should be a free agent rather than a company man in this day and age. I’m surprised you hold the position that people should stay 8-10 years long in a company. I think after 2 years, you know more than enough about how the company operates and whether it is worth your time to stay or go. Staying 8 years when you know the company isn’t going anywhere due to poor leadership or bad loyalty incentives. Many companies offer RSUs to incentivize people to stay. Without that, there is literally no reason to stay except a false sense of comfort/familiarity. I don’t think you can have satisfaction of staying in a job without guarantees that your job is safe for 8-10 years. For example: a contract that lasts 8 years. I personally endured 3 years at a toxic hell hole to save the resume. If I had to count down to 8 years, I’d probably have jumped off a bridge. That company didn’t reward loyalty either so many of the longest serving employees were leaving too (including people who had been there for 10+ years since it’s inception). The turnover of the place is often a better indicator of whether a place is worth staying at rather than arbitrary number of years like 3 or 8.

i feel the same man. i just want to beep boop type code, do my stories, deploy/submit the project. There's so many meetings, emails, and just general politics that fucking suck to deal with and take up so much time. Most of them have no impact on the deliverables so they feel like a drain to me. hate it.

I had this realization early on as well. When I was a kid, I wanted to do nothing but be a studio drummer. I was good. Real good. And I had no interest in anything else. I slowly learned though that the most important aspect of succeeding a musician was mastering the abilityto deal with people - other musicians no less, which is the WORST... but thats another story. Then I learned I'd have to master tuning my drums, reading music, interpreting the desires of other people, sound engineering to work with the sound guys, stage freight, body conditioning (bc you get tired after long sessions), and an endless number of other things. The reality I found is that no matter what you do, if you want to be of VALUE (and thats the point of any job), then you unfortunately have to engage with and master a lot of things that feel tangential to what you really want to do. Not one thing in this world can be done in a vacuum. Sucks.

@@simpleandsuccessThanks so much for the reply. That really puts things in perspective. I guess we just need to do what we need to do to put bread on the table, and try to enjoy life as much as we can without burning out.

@@yura37meetings for the sake of meetings. Justifying estimates or extensions. A button isn’t just a fucking button sometimes lol.

Lol, we're all the same in this thread. I also played drums for the love of it, then found out how difficult and awful it was to work with other "professional" musicians. I'm also at about 5 years in dev experience, and struggling with dealing with all of the people hiding in corporate hierarchy that are less than worthless and only serve to make my job harder by not contributing and sometimes actively sandbagging or talking behind everyone's back because they don't have any real skills and are insecure. It's exhausting to deal with those people in the corporate environment. But also, I have worked a job in this industry where most of my coworkers were on top of things, and management cared about our ideas and was non-intrusive and the company itself was built on good values. This was a smaller consulting company, ~100 people, so just saying that a good company and work environment exists, you just have to work and look hard for it.

27 year in myself. I agree, the ability to learn is key! And the drive to figure things out will take us far.

Yes, the trick is to resist the fatigue

That’s what I’ve been doing since 12 and it’s the only thing that works.

That 20 year shelf life prediction is nothing more than wild speculation.

If you are talking about AI here, that's going to be again another tool on our belt. Yeah, probably junior developer positions as we know it will disappear. We will be mostly reviewing pull requests generated by machines from a couple years from now, telling those agents what they did wrong and how we want those to be rewritten differently. As much as the current speed of evolution is insane, I think it's still reasonable to think that AI advancements will slow down eventually, as we hit some kind of barrier either with hardware scalability or through the limitation of the current models.

@@IstvanNagy86 Honestly, if that's what becomes of software engineering, I'd have zero interest in continuing in the field. I suspect many or even most engineers would feel the same way. I'm not saying that my feelings or emotions are an argument against the AI train, just wanted to vent. I do agree that AI advancements will slow or even halt, if only because the training data will dry up. AIs will be training on content that was generated by AIs. The well will be poisoned. Related to that, I am doing my part by removing my "private" content from places like GitHub into self-hosted so that my content cannot be used to train AI. I'd encourage others to do the same.

​@@IstvanNagy86download the models and figure out their capabilities and limitations. Smaug 34b runs with speed on a 4090, but there isn't enough vram to max out its 200,000 token context limit. Specialist AIs need to be made to be practical by paring down the training set to the bare minimum. As it is, a line of code can be 15 tokens or more. 50k lines of code would need a 750k context size for the entire project to be considered at once. Most local llms do 2k-8k. A workaround is LSTM and persistent storage. The future is weird. I'm currently learning what it can do with deliberate practice. I got a 5000 word short story and a critique in about 3 minutes. It's good with prose, so it may be able to assist with marketing and documentation already.

AI will enable us to orchestrate extremely specific, highly efficient, and very stable applications for our particular business focus. Those applications can be enormous, but the AI will give us the ability to step way beyond our current abilities. Yes, there will probably be very little front-end web work in a few years. But those of us that have specialized industries will be able to accomplish amazing things while still staying in our small and affordable teams. I'm not sure I would advocate for a whole generation to get into programming at this point, but I think a small number of extremely talented and dedicated individuals would still benefit from the career opportunities. That would pretty much place programming back at the level it was before.

Totally

help them in what way? genuinely curious

Great job. I think we overestimate how much people really are willing to reward us going above and beyond. I’m all for doing an excellent job. Anything beyond recognizable excellence has diminishing returns, at least in my experience.

I’ve been there too, about a year ago, just without the extra leave. It really helps to know when to stop so that you don’t get burned out and therefore keep your productivity up there, and in my case people were congratulating me and kept saying I do a good job but in the end that didn’t get materialised in the paycheck I think this is a pretty easy trap to fall into at the beginning, wanting to do more, learn more and impress your colleagues

Honestly, if you're working 8 hours a day, this is well beyond the point of diminishing returns. So unless you *really* love the process, go hiking, or hit the gym, or spend some more time with your family. Your brain, eyes, hands, back, heart, etc will thank you for it.

How much are you making? And how long did you go to school? And how much did your school cost you? And what city are you in? I feel like all that is relative

What kind of customers?

Me too.. currently freelancing but now i think every freelancers need to prepare for long term solutions

You want to find customers that - trust you 100%, - have significant budgets - in projects where you are the most skilled technology expert - in projects where you can learn and explore new techniques and technologies

I've been really, really wanting to do this. Just don't even know how to start. I'm tired of the corporate nonsense. I want to get in, do my job/project, and move on. But I don't want to work for a consulting company either, lol@@giuliogatto1955

I am in a similar position. I have been with small/startup companies for 20+ years and I struggle with the same issue. I'm now working for a consultancy and the jump was quite steep for me.

@@johanbasson7968 after 20+ years, do you consider yourself a computer scientist?

​​@@johanbasson79685 years into the career and the software lead in a start-up for the last 1 1/2 now. I know I enjoy my job now and all the "firsts" it brings, but I can't see myself doing the same thing in ten years. What were the things you lacked the most when you made the switch to consulting?

Bigger corps are worth experiencing.

@@johanbasson7968 somehow my comment got deleted... What was the hardest part for you switching from start-ups to consulting?

You're very welcome! It's a great job if you can go into it with the right expectations. Wish I had 27 years ago ;).

Glad it was helpful!

Thank you sir. 🙏

Several sprints ago I was given a story that was literally to design a new feature, make it robust, extensible etc. etc., so I did. I presented it to my team and got a lot of great feedback on it. Then of course there was a delay in implementing the feature because of other business needs, and by the time we got to it, my design was not even mentioned once by the manager. She gave implementing the feature to some new dev on the team and when I asked her if we were still going to use my design, she said “oh - I totally forgot You wrote that up.” I can certainly accept negative feedback, so if there was a problem with the design, or there was some conscious decision to go a different direction, that’s fine. But this just felt so dismissive, like the work I did didn’t mean anything, and ultimately, it didn’t. Lesson learned. Never get precious about anything at these places

@@luke5100 ooh I think I know that feel. Some jealous seniors had this habit of discrediting my stuff - one of their maneuvers was by timing its implementation in a similar way. I actually intervened by no longer submitting my big ticket work and ran away from the company. Now their product s*cks a*s because it's missing my stuff. That AAA-level game now has no matchmaking/queuing/team balancing and no +80% fps CPU optimizations. Good f riddance. I guess this is why so many games s*ck these days. Yeah I'm still angry I do not normally swear. Good thing I'm going the entrepreneur route now. I'd rather work alone.

Can I ask what do you specialize in? Programs ext? And did you work for a lot of company’s in your career? Or one long career at one company? How much do you make now? And what did you make early on?

I hope these do have some value for people in any tech role I just know my experience is still biased towards dev roles so I typically position it that way.

Thank you! People either love or hate the guitar.

Sounds fun to me

don't forget your hair will fall out!

Thank you!

Hey, that’s my story!! Even most dates are exact 😂

Welcome to the channel! Happy to see another industry vet here.

Welcome to the channel! Glad to have you.

Thanks for the feedback. Glad to hear this resonated with you too.

I'm always struggling to get the lighting just right. I use a "book light". Basically 2 pvc frames I built. One has a sheet on it. The other has a shower curtain. The light points at the frame with the sheet and bounces back through the shower curtain to have a similar effect as a window.

Thank you for the feedback and encouragement! Hey, I've made almost 160 videos and still haven't shared all the ways I've messed up - it's a long list. It's part of learning and being a human. At least you've got the self-awareness to know when it happens and then learn from it! That's more than your average developer. Hang in there. 👍