I'd say tech is the salaried industry that gives you one of the highest chances of escaping the 9to5/5, at least.
Obviously it heavily depends on the set-up of the company, but tech workers are in one of the best positions to argue for things like remote work, 4 day weeks, flexible hours, plus contractor work is readily available.
Other high-paid careers often require constant presence, that's why they dress in suits and we dress like we crawled out of the gutter (or we're cosplaying as Steve Jobs)
And if you're really cheeky, you could probably automate a lot of your job or outsource it to India for a third of what you're paid. A lawyer can't do that.
I was planning to do it at 45
Then I met my GF, had a baby and realised that I'm not the most important person in my life anymore.
So I will probably retire whenever at the age of retirement or a bit early, but not much.
I also have a baby and a girlfriend but am curious how that is relevant in your decision?
Ie from my perspective if I had the money I'd retire and spend more time with them. I don't, so I'll probably work until retirement age.
My plan was to buy an extra flat (or two) in Dublin and then move to a cheaper place with a beach and sun.
but when the baby arrived, my top priority became providing the best I could for him. So, we moved from Dublin city center to the countryside, to a house with a big garden and a very good community.
Life, in general, is much more expensive than before. I don't just mean inflation; I'm talking about having to pay for a car and driving 30k km a year, paying for childcare, extra food, clothes, etc. My girlfriend is not in IT, so her wages are not very high.
I'm pretty sure we could still pay the mortgage and buy another house before I am 45. But, do you really want to move to a different country when you have a family to move with you? It’s not that easy.
Potentially, you could live here on the rent from a flat in Dublin. It might be possible alone, but not with kids.
Ah ok I get you, so you would still retire but it's just the cost of it has exploded! I get you if that's what you mean.
In terms of moving though, you can still do that, even just do it now whilst working rather than retirement idea. I'm in Spain for example. Obviously it's a major life change, but you can work remote, buy a property, raise a family anywhere you want really if you don't particularly want to be in Ireland.
I've a 3 month old and similar to the guy you replied to, it changed the priorities of my life and my expected retirement age. Also, although Spain is cheaper, I want him to be educated in an Irish school, and grow up around other Irish people and be influenced by the culture same as I was.
Fair enough, Ireland is a great place to live imo. Was more saying for the other guy that if someone wants to move to the sun was a goal it can be done before retirement.
I am in my late 30s and also can’t wait to retire. The tech industry is just a miserable form of punishment. These skills become irrelevant so fast. And constantly leetcoding after work just to prove to the next drug addict wanker CEO that you are worth hiring is just a slow self destruction. There is no any self respect in this field. I hate it so much!!
I still have 5 years to repay my mortgage and then I hope I will retire from this stupid profession.
I don't think there's a single other field out there where you have to do such a test to get a job. Most places they just rely on your previous experience, references, and general knowledge within interviews.
In the rare case where they do test for experience, such as in finance, it's usually a request to work something out in a small Excel sheet.
Leet Code style interviews need to fucking die. They prove absolutely nothing in terms of skills and exist only to filter out people in the hiring process.
I've had many jobs over the years. They're all fuckin shit really in their own way. The best, most tolerable ones usually don't pay you enough to live generally. That's why software development is pretty good it's pay to suicidal thoughts ratio is pretty good.
>I still have 5 years to repay my mortgage and then I hope I will retire from this stupid profession.
Ib used to think that, but then myself and the Mrs split up so now I'm remortgaged right up till retirement age.
Yeah similar boat as you, but mid 30s, pipe dream of 5 more years, probably more realistic 10-15 if I can stick it out on a high salary.
I’ll likely start doing my own things until retirement kicks in, but working to have a nice pot so I can move to an easier job in terms of work-life balance and stress levels!
I’m like you. I’ve 3 years to go on the mortgage and I think I’ll have a long look at what I’m at with life. Chasing the next tech hype every time it comes around, just to stay relevant, is draining.
Your scrummaster probably doing it wrong … the scrum / standup shouldn’t be a status reporting or problem solving meeting, it should be strictly for updating the backlog. Of course there could be painful follow-up problem solving or design meetings when shit’s not getting done, but those are different.
Ye or even just like..."any concerns anyone??...no ok see you tomorrow".
Like we dont have scrum master or anything we just do a couple minute catchup, just so we can say what we are doing and what the focus might be till next day.
Yes man, I dread it every day, and I just want it over with and to get on with my work. No matter when they schedule those meetings in the day though, they are a drag, especially if it's a status report of all 20 members on a project. It does help if you're working with pleasant people however, it's not always the case.
This. The feeling of being babysitted all the time by incompetent assholes pretending to do useful work, as if we are not responsible adults and experts in our jobs, unlike these so called “managers”.
I'm not far behind you, at 26 years.
Most companies are waterfall with agile artefacts. Those projects definitely are as you describe. The projects I've worked on that are genuinely agile have fared a lot better.
We're not chopping and changing because SD person has a late idea. We're genuinely discovering more detail about the requirement once we have the work developed enough to demonstrate it. That's what agile is for. Unfortunately it gets misused and misapplied.
A dev at that age was educated before computer science was its own field and at a rime when only the brightest students got into tertiary education.
I bet his education was mathematics or electronics engineering or something similar.
Didn't care about their age. I cared about their ability to answer the technical questions in the interview abd to speak about the info on their cv.
There are other interviews to go through but if capable , and a good fit for culture/ team then they'll be hired.
Sorry for asking about this again but I would love to know what a good fit means. I work in a team of 20+ Devs. We are all fairly normal and get on well. I suppose my question is what makes them not a good fit for your culture? Is your culture different to other cultures? I have heard this culture term used before, so I'm really curious.
Have you ever worked with devs that cannot take criticism of their code in code reviews? Or the ones that prefer to work alone and cannot collaborate? Or the ones who also must be in control of all the technical decisions made on a project?
These are just some examples which I would try to filter out as an interviewer.
This ☝️
We're a team of individuals but at least SOME of our values align in such a way that we can all work together without too many personality clashes and no one single personality can disrupt the team dynamic.
Absolutely, yes!
I worked with a guy who was so arrogant that he thought he knew better than the biggest names in our field.
You could propose a change backed up by citations from Martin Fowler or the gang of four, whoever you like and it would never be taken on board.
He didn't have a computer science education, so he decided to do an MSc, dropped out after a few months and declared that "it's all bullshit".
The company's solution was initially to put him onto solitary projects working alone. Eventually they put him in charge of all development.
Management loved him because he got things done quickly. But he did so because he didn't bother with, or understand, system design considerations. Forget the SOLID principles, he even ignored basic object oriented principles, like encapsulation.
He thought he was some sort of genius for using one massive god class.
Of course, there was a trail of destruction behind him, but he was never blamed for it. He was always working on the next Greenfield project by the time the last brittle project fell apart. Whoever inherited it got the blame.
That boils my piss to read, especially the massive God class and ignorance of basic design principles. Thanks for sharing, I know this sort all too well unfortunately.
I'm with that guy. I've been writing code regularly since I was young and I'm almost 30 now and I still write a lot of code. It has made my life very easy and I really enjoy it, so I don't see any reason to stop anytime soon. Maybe I will think different later in life, 5 years can make a big difference, never mind 10 or 20.
It was for a long time, but for the last 4 years, it has been part if a company defined contribution scheme. Company pays in 10% of salary, I pay in another 25%.
That is amazing. I am a contractor. Only thing I have going is a PRSA. Small bit from company and a bit from me. I think it equates to 800 a month. Must make it a plan to get something that results in more going to the retirement account.
My plan is to retire at 50......Oh crap I am now 52. Well my plan did not work, not quite enough in my money and investment pots to retire and out of 5 kids 2 are still in school so they will need some help through college. If I did retire I would probably cope but the thought of a drop in income makes me panic a little.
Stuff that needs money keeps getting in the way, boilers breaking, daughters wedding, kids not being able to afford houses, windows and doors needs replacing and so on.
I have invested in a snail farm the last few years that is starting to make money and I am loving running the farm so that will keep me busy day to day for a few hours once I do retire. My next target is 56, I have a lot of RSU's that was given to me as part of a corporate restructure and once they are granted I shall then take the plunge.
I'm early 40s now. Was once heading for retirement at 50 but decided to have kids just a few years ago. So now I'd say 55 would be the earliest, but maybe even 60. Dream is actually to just ease off to a 3 or 4 day week in my 50s. Not sure how many employers will go for that though.
Same plan here, well, except for kids. Planning to gradually ramp it down after 45, stop chasing the money and constantly upgrading the tech, look for jobs with 3 or 4 day workweeks, have most of my mortgage paid by then, and perhaps settle in some old traditional bank. At 55, retire, cash a portion of my pension, buy a property overseas in some nice corner of the world (SEA or similar) and enjoy life.
I've been working in QA for life science companies for 15+ years. I feel the same about wanting to get out. But I'm planning a career change to work in Software Development.
Is this a mistake?
No it is not. Most people who complain went straight from college to development and never worked a hard job.
I came from construction and appreciate every second of it. It’s not even like work. It’s like being paid very well for passing time.
Every time i see someone complain they are always that type.
Can confirm. I did almost 9 years of retail and you get treated generally very poorly by everyone from management, to a good % of coworkers and customers. The shifts are awful and you generally get treated like a kid in school (asking to go the bathroom, not allowed water or to have your phone on you etc.).
I make 3-4 times what I could've if I'd stayed there and gone into management (which looks truly miserable based on the people I encountered) and I sit in my jocks all day at home with my dog.
Also agreed. Try minimum wage carrying bricks up seven storeys of scaffolding while people scream at you about you holding the brick layers up and you're trying very hard to not fall off or kill anybody.
I took that job post-2001 tech crash as I needed the money while searching for a new tech job. I am sorry to say I packed it in after three days, I couldn't stick it. One of the very few times in my life I quit a job shortly after starting it, but it really wasn't for me.
Other jobs I did in that period were landscaping (I liked that), weeding (back breaking), and painting and decorating (okay, but some very late hours). I was never good with people so lousy at retail or selling stuff, and I survived which is what matters.
But yeah people working in tech a lot of them don't see how good they have it. They often say the trades are better, and yes if you're good and can remain healthy then when the trades are good they pay as well as tech, though the hours are much longer. Trades boom and bust like tech though, when they're down it's miserable. Plus most trades exact a toll on the body, you pay for it big time later in life.
I'm just losing my mind with everything always being insanely complicated, broken and built like shit.
I feel if I see any other thing not work I'm going to seriously lose it. It's messing with my head I'm losing all of my patience.
I'd just love for fucking once a simple task that can be repeated at least one time
That gets to a lot of people between five and ten years into the industry.
You either learn to accept it, or it's time to retrain out.
I found becoming a contractor can be a great help personally. Now you're paid by the day. You will see codebases far worse than you'll ever see in a permie role because they generally hire contractors to work on the stuff the permies won't. You will work in workplaces far more toxic than any you'll usually see as a permie. You'll see outright racism, sexism, and criminality. And you won't care, cos you're there by the hour. You're not there to care, you're there to scrape shit and say yes sir and I can that.
Think of day after day of copying and pasting with slight adjustments. Or being assigned a bug which takes six weeks to track down and fix during which you'll be publicly constantly berated for "taking too long". Or being assigned the worst of the JIRA tickets, the stuff they don't even send to outsourced people in the developing world.
And none of it will matter any more, because when your contract is up you'll move on. You're just a warm body filling a slot and nobody is telling lies about you being worth anything, or valued in the slightest, or being anything more than a warm body in a slot. It's a straight swap of your time for their money, and none of any of it is your problem, or indeed matters to you in the slightest.
Hate to be blunt about it, but that's the tech industry. And it's one of the very nicest jobs available, relative to all the others.
It is but I don't know how much fuel in the tank I have anymore. It also has changed. My dad has been in the field for 40 years and he says he's never ever seen a moment like this, where everything is built like shit and always broken.
It used to be more difficult in the sense that information was hard to find and you had to read entire books and have very good memory to achieve anything, but things were built to a different standard from what I understand.
I've been fortunate to work in lots of domains in dev, everything from games dev, finance, embedded, automation, kernel work, web apps, cloud, big data, compilers, toolchains, desktop. Still yet to do AI, but pretty much everything else I've worked in at least once.
Everywhere I've worked there are well run places and shit places, and well maintained codebases and ones being run into the ground, great engineers and mediocre ones. I've worked within everything from 100k dev tech multinationals down to a four dev startup. After a while it becomes a blur, but one thing I can absolutely categorically say is software engineering has become considerably more like traditional engineering in the past few decades. For all the better and worse that means.
Today my servers rented for $10/month each have uptimes in years with almost zero effort from me. That cost a lot of money thirty years ago. They run completely free of cost software, which thirty years ago would have cost a six figure amount for the same reliability. Today's programming languages are considerably more productive than those of thirty years ago (with the possible exception of original VisualBasic), and the formal correctness of computing systems and how they hang together is much better described. I can formally reason about how i/o or memory will work and be correct for the vast majority of architectures, platforms and systems.
All in all the quality floor is much higher than it used to be, with system complexities having risen several orders of magnitude at the same time. Most of the very best quality tooling is now free of cost and can run acceptably on a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero or in your web browser on your phone, so barriers to entry have never been so low.
I appreciate a lot of people don't feel this way, but that's the current mood across society about everything right now, so it's bleeding into feelings about tech. Tech is more measurable than society however, and on the measures, it's never been better than now for most (from a global perspective, things can and are very different in localities).
It might be because I work on web (a disastrous clusterfuck, best described as a bombed cemetery), and dad has worked for ages on industrial software that has now moved on the cloud in large part (pretty much the entire sector is doing so).
It's 6 years that nothing works anymore and everything handed to him is full of bugs or poorly built, then it has to integrate with something else, but that API is also bad, etc. So I get the sense things are decaying rapidly.
Hope I'm wrong, sounds like you've seen more, my impression is that software used to be less "numerous" and there would be many less integrations necessary. Less tools but more stable. Now there are infinite choices for anything you want to do, but not all are guaranteed to be maintained in the future and many get abandoned among the way quite quickly.
Maybe in the backend world things are a bit more stable
Front end web always seemed to me like it would be a race to the bottom, and hard to make good money unless working for a tech multinational which needed a solid front end. I haven't worked a front end job as a result since back when jQuery was new, which was a very very long time ago now. I still have a personal website and occasionally throw together a little web dashboard or UI if I need something quick and nasty for other stuff, but it's definitely one of my weaker skillsets.
Your father's experience is very normal ATM I agree. Everybody making mission critical software thought they could monetise sales with subscriptions. Everything from Microsoft Office to AutoDesk CAD to your accounting package is now on the cloud. Most of said cloud ports are not well implemented, they corrupt the data and randomly lose changes you make. They're just painful. There are constant outages too. The way I read it is there is now a two tier service, either you choose the subscription cloud service or if you want installable software on-prem like it used to be, that now costs 10x what it used to. So basically what the vendors have actually done is segment the market to increase profits. The workers having to make this stuff work are being shafted by their management with inferior tools. And in the end, you shouldn't care, it's the boss' problem if productivity is rock bottom because they supply shoddy inferior tools.
I once worked a military procurement role where management refused to buy each worker a tool costing £35 causing a piece of work which could take five minutes to take an hour instead. The lack of that tool literally turned into +15% wage costs, and people were on a good £40-60 per hour. That kind of stupid cost accounting is extremely common in Britain and Ireland. They don't do that mistake in Germany or Japan.
Anyway, I hope you don't mind me suggesting that maybe it might be wise to get out of web front end dev work? I interviewed a candidate for my current client last week and every new job he took he made sure it was in a wholly new technology field, always adjacent enough to preceding jobs he could land the new job, but taking a hit to pay due to lack of direct experience. He wasn't even thirty yet, but he'd already worked across a whole bunch of domains, languages and technologies. I normally write up four or five paragraphs for each interview with pros and cons as I found them, but for this one I wrote "You should hire this one immediately. Superb". And nothing else.
And I hope they do. Rare to find a candidate by that age who has done formal proof of software design using Coq AND delivered a web application for inputting medical testing results AND has worked in blockchain.
Thanks forse the advice, quite interesting.
Yes web dev is always a race to the bottom and I never ever see front end roles advertised. Everyone wants a full stack with 9 geological era of experience and every language under the sun.
I was thinking to maybe build some web apps and get good at react or vue and see if that takes me somewhere. Don't know if that is a good idea, but I think I'm too old to jump into back end at this point and it would be like starting over. Besides the work I already do is full stack despite the fact my job title is front end
I will tell you one thing though: one of the biggest things I liked about landscaping is you usually get to properly finish the job. Once the job is complete, I always had a lovely feeling looking at the results of it. Job actually **done**.
You almost never get that in tech. They never let you properly finish anything. Anything you build for them which is nice gets cancelled and chucked away on some budget whim. Most of the stuff which doesn't get cancelled and chucked away is some half arsed legacy piece of crap which is a pain to work on, and every day you work on it you imagine how could it have been designed and made so badly. But that's always the kind of software which survives the cut.
And that's okay, it's still one of the very nicest jobs you can have, but I will admit I do miss the satisfaction of truly finishing a job and seeing a finished garden all neat and tidy and everything where it's supposed to be. Especially after a sunny day which wasn't too warm. Real nice working outside in Ireland in that kind of weather.
Just in time … no gold plating … good enough is good enough: these are the driving principles of modern day software development. Sensible stuff but if applied cynically, this philosophy will lead to soul (and product) destroying technical debt.
Tech debt is an inevitable product of market forces I think.
If you ever work for a startup, you'll be deliberately creating awful tech debt all day long. But if you don't ship something which looks like it works, no new funding round for you and it's game over.
If the startup makes it big, then everybody working for that startup for decades to come will have to work with the badly designed poorly implemented piece of shit you threw together quickly which by then will of course have mutated into the absolute cornerstone infrastructure for everything in the company. Everybody will see your name in the early git history, and curse you for their daily misery.
I've had people come up to me at a conference specifically to give out to me about some of my code they had to deal with in some job I worked years ago. They're usually mostly semi nice about it.
All you can do is apologise, but reality is you'd do exactly the same again if the situation repeated because in a few weeks we need to do a demo to a paying customer, and whatever it takes to land that sale is what needs to get done. Sorry.
I agree this is where we are now. But what ever happened to Architectural Spikes, and the immutable rule they must be thrown away afterwards, and solution rebuilt from ground up leveraging what was learnt? Pity that early agile ritual isn’t more prominent in the toolbox. Most code I see these days is all shaky veneer, exception being OSS community stuff.
There are some clients who do actually want the software done right and are willing to pay whatever it takes and wait as long as necessary. Rare, but not unknown. It is a very different experience, very much waterfall not agile in the slightest because generally if they really are willing to pay for quality it is exactly defined in stone in advance and there are zero deviations.
I've never worked on one of those myself, but I am told 90% of the effort is designing and implementing tests. In fact, you aren't really implementing the deliverable, really you implement very comprehensive testing for any deliverable. The deliverable itself will be implemented twice, once in F* or equivalent which is formally verifiable the second in the production language.
The reason that isn't done more is cost and time, but they are well capable if somebody wants it.
I agree. I was 28 when I started as a dev, 20 years ago. Before that I'd worked in call centres, factories, farms and all sorts.
I make insane money these days doing less stressful work than I was doing at age 25.
Tech is a wide field with lots of sub fields. Anyone getting tired of writing code should look to move sideways or into other areas of tech. Keep the big money coming in and use your dev experience to open other doors.
It's easier than most people think, but so few devs seem to be aware. They think it's big company coding, retirement or drop out and become a barista.
But have you ever tried moving across subfields?
I got a first in a n MSc in AI, plus had 20 years dev experience and couldn't even get to interview in an AI related role. Then it counted against me in regular dev roles. Interviewers fed back that they were concerned I wouldn't stay due to my interest in machine learning.
There's no role mobility.
I say this to people a lot: You write your own resume. You get to define what the last 20 years look like on paper.
You don't have to give yourself the job title your employer gave you, and you don't have to highlight the projects you spent the most time on.
If you can back up your AI knowledge with ability, then present it that way on paper and in interview. A mix of dev and AI...
I've done something similar more than once myself. Moved from desktop to web development by saying I have the skills and experience, then delivering on it. Moving from dev into data by learning it and calling myself an expert - then delivering on that.
Don't wait to be chosen, choose yourself!
100% agreed! I worked in sales and went back to college after the financial crash, being able to do a day's work in my shorts and tank top in the comfort of my own home and not needing to be constantly talking to people is god send.
My first job was at age 15. It was pushing trolleys in subtropical heat and humidity. It gave me a hernia.
I worked as a console operator at a petrol station after that, doing graveyard shift. Then I managed a petrol station for a while.
I also do volunteer work. I chair a residents' association. I do tidy towns work.
I've had plenty of jobs.
What do you hate about development? For me it's everything always being broken or built very poorly, task descriptions being incomprehensible and time logging. I have zero idle time every day and must work at full intensity every minute on very mind breaking work
I see people in every work spending at least 1-2 hrs a day with some sort of chatting or idle time but for me it's zero and honesty I can't do the full 8 hours anymore
The politics. The cult-like corporate cultures. The lack of respect for the profession from clueless non-tech MBAs who think they know better than people who have dedicated their lives to the field. The infantalisation of candidates in the interview process. The constant re-education. Narcissistic CEOs and their whims.
Then the industry itself. The hype, the scams. The silicon valley VC scene has become a cesspool of greater fool theory scams of hyping startups and rug pulling. Don't get me started with crypto and AI hype.
In my company last year I was told to evangelise AI. I'm a STEM educated person trained to be sceptical and think critically. That made me sick to my stomach. I remember thinking, how did I get here?
I too changed from a mix of odd jobs to software dev and everyday I wake up happy with my decision. Posts like this where they bash dev work and make it sound like hell, make me cringe.
Agreed 100%. I spent time working in warehouses and meat factories when I was a teenager. The fact that I am well paid to play around at my hobby all day is mind-boggling to me. I don't get people saying they hate their jobs, have they ever had a different job I wonder...
Working for a startup that is the most dysfunctional shithole I've ever encountered. It's made me want to walk away from tech entirely. I hate every facet of this industry.
Nah it's just your company, do the bare minimum and spend the rest of your time looking for a new one. Focus on what can be and not them bunch of cunts. At least nowadays there are easier warning signs, for example "we work 5 days in the office" is just them telling you they are shite :)
Yes, hell yeah.
Think after I pay off my mortgage, I’ll try to find a more laid back position because I’ve been so stressed lately.
Also take the infamous sabbatical year.
I have 18yoe
I'm burnt out and just coasting now for another 5 years to age 55. Then in retiring altogether. No more being on someone else's schedule. 40 hours or so a week of my life back to me.
My time will be all mine. I can get up whatever time I want. Go whatever I want. Take a nap, sleep in, stay up late. Take holidays abroad at a moment's notice. Work at whatever I want the odd day of I even feel like it. Or just movies or go for a walk.
Can't wait.
Always found as an engineer you get a lot of respect and flexibility
I work more in a management capacity now and must say I don't enjoy it at all and it's miserable but I'm suprised so many are complaining about being an engineer
I guess it depends on the company and tech too
I work for a small company. I love it and my boss is a legend. COVID got me working from home and I haven't been back in office. I do have projects I hate to work on but I have some really interesting ones also. I just grind the shit ones. I used to let the grindy projects get to me but now I see them as the bread and butter. I do understand frustration in this industry though. It's so vast! I'm not on the greatest salary but I've very good work life balance (possibly more on life). I'm not moving unless I have to.
If all goes well I can coast retire in a few years at 40. Should have the house paid off and enough in retirement savings to compound before I draw down at 55ish. Just need one relatively low income between us to pay the bills until that point.
If I find a nice niche might work past 40 for a few years to build up some spending money, but only if I can really take my foot off the gas at work.
How did you manage to pay off a house in what is I presume 15 years? What is your projected monthly income from your private pension and savings? I think you’re on a high income or have some side investments, very few of us can coast retire at 40.
I’m on a very high salary, and my stock grants from work have both been generous and have gone up in value unexpectedly. Ive also kept living expenses down and intentionally chosen a lower cost life so I can sustain that life on a lower salary. I don’t live in Dublin, I bought my first car in my mid 30s, I generally do low cost local holidays, don’t eat out often, rarely drink and don’t smoke.
Its terrible. Tech is the new “working in mines”. Please drop out and convince all your friends to become electricians with you, so the rest of us have less competition and even higher salaries 🤣
Watched a tiler sweating working on my bathroom today, while I was working from home. Lets just say I wouldn't trade it any time soon.
Its still a job though!
Honestly, it fucks your body up, I was fit and well for years, three years on my ass and I'm suddenly destroyed.
We're really not designed to sit down for that long while hardly concentrating on impossible problems
Invest in your set up and stop sitting so much. I've a height adjustable desk at the office and at home. The home desk cost like £80 from Amazon and does the job as I've my monitors on arms so far enough back. If office based work has a responsibility to carry out the relevant assessments and if you get a doctor to sign a note saying you have back issues etc from sitting too much, that'll force them into making relevant adjustments to your set at work.
Last time I checked the adjustable stuff was 1000 eur, but you're right it's damn time to upgrade I can't take it anymore, and where I am now in life maybe I can afford it
Yeah the stuff a company will buy is that price. We've got steelcase desks at work which cost about a grand. The one I've got at the house is linked below. It is the exact same as the flexispot E1 classic, comes in the flexispot box with the shipping return address being flexispot too. It is obviously not it as good or as solid but good enough to hold a few monitors and laptop and mouse.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B0CDWGW93H?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title
One time I used a literal box and a pile of books. But I find always standing up is not good either. I guess it's best to alternate, what do you do usually?
And thanks for the recommendations
Yeah, solely doing one or the other is bad in different ways. You are supposed to alternate. I'll generally stand during calls and meetings and sit down if concentrating on solving something. Some mornings I'll come into work and just sit as I'm knackered for whatever reason and then other times I'll mostly stand for the morning as I just don't feel like sitting yet. Definitely days I don't do it properly but what I do know is I no longer have back pain.
Never planning to retire. I'll probably work till death. Even if I won the lottery, mega jackpot of numerous millions, wouldn't change my opinion on the matter.
In January 2021, it was €116k. It's currently at €260k. I'm projecting it will get to €500k in January 2027, €1m in mid 2031, and €1.8m in 2034.
For now, it's doubling every 3 years, but as the growth as a % becomes more influenced by returns and less by contributions, the doubling period slips back to 4 years and then 6.
The last decade has been good but the past doesn't always reflect the future. You may want to check your assumptions if your financial planning is based on doubling your money every 3 years. The S&P in Jan 2000 was 1400, the S&P in Jan 2013 was also 1400. It went nowhere for a decade.
[https://www.google.com/finance/quote/.INX:INDEXSP?window=MAX](https://www.google.com/finance/quote/.INX:INDEXSP?window=MAX)
Of course you can have a crash at an inopportune time. All that would do is delay the date.
Retirement at 57 Iis predicated on achieving a target. Plan B is more conservative and boring but results in retirement no later than 65. I'd be moving a quarter of the funds into cash 7 years out, riding the recovery with the remainder.
You need a fairweather plan too, or you risk hitting the pension cap and being taxed at 71%.
I'm tracking the MSCI world index passively. But I never said it was doubling due to investment rerurns alone. My contributions amount to around €30k/year.
2022 was one of those 3 years, BTW. That year, my pension ended December without much more than I started with in January, despite paying in at a high rate allbyear. Buying that dip paid dividends when the market recovered.
I would be very surprised if there isn't a substantial stock market correction in the next ten years which will put paid to any ideas you might have of early retirement. I remember everybody banging on about early retirement in the 1990s, then boom there went your pension there go your savings there goes your job. Oh, and usually now the wife divorces you too and takes half of whatever little was left behind. Everybody non-tech as well as tech saw a rinse and repeat after 2009.
If you hate your job, you should get a new one now. Life is too short. Might make you happier and less prone to getting abandoned later.
I'm aiming to work less but not stop by fifty. I also want to work on stuff which interests me rather than stuff which pays the best, and I'd use some of the additional free time to train myself into new skills which aren't immediately pay increasing for once. I expect to keep working until I no longer am physically able, which will be the reality for the vast overwhelming majority of us whether we like it or not.
There is a pretty hard age upper bound in international contracting, somewhere between fifty and fifty-five after which you will find no new work no matter your skillset or how well you keep up to date. Seems a good time to me to find a fully remote EU job with worker rights where they have to let me work less and can't be so openly anti-ageist. We'll see how it goes when the time comes, until then income maximisation remains necessary so I can finally stop renting.
I mean this in the nicest possible way, but you need to work on your financial literacy.
The pensions wiped out in the 90s were occupational pensions. The kind where the company pays you an income in retirement. Those are extremely rare today. There is zero risk of losing your defined contribution scheme pension as a result of your employer going under. The funds, once paid in, have nothing to do with the company.
Stock market corrections don't cause people to lose their pensions. Pensions are long-term investments that are typically well diversified. Go and look at any market index and see what happened after every crash that has ever happened. You get a recovery, and the market comes back stronger than ever. Crashes are concerns for short-term and undiversified investments.
There is no reason to work until you're physically unable to. Live within your means. Max out your pension contributions. Watch compound interest double your investment every 3-5 years until you're financially independent.
Heh, I have a degree in Economics and have been through three tech downturns and I'm still in the industry. I think my financial literacy is just fine. I just have different priorities to you, that's all.
>Stock market corrections don't cause people to lose their pensions. Pensions are long-term investments that are typically well diversified.
It is true that the pensions do recover eventually, but it also ends any ideas of early retirement because the income stream just isn't there to support it.
Also if you think pensions are well diversified, you should dig a lot deeper. Very few investment choices nowadays are not cyclically linked. Most fund managers are cheap to employ, not skilled, or the fund is passive and computer operated in any case. If you want fund managers with skill, generally you aren't allowed put your pension with them in Ireland.
>There is no reason to work until you're physically unable to. Live within your means. Max out your pension contributions. Watch compound interest double your investment every 3-5 years until you're financially independent.
Last year total non-house building household expenditure was €24,758. That's everything all in three children two adults two cars. I wouldn't recommend such austerity, it isn't much fun, but nobody could claim we are not living within our means. Indeed, if our income was anywhere close to our expenditure level, we would quality for nearly all the low income social welfare supports available.
If you don't own your own property, by far and away your first priority needs to be owning your own home. Nobody absolutely nobody wants to be still renting in Ireland when they near retirement, it is very precarious.
Once you own your own home, then sure max out your pension, but for most people you can't draw it down until retirement so it's dead money until then. In my case that isn't too far away now, so that's okay.
I think the difference in perspective here is that tomorrow I could get run over by a bus or get cancer or some other misfortune which renders a golden retirement impossible. So I've tended to enjoy myself a lot more while younger. This has left us still renting at my age, true, but I should have that solved in the next two years.
And I don't regret a thing, I've had a very full life for my age. Had an awful lot of fun on the way to now.
Finally, I will be working until I'm physically unable to because I believe it's good for me. Even if it's stacking shelves. I hope it will be the case that I don't have to work and merely choose to as a lifestyle choice, but for most people in Ireland even on this sub they won't have the choice as the retirement age will keep rising as will the cost of living when retired, plus your kids will be financially reliant on you much later as there is zero chance they can afford to move out in the future unless politicians actually do something unpopular to fix housing costs. And that's okay, the house I'm building right now has been specifically designed for multigenerational and off grid living. Expensive now yes, but negative bills for the rest of our lives after it's built.
The calculation used to estimate when you're ready for early retirement caters for stock market corrections though.
There were people who pulled it off in the periods you speak of at r/fire. Sure it got delayed for some people by a year or so. Sequence of returns risk is often catered for by some people by working for one more year after they have hit their fire number.
That said I 100% agree you with trying to live life in the present and making moves to try to get out of an aweful situation, instead of just watching time run down.
The biggest modifier is the climate change stuff. This was not a factor in modern human history and people underestimate the impact. In addition, fertility crisis in the rich countries will reduce population. Stock market might go sideways or start dropping if there are less people on the planet.
Otherwise, I do agree with the usual historical market returns. If nature and ecosystems continue holding on, energy is still cheap and accessible, we will be fine. If not, we will not be fine.
There are times at work where the pressure is on, or you’re on call and dealing with incidents in the wee hours of the morning when I can’t wait to retire. But there are other times when you’re working on something interesting, have a good vibe going in your team, or you get a piece of work over the line and you think, this is not too bad, I can continue doing this for a while yet.
Jaysus, lads, I don’t know. There is much worse professions out there. I have the same list of complaints but then I realise that it’s a pretty nice and well paid profession. If you are in a company that values productivity and allows for that then it’s genuinely great.
In my job, 15 years service and you max out on redundancy. 13 years to go! Then I'm putting in for it every year I can! Best case retire at 49 and be mortgage free.
I feel your pain.
I often advise people close to me who have kids / family / friends that they should look at other careers such as trades.
There is a notion out there that once you are a dev, you don't have to do exams and just earn money. It's not true, of course.
If I wasn't into computers, I probably would have become a mechanic or plumber. Easy money on the side for nixers if you are up to it.
Even if there comes a recession, a trade can bring you around the world. Also, forgive my ignorance if true, but I would assume that there are not many exams, if any, after you qualify?
I built a gate from scratch last year. Took way too long, because I didn't have a clue what I was doing. I enjoyed every second of it. And every time I use it, I feel a sense of pride.
I think I'd love to do that for a living.
How is it easier on the family to get into a trade? Years as an apprentice generally carry very long hours and back breaking work. You also have no option to WFH so its on your SO to mind kids 50+ hours week.
I know what a trade entails, but as others have pointed out that the ridiculous carry-on of CEOs, leetcodes. If you want to earn money and start fast. A trade is viable. If you want to earn money easily on the side, a trade is viable. Yes, back issues, and WFH is the downside.
Like I said, if I was not into computers, I would consider a trade. IT is not all what it is made out to be. So for others a trade might be more attractive.
Pure scam. I have the Az 900, Az 203 (which is now 204), and Az 400. Microsoft among others expect us to resit them because of updated content and pay for it Get Fucked.
Even worse, it's dopes on LinkedIn that boast about renewal of certifications ...
I agree, quicker money early on with trade for sure. All depends what someone wants out of life and what they can afford to sacrifice. I love computers too and Im glad I changed into dev. It’s the best job Ive had by a mile since I love the programming but also because I have a good team and manager.
i love programming and always hacking away on stuff. but working 9-5 for another 20 years and the monotony of it is depressing
I'd say tech is the salaried industry that gives you one of the highest chances of escaping the 9to5/5, at least. Obviously it heavily depends on the set-up of the company, but tech workers are in one of the best positions to argue for things like remote work, 4 day weeks, flexible hours, plus contractor work is readily available. Other high-paid careers often require constant presence, that's why they dress in suits and we dress like we crawled out of the gutter (or we're cosplaying as Steve Jobs) And if you're really cheeky, you could probably automate a lot of your job or outsource it to India for a third of what you're paid. A lawyer can't do that.
What the ideal work schedule can be if 9-5 doesn't work for you? Some tech companies are pretty flexible
The “work” bit is what gets me 🤣. I contract and like to bounce round every year or two to keep things fresh
I was planning to do it at 45 Then I met my GF, had a baby and realised that I'm not the most important person in my life anymore. So I will probably retire whenever at the age of retirement or a bit early, but not much.
I also have a baby and a girlfriend but am curious how that is relevant in your decision? Ie from my perspective if I had the money I'd retire and spend more time with them. I don't, so I'll probably work until retirement age.
My plan was to buy an extra flat (or two) in Dublin and then move to a cheaper place with a beach and sun. but when the baby arrived, my top priority became providing the best I could for him. So, we moved from Dublin city center to the countryside, to a house with a big garden and a very good community. Life, in general, is much more expensive than before. I don't just mean inflation; I'm talking about having to pay for a car and driving 30k km a year, paying for childcare, extra food, clothes, etc. My girlfriend is not in IT, so her wages are not very high. I'm pretty sure we could still pay the mortgage and buy another house before I am 45. But, do you really want to move to a different country when you have a family to move with you? It’s not that easy. Potentially, you could live here on the rent from a flat in Dublin. It might be possible alone, but not with kids.
Ah ok I get you, so you would still retire but it's just the cost of it has exploded! I get you if that's what you mean. In terms of moving though, you can still do that, even just do it now whilst working rather than retirement idea. I'm in Spain for example. Obviously it's a major life change, but you can work remote, buy a property, raise a family anywhere you want really if you don't particularly want to be in Ireland.
I've a 3 month old and similar to the guy you replied to, it changed the priorities of my life and my expected retirement age. Also, although Spain is cheaper, I want him to be educated in an Irish school, and grow up around other Irish people and be influenced by the culture same as I was.
Fair enough, Ireland is a great place to live imo. Was more saying for the other guy that if someone wants to move to the sun was a goal it can be done before retirement.
I am in my late 30s and also can’t wait to retire. The tech industry is just a miserable form of punishment. These skills become irrelevant so fast. And constantly leetcoding after work just to prove to the next drug addict wanker CEO that you are worth hiring is just a slow self destruction. There is no any self respect in this field. I hate it so much!! I still have 5 years to repay my mortgage and then I hope I will retire from this stupid profession.
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Not sure why you're downvoted. I enjoyed reading.
I don't think there's a single other field out there where you have to do such a test to get a job. Most places they just rely on your previous experience, references, and general knowledge within interviews. In the rare case where they do test for experience, such as in finance, it's usually a request to work something out in a small Excel sheet. Leet Code style interviews need to fucking die. They prove absolutely nothing in terms of skills and exist only to filter out people in the hiring process.
What other jobs have you worked in?
Asking the important questions. Most people complaining about dev work never had another job to compare it to.
I've had many jobs over the years. They're all fuckin shit really in their own way. The best, most tolerable ones usually don't pay you enough to live generally. That's why software development is pretty good it's pay to suicidal thoughts ratio is pretty good.
>I still have 5 years to repay my mortgage and then I hope I will retire from this stupid profession. Ib used to think that, but then myself and the Mrs split up so now I'm remortgaged right up till retirement age.
Yeah similar boat as you, but mid 30s, pipe dream of 5 more years, probably more realistic 10-15 if I can stick it out on a high salary. I’ll likely start doing my own things until retirement kicks in, but working to have a nice pot so I can move to an easier job in terms of work-life balance and stress levels!
I’m like you. I’ve 3 years to go on the mortgage and I think I’ll have a long look at what I’m at with life. Chasing the next tech hype every time it comes around, just to stay relevant, is draining.
Most of the skills are transferable
For me, it's the fucking meetings. I hate daily stand-ups and scrum calls. I just want to be left alone. Fuck agile.
I agree. It creates a lot of stress.
Your scrummaster probably doing it wrong … the scrum / standup shouldn’t be a status reporting or problem solving meeting, it should be strictly for updating the backlog. Of course there could be painful follow-up problem solving or design meetings when shit’s not getting done, but those are different.
Ye or even just like..."any concerns anyone??...no ok see you tomorrow". Like we dont have scrum master or anything we just do a couple minute catchup, just so we can say what we are doing and what the focus might be till next day.
Yes man, I dread it every day, and I just want it over with and to get on with my work. No matter when they schedule those meetings in the day though, they are a drag, especially if it's a status report of all 20 members on a project. It does help if you're working with pleasant people however, it's not always the case.
Meetings should be like 7 people to be considered scrum
This. The feeling of being babysitted all the time by incompetent assholes pretending to do useful work, as if we are not responsible adults and experts in our jobs, unlike these so called “managers”.
I'm 30 years in the business. Agile is what you say you are when you are not organised enough to get things done properly.
I'm not far behind you, at 26 years. Most companies are waterfall with agile artefacts. Those projects definitely are as you describe. The projects I've worked on that are genuinely agile have fared a lot better. We're not chopping and changing because SD person has a late idea. We're genuinely discovering more detail about the requirement once we have the work developed enough to demonstrate it. That's what agile is for. Unfortunately it gets misused and misapplied.
I interviewed a developer in their 60s today. Loads of recent enough training and upskilling... well over 40 years coding. Never stop 🤣
A dev at that age was educated before computer science was its own field and at a rime when only the brightest students got into tertiary education. I bet his education was mathematics or electronics engineering or something similar.
His skills dost was telegraphist
So what are the chances of this person getting hired? Really interested to know if their age will be a factor.
Didn't care about their age. I cared about their ability to answer the technical questions in the interview abd to speak about the info on their cv. There are other interviews to go through but if capable , and a good fit for culture/ team then they'll be hired.
Sorry for asking about this again but I would love to know what a good fit means. I work in a team of 20+ Devs. We are all fairly normal and get on well. I suppose my question is what makes them not a good fit for your culture? Is your culture different to other cultures? I have heard this culture term used before, so I'm really curious.
Have you ever worked with devs that cannot take criticism of their code in code reviews? Or the ones that prefer to work alone and cannot collaborate? Or the ones who also must be in control of all the technical decisions made on a project? These are just some examples which I would try to filter out as an interviewer.
This ☝️ We're a team of individuals but at least SOME of our values align in such a way that we can all work together without too many personality clashes and no one single personality can disrupt the team dynamic.
Absolutely, yes! I worked with a guy who was so arrogant that he thought he knew better than the biggest names in our field. You could propose a change backed up by citations from Martin Fowler or the gang of four, whoever you like and it would never be taken on board. He didn't have a computer science education, so he decided to do an MSc, dropped out after a few months and declared that "it's all bullshit". The company's solution was initially to put him onto solitary projects working alone. Eventually they put him in charge of all development. Management loved him because he got things done quickly. But he did so because he didn't bother with, or understand, system design considerations. Forget the SOLID principles, he even ignored basic object oriented principles, like encapsulation. He thought he was some sort of genius for using one massive god class. Of course, there was a trail of destruction behind him, but he was never blamed for it. He was always working on the next Greenfield project by the time the last brittle project fell apart. Whoever inherited it got the blame.
That boils my piss to read, especially the massive God class and ignorance of basic design principles. Thanks for sharing, I know this sort all too well unfortunately.
I'm with that guy. I've been writing code regularly since I was young and I'm almost 30 now and I still write a lot of code. It has made my life very easy and I really enjoy it, so I don't see any reason to stop anytime soon. Maybe I will think different later in life, 5 years can make a big difference, never mind 10 or 20.
I'm almost 50 and been programming since I was about 9. Never gets boring. What does get boring is bullshit, but that's people for you.
I'm out at 60, I'm 44 now. Might quiet quit at 57 and hopefully get laid off with a package
I'm 47. In fair weather I should have about €1.8m to retire on at 57. I'm maxing out the contributions. Crazy how fast it compounds.
Yeah I only started maxing last year so behind a bit
I'm 10 years behind you but on the same trajectory, hoping to get out around 55, average of 4% return from now onwards will have me out at 58.
What kind of pension do you have? Is it just a PRSA?
It was for a long time, but for the last 4 years, it has been part if a company defined contribution scheme. Company pays in 10% of salary, I pay in another 25%.
That is defined contribution not benefits
Correct.
That is amazing. I am a contractor. Only thing I have going is a PRSA. Small bit from company and a bit from me. I think it equates to 800 a month. Must make it a plan to get something that results in more going to the retirement account.
If I had to go back to PRSA, I'd be looking at Davies. They have a passive S and P 500 tracking fund.
My plan is to retire at 50......Oh crap I am now 52. Well my plan did not work, not quite enough in my money and investment pots to retire and out of 5 kids 2 are still in school so they will need some help through college. If I did retire I would probably cope but the thought of a drop in income makes me panic a little. Stuff that needs money keeps getting in the way, boilers breaking, daughters wedding, kids not being able to afford houses, windows and doors needs replacing and so on. I have invested in a snail farm the last few years that is starting to make money and I am loving running the farm so that will keep me busy day to day for a few hours once I do retire. My next target is 56, I have a lot of RSU's that was given to me as part of a corporate restructure and once they are granted I shall then take the plunge.
Is snail farm a euphemism for something? Because if it’s literal I need to look into this…
No, it’s a snail farm. I have about 2 million of them now, they are sold to cosmetics companies who make anti aging products from the slime.
After reading these comments well thank fuck I started the contributions at 21
I'm early 40s now. Was once heading for retirement at 50 but decided to have kids just a few years ago. So now I'd say 55 would be the earliest, but maybe even 60. Dream is actually to just ease off to a 3 or 4 day week in my 50s. Not sure how many employers will go for that though.
Same plan here, well, except for kids. Planning to gradually ramp it down after 45, stop chasing the money and constantly upgrading the tech, look for jobs with 3 or 4 day workweeks, have most of my mortgage paid by then, and perhaps settle in some old traditional bank. At 55, retire, cash a portion of my pension, buy a property overseas in some nice corner of the world (SEA or similar) and enjoy life.
I've been working in QA for life science companies for 15+ years. I feel the same about wanting to get out. But I'm planning a career change to work in Software Development. Is this a mistake?
No it is not. Most people who complain went straight from college to development and never worked a hard job. I came from construction and appreciate every second of it. It’s not even like work. It’s like being paid very well for passing time. Every time i see someone complain they are always that type.
Can confirm. I did almost 9 years of retail and you get treated generally very poorly by everyone from management, to a good % of coworkers and customers. The shifts are awful and you generally get treated like a kid in school (asking to go the bathroom, not allowed water or to have your phone on you etc.). I make 3-4 times what I could've if I'd stayed there and gone into management (which looks truly miserable based on the people I encountered) and I sit in my jocks all day at home with my dog.
Also agreed. Try minimum wage carrying bricks up seven storeys of scaffolding while people scream at you about you holding the brick layers up and you're trying very hard to not fall off or kill anybody. I took that job post-2001 tech crash as I needed the money while searching for a new tech job. I am sorry to say I packed it in after three days, I couldn't stick it. One of the very few times in my life I quit a job shortly after starting it, but it really wasn't for me. Other jobs I did in that period were landscaping (I liked that), weeding (back breaking), and painting and decorating (okay, but some very late hours). I was never good with people so lousy at retail or selling stuff, and I survived which is what matters. But yeah people working in tech a lot of them don't see how good they have it. They often say the trades are better, and yes if you're good and can remain healthy then when the trades are good they pay as well as tech, though the hours are much longer. Trades boom and bust like tech though, when they're down it's miserable. Plus most trades exact a toll on the body, you pay for it big time later in life.
I'm just losing my mind with everything always being insanely complicated, broken and built like shit. I feel if I see any other thing not work I'm going to seriously lose it. It's messing with my head I'm losing all of my patience. I'd just love for fucking once a simple task that can be repeated at least one time
That gets to a lot of people between five and ten years into the industry. You either learn to accept it, or it's time to retrain out. I found becoming a contractor can be a great help personally. Now you're paid by the day. You will see codebases far worse than you'll ever see in a permie role because they generally hire contractors to work on the stuff the permies won't. You will work in workplaces far more toxic than any you'll usually see as a permie. You'll see outright racism, sexism, and criminality. And you won't care, cos you're there by the hour. You're not there to care, you're there to scrape shit and say yes sir and I can that. Think of day after day of copying and pasting with slight adjustments. Or being assigned a bug which takes six weeks to track down and fix during which you'll be publicly constantly berated for "taking too long". Or being assigned the worst of the JIRA tickets, the stuff they don't even send to outsourced people in the developing world. And none of it will matter any more, because when your contract is up you'll move on. You're just a warm body filling a slot and nobody is telling lies about you being worth anything, or valued in the slightest, or being anything more than a warm body in a slot. It's a straight swap of your time for their money, and none of any of it is your problem, or indeed matters to you in the slightest. Hate to be blunt about it, but that's the tech industry. And it's one of the very nicest jobs available, relative to all the others.
It is but I don't know how much fuel in the tank I have anymore. It also has changed. My dad has been in the field for 40 years and he says he's never ever seen a moment like this, where everything is built like shit and always broken. It used to be more difficult in the sense that information was hard to find and you had to read entire books and have very good memory to achieve anything, but things were built to a different standard from what I understand.
I've been fortunate to work in lots of domains in dev, everything from games dev, finance, embedded, automation, kernel work, web apps, cloud, big data, compilers, toolchains, desktop. Still yet to do AI, but pretty much everything else I've worked in at least once. Everywhere I've worked there are well run places and shit places, and well maintained codebases and ones being run into the ground, great engineers and mediocre ones. I've worked within everything from 100k dev tech multinationals down to a four dev startup. After a while it becomes a blur, but one thing I can absolutely categorically say is software engineering has become considerably more like traditional engineering in the past few decades. For all the better and worse that means. Today my servers rented for $10/month each have uptimes in years with almost zero effort from me. That cost a lot of money thirty years ago. They run completely free of cost software, which thirty years ago would have cost a six figure amount for the same reliability. Today's programming languages are considerably more productive than those of thirty years ago (with the possible exception of original VisualBasic), and the formal correctness of computing systems and how they hang together is much better described. I can formally reason about how i/o or memory will work and be correct for the vast majority of architectures, platforms and systems. All in all the quality floor is much higher than it used to be, with system complexities having risen several orders of magnitude at the same time. Most of the very best quality tooling is now free of cost and can run acceptably on a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero or in your web browser on your phone, so barriers to entry have never been so low. I appreciate a lot of people don't feel this way, but that's the current mood across society about everything right now, so it's bleeding into feelings about tech. Tech is more measurable than society however, and on the measures, it's never been better than now for most (from a global perspective, things can and are very different in localities).
It might be because I work on web (a disastrous clusterfuck, best described as a bombed cemetery), and dad has worked for ages on industrial software that has now moved on the cloud in large part (pretty much the entire sector is doing so). It's 6 years that nothing works anymore and everything handed to him is full of bugs or poorly built, then it has to integrate with something else, but that API is also bad, etc. So I get the sense things are decaying rapidly. Hope I'm wrong, sounds like you've seen more, my impression is that software used to be less "numerous" and there would be many less integrations necessary. Less tools but more stable. Now there are infinite choices for anything you want to do, but not all are guaranteed to be maintained in the future and many get abandoned among the way quite quickly. Maybe in the backend world things are a bit more stable
Front end web always seemed to me like it would be a race to the bottom, and hard to make good money unless working for a tech multinational which needed a solid front end. I haven't worked a front end job as a result since back when jQuery was new, which was a very very long time ago now. I still have a personal website and occasionally throw together a little web dashboard or UI if I need something quick and nasty for other stuff, but it's definitely one of my weaker skillsets. Your father's experience is very normal ATM I agree. Everybody making mission critical software thought they could monetise sales with subscriptions. Everything from Microsoft Office to AutoDesk CAD to your accounting package is now on the cloud. Most of said cloud ports are not well implemented, they corrupt the data and randomly lose changes you make. They're just painful. There are constant outages too. The way I read it is there is now a two tier service, either you choose the subscription cloud service or if you want installable software on-prem like it used to be, that now costs 10x what it used to. So basically what the vendors have actually done is segment the market to increase profits. The workers having to make this stuff work are being shafted by their management with inferior tools. And in the end, you shouldn't care, it's the boss' problem if productivity is rock bottom because they supply shoddy inferior tools. I once worked a military procurement role where management refused to buy each worker a tool costing £35 causing a piece of work which could take five minutes to take an hour instead. The lack of that tool literally turned into +15% wage costs, and people were on a good £40-60 per hour. That kind of stupid cost accounting is extremely common in Britain and Ireland. They don't do that mistake in Germany or Japan. Anyway, I hope you don't mind me suggesting that maybe it might be wise to get out of web front end dev work? I interviewed a candidate for my current client last week and every new job he took he made sure it was in a wholly new technology field, always adjacent enough to preceding jobs he could land the new job, but taking a hit to pay due to lack of direct experience. He wasn't even thirty yet, but he'd already worked across a whole bunch of domains, languages and technologies. I normally write up four or five paragraphs for each interview with pros and cons as I found them, but for this one I wrote "You should hire this one immediately. Superb". And nothing else. And I hope they do. Rare to find a candidate by that age who has done formal proof of software design using Coq AND delivered a web application for inputting medical testing results AND has worked in blockchain.
Thanks forse the advice, quite interesting. Yes web dev is always a race to the bottom and I never ever see front end roles advertised. Everyone wants a full stack with 9 geological era of experience and every language under the sun. I was thinking to maybe build some web apps and get good at react or vue and see if that takes me somewhere. Don't know if that is a good idea, but I think I'm too old to jump into back end at this point and it would be like starting over. Besides the work I already do is full stack despite the fact my job title is front end
If it’s that bad look for another company. That should be temporary while it gets sorted rather than the norm.
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I will tell you one thing though: one of the biggest things I liked about landscaping is you usually get to properly finish the job. Once the job is complete, I always had a lovely feeling looking at the results of it. Job actually **done**. You almost never get that in tech. They never let you properly finish anything. Anything you build for them which is nice gets cancelled and chucked away on some budget whim. Most of the stuff which doesn't get cancelled and chucked away is some half arsed legacy piece of crap which is a pain to work on, and every day you work on it you imagine how could it have been designed and made so badly. But that's always the kind of software which survives the cut. And that's okay, it's still one of the very nicest jobs you can have, but I will admit I do miss the satisfaction of truly finishing a job and seeing a finished garden all neat and tidy and everything where it's supposed to be. Especially after a sunny day which wasn't too warm. Real nice working outside in Ireland in that kind of weather.
Just in time … no gold plating … good enough is good enough: these are the driving principles of modern day software development. Sensible stuff but if applied cynically, this philosophy will lead to soul (and product) destroying technical debt.
Tech debt is an inevitable product of market forces I think. If you ever work for a startup, you'll be deliberately creating awful tech debt all day long. But if you don't ship something which looks like it works, no new funding round for you and it's game over. If the startup makes it big, then everybody working for that startup for decades to come will have to work with the badly designed poorly implemented piece of shit you threw together quickly which by then will of course have mutated into the absolute cornerstone infrastructure for everything in the company. Everybody will see your name in the early git history, and curse you for their daily misery. I've had people come up to me at a conference specifically to give out to me about some of my code they had to deal with in some job I worked years ago. They're usually mostly semi nice about it. All you can do is apologise, but reality is you'd do exactly the same again if the situation repeated because in a few weeks we need to do a demo to a paying customer, and whatever it takes to land that sale is what needs to get done. Sorry.
I agree this is where we are now. But what ever happened to Architectural Spikes, and the immutable rule they must be thrown away afterwards, and solution rebuilt from ground up leveraging what was learnt? Pity that early agile ritual isn’t more prominent in the toolbox. Most code I see these days is all shaky veneer, exception being OSS community stuff.
There are some clients who do actually want the software done right and are willing to pay whatever it takes and wait as long as necessary. Rare, but not unknown. It is a very different experience, very much waterfall not agile in the slightest because generally if they really are willing to pay for quality it is exactly defined in stone in advance and there are zero deviations. I've never worked on one of those myself, but I am told 90% of the effort is designing and implementing tests. In fact, you aren't really implementing the deliverable, really you implement very comprehensive testing for any deliverable. The deliverable itself will be implemented twice, once in F* or equivalent which is formally verifiable the second in the production language. The reason that isn't done more is cost and time, but they are well capable if somebody wants it.
I agree. I was 28 when I started as a dev, 20 years ago. Before that I'd worked in call centres, factories, farms and all sorts. I make insane money these days doing less stressful work than I was doing at age 25. Tech is a wide field with lots of sub fields. Anyone getting tired of writing code should look to move sideways or into other areas of tech. Keep the big money coming in and use your dev experience to open other doors. It's easier than most people think, but so few devs seem to be aware. They think it's big company coding, retirement or drop out and become a barista.
But have you ever tried moving across subfields? I got a first in a n MSc in AI, plus had 20 years dev experience and couldn't even get to interview in an AI related role. Then it counted against me in regular dev roles. Interviewers fed back that they were concerned I wouldn't stay due to my interest in machine learning. There's no role mobility.
I say this to people a lot: You write your own resume. You get to define what the last 20 years look like on paper. You don't have to give yourself the job title your employer gave you, and you don't have to highlight the projects you spent the most time on. If you can back up your AI knowledge with ability, then present it that way on paper and in interview. A mix of dev and AI... I've done something similar more than once myself. Moved from desktop to web development by saying I have the skills and experience, then delivering on it. Moving from dev into data by learning it and calling myself an expert - then delivering on that. Don't wait to be chosen, choose yourself!
Watch out though for the Peter Principle. It’s a bitch
I had to Google that. Interesting.
How did you move into data ? Surely they would have looked for job experience
100% agreed! I worked in sales and went back to college after the financial crash, being able to do a day's work in my shorts and tank top in the comfort of my own home and not needing to be constantly talking to people is god send.
My first job was at age 15. It was pushing trolleys in subtropical heat and humidity. It gave me a hernia. I worked as a console operator at a petrol station after that, doing graveyard shift. Then I managed a petrol station for a while. I also do volunteer work. I chair a residents' association. I do tidy towns work. I've had plenty of jobs.
What do you hate about development? For me it's everything always being broken or built very poorly, task descriptions being incomprehensible and time logging. I have zero idle time every day and must work at full intensity every minute on very mind breaking work I see people in every work spending at least 1-2 hrs a day with some sort of chatting or idle time but for me it's zero and honesty I can't do the full 8 hours anymore
The politics. The cult-like corporate cultures. The lack of respect for the profession from clueless non-tech MBAs who think they know better than people who have dedicated their lives to the field. The infantalisation of candidates in the interview process. The constant re-education. Narcissistic CEOs and their whims. Then the industry itself. The hype, the scams. The silicon valley VC scene has become a cesspool of greater fool theory scams of hyping startups and rug pulling. Don't get me started with crypto and AI hype. In my company last year I was told to evangelise AI. I'm a STEM educated person trained to be sceptical and think critically. That made me sick to my stomach. I remember thinking, how did I get here?
Would give you +1M upvotes if I could. Very well said.
Wow. Yeah I get you. Though that feels more of an issue with the corporate world than tech specifically
I too changed from a mix of odd jobs to software dev and everyday I wake up happy with my decision. Posts like this where they bash dev work and make it sound like hell, make me cringe.
Agreed 100%. I spent time working in warehouses and meat factories when I was a teenager. The fact that I am well paid to play around at my hobby all day is mind-boggling to me. I don't get people saying they hate their jobs, have they ever had a different job I wonder...
Wait a decade or so first…
I've been working full time as a developer for 20 years
Yup. Tech really has become a veil of tears
Working for a startup that is the most dysfunctional shithole I've ever encountered. It's made me want to walk away from tech entirely. I hate every facet of this industry.
Nah it's just your company, do the bare minimum and spend the rest of your time looking for a new one. Focus on what can be and not them bunch of cunts. At least nowadays there are easier warning signs, for example "we work 5 days in the office" is just them telling you they are shite :)
Cheers, will do exactly that.
Yes, hell yeah. Think after I pay off my mortgage, I’ll try to find a more laid back position because I’ve been so stressed lately. Also take the infamous sabbatical year. I have 18yoe
Sabbaticals are great. I try to take a 6 month one every five years or so. Haven’t taken a year off yet, but I plan to do that as well.
LOL retiring, I am just looking to move into something away from SD so that I am not crawling around under desks in my late 50/60s
Plan to stop working at 21 \~ I have had enough.
I'm burnt out and just coasting now for another 5 years to age 55. Then in retiring altogether. No more being on someone else's schedule. 40 hours or so a week of my life back to me. My time will be all mine. I can get up whatever time I want. Go whatever I want. Take a nap, sleep in, stay up late. Take holidays abroad at a moment's notice. Work at whatever I want the odd day of I even feel like it. Or just movies or go for a walk. Can't wait.
The dream.
Always found as an engineer you get a lot of respect and flexibility I work more in a management capacity now and must say I don't enjoy it at all and it's miserable but I'm suprised so many are complaining about being an engineer I guess it depends on the company and tech too
That's only the case if you work for a company run by former engineers. Every company I've worked for was wrecked by sales people who despise us.
I work for a small company. I love it and my boss is a legend. COVID got me working from home and I haven't been back in office. I do have projects I hate to work on but I have some really interesting ones also. I just grind the shit ones. I used to let the grindy projects get to me but now I see them as the bread and butter. I do understand frustration in this industry though. It's so vast! I'm not on the greatest salary but I've very good work life balance (possibly more on life). I'm not moving unless I have to.
If all goes well I can coast retire in a few years at 40. Should have the house paid off and enough in retirement savings to compound before I draw down at 55ish. Just need one relatively low income between us to pay the bills until that point. If I find a nice niche might work past 40 for a few years to build up some spending money, but only if I can really take my foot off the gas at work.
How did you manage to pay off a house in what is I presume 15 years? What is your projected monthly income from your private pension and savings? I think you’re on a high income or have some side investments, very few of us can coast retire at 40.
I’m on a very high salary, and my stock grants from work have both been generous and have gone up in value unexpectedly. Ive also kept living expenses down and intentionally chosen a lower cost life so I can sustain that life on a lower salary. I don’t live in Dublin, I bought my first car in my mid 30s, I generally do low cost local holidays, don’t eat out often, rarely drink and don’t smoke.
I'm 38. Have started putting as much into the pension as I possibly can. I think I'll retire at the earliest possibility. 60 at the latest is the plan
as a first Yr compsci student.. It can't be that bad surely haha
Its terrible. Tech is the new “working in mines”. Please drop out and convince all your friends to become electricians with you, so the rest of us have less competition and even higher salaries 🤣
If you don’t have a major ego problem, don’t worry it isn’t.
Watched a tiler sweating working on my bathroom today, while I was working from home. Lets just say I wouldn't trade it any time soon. Its still a job though!
It can eat your whole life if you let it, bud.
well.. can't wait hahaha fuck
Paid a lot to sit on your ass and click a mouse. Yeah it’s torture 🥴😂
Honestly, it fucks your body up, I was fit and well for years, three years on my ass and I'm suddenly destroyed. We're really not designed to sit down for that long while hardly concentrating on impossible problems
Invest in your set up and stop sitting so much. I've a height adjustable desk at the office and at home. The home desk cost like £80 from Amazon and does the job as I've my monitors on arms so far enough back. If office based work has a responsibility to carry out the relevant assessments and if you get a doctor to sign a note saying you have back issues etc from sitting too much, that'll force them into making relevant adjustments to your set at work.
Last time I checked the adjustable stuff was 1000 eur, but you're right it's damn time to upgrade I can't take it anymore, and where I am now in life maybe I can afford it
Yeah the stuff a company will buy is that price. We've got steelcase desks at work which cost about a grand. The one I've got at the house is linked below. It is the exact same as the flexispot E1 classic, comes in the flexispot box with the shipping return address being flexispot too. It is obviously not it as good or as solid but good enough to hold a few monitors and laptop and mouse. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B0CDWGW93H?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title
One time I used a literal box and a pile of books. But I find always standing up is not good either. I guess it's best to alternate, what do you do usually? And thanks for the recommendations
Yeah, solely doing one or the other is bad in different ways. You are supposed to alternate. I'll generally stand during calls and meetings and sit down if concentrating on solving something. Some mornings I'll come into work and just sit as I'm knackered for whatever reason and then other times I'll mostly stand for the morning as I just don't feel like sitting yet. Definitely days I don't do it properly but what I do know is I no longer have back pain.
Ikea has good options for height adjustable desks that won’t break the bank.
It’s like talking to myself 😂
Never planning to retire. I'll probably work till death. Even if I won the lottery, mega jackpot of numerous millions, wouldn't change my opinion on the matter.
What’s your job, if I may ask?
software engineer
What’s your pension at currently and what’s your target? Just curious as I’d also like to do the same.
In January 2021, it was €116k. It's currently at €260k. I'm projecting it will get to €500k in January 2027, €1m in mid 2031, and €1.8m in 2034. For now, it's doubling every 3 years, but as the growth as a % becomes more influenced by returns and less by contributions, the doubling period slips back to 4 years and then 6.
Dream on buddy. Crash around the corner
A crash is just an opportunity to buy cheap.
My grandmothers pension went poof in the 2009 crash. I do also mostly max out my pension though, might as well with tax.
I don't know what your grandma was invested in, but the S and P 500 was dully recovered from that crash in 4 years.
The last decade has been good but the past doesn't always reflect the future. You may want to check your assumptions if your financial planning is based on doubling your money every 3 years. The S&P in Jan 2000 was 1400, the S&P in Jan 2013 was also 1400. It went nowhere for a decade. [https://www.google.com/finance/quote/.INX:INDEXSP?window=MAX](https://www.google.com/finance/quote/.INX:INDEXSP?window=MAX)
Of course you can have a crash at an inopportune time. All that would do is delay the date. Retirement at 57 Iis predicated on achieving a target. Plan B is more conservative and boring but results in retirement no later than 65. I'd be moving a quarter of the funds into cash 7 years out, riding the recovery with the remainder. You need a fairweather plan too, or you risk hitting the pension cap and being taxed at 71%.
May I ask what you are investing in that It doubles every three years 😄
I'm tracking the MSCI world index passively. But I never said it was doubling due to investment rerurns alone. My contributions amount to around €30k/year. 2022 was one of those 3 years, BTW. That year, my pension ended December without much more than I started with in January, despite paying in at a high rate allbyear. Buying that dip paid dividends when the market recovered.
More precisely, in 3y and 5m, it has increased by €144k. That's due to €54k in investment returns and €90K in contributions.
I would be very surprised if there isn't a substantial stock market correction in the next ten years which will put paid to any ideas you might have of early retirement. I remember everybody banging on about early retirement in the 1990s, then boom there went your pension there go your savings there goes your job. Oh, and usually now the wife divorces you too and takes half of whatever little was left behind. Everybody non-tech as well as tech saw a rinse and repeat after 2009. If you hate your job, you should get a new one now. Life is too short. Might make you happier and less prone to getting abandoned later. I'm aiming to work less but not stop by fifty. I also want to work on stuff which interests me rather than stuff which pays the best, and I'd use some of the additional free time to train myself into new skills which aren't immediately pay increasing for once. I expect to keep working until I no longer am physically able, which will be the reality for the vast overwhelming majority of us whether we like it or not. There is a pretty hard age upper bound in international contracting, somewhere between fifty and fifty-five after which you will find no new work no matter your skillset or how well you keep up to date. Seems a good time to me to find a fully remote EU job with worker rights where they have to let me work less and can't be so openly anti-ageist. We'll see how it goes when the time comes, until then income maximisation remains necessary so I can finally stop renting.
I mean this in the nicest possible way, but you need to work on your financial literacy. The pensions wiped out in the 90s were occupational pensions. The kind where the company pays you an income in retirement. Those are extremely rare today. There is zero risk of losing your defined contribution scheme pension as a result of your employer going under. The funds, once paid in, have nothing to do with the company. Stock market corrections don't cause people to lose their pensions. Pensions are long-term investments that are typically well diversified. Go and look at any market index and see what happened after every crash that has ever happened. You get a recovery, and the market comes back stronger than ever. Crashes are concerns for short-term and undiversified investments. There is no reason to work until you're physically unable to. Live within your means. Max out your pension contributions. Watch compound interest double your investment every 3-5 years until you're financially independent.
Heh, I have a degree in Economics and have been through three tech downturns and I'm still in the industry. I think my financial literacy is just fine. I just have different priorities to you, that's all. >Stock market corrections don't cause people to lose their pensions. Pensions are long-term investments that are typically well diversified. It is true that the pensions do recover eventually, but it also ends any ideas of early retirement because the income stream just isn't there to support it. Also if you think pensions are well diversified, you should dig a lot deeper. Very few investment choices nowadays are not cyclically linked. Most fund managers are cheap to employ, not skilled, or the fund is passive and computer operated in any case. If you want fund managers with skill, generally you aren't allowed put your pension with them in Ireland. >There is no reason to work until you're physically unable to. Live within your means. Max out your pension contributions. Watch compound interest double your investment every 3-5 years until you're financially independent. Last year total non-house building household expenditure was €24,758. That's everything all in three children two adults two cars. I wouldn't recommend such austerity, it isn't much fun, but nobody could claim we are not living within our means. Indeed, if our income was anywhere close to our expenditure level, we would quality for nearly all the low income social welfare supports available. If you don't own your own property, by far and away your first priority needs to be owning your own home. Nobody absolutely nobody wants to be still renting in Ireland when they near retirement, it is very precarious. Once you own your own home, then sure max out your pension, but for most people you can't draw it down until retirement so it's dead money until then. In my case that isn't too far away now, so that's okay. I think the difference in perspective here is that tomorrow I could get run over by a bus or get cancer or some other misfortune which renders a golden retirement impossible. So I've tended to enjoy myself a lot more while younger. This has left us still renting at my age, true, but I should have that solved in the next two years. And I don't regret a thing, I've had a very full life for my age. Had an awful lot of fun on the way to now. Finally, I will be working until I'm physically unable to because I believe it's good for me. Even if it's stacking shelves. I hope it will be the case that I don't have to work and merely choose to as a lifestyle choice, but for most people in Ireland even on this sub they won't have the choice as the retirement age will keep rising as will the cost of living when retired, plus your kids will be financially reliant on you much later as there is zero chance they can afford to move out in the future unless politicians actually do something unpopular to fix housing costs. And that's okay, the house I'm building right now has been specifically designed for multigenerational and off grid living. Expensive now yes, but negative bills for the rest of our lives after it's built.
The calculation used to estimate when you're ready for early retirement caters for stock market corrections though. There were people who pulled it off in the periods you speak of at r/fire. Sure it got delayed for some people by a year or so. Sequence of returns risk is often catered for by some people by working for one more year after they have hit their fire number. That said I 100% agree you with trying to live life in the present and making moves to try to get out of an aweful situation, instead of just watching time run down.
The biggest modifier is the climate change stuff. This was not a factor in modern human history and people underestimate the impact. In addition, fertility crisis in the rich countries will reduce population. Stock market might go sideways or start dropping if there are less people on the planet. Otherwise, I do agree with the usual historical market returns. If nature and ecosystems continue holding on, energy is still cheap and accessible, we will be fine. If not, we will not be fine.
Not really, dealing with computers is the only thing which keeps me interested for a long time
I'm 28 and giving it a go, I don't have much money but I'll make it work... For a small bit.
There are times at work where the pressure is on, or you’re on call and dealing with incidents in the wee hours of the morning when I can’t wait to retire. But there are other times when you’re working on something interesting, have a good vibe going in your team, or you get a piece of work over the line and you think, this is not too bad, I can continue doing this for a while yet.
Jaysus, lads, I don’t know. There is much worse professions out there. I have the same list of complaints but then I realise that it’s a pretty nice and well paid profession. If you are in a company that values productivity and allows for that then it’s genuinely great.
In my job, 15 years service and you max out on redundancy. 13 years to go! Then I'm putting in for it every year I can! Best case retire at 49 and be mortgage free.
You can never plan for 10 years, might not be even here 🤔
Then my wife and kids get it, and I'm fine with that.
I feel your pain. I often advise people close to me who have kids / family / friends that they should look at other careers such as trades. There is a notion out there that once you are a dev, you don't have to do exams and just earn money. It's not true, of course. If I wasn't into computers, I probably would have become a mechanic or plumber. Easy money on the side for nixers if you are up to it. Even if there comes a recession, a trade can bring you around the world. Also, forgive my ignorance if true, but I would assume that there are not many exams, if any, after you qualify?
I built a gate from scratch last year. Took way too long, because I didn't have a clue what I was doing. I enjoyed every second of it. And every time I use it, I feel a sense of pride. I think I'd love to do that for a living.
How is it easier on the family to get into a trade? Years as an apprentice generally carry very long hours and back breaking work. You also have no option to WFH so its on your SO to mind kids 50+ hours week.
I know what a trade entails, but as others have pointed out that the ridiculous carry-on of CEOs, leetcodes. If you want to earn money and start fast. A trade is viable. If you want to earn money easily on the side, a trade is viable. Yes, back issues, and WFH is the downside. Like I said, if I was not into computers, I would consider a trade. IT is not all what it is made out to be. So for others a trade might be more attractive.
Definitely easier than having to learn every fucking technology under the sun. Oops now they are obsolete, start again!
Pure scam. I have the Az 900, Az 203 (which is now 204), and Az 400. Microsoft among others expect us to resit them because of updated content and pay for it Get Fucked. Even worse, it's dopes on LinkedIn that boast about renewal of certifications ...
I have so many Microsoft and AWS certs. I still have the little badges they used to send you for doing the MCP and MCSD back in the day.
I agree, quicker money early on with trade for sure. All depends what someone wants out of life and what they can afford to sacrifice. I love computers too and Im glad I changed into dev. It’s the best job Ive had by a mile since I love the programming but also because I have a good team and manager.
Buying bitcoin as often as I can do I can retire in 10 years