IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Yea I wouldn't go ask for 7 figures as a software dev. But you do need to be thinking about your career and where you are going to be in 5 years, and how what you're doing today facilitates that. Every job you take needs to be furthering your marketability, and when your current job stops doing that (or stops paying you a market rate), its time to leave.

Cad_sl said:

Yea I wouldn't go ask for 7 figures as a software dev. But you do need to be thinking about your career and where you are going to be in 5 years, and how what you're doing today facilitates that. Every job you take needs to be furthering your marketability, and when your current job stops doing that (or stops paying you a market rate), its time to leave.

Click to expand...

Definitely agree in theory, maybe harder in practice.

Let's take my scenario. I'm getting 4-5% raises per year, 7% bonuses, 10 minute commute, never work more than 40 hours a week. I like pretty much all aspects of my job except that maybe some days/weeks I go home thinking I didn't really learn anything to further my career. Test documentation, for example, is pretty boring, and I don't feel like I learn anything to make myself better at it or anything else for that matter. I mastered documentation years ago.

At what point to you potentially upend a job that's somewhat future-proof in terms of salary?

Deathwing_sl said:

Definitely agree in theory, maybe harder in practice.

Let's take my scenario. I'm getting 4-5% raises per year, 7% bonuses, 10 minute commute, never work more than 40 hours a week. I like pretty much all aspects of my job except that maybe some days/weeks I go home thinking I didn't really learn anything to further my career. Test documentation, for example, is pretty boring, and I don't feel like I learn anything to make myself better at it or anything else for that matter. I mastered documentation years ago.

At what point to you potentially upend a job that's somewhat future-proof in terms of salary?

Click to expand...

This is just my opinion and experience (and keep in mind I stopped working in tech in like 2007) but I had a MUCH better experience as an hourly consultant on contract projects than I ever did as a salaried employee of any company, and I'll tell you why.

• Money. I made more of it. This is a no-brainer.
• I was too expensive to give monkey work to. There were salaried/permanent lackeys who did shit like documentation. And even when I did have to do monkey work, I didn't care because I was paid by the hour.
• When the interesting part of a project (the crunch time) was over, I left. I didn't have to sit and fix tickets or sit in meetings talking about our maintenance plan. I designed and implemented huge parts of apps and websites in a short time, and then I get the fuck out of there.
• I got to see a lot of very different ways to implement things, a lot of different ways teams work, and a lot of different technologies in a very short amount of time. The compressed experience creating new and interesting apps really helps you learn.

Spending years grinding the same app/apps and the same technology sounds boring as fuck to me, and not career-enhancing. 5% raises sounds fine, but with inflation being 2-3%, thats less than it seems. I'd rather have raises than bonuses because raises compound year over year, bonuses do not. The commute thing is great, and the hours are great, but the nice thing about being a consultant is on some projects the hours will be shitty, on some they will be great, but you're never locked into a shitty project. I've walked off of projects after 5 weeks because the people were nutjobs. There's always another.

lendarios_sl said:

Im gonna call bs on any developer making $900,000.00 a year.

Click to expand...

Depends if you call the CIO of a medium sized software company a developer, and if you count his stock options etc as compensation. I've heard of shit like that. I haven't heard of any salaried developer making $900k, anywhere ever.

lendarios_sl said:

Why would you call a CIO, a developer?

Click to expand...

Many CIO's are developers, they probably don't code anymore but they are tech guys.

Celestein_sl said:

Honestly I should probably be more clear on the point, that I'm talking about software developer as a career path and not a specific position. There are in-the-weeds developers who do make that in the bigs, because they can demonstrate their value, but by that point they usually move on to a different leadership position with an even higher cap(ex: John Carmack is a good example of an extremely well compensated person you'd still call a developer for most his career).

I still participate in the implementation/coding of most projects even in a leadership position. At the "bigs"(your googles), the average salary is around 250k~ but the variance is between 150k-700k~ or so, meaning ignoring outliers, there's a sizable number of in-the-grass developers making 600-700k at these companies doing the same work, and outliers making 7 figures plus.

Click to expand...

Carmack is a business owner, not the same thing at all

And I'd like to see some proof of an actual heads-down developer making $700k salary at Google. Not a department or development head, but a guy who sits at a computer and codes? Really?

That's very typical at bigger corporations. Fire employee -> hire as contractor for less or reduced liability(or both) -> fire contractor.

Sometimes I wish for a programming union, or something.

lendarios_sl said:

That is some Tanoomba'a level of retardation Cad. If is not in your job description, then it doesn't matter what you knowledge is, or what other skills you have, you are not it.

Click to expand...

Settle down nerd, I was mentioning CIO because it's actually on the promotion path for a really good developer. Not that they literally are developers. It would be the pinnacle of achievement if you stay technical, position-wise.

Sorry, I was thinking of a different scenario. I guess I was just thinking working as a contractor is not all roses. Especially if they know what they were paying you beforehand.