craigzucchini

That's kind of what I figure, though I didn't articulate that super well. My dream used to be working for Google, but it never really occured to me that it would pay substantially more than anywhere else. It was more that I'd met clever people at conferences that were also down to earth and working on products that had to scale, and consequently had interesting impact.

It's context that I had, but is easily forgotten, especially with the .ca TLD. There's taxes and student debt to service as well—probably.

Yikes. Dig the name btw.

That's also easy to forget ;) 115k ain't going too far in that respect. The U.S is a different place as well, and even that 100k signing bonus won't go that far in replacing student debt. I was surprised that he's a USC grad with a .ca TLD.

Edit: At an 11k surplus every month, I take the above comment back.

I don't know why I ever bother reading things like this. On one hand, I'm not driven by money, so it doesn't motivate me. On the other, my perspective of having been in software for about 4-8 years depending on how you count, and struggling to get to net zero—an amount of only about 10k cad—is just sort of crushing when I realize someone fresh out of school can negotiate a 100k signing bonus and more yearly salary than I've ever been offered. It's just this sort of awful sinking feeling knowing that I'm sort of on the periphery of an industry in which most people are making more money than they know what to do with.

That said, I'm happy that people get paid well to do something they love, but that can often be very depressing. Not always certainly, but damn if you've never looked out from behind your screen at the sun shining and thought a little less of the React component or whatever saas thing you work on.

It's easy to forget that many of these articles, and particularly posts are Blind, are just just riddled with people posturing about the same thing.

Edit: I should add the emotional response I tend to have given my circumstance, I do think it's way better to have transparency than not.

That's where DC and crossfilter might come in handy. One of their demos uses 250k rows of airline transit data and handles it well.

I'm at the same place I think. If we're similar, part of the draw of frontend initially was that it was a true and interesting engineering problem. It was a unique and challenging skill to get basic designs and stuff working cross browser. Now, it's sort of a matter of just re-solving the same problem—even more damning if you've come to the realization that most products are ppintless conduits for money and nobody cares what you do—which just isn't compelling if you're driven by having an impact or doing something novell.

So I've been thinking about this...a lot. On the engineering front, I'm going to try and devote some time to problems and domains I haven't burnt out on yet. Embedded, game dev, AI, etc.. At the end of the day though, programming is very much programming. You have to identify what drives and compells you.

To that end, I'm looking at the people who I admire most for how and what they do for others, and trying to see how I can do the same. For me, this is John Carmack, Armin Van Buren, and maybe PewDiePie, among others. I have no answers yet, but we'll see where it goes.

Edit: I'd add that I don't buy a notion of "just doing it anyway" for the long term. Sometimes things suck, and yes you gotta grind through, but not long term. That's a good way to get depressed, fat, and hate yourself. Better to re-route and explore if you can.

While I haven't been, this is something I find tricky to reconcile, but appreciate that I'm not the only one. My main interest would be the super large scale hardstyle festivals— which I feel might be easier to enjoy relatively sober and feels a bit less granola—but many friends I grew up with go to Shambhala. It seems like a fun time, beautiful scenery, art, music and so on. But it seems like as they've been abusing pot and shrooms etc—abusing pot mostly—they've gone deep down a rabbit hole of paranoid thinking, naturopathy, veganism, iridology, and other nonsense. I'm far from straight-laced—though maybe somewhat straight-edge—but it irks me when "practitioners" of these things claim to other vulnerable people that eating a fruit only diet will cure their colon cancer.

Out of curiosity, had you done an undergraduate research project / thesis before getting into an MSc program? Also, what do you mean by a professional Masters? I'm still learning the jargon of academia. I'm sort of following a similar path, through dipping in and out of an undergrad CS degree now that I've sort of become disenchant with web dev. 27 now, but hoping to worm my way into deep learning in the Geospatial field or just some aspect of geo-spatial hopefully with some aspect of the work being field work or generally outside. I'm interested in having something sort of official like contributions to papers, and I'd like to put the deep intellectual interests and obsession with ideas to use. I used to have these with regard to frontend dev, but after re-inventing the same problem so many times, that's getting a little boring.

That would surprise me. The only people I know who think about Facebook—the actual product Facebook not its subsidiaries—are those that locked into it during their late teens or early twenties, and have stopped meeting new people. Parents, homeowners, married people, etc.. Granted I'm not part of this demographic, but I imagine if I was, I'd already have it and not be a new discoverer of FB. For casual new connections, it's Snapchat & Insta, maaybe Messenger but those are mostly people who used FB and have just continued using the chat aspect. Otherwise, events are still for some reason coordinated on the website, which is why I don't hear about weddings.

I don't dissagree, but the nature of them being "far, far, from perfect" includes things that don't fall under the actions or behaviour of a person and end up being fixed for a period of time, making the comparison in some ways apt. Assuming you don't explore further, knowing someone's number and using it to characterize a person is at least close to as stupid as age discrimination or racial. I'd grant you that there is a higher liklihood than others that the number is informed by poor decision making, but it's equally likely that the number is low due to unforseen circumstances.

It's very much a communication issue, but also an incompetance political game playing issue. To answer your question, I put a ton of energy into doing exactly what you suggest, which most people didn't and don't. It ammounted to some changes eventually taking place after I left, according to my former team members, but the managerial nonsense never dissapeared; those managers involved were later promoted.

I feel you. See me other comment itt.

Lots of conceited sounding comments here from devs who either have an inflated sense of communication skills or stopped reading the article quite quickly.

In my personal experience, the author's anecdote rings very true. At my first and last corporate job, I was handed a thick af HP laptop that could barely be used anywhere but in the cube, a hideous screen, 30 min build times, and a java stack that made testing/understanding the existing YUI (JS) codebase a brutal activity. It took almost my entire first 6 month contract to just get minimally productive, and that's without accounting for meeting interruptions. Another frontend fella was hired on shortly after me, and we worked together to test and get productive with this codebase which was great, until a month later the manager who popped his head in every so often to check that things were running to his measure, decided to shake things up and dismantle all the teams, re-positioning them on different projects for no apparent reason. My colleague and I were split up, me on the new project that he had been prepping for through requirements gathering and UX stuff. Starting from square one, on a team whose members had barely met, in a different part of the codebase that I'd never touched, and with a 2 month arbitrary deadline, all while everyone was moving from SVN to git, and the feedback loop on a frontend change (locally) being 5 - 10 minutes. Shocker, the project failed, I was fired, and much like the author, I wanted to get the fuck out of the industry.

Edit: I think it's important to note sometimes the nature of what you're working on or the company you're doing it for can be extremely constrained. That in and of itself isn't unsurmountable. But when the expectations, compensation, budget, and measure of output aren't balanced, or if the constraint is poor management that don't understand or care about the people they're managing, then it's just a tire fire.