tomreece

This made me laugh out loud. You're fearless!

Nope, south east US. Trying to be vague here for privacy.

The offer was 20k more than my base salary already. Asking for even more seemed crazy to me. I have controversial opinions on how much money developers make already, probably stemming from my imposter syndrome. Asking for more money did not make me comfortable. If they had offered, I would have had to reconsider. I expected more of a conversation after I declined, but it didn't happen.

Did you read the post? I LOVE programming. I HATE programming for someone else as a career.

For fucks sake.

> The author is clearly an idiot.

Wow. I didn't realize Hacker News folks were like redditors.

The 65k comes from the fact that I had to pay tuition and living expenses. My family is from a small town. The nearest college was 2 hours away (Indiana University). 15k a year adds up fast.

I honestly didn't NEED the education, I think if I spent 4 years teaching myself I would have been just fine. I just felt that I needed the degree to get my foot in the door anywhere. Maybe I was wrong, but do you dispute that?

I don't understand why this discussion is about entitlement. I thought this was the american dream? You work hard, you make something of yourself. Things go your way. Things are going well enough my way, but I'm not happy. I don't want it.

Hell, give me a lobotomy and erase my education from me. In return, absolve me of my student loans. Let me start over and try again. I can't even do that because I'm in so much debt that switching careers is not even feasible. I have to program to pay these loans. I wouldn't survive without a programmers salary, but I don't even want the money. That's the part that kills me.

I didn't know if I'd like testing or not. But I thought I would try something new. Comparing my daily work with the coders around me, I still think I'd pick testing because they literally just glue too many shitty api's together into an AngularJS application.

> Just knowing that you can quit, if you're not happy, changes how you interact with your employer.

I think if I KNEW this, I'd have a significantly different perspective on things.

At my last company I had the opportunity to write some code to fetch data from an api and display messages on 15 Daktronics signs for a bus transit station. That was cool and pretty low level for me, because I had to send bytes to this sign according to a certain protocol defined by their poor documentation.

That project could have been a blast, but it was put off until the last minute and then rushed and then the signs were hung at the transit station before we had a chance to interact with them and toggle some switches inside so we had to do that on a ladder in the cold oh and by the way my test sign was not exactly like the sign that was actually installed. So as usual, another project ruined by rushed managers who didn't involve me sooner and just started buying stuff and doing things.

Awesome story friend. I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors!

Excellent.