Occupying yourself as a commercial programmer

[Perica]

..

[Neo]

[0] I can not find work as a programmer, as I am fresh out of university - and everybody just wants an experienced professional.

You don't know how true that is, it's my case and i know what it is like.

[AGI1122]

I can not find work as a programmer as my skills are now old and dated, and I must attend university again...

Havn't had this problem yet.

I can not find work as a programmer, as I am fresh out of university - and everybody just wants an experienced professional.

Havn't had a problem with this either, I found some work already, but it's more of who I know rather than just searching.

I must constantly learn new things, every day in the computing world is a revolution; it is impossible to keep up with how fast things change.

Again, I havn't had this problem, while stuff in my field does change I keep ontop of things as much as possible, not just relying on what I was tought, but actually using the web to find stuff in my field.

[df]

i hate it. i want to get out of IT as fast as I can. I dont care about money.

when you program full time, you come home from work and have no time or energy for your pwn projects, the things you love fall off.

now i try to balance my programming with mountain biking and hiking. programming looses out all the time.

i have 5+ years experience so it isnt a problem for me to find work, and i have a broad base of skills in programming languages to db design to db admin etc etc etc.

you dont have to constantly learn new things. some things are very specific. ie: i have no need for java at all. but I do see a big demand coming for C# and more and more for web building. asp/php/coldfusion etc.

its a hard industry to break into without experience, but i levereaged my work on open source projects.

(the ting that sold my first job and got me into the workplace was my app had a fully functional help file that was context sensitive. all it was was an access 97 'app' with a full windows help file.. my boss said he saw a lot of stuff submitted but none had working help files...)

personally i cant get out of the IT industry fast enough. most pogrammers make other people rich, work long long hours for little reward and have little free time.

[Schol-R-LEA]

I haven't been able to find work as a programmer in three years, simply because there wasn't much work to be had, and because I had gotten seriouly burned out in my last job. I now have a job - a lousy job, but a job - doing phone tech support, and I occasionally do some contract work; at this point, I doubt I will ever work a steady job in programming again, simply because I don't have the tick-list skills (skills that are utterly irrelevant to most actual jobs, but which many companies insist on; e.g., J2EE, Rational Process, UML). This is probably for the best; as DF says, most programming jobs are terrible.

There are a lot of people now who are realizing that the 'long long hours' and the hot-house, high-pressure mentality are counter-productive; one of the main tenets of so-called 'Extreme Programming' is that no one should be allowed to work more than 40 hours a week for more than two weeks in a row, and then only if it is an emergency. Similarly, it is now held by many that it is better slow down and take the time to code carefully than to rush through coding on the way to getting bogged down in debugging. However, while programmers often think highly of these ideas, managers generally haven't grasped them yet.

[Jose]

Sholar-R-Lea is absoulutely right. In my opinion really good programmers find it difficult to get a programming job (contradictory as it sounds though).
Man! if someone like you can't get a job then its really something to think about. Most corporate software companies are basically just interested in money making and do a lot of stupid work (which they are paid for) almost like making money out of the others ignorance.

The problem with good programmers are that they have their own ideas which are rarely ever accepted or even understood by others. The irony in this is that ulitmately the idea may be perceived as good, but by that time the credit for it goes to some other people.
Managers are good at handling people, which i guess is a nice way of saying they are sly and cunning. People who get the credit for the programmers hardwork because as the corporate puts it "They (the manager) got the job done".

This is a really deplorable situation, I think its time some of us tried really hard to get into the industry and change this, become like them at the outer layer but deep down don't forget why we're doing it. On the other hand maybe we need people like them, I can't really say this for sure but maybe programmers wouldn't really like to be a paid for their work (or undervalue it) and the managers make sure we survive (even though the motive is selfish).

It takes a programmer to know the eventual outcome of a program. Most managers just want the thing working within the deadline they don't care how its done. And when it your @$$ on the line you tend to compromise by creating a version which works but will eventually crumble (worse still you know it will and keep blaming yourself). My student life has shown me these kind of people (the manager type) and i know they never really understood anything much in programming although they were the ones who scored higher in seminars etc.. (after we do 'a bit' of research and help them out), I also know they may be regarded as great managers some day and may get their mugs on a lot of paper.

But always remember, It is us (the programmers) that count. We are and will always be better than them in relating to computers, and even if we have to sacrifice fame and fortune, we will, because ulitmately what we are really interested is the thrill of programming and the power we exercise over the machine.

LONG LIVE THE PROGRAMMER. MAY HIS RACE ALWAYS BE AROUND.

[kernel_journeyman]

I agree with df. It sucks hard. I worked for a while when I was 19 and 20 as a programmer, and while I was paid extremely well, I was burnt out and depressed. I worked long, long hours and was basically treated like a punch bag by the project manager and the IT manager, who ganged up on me. But anyway, not just that, I hate it and I will never work in a commercial programming job ever again. The software we must write sucks. It's all Microsoft stuff, and I have to spend all my time programming in lousy languages like VB and Java, .NET and so on and so forth. I would rather do a stupid menial job like picking fruit on a farm than write code on a platform I hate to make someone else rich, while being treated like an expendable idiot.

[Neo]

In the light of all these revelations does anyone have any ideas that may help us earn money to survive at least.

[kernel_journeyman]

Neo, I like your attitude and I think we should at least be able to earn a living without being treated like third world slave labour.

I think we should all band together and form a team of programmers and either:

a) Write software and sell it from a website
b) Contract out our skills for an hourly rate (either individually or in small groups of programmers)
c) Write open source software and look for sponsors
d) <insert your idea here>

or a combination of these things. There are probably ways we can earn a good living and have a good quality of life too, but I believe this means working for ourselves, i.e. self employed, and getting together and using our brains.

Here's a suggestion. Check out download sites like Tucows, download.cnet.com, and other places. What are the top 10 software programs on each site? Clone them off one by one, and sell them for half the price other vendors do. Just cut them out the game altogether.

Another idea is to take an abandoned project like 4.4BSD and built on it like Net/Free/Open BSD did, and sell CD sets. Or check out http://www.linuxfromscratch.com and start your own Linux distribution. Sell CDs, shirts, hats, and custom programs, etc. This is for folks that are interested in OSes of course!

Consulting is big business. Not sure how to get a start in that area, but it could be worthwhile looking into.

Also, ask around businesses what their major IT problems/headaches are. Viruses? Email servers keep going down? Firewall need fixing? Something else? Pick the most unsexy problems that most of them seem to have and go for it.

[NOTNULL]

I agree with all of your ideas. Once we enter a software company, we have to do what we are said. Good programmers may feel lousy to work in a software company. Instead they might start their own company and fulfill their dreams.

[df]

id like to write KDE apps for linux and charge small fee's. i like software affordable... 20$ and the like.

there are several things id like to have that dont fully exist under kde etc. a lot of my window apps that I use. aaanyway. my pipedreams...

[kernel_journeyman]

id like to write KDE apps for linux and charge small fee's. i like software affordable... 20$ and the like.

That's not a bad idea at all. I also like to write KDE and Gnome applications.

Funny you should mention affordable software. I was browsing through a catalogue today and was thoroughly disgusted at the prices of software. Inflated prices, at least a third of the price of a new PC, are normal now. In one case, a FIVE USER accounting package (Quickbooks) was $1,600. I find it amazing that they get away with it. People just get used to the bad things about software (bugs, inflated prices, no warranty) and think it's normal, thanks to Microshaft and their illegal monopoly, helped by greedy hardware manufacturers who collude with them to make sure Winblows is the only O/S that will ever have the average Joe desktop market. MacOS doesn't count, since it has its own hardware to run on.

If the average person "grew up on" BSD or Linux or somesuch instead of DOS/Winblows, they'd be disgusted and throw their PC away and demand a refund from M$.

[Andrew_Baker]

Difficult to get serious full-time work if you don't have university papers or A+ certification, even if you're a ninja like me

[durand]

I resigned from my previous job almost two months ago because I had a manager who didn't understand what programming is and would constantly change significant specifiications daily, give me deadlines in hours and move me from job to job without allowing me to complete the previous one.

It drove me nuts. I'd been there for almost three years, working 11 hours a day without lunch. (seriously).

On top of that, the CEO suddenly started selling products which didn't exist to large (very) corporations and giving me installation dates instead of development time.

So, I walked away. They hired two engineers (because my manager is partial to engineers) and I had to teach them basics like data structures and algorithms and, even though they have a month's warning, I was allocated 5 days to do the handover of the systems I had developed. Now I support those two via email on a daily basis - it's not their fault the business decisions suck, so I help them out with Q&A's.

Managers don't understand programming. I'm really pissed off, as you can tell.

Bleh.

However, what I've learnt from this is: if you're going to work in IT, work for yourself or in large groups of programmers who are managed by people who were once programmers themselves. Also, life is more important that a job. A job isn't forever.

I'm going to give commercial programming one more chance (if I can find a job - very difficult so far) before I give up and do something else.

[Andrew_Baker]

Ah, the constant spec changes. I consult for a guy who is totally NOT an engineer, just a designer. He makes daily changes back and forth. I tolerated this for a while, because I knew him personally. But when I realized that he was going to cause me to miss my milestone by constantly changing specs, I terrified him by dropping a very large bill in his e-mail.

He was fscking flabbergasted, because he thought I was on unbillable time, because I have a maximum dollar/hour amount per milestone. So, he started panicking.

We talked, and I explained that he didn't ever clearly define goals for me, so it was impossible to ever say that I was *done* with the milestone.

Eventually, we negotiated a list of tasks to perform, and I am finishing these and then returning to billable hours on a new, clearly defined task list.

Of course, I let him stew for a few days without communication in order to let sink in the fear and implications of having to hire a new ninja who would charge more and be unfamiliar with the proprietary system I built for him


On the brighter side, I managed to nail a full-time gig working for a small local company here in San Diego who's going to split my tasks between technology and production, so that's nice. Finally, full-time...