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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2613 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 31, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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Are you OK at math? I'd say learn to code. Programmers can be quite smart, but the low-performing ones (who still earn good wages) are pretty shockingly bad at basic reasoning in my experience. Take a few months and learn AWS + javascript and I bet you can find a remote job making like $20 / hr.

That seems like a good plan. I've got a lot of programmer friends and another friend who is being hired by a friend after spending the last year learning in his own time.

It will just take some discipline, I've tried to pick it up a few times and never found that pure interest that allows me to read books without needing to motivate myself. My dad is also fairly passionate about programming so I'm sure there's something to it but I haven't found it yet.

This is rather pessimistic. It's true you'll be competing with people from those abroad for high paying senior positions, but high paying in this field is leagues above minimum wage. For a well paying but perhaps more modest (or entry) position you'll be considered for hiring if you just have a grasp of the programming language you claim to and can solve a basic problem from first principles.

Leetcode is very useful. Get to a point where you can solve all the easy and most of the medium problems and you're at least on par with the average grad.

Yeah. You’ve got programmers that have been coding since elementary school and are posting good projects on GitHub in high school. By the time they’re out of college they have a decade of solid programming experience.

And that is table stakes for most programming jobs. Google? You’ve got to be close to world class if you aren’t connected.

You're competing not only with the local and regional talent but also those from India, China, Russia, and other countries vying for the few and highly coveted high-paying positions.

Sure, there are a lot of employees vying for jobs, but lots of jobs available too. At my last job I had a coworker who made $70k / year and wrote a while loop to find a remainder. It was something like:


function findRemainder(dividend, divisor) {

   let count = 0;

   while (count + divisor < dividend) {

      count += divisor;

   }

   return dividend - count;

}

Except much less elegant than that even. He lasted ~7 months there, his quality of work always around that level. The amazing thing was that it ever worked at all. Other coworkers have been better but still fairly bad at basic reasoning. I envy you if your company has a much better level of talent; sounds like you spend less of your time doing your coworkers' jobs than I do.

I've got a lot of programmer friends and another friend who is being hired by a friend after spending the last year learning in his own time.

That was what I did. I did take two semesters of programming classes in college, but honestly learned a lot more on my own, and got hired through some random hobbyist programming group midway through the second semester at $35 / hr. Since then I've gotten some big raises and nobody seems to care about my lack of credentials.

I never read any programming books, just built a few projects. It's easier, more fun, and more impressive. chatGPT is great at teaching coding so at this point learning to code is easier than ever. At some point it will definitely feel like a grind but hey, you can grind coding for a few months or grind a minimum wage job forever.

EDIT: just FYI this was like 2 years ago so I doubt much has changed since then.

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