Is Software Development/ Programming Oversaturated?

Anything to do with the traditional world of get a degree, get a job as well as its alternatives
AnalyticalEngine
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Re: Is Software Development/ Programming Oversaturated?

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

I make $130k/year working from home at a boring tech job that's low stress and easy. I could probably make $180k if I wanted to hustle at Amazon, but the quality of life downgrade for a hustle isn't worth the tradeoff IMO

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Slevin
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Location: Sonoma County

Re: Is Software Development/ Programming Oversaturated?

Post by Slevin »

Math of equity is hard and fluctuates nastily but I make about 170?ish probably working a cool low stress tech job from home. One of my old team members (who I was team lead of) is trying to recruit me for a similar / easier job that pays in the mid 300s and is a 5 minute bike from here if I ever do want to go into the office; so I’ll take the interview and see if I can get the job.

alex123711
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Re: Is Software Development/ Programming Oversaturated?

Post by alex123711 »

M wrote:
Thu Aug 18, 2022 12:34 pm
Third @zbigi - work in boring non-tech software dev jobs. I'm actually getting more messages now from recruiters than at start of year. I only make 120k /year so not very well paid compared to Google engineers but I assure you my job is also way less stressful with less hours and more time off.
120k is great, how much exp/ Quals?

M
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Re: Is Software Development/ Programming Oversaturated?

Post by M »

alex123711 wrote:
Fri Aug 19, 2022 6:13 am
120k is great, how much exp/ Quals?
15 years experience, but free community college education :lol:

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fiby41
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Re: Is Software Development/ Programming Oversaturated?

Post by fiby41 »

I made $5k last year. Well below a jacob but median for the country so was able to save 89%. Will make $6216.18 by next August.

guitarplayer
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Re: Is Software Development/ Programming Oversaturated?

Post by guitarplayer »

zbigi wrote:
Tue Jan 11, 2022 3:04 pm
I agree with your assessment, with one caveat that data scientist actually spend most of their days coding (they need to write code to collect, clean up, organize, transform etc. data that they will feed into the models - typically the "mathy and creative" part of the work takes less than 10% of their time). It's just that their code is simple and throwaway, and hence much easier and more pleasant to work with. Usually, they don't have to cooperate with anyone on this code, which, to this software engineer, sounds like bliss.

The downside of being a DS is, as you said, the need to sell your results. As in other areas of science, your discoveries are worthless until you convince people that they're actually not, and they start acting on them. Not always it's a big deal though - if you happen to work as a DS who's part of the software product team and working on "optimizing engagement" (e.g. figuring out ways to make people click on ads more often ), then you'll be proposing a lot of small improvements to the product, and not doing iconoclast presentations to the board of company directors :)

Also, the job market for data scientists is considerably worse than for SEs - there's at least an order of magnitude fewer DS jobs than SE jobs, and every person with any kind of quantitative science background is at least thinking about landing one - it's one of the very few shortcuts to six figure career for anyone who went for a PhD in hard sciences (or even some social sciences). Hence, you'd be competing with a lot of smart people who have actually done something like DS work (and hence know the tooling and are well-versed in practical application of statistics) for the duration of their PhD studies.
Hey, just heads up that I got to this place. I am surprised how much it is like @zbigi described. Together with the selling of ideas not being a big deal in this particular case :) I think now that I actually got my foot in the door, I will build on this rather than trying to transition to a software developer job in the strict sense.

ETA: Although I am mindful of the thread elsewhere on the forum re data analyst -> data engineer transition. And I think I have what it takes, too, so who knows.

Thanks again everyone for contributing to this thread (which I have very much used for personal benefit, though others can read it all and hopefully also get something out of it).

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