IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Tenks_sl said:

Yeah instagram/reddit/imgur all got a ton of VC. There is still money to be had in the social market.

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Until it has a glorious crash like Web 1.0 when few of the companies can realize a profit.

Sup Twitter!

That sounds more like having a preference to working in a certain industry which I believe is different than Khane's use of the phrase. Like I'd never go to work somewhere that didn't use Java and mostly open source software but that is because it is my preference.

Likewise I can't really see myself working on anything but firmware. They opened up opportunities here to work on converged infrastructure stuff that was more web/widget/etc stuff and I passed. There were a few guys frothing at the mouths to get into that stuff, so to each their own.

Noodlemod_sl said:

Likewise I can't really see myself working on anything but firmware. They opened up opportunities here to work on converged infrastructure stuff that was more web/widget/etc stuff and I passed. There were a few guys frothing at the mouths to get into that stuff, so to each their own.

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Gotta agree. I enjoy working in Systems Architecture (ex: HA, "cloud-scale", etc...)

Thankfully, nearly every company has this problem now so I just get to avoid working for Social Media Sewage.

I'm chomping at the bit to use the newer web technologies: AngularJS, NodeJS, Bootstrap, etc. etc. But we're stuck with ASP.NET WebForms and I know, deep down, they will never give us the go-ahead to write something new. And that is what's frustrating is that it's difficult to learn something new without having something to apply it to.

I seriously wish I went into cs instead of medicine. 10 yrs of training , 250k+ debt, salaries that are curbed by Obama + malpractice insurance, and now I lose on bidding wars for homes constantly to 20 something gay coder couples in the Bay Area. Six figure salaries plus random ass huge pay days from this or that buyout, and plus they don't have any debt to pay off.

I might try to go back someday and restart in the cs world instead, but since I'm not long out of training I feel like I need to do this for a bit first. Just getting started, even though I'm older than most 6 figure senior coders, is damn depressing.

Deathwing_sl said:

Could be worse, you could be stuck working with tcl. One my previous jobs at IBM, some of their back-end manufacturing was using that to run the tools. Horrid horrid language, harder to read than perl regex in chinese.


Got me thinking though, will people 20 - 30 years from now bemoan usage of language we currently love? Java, Python, C++, Ruby, etc. Or has language development advanced and simultaneously slowed enough that current languages have the adaptability to keep up? I'm still surprised C/C++ is still releasing major updates. And thankful, since my employer's main product is a static analysis tool for those languages.

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I can only really speak for C++, but a lot of the new additions being added are going to make it a really solid choice. Right now if you use unique_ptr/shared_ptr's for your memory allocation you can pretty much avoid a lot of the memory pit falls that make C++ difficult to deal with, and you get all the performance benefits. They're adding future/promises in C++/17 which will allow for things like for loops that have the data fetched in one thread, and acted on in another and it'll be possible to just call functions with directives and those function calls are executed in a different thread. No longer do you have to do any crazy thread management, it just works. So C++ is fairly adaptable from my perspective, though it's weak out of the box libraries are definitely a negative but anyone doing C++ should be using boost as it's pretty much the "functionality" extension of the standard library.

I don't see C++ dying anytime in the near future (5-10 years). Why the TCL hate? I used to write IRC bot scripts in it.. I don't remember it being that bad! Though I probably feel pretty nostalgic about it.

You haven't seen unreadable until you work in a Chinese C code base where they seemingly love to use two letter variables and comments with a mix of Chinese characters and broken English

First year out of fellowship making 500k+?? You'll have to be more specific, because I can't think of any specialty where that's the case. Ignoring the fact that by far most doctors will never make that much, the small contingent who do are usually surgical subspecialties (and specific ones like plastics) that take years building up a referral base and private practice.
I've never heard of an employed position at a hospital with that kind of pay, right out of fellowship. Maybe texas.

Malpractice is only a small part of costs. There's also tail (which can be 100k or more ) everytime you switch jobs , and the huge burden of paying off loans from training.

Also wanted to point out one more thing - even assuming those absurdly anomalous salaries you quote are true (and if they are they are very much the exception and not the norm), by the time they are done with fellowship , typical age is going to be 32-35, maybe older for something like neurosurg. Up until that time, they were making 50k or so - when you put that against making six figures for 10 years earlier, and any compounded savings, and no debts to unload, the difference isn't as crazy.

I can get you some physician salary info if you want but trust me 500k is nowhere near normal. I will concede that Bay Area is exceptionally bad (I know subspecialized rads being started at or below 200k by predatory corporate groups or asshole private practices ) but 500k is just as insane. There are definitely some older folks who make that much as they squeeze the shitty job market for what it's worth and underpay new hires. But for people freshly coming in, it's terrible

It's very easy to lie on the Internet. I'm giving a huge benefit of the doubt here. People assuming docs are overpaid pisses me off enough as it is. Spreading filth about 500-600k starting salaries and using that to justify arguments is just trolling as far as I'm concerned.
Your in-laws, are an incredible exception, so much so much so that I find it hard to believe you are not lying. I am a rad, and I VERY aware of our salary situation across the country. And when I said Texas is a little better, I would say maybe -maybe - 400k starting, in some shithole in central Texas, is believeable. And most everywhere else in the country - not just the Bay Area - is less. Starting salaries, even in the Midwest - we are talking 2s to low 3. Now had you said 'rad in practice for 5-10' years that's different. But starting salaries I know extremely well.
The numbers you describe we're accurate from say 2005, and again that would have just been for flyover country. But now, even for flyover that is way off.
Do me a favor and post your 520k salary at auntminnie.com, will be fun seeing the responses