Tag: work

What are some things you wish you knew when you started programming?

Quora thread on “What are some things you wish you knew when you started programming?” is a goldmine of wisdom.  Irrelevant of how experienced you – whether you’ve been programming for decades or just thinking about a new career path, which programming languages and technology stacks you use, whether you’ve completed format education or taught yourself everything you know, I’m sure you’ll find valuable lessons and food for thought in there.

On Impostor Syndrome

David Walsh shares some thoughts on an impostor syndrome.  I’m sure anyone in the tech industry can relate.  I certainly do.

“Impostor” is a powerful word but that’s how I have felt during all of my career as a professional web developer. I feel like I’ve learned every day of the ride but I feel like I’m way behind. I feel like people see me as something of an expert where I see myself as an accident waiting to happen. I’m a complete impostor. A fraud.

Apart from the honesty of his feelings, I like his ways of snapping out of it.  They do work for me too:

  • Look at your (hopefully decent) employment history and know that, on a basic level, you’re much more wanted than you’re wanted gone
  • Log onto the IRC channel of a skill you feel comfortable with and answer questions of those asking
  • Realize that people who consider themselves “experts”, and don’t go through waves of self doubt, are idiots that are so arrogant to not know what they don’t know
  • Remember the last time a non-developer friend asked you the most basic of computer-related questions
  • Perform any simple exercise in the JavaScript console
  • BLOG!  The worst thing that can happen is someone corrects you and you learn something out of it
  • Review your code and find little nits to fix

One other thing that helps me, is this bit by Joe Rogan:

He talks more generically about life, but I think it’s equally applicable to technology knowledge as well.

Engineers Salary Data

Amitj Aggarwal, former Staff Engineer at Google (2008-2012), has collected a whole bunch of data in regards to engineers salaries, in USA and worldwide.  His points seem to be overly optimistic at times, but I don’t have any links handy to contradict his research.

Here are a few points to get you started:

  • Zoho, Salesforce pay 40% more than Oracle, Cisco, GE!!!
  • Top 7% or so engineers at Netflix, Amazon, Google, Facebook are paid more than $1.4M per year. Next 10% make $700K on average.
  • Facebook has lost relevance to Slack, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest and Quora. If you are working at Facebook ask for a 50% raise else move to a startup.
  • Oracle is loosing to cloud startups. If you are working at Oracle ask for a 60% raise else move to a startup.
  • ENGINEERS DO NOT WASTE MONEY ON AN MBA. You will make 2X more on average as an engineer.
  • Tableau, Splunk, Slack, Airbnb, Quora, Twitter, Facebook, Google pay more than $320K salary to their top hires. Definitely interview at these fine places. Uber top engineer salaries are $190-340K per year.
  • Starting salaries for fresh software engineering graduates is now $130K-160K. Ask shamelessly. For the best ones its ~$180K.
  • Apple pays 60% more than Samsung.