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by dialupmodem 3239 days ago
The glory days of programming are over, mate.

When the masses discovered programming to be profitable ~5 years ago, it became "cool" and was quickly gamed into the ground from both ends.

Look at what "cool" does to art and music. The "rockstars" get paid a lot, and everyone else works for peanuts (or no nuts) or gets a "real job". 90% of the work now is marketing yourself. So it is with programming. Programming is like music now.

This is all thanks to the supply of programmers (and wannabes) increasing tenfold thanks to boot camps, and a 400% increase in computer science majors in the past 5 years.

The craziest thing about all of this is that you can be a complete novice, but if you have a decent following on social media and are putting out somewhat interesting content and are a terrible programmer, you will absolutely get hired over the expert that isn't contributing publically. It's all about visibility now.

My advice is find something you intrinsically enjoy so much, that doing all the extra annoying stuff is at the very least tolerable.

Be happy you haven't invested 10 years into the industry like I have.

1 comments

There is some truth to it. Everyone wants a developer with extensive public portfolio (github/stack overflow/open source contributions) and ideally great performance with algorithmic brain teasers, but don't realize that such people are quite literally celebrities. Do you really need George Clooney for your soap opera? Is the budget of your soap opera sufficient to hire George Clooney? Another thing - for the dirty stuff the celebrity will need a double;)