Fuck computer programming as a career

congrats :)

I was in your shoes 10 yrs ago
and left.

but O'bammie will train you for
another job in a different career

and the next prez will do the same thing

and the next

suddenly, you realize you got old
and never had a steady career in your
whole life and your only retirement
comes in the form of a SS check
which most can't live on.

then you go on welfare to eat

while the CEO of that company you worked
for is enjoying caviar and his 3rd vacation
home in the Caymens

then you realize, it was YOUR hard work
that put him into the elite status.

then you get pissed at yourself for being
stupid enough to work your ass off all
your life just so somebody else could
profit off your labor.

suddenly you realize you were born
into slavery

and now your pissed

this is how Revolutions start ;)

They have a quantum computer.
[link to www.dwavesys.com]

Yep, there is a company web page, press releases, investors (fools), plus a big black box. Where are the actual happy customers from the real world, amazed at the super-powers of this "quantum computer"? What exactly did it compute for them?

Checking a few pdf's from their "Technology deep dive" page [link to www.dwavesys.com] -- it looks like an ovberhyped classical analog computer (super-cooled for theatrical effect), with lots of conventional computing gear around it and conventional software running on it, simulating how QC would work, if it could actually work (I will grant them cute demos and visuals). In summary, that scary black box can't compute a squat that its "support" computing gear can't do on its own, at a fraction of a cost.

No matter how much you learn
some new stuff keeps showing up to make you obsolete!

Yeah that's it tard. Never mind the fact that the CIA invested millions into the company because they have a fake quantum computer.

This thread has helped me reinforce what I had been thinking for a long time - that I'm just treading water ALL THE TIME trying to keep up with the newest advances in code.

AND that it's perhaps time to find a new career.

learn fortran. always in demand in some niche markets of the hardware industry...
learn lisp. for the beauty of it...

the money is probably in phone APPS..

I have been programming for over 20 years and love every minute of it. So far I was lucky to work for small, startup companies, or consulting, always doing stuff I haven't done before, always new challenges. The skills do accumulate, so I have become quicker when jumping into new languages, systems and interfaces.

I have done just about anything that's out there, from modem and hard drive firmware (even in machine code for strange, primitive processors), to operating systems, multiprocessor job control systems, specialized libraries for programmers, web filtering (designed and coded Cyber Patrol in the early days of Netscape), Windows, Linux and OSX/iOS high speed networking, servers & clients for variety of protocols from specs & from scratch (such as http, dns, smtp, snmp) peer to peer systems,device drivers, compression programs (for graphics & audio, compressed data bases), GPS servers and clients, smart screen magnifiers for users with poor vision and input methods for motorically handicapped (e.g. Morse code via puffs or blinks or cheek twitches), golfing application for iPhone (e.g. measures slope & distance to hole, suggests club, kind & direction of swing, shows trajectories), remote PC desktop & remote webcams control/view for clients in Java, Javascript, iPhone native code, tele-conferencing system, software & firmware for Data Center switches and routers,...

The translation of required behaviors into algorithmic patterns, then of those into code, has become second nature, it just flows without thinking, like talking or breathing air. Debugging is fun, too, like solving new puzzles, or like detective solving a murder mystery.

The most enjoyableis the initial nurturing of a program from a little seed, laying out classes and data structures, simulating their behaviours in the mental models of the system I am looking to create. If you learn how to do that right, the program grows like a network (a graph with adaptable links, functioning just like human brain), a live being with intelligence of its own unfolding by itself in perfect harmony, like fertilized egg growing into a newborn baby, with my brain acting as its substratum, my fingers as its fingers. Once that phase takes off, it becomes completely effortless on my part. I don't even need to think any more, the network thinks it through better than I ever could, it knows exactly what it needs, where it should go, and it merely "asks" me what to do next.

I think that's the worst part of it; you can't sit still for a minute. And it can be exhausting.

Yet doctors (well, competent ones anyway) have to keep up or somebody could get sick or die. At least coders don't have to worry about that. But nurses probably have it the worst of all, since they have to keep up but also have somebody with a God complex riding their back all day.

In the early and mid 90's i had a client (a grocery produce supplier) that I installed a 5 user system with a server of 330 mb for $28,000.00 Woek stations were 286 -16's and the entire business was run on a Solomon database I customized for him. he had 15 employees , about 50 to 60 clients and did about 4 million a year. His data was text - his invoices were triplicate doen on a dot matrix with a 4 page per minute laser for the fancy stuff. I talked him about 3 months ago -had not spoke to him for 17 years!
he has 11 employees, 52 customers - did about 3.6 million last year. He now has sql server that houses a $35,000.00 custom database , and pays a system admin about 65K a year to make sure it stays running. His workstations are dells with 500 gb drives and 8 gb memory - everyone has lasers and invoices now just print the same thing 3 times (no triplicate forms) His business hs not changed ONE bit to justify this technololgy. It is the evil empire of Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Dell and their marketing machines , not to mention gaming that has driven us where we are. How sad we have become. And although the PC has lowered the cost of most everything - the field that has benefitted the most - has more than increased it's costs 10 times and that field is medicine - go figure.

I've worked the hardware side all my life in electronics. Yep, the shit is old and we don't built much of shit here anymore, just maintaining the old shit. Everthing now is routers, switches and servers. everyhting is a fucking network now. I agree with the OP and I am equally tired of the hurry up and fix it now, with limited documentation at times and barely a decent schematic if any. They want it fast but they couldn't fix it themselves if they had to. All they know most of the time is their keyboards.

Someone the other night posted a thread about learning web design because there weren't any jobs to be found. I said yeah, that's right, shoot for the moon but when the EMPs come your fucking software ain,t gonna run without a working transistor. Learn some fixin skills that you can barter with when TSHTF.

Fuck software. Hardware was running by itself long before software came around and together they are a great pair but one can live without the other.

The 1% that only know their keyboards and not how it works will be the first to scurry to the bunkers. When it's all over, their fucked.

I have developed since 1987. basic, Dbase, paradox, Vb,VBA. been Novell certified, worked on CTOS systems, Concurrent DOS systems, PC-MOS, LANMAN, built arcnet networks, sql server, asp,vbscript, cobol, and even worked as a fulltime employee for Microsoft Corporation starting off as a support engineer for Access and Visual Basic and leaving after transferring to Microsoft Learns division as an internal trainer for Access and VBA. Got a hand signed letter of recognition from Steve Balmer himself for an HR sexual hrassment DB i wrote for our site. And this is how i see it as well (true story here)
In the early and mid 90's i had a client (a grocery produce supplier) that I installed a 5 user system with a server of 330 mb for $28,000.00 Woek stations were 286 -16's and the entire business was run on a Solomon database I customized for him. he had 15 employees , about 50 to 60 clients and did about 4 million a year. His data was text - his invoices were triplicate doen on a dot matrix with a 4 page per minute laser for the fancy stuff. I talked him about 3 months ago -had not spoke to him for 17 years!
he has 11 employees, 52 customers - did about 3.6 million last year. He now has sql server that houses a $35,000.00 custom database , and pays a system admin about 65K a year to make sure it stays running. His workstations are dells with 500 gb drives and 8 gb memory - everyone has lasers and invoices now just print the same thing 3 times (no triplicate forms) His business hs not changed ONE bit to justify this technololgy. It is the evil empire of Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Dell and their marketing machines , not to mention gaming that has driven us where we are. How sad we have become. And although the PC has lowered the cost of most everything - the field that has benefitted the most - has more than increased it's costs 10 times and that field is medicine - go figure.

I was just asked to upgrade a 1999 Borland C++ Build 3 app to work outside of a virtual XP environment and to work in Windows 7. Told them that they need to re-write the entire app for 100K minimum. They balked of course.

Original programmer could do it for cheaper, I know, but he refuses to touch it. That is a warning flag for this old dude!

I can pretty much talk to anything in orbit/space with a IBM 360AT and a 1979 Fortran Compiler so your whole life is pretty much meaningless to me.

OP hits the nail on the head....he just gives his own job as an example...people all over the world in every sector of the economy are being squeezed like lemons....small example what happened here in Holland..our national postal sevices kicked out all their employees.... they made a decent living earning up to 2000 euros net a month....now they work with part-timers who are paid per deliverance...they end up earning 6-7 euros an hour....

I'm sick and tired of it. I've been programming now for well over a decade and I simply can not write another god damned line of code. It's the same shit over and over again. Make it faster, make it cheaper, make it faster, make it cheaper is all you fucking hear at work and all you see in job postings.

Why in the fuck does any of it matter? Let's run on a treadmill our entire lives so people can have a fucking faster smartphone. Fuck them.

Let's spend hundreds of billions of dollars so algorithms can trade a few microseconds faster. Fuck it.

Let's waste countless man years so the corners of windows are curved and semi-transparent because that shit really matters. Fuck it all.

Let's rewrite the same website infrastrucure in a the latest fad language every couple of years so we all can pretend to be busy bees. Fuck that.

Is there any way out of this treadmill of a life? I highly doubt it. Mankind won't stop in this path to exponential insanity until we are left with nothing but a smouldering pile of ruins we once called civilization.

People can barely keep up with their workload at the office and all the chores at home yet every day you get to work and it's MOAR MOAR MOAR.

And you know what? It's the 0.1% at the top that are *demanding* that every single thing below them cut costs, increase efficiency all so they can see a little MOAR money that they did the month before. Can they even spend the money they make? No, but they still need MOAR and it will come out of your SOUL!

LOL i was just at youtube checking out php mvc framework tutorials and thinking,

"IT NEVER STOPS!"

No matter how much you learn
some new stuff keeps showing up to make you obsolete!

/**
*
* I've f'ing had it!!!!!
*
* I need a new career
* .. something that
*
* 1. I'd actually excel in
* 2. I wouldn't feel obsolete in every 6 months
*
*/

Computer programmer 'outsourced job to China'
A US computer programmer has been allegedly caught spending thousands of dollars to outsource his own job to a company in China.

The software developer, who is in his 40s, is said to have paid a Chinese firm a fifth of his six-figure salary to do his job for him while he spent his working days surfing the internet.

[link to www.telegraph.co.uk]

You might feel better if you can write code that screws up evil bastards, then you become a masked avenger for the little guys.
Using your super powers for good not evil.
Think of yourself as the Masked Avenger, taking down the systemic evil,one line of code at a time.
Ca DMV for example,need their stuff erased.