Hi guys
I'm a software developer in expensive Sydney, you can ask me almost anything :)
Cheers
[AMA] I am a Software Developer in Sydney, Ask Me (Almost) Anything
Lsillyguy on 20/11/2017 - 20:39
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@kaitok: Also the main reason for hiring contractors is they don't count as staff (budget / tax /cost centre / number fudging), has very little to do with "They go in, finish job, get the money, and move on".
I lost count at about the 50th job, might be over 100 by now.
@D C:
You're right regarding the main reason for hiring contractors .
But me saying "They go in, finish job, get the money, and move on" was meant for this comparison of IT contractors = mercs.
Anyway, u must be in your 50s I guess?
@kaitok: > Anyway, u must be in your 50s I guess?
Not yet.
was meant for this comparison of IT contractors = mercs.
Poor analogy and doesn't match the real world. What of companies who convert their staff roles to contractors? Contractors are easy to hire & fire and so on, which is why we have them.
(The currently popular 'short-term permanent' isn't all that different.)
One thing missing from your view of experience is domain knowledge, of which graduates have exactly zero and long-term employees should have a lot of, albeit in a narrow field.
Contractors tend to have broad but shallow domain knowledge, but a lot of it is just realising it's the same crap with people using different jargon.
@T1OOO: > It teaches you how to learn. What’s effective. What’s not. The knowledge is a bonous.
Oh what tosh.
If you haven't figured out how to learn by yourself by the time you get to uni, go dig ditches. Experience teaches you good & bad. Knowledge is all that.
Look at the responses by @kaitok & @smuggler. One talks about what they use (Agile, JIRA, blah blah project management crap) and the other mentions what problem they solve is (medical) and even says he dumped all the PM stuff onto the people whose job it actually is.
Which one do you think has the most experience, and would make the better hire?
@D C:
If there's no companies hiring junior role then where are we going get senior people from?
Someone gotta teach/mentor or give a chance to those people that wanna get start in the industry you know…
@D C:
/shaking my hands as i type with a tear runing down my cheek, shattered….
your right man, your absolutely right, ive wasted my life
@D C:
I went and got a degree and yes it got me a job that I wouldn't have got without. This is demonstrative of a failure on the hiring side though. People have a mistaken belief that a degree now is worth as much as it did 50 years ago.I'd guess that I've used maybe 2% of the things I learnt at University in my career and that 2% could have been learnt 10 times faster in a work setting.
I'd gladly hire a grade 12 kid who has been writing programs for fun over a university graduate that's never done anything outside their degree.
@smuggler: "Yes, degrees do matter, especially for engineers."
Except the best engineers, they drop out, create a revolution then receive honorary degrees later on…
we look at if they've done anything extra (apps on iOS or Android, Github repo, open source project, website etc…), and go from there.
I'm a dev and absolutely hate the job 'requirement' that you write code and develop apps or whatever in your spare time.
I write code all day at work, I have a social life and a life outside programming. I don't have time to be going home and doing personal projects. Interviewers asking me what my personal projects or job descriptions saying 'You will have a GitHub full of projects' and acting like I'm worthless when I dont give me the shits. Is there an assumption lawyers, doctors, accountants, engineers go home and work on personal projects? (profanity) no, so why the hell should devs be any different. Look at my professional work, you numptiesI didn't say that the requirement for the job is to build extra stuff in your spare time. I said that if we selected 20 people based on their resume and could only interview 12 then we would look at if they've done anything extra. If we got the time we would interview all 20.
Except the best engineers
The best engineers aren't the ones who make lots of money.
The best engineers are often unheard of.I once worked with a guy who didn't go to uni, had been developing for 5 years, and I had to help him with a problem. Turns out he didn't know the difference between pass by ref and pass by value. He also used arrays for everything when it was clearly the wrong data algorithm to use. Uni taught me that. Yes there's a lot of fluff buy you do miss things self taught.
Even now when I learn something new, I still tend to do a proper course on the subject….
@D C:
Right, so experience trumps degree (unless you want a bunch of grads desperate to pay of their bills that you can work to death and churn while wondering why your code is crap).
And being able to reason and show quality work should trump all that you mention.
We all know how many people claim all sorts of things and can barely program and havent a clue what refactoring is nor can they explain what different refactorings actually do and why you would want to use them.
I have a BSc in Geography lol. I got my first software engineering job based on doing well studying after I later went to tafe and did an electronics diploma (still not directly relevant to sw E).
After doing 2 years at that first job (at which I did way better that the other new starters with actual compsci degrees), I went overseas and got even more programming experience. I'm still doing it nearly 20 years later. I work on safety critical embedded real-time stuff using C. I'm pretty specialised now, probably wouldn't get a new job easily. I don't do linkedin or github or any of that newfangled crap.
I'd imagine things are different now, and you would need a relevant degree to do what I did. I have done linked lists and hash tables during my work on embedded systems btw. Using C means you actually have to know the ins and outs of programming concepts since they aren't just handed to you on a silver platter.
Everyone should be able to write a link list and hashtable with supporting unit tests in less than an hour, as part of a interview.
Get involved in some open source projects, submit pull requests (yes learn about git). Then when you apply for any job, tell them to look at your contributions.
Everything else is bullshit compared to real life examples of your work.
The best developers I have worked with were self-taught.
The best developer I know is self-taught. The rest after him mostly have degrees.
YOu can't have worked in a very good company.
Hmm it's worth about $300+ million. Must be half decent. My point is that uni degrees don't mean a damn thing aside from getting you an interview and are no actual gauge of skill.
Well your logic is broken because your uni professor prolly has never had a real job and is teaching your stuff that would never get them a real job.
University degree is overrated. I honestly don't think anything I studied at uni was useful at work. I should also mention that I'm not a studious type, I found it useless but continued anyway( I have a masters degree).
At the same time, unless you are a passionate coder, I recommend you do a university degree. Note that IT isn't just about programming/coding and graduate programs normally give you a taste on different flavours so that you can chose the right path.I'd like to share this post to answer this question. This is an answer from a well-respected developer in the industry. He has, very eloquently, responded this same question in this post and comments.
https://medium.com/javascript-scene/learn-to-code-13-tips-th…
Get back to work.
LOL I'm actually working (at home) right now… This is just like a way to relieve stress… LOL
How big is your QA team?
I forgot to hit the Reply button, please find my answer in the comment right below
my last project has 40 testers, means nothing
good for you!
Biggest used to be 10 :).
For now we don't have any professional QA in our company! All the UAT testing is done by various people in different business units, and this actually works very well! Of course I do my own unit testing extensively ;).
no integration tests ?
Sure, integration tests, and load tests, and literally "penetration" tests… I just didn't want to get too deep on the testing stuff… LOL
SIT is done by testers.
QA their own if you have them in you company.Depends, if you have to test your DAO with real database, or your payment module with the payment gateway sandbox during development time then it's considered as integration test. Testers normally don't do those.
every place has different ways,.. we have close to 11 environments, and have nightly automated tests, really testers just focus on being able to write automation tests these days with UTF. ive also worked at places without unit tests, and just dev and prod.
@T1OOO: where I work has phased out most of the traditional testers (the ones doing manual regression tests) and put a larger emphasis on automated testing - from unit through to end-to-end. Makes more sense to me.
As someone who wants to pursue a career within computer science, how's the job market for someone within this field? Is it easy? Competitive? Impossible? Cheers!
Forgot to hit Reply… please find my answer in the comment right below
Competitive with a lot of potential, IMO the software industry always need more developers like we need more tradies, and good local devs are not easy to find. To my surprise all the comps I worked for always prefer local devs to offshore devs :).
Companies are always looking for fresh young talents as experienced devs always move on and budgets are limited.
U mentioned u want to pursue a career in computer science? Do u have a particular field of interest in mind? Mobile? Web app? Data? Security? Cryptography?
Companies are always looking for fresh young talents as experienced devs always move on and budgets are limited.
Ah, there we have it.
But then theirs seniors, who will work for basic pay because the money as opposed to lifestyle is not important, and love and have kept up with technology. Yes I am one of those.
Eh what?
Your post needs a spot of proofreading.
Yeah you're right, I should have said fresh talents or fresh "young at heart" talents.
Do you get bad back sitting in front of a box all day?
Luckily work provided me an adjustable standing desk… and I sit on a $30 gym ball instead of a $1000 ergonomic chair. I keep my back and shoulder in shape by swimming :).
How hard is it working as a one-armed programmer?
j/k
Do you do any support related work at all? I feel all devs need to handle tickets/cases on a regular basis so they're in touch with real world problems.
For all the comps I worked for the support channel is usually like this:
End users report problem <-> Customer service team <-> Technical support team <-> Dev team (bug fixes).
A lot of times we had to bounce back tickets due to "it being a feature, not a bug" LOL.
Having said that I learnt a lot of real world problems found by end users :)
Does a gap in your career, for say a year or 2, affect your chances of getting back into the IT field?
Gap year is a waste of time. Get a job first then go on a holiday.
Find an open source project you can contribute something to, and do it. A bunch of commits to build in some features it needed shows you can do the work and can work autonomously.
Once you're done adding to one, find another. Keep doing it until you get bored, and have a job that competes for your time.
Of course, to contribute to a project, you need to know how to develop in the relevant stack, etc, so this is not advice for those starting out ;-)
Disagree strongly depending on whether after highschool or after uni. Many 17 and 18 year olds aren't ready to be responsible for themselves, having been spoon fed in highschool. I dropped out of my first degree. I'm one of the few that went back a couple of years later and kicked butt. A lot that don't make it first time at uni never will. Even moreso given what degrees cost now.
I think it kinda does since you have to compete with the 1 or 2 cohorts of fresh graduates, and IT industry will have evolved a lot during that time as well.
Of course not simply because there are so many frameworks and technologies its impossible to know them all. Even if you are workign today there are many new ones popping up and its very likely you are working with old crap that nobody else cares about. Life is too short, enjoy it first worry about work later.
Is it too late to start a career in your 30's? Taking considering what has being said with regards to a degree, perhaps even needing to go back to school/retraining and then starting from the bottom.
Nothing is too late really.
If you apply for a Junior dev position, I'll look at your degree transcript or your achievement, not your age nor your career timeline :)
No, I hired a guy who was 54 out of uni, he worked for 7 years and retired, win win for both. He never had a day off sick and worked hard, fit like a glove culture wise too. He could eat more junk food than any one else.
Salary progression since you started working?
Difficult question!
I got my first offer at $45K package as a junior dev while I was still on student visa and just finished my degree, so I accepted it straight away. (actually got an interview with Google but failed… LOL)
I'd rather not say my current wage (I don't wanna sound like I'm bragging) but can give you this:
current_wage / 45000 / no_of_years_exp = 0.46
Oh come on, everyone here has a six figure salary. (Not sure what mine is, I get paid at a daily rate.)
You couldn't afford all the bargains if you didn't pull in 6 digits or more :)
In Sydney 6 figure wages in the low range don't really mean much… It's not really something people can be proud of like they used to a few years ago.
@kaitok: the only people in sydney who don't earn a six figure wage is those working in woolies and servos.
How long u been working
You should be able to figure that out by his posts.
I've been working for a lucky number of years :)
@kaitok: why bother being so secretive? As if anyone cares, and it is somewhat interesting / useful information to know.. Maybe if it's a good salary people will consider joining your field.
I'm not being so secretive!
I'm Asian so u will know what I meant by "lucky number".
Plug it in the formula above then u'll get the answer.
Junior devs can start as low as $55K now, but if you're good and passionate that number will increase very quickly in just 2 or 3 years.
@kaitok:
Say lucky number is 8. You gave "current_wage / 45000 / no_of_years_exp = 0.46"
=> current_wage x no_of_years_exp/45000 = 0.46
8 x current_wage = 45000 x .46
current_wage = 20700/8
=> current_wage = 2587.5Are you sure you know the rules of mathematical division ? Or that is indeed your actual wage. question is, is it wages for an hour ? a day ? week? month ?
I think there are some missing brackets. I read it as (a/b)/C
so making approx 4 times what he started, around 180k.
Still, should be able to sort out brackets on that payscale.
@ozbjunkie:
So much for a s/w developer. I would have hoped he wrote something more clearer.
Anywho, based on your reading, this is what his current wage is :(current_wage/45000)/8 = 0.46
cw/45000 = 3.68
cw = 3.68 x 45000
cw = 165600@AussieB: Are you sure you doing the math right? Calculation is done from left to right… So it should be 0.46 * num_years * 45K :P
Yep, maybe writing the math that way is OK in some programs, but there is ambiguity for humans, and perhaps wouldn't be calculated that way within all programs.
Anyway I teach math what would I know about programming.
What you said would be correct if and only if A / (B / C) = 0.46
A / B / C is equivalent to (A / B) / C, but you don't really need the brackets
It will be calculated the same way in any program. Without maths programming wouldn't exist.
Try to evaluate this in any program: 20 / 4 / 2 == (20 / 4) / 2. You'll get the same result.
No it's not really much in the industry. Guys working for big shot comps earn way more than that figures, plus bonus and stock options while I don't have those perks.
If you're good at maths and logic, you'll be good at programming.
One of my fav doco movies on Netflix: The Secret Rules of Modern Living: Algorithms http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5818010/
I'm lazy and don't like the idea of ongoing learning to keep up with technology. I wish I were different.
But yeah one day maybe I'll change!
edit: oops, replies continued to next page… my comment has already been said
If you're good at maths and logic, you'll be good at programming.
I disagree, I think you need to have a love of programming as well. And difficult maths problems can always be solved by someone else, all a programmer needs to know is how best to apply that solution in the code.
I've worked unlucky number of years and I'm still 100k short of your earnings and working 9-7 almost 3-4 days a week but…. lucky I have a job because there are many others who don't have one.
@NoobTan:
Yeah it's not what it once was that's for sure. I've been on the same hourly rate since 2001, yes, that's right, 17 years without a raise. I've had 2 years of not having any work at all during that time, so I'm just glad I still have that job (plus my 2001 rate was pretty good at the time considering it was right after the dotcom bust)
That's a really good wage. I used your formula and I'm at a measly 0.34 :(
0.34 is still very good.
The op is just exceptionally great. More than $160K in 8 years. That is amazing. I think my rate is less than 0.2 :-(
0.34 should be good for VIC!
I don't know how IT companies can survive say there are 50 people every one getting 70k a year that's easily 3.5m just the wages. What frigging software can you sell EACH YEAR for 3.5m?
@kaitok: > Here's what I've noticed: companies with juniors normally don't hire merc.
You should look around more.