what u actually signed up for

Agree to disagree, I likely have a sleep disorder, so I haven't had a good night's sleep in nearly 10 years! Check, and, mate! Fuck I hate my life.....

Disagree. I used to spend time on more energy-intensive hobbies like programming and music production. But I've had mono and COVID in 2020 and I've never felt the same thereafter. Also working 40 hours a week drains a lot of energy

Yeah sports were my first attempt to solve it. I'm running twice a week usually and have done a few half marathons now. It's helped a bit, but my energy is still not amazing. It's probably related to having issues with mono and COVID in 2020, I've never been the same since then. Working 40 hours per week didn't help either.

You missed the banks tripping over themselves to find a COBOL programmer. My father makes stupid amounts of money (read, $400-$1600 per hour) maintaining bank COBOL systems. My father is in his 70s.

COBOL is almost as much of a PITA as Lisp, but no one, not even the US Military that developed Lisp will pay the really big bucks to maintain it.

A lot of the time it's about being lucky enough be able to have or form connections with rich stupid people. Those kinds are a lot more willing to throw insane amounts of money at someone/some company they vaguely know to do things they know nothing of but hear a lot about.

Or just working at a company that's well-known in the area and deals with clients very intimately while the product is being created.

Sometimes charging more for the same service makes them want it more, to them it means it's premium programming (as opposed to the off-brand wish dot com programming). But sometimes they demand disgracefully cheap yet world-class service and throw a tantrum when they can't pay you $5 an hour for a full rebranded recreation of the Amazon web service.

Yeah man, me too.

I went to school for electrical engineering, my first job was at an architecture firm designing the electrical stuff for buildings (including making all the electrical drawings for bank branches so we had some professional crossover 😋), and I ended up teaching myself software to automate a bunch of our designs and processes. I was literally directly making building design and construction more efficient ..... Buuuut.... The arch industry pays poorly and I realized they was no way of ever owning a house at the pace I was going so I left for software and doubled my salary in like 2 years. I went from senior electrical engineer to intermediate software engineer and saw a 50% increase.... All in a country experiencing a massive potentially existential housing crisis, and the industry pay disparity directly incentivized me to stop working on it and go work doing mostly bullshit software work.

The software industry is grossly overpaid for how hard we work and for how critical our relative contributions are to society, though even in the software industry the pay is incredibly distorted. Orders of magnitude more money goes to random social media bullshit and VC startups that go nowhere than to mission critical teams doing stuff like maintaining security and access control software.

I think it makes perfect sense. Those people are building something from scratch. That's a lot more responsibility and skill needed than to maintain a tiny part of a huge well established system. The people capable of doing an A+ job at building something totally new are very few and far between and the competition to hire them is fierce. The best way to move up in this industry is to build up your skill and jump ship to a new job as soon as your skill has outpaced your salary.

buddy there are a lot more reasons to be more than cynical about the economy, take a good look at things and you'll probably want to bring out the pitchforks.

I think it really just comes down to scale. Relative to other professions there aren't that many software engineers, but the work produced by each one has the potential to reach an extremely wide user base. Someone working at Google could write code that gets deployed on a billion devices. This is pretty clear when comparing between different software engineering roles as well. Companies that serve a global market pay significantly better than local companies.

On top of that, there's no supplies or logistics required for software engineering. It just takes one person and a computer, so expenses are minimal compared to other engineering disciplines.

Software also gets a plethora of remote work. I have zero sympathy as a mechanical and manufacturing engineer.

Britain got it so bad with the natural gas prices in the last few years.

That's wild, how big is your house? My monthly spend on heating is 1/4 of that during winter to keep it at 21.

Thank god we don't have to deal with costumers, imagine what outfit you'd have to wear to deal with them. And to make it work you'd probably have to wear make up too, it'd feel like halloween everyday.

Nah, I took a pay cut at my new job from where I was laid off due to the recession.

Agreed to the part about job security being terrible in the U.S, but it's worth mentioning that the premium you get in income for living in for example San Francisco far outweighs the cost of housing.

I live in rural Pennsylvania but I work remotely for a San Francisco startup.

I get paid less than my coworkers who live in big cities, but more than any of my friends who live in my area except one who's also a programmer.

Yes, but the pay for other jobs is even worse!

Hmm, yes. This reasoning is perfectly sound.

Pretty sure you can lose all your money in a casino regardless of how you earn it

That's your jobs fault?

I genuinely can't tell if this is incredibly dry humor or if you're being serious.

Still high relative to the average but nowhere near their American counterparts.

european countries also have a lower maintenance fee for staying alive, which evens things out a lot.

programmer pay here means you can just save up and retire early.

I've worked with programmers from Europe, they have above average pay.

It is lower than the US, but it's still higher than average EU salary, plus you get tons more benefits and job security. Also, with remote work, you can get a US job in Europe. You'll get paid less than if you were in the US, but more than other Europeans, while still enjoying the social benefits, and since you can accept less that makes you attractive to US companies. Main downside is having to adjust to US meeting hours.

Im a physics major so it is likely my own doing

That might be what I believed when I first started but it's so far from the truth...

Don't stop I'm almost there. 😆

Only if you plan to let your career stall out at Senior Engineer.