this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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I can think of three big pieces of advice:
Are you sure? I think the golden age of the magic tech jobs is nearing its end. If you want to join the tech industry because it's an easy ticket for a successful life then you might wanna rethink that. If you want to join the tech industry because engineering is pure magic and you want to be a part of that, then by all means, you do you. Just be ready for it to be a bumpy road if you aren't able to adapt to whatever AI does to the industry over the lifetime of your career.
Find companies who will treat you right, and where people are real and do real shit. When I was first starting out, a project I was working on was behind. I stayed over the weekend, even though people told me not to. I finished, I was proud of myself. Then I came in on Monday and everyone else's stuff was behind anyway, so we missed our deadline regardless, and in the end it didn't matter. Right around that time was when I decided, more or less, to hell with this. At the company I eventually jumped ship to, my boss would regularly push back on clients who wanted us to work weekends, come by and encourage people to live a normal life instead of just a working-to-death life. Basically, he looked out for people. So I stayed there for quite a while. Basically, after that experience, if the boss wasn't looking out for me or the tech was shoddy, I bailed instantly. You gotta have a good human life and take pride in what you do.
Own up to your fuck-ups. You'll make some. I've destroyed important hardware, made massive architecture mistakes on client work which the clients then identified and talked to us about, deleted the partition table on an important public-facing server, you name it. When I did something like this, I would be 100% upfront about what happened. In good working environments, people would recognize and give respect for that, because nobody's perfect. In bad working environments, being upfront about mistakes would somehow be a bad thing (see point #2). The answer is not to become sneaky. The answer is to leave and go somewhere where people respect honesty. Those places do exist.
That third one can be tough, but I think itβs super important, and, not just in tech.
An easy way to confirm your first point: would you still want to do it if you were paid significantly less? If so, then yeah, you're in the right place.
Point 1 is pure speculation. You could say the same about any profession. Absolutely not something woth considering when looking for career opportunities. You can always pivot with your career and knowing how to code is a plus because that makes you understand tech better