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oliveoil posted:Can you think of anything faster that can also be distilled down to a sequence of simple steps that can be quickly explained? Or is even this too optimistic? I can describe the steps as I seem them to go from zero to highly-paid software engineer if it helps. Have you considered the fact that it is literally impossible for society to function if a significant portion of people worked high-paying "knowledge economy" jobs (and that if this even started to happen it would just depress wages). This is the sort of thing that should be immediately obvious to anyone who isn't a complete idiot. Most jobs that need to be worked for society to function are ones that do not pay well in our society and economic system. oliveoil posted:I'm pretty sure this is all doable with enough optimism. But I see lots and lots of pessimists these days. That's just being a genuinely stupid person. Like it's not even an ideological thing; this is the sort of belief that is indicative of a person being unusually stupid if they're older than ~21/22. Cicero posted:If you can get good at solving leetcode problems, you can probably get into at least the tier of companies below FB/Google, like Amazon and MS. And at that level, saving money to move is less of an issue since they'll cover it. You have a distorted perception because you've either coasted down the path to those jobs or gotten unusually lucky at some point along the way. As another poster mentioned, it generally isn't possible unless someone has gone to the right schools or just got extremely lucky. If someone has the aptitude to become a half-decent programmer (which is honestly pretty rare and difficult to self-teach past college-age) they're still not going to be able to get the kind of jobs you're thinking of. If they're willing to move, they could feasibly get something like a high 5-figure job at a large company that isn't a "tech company" (FedEx is probably the biggest programmer employer where I live, for example), but the sort of thing you're thinking about isn't normally accessible. This reminds me of a college friend who was convinced that his skill and attitude got him his first good job instead of the internship at a hedge fund he got through nepotism during his sophomore year. When almost everyone you know and work with comes from a similar background, those common factors become invisible and you start to convince yourself that difference in aptitude, personality, etc are what actually mattered. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Nov 5, 2019 |
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Nov 5, 2019 20:46
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Cicero posted:Nah, you're greatly exaggerating the difficulty here. I'm working in Google's Munich office and hardly anyone has gone to top 10 or 20 CS schools. Even back in the bay area people who had gone to Stanford or wherever were, while not rare at all, not the norm. There were seemingly a shitton of people who had gone to UCSD though. That doesn't mean it's remotely plausible for the vast majority of programmers to get those jobs, though. There's a selection bias where you're mostly just seeing the people who got jobs and not the people who didn't. I referenced the finance guy because he has the same sort of distorted perception, due to his data set just consisting of "people who got those jobs." Also, you're kinda proving my point regarding the US (it's entirely possible that the employment situation is substantially different in Germany, so I won't speak to that). UCSD is very highly ranked even if it isn't absolutely "top tier" and most people won't have access to that kind of institution. When you're in an "elite" career like that you get a distorted sense of what's normal and lose track of the fact that schools in the top 40-50 are still pretty damned elite and inaccessible to most Americans. Cicero posted:This is dumb. We're talking about coding jobs, not jobs as political aides or as an actor or something that's hyper reliant on networking. I'm not denying that you need some baseline level of skill. Programming is probably actually better than most jobs when it comes to at least requiring some actual skill, and the couple people I've known who worked at Google were definitely very good programmers. Someone who is genuinely talented at programming can probably always get a very good job. I'm saying that "people employed at these companies have this level of skill/experience" does not imply that having that level of skill/experience makes it reasonably possible for anyone to get those jobs. I also think that more talent is required than is obvious to many people who have that talent (and this probably includes you - if you work at Google, you're probably a good programmer, so don't misinterpret this as me claiming that these companies are full of talentless nepotism cases). When I took an intro compsci course in college with a bunch of people who were generally pretty high achievers and probably better overall than your average student, like half the class did very poorly and I had an extremely easy time of it. I'm now 34 and have been working as a programmer for like 10 years now, and I can guarantee you that I am absolutely garbage and I'm not just being modest when I say that. Actual good programmers reach a level of skill higher than mine within the space of about a year. So I actually think that more talent is involved with the sort of programming job that pays really well than a lot of people do (though it's a very specialized sort of talent that doesn't really apply well to other disciplines), but that's also why I think the idea of the vast majority of people ever working that kind of job is deeply unrealistic. All of this being said, I think that making some attempt to learn programming (just to see if it "clicks" for you) is still good advice on an individual level, but this is a separate thing from thinking that the vast majority of people could access the sort of job that pays six figures at tech companies, etc. I think that the sort of abilities I have are probably within reach of quite a few people (and pretty much anyone if taught properly as a child) and, in the current job market, can fairly reliably get you a job making some mid-5-figure salary. There are quite a few jobs who just want people who can fix bugs or make changes to simple user interfaces or whatever. But I think that sort of thing is a fundamentally different job than the sort of thing people usually consider the "tech industry" and isn't the sort of thing the OP is referring to.
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Nov 6, 2019 21:13
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Pochoclo posted:If you were able to make a cool thousand dollars every single day and somehow ignore inflation, you would need to have been saving up since the year 800 BC to reach a billion dollars now. Probably the best way to become rich as a non-rich person is to convince other rich people to invest in some company you make (during a time like the present when they're flush with cash and desperate to find places to invest it). Of course, convincing them to invest money in you largely depends upon you being a person they like and find competent (which generally requires being rich, or at least well-off, yourself).
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Nov 11, 2019 21:50
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