The programmers who attend a full-time job here, how did you get to your current position? With what prior knowledge did you apply and which other achievements helped you to pass?
Yours truly, Anonymous.
> i don haf a job as a progger but u dun need prio nowlege lol jus atend coleg iz enuf lol
Go die in a hole
its a really good question, im gonna be checking this thread too
I started out in IT as a COBOL programmer in 1997 and now I am in IT Security. Not quite the direction I wanted to go but the problem is programming is rated as a low level job now and all of that work is being outsourced to India, China, and Eastern Europe.
I am sure you could get a job as a programmer/developer but it will likely be in .net or java at this point, neither of which I am very good at. I do a lot of Perl coding but that is considered a unix side job.
It all depends on what the employer wants.
>>3
y u meen lol i jus sad i dun haf a progger jop an u dun need noledge eccpt coleg lol
>>5
Where do you live and how much do you get month/year? Just curious.
I would rather not say where I live but I do make currently $70+/k a year, but I no longer program. The most I ever made programming was $30k/year. When I moved to infrastructure and admin work, I started in the $60s.
These salaries are pretty average for the middle section of the US, excluding Chicago. NY and LA will be much higher due to the standard of living. Use an online salary calculator to adjust these numbers for your area.
I started as a data entry clerk in a medium sized global manufacturing company while on the summer break from my University studies in Computer Science. When they found out what I could do, they gave me a few programming projects and I did them so well they invited me back to work for them in the next break, and then when I'd finished Uni offered a full time job.
I accepted and in time got promoted so am now their top programmer and in charge of the sysadmins. The job is pretty good, I get to work on all sorts of diverse stuff all over the company, and travel abroad on business a lot.
All in all, a very lucky break.
>>9
Very nice, you were lucky and good as well, if they decided to hire you full-time. What kind of programming projects were you given? Includes but not limited to language of operation and tasks.
Thanks
I wasn't interested in your exact location :) but mostly the continent and if possible country. Your information was enough as well, thank you.
I'm making 55k right now. Graduated last year and this is my first job. Having a strong knowledge of C++, understanding how to write optimal code, and having a few demos did the trick for me.
>>11
Location please? 55k in in West Virginia is very different from 55k in California.
I write JAVA and make $64K/year
>>13 And 64K should be enough for any--is shot
>>14
It was bound to be said at some point.
>>13 Pretty impressive for someone who can't spell Java properly.
Got a position by starting at the bottom. Through a community college degree and impressing the easily impressed, I've attained a position that involves programming in an unofficial capacity.
I earn about 30% over the minimum hourly wage and I could be replaced or have my position eliminated at any time.
I'd probably do it for less.
USD10k per year. I'm in one of your outsourced locations in Asia. Nobody gets overtime pay and everyone whines but shuts up and work lest you're replaced from the hoard of fresh grads.
>>18 USD8.4k per year ... central europe ... outsourcing. 18 hours in work daily. No weekends for last 4 years. So shut up and work for your USD10k. If you don§t like your job change it with me :(
See you in the real world, boy.
I got a student position as a programmer for NASA at my college. I make $8.50/hr....
Kind of curious about what you do in a student position
>how did you get to your current position
Connections. And (apparently) I interviewed very well.
>With what prior knowledge did you apply
Computer hobbyist, up to programming some basic coding primarily in C, Java, and Ruby. Other than that, a high school diploma.
I started out at this software company doing Quality Assurance testing ($10/hour). Gradually moved to release engineering and automated test development ($20k). Spent about a year and a half doing that, then was moved to full time product development ($60k, full benefits, stock options). I live in the metro Boston area so the pay kind of sucks, but I can't complain seeing as I have no degree.
I do a lot of different kinds of work, but primarily Visual C++ and C# programming: everything from COM+ ENTERPRISE CLASS business objects bullshit to trivial end-user console utilities. I get saddled with release engineering or documentation tasks more often than I'd like, though.
>Dot.Net doesn't have it
.Net does have it to a degree. In 2.0 90 Types and 1145 type members are marked obsolete, but are left in for the sake of compatibility. But they don't sacrifice correctly implementing features for the sake of backwards compatibility.
And why should they? .Net is forward compatible. Old bytecode runs on news versions of the framework. Multiple framework versions can live side by side. Its possible to have multiple Java versions installed, but you have to choose which version you run (not something reasonable for users are gonna do).
>look at all the sites that got broke just between .NET2.0 -> .NET2.0SP2
I tried but couldn't find anything about that. .Net 2.0 sp2 is very new. Did they have problems with the beta?
And why the fuck is MS still supporting older versions? Think about that.
>Don't you fucking dare try to downplay the value of backwards compatibility. Don't even insinuate that .NET has anything remotely like it. It's insulting to my intelligence, and frankly it's insulting to yours as well.
OK buddy. Why should by .Net 2.0 code run on the .Net 1.1 CLR? Why are there Java apps that require a minimum Java version just like .Net?
>The real factors are whether having that breakage occasionally - or even perhaps rarely (it's only happened twice to me, and only once on .NET with a minor version change)-
I am curious as to what the details of that are.
>is worth it in order to gain things like tight integration with generics.
I say yes. .Net 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 all run on the same CLR. The difference is in the libraries. 3.5 SP1 has a modified CLR to improve performance but doesn't include any version breaking changes as far as I am aware.
The biggest 2.0 break was generics and the implementation is better than Java and C++ (templates). C++ templates are type unsafe macros. Java erases the generic type and has to add extra instructions to work with any given type.
In .Net reference type generic methods load the code for them once in memory and all instances share that same code. They can because these instructions work equally well on all instances for all types of the method. The data of the generic type is then held in a special variable table that identifies their type.
>Resolved/hidden. Java6's generics aren't bad. They're not great, but they're not bad, and they handle most of the common cases pretty well.
Generics in any language are a great coding convention and I agree their implementation in the Java language is fine. But in .Net (and to some extent C++) you get great performance. Java sacrifices performance for a good coding convention in their implementation.
>In reality, .NET and Java aren't all that different to a Windows desktop or Windows server developer.
I agree from that point of view.
>a Linux developer
From what I have read from the Linux community is that Mono is hated by the majority just for being "Microsoft." Its hilarious that battle Ubuntu users are having trying to get Paint.Net to replace the GIMP as the default image manipulation program or even added to the standard repositories. Paint.Net is better for the average user, but its hated for being too "Microsoft."
> a CF developer, and so on. Dot.Net won't ever get into these markets doing things the way they're doing it.
Well I think that's because Adobe keeps trying to head them off at the pass by integrating Java and .Net in to CF.
> .Net does have it to a degree.
No they don't. There aren't degrees of stability here; your interfaces are either stable or they are not. If you break them during a minor version bump, they weren't stable.
What remains to be seen is if a new update will fix the fix in a few days...
> I tried but couldn't find anything about that. .Net 2.0 sp2 is very new. Did they have problems with the beta?
I don't know. Most single-server sites apply whatever windows-update recommends. These people use something called absolute news manager, and it had a bug; one of the pages used a combination of IsValid (viewstate) and had a <form action> and a onserver handler. SP2 leaks the action attribute to the html where SP0 did not. This means you get viewstate/mac errors.
This isn't some third party library; this is Microsoft's library. People expect semantics breakage across major version releases (1.1->2.0), not across minor "build" releases.
> Why are there Java apps that require a minimum Java version just like .Net?
You already know the answer. Java adds new things to the library all the time. The part that's bothersome is that there are apps that require a maximum version and refuse to run on newer versions. I have several examples of this happening on .NET; I don't have any examples of this in Java (of course this doesn't mean that there aren't any).
> From what I have read from the Linux community is that Mono is hated by the majority just for being "Microsoft."
Mono is hated for a lot of reasons; one of the major ones is that it's so poor compared to Microsoft.NET - another is that it feels like a trap.
If Microsoft.NET steals Java programmers on the promise alone that Mono will fill the need for cross-platform programming, then cross-platform programmers suffer. As many people have pointed out, Java has a large library of mediocre quality propped up largely by its size. Cross-platform Java programmers worry that Mono will never fill that need, which could cost them an awful lot in the long run.
> Its possible to have multiple Java versions installed, but you have to choose which version you run (not something reasonable for users are gonna do).
This is in the hands of the JNLP launcher and the Java Plugin now, thankfully... no longer something the user chooses.
> how did you get to your current position?
4 yrs college to get a Computer Science (CS) degree. Had recommendation of a place to work from a boss I had while doing an internship during last year of college. Was hired about 2 weeks after graduation. Been there 10 years.
> With what prior knowledge did you apply and which other achievements helped you to pass?
C++ (with some Java) knowledge. I was/am basically computer otaku, in my personal life so that didn't hurt either. As the company evolved, I became a Java specialist. Salary is about 55K (USD) with good benefits. Location is north central USA.
JavaMan out!
>>13
I actually do write Java and make ~64K/yr. This is in Canadian dollars though. I applied straight out of university (4-year CS degree), with no real knowledge of the domain (IDEs for creating J2EE apps). I consider myself lucky
You will be if you're still doing that in 10 years...
When I first left college, it was 1994, and I think everyone knows what happened next.
Earning $100k/yr+ (USD) was great. Really great. Being stupid, it went into parties and up my nose, and not into savings or anything.
I make about half that now.
The safe, rewarding path for IT is corporate... that's where I've worked.
Building web apps, I started out doing basic data binding, then learned about designing databases, queries, procedures; expanded into UI design, basic image creation / manipulation, css, fonts, javascripts & ajax; and then I started learning about design patterns and architecting tiered applications.
If you get to the point where you can meet with a client, design, spec, and implement a solution for them from top to bottom, you will be much more valuable than a generic "programmer". I started out fresh out of college with knowledge of C++, systems, graphics, compiler, networking etc and most of it was useless except from a general logic / object mindset. What I learned from my CS degree was not a specific language or skill set, but how to train myself in the future, to dig into systems, to optimize and understand things like algorithmic efficiency and debugging (GOD DAMN DEBUGGING IS IMPORTANT IN THE REAL WORLD).
I started out making 40k and as I learned more and grew my relevance to the corporate world I have doubled that in 4 years, granted it's not LARGE CASH for Los Angeles but it's better than many. In another 4 years I will be managing teams of people like me when I started and probably will not be doing so much programming, but this is just the path I have chosen.
> What I learned from my CS degree was not a specific language or skill set, but how to train myself in the future, to dig into systems, to optimize and understand things like algorithmic efficiency and debugging (GOD DAMN DEBUGGING IS IMPORTANT IN THE REAL WORLD).
Yes, this is it. If you know how to think and solve problems, the technology itself is not difficult to keep up with. And the underlying skills are more important.
normal jobapplication, and with a lot(but not perfect) knowledge before.
it isn't that hard...
best is to apply as a trainee for IT/Programmer to get more knowledge and have a very good start.
a uni degree ...
programming as hobby ...
and some luck ...
I started looking for jobs at the newspaper while creating some sample apps for portfolio until someone hired me. From there I started growing contacts and my qualities where recognized by the market. Now I work 25h per week at a investment office making 30k plus some freelance job i do now and then... I could earn more, but the hours are too long.