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I have met and enjoyed the company of wealthy plumbers, and very well-off janitors. I’ve also met piss-poor janitors, plumbers. Some do that work for the money, but the reality is they do it because it is what they know.
I actually had a talk with the janitor at my high school just before graduation. He had retired, he had been a white-collar professional and made a KILLING back in the day. Now, in his retirement, he wanted to do something for his high school. He wanted to be sure that the students there had a safe, well-maintained facility, and he knew he was the best man for the job. He had many reasons to choose to do what he did, but (for him) money wasn’t one of them. He janitored because it made him happy.
When money is no longer the object (as in his case), when you reach the day of having “F-you money,” what might be your motivation? Not being a smart-alec, genuinely curious.
If your focus, if your drive, if what gets you out of bed in the morning is money, more power to you. That may be the way your world works. Personally, I’ve been there. I opted out of that world. I do what I do for a whole different set of reasons and (as you can see from my profile pic) I may well be one of those “older persons”. And frankly, as far as where I am personally and professionally, I don’t regret the decision to pursue a career for a different reason than money.
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100% of wealthy coders I know do it exclusively for the money. All of these blogs, articles etc. are just exercises to improve their own coding and one-up their competition.
In most cases being a “wealthy” developer is a direct correlation in being a good developer. How does one become a good developer? , years of practice and motivation.
Many developers have to put in their own time and effort to learn the new trends of technologies outside their working hours they have clocked in without getting paid for it.
If you are so fixated for earning easy money , will you be motivated enough to continuously learn without getting paid to do well in a job?.
FYI, blogs and articles has 0 impact in standing out to the crowd compared to actual skills for a job interview. Any company will priortize candidates who can do the job.
It’s been scientifically proven if you make less than 75k a year, you are almost always less happy than a rich person. After 75k you see the same effects after you double the salary.
You will sincerely regret this decision in your elder years as every older person I have talked to has.
Subjective opinion, it depends on one needs. I have friends who earn less than the average from most people and are happy. “happiness” derives from many forms, not just money. Furthermore, if you can live by the basic need you can have savings. You also did not account from which country you are from. Over here in Singapore, our transportation is efficient, since the country is small. Owning a car is not needed because from one place to another is literally at most an hour or two.
I have friends who only earn a annual income of 36k (2k per month average) most without degrees and are living comfortably. I can break down the cost for you and you can tell me how much do you really need to live?
Suppose average income of someone here 2k
Cost of rent per month with utilities bills included: $500-800
food: $200-300
transport:$200-300
Even if you take the most expensive cost from above example a person who live with this ^ you still have $600 per month as savings. This is assuming you want to live alone and do not want kids. I have friends who live with this lifestyle and are happy.
You seem to derive your decisions based on “scientific” facts based on your own subjective opinions like claiming developers work for money, but do not know the actual reality of what people go for.
My suggestion is that you talk to actual people instead of deriving facts based on online stats. Stats are not always 100 percent accurate from reality and in most cases only account for a small subset of groups. Not everything is accounted for, location, expectation etc. I can argue with you that most people in top companies like Google, Microsoft etc where developers are highly paid will not be able to enter those companies unless one shown interest and passion in the field.
Even in an average company, if you are just working for the money, it will be obvious to companies which is why many have mentioned that you will not survive long if your motive is money.
There is also a initial screening for this , which ensure they only hire candidates who are highly motivated and passionate.
Furthermore, you should really reconsider your motivation if your motive is just money. If you have not coded a single line before, you have no idea what you are getting into. You will end up doing more coding unpaid to learn then being paid for the actual job. If your goal is money this is not ideal for you.
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@Virgil The only thing that matters for a programming job is: Are you good at it? I am wary of people whose only interest in programming is the money because a lot of them aren’t good enough and they are a burden to the rest of the team. If you are good enough, your motivation is none of my business.
Provided you’re good enough to get in and stay in the industry, you have basically two directions your career can take after a few years: The technical track and the management track.
It used to be that it was much easier to move into management than establish yourself as a well paid senior programmer. I haven’t worked in the industry for a long time but I think it’s still true.
It’s not too hard to get a job as a project manager if you have, say, 5 years development experience, and you have people skills. Except in highly technically minded companies (and maybe even there) you are better paid as a manager. So if programming is just a way to pay the bills, maybe that’s the road for you.
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The only programmers who are interested in money, aren’t good at it… Really?
What’s your proof on this, where did you grab this info from?
Experience.
Often when we have hired programmers who have come at is as a way to make lots of money, they don’t have the interest to keep learning past the basics. When you confront them with needing to learn a new language for project, or even evolving with the change in the language they are comfortable in, that can’t or in some really bad cases won’t change. This is mainly because you need to spend extra time outside of work to learn this.
I’ve seen lots of them come in with the knowledge of how to get a position, but no interest in position, they all saw the money and figured they could fake it.
I will say one thing about project managers from an earlier post…unfortunately you don’t need to know anything about programming to be one. Most of the PMs I’ve worked with have never coded a thing. The good ones get out of the way of the devs, the bad ones make life hell.
Look. Most people are unhappy at work. No one is disputing this but I’ll stand by what I said, if you don’t like to do this, programming may not be for you. If the OP wants to torture themself, go right ahead. But what we are saying is no one has too.
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If you take a look at the content on need to know as a developer it speaks volumes on its own as evidence that only those with passion can really excel. Your comment gives me the impression that you are new or hardly touch code.
Learning to code is not just simply learning the technology stack the company uses and your done with learning forever. It is a never ending process of continuous learning in order to keep up with the industry to be relevant and not be obsolete.
There are new technology , frameworks and tools that are released consistently and it is expected from a developer to keep up with the technology doing their own time outside working hours to understand these tools.
Aside learning new technologies and tools , there is a bigger topic which seperates good developers from average developers and that is problem solving skills. This is where a huge chunk in difference of $ is being paid.
I assume you and OP think that coding is just making a product for it to work which is a common misconception by beginners who view coding as easy money. In the real world, just making a product work by coding is not going to make you a developer.
You are not going to code blindly in the job to build features for a product. You have to design and gather requirements which is often a obscure process because 90 percent of the time requirements are uncertain. Ontop of that , you have to design your code for a large enterprise app that is scalable and maintanable so that its does not break, (OOP, FUNCTIONAL Programming).
This is why planning and building a large app takes years of experience and practice in order to be proficient in the job. If you think that learning through tutorials or going through freecodecamp curriculum is enough to substain your career as a developer you have no idea what you are getting into.
What i mentioned is only the surface of what you need to know to be a good developer. There are also topics like Database theory which is often skim through in tutorials. Things like normalizing tables and using effective queries to fetch data. Then data structures and algorithms which is a common interview question in the BIG 5 companies.
Realistically speaking every developer is not going to know what i have mentioned, there is simply too much to know . Proberbly about half and those things take alot of time to learn. Those who are really good has spent a huge chunk of time learning and practicing those concepts in their own free time .
Aside from my list of things mentioned, there is going to be a gazillion things out there to learn in order to be efficient. This is why coding is difficult, without passion its hard to succeed.
You can definitely learn the basics easily to get the job, but being the ideal developer that is highly respected and paid well is a difficult path, it takes blood and sweat in order to get there. This is why people can confidently say that those who go in for the money will suffer with the amount of content required to learn.
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I can only answer based on my personal experience.
I will say one general thing though here: some of the big shot companies in Silicon Valley are ageist, at least according to many medium.com articles I’ve read. If you want to have this as your main and only career, getting started now is great because age might be one of the only ceilings you end up hitting unless things change (or the articles aren’t accurate).
I don’t live in Silicon Valley or in the US. So far, from my experience here, it seems like age is not such a big deal but years of experience is. They have broken down the jobs a programmer can have into three levels: junior developer, developer and senior developer. Your first three years are basically at the junior level, and senior starts around year five to year eight depending on the workplace.
Recruiters I’ve talked to want to know what projects you have worked on, how long in general you’ve coded and what you did before if you weren’t always a developer in your professional career. They also want to know what you plan to learn next and what motivates you. If they’re happy with your responses, you might get invited back for a technical interview.
In this country, devs work long hours and also remote work hasn’t caught on entirely. Not all places are keen on giving leeway to their programmers to do their work on their own schedule and from home alas.
There is also a management track that can start somewhere after about five years or so. Management here pays better than straight up programming but you have to have good management skills on top of being good at coding.
The management track seems to afford more flexibility in hours worked and also it seems to me at first glance that managers don’t have to work as many hours as developers do.
Otherwise, there’s also freelancing. You can have far more earning potential, like up to two to five times more as a freelancer, than as an employee in coding. You can also freelance for as long as you want to and don’t have to deal with age limits and forced retirement. You have to be careful about how to go about doing it though because you can risk actually earning less than an equal level employee if you mess up. However, if you’re commanding a high price, you’d better be a great programmer! If you don’t deliver good quality code, your reputation will suffer and clients will start blacklisting you and destroy your reputation and any chance of finding new clients along with it.
I’d say though, overall, freelancing has less chances of a career ceiling than being an employee.
My suggestions to you are:
- Absolutely in no way tell potential recruiters or clients (if you are freelancing) that money is your sole motivator. They will show you the door quickly. I recommend actually not mentioning money at all as a motivator in any sector unless you’re in finance and you’re trying to get a job as a trader. Many interviewers are trained to poke around the psychology of a candidate to see if they’re truly a good fit for the company, so I think you’ll have a hard time hiding it.
- Consider not always looking at how much a salary is as the sole criterion for whether you take on a job or not. Living costs in the area where you’d have to live in order to do that job are a huge consideration. For example, I make far less than an equal level developer in Silicon Valley but my living costs are far lower. My salary is enough to keep me quite comfortable but it would be considered peanuts to a developer in San Francisco.
- There’s a sweet spot between having too little money and having too much. In either case, most people tend to be miserable. The happiest people are those who have managed to find a balance between the two extremes and have managed to allow themselves a life outside of work and money considerations. Be sure to keep that in mind because even though programming might seem perfect on paper, in practice it could be very different.
Some others made good posts here so I won’t repeat what they said.
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no ceiling. only your limiting beliefs.
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Just let him do what he wants. Just because it happened to the people you knew does not mean it will happen to everyone. For the follow your passion part. I know people who does things because they enjoy it but they are still miserable and broke.
You should check into becoming an app developer if you are looking for high pay. I just read an article that says the highest paying job for people without a degree is an app developer and they START just under 6 figures if they know what they are doing.