Ask HN: Former devs who can't get a job, what did you end up doing for work? That's all. Savings are getting low, and I'm going to be struggling to pay rent soon. I'm curious what other kinds of work other former developers got into and if they like it. Cheers. |
Speaking in general terms, age discrimination in tech (not just software development) is, in my opinion, a really serious problem. It's like society discards you after a certain point in time, even though you are likely more capable than most younger candidates.
I am going to point the finger squarely at YC on some of this, simply because they could be an important part of the change this attitude would require.
If I were to characterize the high-altitude view of YC funded startups, I'd say it's a college campus. Sure, of course, there might be a few corner cases here and there. PG even has an essay where he says the ideal age is between 22 and 38. I think I read that only about 2% of funded founders are above 38. Well, that's bullshit.
Again, society discards you because of a biological clock having nothing whatsoever to do with your capabilities.
Let's put it this way: I can't think of a single "older" founder that would have even thought about the down-right disgusting idea of a startup that treats factory workers like cattle and --even better-- nobody in that age group would think it sensible to actually promote this in social media.
Anyhow, getting back to your question. I have friends who have tried it all. Lie on their resume. Die their hair. Serious dieting and exercise. Take lower pay. Etc. The vast majority do not make it past the Zoom interview. That is, if they ever get one. These days researching people is very easy. Which also means you get to see how old they are. If that isn't used to disqualify, the zoom call certainly does it.
Of these friends, most chose to pursue personal interests or simply retire. On of them had been investing in real estate most of his life. He decided to manage his properties.
Another friend, who ended-up with no retirement or savings to speak of due to a nasty divorce, ended-up finding a job in the oil fields in New Mexico. He sits in a trailer in the middle of nowhere, by himself, 24/7. Every couple of hours he gets in his truck and does the rounds --checking measurements, turning valves, filling out forms.
He is making $250K a year for that.
Here's a guy who is an extremely capable technologist who was discarded by society (well, at least the tech side of society) and is now in the desert living in a trailer. This is horrible. Yeah, sure, he is making a lot of money. He is also as miserable as can be. If he was mentally weak I'd be worried about all sorts of things, from becoming an alcoholic to suicide. Thankfully that isn't his case. You can make a lot of money and still be miserable.
It's interesting how society has been up in arms over the years about providing opportunity for different groups (choose a classification) and yet, age discrimination in tech largely remains untreated...a perfect crime, if you will.
I don't know what to tell you. Widen your search space to uncover opportunities that might have nothing to do with tech. Better yet, perhaps look for something where the entry point isn't necessarily tech based but your tech capabilities will give you the ability to become invaluable. It's like being the person at the office who knows how to write Excel formulas and VBA code. At some point everyone needs you around.
Age discrimination has been one of the few successful discrimination based lawsuits that have been brought against companies in the tech world.
Rarely. A quick search indicates that only 3% of older employees file complaints, and, out of that, less than 1% result in lawsuits.
And that is pertaining to people who are already employed somewhere. What we are talking about here is finding a job. In that case the situation is likely far worse and also likely unknowable (in terms of stats).
This is why I say it feels like society discards you as useless after a certain fuzzy point in time.
This has to be a cultural change over time. I say this because, as a young engineer, I wanted to work with older, more experienced, engineers. In fact, I seriously benefitted from many mentors who were ten to twenty years older than me --lessons that have stayed with me to this day.
Not so today. I have been at companies where you might as well be at a college campus. I'll name one: SpaceX. I don't know the stats, but I remember going through there and thinking that the ratio of 20-somethings to older engineers has to be in a range between 50:1 and 100:1. The only way that happens is if you actively reject older candidates. I cannot dispute their success rate and what they have accomplished. I am just using this as a real example of just how bad it can be out there for older technologists.
Note that I am not proposing forced diversity of any kind. I think that is wrong. However, work and opportunities should be available based on experience, merit and capabilities and not at the exclusion of older candidates because they are not frat boys.
Once again, I will point at least one finger squarely at YC. I think they blatantly practice age discrimination. There is no fucking way older, experienced and capable engineers and scientists cannot innovate and launch successful startups. There's so much talent and potential out there being discarded. And, of course, there is no such thing as filing a lawsuit against an investor for age discrimination.
On my end, once I understood this reality I chose to exit the race and run my own business. Here I get to use my skills and experience to plot my own future, with the help of those who join me. And I most definitely appreciate the value of experience. There's nothing better than working with people who are better than you are and bring enough insight and experience to the table to help you steer clear of a long list of things you should not do.
Its been about exploitation, and control. They want people who will blindly follow orders while providing the value that is implicit in intellect for pennies. Slavery by any other name.
Its not about society either, because this wasn't a choice made by society, it was a choice made by people who have money. Less the people who earned it, and more the people who stole it through money printing non-reserve debt issuance.
Yep. That ended and brought the entire bloated economy crashing down. Now the narcissist psychos who rode to the top of that economy are gutting everyone and everything including their own companies to float the stock prices.
No. Absolutely not.
If I am 60 and you are 30, I can do the job and do it well, I should not be excluded because of my age. You can replace age with any other category that makes sense, like race, disability, sexual orientation, etc. Candidates should not be excluded this way.
A basketball team should not include me because I am not tall and exclude someone who is significantly taller and better qualified (experience and skills).
Another proper basketball team does not exclude me because I am not super tall. They evaluate my skills and experience and compare it that to others who might be taller or shorter than me. If I can do the same or a better job than the others --if I can deliver the required value-- they could hire me. If I cannot compete with others, they should not.
It's interesting how the term "inclusion" turned out to deliver discrimination...precisely what we thought we set out to eliminate from society.
Age discrimination is an easy and silent form of discrimination that has lots of victims while few perpetrators are brought to task for practicing it.
What people ought to be doing is moving to remote, rural, and low cost-of-living areas that have been completely ignored by investors and techies for decades. We live in a post-covid world. Starlink works great. There are simply no excuse. Clinging onto the vestiges of Silicon Valley circa 2014 is a fools errand and has been for multiple years. It's time to start opening mocking people for being delusional.
Interact with your new rural community, and really understand their problems. You can start sprinkling technology in to help and expand from there. These markets have been ignored for a long time because their treasures are not shiny enough for VCs to pay attention to—not because there isn't tremendous opportunity to do some good and making a living.
The people following this advise aren't complaining about the job market, quite the opposite.
[1] Currently bragging about leading a $50 million venture fund for the state which only matches private capital investment. Also, their previous star achievement was a 14% return over 26 years on some company Fender bought.
If this is too difficult to overcome, you're not going to make it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPHVeQ7-ynA
00:03 The two most important things that I look for are number one is just raw intelligence, right? Because you can hire someone who is a software engineer and he's been doing it for 10 years and if they're doing it for 10 years that's probably what they're doing for their life, you know, and I mean that's cool. But there's some things that that person can do and they're definitely useful in an organization and can do a lot of stuff. But if you find someone who is raw in intelligence exceeds theirs but has 10 years lots of experience
00:31 then they can probably adopt and learn way quicker. You know, and within a very short amount of time be able to do a lot of things that that person may never be able to do. And so, I think that's the most important thing that I look for. And the second is just alignment with what we're trying to do. So I mean, people can be really smart or have skills that are directly applicable but if they don't really believe in it, then they're not going to really work hard and they're not going to even if they're smart guy who doesn't have the relevant experience,
01:01 they're not going to care enough to develop the relevant experience in order to succeed. So I think that the best people who I've hired so far have been people who didn't really have that much engineering experience. I hired a couple of electrical engineers out of Stanford's new programming staff and they had very little programming experience going in but just really smart, really willing to go at it, and the guy who just work photos was one of those guys, and if you're willing to just go and do
01:40 whatever it takes to get photos out, then you're probably more valuable than someone who's just a career software engineer. So those are the things that I'm looking for and why I would rather look for people like...
The fun for me was in the refinement to perfection.
On paper, yes, you shouldn't be excluded because of age. In practice, it doesn't work like it. 60 is basically retirement age for a reason, and it's been stretched to ever higher numbers due to demographics and strain on social spending pyramid schemes.
60 year olds do do not perform like 20-30 year olds unless they have some extraordinary secondary characteristics that make up for it.
Yes, everyone will step out of their way and bend backwards to accommodate 55yo John Carmacks and alikes with impressive track records and impressive resumes where their experience and skills. Unless you have those things you won't in forseeable future be on equal footing with a 25-30yo.
Wow. Well, that, right there, is the root of the evil of age discrimination.
This exclusionary thinking is no different from such horrible things as "blacks can't perform as well as whites" or "the disabled can't do what the fully abled can", etc. It is wrong and disgusting.
And, if we are talking about knowledge work, this view is very wrong, even dumb.
I'll give you an example based on the experience of a friend of mine. A TEAM of roughly thirty 25~ish year olds failed to deliver a product for two years. Graduates from top universities. No fucking experience. Seeking help, the company hired my friend (around 55 at the time). The project was a track within a couple of months and finally delivered a year later.
The "kids" had fucked things up beyond recognition. Wasted months running experiments and reinventing every single wheel. Nearly everything was done wrong due to lack of experience and knowledge. For example, the EE's where copying circuits from data sheets, without really understanding what the circuits did or how they worked. The folks with Masters in Mechanical engineering did not understand design topologies under load, which led to repeated failures costing $500K per "experiment". The EE's designed circuits with hundreds of components, when a properly designed circuit could do the job with less than a hundred. Software developers wrote code that performed so badly they had to start from scratch (typical for the Python generation). One of the ME's spent two years trying to design a button panel. Etc.
So yeah, you are right, 60 year olds don't perform like 20 to 30 year olds.
While I agree that 20 year old kid highly unlikely to be a good replacement for an experienced 55yo machinist or a 55yo electrical engineer. The same is absolutely not true in software.
John Carmack shipped Doom when he was 23, and had shipped multiple games by then (Wolfenstein, Keen, etc). Many pivotal software projects are made and created by young guys (Ken Silverman, etc), and not set in their ways 60yo Fortran devs or enterprise java devs with baggage and old habits who will use any excuse not to write any code, learn anything new or better themselves - because they simply don't have that energy and drive anymore. Now this quality is useful ... sometimes, but more often than not it is not if you're doing anything new.
I'd have a Carmack at any age, but given the option I'd always rather have him at 20 than 55.
Back in those days it was rare and unusual if a person started programming when they were 7, 10, or 13. Nowadays it is extremely common that kids start programming when they are 6 or 7. By the age of 20-30, most competent software developers have been programming for solid 7-17 or more years.
No, its being stretched mainly due to people living longer. People are able to stay active in the workforce until 70s now, so the capitalist governments are pushing the retirement age up to 74-75, calculating that the current generations will live well into their early 100s. Of course, the social security system's format and the desire on the capitalist elite to dump the tax load on the working class do play into this, but the main reason is people live longer and healthier.
In the middle of last century, you'd retire in your 50s because you'd already get some debilitating illnesses or get weakened too much, and you were expected to die sometime around your mid 60s. The retirement age in the countries that still did not push it up because of capital's pressure reflects this.
> Yes, everyone will step out of their way and bend backwards to accommodate 55yo John Carmacks and alikes with impressive track records and impressive resumes where their experience and skills
Actually, many countries are doing exactly that? From Europe to China? That's the norm, not the exception. The exception is the US and its 'lets fck everyone for the profit of shareholders' mentality that reflects in tech corps enshttifying everything and exploiting 20 to 30-year-olds as code monkeys. And from how China is kicking America's ass in almost every tech field, they seem to have got it right and not the US.
One thing that I do is that I keep writing code in my favorite languages Common Lisp, Haskell, Racket, and Python (Python only for deep learning). I also still write.
I envisage myself coding for another 45 years (I'm in my 50s now), but I worry about my ability to concentrate on a single task for long spells, think creatively yet realistically enough to find solutions; to learn the latest fads and tools, and maintain my enthusiasm to keep up with the latest fads and tools. Will my hands get too unsteady to type, my eyes too weak to focus; how long will I be able to sit (or stand) up and work in a session. No-one knows I'm a dog, but they will if I have to turn on the camera or go to the office, so, will I necessarily be transitioned to more results-driven work assignments via tasking sites?
(I guess these are the typical prejudices that a hiring team will make when considering an older candidate.)
Prepare me. Share your wisdom. What challenges has aging presented to your ability to code?
Alzheimer's disease.
It says something about society that asks people to work well beyond their retirement age.
I hope you are only looking because it gives you purpose rather than doing it because it’s necessary (ie, medical bills, rent). If it’s the latter, very dystopian and on par for this neoliberal economic hellhole we live in.
Personally, if I get to that age. I am cashing in my chips. No way I am working for soulless corporations, whether that’s part time or full time.
I would much rather “retire” and work on my own open source projects or contribute to FOSS projects I like. Worst case scenario, I become a wood worker ;)
I work because I like it. I like being around smart people doing smart things. But in a couple of years, I will stop working and just spend time lifting weights, practicing bjj and painting.
I dont think that's what's going on here. If you click on OP's profile you'll see that he's written a bunch of books. He also mentions Common Lisp and Racket, not exactly go to languages for soul-less corporations. My take is he's doing it for the love of the craft.
I aspire to do this too when I'm at that age. I've been through a few career iterations with the only constant being is that I love to make things.
So I released my application to the App Store this month, and while savings are dwindling, things are starting to finally move into the other direction now.
I lost my mom, marriage of 18 years, Grandma, and sanity a bit last year... but I'm doing great mentally now, just need financial to align, I'm trying to enroll in WGU for CS and then ai/ml masters and I want to double major with psychology...I want to work with therapy ai things as I've hacked my growth with ai to amazing results...
I'm going back to school to get higher paying jobs and be more sought after... and loans can float me rent for the duration of school...
I've got an RV I can live in (loaner from a friend) but nowhere to park it...I want to outfit it with solar panels but that's pricey.
Wishing you the best.
Would love to hear more about this if you’re willing to share
I'm planning on adding a bunch of prompt examples and outcomes... my favorite thing is like I'll have tough feelings and I'll ask chatGPT to ferret out the trauma behind it and help me release the things... use RTT, DBT, and CBT to reprogram my brain, ask I've question then follow up questions based on answers...
this is with a custom gpt that has a bunch of self help bullet point PDFs as well as a bunch of journal entries and previous therapy chat threads (got too long)... major things I break out into their own document or PDF as a source for the gpr.
The point is not that an outdoorsy job is great for you, but that you may want to consider what kind of things make you happy and see if you can find a job doing something like that. These folks loved being outdoors before become engineers and were happy to go back to being outdoors for work.
This is great advice for job satisfaction, but given current events this sort of move is unlikely to result in an increase in job security or ease in finding a new job.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-forest-service-fires-340...
There’s a humongous amount of BS out there about trading or day trading but the fact is that people do it and make it, and my best friend being a consistently profitable trader for the last 4 years didn’t help my skeptic case…
At any rate, turns out that the challenge of trading is less of a technical or financial one. Sure, one needs to understand stuff like price action and market structure and such, but the core of the thing is kind of like developing this complete disregard towards money. Making and losing money can’t mean anything or have any emotional impact, one needs to just see numbers, statistics and trust on one’s strategy.
I’m not sure I’m comfortable recommending this to anybody because it requires a weird commitment to failing but still striving and it is hard but not in any way I was familiar with. It’s hard in losing X% of my trading account and waking up next day with a clear head to do the same thing again.
I've kept working, but I write free software, for folks that can't afford people like me.
I want to write software. But these days jobs don't want to pay me to write software. They want to pay me to write JIRA tickets. JIRA tickets about fixing other people's code. I keep trying again and again, but the industry has completely lost any magic for me.
Meanwhile I can pump out hundreds of lines a weekend on my own free software projects and actually feel like I'm getting things done.
I can relate. It's sort of "Hell is other people." I work very effectively on my own, but the scope is limited. Big things require teams.
I realize how fortunate I am, that I could afford to retire. I don't have as much money as I would, with another ten years under my belt, but I should be OK.
It absolutely stuns me, that young folks are getting paid more out of school, than I made, in my entire career, and have less to show for it.
I should have moved away from JavaScript work much earlier in my career. I had on reverse beer goggles. I love JavaScript and writing programs in the language, but the problem is that almost nobody in work force liked JavaScript. All the cool JavaScript applications in the wild tend to be hobby projects, because at work most people struggle just to put text on screen. Employment writing JavaScript always felt like a race to the bottom. If I could go back in time and give myself career advise I would recommend an MBA and a PMP and just ignore programming as a career. It is absolutely a wonderful skill to have for personal use, but you will always do better in a more structured work industry.
My fear when looking at jobs that lean too heavily on a tech stack or tool list is that the job is too focused upon delivery in a narrow repeatable context as opposed to solutions delivery. That’s a huge red flag for me that just screams low confidence. I don’t want to work with people who are constantly afraid to do their jobs. That’s what most of my career feels like.
I don’t want to go back to a low confidence environment. It’s just too negative, too irrationally defensive, and too hostile. I would rather do something else, even for less money.
In my experience It's very hard to get back in once you've been out of tech a while. Not because you can't code, but it becomes harder if not impossible to convince someone you can and current oversupply.
However, the company is sliding downhill imo, there have been constant layoffs and eventually I am sure I will be caught in one of them
I'm really not happy about the idea of searching for a new job again, in this new "AI assisted morons" stage of bureaucracy
I'm strongly thinking about trying to pivot to independent consulting. I know it's a tough path to follow and I'm nervous about it, but I have 15 years of experience now and I know I can probably do more with it than most companies will ever let me
Just gotta start figuring out this "networking" thing
I'm back in an office now working in a contract tech role that involves a little bit of coding on the side and it's alright for now I suppose. It isn't glamorous, but I'm happy to be working to be honest. I wanted to respond to your post because I found that cold calling and networking was the way to go for opening doors. I needed to talk to real people and build personal relationships. It took time and some surprisingly interesting opportunities opened up here and there. No one gave me a hard time about looking for work. I met a lot of people who were more than willing to take time out of their day to talk to me. It took a long time to get back into a full time role - about 6 months.
I also applied to a couple hundred jobs online but that approach didn't lead to much. The couple of interviews that I did get weren't even genuine. I deleted my LinkedIn account and never looked back.
Did my premed coursework a decade ago when I did neuroscience. Just needed biochem, and about 800 hours of self-study for the MCAT. Interview two weeks ago, fairly optimistic about this cycle but if not, I think next cycle will go well.
Everyone focuses on the amount of schooling and training that this requires. I am happy when I am helping people and constantly learning new things, and I'm already doing both.
There are a lot of other options than just med school, tbh you can make as much money with way less schooling as an anesthesiology assistant.
Once you finish med school, complete all of the exams (STEP?), get a residency spot, and finally become an MD (or DO). The challenge doesn’t stop there.
Now you get to deal with a whole another beast: hospital and clinical based medicine in a neoclassical economic setting. Your patients don’t matter. Their outcomes (unless sued) don’t matter. What matters is pumping your billings at the end of the quarter, dealing with endless amounts of paperwork with private insurance.
Healthcare in the US is a mess and I am glad I switched early before getting myself into $250K+ or more worth of debt (med school is expensive af).
I started writing here about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43107456
I can't name names but I can say that I touch DGX H200's and their peripherals on a daily basis.
I'm still grinding, haven't "made it" yet, and try to keep my remaining stash afloat by trading options. I also moved to my hometown just so I can minimize my burn rate. I'm more or less flat. I don't make, but I also don't lose money.
I would, however, accept part-time contract work (I'm a generalist with leadership tendencies), if I can find it. someone suggested looking around HN threads (but not in the jobs section), so far nothing notable
i try to register as driver for kind of uber with motorcycle but no success.
now i am trying to develop set of applications for specific market to platform as a service probably it will end up trash can without success :)
one of my friend from another profession change his career to driver as "uber eat", (we have different brands for it) at least his doing ok.
Instead I've certified as an Auriculotherapist (that's fancy speak for ear-acupuncture). I chance discovered auriculotherapy about 10 years ago by its potential to reduce stress by modulating the nervous system. And its been my passion since. The ear is way more than some funny cartilage sticking off your head. Its a complete map of the body with every part treatable via microscopic points on the ear surface. Kind of like a "keyboard" into the bodies "operating system".
So the IT business going batsh!t bonkers was my cue to jump out and start a new healthcare business. I regret nothing and feel that I'm now actually helping people. And people aren't getting less stressed these days.
Good luck to all when the genAI slop code needs fixing and there are no experienced dev's left.
>Instead I've certified as an Auriculotherapist (that's fancy speak for ear-acupuncture).
Out of curiosity, what do you earn?
I can't get a job, so I start a company. Not sure if it's super backwards.
One niche, there's lots of people looking for help coding stock/futures trading apps in sierra chart, ninja and multi trader, etc. These are in c++, c#/framework, python, mostly.
On the latter, work your network, seek out busines owners/managers who are in need of IT/web/database/email list type work and have people vouch for your tech cred/integrity (very important)
Well that's me. My theory is that it is not age that makes one unemployable in the software industry, but the unwillingness to put up with shit cooked up by bunch of 25 year old CEOs, CTOs, and the like.
EDIT: and by changed, I don't mean improved. I was a huge advocate of agile and eXtreme Programming early in my career, and I even worked in shops where it seemed to be really having good results. Now I see everyone using SCRUM and... it's garbage and I want to gouge my eyes out in the meetings.
I see a lot of talking but not a lot of code getting written. And where the code gets written, it's always a pile of ego-boosting needless complexity.
Much later I told my skip boss about the kind of feeling of disregard that may have fostered as he pushed me for insights. And he remarked that it sounded like I had a chip on my shoulder. All I could come up with was 'guess I was born with it.'
Yeah cynical. And much happier working on my own things that are meaningful and interesting.
But this industry is also, in my eyes and experience, madness at times.
"experience" seems to mean between nothing and everything depending on the previous company, the whims of the "hiring market", who/whatever reviews your resume and other nebulous forces subject to change at any time.
I've worked with people with loads of "experience" that are not particularly good that have managed to string together a career well-enough, and I know folks too with fancy resumes and experience that matches roles identically that can't get interviews for identical positions with referrals.
At any given time, what any party responsible for hiring "values" seems to change on a whim.
It's infuriating.
I don't have a "premium" resume, but when I can exceed all the expectations for a several job listings and I have a few years experience at a "fancy" company, you'd think I could at least get some calls back somewhere, right?
This makes the prospect of investing in any software skills for the purposes of employment a total contradiction.
(and yes, I understand the market is an has been very "bad" for a few years, but this kind of thing has existed since I've been doing this for the better part of a decade)
You haven't seen the shit written by 50++ senior and principal 'developers'. Imagine local variables names 20-40 chars long. Then they are passed into function call, like 15-20 of them. While actually these are just 3 structures. I.e. 'gurus' unroll them into individual elements and pass. Long names to make the code what they call 'self-documented'. No comments at all. And all this is in a big project with other devs working on it for years. It's absurdly slow for the project of this size and resources. But with almost no competitors this can last for decades and it actually does.
Prior to that, starting at 45 y/o I was a part time dev and full time firefighter-paramedic (14 years total). Covid scared me to becoming a FT dev.
Most successful businesses and ventures tend to be at our age, and even someone like myself have experienced why.
I think this begins to be visible even sooner, 38 if you graduated at 23. The majority of the job market requires very very few 15+ years experienced engineers. 5 to 10 years of experience is a sweet spot - you will be easily hired. Everything below and beyond is a struggle, especially for the latter since very few companies need and are willing to pay for those skills.
And that's how you become unemployable with the irony of being at more or less what would be the peak of your technical capabilities. In years later on, people start to lose the drive.
On the other hand, I just got hired at 55 and it wasn't difficult.
The baseline requirement of technical competence for extreme financial success in tech is so low that most big tech companies don't even hire rank-and-file engineers whom don't meet that requirement half-way.
that is, a 50 year old isn't even asked what their salary expectations are, it is simply assumed to be higher than what they want to pay, or rather, they can't bring themselves to pay someone like that less than they think is appropriate for their age. combine that with the perception that older people are less flexible and unwilling/unable to learn new stuff, and you end up with the belief that older people are expensive and useless or overqualified.
And as time marches on, there’s more and more competition for those roles.
- Minor health issues accumulate and become a distraction. Especially insomnia.
- Having worked on many projects and technologies that went nowhere, my enthusiasm for the work is diminished, making me less focused.
I decided to return to the last work that I found meaningful, which was as a software developer in the U.S. civil service.
I think this was the right move, although Trump and Musk are doing their very best to make me question that.
How about an angel investing firm for 40+ founders only?
I've known many poker players who end up taking this to the extreme and basically think of every hour of their life in terms of their per hour expected value at the table.
Like, "Is it worth it to go to dinner with friends or should I play for those 2 hours instead?"
There are definitely happy and well adjusted poker pros as well who can shut it off at the end of the day, but that's a learned skill that doesn't come easy to many.
Maybe this is less of an issue with trading because the market has set hours?
But you are right, trading certainly makes one A LOT more aware of risk/reward just in general life, which can be good or bad. Also, it is very easy to gamble instead of speculate, that is to trade something one "hopes" would work vs. trading something that has a statistical percentage of working, and the difference between the two is purely emotional, because one can convince oneself of quite literally anything! Come with a bullish bias and everything looks bullish... take a step back and reconsider and see how easy is for one to see what one wants to see.
He may have discover a relatively unknown niche than he can exploit, or he is plain lucky. The question is: are you confident that you can replicate his success. For most people that I'm aware of the answer is often 'no'. Most people loose money and will rarely talk about it.
When one starts thinking about how to look at all those factors and when one starts thinking about how to measure those factors (what is volatility? What high or low? Compared to what baseline? Does the baseline move?) it becomes clear that the problem is a bit more complicated to measure and implement in code than it is to train oneself and trade discretionary.
With very fast execution (think server collocation on the exchange and direct fiber network access to the exchange server) the possibility of market making opens, I think of the things that Jane Street does, and look how crazy profitable they are. But very few people have access to that.
Game is rigged for big players. You are gambling.
> best friend being a consistently profitable trader for the last 4 years didn’t help my skeptic case…
Last 4 years have been a boon for day traders. Any idiot with a decent sized portfolio and appetite for risk can make a living. However you are literally staring at graphs all day. Not very fun or rewarding or contributing much to society tbh.
For every winner out there, there are always hundreds of losers. Something something, “survivorship bias”
> one needs to just see numbers, statistics and trust on one’s strategy.
In a vacuum, this makes sense. But the market can remain irrational much longer than you can remain solvent.
Good luck with grinding out there. The current POTUS is a massive grifter, and driven by pseudo scientific neoclassical economic theory. So your day trading days will likely be sustainable for the next 4 years.
This is funny tho
> Game is rigged for big players. You are gambling.
That’s the whole point of the thing, I’m not playing their game! Look at, say, wheat… a report comes out with adjusted supply/demands (USDA releases those), then if players need to buy/sell a few million bushels of wheat… well, you don’t buy/sell a couple million bushels of wheat without paying on slippage…
I’ve made money exactly that way from “big players”. We are not playing the same game at all!
But I finally stuck with MotiveWave, so much so that I actually paid for a full license even though there are a bunch of great free platforms. Main thing, works on Linux and macOS, where as many other platforms are exclusive Windows.
Also, the SDK is quite nice too!
As for commodities, I've found some success in agricultural commodities but I also dabble in currencies and indexes. Agricultural though have some interesting characteristics given than they have an actual physical thing behind them as opposed to how stocks move... which varies depending on which side of the bed the CEO of the company woke up!
I also started with the idea of doing algo trading, my tests results looked amazing! then I learned about slippage, commission, over fitting my stuff to my test data... trading is not a computer problem, is a market problem and once one understands those building an algo makes more sense. I use some tools I coded myself but I still have no idea how to quantify what I see on a chart, why one "signal" I'm fine trading, and another is a no inspite of being the same signal (think stuff like SMA crossing)
Good luck!
I think people often conflate "being a <trade>" with "owning a <trade> business." A W-2 electrician earns a median salary of $62k in the USA. A guy who runs a business as an electrician might bill out $250k a year for his work, but he'll have to pay expenses like insurance, vehicles, gas, tools/tec, FICA, taxes, rent, on call services, and probably salaries for his assistants (which may include an unpaid secret assistant like a spouse who coordinates appointments). So their take home isn't nearly that much.
Yes, but I presume at a high physical cost in the long-term? (I mean, more than the physical cost of sitting in a chair)
Why? Electricians aren't doing intense labour, and I'm 99% certain that being in a job where you move around a lot (as opposed to sitting at your desk) has long term health benefits, without even getting into carpal tunnel syndrome and other RSIs associated with being at a computer.
Canada?
I live in a subdivision with cookie cutter houses and a custom wood front door would be neat, assuming it passes wife and HOA approvals.
edit: I ask because I used to have the domain zvive and use that username... so a little personal for the user to use zvive2.
It just has no path towards paying the bills or putting my teens through university.
I wonder if the new technical lead and boss still work there, at that much later time?
On to your point - yes of course people will (and should) attempt things that they believe might work. There is no way to have a crystal ball. All I'm trying to say that consistent success appears very rare when it come to the stock market from what I've heard. The only consistent success in the stock market that I'm aware of, when it come to ordinary mortals is through insider trading etc. which is not an option for most of us.
A single person can trade limit orders with almost no transaction cost with enormously deep markets. The modern world has made the markets incredibly inefficient, prone to massive overreactions on basically everything.
What would the economics look like for selling unpapered horses just randomly bred? Is that even possible?
Also what are the economics of selling mules or other animals at the same time?
I'm very good in my niche, but businesses just want 'answer to question'. I can provide 'answer to question while also making sure the answer-generating process is fully reproducible, data limitations are addressed and made visible, uncertainty has been calculated and is included in the answer'.
Not every question needs that!
Most people are willing to pay for Ikea furniture, not hand-crafted artisanal pieces. Ikea is good enough.
Futures are leveraged tho, so it’s kinda like a table saw, you can be very efficient with it but it can also remove your thumb as efficiently
Never in my life do I want to run Cat6 cables around again. I was freaking 17 and already getting back aches from leaning down so often.
You must have missed that part.
I worked for an engineering firm that did low voltage design (Network / A-V). The people who installed our plans weren't just high school types, trust me.
And then, yes, I found, wait, I actually need to work in a team because like you say there's a limit to how far you can get by yourself. To do big things you need more people.
So I gave up on my fantasy of solo working or somehow retiring, and returned to work.
Only to spend the last 3 years increasingly frustrated.
At least Google dumped insane quantities of money on me, so the frustration was worth it. Plus free food.
Now I'm just frustrated and not nearly as wealthy.
It's UX & UI design, documentation, product specification, promotion.
I'm unsurprisingly just not that good at these things, but also don't really like to do them. And missed having team members who specialized in them.
Right now I have a project where a PM asked me to describe the logic of a certain thing to him and I couldn't do it. Literally I couldn't spell it out better than just reading the code.
I ended up translating the code into pseudo code and send it to him (would have made a flow chart if he wasn't very smart).
And it is not just because of "bad engineering" or bad org, no it was just features added to account for multiple series of edge cases that had to work properly or a few thousands of people would call our company to complain the system wasn't working.
Like the hard part wasn't the code, it was the flow chart. Changes to that flow chart could take weeks to implement/test/release.
Then I started doing some more automation stuff. Nothing super interesting and mostly bespoke stats gathering.
There are plenty of developers who work 7+ hours a work day, plus a little more at nights or on weekends during crunch times. I'm one of these people and every place I've worked has had these people. It's not like all of our work requires intense concentration - sometimes it's just typing or testing.
Sure, there are people who put in very little "real work" by their own admission, and think they are doing just fine. But that's not a luxury afforded to the entire industry
That's normal across all industries. If there are people who are actually productive for 7 hours per day, they are extreme outliers.
I used to think that I worked 8-10 hours per day. That was until I measured my actual productivity.
I worked as a translator once. When I timed myself, I found that I can translate about 2,000 words in 1 hour. But in a day, I struggle to do more than 5,000 words, no matter how hard I push myself- even though that's just 2.5 hours of work! And if I do 5,000 words every day, I burn out within a week.
I do pretty grueling manual labor at night. The shift is 8, I think about 4 hours is reasonable (under 55), we do about 5. We have to carefully hide the other 3 hours. The shift starts with 20-40 min of planning and organizing which is maybe 4 minutes of work, we glue 10 min in front and behind the lunch break, we rest out of sight, we "finish" early.
I often joke that a marathon is only 2 hours if you run really slowly. The culture is to expect us to do 5 marathons in 8 hours, every day! uhh.. i mean every night! Which is every bit as hilarious as it sounds.
I calculate for the MBA types that if they cut the shifts in half and raise the pay by 50% people will be well over 25% more productive. Sleeping at night is not overrated. Both the pay raise and the reduced work day are of course culturally unthinkable. Their eyes just glaze over. I further joke that they don't have to understand. They can just join us and run these 25 marathons for a week. Only one week?
When coding I prefer either ONE hour/day or 14 days straight 14 to 18 hours/day. That way everything fits in my head and I feel very productive. The endorphin milestones fly by. It's lovely. After that I don't want to see any code for two months. I don't want to even try to explain this to any employer. I probably wouldn't even want to understand it if I was hiring.
Philip limited mine workers work days to seven hours! That was 430 years ago.
</rant>
this all kinda solvable, you add slippage, commissions to the profit calculations, and use separate eval data split(or 1, 2, 3, 4) to check how model is overfitting?
Props to whoever can work that out by themselves.
There’s a guy that supposedly has a couple of live trading bots trading live money on YouTube. I’ve watched his stuff and don’t really have reason to not believe him since I can look at the charts myself and see that they are indeed live. His tutorial of mql5 is also very interesting. Algo bot programming is kind of just event programming. When a bar closes or on a tick… buy? sell? do thing? That’s all it is! The trick is in when to buy/sell/do nothing.
https://www.youtube.com/live/QfDysU5eyM4?si=mvjN8dj6IHMlODR6
I am more wondering how big is opportunity for solo trader and if I should try to do this or work on some other ideas.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121413
fiaz on Feb 22, 2008 | parent | context | favorite | on: Ask News.YC: How to re-motivate yourself?
APOLOGIES for making this post so annoyingly long, but I really hope you find value in the words below.
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I'm going to first share a personal experience from my early trading days to illustrate where I'm coming from. I used to wake up at 4:30 am everyday in the Chicago suburbs to beat rush hour traffic and make it into downtown Chicago at 6:30 am. In order to wake up so early, I fell into a habit of sleeping at 9:00 pm and like a robot waking up at 4:30 am. This simple routine was indirectly helpful when things seemed darkest.
For the first six months, I lost money and was ridiculed constantly by other traders who were more successful than me (which was about 20 other guys CONSTANTLY using me as a punching/whipping bag). The only thing that kept me going was the fact that some of the very same traders that would be making wise cracks at me for losing money were some of the most successful people I knew at the time. For better or worse, if I needed a trader to model myself after, it was the same people that were telling me how bad a trader I was - and although I was not open to really hear what they were saying, they were right about my skills in every way (but their feedback was always packaged in some sort of insult) ...
I also find curious the human part of wishing to be believed. The numbers in trading are completely ridiculous given that the ceiling is very high for a skilled trader, and thus most people bundle it together with Vegas the hundreds of thousands of dollars in a gambling game or horse race.
I keep forgetting my own complete unbelief until I experienced a trade with triple digit returns... that makes no sense but I did it (the trick is to not return that to the market and to know that those are exceptions and slow and steady wins the race!).
The irony is that many people here in HN (this is y combinator after all) attempting entrepreneurial pursuits with the hope of making a living and a big payout on acquisition and whatnot... in spite of knowing the statistics of how rare it is for that to happen.
At any rate, thanks a ton for sharing that, it is very encouraging! I've seen people do it, that post is one example, and I have the wild believe that I can do it too! I'm expecting nothing but blood, sweat, and tears, but it's worth it for me :-)
They already help me to write marketing copy (a weakness of mine), and have been helpful in solving bugs and researching the correct approaches to design.
I’ve been doing “soup to nuts” apps for a long time, but it can be tedious, so my scope is limited. I’m hoping that AI will help me to expand it.
No-code and low-code solutions have been getting better so the demand for those jobs is drying up though, but there are still massive operations running on top of some wordpress server that people FTP files to.
The median salary of an electrician in the USA is $62k. For a software developer, the median is $130k.
A top 10% electrician earns $110k. A top 10% software developer earns $210k.
In fact, even developers in the bottom 10% of software development out earn a median electrician.
I think it’s important to realise that there’s that limit to productivity, so don’t force it if it’s not working. take a break, come back tomorrow, you may find that you’re far more productive even though you’re spending less time “bums on seats”. Somewhat employer dependent
I took a EMT Basic night class because my wife and I were getting into scuba diving and I wanted to be a dive master on boats during the weekend. I enjoyed EMT so much that I signed up for Paramedic class, not knowing what I was going to do with it, just did it. It was relatively cheap at the time and we were kid free at that time as well when I started. School was 15 months long.
As we were about ready to graduate PM school the county fire dept (FD) came in and said they would hire paramedics but you had to cross train to be a fire fighter as well. I was 36 y/o, we just had our 1st kid and I figured if I didn't do it then I'd never would and probably regret it so I got hired as a PM and then FD trained me for FF. This was 2006, hence the username FM2606 for fire-medic Feb 6, 2006 my hire date.
It didn't take long to see a bunch of firefighter's getting hurt, specifically back issues due to working and mainly from lifting stretchers with patients on them. I also have a chronic health issues and I figured if either or both of these issues became a problem and I couldn't work as a FF/PM we'd be screwed, so I decided to do an online master's degree in comp sci. Comp sci being my initial major out of highschool before I dropped out.
Fast foward to 2015, I finished my master's, had 2 kids and started working part time as a dev.
Fast forward again to 2020, I was about to turn 50 y/o, Covid hit and I was taken out of the field due to my health issues. I started applying for full time dev jobs. Landed one and then two years later switched to a bigger org.
No regrets on any of it. Becoming a FF/PM was one of the best career decisions of my life. I loved it (for the most part) but it was time to go.
I didn't have an "in". I think persistence paid off and plus I feel like I interview pretty good.
Feel free to ask me anything else.
Mission Critical Team Institute (MCTI) Teamcast Exploring the questions vexing the most elite teams in the world
You also have a different background that would perk up interview potential (at least to me). Diversity (aerospace eng, firefighter, emt, paramedic) can help bring different perspectives and ways of thinking through problems that will ultimately help an organization.
Organizations that mostly hire people with CS degrees from top universities that can fly through leet coding tests and ace system design problems I think end up with not much diversity in thought when it comes to problem solving.
Luckily for me my current manager didn't have a code test. I received a timed coding test for another position within the same org but a different manager and bombed the hell out of it.
I once worked in a company where one of my colleagues actively created phantom projects for his department, oversaw them, checked off metrics, went to meetings, and “deployed” solutions for capabilities that the company already had but had forgotten about. He once confided to me that he hadn’t actually made anything in over a decade. He still works there, 15 years later.
I agree though.
But hammering a rod into the ground for 15 minutes, or holding some weight over your head, or carrying weight in your toolbag are not things that break your body down; they build your body up.
I have seen it in other trades. My family is GC, we have retired biz folks doing cranes, excavators, and some light hand trades.
I personally am considering starting an arborist.
Bending a 200 amp service wire around in a panel is no light task.
As someone who has never been to a gym, but has grown up on a farm and lived a life of mostly trades, it reminds me of all I see written about the different types of working out and how gym can be so different from physical labors conditions where what you are doing may not be a giant lift, or a giant use of force, but you've got to be able to do it for hours a day, back to back to back, day after day.
Our perspectives delude us.
I'm not deluded at all. I spent a few of my younger years in the oil sands, which definitely convinced me that wasn't something I could or wanted to do forever.
But we seem to be calling anything other than "sitting at a desk doing knowledge work" physically demanding. Maybe it's me, but having physical elements of your job and the job being physically demanding are different things. And when you are out of shape, anything is demanding.
There’s usually an inverse correlation between win-rate and accuracy. If you increase your risk you can be right more often but your rewards are smaller. Alternatively you can be more “selective” with tighter stops and thus lower risk and is likely that you’ll be wrong more often but that the winner will be bigger…
I believe that you can have the skills to build a system that can detect patterns from historical data, but notice how, for example, from the previous calculations the problem of trading is less of a “technical” problem and more of a market, risk management, money management, statistical kind of problem.
Then there’s the emotional part of, you still have the power to stop your system… if it has had 4 or 6 losses in a row… are you still keeping it up? Loosing is inevitable in trading, but how much loosing can you handle? Have the market conditions changed? How do you measure that?
Good luck!
I agree. It just happened I built such system already which models strategy over significant period of time, and accounts statistical/risks indicators, transaction price, sleepage, etc. I built it for forex eur/usd pair (probably hardest market to beat), while results were positive, I decided that they are not strong enough, and I keep wondering since then if predicting patterns in commodity futures is easier, and I should try to relaunch my effort..
I’m probably biased but I prefer futures, even for forex, just because is only one market vs all the extra markets a big spreads in forex, 6E for euro dollar or M6E for even smaller positions/capital/risk.
There also the element that there are a lot of things you don’t learn until you run a system live
Anything that becomes mainstream is likely to get twisted and turned into whatever the "powers that be" want it to be.
So, while using XP or Scrum or Kanban for that matter properly in a sane environment is going to be great, if you work in an un-sane (sic) one, then the powers that be have turned whatever system you're using into theirs. This is how things like SAFe are born, that try to make "agile safe for the corporation" and of course they're nothing more than corporate BS under an agile name and that gives agile a bad name.
Just like Jira is getting a bad name because it's so configurable that corporations are able to use it to do what they do. You can also use it as nothing than an electronic place to house your "post-it notes on a wall". All up to you, your cow-orkers and company. Nobody can blame Atlassian / Jira for taking the money of these corporations. I know I would if I had had the idea of releasing a ticketing system that doesn't even know that you should use surrogate keys for all your entities instead of making an issue key that can change if you move issues between projects your "primary key" that is referenced everywhere and shit breaks :shrug:
I miss buganizer at Google. It didn't try to hoist a process. It was... "here's a ticket. go do it. or not. whatever" low clutter. right to signal to noise ratio. The bug tracker in Google's ill faited github competitor was similar. Really decent.
The problem with JIRA is it becomes a little fantasy code writing exercise for people who've stopped coding (managers). You get to pretend you're dispatching program for your robots^H^H^H^Hteam to execute. And write out a little maze for your rats to run through.
Also was just talking to a friend about this. The original agile folks, the XP people... were explicitly against using software to track tasks. It was yellow sticky notes on a whiteboard. ON PURPOSE.
You may have hit on a carrot.
SAFe was truly one of the worst things I encountered with consulting clients. Planning days were an unbelievable exercise in futility. Waterfall masquerading as agile, the absolute worst of both worlds.
we've been using SAFe for a few years, I despise every minute of the planning process. Feel like a mix between using a crystal ball and forcing square pegs in round holes... Of course the additional disfunctionality at my company between sales, PO/PM/BO and engineering doesn't help, though it seems that I've avoided the worst SAFe train of the company.
1. Get the change to work
2. Refine the change to make it cleaner, less complex.
One other anecdote, me and a buddy were responsible for cleaning up a fairly sophisticated DSS scheduling system. The original dev left and a poseur came in and wrecked the codebase for over a year. Hospitals were cancelling contracts left and right and our cash flow was ... uh, short a lot. Our rule was if we ran across some bad code while working on our tickets: a bug, janky code, disorganized code, shit variable names, whatever, we fix it on the spot. We were able to do this because we had 3 month cycles and nobody breathing down our necks asking, "what did you do yesterday?" "why aren't all your tickets done this sprint?" Well it worked and we ended up with a clean scheduling system that was really nice after a few years and the company exited with a decent sale. I couldn't imagine a culture like this today.
0. Compose a new abstraction to describe the change.
And then at #2, the abstraction starts to get in the way.
I recommend the first half of the Out Of The Tarpit paper.
For them I understood some of the motivation. Hardware & equipment manufacturer, which involves scheduling complicated industrial processes for months/years out. So you need some semi-coherent vision of where things will be, so having a multiquarter waterfall-esque plan was going to be needed.
Not that any of that actually seemed to work.
Team building is people skills, and it's about finding well springs of motivation, soft skills, getting people talking to each other, making sure people aren't forgetting things.
Unfortunately people coming from an engineering/programming mindset can go the other way: management is about making lists, and getting people's names on those lists. Management is about making processes, and making people conform to those processes.
I'm not saying those aren't useful tools, but they need to be seen as that. Tools. Means to an end, not ends in themselves.
Most software developers want to do good work. They want to write code to make things happen, because that's what they were trained to do. Original agile was about trying to liberate that instinct from the crushing weight of corporate processes so that teams of developers could self-organize to do the things they generally naturally want to do.
I don't recognize that in SCRUM based teams today.
And as for your point, I do think that remote work makes things harder, and I've yet to see a remote team that fires on all cylinders. But for years I worked on hobby projects with people who I never met face to face and it was fine. So I dunno.
The way I see it is businesses can have it one of two ways:
They can acknowledge that remote work is fine and allow their teams to work from wherever and figure out timezone differences and async collaboration workflows
Or
They can decide that remote work doesn't work. Then they must stop hiring expensive remote consulting firms and cheap offshore remote teams. They also must stop spreading teams out across multiple regional offices across North America
It is absurd to make people commute to an office building only to have people dialing in to meetings from other office buildings in other countries anyways, and then say remote work doesn't work
But yes, mixing remote and on-premise and expecting it to produce improvements is broken. Or being done for the wrong reasons.
I seem to have landed myself at a job like that just recently, in hopes of sparking joy with in-person collaboration again. I am not happy about it.
A lightweight process works well when you have engineers that are all of the following: - experienced - competent - understand their problem domain - actually care
In other words, a team of strong engineers (and a great, accessible product owner).
What I’ve found is that lightweight agile fails without a lot of oversight and frequent checkins, for anything else.
So SCRUM is SE training wheels because it forces a cadence, gets engineers to start breaking down work, and estimate; but the cost is that it holds-back great engineers with all of the (stifling) ceremonies.
I’ve gently nudged my risk adverse tech-lead to consider moving to Kanban now that his team is pretty strong now.
no process that consumes more than 5% of your developer's time can be called an effective process