How many of you are professional programmers? Still working as software developers for a regular income and doing trading only as a side project? Or rather ... any of you still prostitute themselves? God I hate programming (for a job).
Hm, a software job now equal to prostitution in your twisted mind???? I guess, by this logic any service rendered for money is prostitution????
I am a tech lead in corporate IT. Love it! It is a fun atmosphere...we basically hang out and write code all day. And the best part is a nice paycheck arrives in my bank account every two weeks which allows my trading account to grow without needing to withdraw funds for living expenses.
If you hate programming, you were not suited to be a programmer from the beginning... I always pity people who got into programming not because of their inclinations but because of the $. Programming is horribly tedious/boring unless you are born to program. But if you are, it's fun.
Corporate programming is sometimes fun if you are lucky. But mostly it is not fun. Endless sprint meetings, agile nonsense, code reviews, dealing with other programmer's crappy code (no one knows how to encapsulate code properly these days). Dumb managers. 10 programmer teams to do the job that one or two good programmers could do by themselves etc. Smaller companies are actually better for coding but don't pay as well. Although one benefit of Agile is we don't have to write as many documents as we did in the old days.
I am lucky. I started in 1978, I have only worked in big corporate environments mostly as a consultant/contractor (and when an employee, a fairly independent one), and I also have been a my-own-boss-programmer for the last 22 years. And if corp. programming is not fun (and I am sure there are corporations where it cannot possibly be fun) - leave. Programmers are in demand, I hear.
In general i found the highest paid programming jobs were sometime the least fun as they had to pay people more to compensate for the fact they weren't fun. Otherwise no one good would do them. The best job i had was during the dot com bubble days, very high pay and fun. But only lasted one year, then the bubble popped. This Agile methodology that many companies now force on us has also taken a lot of the enjoyment and art out of programming, turned into a sweat shop, production line instead. They divide up the work into short 'sprints' and they expect you to work like mad and be out of breath at the end of each sprint.
Thats one of the problems. Companies cant find that many good programmers so they end up hiring mediocre and bad ones. And you end up working with them on your team and having to deal with the garbage code they write.
I can appreciate this and feel fortunate that I am working for a shop where the managers are not Agile cultists. We have some devs who are but they do not have the power, fortunately.