conwy

Seth Godin's 'Akimbo'

> You can have a degree or not, even bad developpers can hop from one job to another, making more and more money in the process, given they're good enough to manipulate the recruiters/clients into hiring them. Making money does not mean your product is good,useful or well-designed. It means you're a good salesman.

Good developers can also hop from one job to another and make more and more money in the process.

Job security is a thing of the past, whether you went to school or not.

The "ideal" developer isn't some kind of monk who dedicates his entire life to one firm.

Making money doesn't mean your product is bad, useless or badly designed. It also doesn't necessarily mean you're the best salesman.

Sometimes experienced developers without a CS degree and without sales skills still get paid a lot because:

A) the requirement doesn't call for advanced computer science knowledge

B) the requirement does call for a significant amount of practical experience and business knowledge

C) it's a highly profitable industry and the specific work being done will generate the company profit and/or cut costs

It can be perfectly legitimate to perform jobs like this without having a CS degree or ever intending to get one.

It can be perfectly legitimate to work your way up the ladder of such jobs and jump from job to job in the process.

Some of us want to raise a family and/or be able to retire one day. Why should we put our careers on hold to pursue a degree?

Good to see Americans wisening up to the necessity of saving.

Yep, great idea. Today I broke my work into a whole list of commit messages, then made the changes one by one.

Thanks, will give it a go then.

In response to one of the responses (that seems to have been deleted) that's a really good point about doing it out of interest.

I think I am interested in the fundamentals of this field, at least enough that I've been reading some of the books and papers in my spare time. If it was just a matter of interest and curiosity, I guess I'd just keep up the reading, which I can do for free anyway.

But I would only invest in a degree if I thought it would boost my earning potential in the Valley. Otherwise it seems better to just keep working full-time, maybe do some short courses here and there.

Only a quarter through Satya Nadella's 'Hit Refresh' and it's already giving me food for thought.

If only everyone had the luxury of time. Universal basic income FTW.

Nothing like chopped & steamed spring greens topped with west indian hot sauce, a little mayo and some pepper. Mmmmmmm

So how does one not become homeless without money?

Peanuts are fucking awesome. 45p buys you 1200 calories worth, and they're packed with nutrition. I'll take a few handfuls of peanuts over an overpriced refined sugar-laden piece of crap any day.

Undesirable from our perspective perhaps, but also not quite the same, or as bad as, what we might imagine.

See this website: dollarstreet.org.

Looking at the photos of some of the poorest places, I suppose they're undesirable from my perspective now, but if I moved there and lived there long enough and adapted, I could see myself finding contentment with less.

I actually want more screen-time. But screen-time doing my own projects and tinkering rather than making $$ for mega-corp. Though making $$ for mega-corp is its own type of fun, so I can't totally complain about my full-time job.

Bay Area is one of the most expensive locations in the world. Been living in London and 12k USD (8.5k GBP) is roughly doable even here. Obviously not luxurious living, but doable.

Don't depress me please :(

Yep, I have the same goal. If/when I manage to get to $600k (~12k p/year assuming 2% yield) I'll take 3 months totally off work of any kind, just recuperating, then another 3 months to plan out the rest of my life.

Yep, I'm currently going in the opposite direction. I'm now spending less on food and clothing than I've ever spent in my entire life. Rent is about the same as before, but I'm going to find ways of reducing that as well.

For more info about this lifestyle, see this website: http://earlyretirementextreme.com

Thanks for your thoughts.

While I certainly believe in self-documenting code where possible, I think there's a place for comments, and also for well structured comments.

I wouldn't recommend going haywire and commenting on every HTML element, attribute, etc., any more than I'd recommend using any other language facility or tool like a sledgehammer.

But that's not to say structured commenting isn't a useful tool for the right situations. I have found the JSDocs in the code-base of Angular and other libraries to be invaluable, on occasions where it wasn't possible to fully convey the meaning in pure code.