I hear you; I'm only a hobbyist programmer myself. I worked in investment banking at the beginning of my career and did an MBA so know lots of consultants and work a lot with lawyers in my work at startups, and I know those can be grueling jobs and that most people don't make nearly as much as the lucky few at the top firms
I was referring more to the intellectual challenge of the work. In investment banking there is basically no intellectual challenge at a jr level and at senior level it's all relationship management. The trading side can be hard but increasingly that's a programming job
I'm sure there are some super challenging law assignments but from what I understand from friends at top firms there's a lot of template changing and standard cases for a lot of stuff. At startups I try to do as much of that basic work myself so we can save on legal fees. Of course I get lawywers to review / sign off, but it's usually easy for them to do so
But programming is hard at an intellectual level in a way that is different from banking and consulting work and from what I understand, legal work. The first time I did a problem set in C involving memory allocation it took me like 20 hours to get it right. And the engineers working on massive systems that have to run perfectly, fast and be maintainable by hundreds of random people have work that is orders of magnitude harder. In programming, the difficulty of the work seeks to scale as your skill does. Don't know many other professions like that
I interned at google not as a programmer, and you are right that the work life balance there can be amazing, but it probably is the best company in the world for work life balance. Lots of programmers at other companies like work crazy hours as well, and often for non technical bosses or poor managers who make those long hours unpleasant
> I interned at google not as a programmer, and you are right that the work life balance there can be amazing, but it probably is the best company in the world for work life balance.
I'm not convinced. From what I hear, being a developer at Google can actually be stressful, if only for the fact that your peers are likely to be talented and ambitious - so it will take effort to keep on par with them.
Compare that to countless corporations which also hire developers, but where the motivation and talent levels are lower. In many of those jobs, you will be fine with doing maybe 15 hours of real work peer week. I'm not sure it would fly at Google. Based on this, I recently declined an interview invitation from Google recruiter - precisely because I was worried that my work-life balance would plummet.
There's also a very important point to be made here. Large-scale software development and self-directed programming have very, very little overlap in terms of time allocation and mental effort. To exaggerate the difference somewhat, it is like comparing building a go-kart in your garage with designing a factory that produces commercial, road-ready cars.
I tried to make that point in the post, though I don't have experience building large scale software. If hobby programming is building a go kart in your garage then the analysis you do in banking is like playing Mario kart :)
There's a huge jump in intellectual challenge of hobby programming vs the analysis you do in investment banking, and I'm sure there's another huge jump between hobby programming and large scale swe. Though I don't know which jump is harder. And I'd imagine that designing the factory in your analogy probably is the work of very experienced engineers, and jr eng is probably more like designing and building the machine that attaches all the wheels as part of a massively complex automated system
I was referring more to the intellectual challenge of the work. In investment banking there is basically no intellectual challenge at a jr level and at senior level it's all relationship management. The trading side can be hard but increasingly that's a programming job
I'm sure there are some super challenging law assignments but from what I understand from friends at top firms there's a lot of template changing and standard cases for a lot of stuff. At startups I try to do as much of that basic work myself so we can save on legal fees. Of course I get lawywers to review / sign off, but it's usually easy for them to do so
But programming is hard at an intellectual level in a way that is different from banking and consulting work and from what I understand, legal work. The first time I did a problem set in C involving memory allocation it took me like 20 hours to get it right. And the engineers working on massive systems that have to run perfectly, fast and be maintainable by hundreds of random people have work that is orders of magnitude harder. In programming, the difficulty of the work seeks to scale as your skill does. Don't know many other professions like that
I interned at google not as a programmer, and you are right that the work life balance there can be amazing, but it probably is the best company in the world for work life balance. Lots of programmers at other companies like work crazy hours as well, and often for non technical bosses or poor managers who make those long hours unpleasant