Look. Becoming a programmer is NOT going to give you a satisfying life. Being a programmer is fucking boring. Companies do not give a shit what cool stuff you've built once they hire you. They want you to spend your time figuring out why their automated build system is broken and optimizing their databases. Sitting in front of a screen for 8-12 hours a day is a terrible approach to achieving satisfaction in your life.
Starting a company is different, and if you are massively interesting in solving a problem, that can be a great way to go. But starting a company is completely unpleasant a lot of time and if you want to pick a job that is going to fill your plate with bullshit, that is a good choice.
The best advice I ever received in regards to this topic is still pretty worthless, because almost all advice is worthless. You cannot learn wisdom that way. You learn it through experience. But here it is: Pick a problem that is meaningful to you and work on it. Optimize this by working with people you like and who share your passions.
That advice was given to me by one of the most famous computer scientists alive who also happens to be worth tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Note that his advice did not involve becoming a good engineer, getting papers cited, or starting a company.
I keep an index card in my pocket that says: "Never again have reason to regret." This is not "live without regrets". I think that attitude is mostly contemptible. Rather, spend your time -- all of your time -- on things you will not regret having done when you climb into bed at night. If nothing else, every day that I have obeyed this rule unfailingly I have slept well and awoken excited and optimistic in the morning. That's all the wisdom I have. The rest is just get damn lucky.
> Being a programmer is fucking boring ... They want you to spend your time ... optimizing their databases
Honestly, I really fucking love optimising databases. I can't believe my luck that people want to pay me to do that sort of work for 8 hours a day.
To me, hell is having to define and defend my own problem. I would loathe running a startup - I love the feeling, instead, of having people come to me to solve their problems. Fortunately, I've managed to arrange a situation where enough of those problems are reasonably interesting to my apparently unusual tastes :-).
This is not meant as a dig against those who run startups, just a note from someone with a very different perspective.
You are probably a wonderful person to work with and any team is really lucky to have you. Having someone who is deeply passionate about these problems is very important and these are important problems!
Not sure if you'll check back on this thread, but this part of your comment kind of made my day :) >> Honestly, I really fucking love optimising databases.
Seconded. You'll find a lot of people on here saying about "never to give up" but IMO, programming is not that glamorous only outside looking in. To give you best sense of this, it's like people not in academia thinking that it's great to have tenure and be paid to pursue your own passion in an academic community.
The truth is most people in IT do very mundane stuff; most web-stack stuff glorified have nothing to do with C pointers. And most people are applying commonly used open-source technologies as users than making original contribution to algorithms. A lot of people have the vision of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg but it's like winning the Nobel Prize, a lottery; especially in today's social-media infused tech scene, it's about being in the right place at the right time.
Ultimately, this is not to discourage you from going further into tech. But to short-circuit a lot of the BS floating around. You'll get pretty far if you work hard in IT; meaning if you sacrifice your free-time for the start-up treadmill, in 10-15 years, you can get to $150-200K as mid-level manager, saddled with a mortgage, kids and high cost of living in socially-eco-conscious city. For the average-case, it will not give you extreme wealth, it will not give you friends/family, and it will not be novel after a few years of the mundane work.
Take original replier's advice, "live without regrets." If you want to get over the hump of some kind of perceived technical inferiority, by all means, go for it but don't go all in thinking that any field will validate and solve all life's problems. That is very personal and not even your mother would even know. Some people here are happy just being a web developer, a "part of the revolution"; some people here see themselves as tortured young startup artists in struggle to be a triple threat of "a creator, an influencer and a monetizer"; some people get off on the rush of show & tell of weekend projects and their technical prowess and pulse on the trend.
Starting a company is different, and if you are massively interesting in solving a problem, that can be a great way to go. But starting a company is completely unpleasant a lot of time and if you want to pick a job that is going to fill your plate with bullshit, that is a good choice.
The best advice I ever received in regards to this topic is still pretty worthless, because almost all advice is worthless. You cannot learn wisdom that way. You learn it through experience. But here it is: Pick a problem that is meaningful to you and work on it. Optimize this by working with people you like and who share your passions.
That advice was given to me by one of the most famous computer scientists alive who also happens to be worth tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Note that his advice did not involve becoming a good engineer, getting papers cited, or starting a company.
I keep an index card in my pocket that says: "Never again have reason to regret." This is not "live without regrets". I think that attitude is mostly contemptible. Rather, spend your time -- all of your time -- on things you will not regret having done when you climb into bed at night. If nothing else, every day that I have obeyed this rule unfailingly I have slept well and awoken excited and optimistic in the morning. That's all the wisdom I have. The rest is just get damn lucky.