Programmers, describe a typical day of "coding" for us...

[SaviorSix]

What's the salary if you don't mind me asking? 40k-50k?

between 50-60 and I am on the very low end.

What I don't like the most is that I pretty much have to do everything, from designing crystal reports, creating the stored procedures, to writing .net code for our internal web applications, to making changes depending on whatever way the wind is blowing because the end users 'need it' - It gets to be a little too scatter-brained, especially since we have no coding standards or change control system

[Anomynous]

Employed software developer for 2.5 years. I work from home 2-3 days a week. Some times I wake up and just say "fukc it, I got a sh!t night of sleep so I'm working from home today." The work is fun when the project is moving at a steady pace but if the project is slow then I get disinterested and lazy. I have mixed feelings about my company so that plays a role too. It used to be like a community environment but so many people were laid off that it feels more like isolated work. The best days are the ones where you have a clear objective and you can spend 6 hours "in the zone" programming with tunnel vision. A little over 60k salary but according to averages, next year I should be making like 10k more, which I won't get working where I am.

[betitom]

between 50-60 and I am on the very low end.

What I don't like the most is that I pretty much have to do everything, from designing crystal reports, creating the stored procedures, to writing .net code for our internal web applications, to making changes depending on whatever way the wind is blowing because the end users 'need it' - It gets to be a little too scatter-brained, especially since we have no coding standards or change control system

did you get your associates or bachelors? can you get into jobs like these with just an associates degree?

[Olguaauna]

Pretty much this.

We keep our programmers on the first floor to cut down on the suicide rate. Talk about a miserable bunch.

I should say tho, most of our programmers could be the poster children for the misc. FA geeks, socially awkward, never had a gf, wannabe ceo10k day.

Would not want that job...ever!

Jokes on you little bud, while you're busy doing sales or whatever sht job you do, the programmers are literally down there playing games and sht, doing less than an hours worth of actual "work" per day. Tech jobs are the easiest jobs ever, so glad I'm in Computer Science.

[gatovolador]

Most places you do almost zero algorithm stuff, which is too bad, because it's really interesting.

When I worked at a startup, I spent most of the day (and night) coding and checking production systems. When I worked at a massive company, it was meetings on meetings and maintaining old systems and management changing directions quite frequently, but we had the freedom within teams to do mostly what we wanted.

Typical day at massive company:
0900 - Arrive at work, get coffee
0930 - Scrum meeting, takes 30 minutes because too many people want to talk to long
1000 - Get more coffee, chat with team
1030 - Maybe do some actual work if there isn't a meeting
1230 - Get lunch
1330 - Return from lunch, possibly get coffee
1400 - Do some work
1600 - Get coffee
1630 - Meeting
1700 - Go home, or get beers with team first
2000 - Do some actual work at home because it's peaceful and quiet

Now, if it looks like I wasn't getting much done, I would say that was the truth. "Collaborative, open, loft" - these words mean a totally unproductive workspace where you cannot focus and get **** done. We routinely worked from home or hijacked conference rooms so we could get **** done when we wanted to. And having meetings routinely in the middle of work periods really broke up your concentration.

[Fozzy13]

I know its not necessary, but if it makes me that much better, it seems like a good idea

can more people chime in on this for me? thanks. i got about a year left. pretty much took all my major courses.

Experience is going to count for more. Learn more programming languages and get more experience.

Simply having a Masters isnt going to do chit if you dont have enough exp. and skills to back it up.

Non CS major checking in. I HR intern stuff and looked at a bunch of resumes. CS is all about exp. Having a masters doesnt mean chit...the people with masters who made $$$, had tons of exp...along with non masters who had tons of exp and skills.

If you have a masters you better make sure your resume takes up 2 pages, otherwise it wont mean chit

[Fozzy13]

Jokes on you little bud, while you're busy doing sales or whatever sht job you do, the programmers are literally down there playing games and sht, doing less than an hours worth of actual "work" per day. Tech jobs are the easiest jobs ever, so glad I'm in Computer Science.

age: 19. You are dumb as fuk.

Programmers are writing and testing coda ll day.

[ClarkGrizwold]

you guys are making it seem easy as fuark. i had a java and c teacher from hell, and she worked us hard as hell. she went above and beyond the call of duty. you guys are making it sound easier than that

[ClarkGrizwold]

Experience is going to count for more. Learn more programming languages and get more experience.

Simply having a Masters isnt going to do chit if you dont have enough exp. and skills to back it up.

Non CS major checking in. I HR intern stuff and looked at a bunch of resumes. CS is all about exp. Having a masters doesnt mean chit...the people with masters who made $$$, had tons of exp...along with non masters who had tons of exp and skills.

If you have a masters you better make sure your resume takes up 2 pages, otherwise it wont mean chit

thanks brah. i appreciate the response. i just want to make sure i dont leave any stones unturned. im only 21..so when i go out into the work force i want to put myself in the best possible position. but if grad school ain't necessary, then, well i wont be mad about it. got another year to think about it anyway .

[SaviorSix]

did you get your associates or bachelors? can you get into jobs like these with just an associates degree?

Both. 2 associates in CS (different concentrations - long story...) and bachelors in CIS. You can probably get a programming job with no degree if you can demonstrate your coding ability in your portfolio and manage to get by the HR black hole that just sucks resumes without a degree into the void, never to be seen. Depends on what they 'require' in the job description

[SaviorSix]

you guys are making it seem easy as fuark. i had a java and c teacher from hell, and she worked us hard as hell. she went above and beyond the call of duty. you guys are making it sound easier than that

The hard part for me is getting something to work right in an extremely tightly coupled environment with no documentation and hundreds of little idiosyncrasies, and everyone using different business jargon for the same thing. Plus nobody in the company understands that developing a semi-elaborate internal web application by myself can often be time consuming, even though it "seems easy" to them.

[Rusty1991]

I'm a 5th year electrical engineering major but interned for a moderately sized defense contractor as a hardware programmer last year. A typical day in the job went like this:

-9:00- Arrive at work, power down some coffee and a bagel and check emails

-9:30 - Attend morning meeting with my group and a couple closely related engineering groups discussing current project and days work

-10:00 - 1:00 - Complete various programming duties, ask more experienced engineers for help if I'm stuck, otherwise work alone for a few hours

1:00 - 1:30 - Lunch

1:30 - Power down more coffee

1:45 - 5:00 Continue on prograaming assignments for the day. If I finish early surf the web (if I'm feeling lazy), work on tomorrow's work (if I'm feeling ambitious), or help other interns/engineers on bish work (if I'm feeling nice)

All in all it was a pretty repetitive job and got boring pretty quickly. I wou;dn't reccomend being a programmer if you have trouble sitting for long periods of time. The plus side though is you get to listen to a ton of music while programming and I discovered a lot of really sick artists from listening to Internet radio.

Ad far as algorithms: It was a scripting language based off of C++ and it was extremely user friendly consisting mostly of function calls that were one to two lines and occasional looping. IT was used to validate hardware for various digital electronics. If you have any hardware experience, expect to have a job similar to this

[Olguaauna]

age: 19. You are dumb as fuk.

Programmers are writing and testing coda ll day.

Says the person who isn't a programmer. Get lost virgin.

[ClarkGrizwold]

Fuarkk if grad school isn't worth it im gonna happy as fuark. I don't hate school but I don't really love it either. Might be working in 1.0 years feelsgoodman.jpg

[happytrails]

Fuarkk if grad school isn't worth it im gonna happy as fuark. I don't hate school but I don't really love it either. Might be working in 1.0 years feelsgoodman.jpg

Comp Sci is always rated as a top 5 degree to get a masters in. Pay jump ~25% from undergrad Comp Sci.
http://www.forbes.com/pictures/efkk4...puter-science/

[Olguaauna]

Comp Sci is always rated as a top 5 degree to get a masters in. Pay jump ~25% from undergrad Comp Sci.
http://www.forbes.com/pictures/efkk4...puter-science/

Yeah I'm definitely gonna get a masters, definitely not a PHD though. Brb start out making tens of thousands of dollars more

[ho_124]

You should really love programming, or else you will hate your life. Also I don't think it is as glamorous as the media makes it out to be. They are always talking about some programmer making the next big app or website and making millions, when in reality, programmers are grinding away 9-5. My dad loves it, like literally loves programming, and has made a good career out of it because he is truly passionate about it, but if I were to guess, a lot don't like their jobs (like most people). I mean if you are sitting at your desk for 8 hours writing in code, you better love it, or else you will want to kill yourself.

Also be careful since many programming jobs have or are being outsourced to India.

[Engineer_Guy]

You should really love programming, or else you will hate your life. Also I don't think it is as glamorous as the media makes it out to be. They are always talking about some programmer making the next big app or website and making millions, when in reality, programmers are grinding away 9-5. My dad loves it, like literally loves programming, and has made a good career out of it because he is truly passionate about it, but if I were to guess, a lot don't like their jobs (like most people). I mean if you are sitting at your desk for 8 hours writing in code, you better love it, or else you will want to kill yourself.

Also be careful since many programming jobs have or are being outsourced to India.

Another guy who doesn't have a programming job talking about programming jobs.

[Olguaauna]

Another guy who doesn't have a programming job talking about programming jobs.

This. Fuking communication and liberal arts majors coming in here talking about programming jobs and how "bad/boring" they are.

[ho_124]

Another guy who doesn't have a programming job talking about programming jobs.

Yea, I'm totally wrong, if you don't love programming, you will LOVE sitting at your desk writing code.

This. Fuking communication and liberal arts majors coming in here talking about programming jobs and how "bad/boring" they are.

Never said it was boring

[Cheetah]

[Engineer_Guy]

Yea, I'm totally wrong, if you don't love programming, you will LOVE sitting at your desk writing code.

Common sense +1

If you don't like doing your job you probably won't like your job.

Hurr durr?

[SaviorSix]

Yea, I'm totally wrong, if you don't love programming, you will LOVE sitting at your desk writing code.



Never said it was boring

The bonus being a lot of programming jobs (or so I hear) let you work from home. BRB buying a sick dev laptop and sitting in a cafe all day

[Danzeligan]

Programmer brah checking in.

I don't really have an 'average day.' Sometimes I can be up the wall with tight deadlines, sometimes (like today) it's a real real easy day so I'll misc hard and maybe do some research.

I specialise in .net for the web app development work I do. When I do finally get some coding tasks in, I fukin love it. And if you get the right company you can do it from home/cafe/beach somewhere - noone gives a fuk, just deliver what you're supposed to deliver and do it well.

[max02man]

I'm CIS major and have 2 years left to graduate. why do you do research? what are common languages for programming?

[MikeinNJ]

BS in CS checking in.

Been at one of the worlds largest telcos for 2 years now. If you are good, you can have lots of down time. I'm finished with my work until September. The work load and skillset needed vary greatly by the project you work on. For the most part its maintaining and adding features to existing large scale enterprise applications. Large corporations are very good at training people and onboarding. There's a whole 18 month program at my company for college hires that makes transitioning from college to 'real world' very easy.

I've never worked past 4:30pm in the last two years. Can work from home 1-2 days/week. I work down the hall from my two best friends from college and my brother. I can take vaca whenever, unlimited sick days, and flex time as needed. I have my own office and am not micromanaged. As long as you finish your work, they don't care. Lots of time to study/pursue other interests.

The large corporate environment has its ups and downs. A lot of focus on business process/compliance and bs paper work (mainly for engineers/project managers). Devs have it pretty easy. People are pretty chill overall.

Currently close to $80k/yr at 24 y/o in a medium cost of living area. For where I am at in life right now, this job kicks ass.

Things to study for corporate dev environment that they didn't cover in my CS courses:

- Web Services (big one for any corporate systems and web applications, learn all about wsdls, xsd files, play around with SOAP/soapUI)
- Weblogic, Apache
- Java J2EE, JSP, AJAX, Javascript
- SQL (SqlWorkbench is used a lot)
- Version control (SVN/CVS)
- Unix command line (Can be decent amount of scripting for deployments, etc)

[JesseV87]

I work in a bank and I haven't done any coding for like 2 weeks now. In fact most of the time you're either in design meetings, writing documentation or just straight up doing nothing but browsing the internet and chatting. Usually there's like a month and a half period of coding (frankly you don't really need all that time to code anyway) and then doing Unit Testing, QA support, etc. and then it's back to chilling or going into meetings or writing documentation for the next few months until your next project goes into Design/Coding.

[wfsolis]

I'm working towards a cs/math double major right now.

My father-in-law is the head of software at a big medical company here in Minneapolis. I'm hoping he can help me get a job when I get out.

[SaviorSix]

when will it be my turn

brb this company is 'old school' and makes everyone work from the office for 45+ hours per week

brb they don't really know what IT does, just 'make it happen'

brb can't really work from home regularly/at all

brb barely using .net except to piece together simple intranet apps

brb low pay

[hockeybpr25]

I get in anywhere between 8 and 10. I usually dick around for the first hour, check e-mails, listen to voicemails, misc, etc. Then I'll do some work, when I get stuck I'll surf the web some more. Depending on how much I have to get done I won't go on the internet at all though. I just program or document my programming most of the day. Sometimes I have conference calls and chit but not often. Part of my day also is answering the phone for my clients if they have issues with their software or they want to get it tailored so then I have to do that as well. Then leave anywhere between 4 and 6 depending on how busy I am. Sometimes I work from home as well and then when I do that I don't do much.

when will it be my turn

brb this company is 'old school' and makes everyone work from the office for 45+ hours per week

brb they don't really know what IT does, just 'make it happen'

brb can't really work from home regularly/at all

brb barely using .net except to piece together simple intranet apps

brb low pay

Well considering programming is not IT.... Just sayin'