- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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Don’t tell me employer but it would still work for free. Software engineering is an absolute privilege and I can’t relate to this meme at all.
I think for many, money isn’t why they became an engineer but it is why they remain one.
You would have to have an incredible grindset to become a decent engineer without actually enjoying any of it. You could become a shitty one just by passing tests, I guess. (And probably many people do)
My job is also tough and more recently I felt despair because of pressure. But I remind myself that I chose my career because of good pay, which could improve once I leave my shithole company.
If money isn’t an issue, I would pick a more relaxed job. There is plenty of snobbery against blue collar jobs, but they are the most relaxed jobs I have ever had.
I think it depends on the type of blue color job and company as well. Some of them, you’re basically breaking your body to get some money and it could really hurt you in future.
I think having your own, or working for a small local business is great. Specially if you have a paid off house and aren’t struggling otherwise.
I’m different; none of my software projects bring me any money…
cries in helpdesk technician
I truly went into the wrong part of tech.
Man, fuck the helpdesk shit. That was the worst thing I’ve ever done. Fucking strapped to a phone all day was brutal. Thank fuck I’m outta there
I mean, I enjoy the work a lot. It’s the people I don’t like. The worst part is that I’m really damn good at this job, the users adore me, and I am somehow very productive. So now I’m dealing with being important on top of everything else.
I’m not internal IT either. I work at an MSP, so every day I am guaranteed to see a new horror and interact with some of the worst specimens of humankind.
Think the worst thing I’ve experienced at this job was the time I called a dude and he spent the whole 45 min call sexually harassing and fetishizing me and begging me to marry him. I fixed his computer, threw up because I was so disgusted, then told my boss. My boss reviewed the call, which the user knew was recorded because I told him so when he answered. My boss was like “what the fuck. I’m so sorry he did that” And sent the recording to the big boss, who responded to me in the same way before sending it to HR of that dude’s company. Dude was fired immediately. I got to deactivate his stuff and HR of that company personally apologized to me.
I would leave this kinda job, but I have insanely good benefits, make more money than I should at this stage in my career, and I am full time remote. It’s kinda hard to top this shit, esp with how the US is right now. I’ve accepted that I’m here for the long haul.
What a fucking jackass. I’m so sorry you had to deal with this shit. Thankfully, I was internal and all my calls were from our employees. Didn’t stay long there. 8 months and got another role. I’m now a software developer and don’t even come near the phones and I make double what I made on the phones. I, too, was good at it, but I still hated it and went into depression because of it. I just can’t do phones at all.
Thank you. It felt good to deactivate all of his shit lol.
I’m glad you got out of the helpdesk trenches. Being a tech support grunt is harrowing. I have a mild breakdown about once a quarter, but that’s been a thing since my college days (yes I’m in therapy lol)
I don’t mind talking on the phone because I make a lot of calls outside of work. I just hate people being absolute idiots and being proud of not knowing how to do the most basic shit. Got a ticket from a client asking to help a different user connect her new mouse to her computer. It was just a wired mouse. That was the start of 2025’s Q3 breakdown.
Engineering as a whole is now diluted with a bunch of money-hungry STEM’s who were never even that good at engineering. Their parents probably pushed them into the degree. It’s sad.
diluted with a bunch of money-hungry STEM’s who were never even that good at engineering.
That’s all the STEMs now. The actual competent ones are on Wall Street.
Yep. why struggle doing research when you can make 500K a year writing stock trading algorithms.
i had a roommate who was a physics PhD. He quit after 4 years and went to work for a Wall St and his starting salary was 400K, this was 2009, after the crisis. had he completed his PhD he’d have been lucky to make 60K a year and then after decades of work he might have made close to 200K. I would guess today he’s probably making well over a million a year.
Yep. why struggle doing research when you can make 500K a year writing stock trading algorithms.
…because research contributes to make a better society for everyone compared to scamming people with overhyped stocks?
But yes, in reality, the trend seems to be finance first, if you can get in.
only a tiny minority of researchers get to do that.
most research is lots of work with poor pay, often to the point where are per hour making less than working at a fast food job.
very few researchers are lucky enough to get rewarding work, and hardly anyone gets to do rewarding work that is well-paid.
and most well-paid research even in industry is working for corporations that are seeking to enrich themselves rather than better society. most pharma research goes towards high profit highly specialized drugs, for example, that will mostly only benefit the small slice of society that can afford them.
god forbid well-off parents want their kids to be financially secure…
It entirely depends on if the parents being well-off allowed their kid to get a degree they aren’t really qualified for because they could use money as a crutch.
parents money has nothing to do with if they get a degree… you have to complete the coursework regardless.
colleges will prefer to admit kids who can pay full tuition over kids who need financial assistance… if that is what you are complaining about?
And AI is going to put that into overdrive.
For a little while, I helped with some intern and recent grad interviews and holy shit some people didn’t have a clue. Had one guy on a remote interview that had a friend there helping him answer questions. It was obvious because he didn’t even mute his mic and we could hear them. And it was extra pathetic because his friend wasn’t even feeding him anything useful, like Bevis was helping Butthead with a software engineering interview.
We had a short break and when we resumed, he had at least figured out to mute his mic between questions (not that that helped, as muting yourself frequently when you’re one of the main speakers in the meeting alone is a red flag without some reason that should be obvious when it isn’t muted). Only resumed because I was fairly new to interviewing, if I got one of those today (and still did interviews), I would have ended it early.
Tell them to bring in the friend, then hire the friend on the spot and when they spin out of control say you were only kidding and end the meeting.
Engineering is just alternating between existential dread and direct deposit therapy.
So I should be a therapist because they are the ones selling the shovels?
Where tf did you get that pay lmao, maybe its regional, but I need a raise like that, I’m a BE Dev 2, awaiting performance review for 3 (Senior) and sadly not as close to that as I’d like.
Yeah im like half that haha
I’m a bit over 6 figures and if I didn’t pay Healthcare and 100% of our dual income household taxes I’d get ~$5k twice a month.
have a degree from a top 10 school, 10 years of experience, and work for a large corporation.
and learn to brown nose and play politics with your bosses
Check levels.fyi. 400-500k+ isn’t unusual for senior and above positions in US HCOL areas at competitive tech companies.
sickening
That reminds me, I need a raise
Why should you get a raise? You’re terrible at your job!
Not a single downvote, and you call yourself a downvote hunter smh
He already killed all the downvotes in his region
Yeah.
downvote_hunter: “Do you SEE any downvotes?”
Ignotum: “No…”
downvote_hunter: “You’re WELCOME.”
Give derry a raise!
Same I’ve been getting scammed for too long
Lol. They ban my account for posting this meme programmatically. Apparently only old school artisanal manual uploads to be allowed. 0 logic
You mean bulk repost and thus making spam?
How can you post when you were banned?
How can you post when you were banned?
or - they banned me from from programmer Humor@lemmy.ml, Programmer Humor@programming.dev just deleted all the posts. whatever
4 posts were still left up from your batch after I cleaned up some to clean the home instance feeds and them the mods trimmed it down more (from 19 within the same small window of time). Just make sure to spread posts out so theyre not all posted in a chunk (and dont use camelcase for titles or have connections to reddit). This post is more than a day after the other ones so would be fine
This post is literally the same reddit post with camel case.
I have 0 connections to reddit, but this clearly a lot of this content comes from reddit - what is the logic in banning that?yeah but ideally it wouldnt be. People come here to escape reddit they dont want to be reminded of it. Just warning that if you post with it youre going to get a lot more complaint comments
There is a chicken and the egg problem. U need content first before people would come.
Are u complaining about reddit link? Oh - I added it become some lemmy users complain “attribution is needed”.
Just cant keep ya all happy.
im saying the posts and content are fine, just dont swamp every other type of content with it. Give breathing room for other communities and other people in this community to be able to have things surface. You can still post things hence why you havent gotten any moderation action here past getting your flood of posts removed.
some users can like attribution to reddit a lot of others dont. Not everyone has the same opinion or is the same person
It’s .ml, if you don’t simp for authoritarians they ban you too, join the .ml boycott today and just don’t participate on anything .ml
Also, just don’t post the reddit link back, fuck reddit don’t give them any traffic back
The db0 fruitcakes are just as bad. They are also authoritarians who think disagreement is treason. It’s really sad because I have yet to find any place with true leftists out there.
I would say db0 has had a few red flags here and there, but they’re still far from being the 4th Tankie instance
Keep in mind tankies have been known to create accounts on non-tankie instances to create this sort of division and generally troll
i def agree that /0 is having a lot of flippancy and groupthink issues, but i would not call them authoritarian. i would say it has true leftists, just a culture of extremely mean ones who don’t need too much evidence to be persuaded into exclusion
I guess I’m getting scammed then.
Or comparing European vs US wages
At least we don’t have to deduct 45% of our wages for the eventuality of needing a doctor and also walking 10km with a broken leg to avoid an ambulance ride.As an American, I take offense to this. We would never use kilometers
In Germany we get deducted around 40% directly, before the money even reaches us q.q Tbf that includes health care as well as taxes already and also we are a smidge farther away from fascism.
Yeah don’t Americans get paid taxes included? Here in Italy I get my wage with income tax, welfare costs etc already deducted.
I know right. It’s so weird here. People should just negotiate after tax salary and calculate everything after tax. But I guess everyone likes saying big numbers and then get angry government is taking a portion.
Honestly you should just have business pay tax like: x% for profits + y% (less than x) for employees’ salaries. That way they’ve incentives to pay salary over keeping profits (growing company is better long term). And employees don’t have to pay any tax themselves. And they negotiate amd work for after tax salary, no need to feel like gov is taking their money.
Except if your spouse works or you have kids, those taxes are doing to be different, and the business isn’t going to know those details when negotiating
I mean, the next thing I’d like is to not penalize for having kids as a society so much that you need tax breaks. It should not be this expensive to have kids. Kids eat what you eat, and play with other kids in the community. And any assistance for kids from government should be given to all the kids, not just people with jobs. Current system of deductions for kids is government just taking less from people who already have money.
As for spouses, similar concept, but it’s a bit complicated. I’d like one parent income to be enough to have a family, because we need children to grow with parents. Currently both parents have to work and pay for daycare. The time spent with their own children is very limited. Of course people without kids will be in advantage if they have double income, but that’s bound to happen. And if having kids wasn’t this troublesome and expensive, maybe more people would do it.
Okay so a lot of people are telling you incorrectly, most people do get paid with their taxes taken out already and there are penalties for not doing so but technically it is optional.
Apples and oranges.
Contractors get paid directly with no taxes taken out. They must deduct it from their pay themselves.
Employees get taxes deducted before they are paid.
Ok but the meme doesn’t mention the type of employment
It was mentioned in other comments.
I am.in the US, taxes come out of the paycheck before its paid.
On my check, before Inget it it pays
Taxes
Social security
401k
Health insurance premium
Dental insurance premium
Union dues
I think a few other small misc things.
Yes, we still get taxed and then we have to pay out of pocket for health insurance. Luckily my company has some good, cheap insurance. I also take advantage of the high deductible program so I can save tax free money in my health savings account.
The high deductible is the insurance company taking advantage of you. The fact that you can save for that tax free does not offset that you shouldn’t have to pay for it in the first place.
How to even get an internship? I have tried everything but cant get a single call and you are saying there are people earning 6k dollars pm. Noice.
You should have tried harder to be born earlier. I remember being interviewed by an IBM senior who said when he got the job in the 80s, he only had Writing background lol
have a personal social connection
Pretend to be an AI agent.
My first internship I kind of landed by talking to a company representative at a career fair organized by my university and then mentionjng said guys name in my online application. Not sure how much impact that actually had but I guess it might have helped.
My second internship I found via linkedin. I just looked for companies there that had somilar positions or actually posted internship positions and then went to their website to apply and look for possible other open positions I could send a slightly altered letter from my first application to. If a company sounded interesting but didn’t have any internships on offer I sometimes just sent them an unsolicited application. Honestly I don’t remember how much feedback I got on those though.
Should be obvious but I also didn’t limit myself to looking for companies close to where I lived at the time. In the end I had to move literally to the other end of the country.
The college I went to R.I.T. has a co-op program. They require co-op blocks but give you the tools to find them with career fairs. Companies flock to our college for students. Once my foot was in the door as co-op for 8 months I turned it into a full time job (14 years ago).
You’ll hate it, but honestly I went for (cyber engineering) a consulting internship, led to a full time offer at the firm which i eventually turned into a really good position at my client
if you’re not landing internships via your college then you’re attending a shit college. my old school has Google, Meta, OpenAI, Apple, Microsoft, etc setting up mini conventions on an annual basis hoping to snipe some UofW fresh grad to exploit.
tbh that sounds more like you’ve been at an awesome college.
really? I always assumed that was the norm for schools. I went to the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada and every year it was a massive thing getting internships and paid gigs with these places. It’s such an important thing we had an entire building on campus dedicated purely to it. for CS majors it was required for graduation.
I went to an university in Europe. None of the companies you listed set up anything here.
Don’t forget those sweet RSUs too!
Yes, there’s nothing like an imaginary number that keeps growing and never materialises.
RSUs aren’t imaginary. They can be sold for cash once vested.
Well it depends on how the RSU is set up of course. All the equity I’ve apparently received in my time is still waiting on “defined liquidity event” before I can do anything at all.
You got RSUs(restricted stock units) from a startup?
For startups those will usually be options (not RSUs) which do not materialize until an exit event. There can be liquidity events before exit as well if the company is doing well.
RSUs are usually offered by publicly traded companies and basically as good (or better) than cash.
No, not from a startup. It might be worth mentioning that I’m in the U.K. so the terms and lingo may differ from yours.
I’ve had RSUs from series D scale ups. I’ve had options from start ups. Typically in the UK they’re wrapped as an investment you make on entry (using a loan the company offers you) to only pay capital gains tax (25% in the UK). And I’ve had RSUs from big, established enterprises.
What’s common to them all, for me, is that they’ve broadly not paid out what they were advertised to, either because the stock falls (Unity springs to mind), you leave before anything material vests (and the hiring company matches your RSUs) or there’s no liquidity event.
I trust cash, paid into my bank account. The rest, IMHO, is just trumps (US: farts) in the wind.
Oof Unity is just bad luck. Most other tech stocks have done well.
Most big tech will vest monthly/quarterly and you can setup an auto sell when your stock has vested. This is literally cash in your bank account every vesting period.
Monopoly money is the best kind of money
Love me a good payday.
