I wanted to take this brief moment to link an interesting article I read from Matt Aimonetti found here. In this blog post, he talks about how software engineers can be caught in ruts being underpayed, undervalued and without the effect they desire in their jobs. He uses this to discuss how every software developer should take some time to evaluate their worth before/while/after taking jobs and such. I think this is an important topic to raise awareness for, but I won’t spend more time reiterating his topic here. Go check out his old, but still very relevant, article here. I do not expect the contents of this article to come outdated anytime soon!
Besides a shoutout, I did want to add a little bit to this narrative. Or, well more specifically, the tech community narrative. I am absolutely in love with how sincere this guy is. At the end of the article the guy offers to help people out by shooting him an email. He offered, free of charge, advice on how to up your pay and/or up your satisfaction in the industry. Obviously he since stopped offering this due to overflowing of emails, but the fact that he did this for free and with full intentions reminds me of just how good the people in the tech community are. Everyone wants everyone to succeed. I would say most people are optimistic about the outlook and most people are there to help eachother. It brings me more confidence every day.
I think free software is the embodiment of this. I have no data to back this up (Fake news!), but I suspect that never in history has so much work been freely available for all to use. No other engineering field has so much greatness been developed on the shoulders of so many tiny bits of contributions (from countless developers). Certainly no other engineering field has advanced so quickly as tech. Every day, uncounted number of developers work to build/support/maintain packages used by orders of magnitude more developers, free of charge. That big oh 1-time invested by those open source developers has an n-fold effect over the community. And all of this for no other purpose than possibly attribution, but more likely nothing at all.
Basically, I love tech and (I think) tech loves me back!
Have a great day, D