Comment by bitwize
3 years ago
Playing the game is an important life skill. Go for that pile of money early. Compound interest over years means it can make the difference between just making ends meet for the rest of your life, and actually having something substantial to retire on. Apply to FAANG or whatever it is these days if you're smart enough. Prove you're smart enough by grinding leetcode and doing mock interviews. Don't faff about with homebrew game consoles or microcontroller things, things of that nature unless work demands it. Focus on GPGPU and open source FPGAs. Not quantum computing, though, it looks like that might be another time/money/energy sink like crypto. (Reconsider it if I'm proven wrong.)
Don't get distracted by the Lisp lotus-eaters. The future will be built on doing massive array-based computation as fast as possible, as parallel as possible, using as little power as possible.
Knuckle down and do the high-paying work early on, and possibilities will open up as to what game to play in your 30s, 40s, and beyond. Play the tech bohemian in your 20s, and you may find yourself struggling in later life.
Having played the open source tech bohemian in my 20s I think it was fine. While I earned a fraction of what I earned later in Silicon Valley it paid better than most of my contemporaries and through it I met a bunch of interesting people from around the world and became a much better programmer than I’d otherwise have been.
> and you may find yourself struggling in later life.
Generally you don't get to pick no struggles. If you play the tech game real hard in your 20s, you might have no friends in your 30s, and your struggle might manifest in "Ask HN: How do you make friends after 30?" type posts.
You can always push personal value down the line until you don't remember what it is you truly value. If that's only money and arbitrary success, then great, spend your 20s doing that.
Maybe. I've never hired for FAANGs but from the other side of the interview table, I'd much sooner hire someone overflowing with energy and enthusiasm for homebrew game consoles or hacking a TI-83 calculator, than someone who has practiced the right exercises but has no passion for the work, doesn't remember when they stopped loving tech, and would have pursued a different major if the big bucks were elsewhere.
It's not hard to tell.