alas, many of us will never reach goose-farm level success
Yeah that sounds way more enjoyable, but first you need the 250k and up salary that a principal engineer at MS makes for 20 years, then you have plenty of equity to focus on whatever your hobby is
Average 350k according to levels.fyi.
I was expecting higher for principal tbh
I think MS like other big tech companies has started to run out of “senior” positions without paying more so many people just end up as “senior” principal engineers which is basically “this is as far as you can go if you don’t want to get involved in management”
“this is as far as you can go if you don’t want to get involved in management”
Yes. That exactly. This typically comes with a nice perk: Principals are supposed to have the same clout as lower-level managers. Which is to say they usually report to Directors or even the CTO in some organizations.
Another one is “Independent Contributor” which is similar but, as the name would suggest, is very self sufficient and does not work on (or for) a team. They’re basically one-man engineering shops and are expected to perform well everywhere in the company’s tech and talent stacks. As a result, ICs are very rare.
Jokes on programming. Hated life before being forced into it…
Just try being uneducated and working in a dead end factory job while having hated life all your life anyway!
Much fun! -46/10 would never recommend!
I wish I was forced into programming… I tried on my own and just don’t have the mind for it, I find it incredibly boring. All my friends are in the field and all work from home wherever the hell they want to live. I’m stuck in a VHCOL area with shit income and 0 potential to increase it :(
Yeah well I was „forced“ into it by an injury and one my parents working at the university. I never finished my degree so in that sense I’m also uneducated.
I didn’t have the mind for Uni stuff either esp. the maths stuff. There are so many areas. I just liked doing webdev stuff in my freetime and that landed me a few jobs.
I’m sorry you’ve had to suffer an injury! From what I understand, your experience now and your interest outside of work counts for more than the paper degree so if you do choose to continue that path I wouldn’t worry too much about being uneducated. Good luck, I hope you find happiness in whatever you do!
Our previous CTO left by saying “I have enough money now. Peace out!”
We need more of those people, people who find contentment in their wealth instead of endlessly pursuing more wealth.
This isn’t a shit post, its the truth
You ever been around geese? Those terrible shits take shits everywhere, all the time. Loud, nasty birds.
Currently have 26 ducks and one goose on my farm so I get it.
You ever been around Microsoft management? It’s an improvement.
Wtf does a goose farmer even produce
geese
its the last layer for my gooturducken
That sounds incredibly niche. Why not raise chickens or ducks :/
Bigger eggs and more meat. The cobra chicken is also a great security system.
Maybe they’re raising an army of nature’s angriest animal.
You say that, but have you ever met a Sandhill Crane? They started coming back, and people think they’re wonderful and majestic. Then they get too close, and find out they’re feathery balls of pure hate with pointy beaks that will send you to the emergency room.
Appreciate Sandhills from a distance.
That’s what a year of being a software architect does to you.
You spent all those years down in the trenches implementing bullshit designs an architect came up with, positive you could do better if you just got the chance. Then you go to graduate school to get the qualifications companies say you need to be an architect. You receive a masters degree. You’re your companies leading expert on software design. You get promoted to architect.
That’s when you find out the truth. All those previous architects left for the same reason you someday will. It wasn’t the previous architects making the terrible decisions that frustrated you. It was the marketing team and the CEO telling the CTO that the software product must have certain buzzwords present in the design. Those buzzwords offer no value to what your software product is meant to accomplish. But if you don’t put them in the designs, they’ll fire you and hire someone who will play their games.
Eventually, you can’t take it anymore. Having interfaced with the upper levels of your company, and having the understanding of systems engineering you do, you realize that every software firm will be this. There is nowhere you can go that will be better. You start saving.
Your goal is to save enough money to purchase a small plot of land and put an organic farm on it. Your convictions for this farm are simple: it must be able to feed your family. This may not be exclusively what you envision for it, and you may not even intend for it to be the only source of food for your family, but it will help you be less reliant on the kinds of corporation you’ve come to know and come to see as irrevocably evil.
And then sometimes, you get people like this in the post. Who find enough success farming to focus their energy on it exclusively.
I was in my first architecture review meeting this week.
The accuracy is infuriating and humbling.
22 years. 1 year is chicken farmer, 10 is ducks, 15 is, oddly, Alpacas, and 20 is geese.
I feel like the progression of my “Programming shelf” says a lot about my career trajectory as well.
Yeah… But right to left or left to right… Lol.
The programmer to homesteader pipeline is real.
Just know that complete self sufficiency is a pipe dream, whereas community sufficiency is much more achievable
I wholeheartedly agree, I’ve been going down the pipeline myself and this has been my approach. Recently I’ve been working with family and neighbors to get a community garden going.
You read some Thoreau and immediately wanted to leave society behind lol, I see you took his lessons to heart.
The other pivot point is The Pragmatic Programmer, which is totally understandable.
That book does a good job of grounding the reader through examples and parables from everywhere else but IT. By the end, you realize that good software engineering makes the best of general problem-solving skills, rather than some magical skillset peculiar to computing. You wind up reaching a place where you can begin to solve nearly any problem through use of the same principles. So @codex here, perhaps effortlessly, went on to management instead.
I love ‘DEBT’ lurking on the bottom there.
What are those books on Doom and Wolfenstein? Is it the game development black book by sanglard? That’s the book I found with a bit of searching
Yes, those are the Game Engine Black Books (Doom|Wolfenstein) by Fabien Sanglard. Highly recommended for anyone interested in games, programming, and history. They are amazing time capsules of those games and the development environments that produced them. I think/hope he’s working on GEBB: Quake and I’m so excited for him to eventually release it!
To have such a good career payout that you don’t need a career.
I’m a senior/principal engineer with 20+ years of experience and I can’t even think about retiring any time soon. All the posts in this thread are making me super sad. And the posted salary numbers are way higher than mine. :(
20 years of Microsoft stock options is a good pile of money
I’d way rather be a duck farmer. Geese are noisy little bastards.
and MEAN
Yeah I was thinking farming geese has got to be complicated and awful work.
Entertaining for the neighbours though!
Chicken is more profitable than ducks.
Not in computers. I’m an accountant. I don’t have enough money to throw the double middle fingers. Can somebody please, for the love of all that’s holy, show me the way out or, you know, come sneak onto my property when I’m not looking and delete me?
sell all your earthly possessions and buy two geese, one male and one female. then you, too, will be a goose farmer.
Yeah, after 22 years at Microsoft in a senior position, you should be able to retire and do whatever the fuck you want as a hobby. I very highly doubt this guy will ever make significant money from goose farming.
We have a principal software engineer who is a part-time farmer. He has chickens and cows.
Man I’m starting to think I’ve got the wrong hobbies. Maybe I do need to get out more.
Touch
grassgeese.
You should say “This is how something looks” or “This is what something looks like”, but don’t put the “how” and the “like” in the same statement.
That is not how it should look like.
This is what not it should look
I worked in IT for 20 years. I became a handyman and have 7 geese.
Are geese good animals to have?
Yes and no. They are much cleaner than ducks and they can be exclusively fed on grass once they are feathered out. This makes them unbelievably awesome in addition to their guard dog ability. In the springtime you get giant goose eggs. Which is a big perk. Since we got our first two geese we have not lost a single chicken or duck to hawks. Which is why we got them. We were losing 1 to 3 a year just to hawks.
The downside is that like all birds they poop everywhere And their poops are more undigested grass than runny stuff. And in the spring when you get those giant eggs the geese can become extremely aggressive. This means separating them from the other birds to prevent injuries and it means learning how to wrestle geese in a safe manner. And it means always being on guard. You will not be safe on your own property.
But for me the benefits far exceed risks. They pay for themselves. They give giant eggs, they stop hawks, they mow the yard, they require no feed.
There were a bunch of geese around my grandparents’ house when I was a kid. God those things would torment me. They had free range of the property and I tended to completely avoid the area they hung out because they were hyper aggressive and would chase after me every time I got anywhere near them. I was six years old, so it felt like they were as tall as me and they were definitely faster.
It wasn’t so bad once I got a little older, a little taller, and relied more on my bicycle than my feet for movement.
Nonetheless, those things gave me childhood trauma to the extent that I still can’t stand geese some forty five years later.
Damn it! It’s Duck, Duck, Grey Duck! NOT goose!
***A Minnesotan argues about the important stuff
