Tangential but for peeps who're in their late 20's and early 30's in tech, do you feel like we have peaked and now are in the decline?
When I first got out of school, was feeling like a shiny new penny as most of my other peeps were going for law school or doing their gap year in life sciences or other prep for graduate school. Basically leading life as struggling students. So relatively, I had relative high spending power, living in the city with discretionary income and splurging it on un-necessary latte /gastro-pub/trendy lounges and going to feel-good rock-climbing/hiking trips on weekends (posted on FB obviously) and believing in the mission of the startup/corporation same as mine.
Now in my late 20's, I feel like both my programmer peers' buying power and personal power are waning. Financially, most of my friends who're going for medicine and law are now in residency/associate training and will soon over take me in earnings. For my friends in finance/ management/accounting, there is a well-defined path to promotion where I feel like I have capped out and they're gonna start making more and having more power in comapnies. Applying to accelerators and doing hackathons and making business cards for startup's seem awfully empty to me now.
In terms of personal agency, my friends who have pursued graduate research are wrapping their degrees and are either going for post-doc's or joining industry as Associate Scientists doing much more self-directed research than the off-the-shelf web CRUD and "Big Data" that I'm doing. My friends who are musicians or artists or film-makers, albeit still poor are pushing out their albums and films in festivals and galleries; not so much critical success but having something they made by themselves and persevered to show for. I just made a bunch of cogs tick in a number of corporations and a few vanity project that I call "startup's."
I feel like I followed the cult of PG kinda of like the cool kids in high school have followed the cult of "cheerleaders and football QB" and bought in the hype. When I don't really care about consumer web, whether Angular.js or Macaw or whatever is next is better than Backbone.js, or the next message queue performance metric's or the next startup mantra about "pivoting" and "increasing your luck surface area" so all I was doing was looking for personal validation or trying to get rich without a cause. Oh well, youth is wasted on the young and I hope to learn and from this experience to recoup my loss.
>I just made a bunch of cogs tick in a number of corporations and a few vanity project that I call "startup's."
Considered contributing to open source?
I teach and write libraries. Gives me that nice "I made this" feeling. Career-boosting too.
How did you get into teaching?
I'm interested - although I will have to work on my exposition / pedagogic skills (that's why they say the teacher learns the most in classes :) ).
I offer to teach people online and I have an IRC channel called #haskell-beginners on Freenode.
People go through my course: https://github.com/bitemyapp/learnhaskell
And when they get stuck, they ask questions.
I'll begin giving local classes soon. I'm giving a talk the 19th in Austin.