All the Software Eng. degrees I looked at were all Comp. Sci but with a fixed set of modules in the final year rather than a choice of modules. Likewise for the AI degrees.
First at 18 it’s enough time to get a degree.
Second if money are what is is for, it would be better if he would work in hospital, and do programming in his free time, and try programming job after finishing university.
10$ * 40 hour * 4 weeks * ~25 (conversion)
40000
So it’s more than is paid for common programming jobs in this country. AFAIC. (last times I seen 30000 / 25 as monthly salary for university educated.)
Because programming jobs market is going to be nivelizated, salaries are going to drop at least by 25 %. That is, aprox. to 75 % of current new jobs salaries. If you are in the US, its economy stagnation, and lack of long term research is widely known. It could be aproximated it will get itself into problems in 2 years and for at least 3 years.
So smarter thing would be to held some job with long term availability, and try to get a paper similar, or identical to degree.
Of course one of major problems with universities is they are not create directly usable abilities. (nonvocational education) So this mean that everyone who would like to know something should do also a work outside of university (and by work I don’t mean for salary work, I mean research/development in field. And of course learning how to do things that will not be explained on university.)
And one more thing.
If I’d have company, I will not hire anyone lazy, even for unpaid work.
A sidenote, movie making might be easier to get into. Barriers and costs for movie studios have decreased, so it’s somewhat cheaper and easy for them to exist, and do stuff. Not to mention an hypothetical increase in TV studios, because of digital broadcasting.
Why? Nothing wrong with doing other things first
Are you saying there are 25 months in the year? $10/hour is nothing.
I doubt it. Such things dont generally happen except for overpaid and/or unskilled jobs.
Apart from CS courses, of course. Used mine on day one after graduating.
Great. How do you tell, out of interest?
I’m still in highschool (actually college courses for highschool credit) ; 20 hour week is most I could manage.
[quote]A sidenote, movie making might be easier to get into. Barriers and costs for movie studios have decreased, so it’s somewhat cheaper and easy for them to exist, and do stuff. Not to mention an hypothetical increase in TV studios, because of digital broadcasting.
[/quote]
That’s good, seeing as it’s my chosen career. i just am looking for a job to carry me through highschool and college.
Virum, just get some shitty brainless bar work or something. Cleaning’s good actually. Gives you a lot of time to think. Do your programming at night, and aim for that degree when the time is right. But be assured no-one with any money is likely to employ you without a CS degree. Of course you could just make it on your own which is hard but probably more rewarding. I’ve got a friend who’s 18, writing a game in Blitz Basic which is basically a Snoodalike, but it’s so utterly amazingly polished, he’s aiming for a top 3 spot on the portals and is probably going to make a very, very large amount of money from it. That’s a relatively sound plan.
Cas 
my job that’s carrying me through college (still at least 4 years to go) is a simple backroom job at target, making $7/hr for now (getting a raise in 4 days). Everything starts out small and eventually grows, even the job you dont plan to keep after you get your degree. For example the Target warehouse is offering to hire me this spring starting at $14/hr. Not too bad considering my college is paid off thus far without loans (finally, the government working for me). Then when you get through college you can leave the crap $15/hr jobs and shoot for big salary. At least, that’s what I’m hoping for. o_O
Anyway with highschool work hours will suck, but college schedules are generally not as bad as highschool. In highschool you go to the same classes every day, college you may have a class that meets maybe twice a week. I’m managing 35+ work hours and college and it really isnt bad at all. It’s more intimidating in highschool than it is when you actually arrive at college.
When I was 11-16 years old, I earned my money by delivering advertisements (I got around 2-3 EUR/h = ~50 EUR/month). When I was 16 (in high school), I got a work as a sysadmin in a small company (half a dozen people at the office) thanks to a friend who had been doing some work there and told them about me when the previous sysadmin quit. I’ve been doing that sysadmin work since then (now I get 17 EUR/h, about 20 hours per month).
I’ve been studing computer science since 2002 in the University of Helsinki (http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/index.en.html) and my fourth year there started just. My first commercial programming project was 2 years ago, and I got it also through a friend (he did the marketing and I did the programming) and since then I’ve got money through the program’s maintenance agreement and the adding of new features (30 EUR/h, >=10 h/month). Since this summer I’ve been doing some programming at a software company (50 EUR/h) where I was invited to by one of my course mates who works there.
So here I am 21 years old, with no degree (takes 2 more years) and about 3 work places plus some random jobs (such as fixing somebody’s computer). I’ve never really tried to look for a job - the work has always come to me first. I suppose the easiest way to get a work is that your friends know your skills, and every now and then one of them hears about an opportunity for you. Then when you have a degree and some experience, it’ll be easier to approach the companies directly.
Thanks for all the help guys.
I’m sending in an application to the hospital (10.23 an hour). My dad knows people there (he’s the supervisor of the same department at a different hospital), so hopefully that’ll help me get in. 
By the way Woogley, I’m taking my senior year of highschool at the local community college. I only have school two days a week.
Well, if this is the US then pay is to a degree regional and marches along with licing expenses.
40K woudl be very low in silicon valley.
I started at about $30K but that was abut 16 years ago. Just as an exmaple, apartment rent here has about doubled since then. House prices have more then tripled.
One thing you have to ask yourself is where you are headed for the future? What do you want to do with your life? You are going to spend too much of it workign not to be doing something you enjoy. The other factor to consider is growth room. $10/hr may seem like a king’s ransom to a kid just out of highschool, but trust me, life has a way of getting mreo expensive. Where can you go for tht $10 an hour?
As a successful 42 year old engineer, Im making comfortably over $100K a year. Something to think about.
I WOULD say howevre don’t rush school. If you don’t know why you want to be there then go work in the real world a few years. I did that. All it took was 2 years of sh-t jobs to make me really undertand why I wanted a degree and, as I result, I was a very serious and successful student.
Beers on Jeff then!
Kev
For that you need to work on JInput, we are currently looking for someone with a mac to do some work on the mac plugin
Endolf
Well Jeff I think it wasn’t his point. He obviously don’t plan to stay as UNMO (undereducated medical officier) forever.
There is also no need to play with big and low salaries, we all know that quality of job/person can’t be measured by salary.
(BTW if your work is so big leasure, where is my favorite request. Java to 64 bit native compiler with ability to use Intel assembly syntax. ~_^)
Re blah^3
[quote] Are you saying there are 25 months in the year? $10/hour is nothing.
[/quote]
Note the word “conversion (factor)”. $ vs some other money. Actually it should be 23.7, but it made my point anyway.
If you believe $10 is really nothing, you might give me the difference if I’d get a less paid job.
[quote] I doubt it. Such things dont generally happen except for overpaid and/or unskilled jobs.
[/quote]
I think in comparison to game developers salaries rest of industry is overpaid (relative decrease in salaries in one part of industry tends to influence other parts as well). In comparison to the rest of the world current US/UK salaries are too high, and because a program’s quality isn’t country dependent…
[quote] Used mine on day one after graduating.
[/quote]
It might be interesting history, would you share?
[quote] Great. How do you tell, out of interest?
[/quote]
Would you like a 6 pages article full of juicy and boring details, with ending words: it depends on your previous experience, and about detailed knowledge of various persons, and a bit of luck?
Of course there is a nice preliminary method. Choose topic force him to do demo, look curiously at it. Then if you’d hire him, you’d have to do testing him some more, there might be a time interval when it’s easy to kick him out.
The real problems are person that could play on working when on probation, then when they started to be protected by law, theirs working activity could decrease by a factor of 3. Alas the choosen demo method doesn’t work on them.
http://www.homefair.com/homefair/calc/salcalc.html
According to this my equivalent salary in San Francisco would be $113,000. That’s insane.
Well my equivalent salary would be well over $200,000 … and I kinda like the look of that
Note the word “conversion (factor)”. $ vs some other money. Actually it should be 23.7, but it made my point anyway.
[/quote]
Conversion from what to what? I dont understand
Sure, if you do some of my programming for me
I think in comparison to game developers salaries rest of industry is overpaid (relative decrease in salaries in one part of industry tends to influence other parts as well). In comparison to the rest of the world current US/UK salaries are too high, and because a program’s quality isn’t country dependent…
[/quote]
Rubbish :P. Quality is highly dependent upon experience, training, and psychology. There is a huge cultural and literal difference in each of those things from country to country.
It might be interesting history, would you share?
[/quote]
For instance, FSM’s and whether or not you can ever write an algorithm to match infinitely nested brackets (one of my co-grads had to explain this to his employer at the start).
Would you like a 6 pages article full of juicy and boring details, with ending words: it depends on your previous experience, and about detailed knowledge of various persons, and a bit of luck?
[/quote]
Yes - basically, you can’t. It’s wonderful to say you won’t, but nobody does it intentionally, it’s just extremely difficult (almost impossible) to avoid completely.
Not to disrupt the wave of agreement, but it is possible to work in programming in High School.
This might inspire you (or at least give you hope):
I started programming at age 11 and knew it was what I wanted to do. By 16 I was doing contracts for small companies. I self taught and studied anything I could get my hands on. While in my final year of high school I went to a programming company, with several programs I had written on disk, and asked to speak with the technical lead. Surprisingly I found myself in the CEO’s office talking software engineering (very technical guy who was a PhD CS from Waterloo, Canada’s best programming university).
He was impressed with my knowledge and I could see it. I boldly asked him if there was any way I could work for him. He said that it was obvious I knew alot, more then most of his other engineers. The project was being funded by the government through a research grant and all employees had to have a CS degree. He challenged me to learn C++ (I had only been doing C), and rewrite some code that took a BSC a year to complete…if I could do all of that in 1 month, he would go to bat with Ottawa (where the funding came from) on my behalf.
I took to the challenge and taught myself OOP principles and C++ in about a week, spent 3 weeks developing the software on my own time after school. On the last day of the month, I skipped school and went into the office and presented what I had done and explained the design. I was hired on the spot for $29K (pretty good at the time) starting in 2 weeks (1 week after graduation). By the time I was 19 I was the technical lead on the project and had 5 CS graduates reporting to me.
Now I am 34, Director of R&D for a $60 million dollar software company, I have 25 software engineers working for me and I make over $190K per year…still no degree, just my High School diploma.
It is doable, if you are creative, energetic and truly dedicated to programming.
Wow, great story Vorax. That’s very impressive.
I’m more of a casual programmer though; it’s not my preferred career (just my second), so I don’t know if I could pull something like that off, if only because I’m spending most of my time working in the direction I’d prefer to go (filmmaking). In other words, I’m not “truly dedicated to programming.”
That’s still very awesome. Which company do you work for?
BTW, to keep everyone update, the interview at the hospital went well, it looks like I’ll get the job.
Along with that I’m doing some low paying contract out programming in my off school time.
BTW my story is very much like Vorax’s, except I spent 3 years whacked out of my head on weed and whisky somewhere in the middle and I think there was a degree involved in there somewhere Curiously enough my story has ended pretty similarly to his as well although I’ve got 2 years to catch up on him and only 5 minions so far
Cas
And exceedingly lucky.
Surely, software jobs requiring qualifications for people with no commercial experience has very little to do with whether the person can or can’t do the job. Its to do with the company being at least partially assured that their staff will be able to turn out the quality products they require to get and keep customers. Hell, if it was just about being able to do the job every 16 year old computer geek coming out of school could take a job. I can’t count the number of people that came out of the degree course I took, knowning nothing new*.
Congrats on the jobs Virum,
Kev
- And not just down to the amount of beer they consumed.
I notie he said he lvies in vetura…
FOr what its woirth, i got my first big jum pwhen i mvoed from Silicon Valley to LA for a job (and that was only 1 year after that $30K salery so it ws the same time period.) They told me “you cant live on $30K, we’re giving you $45K” and again this was 15 years ago, My wife (then my fiance) got a job for about $30K. Between the two of us making 75K we managed to afford one, only a few years used, car, a decent apartment in a decent area, my school loans (about $250 a month as I recall) and to put away enough to have a nice wedding on the cheap (she mad her own wedding dress for $500 of materaisl and a year of nights sewing. I rented prfessional sound equiptment and got my brother to spin CDs at the reception. etc)
That was about 15 years ago.
Ofcourse if your parents are gonna let you live at home and theya re gonan feed you then its a whole different story…