So you want to become a developer

I'm sure you've heard things like we can work from home. You can set your own hours. IT is the future. We make $85,000 a year.

Here is what you probably haven't heard. The expectations put on you are insane. The amount of programming language is and best practices and design of philosophies and new library this new library that requires you spend at least an hour a day learning something new.

sure the average salary is $85,000 but what is the median salary? There are a lot of developers making $300,000 a year, I personally am in the ~55k bracket, and been working professionally for about 8 years.

Speaking of being underpaid, how good are you at convincing everyone that you are hot s*. Because I'm not very good at that, and that set me quite a bit behind.

How about doing your own deployments? Most of my clients want those done after hours, which is great because it won't cause any down time for them. What's not great is appointments tend to go south for one stupid reason or another, and if it's after hours chances are your not thinking very clearly.

How about fixing bugs? Majority of projects I've been on I spend at least four to five hours cleaning up bugs I've done and others. I don't really like bringing that up because it makes me think I am a sloppy developer. But I know that's not the case, I only have so many productive hours in a day.

Even a few minutes to do better than all of the things I struggle with, you'll have to convince your boss and your client that you know what you're doing, explain to them why you should write code, how are you plan to write it, accurately estimate the number of hours it will take to write the code, and then document code you're about to write so that sales can approve it.

So hey, I ask again. Do you want to do this? Hopefully it isn't for the money. if you think you're going to be respected because your IT you've got another thing coming. If you are really determined and believe very strongly that you just love computers and want to work with them and stare at them all day long and deal with all this crap go for it.

But if you think it's a sweet gig, save yourself the trouble, get out.