I hate to pop anybody's bubble, but at the
software company where I work, the people making the really big bucks are
management -- and very damn few of those guys were playing
D&D in
high school. This is true everywhere; even if the
programmers are getting serious
stock options,
management is getting more.
In the larger scheme of things, a
BMW is a small and cheap thing.
This is a law of nature:
Whatever the programmers get, management gets more of it. This includes ulcers, by the way, so it's not
all bad. And
upper management tends to be
sales and
marketing types. They're "people people", and
management is not about technical issues; that's what they hire
us for.
Management is about people.
Upper management is about
strategy too, yada yada, but that's got very little to do with
exception handling and
memory management.
There are
fabulously rich techies like
Bill Joy,
Jerry Yang, and
Steve Wozniak, but I'm willing to bet that
Scott McNealy has more money than
Bill Joy, and that
Steve Jobs has more than
Steve Wozniak. I don't think damn near anybody has more money than
Jerry Yang, so chalk one up there for the thick-glasses crowd.
Getting paid to do something useful is nice (that's what
I do for a living anyhow), but you'll get a hell of a lot more money, power, and respect if you learn to schmooze, slap backs, and bullshit people into giving you everything they've got.
I like my job. I sit in my cube and write
C++ code all day and that's cool, and I'm lucky enough to work for a company where
upper management thinks it's cool too. They don't shit on us the way a lot of
managers do at other companies. I've been there and it's no fun (and it's an unbeatable way to run a
software company right into the fucking ground and lose everything, in case anybody's considering that as a
management strategy).
Do what you're good at, and if you do it well you've got something to be proud of. If you work for
a halfway sane company they'll even love you for it (where "love" is precisely equal to "throw money at"). Don't get yourself tied up in knots about the popular kids succeeding too, because a lot of them will (just as a lot of
D&D geeks go nowhere), and you'll be working with them and for them for the rest of your life. There will
always be somebody, somewhere, making more money than you.
The good news is that right around the time you grow out of your baggage from
high school, they'll grow out of theirs if they've got any brain at all. If you avoid
death-ship companies run by idiots, you'll get along with the ex-popular kids just fine.
psydereal: Yes, most of the
football team will go nowhere, you're right. But one ex-"popular kid" is the president of the
software company where I work, another is the
CFO, another is the
CEO, etc.: And this company is not a freak. I doubt that any of them ever played football, but they sure as hell never played
D&D. They're not "geeks". And, yeah, let it not be forgotten that some "geeks" run companies and get filthy goddamn rich. None of this is perfectly
cut and dried.
The point I didn't stress enough was that
the whole "success defines me" thing is a total crock.