Love your sig, by the way.

Right. 100k is baseline, starvation wages. Only take if you have to.

Yeah, but managing other people, while a good stable long term job, doesn't pay for shit.
I've been making more than anyone who manages me for well over a decade.

You're probably right about modelling though.

Wish it was. It's a rinky toy for wordpress.

Exactly. And yet, here we are. We've got 8 open positions for any M2 back end skills on the team I work on. And the eta is anywhere from 9-12 months to fill, and these guys, the stuffed shirts, guys who are very formal and old fashioned, are willing to consider remote workers for the first time in the history of the corporation. It's pretty common. Every magento shop I've ever worked in has had problems like this. Different companies have flown me across the country a dozen times to work in their implementations over the last few years. I've been to Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Nashville, and more. I'm not kidding when I tell ya, this is a thing.

They actually pay decently too. I've actually been nervous more than once, quoting some of these hourly rates, but I rarely get pushback.
It's the most money you'll ever see writing php.

My rule of thumb, feel them out when you talk to them. Quote a rate that's almost high enough, but not quite high enough for them to walk away, and let them come back with a counter offer. You'll know when you get there if you went too low.

That would be great, but pay for this stuff varies dramatically by region in the US. Outside the US, it swings even more chaotically. Rates in places like Barcelona aren't going to match up with Omaha or India, is what I'm getting at.

I really hate to say this, because I still have a soft spot in my heart for C++, but people in the private sector talk about it with a kind of disdain that you usually only see reserved for dinosaurs like Cold Fusion or ancient Microsoft technologies. The big place you see C++ today is in embedded mobile systems, a lot of small devices, a lot of war. Some online trading, but most of that's moving to more modern stuff like Go.

Like I said, I don't believe in the whole high demand thing. I think it's a huge scam, just in general. Rarer higher paying jobs are the better deal for you as a programmer, almost every time. And if you've got a portfolio of skills that gets you there with C++, go for it.

AWS is more or less essential in real enterprise shops these days. Everything's containerized, usually with docker, and AWS buckets work well with it. AWS does have a learning curve. It's got a nice friendly web ui, but if you don't know what you're doing with it, you will blow something up. So yes, it's definitely a skill, and I would argue, an absolutely essential one in today's job market.

Okay, now that's funny.
Shopify can't handle load. Have you not been reading the news lately?
They couldn't even handle geoffrey star, and his meager 9 million sales in a morning.

Uh huh, and nobody freaking knows how to write for it.
Jobs in this particular toolset are going unfilled for years.
But if you want to laugh at something like that, be my guest.

No, I mean Magento, specifically Magento 2, as a framework.
Look it up.

If you're in the commodity skill market, you're a sucker. High demand is a game that gives employers all the negotiation power.

You don't want the jobs that anyone can fill. You want the jobs that people are killing their brothers and flying people across the world to staff. Trust me on this.

And in 2020 the two hot skills are Golang and Magento.

You're welcome.

They force us to use Teams at work. It's awful. The whole thing is like a purple themed photocopy of Slack, so it makes sense that the commercial is a purple themed photocopy of their commercial. It's ironic that Microsoft doesn't have the self awareness to understand why this is bogus behavior, but this is Microsoft we're talking about.

The whole idea of using digital things is so that you don't have to waste resources on things like, oh, I don't know... paper? But the whole idea, the entire concept of transporting a document digitally, from one place to another, only so that you can waste paper on the other side... it's a brutally stupid concept. Why did this even need to exist in the first place? Why did it stop? How many aging office workers who do we really have that would use such thing to begin with?