Heisenberg Developers (2014)

When I got out of contracting, and later after 2008 business failure, I lost count of interviews that went thus:

"You're perfect for the role", "You have just the skills we need", "you're by far the best of those interviewed"

but by email later, sometimes directly

"we think you'll get bored", "we think you'll leave after six months" etc

(Sometimes, "we think you're a bit overqualified")

For sanity's sake I went on a few contract interviews, and usually got an offer.

My experience was that employers are utterly terrified of someone who's got some entrepreneurial or business history. Sure the money was less, but there many reasons to want to go back to employment.

As they didn't like it, I always wondered why so many invited me to interview when the 5 years of successful business and 4 years of contracting was very clear to see on my resume.

I say it's a mistake to expect to have creative control at all, over something owned by the corporation you work for. Best to accept that it's not your baby you're working on. You don't get the profits or the glory or any of that. Just do your tasks and treat it like what it is: a job.

Creative control and passion and all that is for side projects and things you build yourself. I just feel it's setting yourself up for disappointment to think otherwise. Companies are not founded to provide the ideal environment for software development. They are founded to make products and hopefully a profit.

You might argue that a smart business person would provide that environment in order to get their product built, and maybe you'd be right, but that also risks building the thing developers want to build as opposed to what could sell. And as soon as you intervene, poof goes the ideal environment. So even if the environment exists at a company, as at the beginning of this story, it's best understood as a happy accident and shouldn't be expected to last.

> I attended a hackathon with a number of Amazon employees, and one of my distinct memories was a Principal Engineer who didn't even know what "publicly traded" meant and was sure that Bezos owned 100% of the company.

It's not clear to me why that knowledge would be especially useful to a principle engineer at Amazon. I think it's a generally good thing to know, and difficult to avoid picking up. But clearly someone did avoid it, and I don't particularly expect that to reflect in their engineering competence.

What is it about programming as a profession that attracts people who believe they are all things? When becoming a civil engineer do you take a large number of business courses? When becoming an electrical engineer do you take a large number of business courses? When becoming a doctor do you take a large number of business courses? When becoming an astrophysicist do you take a large number of business courses?

Why are you not suggesting that ethics should be a larger portion of the programmer's training and skill set. Perhaps while building the infrastructure for the next century we should all think long and hard about the ethical implications of what we're building rather than just racing to get the next round of funding or a positive report by some Wall Street analyst on the other side of the country.

Most code bases look as though they've been built by business analysts rather than professional software engineers. The number of security exploits is a testament to this in practice. What we have here is basically a repeat of Wall Street's bond market in the 80's, just in a different industry. Because of the market fundamentals most any idiot was making a killing. Most of these bond traders actually were not terribly bright, but they were making money hand over fist, and so, they thought they were geniuses. In the end it really didn't work out well for anyone. For a good overview of what I'm referring to you can read "Liar's Poker."

Eventually these idiots were replaced with professionals, and to work at any of these shops one must now first prove, through both schooling and certification, that one has a solid grasp of a large knowledge base. If you want to become a portfolio manager, and you already graduated from Columbia with a degree in finance, that's great but you still need to go get your CFA. Google CFA and then compare that to your average programming interview. Just the Level 1 exam has over 3,000 pages of material. There are 3 levels. You basically don't have a social life for 18 months. And most of the time this is something one does while holding down a full time job that already assumes they own your free time. Lawyer's bar exams and the Board Certification process are equally grueling.

I'd be very happy with more of an emphasis on classical knowledge. A strong foundation based on a knowledge base of classical knowledge is the foundation of any professional engineering society. Patronizing someone with a firm grasp on this knowledge by saying that they are "great as code monkeys" betrays an enormously immature approach to one's profession.

No worries mate. Though notice I said consulting repeatedly and contrasted it with running a business or being employed. You can sell your services without having to run a business. I don't want to hire anyone, advertise, have an LLC/S-Corp to manage, deal with licensing, or even print business cards. I just want to show up, do the work, and get a check.