31–40 of 235 posts
I think it has a lot to do with wanting to have your cake and eat it too. Supposing you literally “just write code,” there’s a ceiling to how much impact you can have. One person can only hold so large of a program (or so many small programs) in their head, and if you are on a project that reaches a certain size you have to start working with other humans to maintain it, and thus the need for technical leadership and…
I think it has a lot to do with wanting to have your cake and eat it too. Supposing you literally “just write code,” there’s a ceiling to how much impact you can have. One person can only hold so large of a program (or so many small programs) in their head, and if you are on a project that reaches a certain size you have to start working with other humans to maintain it, and thus the need for technical leadership and…
I'm don't see why a single person can't have a ton of impact merely as a coder.
I mean, this whole website is dedicated to (mostly) discussing tech startups and how (mostly) software disrupts and help scale outdated business models. Isn't the software-making business model also ripe for that disruption, at least in a smaller scale?
Couldn't a single coder (or a small team) help an organization get some competitive advantage when it comes to tools. Or even programming languages? Why does ALL the innovation has to come from outside in our industry?
Fred Brooks talks about "The Toolsmith" it the "Surgical Team" chapter in Mythical Man-Month, and how "the tool-builder will often construct specialized utilities, catalogued procedures, macro libraries".
Facebook made React, Apple made Swift, Google has dozens of those. And the teams doing those tools aren't that huge. Why don't we try new things instead of letting good coders go away or making them stop coding?
I’ve been reviewing a lot of career path documents recently for different engineering orgs, and every one is fairly uniform in that you either progress into management, team leadership, or architecture (or some blend of the three). If not, you’ll stagnate at a pretty high level, but stagnate none the less. I’ve been noodling on this for a while, and I think maybe a fourth track at a lot of organizations should be spe…
In one instance that I know, a Tiger Team of 6 delivered run away hit TV streaming product in 8 months. From conception to design to prototype to factory production to launch.
Another, albeit larger scale example would be Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works
You stay in the company long enough and you write less code and spend more time managing people and processes as now you own your projects as the most knowledgable person for these projects. You start hating it (I did) and look for a pure programming role. But you are not in your twenties any more and you have to align with and follow someone else's designs and decisions and you can't since you are experienced and kn…
[1] https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2018...
I’ve been reviewing a lot of career path documents recently for different engineering orgs, and every one is fairly uniform in that you either progress into management, team leadership, or architecture (or some blend of the three). If not, you’ll stagnate at a pretty high level, but stagnate none the less. I’ve been noodling on this for a while, and I think maybe a fourth track at a lot of organizations should be spe…
I guess it's nice for the devs at first, but creates a lot of waste. They're basically spamming the world with programming languages, libraries and products only to wind them down and start again.
I’ve been reviewing a lot of career path documents recently for different engineering orgs, and every one is fairly uniform in that you either progress into management, team leadership, or architecture (or some blend of the three). If not, you’ll stagnate at a pretty high level, but stagnate none the less. I’ve been noodling on this for a while, and I think maybe a fourth track at a lot of organizations should be spe…
Thank you for saying that, this was exactly my conclusion when reviewing my own goals and notes on how other companies build products. If your company doesn't have this special-projects track in place, then your only option at some point is to quit and start your own thing I'm afraid.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for saying that, this was exactly my conclusion when reviewing my own goals and notes on how other companies build products. If your company doesn't have this special-projects track in place, then your only option at some point is to quit and start your own thing I'm afraid.
...or move into architecture or management. That seems like the more reasonable thing compared to playing the start-up lottery.