But eventually he jumped into marketing.
Why Good Developers Are Promoted into Unhappiness (2007)
151–160 of 235 posts
Re: Why Good Developers Are Promoted into Unhappiness (2007)
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Mistakes need to be made over and over again. Do not try to stop this force.
Then what is the point? Are you just there to gather your paycheck? I mean, to an extend, yes. But you need to be able to excert some positive effect.
Treating jobs as “just a paycheck” is normal and healthy.
Re: Why Good Developers Are Promoted into Unhappiness (2007)
#153OP should consider working on some coding side projects and keep his passion alive. Consider the day job as just a means to pay bills.
In my experience, this works when you're younger, but as you age, you tend to accumulate responsibilities that take up a lot of your remaining energy. YMMV though.
Re: Why Good Developers Are Promoted into Unhappiness (2007)
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since you seem to have some idea of what an Architect is, can you explain this to me? As far as I’m concerned they’re the people that run around flooding every meeting with words that have already been said by the developers, and by extension do not need to be said.
Depends on the company. Big orgs with lots of outsourcing, architects are supposed to police the result to make sure it's semi decent. But since they've long since gave up doing any real work, they tend to be people who buy really expensive crap to cover their arse. In smaller orgs, it can almost be just a lead dev with a fancy title. Rarely does the title seem appopriate, but some of the folks with the title are goo…
I’d like to think I’m one of the people who manage to do good despite the title. I see the job more as technical review (like code review, but at a higher level taking into account how systems interact, and existing solutions used in other places). Sometimes I’ll also try to drive the adoption of technology which has the potential to improve systems - in those cases I’ll typically be the one doing exploratory work to validate the solution is viable at all, and then working with other developers to introduce it.
Its taken a while to get to this point, with a fair bit of pushing back on more traditional project management stuff, but I’m ridiculously happy with what I get to do for a living now. That was definitely not true when I was in a pure technical management role, where 80% of my week was spent in meetings.
Re: Why Good Developers Are Promoted into Unhappiness (2007)
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Xerox. Arpa / Darpa. 3M. AT&T / Bell labs.
Google (maps, Borg, bigtsble, etc) Amazon (AWS, FBA) Apple (iPhone, iPad, iPod)
I would argue these are the exceptions that prove the rule. They all have demonstrable leaders that made this happen. Xerox is done, as is AT&T, as those leaders are long gone. Sony is another one that lost their leader and their magic.
I would argue Apple is on this route now as we are only now seeing the impact of losing Jobs.
Re: Why Good Developers Are Promoted into Unhappiness (2007)
#156I’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…
Most of the companies I’ve worked for have utterly no possible capacity for formally managing special projects. It will either be an argument over what business goals the project must serve, whose autonomy gets to drive the project, politics about who gets to work on what.
The only successful special projects I’ve ever seen are ones that are off the books initially, possibly even pissing off product managers or others because engineers essentially have to flippantly disregard the official prioritization of tasks according to non-engineers and just override it with what the engineer can easily see is actually more important from a genuine business/product perspective but can’t waste the time trying to jump through the hoops of political jockeying disingenuously asserted to be sincere evidence gathering to satisfy all the other competing interests and credit grabs.
Re: Why Good Developers Are Promoted into Unhappiness (2007)
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
So instead of going into management because you don’t like management and want to stay an individual contributor, you now become not only the manager of your own company, now you have to worry about marketing, finances, etc. I go to bed every night not worrying about whether my company remains sustainable. If they don’t, as long as it is a microeconomic issue (company failed) and not a macroeconomic issue (economy is…
You're doing that thing I warned you not to do... I go to bed every night not worrying about whether my company remains sustainable. As do I. The key is to build the business to the point where it replaces your income before you quit your dev job. Once it's ticking away, there's very little that can happen over the course of the night (or a month) that can much affect its profitability. The same amount of money appea…
> You're doing that thing I warned you not to do...
> The key is to build the business to the point where it replaces your income before you quit your dev job.
So your counter argument is for people to build a successful business on their own that will last for the remainder of their careers while working a full time job (and most likely while supporting a family and raising children)? Yes...it's just that simple.
Re: Why Good Developers Are Promoted into Unhappiness (2007)
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then what is the point? Are you just there to gather your paycheck? I mean, to an extend, yes. But you need to be able to excert some positive effect.
big companies do not innovate. (counter examples welcome!) unless you’re in a 1-20 person startup, your impact is -5% to +5% as a division. Essentially you’re stroking egos: yours or management’s. best to choose the latter and try your hand at changing the world in after-work projects.
Largest corporation in the US, builds the best jet engines in the world, is very innovative. Constantly developing new technology and learning from failure. Amazing culture, laid back, supportive, management is well trained and very smart and they don't force engineers into full-on management.
Re: Why Good Developers Are Promoted into Unhappiness (2007)
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
be warned: the government does not like it if you are an employee and then go directly into contracting for said same company. you become an "employee under guise" and then you will be taxed as such. then you get the worst of both worlds.
Which government?
I assume he means U.K. (IR35 ruling) although there may be equivalents elsewhere in the world
Re: Why Good Developers Are Promoted into Unhappiness (2007)
#160I’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…
What you aspire sounds close to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_team 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
Sounds also like the Google X branch.