11–20 of 316 posts
This is genuinely really good advice. However, I want to caution against one interpretation: When you focus your attention on projects to cut costs (and risk) and grow revenue, it is possible to put that as your top priority. It should be your second. Your real top priority should be the health and stability of yourself and your family. Ideally, this is aligned with focusing on visibly-profitable work for your employ…
I know this is a minor statement (and not really important to the advice otherwise), but I liked this discussion that there can be various reasons why good candidates would struggle to find a job: https://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/
I’m not sure Patrick would entirely stand behind this as written anymore, just because the long term trajectory of just a programmer looks better than when he wrote this. https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/117561737079606886... An under remarked-upon trend: SFBA/NYC engineering wages are starting to drive engineering wages in the rest of the US as these companies open other US hubs and print remote offers, in…
I think if you call yourself a programmer you can do consulting at a relatively high rate for companies who need to get some project for their profit center done. You do that, demonstrate your worth, leave with lots of money, and they might just call you again next time they need to do something for their profit center. There's definitely ways in which being a programmer can be part of a rewarding career.
This is genuinely really good advice. However, I want to caution against one interpretation: When you focus your attention on projects to cut costs (and risk) and grow revenue, it is possible to put that as your top priority. It should be your second. Your real top priority should be the health and stability of yourself and your family. Ideally, this is aligned with focusing on visibly-profitable work for your employ…
I find Go codebases more likely to be full of ad hoc undocumented stuff than PHP.
I guess it depends what you are used to.
This is genuinely really good advice. However, I want to caution against one interpretation: When you focus your attention on projects to cut costs (and risk) and grow revenue, it is possible to put that as your top priority. It should be your second. Your real top priority should be the health and stability of yourself and your family. Ideally, this is aligned with focusing on visibly-profitable work for your employ…
Curious why you pick PHP? I find Go codebases more likely to be full of ad hoc undocumented stuff than PHP. I guess it depends what you are used to.
This is going to be specific to each person. Some people find PHP way easier than ruby, python, or haskell. Different brains are different.
This is genuinely really good advice. However, I want to caution against one interpretation: When you focus your attention on projects to cut costs (and risk) and grow revenue, it is possible to put that as your top priority. It should be your second. Your real top priority should be the health and stability of yourself and your family. Ideally, this is aligned with focusing on visibly-profitable work for your employ…
Nit / friendly amendment: mise en place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place
I was once on a team that maintained a SaaS application that was in some sort of bizarre super-position of "cost center" and "profit center" a few years back.
The company technically sold the app and made money from it, but they also tended to give it away almost for free as long as the buyer was going to be paying lots of money for the company's $FLAGSHIP_BUSINESS_SERVICE that integrated with the app. (Think of it like a free mobile game with micro-transactions.)
The primary way customers interacted with $FLAGSHIP_BUSINESS_SERVICE (and generated micro-transaction revenue) was through our application. However because the application wasn't what the customer was actually paying for, the executives had an impossible time deciding whether to treat the app like a cost or a profit center.
Whenever the app was working fine and everybody was happy the executives were convinced it was a cost center and looked down on it. Whenever it wasn't working fine and companies began to get angry and threaten to take their business elsewhere suddenly the executives would realize that without the SaaS application they wouldn't be able to sell more $FLAGSHIP_BUSINESS_SERVICE.
Long story short, it was a strange and frustrating experience in many ways.
I’m not sure Patrick would entirely stand behind this as written anymore, just because the long term trajectory of just a programmer looks better than when he wrote this. https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/117561737079606886... An under remarked-upon trend: SFBA/NYC engineering wages are starting to drive engineering wages in the rest of the US as these companies open other US hubs and print remote offers, in…
I would argue the opposite: the trajectory of being a programmer has been really good for the past 10 years or so, but we've pretty clearly reached Peak IPO and a correction is on the way. And if/when it does hit, the person with the skillset "can increase revenue or reduce costs" will be in much better shape than "can program mumbo-jumbo".