21–30 of 316 posts
This article is to me quite brilliant and hits most of the right spots. I liked it. Then I see the picture of the author and cannot help but think: practice what you preach. I would not be caught dead wearing a red tracksuit on a bad hair day when posting a blog post about, among other things, how grooming well and wearing a suit helps you make more money.
Re: Profit Centers vs Cost Centers 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 inte…
This is as good a place as any to put this:
Peter Drucker originally coined the term "profit center" around 1945. He later recanted, calling it "One of the biggest mistakes I have made". He later asserted that there are only cost centers within a business, and "the only profit center is a customer whose cheque hasn’t bounced."
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.
The point is that you should call yourself a consultant or businessperson, even if you want to be a programmer.
If I’m a high rate programming consultant then I want my customers and potential customers to understand what I do, and it’s likely programming, business, consulting- in that order.
Oddly of all the jobs I've gotten most have been via that route. I've never had recruiters do anything but waste my time and trying network has always seemed to land me among people who are looking for a job as well.
Early in my career I worked with a few folks who had PhD after their names. I don’t have a PhD so I was completely unaware of what that really meant and how to value it. Almost exclusively they were pompous, sucky programmers and dbas, and project managers, and other roles common in profit center tech companies making software.
I thought PhD was a signal for dummy based on my super small sample of 20 or so people.
I eventually got to work with a ton of awesome PhDs and realized that I was wrong and scientists working in their field leveraging their life passion of study is very different than someone having a PhD and working outside their element.
I think this is the basis for how many people view programmers. They just see the person who cranks out a billion lines of SharePoint and costs them a lot and don’t even get to experience a world where a programmer creatively removes the need for a billion lines of SharePoint.
So there’s different kinds of programmers. My current idea is to call myself a programmer and describe my roles and outputs in a way that people can assess if that’s something that helps them or not.
I generally don’t think labels and titles mean too much by themself and actively want people who think that to avoid or misinterpret my profile as I probably don’t want to create something with them.
Debatable. A poorly written software will generate as much cost as a manual labor if not more.
Re: Profit Centers vs Cost Centers 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 inte…