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Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)

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Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)

#32

Post by elif »

I call myself a programmer to avoid people thinking I want to be a manager or spend my days in meetings. I want people to expect 90% of my output to be code.

If this is good for a career? Don't know don't care. It's what I do and enjoy, and there are many slippery slopes to not coding and becoming rusty, and ending up on the M train by default.

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)

#34

Post by mcnamaratw »

mcloide wrote: post #29

”Writing bug-free code is not a goal. ” Debatable. A poorly written software will generate as much cost as a manual labor if not more.

Sure. And that's why bug-free code might become a goal. Because of which way it makes the money flow. It's not a goal on its own, is what I think he's saying.

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)

#36

Post by williamdclt »

SQL2219 wrote: post #33

I tend to agree with this guy, BUT, the gatekeepers are low-level HR people who do not think "increase costs" and "decrease revenues" they are looking for boxes to check. You have to get through AI and HR firewall before you can talk B2B strategy.

Part of the point of the author is that if you're talking to the low-level HR people, you're not talking to the right people. That's not how interesting people and interesting jobs find each other.

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)

#37

Post by bdowling »

cool-RR wrote: post #24
chasingthewind wrote: post #19

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…

My best conclusion is that there is no definition of "cost center" and "profit center" that makes sense. I challenge anyone to give me such a definition. 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…

Profit centers consist of people who can directly attribute revenues or savings to the work that they do. Everyone else is a cost center. No, it's not fair.

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)

#38

Post by tjpnz »

ensiferum wrote: post #23

"Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things." Yup writing software should be the last recourse and only to be used when all the other solutions to problem are not viable.

That's a function of experience. Junior dev me was coding 80-90% of the time but 10 years in it's 10-20% of the time.
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