Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011) • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by ghaff » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 1:36 PM UTC

non-entity wrote: post #26

> Read ad. Send in resume. Go to job interview. Receive offer.” is the exception, not the typical case, for getting employment 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.

It really depends. People with well-defined specific skills can often get jobs through essentially keyword searches.

WRT "networking" I agree if, by networking, you're referring to "networking events" which, as you say, probably tend to be attended by people passing out business cards and looking for jobs. But every job I've had since my first one out of school has come through emailing people I've known professionally at aa company I've been interested in working for.

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

#52

Post by scarface74 » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 1:37 PM UTC

elif wrote: post #47

scarface74 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know what to code or whether you should even be coding at all if you aren’t willing to spend the time knowing the business and the customers?

Because there are hard problems to solve. I'm into computer science not capitalism.

I bet the company you work for is “into capitalism”.

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

#53

Post by xchaotic » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 1:37 PM UTC

ReptileMan wrote: post #2

Some solid advice, some not so much. I do call myself a simple programmer. That is how I introduce myself either. Helps a lot when dealing with people whose job title require a third of A4 page to fit. >How do I become better at negotiation? This could be a post in itself. Short version: He misses the most important thing. The most powerful thing into negotiation is to know you can stand from the table and leave.

I really like that argument and I feel when interviewing I am in that position often, but if you leave money on the table and leave have you ‘won’ the negotiation? Potentially there are greener pastures out there but that’s hypothetical.

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

#54

Post by scarface74 » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 1:40 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #49

scarface74 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a company choose someone who doesn’t know the stack they are using over someone who does? Let alone 6-12 months. Knowing the ecosystem, best practices, frameworks, etc takes longer than a few weeks. Sure I could learn Java or Swift in a few weeks, but does that mean I would be a competent Android or iOS developer?

I have made the jump from one language to another several times on the job. It’s considered lower risk to use someone on the team than higher someone new. It’s also going to take a while to higher someone and get them up to speed. After a year you might not be as experienced as someone using the same stack for 5+ years but the difference is not that extreme. Further stacks tend to share quite a bit. Knowing SQL, HTML…

Languages are easy. But do you think you could jump from systems programming in C to mobile programming on Android “easily”.

I’ve seen people jump from Java to C#. You can see the difference in their coding style, them not taking advantage of the features of the language, reinventing the wheel because they didn’t know there were popular packages that would do it for them, creating horrible inefficient queries and practices using EF etc.

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

#55

Post by ellius » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 1:43 PM UTC

bdowling wrote: post #37

cool-RR wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That "directly" is carrying a lot of weight, though. The salesmen have nothing to sell without all of the work of the other employees. I prefer the conception of profit and cost in "The Goal": you have throughput (money from sale of your product), inventory (goods in the system not yet converted to sales), and operating expense, the cost of translating raw materials to goods or services (e.g. payroll, cost of electricity for your buildings). In that model it's obvious that salespeople are an expense like everybody else, and the profit from their sales is a reward of the effort of the entire system, not just the salespeople.

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

#56

Post by rco8786 » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 1:44 PM UTC

arbuge wrote: post #41

> Do Java programmers make more money than .NET programmers? Anyone describing themselves as either a Java programmer or .NET programmer has already lost, because a) they’re a programmer (you’re not, see above) and b) they’re making themselves non-hireable for most programming jobs. In the real world, picking up a new language takes a few weeks of effort and after 6 to 12 months nobody will ever notice you haven’t be…

This is entirely company dependent. My team is primarily Ruby and we hire folks with no ruby experience all the time.

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

#57

Post by LastZactionHero » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 1:44 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #44

arbuge wrote: post #41

> Do Java programmers make more money than .NET programmers? Anyone describing themselves as either a Java programmer or .NET programmer has already lost, because a) they’re a programmer (you’re not, see above) and b) they’re making themselves non-hireable for most programming jobs. In the real world, picking up a new language takes a few weeks of effort and after 6 to 12 months nobody will ever notice you haven’t be…

Why would a company choose someone who doesn’t know the stack they are using over someone who does? Let alone 6-12 months. Knowing the ecosystem, best practices, frameworks, etc takes longer than a few weeks. Sure I could learn Java or Swift in a few weeks, but does that mean I would be a competent Android or iOS developer?

I've hired for the stack specifically and it really narrowed our applicant pool. Lately I've relaxed this filter. We're a Rails app, but what if there was a really great engineer that uses Python or Node?

They might not know the right libraries to use, but would probably know there are libraries, have a good concept of application design in general, and know how to ask the right questions. And we're hoping to hire someone for years.

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

#58

Post by cool-RR » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 1:45 PM UTC

bdowling wrote: post #37

cool-RR wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The bullshit is hidden in the word "directly". You can define this word to mean whatever you'd like to mean. You can say a salesperson directly adds revenue to the company, but it's not really directly, the billing department is much closer to the actual money. You allow yourself to take the billing department for granted, but that's just because you don't work for the billing department. In the same way you could view the developers as the profit center, and take the sales department for granted.

I'll say it again, I'll be happy to see an objective definition of profit centers and cost centers.

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

#59

Post by NiKMic » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 1:46 PM UTC

claimred wrote: post #45

>In the real world, picking up a new language takes a few weeks of effort and after 6 to 12 months nobody will ever notice you haven’t been doing that one for your entire career. I've always been a bit baffled by notions like that. How in the world one becomes a professional in a foreign programming language tech in 6 months? It feels like every modern realworld battleworn programming stack (ecma, c++2x, .net, jvm w/…

Because companies don't care about how 'clean' you code is, what design patterns you use or what cool new technology you are using. They just care that you manage to release quickly so the company can start making money.

So even if you don't know the best way to do things or the best pattern to use, as long as you can hack something together that works reasonably well for some time then you're good enough. Sure, it might be flimsy, break easily, unreadable etc. but if the company is making money then business is happy.

Think about it...code becomes legacy so quickly. 2-3 year old code is considered legacy, especially if it's not used/modified much. You could have spent 15% more time to make it more maintainable but it will still be considered bad code by the next guy who had to work on it because he has absolutely no idea how the code works and what it is meant to do. Chances are, it would be re-written anyway even if you spent that extra 15%. The in the meantime the company might have missed their initial release date and some potential revenue.

Not saying I agree with it but that is how it is unfortunately.

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

#60

Post by amirathi » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 1:51 PM UTC

This is fantastic practical advice for software engineers early in their career. Here's some more based on the common pitfalls I see,

- Don't apply to 50+ companies at one go thinking only a % of them will call you. Choose ~5 companies, do a lot of homework about their business & write to key people at these places telling in ONE paragraph what you can do for their business. If it fails, choose next ~5 and so on.

- Other things being equal choose team over company. E.g. working at core technology or customer facing team at a less-known growing business is much better than working at some internal tools team in Google. FAANG carries some brand value for future recruiters, VCs but you should really optimize learning rate early in your career.