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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)

#61

Post by lonelappde »

keiferski wrote: post #15
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #6

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.

Patrick is not mainly a programmer. He does some programming, but he is mainly a n A/B testing consultant to companies with small tech teams. That's great, but consultant isn't the only tech job. There are tens of thousands of jobs where companies have highly leveraged programmers (called "engineers") that are well compensated for doing what they are good at -- programming.

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

#62

Post by codegeek »

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…

I run a small company and I m looking for Web Developers. We primarily use PHP and getting into Golang but I really dont care about the language since what matters is concepts and experience with html/css/js http requests/response, client server architecture, database/CRUD, REST API etc. So i m not one of those employers :)

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

#63

Post by lonelappde »

williamdclt wrote: post #36
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.

Not everyone can be as famous as Patrick. That's not how celebrity works. Tens of thousands of people get great jobs the normal way by joining a company as rank and file and working their way up, and then getting invited to join their former co-workers' new companies later.

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

#64

Post by matz1 »

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.

Then who program the things? Yup thats right: programmer.

Program things and create business value can be two separate thing. Each in itself can be really hard and require different expertise.

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

#66

Post by Retric »

scarface74 wrote: post #54
Retric wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pra…

Sure, jumps like that are not as bad as you might think. Style wise the code is often poor, but users don’t really care about the code.

I started with Object Pascal on Mac OS 8/9 which forced you to do a lot of low level tasks like deal with Handles and suffer through a cooperative multithreaded OS. Rewriting the network layer from AppleTalk to TCP/IP was closer to systems programming in C than you might think.

I have also been paid to write C programs, Windows application pre .Net in Visual C++ and post in C# and VB, written Java and C# websites, and most recently Angular SPA’s. Add to that a few random oddities like XSLT.

PS: I even turned down working on Android, but could have made that jump.

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

#67

Post by jfabre »

rco8786 wrote: post #56
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.

Because ruby programmers are rare nowadays and your company still need people to build software. At least, that's my assumption.

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

#68

Post by lonelappde »

timwaagh wrote: post #14

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.

The bias goes the other way now. A lot of people with a lot of money wouldn't hire a tech consultant in a "phony" suit with a stock photo -based website. They prefer "authentic" people who focus on their work, not their clothes.

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

#69

Post by matz1 »

scarface74 wrote: post #46
elif wrote: post #32

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.

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?

In the case of me

>How do you know what to code

Someone need something to be made or done, I help them by writing code.

>whether you should even be coding

I've been doing it for long time

>if you aren’t willing to spend the time knowing the business and the customers?

That's precisely the reason I prefer code. I'm not that interested or even willing to spend time knowing the business and the customers.

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

#70

Post by matz1 »

mongol wrote: post #43
bdowling wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sales people are usually profit centers, as I understand it. Without sales, no profits.

But without product, no sales?
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