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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)

#71

Post by williamdclt »

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?

> Why would a company choose someone who doesn’t know the stack they are using over someone who does?

If the two candidates are perfectly identical on every other criteria, sure. But that's not the case, the point is that most other criteria are more important that the specific tech experience when dealing with competent people.

> Sure I could learn Java or Swift in a few weeks, but does that mean I would be a competent Android or iOS developer?

If you have web experience, I'm not too worried about your productivity on Android or iOS. If I'm hiring for Django and you have experience with any of Symfony, Rails, Spring, .Net or NestJS, the tech expertise is the least of my concerns.

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

#72

Post by reggiew »

This advice is is all well and good but to me it seems to optimise for someone with an already successful career. Those of us with multiple long streaks if unemployment can't really pick and choose when it comes to the next contract. Nor can we really negotiate because we can't walk away from an offer.

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

#73

Post by hacknat »

Mistletoe wrote: post #65

There’s no shame in the word programmer and there was no need to culturally appropriate the word engineer from another profession. Bring back the word programmer.

More and more I think the word programmer has come to mean nothing and will continue to lose meaning. More and more people need to program for their work and would not call themselves “programmers” (Scientists, Marketers/DevRel, other Engineering fields, Support, Ops, etc).

BTW, there are people who definitely “Engineer” software they are rare, but they exist, especially at the FAANGs. There are lots of people who have the word “Engineer” in their title that shouldn’t, a fine alternative is “Developer”.

What’s the difference? A developer is implementing a known solution in a specific domain. An engineer is dealing with a significantly unique problem space that has only been addressed by theory, if that. Engineers spend a lot less time programming than Developers do, because their primary occupation is solving tough problems with their colleagues through documentation, RFCs, etc. They often are not the ones who even implement their own ideas. Wait, isn’t that a Software Architect? No. Software Architects plan and documents in known solution space, they aren’t solving unknown problems.

Most people that I’ve worked with in Software have never worked with a Software Engineer before.

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

#75

Post by ensiferum »

matz1 wrote: post #64
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.

Yes programmers program but the point was that programming new software should be the last option in solving a problem and only done as a last recourse.

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

#77

Post by jokoon »

> “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.”

Stereotypes. So it's all about titles and appearances? Who cares about such things? Don't you think people should learn how to code instead of pretending they don't like code because they hate math or something?

Your company builds software or it doesn't. Ultimately being able to use a computer should not be limited to using word and an internet browser, people should be able to learn how to code some python or other scripting languages.

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

#78

Post by jamesjguthrie »

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.

I need a job and can write code in nearly any language. Hire me?

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

#79

Post by scarface74 »

Retric wrote: post #66
scarface74 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

The jump is huge. Web development has a completely different model than mobile development. In web development, losing a connection is a failure case. Developing for mobile it is expected. Especially for enterprise apps. Logic is usually distributed, syncing is required, knowing which is the source of truth etc.

This is really an example of hiring someone who has experience and hiring someone who thinks “it’s easy and just like what I did before”.

Then I could get into all of the old netops guys who think AWS is just like what they did on prem and end up costing the company more...

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

#80

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

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?

It’s like saying “well, we’re an agile company, so we prefer to hire people who know standups and sprint planning”. In principle they will ramp up faster, sure. But it’s just not a useful thing to select on, and if you do select on it you’ll end up with a weird monoculture.
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