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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)

#101

Post by keiferski »

jpindar wrote: post #81
keiferski wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that you should call yourself a consultant or businessperson, even if you want to be a programmer.

That depends on who you want to be hired by. Some companies already know exactly what they need - they need some specific software written so they are looking for a programmer.

I mean, that’s sort of Patrick’s exact point - you should avoid being hired as a generic “programmer” as you’ll make far less income. Instead, if you frame yourself as an expert in a particular business problem (and have the data to back up your results), you’re far more valuable to the average manager at BigCo, or to any business in general.

A good example of this is the acquihire phenomenon. BigCos often acquire small startups purely to hire the people working there. Half of the time, they shut down the startup and throw away the code. The objective is to hire smart people whom are also domain experts in a particular problem.

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

#102

Post by cool-RR »

leetcrew wrote: post #90
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…

not sure this is an airtight definition, but think about employee skill vs revenue in a particular department. if you're selling software, you would expect revenue to go up a lot if you increase the overall skill of the developers. if you're a restaurant, you probably don't see a huge increase in revenue from hiring a very good website designer. basically, how hard is it to get people who do a "good enough" job? mayb…

I understand that we're mostly agreeing, and I think that we both have an intuition for what it means for something to be a profit center.

Still, I'd like to show a gap in what you said: You talk about what kind of increase in revenue you'd have if such and such people did a better job, and what kind of ROI you'd get from each department.

But the question is, an increase relative to what, or an ROI relative to what?

Let's take the billing department. If you made sales for $10 million, and your billing department works okay, then you would have a revenue of $10 million. If you hired the best billing experts on earth, you still would get just $10 million. So that might make you look at the billing department as a cost center rather than a profit center.

But maybe if the billing department fucked up royally, either by not charging a customer, or overcharging them and hurting the relationship, or breaking obscure laws and getting the company in legal trouble. Then you could be out a lot more than $10 million.

So in effect, you could view the billing department's ROI as "how big a disaster they can prevent, and how good they are at preventing it." That kind of thinking makes sense for any department in the company.

That's the reason why I don't see the logic behind branding some departments as profit centers and some as cost centers.

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

#103

Post by amirathi »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #95
amirathi wrote: post #60

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. - O…

What if you truly need employment and you are a run of the mill beginner? Is that 5 company application approach still optimal?

Yes.

With 50-company approach you increase the absolute number of first callbacks you get (hence everyone thinks it's optimal). With 5-company approach you increase the odds of actually getting through to a single job offer. Think about it.

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

#104

Post by elif »

scarface74 wrote: post #52
elif wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

You don't know anything about my particular situation, and happen to be very wrong. But assuming the role of your rhetorical me, there are thousands more companies just like "mine". they all provide paychecks.

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

#106

Post by scarface74 »

palerdot wrote: post #96
scarface74 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now we are going to spend more on development and probably rework because the developer decided he was just going to wrap the website in a webview and call it a “mobile app” because he didn’t think through these scenarios. Anytime that you have to go through the development -> QA cycle more then once it costs money and time. That’s kind of my point. Learning a language is easy and for the most part useless without…

The argument made here is a good generalist tech guy would definitely think these things beforehand as much as an android or iOS guy ... That is language knowlegde !== problem solving ...

I know all of this because I’ve Architected two solutions on Windows CE devices and built one on top of proprietary mobile/web form builder that would let you do real coding in Javascript.

Any company that would hire me as a modern “mobile developer” would be absolutely foolish. I have only written 30 lines of Java my entire 20 year professional career, never written a line of Swift or Objective C. Why would they hire me over someone with relevant experience as a developer? If they want to hire me as a team lead/architect and then find mobile developers, I would know what to look for.

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

#107

Post by scarface74 »

elif wrote: post #104
scarface74 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You don't know anything about my particular situation, and happen to be very wrong. But assuming the role of your rhetorical me, there are thousands more companies just like "mine". they all provide paychecks.

And how do those companies earn money to give you a paycheck?

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

#109

Post by mobjack »

krallja wrote: post #88
mobjack wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing is a huge profit center. Improving efficiency in marketing spend can bring in millions in new business value. If you can do that, it will definitely be noticed by the business.

Marketing spend is a cost. You are talking about reducing costs.

Everything is a cost.

Marketing brings in more revenue if done efficently making it a profit center. It is no different than sales.

Marketing spend is usually fixed in costs and the goal of efficiency is to acquire more customers for the budget.

Most engineers dismiss this part of the business, but if you can do it successfully, businesses will pump more money into it.

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

#110

Post by BjoernKW »

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…

Drucker also stated that the basic functions of a business are marketing and innovation because those produce results; everything else is a cost.
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