If you like your job, call yourself a programmer and build stuff you like. This article is marginally good advice for your pocket but bad for your soul. Don't be a programmer and act like a lawyer. It's one of the few jobs where it doesnt matter if you 're a dog. You create value, easily, you don't just extract it. It's part of the reason why i m a programmer and not an e.g. academic.
Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)
201–210 of 316 posts
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Knowing an ecosystem well on a senior level won’t happen in a few weeks. But to your example, I’ve seen developers who couldn’t adjust to developing where they had a rapid release cycle because they were use to the big design up front. How you develop software where you don’t have all of the requirements for the next year is a completely different mindset. Even on comments on this post, I see people who aren’t actual…
Really senior level is about talking to people; “Knowing the ecosystem well” (if by that you mean a specific tech stack) is almost irrelevant. Senior is more about solving the right problem than solving the problem “right”
And then you end up re-inventing the wheel, setting up servers and spending more on maintenance and development because even though your entire company is already on AWS, you didn’t know you could just click a button and make that entire part of the product someone else’s problem.....
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)
#203Sure, this post might objectively get you to a higher paying software job, but good God I hope I never start seeing the world like this guy or ever have to work with people who do. Am I really reading the same article as everyone else? The one I'm reading is filled with these sociopathic gems: > Add revenue. Reduce costs. Those are your only goals. > You’re in the business of unemploying people. If you think that is…
Yeah cynicism is not the best way to go about your career.
and btw instead of "Strive to help people" , seems "strive to ask for people's help" is better for networking
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)
#204I think the author is going out of his way to try and sound like a grizzled
veteran of career pragmatism, but I think he's just giving advice on how to
make your life harder. He's basically trying to find some idealised
description of "how things are" and adivising you that, well, that's how
things are and you should shut up and suck it up, or you'll never go anywhere
in your life.
Well, what kind of advice is that? You should just blindly follow what everyone else does, regardless of whether you like it or not? That's just self-limiting.
Burnout is a thing because people who want to do something radically different convince themsleves that their only option is to work for a profit center, or something equally soul-sucking and don't use their brains to find a worthy alternative and make it work.
There is nothing to be gained by limiting yourself to what seems like "how things are" and trying to do what it looks like everyone else is doing. That way you can only hurt your prospects for personal development and progress.
>> Co-workers and bosses are not usually your friends
Oh wait. Now _that_ is solid advice. That is 100% true.
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)
#205I think the author is going out of his way to try and sound like a grizzled veteran of career pragmatism, but I think he's just giving advice on how to make your life harder. He's basically trying to find some idealised description of "how things are" and adivising you that, well, that's how things are and you should shut up and suck it up, or you'll never go anywhere in your life. Well, what kind of advice is that?…
The advice given in the blog is colored by the author's life experiences: they had a job they weren't satisfied with in Japan, tried their hand at an ISV (this is what start-ups were called back then), then at consulting and found what I assume to be success with that. This happened over the last 15 years I think.
The funny thing is that calling oneself anything except X programmer has become pretty common. In fact, with more and more money flowing into programming, there's no shortage of bullshit artists and self-promoters.
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)
#206On the other hand: https://yosefk.com/blog/do-call-yourself-a-programmer-and-ot...
Good read- thanks.
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)
#207> 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…
Exactly what I thought when I read this paragraph. But still some CTOs are willing to let the team take time to learn a new stack and that in the end helps the organization (was part of one).
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)
#208Earlier 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?
Because someone is smarter or better at the job in general that the lower quality specialists they can find. It's very hard to find a good generalist. If you can be a good generalist, you're exponentially more valuable than a generic specialist. I have done mostly backend work in Python, but in my current role I've worked in the frontend with Angular, I've debugged critical issues on our iOS app, I've fixed our AWS i…
I would say just the opposite. When it comes to the entire “web developer” tech stack, sure I can put together a website good enough for internal use, but I’m not very good at the front end.
I consider myself to be very good at C#, okay at backend JS development and passable at Python.
I have enough experience from doing a lot of ETL in a previous life to know how to automize queries and schemas for speed and to not lock up a database.
I’ve set up CI/CD solutions from scratch with what is now called “Azure Devops”, AWS’s CodeBuild/CodeDeploy/CodePipeline, OctopusDeploy and Jenkins
I could just as easily and competitively apply for jobs as an “AWS Architect” who knows most of the popular AWS offerings for developers, Devops, netops, and system administrators and I have experience with them.
But in many of those areas - especially on the front end and with the netops, system administration stuff, at any scale. It wouldn’t make any sense to hire someone who “kind of” knows what they are doing over hiring a specialist.
If I need something now I’m not going to want to wait for you to get up to speed in year.
Do you really think you’re as good at any of those areas as a specialist? AWS alone announces dozens of new things every month on their podcast.
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)
#209This 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?
Like many things in life, applying to jobs is a numbers game. You don't know what the other side is doing/thinking. You don't know how much there is out there (answer: a lot). To negotiate well you need multiple offers and practice negotiation. If you are nervous about the application / interview process at all you gotta do it more.
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because ruby programmers are rare nowadays and your company still need people to build software. At least, that's my assumption.
They're not rare. I know a ton and many still write Ruby. Willingness to work on brownfield Ruby projects is rare; as with other similar systems like Django or roll-your-own Express stuff, such systems strongly tend towards chaos and a lack of maintainability after a certain point if they haven’t already had strong leadership end-to-end. In my neck of the woods, the folks who you want doing that work don't want to do…
> They're not rare
Depends on how you define rare. Exceedingly uncommon at the very least. stares at a pile of 150 resumes Ruby is a language languishing from being embedded in a few niches, having poor performance, and otherwise being unremarkable, imo. Ruby was made with the idea that picking it up would be easy (which it is), leading to less incentive to learn it.
Putting Ruby in the job description gives you applicants with Ruby experience, which is why the blog post was (and is) impractical. Signaling works.