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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)

#251

Post by hacknat »

eng888888 wrote: post #231
hacknat wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

"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." Sorry but 100 times no. Engineering is about understanding and using the laws of nature in scientific terms (mathematics). Strength of materials, thermodynamics, hydraulics, that's the stuff engineers study and do.

Yeah, sorry I omitted what you just said, but computer science is a theory driven branch (of mathematics?) that can be incredibly difficult to implement as much as other engineering fields struggle to implement new theory breakthroughs in other branches of science.

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

#252

Post by username90 »

jstummbillig wrote: post #242
dcolkitt wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the first thing about web accessibility, polyfills, bundlers, cross-browser support, etc. Almost all of these concepts could easily be learned in a few weeks by a talented engineer with strong fundamentals in software design and computer science. Polyfills aren't exactly quantum mechanics. They're not some radically different mental paradigm that takes years to develop fluidity. If you already have a sound basis in…

> Almost all of these concepts could easily be learned in a few weeks by a talented engineer with strong fundamentals in software design and computer science. How about average engineers with average fundamentals? The kind most people will on average be hiring and working with.

Another career advice: Try to not join a company which mostly hires average engineers with average fundamentals.

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

#253

Post by artsyca »

ivanhoe wrote: post #7
artsyca wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea but you're selling yourself and all of us short -- you're either a hacker, a poet or a craftsman, haven't you heard?

And it's really all of those, or none...

Yes! Add to that fixer, tinker -- as knowledge workers, our role is to create knowledge and disseminate it into the organization which is frankly the hardest task in the world, especially when we're working against our own selves

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

#254

Post by bcrosby95 »

scarface74 wrote: post #247
mcv wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly the thing I select for. I recently had to hire 4 developers, and I was not all that interested in how many years of experience they had in javascript or typescript (our main language), and even less if you know Vue or Express (our stack). I mean, it's good to know javascript, and certainly ES6 or typescript, but I'm much more interested in: can I discuss stuff with you, do you have interesting opinion…

And then when you need to ship now you have a bunch of dead weight while you wait for them to ramp up. Also, since now you are taking time from your devs who do know the stack to mentor your new hires and code reviews because you can’t trust them to do good work without messing up your code base. They are now doing “negative work”.

Compared to what, needing to ship now and not being able to find any "qualified candidates"?

It really depends upon the exact situation. We can all make up bullshit examples to make either option look stupid.

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

#255

Post by scarface74 »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #254
scarface74 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then when you need to ship now you have a bunch of dead weight while you wait for them to ramp up. Also, since now you are taking time from your devs who do know the stack to mentor your new hires and code reviews because you can’t trust them to do good work without messing up your code base. They are now doing “negative work”.

Compared to what, needing to ship now and not being able to find any "qualified candidates"? It really depends upon the exact situation. We can all make up bullshit examples to make either option look stupid.

It’s “bullshit” to open req to hire a developer because you need to ship a product within the next six months and you need more bodies? Why are you hiring if you don’t need the extra people? If you didn’t need the extra people for a year until they ramp up, wouldn’t it be better just to take your time hiring until you found someone that didn’t have to spend a year learning on your dime and then leave in two years?

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

#256

Post by magicalhippo »

matz1 wrote: post #153
swsieber wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, you can totally have sales without a product - it's just not very sustainable. It's a little tongue in cheek, but I think illustrates a real perspective - improving a product doesnt necessarily extract more revenue from existing customers. Selling more copies does extract more revenue from existing products though.

Likewise, you can totally have sales with just the product. There is saying good product sell itself.

Indeed. Not long ago our sales team was our existing customer base. Users would call up their friends who work in other companies and tell them "you need to get this software".

We've since added a dedicated sales person, but we still get a significant amount of sales this way.

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

#257

Post by vtange »

username90 wrote: post #252
jstummbillig wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Almost all of these concepts could easily be learned in a few weeks by a talented engineer with strong fundamentals in software design and computer science. How about average engineers with average fundamentals? The kind most people will on average be hiring and working with.

Another career advice: Try to not join a company which mostly hires average engineers with average fundamentals.

A lot can be learned working with average engineers. You shut yourself out of a lot of jobs by avoiding average and will be probably screwed if the "above-average" places consider you an average candidate.

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

#258

Post by scarface74 »

dleslie wrote: post #157
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…

> The stack they are using seems to be the first thing hiring managers look at. I try to avoid companies that hire in this manner; it shows a lack of vision and planning. It's unlikely that a given developer will be working on the same stack in five years; the stack will have evolved or the developer will have moved on.

That’s kind of why you do want people who know the stack. If you as the manager or you expect the developer to move on with three years. Why waste a year getting a developer up to speed without having anything to show for it?

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

#259

Post by dcolkitt »

pytester wrote: post #235
dcolkitt wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the first thing about web accessibility, polyfills, bundlers, cross-browser support, etc. Almost all of these concepts could easily be learned in a few weeks by a talented engineer with strong fundamentals in software design and computer science. Polyfills aren't exactly quantum mechanics. They're not some radically different mental paradigm that takes years to develop fluidity. If you already have a sound basis in…

>Almost all of these concepts could easily be learned in a few weeks by a talented engineer with strong fundamentals in software design and computer science. Individually yes, but all of these things would take more than a few weeks - possibly months. With onboarding on an average software project also taking months, you could be looking at paying for a lot of unproductive time if you don't hire somebody with some pr…

> Individually yes, but all of these things would take more than a few weeks - possibly months. With onboarding on an average software project also taking months,

So, let's say that is the case. The lesson is that hiring is expensive and risky, even if you find a candidate whose experience exactly matches your stack. Like you mention, just onboarding for the internal technology and project itself takes months.

You're already sinking a big investment into a new hire. So most times you should choose the best engineer even if it means additional O(project onboarding) time. From a business standpoint a great engineer who takes 6 months to get up to speed is a much better investment than a mediocre one who takes 3 months. Not always (maybe you're an ultra-high growth startup who needs bodies on the floor ASAP). But usually.

And the reality is that dropping stack requirements drastically improves the candidate pool. For one you have way way more candidates to select from. Two, most times when a company is hiring for [tech X] it usually means that the market for engineers who know [tech X] is super-tight. It's just the nature of the business cycle. If [X] is in demand at your company, it's probably in-demand everywhere, and therefore in short supply.

All of which means that if you insist on [X] experience, most of the time you're scraping the bottom of the labor market barrel and getting mediocre engineers. If you're willing to hire from anywhere, then usually there's some sub-sector that's in a downturn. That's a huge opportunity to poach talented engineers, who are being mostly overlooked because their stack experience doesn't align with the hot growth sectors.

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

#260

Post by carapace »

Is it relevant to bring up that time major tech companies stole ~$8B from their programmers, more-or-less because they could?

https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valle...

Oh my, I just now saw this follow up: https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...

> Confidential internal Google and Apple memos, buried within piles of court dockets and reviewed by PandoDaily, clearly show that what began as a secret cartel agreement between Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt to illegally fix the labor market for hi-tech workers, expanded within a few years to include companies ranging from Dell, IBM, eBay and Microsoft, to Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, and London-based public relations behemoth WPP.

So, anyway, yeah, don't be a chicken, be a fox. But better than being a fox, be a human being.

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