Fuck you 2011, I'm a programmer.
Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)
301–310 of 316 posts
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stack is relevant though. If you need a front-end architect, and you hire someone with 10+ years Java experience, they aren't going to know the first thing about web accessibility, polyfills, bundlers, cross-browser support, etc. The domains of implementing microservices vs. writing front end code are fundamentally driven by very different problems. The stack an engineer has experience with can be one indicator of th…
> 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…
"Polyfill" itself is a word that was invented by some inexperienced people who had never programmed anything outside of the browser that needed per-platform conditional code to isolate itself from missing or different functionality.
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sales people are usually profit centers, as I understand it. Without sales, no profits.
But without product, no sales?
Yes that is true. Despite this, I think this is the way executives sees it. For example, without logistics, no physical products would reach customers. Despite this, logistics is traditionally a cost center.
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)
#304Earlier 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…
Jordan Walke and Miso Hevery are outliers working at companies that pay a lot. An average company is not going to be attracting talented engineers with strong fundamentals. They are going to be attracting engineers with average aptitude and average fundamentals. An average company, paying average wages, solving average problems is better off getting an average developer specialized in the area they need.
This is only true because average teams get annoyed at having people trying to push the project along in ways they do not understand. In most of my jobs, average people really appreciate stability and do not like change. To fit in, you end up having to do less work and transfer your energy to side projects or hobbies
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)
#305Earlier 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”.
It’s not current speed that matters but acceleration and max speed
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the first thing some hiring managers look at. Speaking for myself as a hiring manager I'm not looking for specific tech stacks. I'm looking for general patterns. Someone who has spent their entire career doing front end work is unlikely to be a great fit for embedded development and vice versa, but I don't care so much about the specific technologies they used in the process. My experience has been that concepts…
Until your customer needs a feature a month from now and not a year from now or you only have a six month runway....
Doesn’t brooks say that adding manpower to an already late project makes the project later?
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)
#307There’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 ha…
To laypeople (like management), 'programmer' means 'a technical person who (for a living) tells computers what to do'. Terms like 'developer' or 'software engineer' are unfamiliar.
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until your customer needs a feature a month from now and not a year from now or you only have a six month runway....
Doesn’t brooks say that adding manpower to an already late project makes the project later?
who said the project was late? You get a new customer or want to get to market with a new feature fast you still need new people.
On the other hand, you have a few “full stack developers” on hand and you need someone to concentrate on one part of the stack so your current developers can concentrate on other parts.
I’ve found it remarkably easy to hire a front end developer who knows the stack we want to use, who doesn’t know anything about the business besides - here is what we want from the website, give us some mockups and we come up with the APIs you need.
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stack is relevant though. If you need a front-end architect, and you hire someone with 10+ years Java experience, they aren't going to know the first thing about web accessibility, polyfills, bundlers, cross-browser support, etc. The domains of implementing microservices vs. writing front end code are fundamentally driven by very different problems. The stack an engineer has experience with can be one indicator of th…
> 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.
It's web development, and let's face it, many companies don't want long term talent, they just want someone to finish their current project and move on. Which can make sense in some circumstances. You don't need a software engineer level guy to make a dashboard.
People that are beyond the framework user level end up also moving on from even considering working on those kind of jobs.
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)
#310Earlier 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…
> The only major sub-domain of software that I think this may potentially be true of is embedded systems. And even then, that's a big maybe. The big problem with embedded is that when things go wrong, it has a cross cut with electrical engineering--you have to understand datasheets, read a scope, and understand that digital signals sometimes aren't. I have never known a good embedded software person who is software-o…
Exactly but now embedded systems look more and more like personal computing used to be not much time ago. We're certainly on par with mid to late 90s in regards to that, and even farther if you consider things like the RPi as embedded. Not only processing power but relating to the skill set needed.
I don't take lightly your skillset at all, but it comes a time when people start using inneficient solutions because it's faster to produce, and you have plenty of hw resources, so... why not? Do it in Python and improve it later... maybe, and then you don't. :-)
I believe you get my point. Not that I personally think using micropython is a worthy path solution for embedded dev as of now, in a professional context. But there will come a time when that can make sense, as it's already the case in the RPi, as I mentioned.
> I consider myself a very good embedded engineer, but my software is merely "straightforward"
And that's where I make my business. I'm merely a straightforward embedded engineer but focus on the software/hw integration making the excellent work of people like you work with the external world, databases, desktop/web UIs and all of that using software engineering practices. Basically doing the "cloud", "edge" and "IoT" buzzwords.