31–40 of 125 posts
It seems you have a much-needed talent, but software is only half of software business; find your complement (some people use meet-ups, others MBA programs to meet their co-founders).
If you’re that good pick a niche and go consulting. No doubt you have a professional network that can attest to your ability. Go to conferences and share war stories. If you like that you can just keep going. There are people who charge $50,000 a week. Or you could make it known you want to confound a startup. With lots of management experience and well out of the ordinary programming skills that’s a plausible use v…
I think it's called MAMAA instead of MAGMA these days.
I guess you already know, and you're asking exactly because you know.. But programming does not create value, it creates programs, which may create value.. Programming is a skill sure, but it does not create value, it creates programs. Programs may create value, so, the valuable skill is not really being able to create a program, but being able to find some problem, whose solution creates value. Programming may be re…
Economic value is created when a human being spends man-hours to produce an artifact that other people need and thus are willing to pay for. Programming is a form of working, as is designing, researching, building, plumbing etc.
The artifact of programming (ie the program) is the value you create by working.
Programs do not by themselves produce value because. if that were the case we would all run "programs " 24/7 on our computers and produce infinite value. Programs help other human beings produce value by putting in the man-hours in a more efficient manner than without the program
I guess you already know, and you're asking exactly because you know.. But programming does not create value, it creates programs, which may create value.. Programming is a skill sure, but it does not create value, it creates programs. Programs may create value, so, the valuable skill is not really being able to create a program, but being able to find some problem, whose solution creates value. Programming may be re…
> Programming is a skill sure, but it does not create value, it creates programs. Economic value is created when a human being spends man-hours to produce an artifact that other people need and thus are willing to pay for. Programming is a form of working, as is designing, researching, building, plumbing etc. The artifact of programming (ie the program) is the value you create by working. Programs do not by themselve…
The man-hours spent are irrelevant.
If someone is doing strip mining by men with shovels, the value they create is not the price of the mined material, but the value that that material brings when it's put to good use.
If someone comes along start doing strip mining by truck and bulldozer, they will spend a fraction of the man hours, and yet create orders of magnitude more value.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would one sell that / do jobs like that actually exist? I'm trying to imagine the conversation where I would suggest that without the framing that I should be allowed to work on my own projects on company time because I'm not being productive with most of my working hours.
I only have 5 years of experience as a dev, but I just never was offered a contract where I couldn’t create side projects on my own time and on my own equipment. I never worked for a company that wanted to have IP of everything I did. So these jobs certainly exist. When I worked in an office, the “own time” and “own equipment” were pretty much the same, I would work at night at home on my side projects. Now, with rem…
It's definitely more blurry now but I think there was a blur without remote work too.
For example, you might work at an office and come home but then think about a programming problem you had at work at 9:30pm. Not so much sitting at a code editor but your mind is occupied with the problem and potentially you even solved it on paper so you can output the code tomorrow "at work".
Or maybe during your lunch break you're mentally churning through some problem you were stuck on 2 days ago because that's how your brain operates.
This is why the idea of working long blocks of set hours is so strange to me in this field. I often solve very complex problems when talking a walk, showering, nearly falling asleep or the second I wake up. None of this is "on the clock time" in a traditional 9-5 job but very important work happens during these after hour times -- often times it's uncontrollable because your brain has actively running background tasks that finish when they want to finish.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Programming is a skill sure, but it does not create value, it creates programs. Economic value is created when a human being spends man-hours to produce an artifact that other people need and thus are willing to pay for. Programming is a form of working, as is designing, researching, building, plumbing etc. The artifact of programming (ie the program) is the value you create by working. Programs do not by themselve…
Only a little bit, the idea is what creates the majority of value, not the actual work put in. The man-hours spent are irrelevant. If someone is doing strip mining by men with shovels, the value they create is not the price of the mined material, but the value that that material brings when it's put to good use. If someone comes along start doing strip mining by truck and bulldozer, they will spend a fraction of the…
> If someone comes along start doing strip mining by truck and bulldozer, they will spend a fraction of the man hours, and yet create orders of magnitude more value
They only reason the truck guy would create orders of magnitude more value is that, in genreral, the rest of the people would work manually. The truck guy would sell the volume of mined materials at the market rate and the market rate is based on manual labor. The truck guy has an advantage. When everyone gets a truck though, his advantage will be lost. He will make as much money as the others and prices will drop because suddenly everyone has a truck and it cheaper to mine because way less manual labour is involved