It seems like the author had a really hard time. If you're a software engineer, work at a software company if you want to be happy. Negotiation isn't what's going to get you the job either, programming is.
Don't Call Yourself a Programmer
41–50 of 274 posts
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer
#42"Want to get trained on Ruby at a .NET shop? Implement a one-off project in Ruby. Bam, you are now a professional Ruby programmer — you coded Ruby and you took money for it. (You laugh? I did this at a Java shop. The one-off Ruby project made the company $30,000. My boss was, predictably, quite happy and never even asked what produced the deliverable.)" Unless an employee actually gets permission to do this, this mak…
Assuming he had a green light on the project itself, and it creates value, I don't see why that would be selfish.
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer
#43One of the things that I see among hardworking smart people is they somehow tend to use 'difficult work' as a yardstick to measure 'good work'. Difficult work need not necessarily be good work. Unfortunately if you fall for this, you will end up wasting a lot of time, effort and energy over years and at the end wonder why you are not as rich as someone who does has half the difficult work as you do.
'Good work' or something that brings long term financial success and happiness is something that adds value to business you are serving to write software. There are also many academic kind of jobs which involve a lot of algorithms, math and precision science which won't deal with much of flavor business software has today. That's not wrong if you are a academician by profession, but that's a serious problem if you are doing software development for a living.
Much large of software development today, has got to deal with learning tools, knowing how to use a programming language to quickly turn idea to code, or fix a bug or add a feature. Apart from this you must also know how to quickly discover solutions to problems, even by searching on the internet. Being able to discover has become more important that being able to invent these days.
Additionally you must know how to push long hours, work late nights and may be on weekends. All this has fundamentally nothing to do with software.
All passion of working on something interesting, changing the world et al is perfectly acceptable in your early 20's when you relatively have lesser responsibilities. As we grow older our responsibilities will only increase, the bills and expenditure will grow up. For vast majority of people, thinking pragmatically in this case is important(I'm not saying this for everybody, some can. Not all will make it, those how will not have to take the most pragmatic way out).
That's probably why start up's are not for everyone. And that's why php et al is still alive. Anything that helps you make those first dollars will win.
This is the sad thing about the real world.
Learn, but use the most pragmatic tool at the moment to serve your business.
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer
#44Personally, I think this is an interesting article, and I got two things out of it:
1. Effective communication with people from various backgrounds is important. This is incredibly hard, and it does require practice. Those that succeed typically communicate very well.
2. I mentally replaced the "don't call yourself a programmer" mantra for "tell people why you're doing what you do - what problem do you solve and how is it valuable". If you work for a business, you also need to have some basic understanding of business. Successful organizations probably have more people that really try to find their role in the "big picture" of the company, and they strive to use their place to create value.
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer
#45>Actual grooming is at least moderately important, too, because people are hilariously easy to hack by expedients such as dressing appropriately for the situation, maintaining a professional appearance, speaking in a confident tone of voice, etc. Your business suit will probably cost about as much as a computer monitor. You only need it once in a blue moon, but when you need it you’ll be really, really, really glad t…
Nowhere in the article did it suggest wearing a suit at an interview at a software company in California. That would go much too far.
And it would appear that suits make you overdressed in the software business even here in relatively staid Boston.
However, when you're going to meet with Japanese bureaucrats, or perhaps even American investment bankers, the suit might be a good idea.
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer
#46"Want to get trained on Ruby at a .NET shop? Implement a one-off project in Ruby. Bam, you are now a professional Ruby programmer — you coded Ruby and you took money for it. (You laugh? I did this at a Java shop. The one-off Ruby project made the company $30,000. My boss was, predictably, quite happy and never even asked what produced the deliverable.)" Unless an employee actually gets permission to do this, this mak…
Assuming he had a green light on the project itself, and it creates value, I don't see why that would be selfish.
Suppose the OP leaves. It's going to be hard for the his former coworkers to maintain the Ruby app.
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also won't let you into the labs with just a backpack. In a literal sense, no, that's not enough. In a practical sense, if you're serious about doing research and have the necessary background to be able to do good research, finding a faculty member who will invite you to join their group as an unpaid "research assistant" is trivial.
This is literally true. But I come out of experimental physics, semiconductor engineering, and biology, where "the necessary background to be able to do good research" generally translates to "you have the kind of lab skills training that you can only get by getting a Ph.D. in a lab just like ours, plus you know how to write (or at least contribute vital portions of) successful grants to pay for the equipment you'll…
I think we're disagreeing mostly on what "getting into the labs" means. Sure, you can't walk into a lab filled with expensive equipment and start doing your own research; but you could absolutely walk into someone's lab and start helping to do their research. My father studies chemical reactions in supercritical water using a beam of spin-polarized muons from a cyclotron; there's many millions of dollars of equipment involved in his experiments -- yet he still hires undergraduate students, because there's always plenty of grunt work to be done.
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming he had a green light on the project itself, and it creates value, I don't see why that would be selfish.
Suppose the OP leaves. It's going to be hard for the his former coworkers to maintain the Ruby app.
If the OP did a proper job documenting his work and his former coworkers are competent, it would only be a tiny bit selfish.
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming he had a green light on the project itself, and it creates value, I don't see why that would be selfish.
Suppose the OP leaves. It's going to be hard for the his former coworkers to maintain the Ruby app.
$30,000 hard, or minor annoyance hard?
Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is literally true. But I come out of experimental physics, semiconductor engineering, and biology, where "the necessary background to be able to do good research" generally translates to "you have the kind of lab skills training that you can only get by getting a Ph.D. in a lab just like ours, plus you know how to write (or at least contribute vital portions of) successful grants to pay for the equipment you'll…
I think we're disagreeing mostly on what "getting into the labs" means. Sure, you can't walk into a lab filled with expensive equipment and start doing your own research; but you could absolutely walk into someone's lab and start helping to do their research. My father studies chemical reactions in supercritical water using a beam of spin-polarized muons from a cyclotron; there's many millions of dollars of equipment…
Ah, okay, if you want to be an unpaid lab tech I agree that you can get that job pretty darned easily.
It hadn't occurred to me, recently, to have such low standards for hanging around in a lab. ;) The novelty wears off, you see.
EDIT: just to summarize for the audience, I believe cperciva and I are in agreement with Patrick that it's easy to flawlessly impersonate a university student for free; We are debating the extent to which one may also impersonate a junior professor. ;)