Don't Call Yourself a Programmer • Hacker News Board

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

#181

Post by kamaal » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 2:31 PM UTC

reinhardt wrote: post #163

71~94: Your equity grant is worth a lump sum of money which makes you about as much money as you gave up working for the startup, instead of working for a megacorp at a higher salary with better benefits. Or phrased differently, you get to work for a startup you believe in and enjoy instead of a soul-crushing megacorp, with (almost) no cost. This counts as a win in my book.

You are making the assumption that working in a Start up always compensates for the losses through equity. That is true only if the Start up wins and ends making money or sells for good enough amount to money pay you that chunk.

But if it doesn't you loose time and money. And have to deal with added frustration of that loss and finding a new job.

At the same who is almost as good as you would have never been through all that. Made more money with the same learning experience as yours.

Its not about the positive scenario that's the problem here. Its the negative scenario.

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

#182

Post by davidwparker » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 2:50 PM UTC

synnik wrote: post #164

I love corporate, boring, "soul-crushing" work. Why? Because I can sit down, whip out a basic CRUD form with a small approval cycle in a day. It saves a company 100K over the year, I am loved by the customers, and because it is so simple, it normally requires no maintenance. Maybe we update the fields once a year or so. At the end of the week, I've already saved the company more than my salary. After a year, I am a c…

I find that pretty interesting, and quite the opposite of my experience. I'm guessing that it has to do with the size of the boring corporation.

I worked for a mega corp, and redtape and layers upon layers of bureaucracy would pretty much make any project take months instead of a day. Additionally, there were plenty of times where the right arm was working on something and the left arm didn't know about it, so it was also working on the same thing. Finally, the customers didn't really know what they wanted, the databases weren't designed properly by a solid DBA, and really good system architects weren't brought on early in the design, which resulted in an extremely poor working applications.

All-in-all, it was definitely soul-crushing, and I personally have no desire to do it again. YMMV.

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

#183

Post by _delirium » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 2:51 PM UTC

I'm not too into gatekeepers, so I'd like this to be true:

you might rightfully question whether Published In A Journal is really personally or societally significant as opposed to close approximations like Wrote A Blog Post And Showed It To Smart People

But honestly I have never found a blog post that I could see as replacing journal articles, if your goal is to promote advancement of scientific knowledge. I like blogs, and read them often, but they aren't normally in-depth, with solid scientific evidence for their results, with discussion of how they relate to existing results, etc. The closest is probably in mathematics, where some of the mathematics blogging is quite high-level and results in actual new discoveries--- but those blog posts are mostly written by math professors (e.g. Terence Tao's blog), which doesn't seem to be what this article is proposing.

Where on the internet can I find blog posts of the same scientific standard that one finds in, say, http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/ ? I read quite a few statistics, data-mining, and machine learning blogs, and while there is a lot of good content, I haven't found anything that I'd say replaces a journal article; it's more along the lines of tutorials and tips and tricks (which are also very valuable, but a different kind of contribution).

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

#184

Post by kamaal » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 2:53 PM UTC

scottschulthess wrote: post #169

patio11 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reprising a comment of mine from earlier: the actual work performed by most lawyers is letter-writing at $X00 an hour. No lawyer describes themselves as a "professional letter-writer" or "professional letter-writer specializing in Mostly Empty Threats." When "programmer" starts showing up with lawyer and doctor on "high status occupations used as the canonical examples of professional jobs since you were three years…

How about a surgeon? Their actual core competency is performing surgery. Should they not describe themselves as Surgeons? Edit: Are accountants high status? I'm not sure. They are generally regarded as making a fair bit of money but they are boring. Probably a bit more high status than a programmer, perhaps. But I wouldn't suggest to my accountant friends that they stop selling themselves as experts at accounting. An…

Engineering is a older profession that Medicine. Remember it was wheel and before that tools to invent the wheel that got invented.

Software is a sub branch of engineering. Like veterinary doctors. In fact man kind had taken huge leaps in engineering before they took in medicine(Stuff like Pyramids of Giza etc).

Doctors and Lawyers have a nature of work which if done badly or of subjectively low quality a persons quality of life gets very hugely impacted.

Its like high risk, high gain.

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

#185

Post by dpritchett » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 2:53 PM UTC

scottschulthess wrote: post #170

dpritchett wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think back to the now-wealthy Googler who wrote the code that 97% of $BILLIONS in revenue passes through. Do you think that person introduces him/herself as "C++ programmer with 10+ years of industry experience"? You'll get better work on better terms if you focus on results rather than tools, even if your technical skillset is fundamentally the same as another dev with a poorer sales pitch. You're finding the best m…

Say that person leaves google and spends all his/her money. What jobs do you think that person will be most qualified to apply to next? Senior C++ Programmer jobs. And what do you think they'll have to prove to potential employers? That they are capable of writing lots of C++.

You're overlooking the vast network of powerful Xoogler/VC/founder contacts this guy has surely developed in the past decade. He's also likely picked up world class experience in ecommerce, advertising, billing, and infrastructure scaling at Google.

Commodity programming is an inefficient use of this person's time and luckily he will be known and respected by enough business leaders to be able to carve out a more valuable (and again, mutually beneficial) arrangement somewhere in the Valley.

This job may involve C++ but it won't be as generic as you described. Think Paul and Bret at FriendFeed. "Python Programmers" was not their $50 million value proposition.

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

#186

Post by _delirium » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 3:06 PM UTC

div wrote: post #160

motters wrote: post #144

Not very good advice. It's basically an accountants view of engineering, which can be summarized as follows: - Only be interested in increasing profit or reducing cost - Don't care about what you do unless it conflicts with the above - Treat people you meet as commodities - Produce cruddy code, because "good enough" is all that matters - Good engineering is not a "profit center" - Don't bother keeping up with new pro…

You may disagree with those views, but if they are predominant among the people who have final say in hiring you, and at what salary, then the advice is good. The whole point of the article is to force a typical engineer to look at how most of the world perceives him, and work with that. If you have to talk to another engineer as part of a hiring process, talk all the shop you want. If you're talking to business peop…

You may disagree with those views, but if they are predominant among the people who have final say in hiring you, and at what salary, then the advice is good.

Are they, though? I can see they might be if you're in consulting (as the author of this post appears to be), but I've never heard of an interview at somewhere like Google or Intel that wants to hear you talk about Providing Value; they want to know your technical skills.

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

#187

Post by T-hawk » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 3:13 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #114

freemarketteddy wrote: post #22

I think Patrick is missing a niche segment of Hackers who have been making a lot of money in last few years.They are the independent Mobile App Developer(iOS/Android) If you choose this path then you dont even have to start a company,all you need to do is make awesome apps.It might be a little hard to start but in a year you should be making good enough money to go independent and then sky is the limit.It is not only…

Everyone knows I pay my rent by making bingo cards for elementary schoolteachers and bear no ill will for small businesses, right? If you are sufficiently skilled to create a popular iPhone app, you can sleepwalk your way into either $100k+ as a salaried engineer or $200+ an hour doing contracting work. The vast majority of app devs will not reach these numbers.

> If you are sufficiently skilled to create a popular iPhone app

How much of this skill set is programming, and how much is design and marketing and the ability to navigate Apple's approval process? (Legitimate question, not rhetorical.)

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

#188

Post by scottschulthess » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 3:14 PM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #184

scottschulthess wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a surgeon? Their actual core competency is performing surgery. Should they not describe themselves as Surgeons? Edit: Are accountants high status? I'm not sure. They are generally regarded as making a fair bit of money but they are boring. Probably a bit more high status than a programmer, perhaps. But I wouldn't suggest to my accountant friends that they stop selling themselves as experts at accounting. An…

Engineering is a older profession that Medicine. Remember it was wheel and before that tools to invent the wheel that got invented. Software is a sub branch of engineering. Like veterinary doctors. In fact man kind had taken huge leaps in engineering before they took in medicine(Stuff like Pyramids of Giza etc). Doctors and Lawyers have a nature of work which if done badly or of subjectively low quality a persons qua…

Even primitive cultures have medicine men. But they don't have engineers, at least, certainly not full-time ones.

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

#189

Post by reinhardt » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 3:15 PM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #181

reinhardt wrote: post #163

71~94: Your equity grant is worth a lump sum of money which makes you about as much money as you gave up working for the startup, instead of working for a megacorp at a higher salary with better benefits. Or phrased differently, you get to work for a startup you believe in and enjoy instead of a soul-crushing megacorp, with (almost) no cost. This counts as a win in my book.

You are making the assumption that working in a Start up always compensates for the losses through equity. That is true only if the Start up wins and ends making money or sells for good enough amount to money pay you that chunk. But if it doesn't you loose time and money. And have to deal with added frustration of that loss and finding a new job. At the same who is almost as good as you would have never been through…

The "positive" (actually breakeven) scenario is what the "71-94 roll" refers to in the OP. The more common negative scenario is if you "roll 1-70", I didn't dispute that. I simply did a half-full glass rephrasing of the 71-94 case instead of the original half-empty version.

Re: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

#190

Post by finnw » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 3:40 PM UTC

mhartl wrote: post #140

Strive to help people. It is the right people to do A heads-up for patio11: There is lots of good stuff here, but it needs to be copyedited. There are a bunch of little errors like the one quoted above.

This could be another little error, or it could be intentional. It's hard to tell:

It is