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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)

#81

Post by bee_rider »

mrguyorama wrote: post #78
bee_rider wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since we’re generally sitting on top of a giant pile of semi-understood abstraction that doesn’t have a real mathematical model and is often defined by matching legacy behavior (aka precedent), “Software Lawyer” could be a better name.

Naw, we should be honest about what we actually do, mostly so we can stop pretending our industry is good at what we do. We are "Framework and API plumbers" by and large, taking existing packages and just hooking them into each other.

Plumbing generally works despite being constrained by real world non-idealities and things like wear-and-tear.

We belong with the lawyers, who are working in an entirely human constructed framework but have somehow fucked it up so bad that it has loopholes and undefined/unexpected behavior.

Re: Don't call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2011)

#83

Post by HellDunkel »

If you need to hint towards „salesforce“ in your pitch then something is fishy.

Btw. whatever happened to understatement? Is that not cool anymore?

Oh and Don’t ever call yourself a systems architect unless you want to be ghosted by the programming people.

Re: Don't call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2011)

#84

Post by justusw »

mikewarot wrote: post #2

Don't call yourself an Engineer unless you are licensed to do so. Most states have a professional licensing board to oversee the practice of Engineering. Here's the link to the one in my home state of Indiana.[1] I've been a programmer, system administrator and a machinist. I've never called myself an engineer, and wouldn't want the criminal liability for doing so. I wouldn't call myself a "computer doctor" either fo…

Here in Japan you can hear someone calling themselves a software engineer, fresh out of a bootcamp. The original meaning of engineering has gotten lost over the time, diluted by a sense of self-importance.

Imagine a world in which we let the bootcamp grads build our bridges and medical devices (Therac anyone?).

I don’t mean to be a gatekeeper. Keeping someone from practicing medicine if they won’t get a degree is not gatekeeping by anyone’s definition.

„Trust me, I am a software engineer“ just doesn’t have the same ring as „trust me, I’m a doctor“

The risk of criminal liability in many countries is most likely low, as long as you keep the anglicized term and not call yourself Ingenieur (engineer) in Germany or for example 工学者 (こうがくしゃ, kougakusha) in Japan, both of which imply that you have a degree in engineering.

To make things more confusing, the information technology qualification I possess in Japan called 基本情報技術者試験, loosely translated as fundamental information technician, is often translated using engineer instead of technician.

Some countries do over software or information engineering degrees, with a professional body regulating them, but I find that to be the exception.

The battle is already lost.

Re: Don't call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2011)

#85

Post by imiric »

> Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things.

That's a false dichotomy.

Engineers create value _by_—among other things—programming computers. That's nothing to be ashamed of by trying to elevate your title to some perceived higher status by calling yourself an "engineer".

If anything, I identify more as a programmer, than to the field of engineering.

Sure, there's more to creating value in a company than just programming. A good programmer communicates well, knows when to lead and when to follow, is an insatiable learner, and enjoys understanding how things work.

> "Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.”

Anyone who thinks that doesn't understand programming, and is someone who you probably don't want to work with anyway.

I didn't read the entire article, and there is some good advice there, but I'll give a better advice to new programmers: take any opinion presented in absolutes with a chunk of salt. Follow your passions, and reach your own conclusions, rather than assuming anything a so-called expert says as the absolute truth. And, of course, be open and ready to change your opinion if presented with valid evidence.

"Strong opinions, weakly held."

Re: Don't call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2011)

#86

Post by kragen »

tinym wrote: post #21
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point, but Facebook had large collection of code written in php(still is?), and they are far from having "lack of investment or interest in technology."

To your point they also, like, wrote their own PHP interpreter. If you asked your Facebook interviewer about PHP you'd probably get an interesting answer!

compiler

twice

Re: Don't call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2011)

#87

Post by throwaway675309 »

mikewarot wrote: post #2

Don't call yourself an Engineer unless you are licensed to do so. Most states have a professional licensing board to oversee the practice of Engineering. Here's the link to the one in my home state of Indiana.[1] I've been a programmer, system administrator and a machinist. I've never called myself an engineer, and wouldn't want the criminal liability for doing so. I wouldn't call myself a "computer doctor" either fo…

I think it largely depends upon the state, but I agree in sentiment.

I think what I'd rather like to see is an industry standard professional engineering board for computer science. I think the field could actually do with some minimal barrier to entry even if that sounds like gatekeeping.

Not having a professional software engineering license wouldn't prohibit you from taking jobs or practicing software development, but it would help to guarantee a certain level of fundamental grounding in computer science that certain employers might desire in their prospective employees.

Re: Don't call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2011)

#88

Post by daveidol »

strict9 wrote: post #4

>You are not defined by your chosen software stack: I recently asked via Twitter what young engineers wanted to know about careers. Many asked how to know what programming language or stack to study. It doesn’t matter. There you go. I generally agree with this point and many others in the article but when looking for a position the tech stack of a company you're interviewing with matters a whole lot. Using some older…

Yeah but when you are first starting out it really doesn't matter - what matters more is keeping interested enough to keep learning and growing from wherever you start.

Re: Don't call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2011)

#90

Post by TideAd »

bee_rider wrote: post #81
mrguyorama wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naw, we should be honest about what we actually do, mostly so we can stop pretending our industry is good at what we do. We are "Framework and API plumbers" by and large, taking existing packages and just hooking them into each other.

Plumbing generally works despite being constrained by real world non-idealities and things like wear-and-tear. We belong with the lawyers, who are working in an entirely human constructed framework but have somehow fucked it up so bad that it has loopholes and undefined/unexpected behavior.

Is that not what we're doing with distributed systems? A lot of the theory & practice of our field is how to elegantly cope with servers dying, data being corrupted, load limits of single machines, etc. We have a lot of constraints.

And there's no possible way not to have some leaky abstractions with this in front of us.

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