131–140 of 438 posts
This guy seems interesting .. I go to subscribe via RSS - no feed? :(
Yes, absolutely!
I once had a PM who told me coding was just a stepping stone to them in their career. I couldn’t understand, I thought they must not have been a “natural” like me. Fast forward a few years, after taking on more mentorship roles, then staff responsibilities, then slipping into project oversight roles… She was so right. Coding was a great stepping stone. Several years ago my father got promoted to some leadership role.…
> Technical leadership is very expensive to find though, and once you find one you don’t let them go back to the production line. I have a friend at our company who is a gifted programmer. He was moved into a management position. He discovered that he hated working in a leadership position. He tried to get them to move him back to an individual contributor position. They refused. He said, move me back or I quit. It t…
It's acceptable to want to stay in a specific role, but I am not certain I feel it's acceptable to eschew an increasing responsibility or mentoring role as you gain experience. That way lies the "genius programmer that works alone and writes code no one else wunderstands".
> I am not sure though if this is still the case for software engineers. Are there younger engineers, new to the career, for whom programming is not merely a job but something they can imagine doing in their spare time? I think I met a few as I was winding down my career. I do feel though that back around 1988 or so when I started getting serious into programming that all fellow programmers I met were also doing it w…
But canceled projects, inept managers and deadend startups led by brain dead CEOs knocked it all out of me. I’m heading into my 40s and I’m officially a clock puncher. Could not care less who knows it.
I wish I could work somewhere that would just get the fuck out of my way and let me build, fix and make, but tech is full of people riding on the coat tails of engineers now, pretending we’re all on equal footing. We’re not. We don’t need the middle managers and HRs and dozen VPs. We just need some good designers and some good engineers and we can blow peoples’ minds.
But makers making things makes people who can’t make anything uncomfortable.
As for myself, I already know I won’t be programming in retirement. Not because I don’t love programming. I do! But because life is a journey and I know the next phase is teaching and mentoring. I don’t know what it will look like exactly, but I know I won’t be in the driver’s seat.
> I am not sure though if this is still the case for software engineers. Are there younger engineers, new to the career, for whom programming is not merely a job but something they can imagine doing in their spare time? I think I met a few as I was winding down my career. I do feel though that back around 1988 or so when I started getting serious into programming that all fellow programmers I met were also doing it w…
What's there to love nowadays when it comes to software? I'm genuinely asking. What's there to love in making a company worth $2 trillion into becoming, what? A $3 trillion company? What's there to love in helping with making a tech dystopia more and more a reality each and every day? The dream of the '90s - early 2000s is well and truly dead, even in Portland.
But, it really does need to be in a language and platform I enjoy. I also notice that if you have a job with a more niche language all your collegues will be passionate about the work too.
This is why I personally do not care much about language comparisons. It might be that the language of my choice is only marginally better and in some case worse as a more mainstream language. But there are cultures around languages and you need to fit with that culture to get the most joy out of your work.
I once had a PM who told me coding was just a stepping stone to them in their career. I couldn’t understand, I thought they must not have been a “natural” like me. Fast forward a few years, after taking on more mentorship roles, then staff responsibilities, then slipping into project oversight roles… She was so right. Coding was a great stepping stone. Several years ago my father got promoted to some leadership role.…
> But there is something becoming more familiar to me as I go back to the wild west of C programming (where very little happens behind the scenes I might point out - no garbage collection here!). I share this sentiment. I pursued computer science because of the romanticized notation of tracking every bit and byte and talking directly to the hardware. I know I'm not alone given the popularity of old-school fantasy con…
> I pursued computer science because of the romanticized notation of tracking every bit and byte and talking directly to the hardware. Isn’t computer science mostly math? Figure people in computer science would be more at home with the abstract stuff like Haskell where you can’t even see the underlying hardware and your programs are expressed as a bunch of (declarative) functions where sequential execution of instruc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Technical leadership is very expensive to find though, and once you find one you don’t let them go back to the production line. I have a friend at our company who is a gifted programmer. He was moved into a management position. He discovered that he hated working in a leadership position. He tried to get them to move him back to an individual contributor position. They refused. He said, move me back or I quit. It t…
I feel it's completely acceptable to wish to stay in an IC position, but to refuse outright to give advise or share the experience (it's hard to tell from your short paragraph) seems... odd? It's acceptable to want to stay in a specific role, but I am not certain I feel it's acceptable to eschew an increasing responsibility or mentoring role as you gain experience. That way lies the "genius programmer that works alon…
It’s the same as not solving chat request bypassing prioritization.
The company is full of incentives to ask that guy for guidance/things, if he doesn’t say no most or all of the time, he simply won’t have time for his IC role, and would remain a lead just not in name.
It’s hard that it comes to that extreme measure, but if his requests aren’t being heard, it’s either that or leaving. The company has to let him be an IC or explicitly tell him that he can’t stay there as IC, are at least negotiate some timme allocation for those requests and log them