11–20 of 125 posts
Maybe you should renegotiate those IP clauses or find a new job that doesn’t have them. It seems to be the main blocker for you to do what would make you happy.
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…
Here's a great playbook from patio11 on this topic: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...
This isnt that serious, is it? At my previous job (a large company) we even had one so-called 10x programmer (which some people claim doesnt exists, but I saw him with my own eyes), and it wasn't such a big problem overall. He was assigned more difficult tasks or more tasks, and that was it. (Although yes, his salary wasn't 10x).
On an agile team once, I was anticipating a vacation before a larger project came up and for whatever reason I completed a bunch of work tasks in a couple days. The PM at the time had said that work was supposed to last the team a couple weeks before the larger project kicked off. So I get the social/team consequences of just pumping out a lot of quality work. That work mostly languished until my return because nobody really had time to oversee it getting thru the process to being deployed to production.
As you know there are a lot of other elements than programming needed to deliver a software product. Analogies usually fall down with any close inspection but I'll use one here. If we replace software development/programming with house construction/wall assembly and someone was very prolific with wall assembly and wanted to monetize that skill-set it sounds kind of odd. Usually someone would be a carpenter and be able to work on walls, staircases, trim work, roof trusses, decks, etc. Someone prolific with just wall assembly skills can't really build a house for a company where it is safe and profitable and it doesn't really make sense to have someone like that on staff because they are doing a very narrow part of the overall job.
The software development job market doesn't really work that way either where a specific skill, like time on keyboard and programming, is an entire job by itself.
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…
Do you mean trying to get a job as a SWE inside FAANG/MAGMA? I guess my concern would be that although the pay is good, it wouldn't really solve the QOL issues. I.e. my impression is that the work isn't necessarily more interesting when you're talking about companies with thousands and thousands of developers, and if you want to advance it would have as much to do with jumping through the right corporate hoops as it would have to do with actual value creation. And I'm sure if anything the IP shackles are much much worse.
But I could be totally wrong, that's mostly speculation and maybe those companies are very good at finding ways to allocate resources to where they can produce the most value.
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 concur. Consulting is probably a great path. You might not program all that much, as you'll be focused on solving the problem, but you can get paid a lot. Here's a great playbook from patio11 on this topic: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...
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.
If you have to work slow on purpose to avoid making others feel bad... find a different job? Plenty of companies out there that need someone productive and/or don't care if one is faster or better than the others. I mean don't take this the wrong way, but your post reads a bit like you're humblebragging about how good a developer you are. I think you know the answers to your question already.
It's not my intention to brag, and in fact I am quite embarrassed to speak about this predicament publicly which is why I have posted this anonymously.
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…
Thanks Do you mean trying to get a job as a SWE inside FAANG/MAGMA? I guess my concern would be that although the pay is good, it wouldn't really solve the QOL issues. I.e. my impression is that the work isn't necessarily more interesting when you're talking about companies with thousands and thousands of developers, and if you want to advance it would have as much to do with jumping through the right corporate hoops…