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

Similarly, using a bleeding edge stack indicates the engineers are getting away with resume stacking and you can be pretty sure the product will be late, over budget and developers leave after a year because it turns out using any particular tech stack in and of itself doesn't mean you can create something useful.

Nobody's skirting the law. In most US states, there is a so called "industrial exemption," which allows you to do engineering without a license if you work for certain kinds of employers. I work for such a company, though I don't have an engineering title. But when we do offer a product for sale to the public, it goes to a third party for approval, and the people at that company who conduct the design review all have engineering licenses. The thing that will get you in trouble is offering engineering services directly to the public.

Now in my state, there are only licenses for a small handful of engineering disciplines: Electrical, mechanical, power, etc. I don't know if it means that the rest of us can't call ourselves engineers at all, or if we're just unregulated. I've never tested those waters.

From what I've observed, people with engineering job titles rarely do any hard quantitative engineering. Most of the work consists of organizing and arranging things, fitting things together, troubleshooting, etc.

What I would add is: sometimes the thing which you want to do can't be done without some engagement in a game you don't like. It doesn't mean you have to give in and lose yourself entirely to the game, but you need at least pay enough attention to understand what's going on. The world is full of gatekeepers, often where you least expect it. Trying to avoid that reality can sometimes lead you to a worse place than just sucking it up and putting on a smile to get where you want to be.

We are "Framework and API plumbers" by and large, taking existing packages and just hooking them into each other.

The first thing that is outdated, the advice is basically don't be a programmer be an expert in something the company needs. The thing is in the modern world the company often needs programmers more than it needs the other expertise, hence the big salaries we earn getting hired to solve problems.

>There are companies which create software which actually gets used by customers, which describes almost everything that you probably think of when you think of software. It is unlikely that you will work at one unless you work towards making this happen.

I mean, I've never done anything to try to be writing customer facing software but, aside from some international standardization work, that is all I have ever really worked on.

I think between 2011 and now that stuff changed, and maybe it was already very well on the way to changing in 2011 but the person who wrote this wasn't aware it was changing.