Stop Arguing with Software Developers on the Internet

I won’t bother pasting the iconic XKCD that we’re all thinking about right now, given the blog post title.  Instead, I’ll just lead with the premise.  You should stop arguing with software developers on the internet.  In fact, you should probably stop arguing on the internet altogether.

Now, before you go any further, notice that this is a post in my “developer to consultant” series.  What follows is thus advice for someone who is looking to be a consultant — someone for whom an internet presence is a marketing asset.

If that doesn’t apply to you, then don’t worry.  If all you’re looking to do is find some catharsis because the expert beginner serving as tech lead in your group has outlawed writing unit tests, then go nuts.  Pick every fight out there on Reddit and in comments sections.  Sharpen your reasoning or debate skills by bouncing ideas off of other people with varying degrees of mutual hostility.  Do you.

But don’t kid yourself — what you’re doing is a hobby, not a hustle.  It might be fun, and it might help you in a vague way, but it hurts you professionally (unless you’re doing it in a very calculated fashion, but this is an AP tactic I’ll return to).

Arguing on the Internet as an Employee is a Lot Different than as a Consultant

When you’re an employee, the internet is sort of a vast sea of potential fights to pick.  You can argue with your cousin on Facebook about politics for a while.  Then, you can mix it up by posting an angry screed to Medium entitled, “[Thing Everyone Currently Likes] Considered Harmful.”  And finally, maybe a few palate-cleansing down-votes on a Stackoverflow before you call it a day of sometimes doing your work.

As long as your Twitter handle contains some boilerplate about how your views aren’t the company’s, you’re mostly good.  From there, you really just kind of need to avoid being overtly offensive when people can trace your words back to you, and your company will just shrug off anything you do.  You play in a vast yard, and the only thing that will trigger your metaphorical shock collar is running outside the generous boundaries of “reflecting poorly on the company.”

Not so when you own your own career and brand.

When you own your own career and brand, your presence on the internet becomes a digital job interview, writ large and made permanent.  As an employee interviewing for jobs, imagine your interviewer being wrong about something.  You’d bite your tongue, turn slightly red, hemorrhage a bit internally, but ultimately keep the indignation to yourself.  When you go on your own, you should approach your online presence this way.

To really underscore why, let’s place you in the role of a buyer through an analogy.

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Consulting Skills You Need, Without the Vague Platitudes

Let’s take a break from the heretofore linear nature of the developer to consultant series.  I’d been writing this as if it were a book.  But it’s not a book (yet).  So today, appropos of little, I offer my thoughts on essential consulting skills.

Now, before you object with, “I just want to be a software developer,” read this post about why every developer should also be a consultant.  If you want your career to consist of more than having project managers order you around, you’ll need these skills.  They’re essential skills for consultants, but they’ll help your career either way.

I poked around a little to see what others had to say on this subject.  If you google “consulting skills” you’ll find advice that comes in two flavors.

1. “Here are some skills you need to convince Gigantic, Ubiquitous, & Inevitable Consulting, Inc. to hire you as an entry level consultant.”
2. “Here are some skills you need as a consultant, like being nice and having curiosity.”

Let me briefly address these things before I offer my obviously different take on the matter.

I Have No Idea What To Tell You about Consulting for Massive Consulting Shops

What does it take to work at one of these huge agencies?  Dunno.  I’ve never done it.

So if you’re looking for interview advice ahead of your phone screen with McKinsey or PWC, you’re probably barking up the wrong tree.  Will these skills help you in general?  Yeah.  I don’t see how they couldn’t.

But this advice is about how to succeed with your own, specialized practice.  It’s not going to help you get an entry-level, salaried consultant position.

No Vague Platitudes Here, Just Consulting Skills

Let’s be clear on something.  “Be nice” isn’t a skill.  “Enthusiasm” and “curiosity” aren’t skills.  These are all more or less personality traits.

But I’m not objecting based on semantics as much as I am on the basis of effectiveness.  In the “every developer should be a consultant post,” I laid plain the definition of consulting.  It means you provide expert advice in exchange for money.

Now, does being nice help with that?  Or curious?  Yes, of course it does.  But so do a lot of other things, too, in a vague way.  Decent hygiene, taking notes, and not showing up drunk are also helpful.  But these aren’t skills, and they’re not specific to succeeding with a consulting practice.  Most of this is just table stakes for existing in the corporate world.

So I’m making a point here to leave out ‘skills’ that are too vague to help, like “good EQ” or “leadership” or whatever.  Instead, I’m going to list some very specific things that you can actually practice.  And I’ll list them in rough order of when they help in a gig, from discovery to wrap-up.

That said, let’s get specific.

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Learn from My Mistakes: Applied Positioning and Specialty Lessons

I’ve talked a lot about how not to position yourself lately.  Last week, I suggested you not do it by tech stack of framework or whatever.  And before that, I suggested you not do it by being a laborer.  In general, I’ve talked a lot about positioning lately.

But all of the talk has been pretty abstract.  Let’s switch it up today and get concrete.

Up to this point, I’ve thrown out off-the-cuff examples, like becoming “the build expert” or something.  Some of you have asked for more tangible, specific examples.  And I can actually think of no better way to offer those examples than by wandering through my own career, looking for them.

Of course, I didn’t figure all this stuff out until quite recently.  So these are all “road not taken” kind of examples, and that’s why I’m titling this post “learn from my mistakes.”  Here are all the times that current Erik would have told past Erik to recognize opportunity knocking.

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Tech Stack, Framework, Library or API: How Not to Specialize

Today, I’m going to keep plugging away with another mid-week post in the developer to consultant series.  To recap, I’ve talked recently about how you need to start by figuring out your positioning and then about how that positioning should orient around problem solving instead of laboring.  Today, I’m going to build on that momentum.  I’m going to talk about the positioning mistake you’re almost certainly going to make and how to avoid it.

The Positioning Mistake

You’re going to try to position yourself around a tech or tech stack.  “I help people with blockchain” or “I’m a Ruby on Rails performance expert.”  Now, this isn’t as bad as the generalist career approach, to be sure.  But it’s really not where you want to go, either.

I’ll get to why in a moment.

But first, let me just say that it’s completely understandable why you gravitate toward this.  Our industry pushes you that way with an aircraft carrier’s worth of momentum.  You should be a generalist and compete with 18,000,000 other programmers to be “the best” and get hired at SiliconPrestigeTech.  Not for you?  Well, fine.  Then get better than everyone else at some tiny piece of technical real estate.  Everything in your experience pushes you this way.

Indulge me for a moment.  I’m going to force one of my parables on you to demonstrate the absurdity of this situation.  And then I hope this will serve as your compass to navigate your way out of the generalist quagmire.

I once wrote a post about what it would be like if contractors behaved like programmers.  This is going to be a bit like that, but doctors are knowledge workers, so it illustrates the point a bit better.  And I’m going to emphasize a different set of specifics.

Walter White, His Doctor Recruiter, and His Doctor Manager

My wife and I have been watching Breaking Bad again over the last month.  It’s not a spoiler if I tell you that the main protagonist, Walter White, receives a cancer diagnosis (it’s the premise of the show).  Lung cancer, and an aggressive form at that.  So let’s imagine Walter in a world where doctors acted like programmers.

The first thing that Walter would need to do is to hire two people for his “diagnose and treat my cancer” project.  These would include a doctor recruiter and a doctor manager.  The doctor manager would sit with Walt, listen to his symptoms, and lay out a roadmap of what comes next.  Now, this doctor manager “isn’t medical” so he would need to enlist doctors to perform the actual diagnosis.  But he’s “medical adjacent” enough to at least know which doctors to call.

Of course, he’s too busy and important to make those calls, so he enlists the doctor recruiter to do that, explaining that he needs someone with at least 7 years of CT scan, 5 years of X-Ray, 6 years Sputum Cytology, 4 years of Biopsy, with strong Bedside Manner skills a plus.

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