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Stories about Software

Jun
10

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Don’t Learn to Code — Learn to Automate

Category: Language Agnostic Tags: | 11 Comments

Does anyone remember a few years ago, when the mayor of New York decided to learn to program? It was a heady time, because it wasn’t just him. I remember these surreal commercials where Miami Heat forward Chris Bosh was encouraging children to learn to code for the good of humanity or something. There was this sudden, overwhelming sentiment that humanity should abandon the folly of any non-programming pursuit and learn them some Ruby or whatever. Andy Warhol, were he alive in 2012, no doubt would have said, “in the future, everyone will write code for 15 minutes.”

Jeff Atwood wrote an interesting rebuttal to this zeitgeist, entitled, “Please Don’t Learn to Code.” The covers a good bit of ground and makes some interesting points, but the overarching thesis seems to be, “avoid thinking of writing code as the goal and learn to solve problems.” I think this is an excellent, philosophical point, but I’d like to add a bit of nuance.

I’ve written in the past about how important I think that it is to be a problem solver, to the point where I wrote a post about liking the title “problem solver.” So please don’t think I disagree with his take that a lot of programmers get too hung up with the particulars of code. I don’t — I think that’s a very common issue. But, at the same time, I think the mayor of New York and Chris Bosh and others have a point that Jeff doesn’t really address, per se. Specifically, the world is getting dramatically more technical, which means that a lot of pursuits are being automated out of existence, while other pursuits require an increasing degree of technical savvy. My fiancee, a professional copy editor, is finding aspects of her job to be easier if she knows a bit of HTML and CSS.

So while I wince alongside Jeff at the thought of people randomly learning programming languages because they think it’ll make them rich or because they want to be a person that writes lots of code, I don’t think we can simply say, “stay out unless you’re serious and willing to spend years getting good.” The rapidly evolving technical landscape has created this black hole of technical savvy that’s sucking in even people well past the event horizon.

The advice that I’d offer on this subject creates a pretty fine distinction. I don’t think that everyone needs to learn to code by any stretch. What I think that everyone needs to start learning about and understanding is how to automate. Or, if not how to do it themselves, at least how to recognize things that could be automated and have meaningful discussions about whether the effort is worth it or not. Read More

Jun
3

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Career Advancement for the Low Price of Your Soul

Category: You Asked For It Tags: , | 11 Comments

When I was a kid, I remember my little brother watching Disney films pretty much constantly from the ages of probably 1 to 6 or so. As a result, I have an embarrassingly encyclopedic memory of the plots and songs of the movies from that specific time window. Probably at the epicenter of this Disney knowledge for me was the film, “The Little Mermaid” and I can remember that crazed chef chasing Sebastian the crab around and still giggle to this day. But of all of the songs in that movie, there’s only one that makes me think of the corporate world. I’ll come back to that.

Claw Back, Disney Style

There are a few standard perks in corporate America (and, I’m sure the world, though I’m only familiar with hiring in the USA). Health insurance is pretty much table stakes for serious employment these days, and with a decent employer contribution to boot. Paid time off is certainly up there, along with holidays and general human decency, one would hope.  There’s another tier that includes 401K contributions or some other retirement provision, perhaps a pension of some kind, things like life and disability insurance, and so on.  And, then, you start getting into a land more exotic where employers offer weird, unexpected stuff like “take your dog to work day” or sabbaticals or something.  One that usually shows up in this slightly more exotic realm is some concept of tuition reimbursement for employees that seek degrees or want to acquire skills through classes, certifications, etc.

This perk is a classic win-win situation.  The company invests in the career development of an employee and, in exchange, reaps the benefit of the employee’s learning and added skills.  The employee becomes more valuable to the organization by virtue of new knowledge and skills and, all other things being equal, will wind up earning more money over the course of a career.  What could be better than this arrangement?  Employees donate their spare time to improving themselves for their companies and companies donate money to the cause.  Sounds like a pretty good exchange of consideration.

And the company, really, just wants to help.  Advancing one’s skill set and education isn’t cheap, and there are so, so many poor unfortunates that just can’t afford it.  You know what?  I’ll let Ursula from the aforementioned Little Mermaid explain.

Poor unfortunate souls,
In pain, in need!
This one longing for more skills
That one wants a new degree
And do I help them?
Yes, indeed!

UrsulaContract

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May
6

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8 Career Tips That Don’t Require Competence

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , | 4 Comments

A few weeks ago, I posted my spin on the MacLeod Hierarchy and promised to follow up with a post addressing the kind of vacuous, non-strategic career advice that is often given in Buzzfeed sorts of formats.  I started, then, to type this post, but realized that a bridge of sorts was needed.  So I indulged a digression wherein I described the corporate idealist that typically solicits and follows this sort of advice.  (That post also became pretty popular, with a number of requests to pre-order my upcoming book, which you can now check out here on leanpub).  Now, having described the corporate idealist and his willingness to overwork in exchange for useless status tokens, I can go on to be clearer about why so much of the career advice that you tend to hear is so, well, frankly, dumb.

I started to write this just from anecdotal experience, including various comical, ham-fisted self promotion attempts that I’ve watched over the years.  But then I thought it’d make more sense to go out, do some research, and synthesize my experience with actual advice offered in these “Linkbait for Idealist” articles.  This is a list of the ones that I read as reference material.  (As an aside, I also stumbled across a few that offered fairly sensible, decent advice for how to advance meaningfully, so it is actually possible to find advice that isn’t silly)

KingOfSmallKingdom

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May
3

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I Have a New Book

Category: Announcements Tags: | 2 Comments

It’s been an interesting week with respect to my philosophy about the future of labor for knowledge workers. This post about corporate idealists and seniority got relatively popular and attracted around 10,000 readers. If you’re a regular follower of this blog, you know that one was just the latest in a series of a few posts I’ve done on this topic and you probably also know that these are coming from my work on a book. But this understandably wasn’t immediately clear to new readers, and so I got a smattering of inquiries as to where the book was for sale or whether it could be pre-ordered. I invited those folks to stay tuned or sign up for my mailing list, but alas I had nothing to offer.

A few days later, I noticed the hashtag #talkpay on Twitter, promoting the controversial but clearly forward-thinking idea that making salary information confidential is problematic in a variety of ways (specifically, in this case, that it facilitates gender and racial pay inequality). I’m not a salaried employee, so I couldn’t offer information about my salary, but it did prompt me to tweet this:

As you can see, this was a pretty popular sentiment, which jived with the reception my post about salary negotiation hacks received. There appears to be a great deal of appetite for reconsidering the knowledge worker’s relationship with the corporate structure.

To this end, I decided over the weekend to put an end to my large-batch approach to writing this book and include anyone that wants to come along for the ride right from the outset. I wrote my initial introduction to the book and published it on Leanpub (most of the material I’d been gathering is still scattered in a large document on my personal google drive). Beware, there’s not much there, but that will change. In the coming months, I’ll be writing to the book almost the way I would to a second blog. So, stay tuned.

The infant book is now officially on Leanpub and officially for sale. I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing when it comes to marketing or setting price, so please bear with me. It’s doubly confusing because Leanpub offers a lot of different options for differentiated pricing. The minimum price for the book is $1 and the suggested price is $4.99. The suggested price was just the default, and the minimum price is 1 cent more than the default for no particular reason other than selling things for 99 cents seems somehow hokey to me. I considered making the initial minimum price free, since there’s not much book there, but data about whether people would pay for the thing or not is a lot more meaningful if people have to pay for it. If I made it free, I might get a lot of spurious information (lessons learned from Lean Startup and 4 Hour Work Week).

DeveloperHegemony

Now, here’s the nuance. You can get the book for free. I wanted to be sure to offer that option to people that are regular fans and followers of the blog and will provide feedback as I write it along with support and shares. So I created a coupon that I’ll send out to the DaedTech mailing list as well as anyone who signs up for it from here forward. Also, I’m not going to lie. If you just email me, I’ll send you the coupon too, but I’d prefer to do it through the mailing list. For those of you on the mailing list, look for the coupon email in the next few days.

As I said, I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to marketing, so I hope this makes sense and isn’t crazy. I wanted to err on the side of giving too much away if I erred in any direction. Weird as it sounds to say, I’ve never regretted erring on the side of giving away content. People seem to live life petrified that they’ll give something away for free when they could have wrung a few dollars out of it, but for me, the goodwill and engagement created by giving away content has paid far more dividends down the line than a few dollars.

So I cordially invite you to join me on this book journey. And, naturally, I invite you to invite as many of your friends and colleagues as you please! 🙂 I’m excited and looking forward to this, and fascinated to see how it goes.

Apr
23

By

Carnival Cash: The Cult of Seniority

Category: You Asked For It Tags: | 24 Comments

Alright, screw it. Let’s burn the boats. I said I wasn’t going to get into this until I released the book, but the idealist career advice post I had planned doesn’t make sense without a discussion of corporate seniority.  If you haven’t read this recent post, in which I outline the terms pictured below, you’ll probably want to read it for reference or this one might not make as much sense to you.  In this post, I’m going to defend a thesis that the best career advice I could offer to any knowledge worker, counter-intuitive though it may seem, would be to avoid earning seniority at a company.

In a prequel to this series I seem to be starting, I define the essential conundrum of the corporate pragmatist.  This post is going to focus on corporate idealists and the essential conundrum that they face, and it’s going to address a reader’s question while we’re at it.  That question provides a good lead-in to the context here.  Paraphrased, it was, “while going it alone may be good advice for seasoned, senior developers, shouldn’t junior developers hitch their wagons to a company for a while, giving a lot of extra effort and working their way up while learning the ropes?”  My simple, off-the-cuff response is, “oh, dear God, no!”  But the more nuanced response I’ll expand on here is, “that may be a strategy, but be very, very careful, because here be dragons.”

Dragons

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