DaedTech

Stories about Software

Apr
20

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Defining The Corporate Hierarchy

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , | 29 Comments

Think back to being a kid, and you can probably remember a rather dubious rite of passage that occurred when you figured out that you weren’t going to be a sports player, lead singer, or Hollywood star.  You probably felt sad, but your parents and older siblings likely breathed sighs of relief that you’d never be explaining to people that a manual labor gig was your “day job.”

State lotteries notwithstanding, giving up on improbable dreams is considered by adults to be a sign of maturity in budding adults.

Rites of Passage

If you think about this, the easy message to hear is “you’re not going to be great, so give up.”  It’s depressing and oft-lamented by college kids having mini crises of identity, but it’s actually a more nuanced and pragmatic message, if a poorly communicated one.

It’s that the expected value of these vocations is horrendous.  For baseball players, actresses, and rock stars, there’s a one in a million chance that you’ll make ridiculous sums of money and a 999,999 in a million chance that you’ll make $4,000 per year and have half of it paid to you in beer nuts.

So the expected value of going into these positions is about a $4,200 per year salary and a handful of beer nuts.  Thus the message isn’t really “give up because you’ll never make it” but rather “steer clear because anything but meteoric success is impoverishing.”

The better play, we tell our children, is to head for the corporate world where the salaries range from minimum wage in the mailroom to tens of millions per year for CEOs of companies that create stock market volatility. Most importantly, you can find every salary in between.

So if you aim for the heights of CEO and fall short, mid-level manager making $140K per year isn’t a bad consolation prize.

And so a funny thing happens. We consider it to be a rite of passage to abandon the delusion that you’ll be Michael Jordan, but we encourage the delusion that you’ll be Bill Gates until people are well into middle age.

That’s right, “the delusion that you’ll be Bill Gates.” You won’t be him. You won’t be a CEO, either, unless you pop for your state’s incorporation fee and give yourself that title.

You’re about as likely to “work your way up” to the CEO’s office over the course of your career as any given child is to luck into being the next multi-platinum pop star. So, it’s a rather strange thing that we tsk-tsk children for indulging pie-in-the-sky fantasies past a certain age while we use nearly identical fantasies as the blueprint for modern industry.

Kid wants to be Justin Bieber? Pff.

Thirty-year-old wants to be Mark Zuckerburg? Keep working hard, kicking butt, and acing those performance reviews, and someday you’ll get there!

Pff. Read More

Apr
10

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Please Direct all Inquiries to My Agent

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , | 21 Comments

I got an email from a recruiter not too long ago.  I suppose that’s not a surprise, given how I’ve made my living, but what might surprise you is that I usually respond to recruiters, and politely at that.  They’re human beings, trying to earn a living in a way that I don’t envy.  These days, my relatively stock reply is to thank them for reaching out, tell them that I’m pretty happy and thus pretty picky, and to offer to chat anyway, if they just want to network.  As a developer with some community presence, a serial freelancer, a consultant, and general entrepreneur, it never hurts to talk for a few minutes and make a connection.  This recruiter persisted, and said that, even if it wasn’t a current fit, something might make sense later.  Sure, why not?

Come Hear about this Depressing Opportunity!

When she called, we exchanged pleasantries and she asked what I’d been doing lately in a professional capacity.  I explained that the last 2 years had seen me as the CIO of a company, running an IT department, and then going off on my own to do freelance development, consulting, coaching, and a cadre of other activities.  At this point, she began to explain what life was like for line level devs at her company and asking what tech stack I preferred.  I sighed inwardly and answered that I’d been engaged in coaching/mentoring activities in Java and .NET recently, but that I didn’t care too much about language or framework specifics.  She then asked about my career goals, and I scratched my head and explained, honestly, that I was looking to generate enough passive income to work on passion projects.  She became a little skeptical and asked if I had recent development experience, clearly now concerned that whatever it was that I’d been doing might not qualify me to crank out reams of line-o-business code or whatever fate she had in mind for me.

The conversation had become deeply tiring to me at this point, and I steered it to a close relatively quickly by telling her I had no interest in line-level development positions unless they were freelance, B2B, part time sorts of engagements that weren’t very long in duration (and not bothering to mention that I’d probably sub-contract something like that since I don’t have an abundance of time).  She assured me that all of the positions she was hiring for were W2, full time positions but I should give her a call if I changed my mind and felt like being an architect or something, and that was that.

I hung up the phone, sort of depressed.  Honestly, I wished I’d never taken the call more profoundly than if I’d interviewed for some plum gig and been rejected.  This just felt so… pointless.  I couldn’t really put my finger on why, and indeed, it took my subconscious some time to kick into useful mode and deposit it coherently into my active brain.DevOpportunityCost

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Mar
31

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The Tech Lead Role: Lessons from Ancient Rome

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , , | 2 Comments

 

Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Cassius walk into a bar, and the bartender asks them what they’ll have. “3 beers!” Caesar proclaims. “2 beers,” whispers Cassius.

 

Because I’m not a historian, I have the luxury of making spurious historical arguments that suit my purpose. I can even bring in Star Wars if I want to. For those of you only passingly familiar with the story of Caesar, he was the pivotal, popular, and controversial figure around which the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire. He was also the obvious inspiration for the scene in which Chancellor Palpatine becomes Emperor Palpatine, causing Padme to remark, “so this is how liberty dies… with thunderous applause.” Caesar was a popular and extraordinary general that imposed his will on the increasingly ineffectual Roman Republic, essentially replacing it with a more unified and centralized imperial government. That is, until his friends in the bar assassinated him in the name of “liberty.”

Caligula Read More

Mar
13

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Employers: Put Your Money where Your Mouth Is

Category: Run with It Tags: | 15 Comments

Editorial Note: Since writing this post a couple of years ago, Dave has created a site in pursuit of his goal.  He also interviewed me for it.

I had an interesting exchange on Twitter a couple of days ago with Dave Schinkel. Here’s the most salient tweet:

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Mar
10

By

Lifting the Curse of Knowledge

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , | 12 Comments 

public ActiveProduct(Product product, StringVersion driver, Side es)
{
    Side = es;

    try
    {
        if (product == null)
            throw new Exception("Can't create an active product from a null product");

        Logger.LogTimeStudyStart("ActiveProduct create");

        if (driver.IsEmpty())
            CurrentDriver = product.Driver;
        else
            CurrentDriver = driver;

        _Device = Session.Instance.DeviceManager.CreateHI(es, CurrentDriver.ToString());
        _Device.ConnectionStatus += Device_ConnectionStatus;
        _Device.BatteryStatus += Device_BatteryStatus;
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        ExceptionHandler.HandleException(ex);
        throw ex;
    }
    finally
    {
        Logger.LogTimeStudyEnd("ActiveProduct create", "ActiveProduct: Creating " + driver);
    }

    State = ActiveProductState.Simulated;
    Environments = new SortedList<string, Environment>();
    this._Product = product;
    _Options = product.AvailableOptions;
    AvailablePrograms = new ProgramSlots(this) { HIStartIndex = 0 };
    AccessoryPrograms = new ProgramSlots(this) { CanRemoveOverride = true, StartIndex = 4, IsAutoShifting = false };
    VirtualPrograms = new ProgramSlots(this) { IsVirtual = true, CanRemoveOverride = true, SlotConfig = Limit.None };
    SlotCalculator = new ProgramCalculator(this, false);
    VirtualCalculator = new ProgramCalculator(this, true);
    DFS = new DFSCalibration(this);
    Accessories = new Accessories();
    PowerBands = PowerBands.Unknown;
}

As most of you know, one of the biggest anti-patterns when you’re instantiating program slots is to forget to set CanRemoveOverride to true. But what you probably didn’t know was that the SlotConfig is — Just kidding. I lifted this from a post I wrote almost 3 years ago about legacy code I was working with then. I have little more idea than you do what any of that means.

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