Software Craftsmanship is Good Business
Tonight, I logged into my site and saw a picture of someone’s colon, compliments of everyone’s favorite NSFW advertising engine, Disqus. (Read more about this here). Enough is enough, so I switched commenting engines. Please bear with me and let me know if you have issues with comments.
On a less aggravating note, please enjoy post number 4 of Developer Hegemony week! Pre-launch activities are progressing nicely, and I’m looking forward to the launch. If you’d like a free paperback copy of the book, remember to sign up for the Thunderclap.IT campaign so that we can get to the sharing threshold — we’re halfway there, but I still need your help. It only takes a second.
I feel as though I’d like to balance the scales a bit. Lately, I’ve made a lot of realpolitik posts about how organizations cast software developers as grunts. This is true, but also depressing. So let’s talk about the uplifting alignment between well reasoned code and success in career and business.
Raw Programmer Skill and Diminishing Marginal Returns
First of all, I should point out that I talk a good bit about the diminishing marginal returns of programming skill, both in posts and in Developer Hegemony. And I stand by that. To understand why, I invite you to do a thought exercise with me.
I’m pretty sure that most of you programmers reading, if you were so inclined, could go out and find a new job within a few weeks. And, what’s more, you could probably negotiate a 5% pay increase to switch. Did you suddenly become 5% better at programming? Or would you acknowledge that programmer pay doesn’t necessarily correlate simply with programmer skill?
The industry isn’t meritocratic. Of course, the industry is also not anti-meritocratic. Rather, if programmer skill and programmer pay had a mutual Facebook relationship status, they would choose it’s complicated.
I would further reinforce the point about diminishing returns. Go from zero to decent programmer and you might go from 30K per year for non-degreed work to $90K per year for programming. Go from decent to highly skilled, and you can climb to $120K, which feels less life-changing. Beyond $120K, your increased skills help you not a lick at puncturing the software developer’s glass ceiling. Diminishing returns on skill investment.
Good vs Valuable
But don’t despair. Winning programming “contests” and algorithm trivia jousts won’t pay off, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t make your software career pay off. You just need to understand what businesses value.
So far, all we’ve done is figure out what they don’t value. Namely, they don’t value journeyman idealist pissing contests. The company will say, “it’s great that you can write a compiler on the back of a napkin and have it work flawlessly the first time it’s transcribed and run, but I only want that within the Software Engineer IV salary band.” The company doesn’t value this prodigious industry cred the way your peers do.
And why should they? If the company sells cable modems, how does that compiler help them? “I can see that you’re quite good, but we don’t find this valuable.”
The trick then becomes establishing yourself as valuable. And, while valuable and good have a deeply intertwined relationship, you cannot simply interchange them. I submit that the software craftsmanship ideal offers you a ready-made playbook for turning good into valuable.
