Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice (2011)

&gt; Don’t call yourself a programmer: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.”<p>That&#x27;s a perfect description of what I do. I&#x27;m proudly a Programmer.

&gt; You radically overestimate the average skill of the competition because of the crowd you hang around with: Many people already successfully employed as senior engineers cannot actually implement FizzBuzz. Just read it and weep. Key takeaway: you probably are good enough to work at that company you think you’re not good enough for. They hire better mortals, but they still hire mortals.<p>As much as I want to believe this, I think the ability of developers separates itself in different “classes”. The senior devs who can’t complete a fizzbuzz are probably not the competition for the jobs I want.

Seeing all of the dismissals of the article makes me think you all are proving the author&#x27;s point for him. Read: you are not ready to step up your career and are stuck in the phase of taking pride in your craft and optimizing for job stability in your current company.<p>If you are completely fine with your salary and job atmosphere and have no further ambitions then great, that&#x27;s good for you; not the case for me and many other programmers looking to break their back less and make more money however.<p>I&#x27;ve personally been a real-time witness to how I flunked interviews -- and rarely, some sort of business negotiations -- due to sending the wrong signals: clothing, general demeanor, tone of voice, wrong topics (programming languages or amount of servers etc.), and others. I&#x27;ve been there when I failed those, I even cried after some of them, but I gave myself time to reflect and extracted my lessons.<p>Are people super shallow in how they judge you? Feck yes they are, there&#x27;s no ways around that fact. But one thing I am learning after I hit 40 and wanted something more than being a yet-another-programmer-drone-fearing-for-his-job, is that rebelling against reality and not making a strategy to exploit the said reality is foolhardy and downright at a teenager level of being disconnected with reality. Or, to use more HN-friendly lingo: it&#x27;s not productive.<p>I find it interesting how many people here rebel against the realities the author outlined. And yes they are realities, not fantasies. People will judge you by your clothes and people will try to negotiate you down and the moment you budge they lose <i>all</i> respect for you; to them you are no longer a potential business partner, you are now a lowly slave they can boss around so they want to quickly wrap up the dinner with you and leave. Those dynamics do exist.<p>IMO it pays off to see all this, acknowledge it, stop rebelling against it, take a few deep breaths, and learn how to exploit it.<p>Evolution. Those who adapt best will survive.<p>I am looking to change my life and that&#x27;s why I feel the way I do about all this. If you are happy with your life I can only envy you and congratulate you for being in a state of internal harmony.

Mmm. I get the idea, but I think there’s a better way to describe this.<p>Programmers are in such high demand that it’s the opposite of a dirty word. What’s being described feels more like mid- or late-career advice where you might want to specialize to keep advancing. That can mean deep-diving a domain, like the post suggests. It can mean focusing in a category of comp sci, like distributed systems or ML. It can mean consulting. It can mean management. Etc.

&gt; You really want to be attached to Profit Centers because it will bring you higher wages, more respect, and greater opportunities for everything of value to you.<p>I’m experiencing this now. I was attached to a theoretical (in the way that startups are) profit centre which just got whacked and now I am being shifted over to “business support.” Accordingly, we are the last to hear about anything.<p>Boss used to be consulted on things. Now he is told via email of who he now reports to.

The older I get the louder I shout at clouds.<p>&quot;Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things&quot;<p>FFS. True enough, but it&#x27;s still claptrap. One quote from George Orwell really struck for me: &quot;speaking the truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s why now when people ask me what I do, I say &quot;programmer&quot;, not &quot;software developer&quot;. Actually, I usually say &quot;computer programmer&quot;, because otherwise people get confused and think it might be to do with programming videos. Like programming your video recorder was a job, or something.

The bigger problem is the forced march of hobbyist programmers (who had to get this job just to pay the bills) into some corporate automata climbing up and down some ladder in the name of career. The only thing worse than a career is career advice, especially if given by a career programmer.<p>Enjoy being a programmer, from this you&#x27;d never have to retire. Enjoy the freedom; it shouldn’t be all about money and optimizing the optics of what you do, just to force some perspectives.

Don&#x27;t engineers have engineering degrees or else have some other sort of credentials?

I was once a programmer.<p>I was promoted to &quot;Assistant Systems Analyst&quot; (but I wasn&#x27;t actually assigned to assist anyone).<p>I was promoted again to &quot;Systems Analyst&quot; (I wasn&#x27;t in fact a systems analyst - real systems analysts don&#x27;t program, and I&#x27;ve never analysed a client&#x27;s processses and systems).<p>I was promoted to &quot;Consultant&quot;. I confess I did do some consulting for clients; but the job was mainly programming, as before.<p>I was hired as an Engineer (I was nothing of the sort).<p>I was hired again, as a &quot;Senior Developer&quot;. I was &quot;senior&quot;, in that I was the oldest person in the company. I had no reports, and my duties were the same as all the other peons in the company.<p>I&#x27;ve done many other things than programming during that time; for example, I&#x27;ve designed complex systems of interacting components (which I understand is now known as &quot;architecture&quot;). I&#x27;ve done a lot of sysadmin; in fact I once had the job-title &quot;systems adminstrator&quot; for a short while.<p>The whole time, my real job has been programming computers. I&#x27;m not a professional; I belong to no professional bodies. I&#x27;m a tradesman, or perhaps a journeyman craftsman. I know I&#x27;m not a Master Craftsman. My trade is programming, so in point of fact I am a programmer. I&#x27;m certainly not ashamed of that; most people I know are incapable of doing the work I do.<p>There&#x27;s no shame in being a tradesman. Hell, my electrician probably earns more than me; he has to get certified every year. He&#x27;s more like a &quot;professional&quot; than I am.<p>And FWIW, I&#x27;d much sooner have my pay inflated than my job-title.

I think this explains a lot of the buggy software, companies should have employed someone who calls himself a programmer.<p>And maybe companies should learn that they need programmers especially good ones otherwise you get something like Salesforce

&gt;Perceptive readers will note that 100 does not actually show up on a d100<p>Yes it does.

(2011)<p>anything new to add?<p>Some previous discussion:<p><i>2 years ago</i> (which is basically same as now) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21303181" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21303181</a><p><i>5 years ago</i> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12548043" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12548043</a><p><i>7 years ago</i> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8147008" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8147008</a>

&gt; The decisionmaker at a company knows he needs someone. He tells his friends and business contacts. One of them knows someone — family, a roommate from college, someone they met at a conference, an ex-colleague, whatever. Introductions are made, a meeting happens, and they achieve agreement in principle on the job offer.<p>Must be an American thing. Where I&#x27;m from this screams &quot;did not practice due diligence&quot;, which is a big management ouchie.

&gt; Many people already successfully employed as senior engineers cannot actually implement FizzBuzz.<p>The f*ck??<p>* For loop, int 1-100<p>* if int%3 == 0 &amp;&amp; int%5 == 0, print fizzbuzz<p>* else if int%3 == 0 , print fizz<p>* else if int%5 == 0, print buzz<p>* else print int.<p>How difficult is that??

When I was young I didn&#x27;t cally myself a dev so that people would view me as more.<p>Now that I have enought, I do call myself a dev so that it filters annoying interractions.

The author of this blog post uses the words engineer and engineering way too haphazardly. In my opinion, calling yourself engineer, when you are not a registered one, is a disservice to the actual engineers (that have to pass technical and ethical exams)

Written by someone who sounds like they haven&#x27;t done any programming.

Wow is this ever condescending

&gt; If you really like the atmosphere at universities, that is cool. Put a backpack on and you can walk into any building at any university in the United States any time you want.<p>I would not follow this advice if your really have no business being there. Most universities in the US are in fact private institutions and this would be considered trespassing if you are found out. You might have an easy time blending in, but if any faculty (not just police, at least at my institution) asks to see your school ID, you are required to produce it.