Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

Okay, I guess as someone with hard-won expertise I'm duty-bound to take slight exception to this line:<p><i>Put a backpack on and you can walk into any building at any university in the United States any time you want.</i><p>First, the nitpicking: Technically you can't get into Harvard's excellent libraries without actually (a) being a Harvard student, or (b) working for Harvard. (And if you're a programmer, I'm not sure which of those options is going to prove more expensive.) But, of course, the rest of Harvard is open to the backpack-wearer, and MIT even opens their libraries (I'm proud to routinely impersonate a graduate of MIT) so this isn't much of an objection.<p>On a slightly more serious note: They also won't let you into the labs with just a backpack. If you'd happily accept a sub-market wage to be taught laboratory research techniques, in a piecemeal and haphazard fashion, by sleep-deprived world experts equipped with state-of-the-artish equipment, engineering graduate school is the game for you. And I did kind of enjoy working in the lab, just not enough to keep that as a career. It's not that great a career; you have to love it to stick with it forever.<p>Now, having said that, I cannot re-emphasize this line enough:<p><i>After you’ve escaped the mind-warping miasma of academia, you might rightfully question whether Published In A Journal is really personally or societally significant as opposed to close approximations like Wrote A Blog Post And Showed It To Smart People.</i><p>All my journal publications mean nothing compared to the stuff I've scrawled in the margins here at HN.

I love corporate, boring, "soul-crushing" work. Why? Because I can sit down, whip out a basic CRUD form with a small approval cycle in a day. It saves a company 100K over the year, I am loved by the customers, and because it is so simple, it normally requires no maintenance. Maybe we update the fields once a year or so.<p>At the end of the week, I've already saved the company more than my salary. After a year, I am a critical asset to the company.<p>After 3 years, I've optimized everything, the ROI slows down, and I move on.<p>This pattern is not a tragedy. It doesn't crush your soul. It makes you a prized commodity in the business world, with a chance to make a change in your life every few years.<p>I have usually alternated between 3 years doing this, then 2 years doing startup work. It has given me a much broader base of experience and skill than anyone who stick to one one side of the coin. It also has given me years of experience in large industries (banking, energy, etc.) which I then use to find very real problems to which a startup can be applied.<p>I have led a very satisfying career, doing this for almost 20 years now.

<i>&#62;&#62;"Programmer" sounds like "anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo." If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired. </i><p>I call myself as a programmer because I enjoy programming and do a lot of programming as part of my job.<p>It is unlikely that I'll get fired because I run the (tiny) company I work for :). and customers seem to like the products we sell in the app stores.<p>Prior to starting this company, I was a Principal Development Manager,SDE Lead and Software Design Engineer at Microsoft. Describing myself as a programmer or a developer didn't hurt me there either.<p>This is not to say that Patio doesn't make a good case about the need to focus on value created. Regardless of profession, you have to focus on the value you create. A doctor saves lives, a construction worker builds homes, a pilot takes people home etc.<p>It is definitely possible for all of them to use MBA-speak mumbo-jumbo job-titles to describe what they do. Alternately, one could be a bit more of a plain-speaking, straight-talking person and just say that you're a doctor or a programmer or a pilot etc.

Back in the day, John Carmack would micro-blog on the finger protocol (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol</a>). <i>finger johnc@idsoftware.com</i> got you Carmack's .plan file, a well-written and, for a time, frequently-updated journal of whatever programming challenges he happened to be facing at the time. <i>finger @idsoftware.com</i> got you the id corporate directory, a simple list of about 20 names and titles. The only titles were CEO, designer, and programmer. In a tech world awash, even then, with countless software engineers, senior software engineers, senior members of technical staff, architects, chief architects, CTOs, rock stars, and ninjas, it was always refreshing for me to see Carmack's humble programmer listing.<p>All of my heroes in the field are programmers.

&#62; 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. Backpacks are a lot cheaper than working in academia. You can lead the life of the mind in industry, too — and enjoy less politics and better pay. You can even get published in journals, if that floats your boat. (After you’ve escaped the mind-warping miasma of academia, you might rightfully question whether Published In A Journal is really personally or societally significant as opposed to close approximations like Wrote A Blog Post And Showed It To Smart People.)<p>The degree of arrogance in this article is astounding. I've worked at Google, Microsoft, and IBM, and the work I've found <i>most</i> satisfying is in grad school.<p>To each his own. If you let something like this guide your life decisions, you have much bigger issues to deal with than finding a so-called "README.txt for your career as a young engineer".

One of the things that I see among hardworking smart people is they somehow tend to use 'difficult work' as a yardstick to measure 'good work'. Difficult work need not necessarily be good work. Unfortunately if you fall for this, you will end up wasting a lot of time, effort and energy over years and at the end wonder why you are not as rich as someone who does has half the difficult work as you do.<p>'Good work' or something that brings long term financial success and happiness is something that adds value to business you are serving to write software. There are also many academic kind of jobs which involve a lot of algorithms, math and precision science which won't deal with much of flavor business software has today. That's not wrong if you are a academician by profession, but that's a serious problem if you are doing software development for a living.<p>Much large of software development today, has got to deal with learning tools, knowing how to use a programming language to quickly turn idea to code, or fix a bug or add a feature. Apart from this you must also know how to quickly discover solutions to problems, even by searching on the internet. Being able to discover has become more important that being able to invent these days.<p>Additionally you must know how to push long hours, work late nights and may be on weekends. All this has fundamentally nothing to do with software.<p>All passion of working on something interesting, changing the world et al is perfectly acceptable in your early 20's when you relatively have lesser responsibilities. As we grow older our responsibilities will only increase, the bills and expenditure will grow up. For vast majority of people, thinking pragmatically in this case is important(I'm not saying this for everybody, some can. Not all will make it, those how will not have to take the most pragmatic way out).<p>That's probably why start up's are not for everyone. And that's why php et al is still alive. Anything that helps you make those first dollars will win.<p>This is the sad thing about the real world.<p>Learn, but use the most pragmatic tool at the moment to serve your business.

&#62; If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired.<p>If you work at a place like that, I feel sorry for you.<p>Even the owner of my company lists himself on Twitter and his blog as just Programmer at RAD Game Tools. Besides being the sounding board for us when we have problems and ideas, he still writes more code than most of us can regularly muster.

I'm not too into gatekeepers, so I'd like this to be true:<p><i>you might rightfully question whether Published In A Journal is really personally or societally significant as opposed to close approximations like Wrote A Blog Post And Showed It To Smart People</i><p>But honestly I have never found a blog post that I could see as replacing journal articles, if your goal is to promote advancement of scientific knowledge. I <i>like</i> blogs, and read them often, but they aren't normally in-depth, with solid scientific evidence for their results, with discussion of how they relate to existing results, etc. The closest is probably in mathematics, where some of the mathematics blogging is quite high-level and results in actual new discoveries--- but those blog posts are mostly written <i>by math professors</i> (e.g. Terence Tao's blog), which doesn't seem to be what this article is proposing.<p>Where on the internet can I find blog posts of the same scientific standard that one finds in, say, <a href="http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/" rel="nofollow">http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/</a> ? I read quite a few statistics, data-mining, and machine learning blogs, and while there is a lot of good content, I haven't found anything that I'd say replaces a journal article; it's more along the lines of tutorials and tips and tricks (which are also very valuable, but a different kind of contribution).

I spend a bit too much time on HN, as evidenced by the timing of this post, and one of the dangers I've noticed is that I can become so fascinated with the interesting things other hackers are doing that I lose perspective on how valuable &#38; relatively rare my combination of skills are. I suspect this is true for others here.<p>Patrick gives insanely valuable advice for hackers who could be both create more value and capture more of it by being aware of the big picture &#38; the motivations of others.

Does anyone else think that this article is in poor form?<p>On the perils of describing yourself as a programmer: If you're hiring someone to provide a specific skill set (programmer) you want them to be good at programming. Would you hire an accountant if they didn't know accounting? Should lawyers not describe themselves as lawyers? Doctors as doctors?<p>On the perils of selling yourself as an expert in a certain technology: I spend a fair amount of my time learning about the specific technologies I use. I've been doing this for a while and I don't know everything about sql, postgres, mysql, mongodb, javascript, html, css, ruby, rails, unix, chef, capistrano. But I've put thousands of hours into these things and the tools themselves took thousands of hours to create. Either I'm really bad at learning, or there is a lot to learn there and that information makes me more valuable to potential/current companies. Sure, there is a baseline level of skill you can achieve in programming where you can not suck at most stuff but there is still a lot of valuable information that you don't know if you just half assed your way through a Beginning Ruby on Rails book.

&#62;&#62; ”What is your previous salary?” is employer-speak for “Please give me reasons to pay you less money.” Answer appropriately.<p>What is the proper approach to answering this question?

<i>90% of programming jobs are in creating Line of Business software: Most software is not sold in boxes, available on the Internet, or downloaded from the App Store. Most software is boring one-off applications in corporations, under-girding every imaginable facet of the global economy. It tracks expenses, it optimizes shipping costs, it assists the accounting department in preparing projections, it helps design new widgets, it prices insurance policies, it flags orders for manual review by the fraud department, etc etc. Software solves business problems. Software often solves business problems despite being soul-crushingly boring and of minimal technical complexity.</i><p>Wasn't this precisely the insight of the founders of Infosys in the late 80s? Together, the Indian outsourcing giants, Infosys, TCS and Wipro have amassed huge armies of "programmers" to meet these needs. I stay away from CRUD stuff, because 1. I don't expect to be very successful competing with armies. 2. I don't like being a part of a huge army.

The language stuff is only part true. It's true enough, perhaps, that it's not usually the most important thing to emphasize on a resume, especially if you're doing simple CRUD apps, but nevertheless programming languages and their implementations are varied and complex.<p>Yes, you can become productive in a new language after 6 months of using it, but most people will still have a long way to go before they can claim a reasonably high level of proficiency, especially if there's significant dissonance between the languages. Going from Java (or most languages, really) to Python isn't going to be too difficult, but a lot of that is because Python is a very easy language to get started with. But even with Python it will probably be a lot longer before you really understand some of its less obvious features, pitfalls, performance profile, and are comfortable writing idiomatic code. For a more complicated language, like Perl, or a more distant language, like Haskell, it'll probably be a lot longer.

Fantastic post. I'd also recommend any "programmers" to invest a couple years in a systems integration engineering role as well. It's generally a great place for picking up some skills many programmers / engineers lack:<p>* Communicating with internal and external customers<p>* Understand systems from a broader (higher level) perspective<p>* Ability to translate wants and needs to technical requirements and specifications that are implementable<p>* Ability to sell yourself as well as the product / service<p>* Give constructive criticism as an internal customer to programmers / software engineers (great chance to view the role @ 180 degrees)

I agree wholeheartedly. That's how I promote my consulting biz, "More money for your business."<p>It is amazing how devs think that dollar value should equal effort. It does not. And this doesn't just apply to software. It applies to anything and everything. The value of something is what someone is willing to pay for it in that one split second when they click "charge my card".

Patrick has some great advice.<p>I'll add my own anecdote: earlier this year I had an interview which required taking a plane. I decided to wear my suit on the plane, and it was an entirely new experience. I can't put my finger on exactly what it was, but the people simply seemed nicer, more pleasant and accommodating. If you want people to think of you as a professional, dressing the part certainly helps.

<i>Many asked how to know what programming language or stack to study. It doesn’t matter.</i><p>It does matter in so far products come and go and you don't want to accumulate knowledge on a product that's going to disappear from the market.<p>I worked with SGI IRIX from 1991-1996. The company has since gone bankrupt twice and IRIX has disappeared from the market. All the knowledge I accumulated on IRIX is worth nothing because it's no longer in demand. Practically noone still has IRIX machines in production.<p>In 1996, I switched to Linux. It had a vibrant community and you could feel it's growing rapidly. Turns out that knowledge is still valuable.<p>So it's really important for engineers to keep a close eye on the marketplace: If something's getting out of business or out of fashion, stop investing time in it. Instead, be on the lookout for stuff that's growing. In general, open source stuff has a longer lifetime because it can be forked if need be, wheras proprietary stuff is often problematic as companies change their mind on a whim. HP/WebOS is a recent example.

&#62;<i>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.</i><p>This is one of the most important career lessons I've learned first-hand of late.

<i>71~94: Your equity grant is worth a lump sum of money which makes you about as much money as you gave up working for the startup, instead of working for a megacorp at a higher salary with better benefits.</i><p>Or phrased differently, you get to work for a startup you believe in and enjoy instead of a soul-crushing megacorp, with (almost) no cost.<p>This counts as a win in my book.

This article has tons of gold in it besides the "don't call yourself a programmer" part. I actually thought the paragraphs past that were better, especially for the younger crowd. I want to send this post to every kid that's about to graduate college.

Great read. Probably patio11's best yet (TLDR: A summary of pretty much all his comments here on HN). Thanks.

Not very good advice. It's basically an accountants view of engineering, which can be summarized as follows:<p>- Only be interested in increasing profit or reducing cost<p>- Don't care about what you do unless it conflicts with the above<p>- Treat people you meet as commodities<p>- Produce cruddy code, because "good enough" is all that matters<p>- Good engineering is not a "profit center"<p>- Don't bother keeping up with new programming languages or new techniques

"Want to get trained on Ruby at a .NET shop? Implement a one-off project in Ruby. Bam, you are now a professional Ruby programmer — you coded Ruby and you took money for it. (You laugh? I did this at a Java shop. The one-off Ruby project made the company $30,000. My boss was, predictably, quite happy and never even asked what produced the deliverable.)"<p>Unless an employee actually gets permission to do this, this makes him incredibly selfish, and is a good way to get fired (and deservedly so), no matter how good he is.

A little cynical, but overall mostly rings true. I also have found that focusing on business/product goals and good communications skills dwarfs the ability to hack when it comes to success.

Personally, I think this is an interesting article, and I got two things out of it:<p>1. Effective communication with people from various backgrounds is important. This is incredibly hard, and it does require practice. Those that succeed typically communicate very well.<p>2. I mentally replaced the "don't call yourself a programmer" mantra for "tell people <i>why</i> you're doing what you do - what problem do you solve and how is it valuable". If you work for a business, you also need to have some basic understanding of business. Successful organizations probably have more people that really try to find their role in the "big picture" of the company, and they strive to use their place to create value.

I think this is the best OP has written yet. A lot of people in this thread are fighting with his b/c they make apps or run a small company.<p>Not living in the bay area I see what he is saying, most programmers are not selling apps, or selling small consumer applications. Most make internal apps, and many of those internal apps are more interesting than mobile apps or web apps.

I'm new to the startup game, and most of my hunches that Ive formed over the past 6+ months are proved true by this post. This is insanely good advice in this post, one of which involves modesty and confidence.<p>I'm never going to be modest from here on out and will act like a pompous douche when deemed necessary. I see people act this way ALL the time, and I figured people could see right through their bullshit. Apparently not, as it clearly does not matter if they are right - only if their bullshit is passable. Apparently being modest does not work to my advantage. I have no choice but to play the game.

Does this cause people to read "The Genius and Tragedy of Patrick McKenzie"<p><a href="http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/the-genius-and-tragedy-of-patrick-mckenzie" rel="nofollow">http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/the-genius-and-tragedy-of-p...</a><p>(posted last month by an observer of the author of the submitted post here) with a different reaction?

It seems like the author had a really hard time. If you're a software engineer, work at a software company if you want to be happy. Negotiation isn't what's going to get you the job either, programming is.

Well now I can honestly reward myself for picking the University of Waterloo. All of the points made by this article are well understood by second+ years of Waterloo Engineering.<p>How?<p>The coop program i.e. the four month work then four month study program.<p>Except maybe for the startup stuff. That said, there are are overarching initiatives being undertaken by uWaterloo to infuse entrepreneurship and student success. The most popular one? <a href="http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/" rel="nofollow">http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/</a>

&#62; Perceptive readers will note that 100 does not actually show up on a d100 or rand(100).<p>It also jumped out at me that the zero case is not handled (it occurs on the rand(100), if not the die).<p>He's got a great point about learning negotiation skills, too, but I've read a lot of things and feel that what I lack most is actual live practice. I think this is similar to the point about meeting people and shaking their hand and how different that is from meeting some person online.

&#62;Actual grooming is at least moderately important, too, because people are hilariously easy to hack by expedients such as dressing appropriately for the situation, maintaining a professional appearance, speaking in a confident tone of voice, etc. Your business suit will probably cost about as much as a computer monitor. You only need it once in a blue moon, but when you need it you’ll be really, really, really glad that you have it. Take my word for it, if I wear everyday casual when I visit e.g. City Hall I get treated like a hapless awkward twenty-something, if I wear the suit I get treated like the CEO of a multinational company. I’m actually the awkward twenty-something CEO of a multinational company, but I get to pick which side to emphasize when I want favorable treatment from a bureaucrat.<p>is it really expected or even appropriate to wear a suit to an interview in the valley? i remember doing that during for my internship interview and i felt silly sitting next to my interviewer at lunch who was wearing shorts and flip flops.

Thanks for this manifesto patio11! I read it a couple of times and thought how I could apply it to my career.<p>There are 2 parts in it that I have difficulties with, and I'd appreciate clarifications:<p>-----------------------------<p>"In the real world, picking up a new language takes a few weeks of effort and after 6 to 12 months nobody will ever notice you haven’t been doing that one for your entire career."<p>How can you say that? Sure, an experienced and intelligent programmer can learn to program in Language X in a few weeks, but do you think that after a year he will reach the same level of efficiency of a similarly experienced and intelligent programmer who has 8 years of experience programming?<p>Sure, you'd know most of the important things that the 8-year guy knows, but I was taught that the worth of programmers is exponential to their talents. Say that if you're at the 99% percentile of Language X developers, there are (say) about 1,000 people like you in the world. If you're in the 99.99% percentlie, there are now only 10 people like you worldwide. Wouldn't that result in a much bigger price that you could put on your services?<p>-----------------------------<p>"Profit Centers are the part of an organization that bring in the bacon [...] Cost Centers are, well, everybody else. <i>You really want to be attached to Profit Centers.</i>"<p>I don't understand this.<p>Let me see if I got the terms right: Profit Centers are "where the money comes in from", and Cost Center are "where the money comes out of". But of course, Cost Centers do not exist because CEOs are looking for ways to flush money down the tubes-- it's just that Cost Centers bring in money in indirect ways. For example, let's say that you're a CEO, and you have hired an expensive programmer to write a script that periodically checks that your backups are valid. That would qualify for a "Cost Center", right? And everyone would agree that this is a wise investment.<p>So what am I supposed to do if I'm hired to do this kind of job? Decline it because it's a Cost Cetner?<p>You also suggest to "engineer your transfer [from Cost Center to Profit Center] after joining the company". Wouldn't that be kinda douche-y? I mean, I'd be pretty pissed if I hired a guy to do Job X and then he was trying to engineer his way into Job Y because that's where the money is.<p>-----------------------------<p>Thanks again for the post!

Is this article's claim about Google -- that the programmers closest to Adwords revenue have highest status (edit: and/or pay) -- true? It contradicts what I've heard.

I'm kind of terrified of "At the end of the day, your life happiness will not be dominated by your career." Hopefully he means that primarily for employees, not for startup founders, and even then, I know a lot of people who work in research, engineering, etc. where career is by far #1.

One of the takeaways I get from this is that if you can't prove value, you can't demand payment for it. Proving usually involves measuring.<p>How does one go about measuring? They're not about to give a "mere programmer" access to the sales data or whatever.

<i>I recently stumbled across a web-page from the guy whose professional bio is “wrote the backend billing code that 97% of Google’s revenue passes through.” He’s now an angel investor (a polite synonym for “rich”).</i><p>Any idea who this person is?

I did appreciate the section about programmer skill and not to underestimate yourself too much, simply because it was a feel-good paragraph. By regularly reading a variety of tech blogs and trying to keep up with software goings-on, I've put myself on a drip feed that constantly reinforces: "Holy crap... every programmer out there is developing mind blowing software in languages you've never heard of in the course of a weekend. Meanwhile, you're dribbling out a few dozen lines of C in a day."<p>Who knows where the truth lies, but for the next few minutes I'll just enjoy the slight buzz from the article.

My employer calls me a programmer. They print it in on my business cards and hang a sign on my door that reads "Senior Systems Programmer"... so I'm a programmer and I'm not ashamed to be called that.

"Your GPA largely doesn’t matter (modulo one high profile exception: a multinational advertising firm)."<p>Nice jab at Google.

Enjoyed the post. Do programmers really not know who Peter Drucker is?

I feel like this article takes a very pessimistic view. To be great or have success in any field, doing anything, you are going to be up against "bad odds". If the odds of success were in everyone's favor then it wouldn't be "success" anymore. If anything this is a very discouraging article for people who may be aspiring to accomplish something great which I feel like the HN community is all about.<p>Perhaps I've misunderstood the authors intentions? The parts about young people in start-ups, and how it becomes a downward spiral if you aren't in the lucky 10% is such a negative view it hurts. Specifically the "odds" of succeeding and the relative unimportance of the connections you make during that time because [paraphrased] "most of the connections you make in the start-up world are with other start-ups who are likely to fail as well". This is just such a losing mindset to have. If the only thing you are concerned about is not failing then you have no chance to do anything of importance. The choice is yours.<p>I apologize if I've missed the point here as I know there were a lot of other parts in the article about adding value to your career and understanding how corporate structures work. I do believe those are great things to understand but the tone of the whole thing really struck a nerve.

Patio is like a modern day Phillip Greenspun. Trying to turn childish programmer nerds into responsible engineering professionals.

My favorite from this article: Networking: it isn’t just for TCP packets.<p>Seriously, get out there and grow your network. Do it by getting over being shy and smile more. Ask how you can help others. And ask for nothing in return. You will be shocked (over time) by how much you actually get back.

On the not calling yourself a programmer part: It may be a local thing, but the term engineer was usurped by government to essentially refer to someone who does things by the book. As such, engineer has come to mean someone who has trouble seeing the bigger picture and won't break some rules to deliver something amazing.<p>Obviously that is not true of many engineers, but the damage to the term is already done (again, perhaps only locally). I find it hard to take programmers who call themselves engineers seriously as a result, even if they are really good at what they do. My advice is not call yourself an engineer if you develop software. You want to use a title that makes people think you do amazing things.

In most domains engineering is not the biggest challenge. The challenge is in a dozen intersecting domains that have little to do with engineering. Calling yourself a programmer is like a guitar make telling people he is a carpenter.

<i>In the real world, picking up a new language takes a few weeks of effort and after 6 to 12 months nobody will ever notice you haven’t been doing that one for your entire career.</i><p>I wish more HR/recruiting people understood this.

<i>At the end of the day, your life happiness will not be dominated by your career.</i><p>That said, a crappy career can put a serious chokehold on life happiness. You spend close to half your waking hours at it, after all.

Best quote -- "He’s now an angel investor (a polite synonym for “rich”)."

<i>Strive to help people. It is the right people to do</i><p>A heads-up for patio11: There is lots of good stuff here, but it needs to be copyedited. There are a bunch of little errors like the one quoted above.

<i>For example, consider an internal travel expense reporting form. Across a company with 2,000 employees, that might save 5,000 man-hours a year (at an average fully-loaded cost of $50 an hour) versus handling expenses on paper, for a savings of $250,000 a year.</i><p>I should have demanded a bonus for the in-house purchase req system I wrote to replace the antiquated, pen &#38; paper system we had been using for years. I feel better about the salary I was drawing with this in mind.

This post touches on nearly everything. Some interesting snippets - well worth a read if you are a [insert appropriate spin on how you add value as a programmer].

I don't agree with <i>everything</i> he said, but in terms of completeness about working as a software developer vs what you learn in school this is spot on.

&#62;If a Python shop was looking for somebody technical to make them a pile of money, the fact that I’ve never written a line of Python would not get held against me.<p>&#62;Much of Fog Creek uses the Microsoft Stack. I can’t even spell ASP.NET and they’d still hire me.<p>A bit presumptuous, perhaps?

You might like to read this too, "Are you a programmer or a coder?" <a href="http://brajeshwar.com/2007/are-you-a-programmer-or-a-coder/" rel="nofollow">http://brajeshwar.com/2007/are-you-a-programmer-or-a-coder/</a>

Networking, networking, networking... "The classic its not what you know but who you know". Also super confidence (even if your wrong). I wish it was different but then again I'm not smart so maybe I'm glad :)

Paul Graham, Computer Programmer<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_%28computer_programmer%29" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_%28computer_program...</a>

We must create bacon, not bring it :) Like that pg's rant.

I have a degree in engineering, but when people ask me what I do, I say I'm a computer programmer because that's what I am and I'm proud of that.

"Producing beautiful software is not a goal." Speak for yourself! That is my goal; money is a mere byproduct enabling it.

This is definitely some of the best advice I've heard. Thank you very much for posting this.

Excuse me, but the company decides what the titles for positions are, not the applicants. And I'm sure no one with "Software Engineer" in their title ever got laid off. "But the article is really telling you to pick a job where you'll be considered King Shit!". Thanks for that great advice.

Is it okay with you if I call myself a programmer even if I become CEO?

fantastic article...

I think Patrick is missing a niche segment of Hackers who have been making a lot of money in last few years.They are the independent Mobile App Developer(iOS/Android)<p>If you choose this path then you dont even have to start a company,all you need to do is make awesome apps.It might be a little hard to start but in a year you should be making good enough money to go independent and then sky is the limit.It is not only possible but probable that you will write better applications (using services like Parse) than entire megacorps.

Good read, i totally agree with some of the points made.

How jaded.<p>Sounds rather like a "Guide to Success in High School" written by the guy that graduated with perfect grades but got his ass kicked every day.<p>Well, not everybody gets their ass kicked every day.<p>I absolutely cringe at the idea of a bright-eyed young programmer becoming prematurely jaded based on somebody else's experiences.<p>"This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer."<p>Definitely failed in that regard for this young engineer and I hope it fails similarly for my cohorts.