[HN Gopher] Do call yourself a programmer, and other career advi...
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Do call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2013)
Author : luu
Score : 28 points
Date : 2024-01-17 11:42 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (yosefk.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (yosefk.com)
| hintymad wrote:
| Thanks to low interest rate and phenomenal paradigm changes in
| the last 15 or 20 years, the tech sector has grown so much that
| engineers with three years of experience can become "tech leads"
| or "staff engineers" who spend most of their time drawing boxes
| or "aligning" whatever in meetings. Day in and day out, the most
| valued engineers are either in meetings or on their way to
| meetings. For some reason, companies value such positions more,
| probably because managers are not into hard technical or product
| decisions and therefore relied on smooth communicators to feed
| them digested information, or worse, opinion.
|
| Now that the golden 10 years is in the rear view, maybe
| programmers will once again be valued more, as only the companies
| can really build fast and well will stand out.
| beacon294 wrote:
| This kind of an old axe to grind at this point, many engineers
| involved in these kinds of choices would rather be coding but
| see the need for good navigation. It is hard to decide when to
| differentiate roles as a company grows.
| kelnos wrote:
| I found the "On job hopping, backstabbing, and the lack thereof"
| section a bit odd. The argument seems to be that your co-workers
| aren't your friends (in general, of course there will be
| exceptions), and you'll move on in a few years, so it doesn't
| matter. And the counterargument is that the reason they're not
| your friends is because you're going to move on in a few years,
| so you don't bother to form stronger relationships, and that if
| you stay at a company for much longer (say, 10 years or so), then
| your co-workers will be your friends.
|
| I just don't think whether or not your co-workers are or will be
| friends has anything to do with any of that. I stayed at my last
| company for 10 years, and ended up with quite a few real, non-
| work friends from that job. And those friends are mix of people:
| some were only with the company another year or two after I
| joined, whereas others had longer tenures.
|
| If you are going to make sustainable friendships with your co-
| workers, you need to know them in more context than seeing them
| at the office or on video calls. If you do things with them
| outside the office, and actually develop real friendships with
| them, then you are likely to remain friends after one or both of
| you leaves the company. And so the length of time you spend at a
| company is pretty much irrelevant.
| pmarreck wrote:
| There should remain some cachet when it comes to actually working
| directly with code that directly impacts software functionality.
| I love it. Coder, programmer, electron magician, logic monkey, or
| perhaps my favorite, Techpriest, call it whatever you want... at
| the end of the day this is the only job where you get paid to
| build completely nonphysical machines. I press keys that go clack
| clack, logic gates go flip flop, the electrons go zoom zoom, and
| my bank account goes ding ding.
|
| _From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it
| disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I
| aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine.
|
| Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail
| you. One day the crude biomass that you call a temple will
| wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already
| saved, for the Machine is immortal...
|
| ...even in death I serve the Omnissiah._
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Do call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2013)_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23675363 - June 2020 (74
| comments)
|
| _Do call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2013)_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015370 - Feb 2015 (76
| comments)
|
| _Do call yourself a programmer, and other career advice_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6033135 - July 2013 (112
| comments)
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