http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   People tell me I am the counter-example.

Post a reply to this message

Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/

made many people angry, all the mediocre "cost centers".

But this advice is to people who want to make money. I don't. The only purpose
of money is to pay debts. I don't want debts nor properties. I'll merrily sing
along the joy of life while ants are busy digging holes in the ground and
filling it with stuff they may some day attempt to find joy with when they're
off work in their last days...

I don't care either for the name.  Probably duct tape expert would be more
precise than programmer.

Post a reply to this message

On 11/13/2011 17:40, nemesis wrote:
> But this advice is to people who want to make money. I don't.

No, I think this is advice to people who want to get paid more money for the 
same amount of work. Hence, you get to work less if you pay attention to 
these details.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   People tell me I am the counter-example.

Post a reply to this message

On 13/11/2011 10:08 PM, Darren New wrote:
> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/

Interesting.

I love how I read "you should be able to explain your ideas to a bright 
8 year old or to the CFO", and I immediately wondered whether the CFO 
would be smart enough to comprehend something a small child can 
understand. ;-)

In my limited experience, managers are astonishingly stupid people. 
(Depending on how high up they are, generally. Some of the ones lower 
down actually *have* a clue...)

I also love how a large segment of people are all like "BS! The real 
world isn't like this! You're lying! You don't know WTF you're talking 
about! How made you an expert anyway?" Can you spell "denial"?

Having just said that, I'm not sure that *every* company is actually 
like this. From what I've seen, organisational culture varies from place 
to place.

For example, where I work, few people would try to take credit for 
somebody else's work, or steer the group towards a path of action that 
most benefits themselves. Because, frankly, if you did these things, you 
would be wasting your time. Achievement is not recognised nor rewarded 
here. Nobody ever gets pay rises for any reason. Nobody is thanked for 
their effort. So there's really no reason to try to out-do anybody else. 
(On the contrary, people's attitude is more one of "we're all in this 
together, we're all stuck in this dead-end, let's just make the most of 
it".)

Where my mum works, there's a lot of back-stabbing. Everyone has target 
statistics to meet. And that means that almost every single employee 
constantly operates on the basis of "how can I make this become somebody 
else's problem as fast as possible?" People will try to claim that 
something is another department's responsibility, they will try to dump 
jobs into somebody else's job queue, they will redirect callers to 
someone else - *anyone* else - because if you can just get *rid* of the 
work as fast as possible, you get the best stats.

Those poor unfortunate people who try to actually HELP THE CUSTOMER? 
They are the ones with the awful stats who end up getting hired. Welcome 
to defective management practices.

So in summary, I'm sure there are companies where everyone is very 
up-tight and constantly trying to stab everyone in the back and get the 
glory and the money. And there are other companies where everyone is too 
laid back to care. And companies somewhere inbetween.

What I *will* say is that, seemingly without exception, every 
corporation on Earth seems to regard programmers as "those unnecessary 
people we keep having to spend huge sums of money on; if only we could 
figure out how to get rid of them..." Nobody, anywhere, seems to value 
technical skill in the slightest.

I guess that's just a reflection of the larger issues in society. There 
was a time when people prized the highest-quality goods. Today everybody 
just wants to find the cheapest model on the market. Given the choice 
between a nice quality TV that works well and is easy to use, and a shit 
TV that's 85% cheaper, every single man, women and child will pick the 
cheap one, and then complain like hell that it's unreliable and horribly 
complicated to operate...

Also: This is why I've given up trying to get paid as a programmer. 99% 
of companies don't need anybody to write software for them. 95% of all 
software written is technically trivial. 100% of managers want the 
crappiest, buggiest software you can write. Because software that works 
properly doesn't add any value. (See above.)

On the other hand, the guy who fixes your mission-critical computer 
stuff when it breaks? That guy is seen as necessary and useful, and gets 
paid money. (In varying degrees.) Plus I can walk in the door and say 
that I already get paid to do that for a living. People take that kind 
of thing more seriously.

Post a reply to this message

Le 2011-11-14 05:50, Invisible a écrit :
> On 13/11/2011 10:08 PM, Darren New wrote:
>> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/
>
> Interesting.
>
> I love how I read "you should be able to explain your ideas to a bright
> 8 year old or to the CFO", and I immediately wondered whether the CFO
> would be smart enough to comprehend something a small child can
> understand. ;-)

Technical issues?  They're probably equivalent.  However, an 8 year old, 
would probably have problems understanding how to hide profits in a 
tax-haven country...

>
> In my limited experience, managers are astonishingly stupid people.
> (Depending on how high up they are, generally. Some of the ones lower
> down actually *have* a clue...)

While managers are sometimes hired from the "old boys' network" and make 
Dilbert's Pointy-Haired Boss look like a rocket scientist, as someone 
once pointed out to me, managers have to supervise a team of people,or 
in the case of upper management, teams of teams.  They CAN NOT possibly 
know more than every member of each of these teams.  It's not their 
role.  And, as you point out, the further up the food chain you go, the 
less they know about each individual's field of experitse.  Besides, 
someone who did know more than all of her team members would be a 
horrible manager, micro-managing every one.

This, unfortunately means, that they will sometimes misundertand your 
explanations and will have to go to their management with their flawed 
view of your concerns, and may return with what they think is a "good 
compromise" that is totally unworkable.

-- 
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/*    flabreque    */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/*        @        */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/*   gmail.com     */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }

Post a reply to this message

> Technical issues? They're probably equivalent. However, an 8 year old,
> would probably have problems understanding how to hide profits in a
> tax-haven country...

LOL.

>> In my limited experience, managers are astonishingly stupid people.
>> (Depending on how high up they are, generally. Some of the ones lower
>> down actually *have* a clue...)
>
> While managers are sometimes hired from the "old boys' network" and make
> Dilbert's Pointy-Haired Boss look like a rocket scientist, as someone
> once pointed out to me, managers have to supervise a team of people,or
> in the case of upper management, teams of teams. They CAN NOT possibly
> know more than every member of each of these teams. It's not their role.
> And, as you point out, the further up the food chain you go, the less
> they know about each individual's field of experitse. Besides, someone
> who did know more than all of her team members would be a horrible
> manager, micro-managing every one.
>
> This, unfortunately means, that they will sometimes misundertand your
> explanations and will have to go to their management with their flawed
> view of your concerns, and may return with what they think is a "good
> compromise" that is totally unworkable.

This is how competent management works, yes.

The problem seems to be that most managers apparently don't live in the 
real world. I'm not talking about not understanding computing or 
whatever. As you point out, managers hire other people to do that for them.

I'm talking about things like... The company is making several million 
dollars in losses annually because our order books are *empty*. Back 
when the order book wasn't empty, we were making a decent profit, but 
since our best salesmen left we're getting hardly any business. 
Activities which will not rectify this situation include:

- Firing people.

- Making all employees memorise the 12-point company objectives list.

- Having a meeting once per month where all the employees stop doing 
productive work to spend 2 hours listening to various financial officers 
describe the current health of the company in extraneous detail.

- Redesigning the employee performance appraisal process.

- Changing people's job titles.

- Reducing investment in vital laboratory equipment.

- Giving employees "team work evaluation" questionnaires to fill out.

- Replacing the entire sales team every 3 to 4 months.

- Lecturing employees about efficiency.

- Streamlining order processing via formal task analysis methods.

- Telling people [who haven't seen a pay rise in half a decade] that 
they should be willing to work unpaid overtime when the situation arises 
[even though we've got so little work on that people are sitting around 
the lab reading books and playing Flash games during office hours].

Activities which will improve the situation include:

- Hiring more sales staff and reducing turnover.

- Putting more resources towards customer liaisons.

- Producing a coherent marketing strategy.

Three guesses which set of activities top management are throwing all of 
their time and energy at...

Standing on the ground, it seems as if management have absolutely no 
idea what the problem is, and are blindly trying everything they can 
think of to figure out why we're losing so much money. And, standing on 
the ground, it seems bloody obvious that no sales = no profits. You 
would think that management would be urgently attacking the problem of 
massively increasing sales ASAP, given that we work in an industry with 
extremely high fixed overhead costs that can't be reduced. But nooo...

Post a reply to this message

Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/

  I suppose I should be (and I *am*) very glad to be, at least at the
moment, in a job where I get to solve and implement real, interesting
programming problems (such as problems related to geometry, combinatorics,
low and high level program optimization, and so on) with immediate visible
results and payoff (namely: a playable computer game), where I make the
programming decisions and design.

  I have seen a glimpse of what the "real" world of commercial programming
is, though, as I temporarily had a training job in a much larger firm.
It was a nightmare. CEOs would promise clients results with absolutely
unrealistic dealines, without consulting the project manager, the lead
programmer or any of the development staff, forcing the otherwise very
competent developers to create a haphazard mess with little to no planning
in a record time, with the infrastructure of the project constantly changing
without proper information being delivered to the programmers (which caused
much of the work to have to be rewritten), with no clear instructions on
what should be done when, where and how, and what's worse, with the project
manager, who in this case was also the lead programmer, being forced to sit
in completely useless meetings with the clients and CEOs, where requirements
would constantly change and unrealistic expectations would be constantly
presented.

  At the end of this training period both me and the project manager more
or less silently agreed that I wouldn't continue. I'm glad I didn't. I ended
up costing the company much more money than I could deliver in amount of
work, to no cause of mine. Overall it was an unpleasant experience. (The
fact that the developers there were very competent makes the whole ordeal
even more unpleasant. With enough time and proper organization they would
have made an excellent job, if not for the stupidity of the higher-ups.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

On 14/11/2011 05:35 PM, Warp wrote:

>    I suppose I should be (and I *am*) very glad to be, at least at the
> moment, in a job where I get to solve and implement real, interesting
> programming problems (such as problems related to geometry, combinatorics,
> low and high level program optimization, and so on) with immediate visible
> results and payoff (namely: a playable computer game), where I make the
> programming decisions and design.

I love how when I did my "computer science" degree at uni, the entire 
course was predicated around the idea that you will be writing large 
enterprise systems which consist of a database backend, and a Java or 
HTML front-end, possibly with some middleware in the center. Because, 
seriously, that's all there is, isn't it? It's not like anybody writes 
device drivers, or industrial control software, or computer games, or 
compilers and interpretters, or anything that isn't an enterprise CRUD 
system...

...oh, wait. :-P

>    I have seen a glimpse of what the "real" world of commercial programming
> is, though, as I temporarily had a training job in a much larger firm.
> It was a nightmare. CEOs would promise clients results with absolutely
> unrealistic dealines, without consulting the project manager, the lead
> programmer or any of the development staff, forcing the otherwise very
> competent developers to create a haphazard mess with little to no planning
> in a record time, with the infrastructure of the project constantly changing
> without proper information being delivered to the programmers (which caused
> much of the work to have to be rewritten), with no clear instructions on
> what should be done when, where and how, and what's worse, with the project
> manager, who in this case was also the lead programmer, being forced to sit
> in completely useless meetings with the clients and CEOs, where requirements
> would constantly change and unrealistic expectations would be constantly
> presented.

You mean you worked for a Daily WTF 100 company?

Damn, that must have been fun.

Daft thing is, I imagine time and again it plays out like this:

Sales team: We will deliver this application in 3 weeks.

Dev team: What?! That's impossible! It would take at least 9 months to 
implement that kind of functionality.

Management team: But we told the customer it will take 3 weeks. YOU MUST 
DO IT IN 3 WEEKS!!

So the dev team go off and work heroic miracles to cobble together some 
barely-functional crock of junk in just 3 weeks. And then it gets 
delivered to the customer. And then management sit back and say "gee, I 
guess it *was* a realistic deadline after all; I'll remember that for 
the future..."

And so the cycle is perpetuated forever...

You must be *so glad* you don't work there now.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message

On 14/11/2011 10:50 AM, Invisible wrote:

> Interesting.

I also find it interesting how I had to get out a dictionary no less 
than *seven times* while reading this article. All those people who keep 
telling me I have a really wide vocabulary? They don't know jack.

Again, also interesting is the term "profit center". Obviously everyone 
has heard of a "cost center" (it's what you assign stuff to when you 
need to buy stuff), but I have never, ever heard anybody say the words 
"profit center". Perhaps it's just because people don't argue about it 
quite so much?

(I also had to go look up WTF an MBA actually is, since I've never heard 
of one...)

“Let’s replace really expensive Cost Centers who do some magic which we 
kinda need but don’t really care about with less expensive Cost Centers 
in a lower wage country.”

That sounds pretty much like *exactly* how almost every company views 
programmers. These are useless people that cost huge amounts of money 
but don't generate any value. Surely there is some way we can get rid of 
them? *sigh*

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message

On Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:12:41 +0000, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> All those people who keep telling me I have a really wide vocabulary?
> They don't know jack.

Just because you had to look stuff up doesn't mean you don't have a wide 
vocabulary.  I routinely consult a dictionary (there's one built into my 
Nook e-reader) when reading to make sure I understand what I'm reading.

Jim

Post a reply to this message