
Do call yourself a programmer, and other career advice - smackay
http://www.yosefk.com/blog/do-call-yourself-a-programmer-and-other-career-advice.html
======
analyst74
You should call yourself whatever based on the situation.

If you are hanging out with a group of consultants, you call yourself
consultant; if you are a special effects programmer, and talking to a model,
you say you're in the movie business; if you are interviewing with the author,
you call yourself programmer.

The best way to connect with others is to understand how they perceive things
and find ways to relate to them, not enforcing your own world view onto them.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
This so obvious I'm amazed that it isn't discussed every time this topic comes
up. Programmers seem to think that there is something "dirty" about adjusting
your language according to audience.

~~~
lsc
> Programmers seem to think that there is something "dirty" about adjusting
> your language according to audience.

Yes. I am struggling with this right now, myself. I mean, not specifically
that, but this general idea that putting effort into social bullshit that has
little to do with my actual competence is dirty. It really /does/ feel dirty,
and I have a difficult time articulating why.

The problem is that I have moved myself more towards management, and so
getting people to do what I want really is part of 'competence' now.

A big part of this is that humility (false or not) is so absolutely core to
getting along with other engineers, and so absolutely terrible when dealing
with business types; behavior I have put a lot of effort into training out of
myself now needs to come to the fore.

I don't know. One track is to view social nonverbal communication as ethically
neutral, but eh, that... might have other problems, too. As this is an active
problem for me, I clearly don't have the correct solution.

~~~
dmoney
I've recently found myself in a leadership role as well, and I don't think it
has to do with whether people are business types or not. Humility is necessary
to fit in with peers and to get along with superiors. Confidence is necessary
to influence people (be they peers, superiors, or subordinates), and you can't
manage without influence.

A piece of advice I've seen in a couple places is to focus on service, whether
that's service to your organization or to the team you manage, or the
customer. The idea is that it takes your focus off you and your communication
skills, and lets you argue from what the company or team needs.

~~~
lsc
Edit: Yes, I know this sounds kind of... angry and juvenile. Bitter. That is
what I meant when I said that I clearly don't have the correct solution.

a big part of the problem is that I don't even know what most of these words
I'm using _mean_ \- And honestly? I think it's "confidence[1]" that other
people say they do. Of course, I know I'm not competent enough in that area to
know that for sure.

>I've recently found myself in a leadership role as well, and I don't think it
has to do with whether people are business types or not. Humility is necessary
to fit in with peers and to get along with superiors. Confidence is necessary
to influence people (be they peers, superiors, or subordinates), and you can't
manage without influence.

But when you are dealing with less-experienced Engineers, your accomplishments
are that influence. And when you are dealing with more-experienced Engineers,
well, you should be giving them requirements, and listening to them tell you
what should be done. I mean, yeah, sometimes emotional bullshit intervenes,
but it's bullshit I can mostly deal with.

As an example, I came in conflict with my apprentice a while back... I am
fairly certain the conflict was caused by the fact that he had learned enough
that he was, well, better than me for some of the parts of his job, and that
wasn't the deal when he hired on. (I mean, it also wasn't true when he hired
on; he worked here for a while, and he learned a lot.) I don't know how much
of it was him not adjusting to our new roles and how much of it was me not
adjusting to our new roles (and how much of it was me just not being able to
pay him what he was worth; he ended up getting a much better job elsewhere.)

I mean, I didn't understand how to /fix/ the emotional bullshit, but I had a
pretty good idea of what it was about. that's the thing about dealing with
people who are primarily engineers; I'm not saying that I am good at managing
Engineers? but when I screw it up, I usually have a pretty good idea of how or
why I did so.

The problem is that when you deal with normal folks, they are influenced by
what looks to me like empty arrogance. It's like they have no way of judging
actual skill, so they say "Why don't we do what the tall guy says?" you know,
they focus on things like posture and voice and how you dress... which really
have nothing to do with anything that matters.

My other problem is that I've always been way better at managing down than
managing /up/ \- that's the primary reason I started my own company. If you
always focus on what _you_ think is best for the company and/or the customer?
you are going to come into serious conflict with the management above you. [2]

>A piece of advice I've seen in a couple places is to focus on service,
whether that's service to your organization or to the team you manage, or the
customer. The idea is that it takes your focus off you and your communication
skills, and lets you argue from what the company or team needs.

Yeah, well, it's my company, so I think I do keep my 'eyes on the prize' as it
were. But that doesn't really help when it comes time to negotiate that big
new bandwidth contract (or get them to interpret that contract in my favor,
after it's signed.)

I mean, that's the thing. when you are negotiating with professionals, it's
their job to take as much of the surplus value out of a deal as possible. It
is, by definition, 'surplus value' \- the difference between the highest price
I'm willing to pay and the lowest price they are willing to give me.

(the other thing about negotiating with professionals that is not fun is that
they usually don't have the attention span or the knowledge of their product
offerings to negotiate other than in the emotional manipulation way. I'm very
flexible, and very willing to line up what I buy to what they have surplus.
I'm also very willing to share what I would like, and what I can be flexible
on. A professional? generally speaking, wants to collapse that down to a
linear type deal, where we pick a product and hammer eachother on price until
someone is exhausted. Their secrecy destroys any possible gain in value from
negotiation.)

Of course, now I'm conflating negotiation with influence in general, while I
probably ought to think of those things separately.

[1]Confidence as in "a confidence game" \- I don't think anyone understands
human interaction the way you can understand, say, how a program works. The
meaning of a word someone used early in a conversation changes towards the end
of that conversation. This is where I'm lost with verbal communication. The
line between "saying nice things to give someone a good feeling" and "outright
lying" is... I don't even see it. I have no idea where that line is or if it
even exists. Does a professional think it's even possible to lie in a medium
that isn't recorded?

[2]some of the things my apprentice and I disagreed about would have fallen
under this. The really funny thing, for me? was that I remember having nearly
exactly the same fight with my boss when I was his age, and was working in a
similar role. Things... look different when you have to balance the business
end. But, fundamentally, I think I _can_ learn to deal with those conflicts,
because I understood where the guy was coming from.

~~~
dmoney
It's like entropy: the emotional bullshit in a closed system only increases.
Until one person leaves, or you bleed off the pressure outside it.

With negotiation, my understanding is that the real negotiation starts weeks
beforehand, because the game is about getting an information advantage, enough
to make the other side's shady tactics irrelevant. All the nonverbal skills
are just used to hide the math layer of the exchange. Assuming you can't dump
the shady opponent for one who thinks win-win, but even then having more
information can't hurt.

~~~
lsc
>With negotiation, my understanding is that the real negotiation starts weeks
beforehand, because the game is about getting an information advantage, enough
to make the other side's shady tactics irrelevant.

You say 'shady' \- I say 'professional' because this is what the big guys do.
the bullshit isn't nearly as thick when you are dealing with a smaller
company, generally speaking. They are less interested in wasting time.

Even when dealing with professionals, information is essential, but it doesn't
make the emotional bullshit irrelevant. It's irritating, as first? I don't
know if I want to do something unless I know what it costs. The negotiated
price is generally 30% to 50% of the list price (but that varies a /lot/ both
by vendor and by industry.) And the only real way to get prices is to
negotiate with a vendor. So, yeah, I'm looking at a /lot/ of work to just find
out if a business that, say, requires more bandwidth makes any sense at all.

~~~
dmoney
So the business wouldn't make sense (but just be less profitable) if you had
to pay the list price?

~~~
lsc
some businesses, it makes the difference, like re-selling bandwidth or co-lo;
the margin I get on that sort of thing is usually between 10-50% so if I
negotiate badly from my supplier, yeah, I'm losing money on the deal (or
charging above-market rates, which considering that I'm bad at negotiation,
means I'm losing even more money because the space sits empty.) - usually you
have to get commercial style leases on those resources, too... and so you have
all the problems of commercial leases 'Oh,' the landlord says 'you are doing
well... now that your lease is up, of course, the market rates have gone up!'
even if there are empty units on either side of you.

So yeah, for co-lo? it makes all the difference in the world.

Other things, like VPSs? it's just a matter of profitability... the margins on
VPSs are pretty good if you don't count labor, so it'd be a matter of just not
raising my bandwidth quotas like I ought and maybe spending more money on
hardware.

Sometimes, there are two substitute products, one where it's traditional to
negotiate, and one where it isn't... for instance, if you buy pre-assembled
servers? if you aren't getting 50% off list price, you are getting it in the
shorts. But, if you are buying the parts used to build said servers? generally
speaking, the lowest price on the internet is pretty close to the real lowest
price.

This is the primary reason why I do my own assembly; assembling computers is
way easier than negotiating Dell down to a reasonable price.

So yeah; this is starting to shape what businesses I want to get into. I mean,
co-location only has margin if you own the building. (I'm working on that
part, but I don't have an ETA.) - so yeah, if the 'owning the building' deal
doesn't work out... well, I'm not going to dump existing customers, but I am
not taking more at the moment.

------
alxbrun
I was having a beer in this small Brazilian town, mid-afternoon. Two girls
come to my table. We try to chat ; they can't speak any foreign language and
my Portuguese is awful.

\- Me: What is your job ?

\- The girls: Programma

\- Me (for the next 30 minutes): Oh great, me too ! Which languages ? <here
comes the enumeration of the 100 programming languages I know, each one
pronounced in 10 different ways, Brazilian accent, etc.>

Even "Java" didn't seem to mean anything to them. Strange. I assumed they had
special programming languages in Brazil.

10 years later, in Palo Alto. I read some article about Brazil society. One
word catches my attention.

Programma = Prostitute. Oh.

So yes, don't call yourself a programmer. Especially in Brazil when you don't
know the language.

~~~
crazygringo
That's pretty funny. In case anyone's wondering, the full term is "garota de
programa", literally "girl of program" or "program girl". Obviously, the
English is "call girl".

Normally, "programa" just means events, like "what's the program for the
evening?". Here, of course, you can figure it out yourself.

~~~
mtraven
Now I'm wondering if there is a difference between call-by-value girls and
call-by-reference girls.

~~~
alxbrun
If only my wife's body was immutable.

~~~
bigtech
I'd love to continue this but I have garbage collection to attend to.

~~~
Phlarp
And they say nobody around here has a sense of humor! Happy to see it was just
a matter of injecting the proper dependencies!

~~~
donutdan4114
Whoops, came to reddit by accident.

------
jmduke
A few comments:

1\. _To me, however, a programmer is who I 'm looking for, while a resume full
of revenue increases and cost reductions sounds like an "anomalously high-cost
parasite who types some mumbo-jumbo into Excel and PowerPoint, claiming credit
for others' work"._ This is in no small part because you are a programmer. The
vast majority of people who pay other people for work that involves
programming are _not_ programmers (and that does not make them any less smart,
or any less lucrative.)

2\. Abstracting a greater point from Ron Garret's career history is tricky, if
only because the vast majority (by which I mean myself) of programmers will
never reach his level of competence.

3\. There is absolutely a chance that the value of the company which employs
you will increase by ten times over the course of your employment. This chance
is vastly overestimated by workers, especially in startups.

Overall, I think Yosef is misconstruing a lot of patio11's original points
(though the points Yosef makes, especially about forming relationships with
coworkers, are still quite true.) Perhaps the biggest takeaway: the path to
success in a chip architecture career is entirely different than the path to
success in a SaaS/freelancing career.

~~~
_yosefk
My replies to your points:

1\. Do you have stats? In absolute terms, a whole lot of people hiring
programmers have programmed themselves. How do you know the other people
hiring programmers are "the vast majority"? (I sincerely wonder about it. I
cited two numbers by two bloggers, one says it's 80% of the cases, the other
says 90%. I have no idea, but I intuitively feel it's less than 50%. Are there
real stats?)

2\. I mentioned Ron Garret because I replied to an article mentioning him and
Google as a proof of something that this example actually disproves, not
because I thought it's a good example to generalize from.

3\. I agree, which is why I said that people overvalue _early_ option grants
(hoping for the value to rise tenfold which it probably won't); I added to
that an explanation why _late_ option grants past the point where value can
possibly rise tenfold are undervalued (because the money you make is the
difference in prices, which rises with the absolute value of the stock price
even if the growth rate goes down.)

I said near the end that I'm not sure I'm reading the original article as
intended so you could say I misrepresent it; what I am pretty sure of is that
a whole lot of people read it very closely to the way I'm reading it in my
reply, and I'm writing for those people.

Your "biggest takeaway" is exactly what I'd like the takeaway to be; all I'm
saying is that SaaS/freelancing career is not the only path to succeed in
"programming", and that there are other paths you might want to take and you'd
behave differently if you took them.

~~~
msellout
1\. There are far more non-programmers than programmers. Even with a
correlation between being a programmer and hiring programmers, it is plausible
that the vast majority of hiring managers are non-programmers. This becomes
more plausible if you step back a layer to the budget allocation for headcount
rather than specific hiring decision.

~~~
gingerlime
Isn't it also plausible that after the first programmer hire (by non-
programmer), any subsequent hiring will at least involve this first
programmer?

I would even go as far as saying that an 'expert opinion' from a programmer
would typically be involved in the hiring decision (be it from an external
consultant, a friend or what not). Given that the non-programmer would
typically realise they don't have themselves the skills to evaluate
programming abilities or CVs.

~~~
dmoney
_> Isn't it also plausible that after the first programmer hire (by non-
programmer), any subsequent hiring will at least involve this first
programmer?_

Definitely. You'll generally have to convince a programmer of your competence.
Once you've passed that test, you may also have to negotiate with a non-
programmer for your salary. At that second stage is when you want to be able
to convince someone of your ability to multiply dollars.

------
dkrich
I think Patrick's article is one of the best-written I've seen about the
realities of the intersection of programming and business for people who have
come from a strict tech background with zero business exposure. In my
experience what he says is spot-on in almost every way.

Businesses exist to make money. Yes, very often making stuff is an integral
part of the business model, but its still a business. To excel in a business
you need to be responsible for growing its bottom line. This can only happen
through increasing revenue or decreasing costs.

This probably applies more to consulting than any other field. If you go to a
potential client and try to sell them on the fact that you are the best Java
developer in 5 states, they are going to look at you with glazed eyes and stop
listening. Tell them you think you can bring them a 10% increase in revenue
with a simple piece of software, and you will get much further. This is in
fact how large consulting firms make sales every day. I assure you they don't
send in their developers to sell clients, they send in people who are flashy
and know how to appeal to a decision-maker's interests.

I think more than anything his article explains things that are necessary to
successfully convey value to purse holders who don't speak techie. If you
restrict yourself to describing yourself in purely technical terms, you will
sound great to other people who understand you but will never resonate with
those who don't.

------
tootie
The business terms are "cost center" and "profit center". If you do IT for a
financial firm, you are a cost to be controlled. If you do product development
at a software company, your work contributes directly to profits and the more
of you there are, the more profit they make. I can add that aside from
software, consulting also treats programmers as profit makers although clients
will see you as a huge cost. Good companies know that IT facilitates their
work and should be treated with respect, but that mindset is still the
exception rather than the rule. The one an interviewer told me I had asked an
excellent question, was to ask how IT is viewed within this (financial)
organization

~~~
bigtech
In a former life, projects were paid for either from 'expense' or 'capital
expenditure' buckets. Investors like expenses to be low as possible, but
capital expenditure is investment in the future. Managers were always trying
to creatively finagle projects in whichever bucket had some available money.

------
dwc
There's a major point in this article that not many commenters seem to be
picking up on: there's a fork in the road of careers. To one side is a
multilane highway over fairly level ground leading straigh to predictable
suburbia. To the other side is an uneven dirt path leading through mountains
and countryside to parts unknown and has many forks of its own. Neither path
is right for everyone. And hardly anyone needs to be talked into the highway,
as it's the default choice and the common wisdom.

The sad part comes when some bright, young up-and-comer leaves off their
interesting personal projects in less used languages in order to focus on only
mainstream stuff.

~~~
UK-AL
Its also sad when some bright up and comer ends working for lots of little
small companies, on a tiny wage when they could be earning a seriously better
life working for a large company.

~~~
nbouscal
"earning a seriously better life" is one of the saddest phrases I've heard.
You don't earn a good life, you make it.

~~~
UK-AL
Of course you can. For a lot people the good life is a nice family, nice
holidays, not being stressed. For that you require money. Otherwise you might
end up in a tiny apartment, eating cheap food, feeling quite stressed.

~~~
nbouscal
No. Having a nice family, nice holidays, and not being stressed _do not_
require money. Furthermore, your counterexample of a tiny apartment and cheap
food don't actually contrast your definition of the good life. You can have a
nice family, nice holidays, and not be stressed while living in a tiny
apartment and eating cheap food. A lot of people do so every day, all around
the world.

------
tempestn
Having just hired two senior programmers (admittedly for a small "software
company"), I couldn't possibly agree more with this: "To me, however, a
programmer is who I'm looking for, while a resume full of revenue increases
and cost reductions sounds like an 'anomalously high-cost parasite who types
some mumbo-jumbo into Excel and PowerPoint'."

Resumes full of marketing-speak go onto the discard pile very quickly. I want
to hear about your skills, and I want to see that you can present them
effectively (which is your first opportunity to demonstrate your intelligence
and aesthetics). People who claim to be programmers but talk about revenue
growth and such _in their resumes_ are always the types who want to talk to
you about how they "have tons of great ideas, [they] just need a team to
implement them!" Well great, then start your own company. I'm certainly
looking for smart people with ideas, but we already have a product and work
that needs to be done. We're not here to provide a team to implement our new
hire's hand-wavey built-for-adsense get rich quick site or whatever.

Whew. OK, veered a bit into hyperbole there, but it demonstrates the visceral
sort of mental response that kind of resume can provoke...

Edit: Given other comments that agree with focusing on costs and revenues,
maybe the take-away is that you should really have two separate copies of your
resume, and do your best to find out whether a programmer or non-programmer
will be reading it before choosing which one to send. Because it seems like
the reactions are essentially polar opposites. Which honestly I find
surprising. I would expect that what sounds like mumbo-jumbo to one
intelligent person would largely sound like mumbo-jumbo to another intelligent
person, regardless of specific discipline - even if those disciplines are as
different as marketing and programming. Perhaps I just haven't ever received a
_good_ resume that focused on financials.

~~~
bobbydavid
something to consider, though: your job may not be the best opportunity for
this hypothetical candidate we're musing about. for pure programming skill,
there is no well-defined "value" for the business, which means you simply want
to hire the best programmer for the least cost. in many markets today this is
about $200k for an entry level programmer (employer costs). why pay more than
that?

the point of marketing mumbo-jumbo is that it frames the value of the
individual. if a candidate is capable of making you $10 million extra dollars,
why not pay them $1m? you'd be a fool not to!

~~~
_yosefk
Erm... because that $10M is a conjecture, while the $1M is a cost paid upfront
with complete certainty? Or do you want to pay in equity? Also - because
someone else is willing to do the same job for less? I'm not sure that
"framing my value" will help me when someone is willing to do the same for
less money.

------
quaffapint
In the huge mega conglomerate where I work, I was told by my old boss to not
call myself a 'programmer', as those with that title they can outsource to
India, I had to have something with Architect in it to hopefully keep me
employed continuing the daily grind.

Of course in all reality I am more of an architect, but when people ask what I
do, do I say architect of this or that, and have to explain that, or simply
computer programmer and that they get right away.

~~~
cglace
Yeah, I usually say programmer/software engineer rather than architect. Makes
explaining it a lot easier

------
johnrob
I don't agree with the point about later stage options:

 _But what this misses is that you don 't get paid in percentage points - you
get dollars. A $100 share going up 20% to $120 means you make $20 per share. A
$5 share going up 100% to $15 means you only make $10 per share._

If you join a larger company, the shares will be more expensive but you will
own less of them. Percentage growth is definitely the way to measure
opportunity when it comes to options. In other words: (how much I might earn)
/ (how much I have to pay).

~~~
_yosefk
If you _join_ a larger company, yes you'll get less. If you _stay_ in a
company while it grows larger and you _then_ negotiate for more options, maybe
you'll get relatively many, as you're now rather uniquely valuable to that
company. What people do instead is decide that options aren't worth it any
more because how much the price will rise at this point, and ask for
relatively small salary increases instead of relatively large option grants.
This is doubly wrong since their salary is already pretty high at that point
and there's a ceiling on salaries for various reasons that I don't fully
understand but which certainly exist, while there's much less of a ceiling on
option grants.

------
coldcode
I have been a professional programmer for 32 years. When I stop calling myself
a programmer I will call myself dead (if I could).

~~~
el_fuser
My "career" aspiration in school was to be a bearded, suspenders wearing unix
admin/hacker.

I don't ever want to get non-technical. I've been a project manager, and found
the work excruciatingly boring.

I've been a freelancer, and found the work mind numbingly boring.

I much prefer working for a company where I can be neck deep in designing and
building challenging products.

------
xyzzy123
Funny thing. It took me _ages_ before I actually had the balls to call myself
a programmer.

------
ExpiredLink
I don't call myself a programmer because software development is not
programming, probably not even mainly. Moreover, programmer gives other people
a false impression of your work. Outsiders consider a 'programmer' to be a
'trained monkey that does the typesetting'. Software developer, in an all-
encompassing sense, is the best description I have found for my work.

~~~
diminoten
I promise you, outsiders have no concept of what a programmer does beyond,
"Works magic with a computer." "Software developer" and "programmer" are
equivalent to the layman.

The negative association with the word "programmer" is an industry-specific
thing.

~~~
ExpiredLink
Zed Shaw on corporate programmers (not mainly on titled ACLs):
[http://vimeo.com/2723800](http://vimeo.com/2723800)

------
zura
In Georgia, it is the mostly used title - "Programisti".

Because, we don't have one single word, the synonym of "Software". So word by
word translation of "Software Engineer" in Georgian would be:

Computer Program Provisioning Engineer.

Nobody uses this title.

~~~
gdy
Your Georgian language looks exactly like Russian J

~~~
zura
Actually no. There can be some particular similarities, as with any other
language, but overall, they are quite different.

------
corprew
When I was first started out in programming, someone gave me the advice "never
work at a company where you're a cost, always work at a company where your
output is [directly tied to] the profit."

It seemed like a truism, and was somewhat memorable. To date, the only really
bad jobs I've had in programming/engineering/what have you were ones where my
work output was seen as a cost and not as a product or service, so anecdotally
it's worked out.

------
bitwize
No, the person he's responding to is right. In general, hiring managers don't
care about bits, they care about dollars. They're going to be looking for
dollars you made for other companies because that translates into dollars you
can make for them.

Money. It's the universal language.

~~~
_delirium
That is not true across the board. Many companies are looking for specific
technical talent. When nVidia is looking for someone to fill a specific niche
on the CUDA team, they don't care about how much money you made for company A
or B; they care whether you have the technical ability to fill the niche as
they conceive of it. The hiring manager isn't naive, and already has an idea
of why this position was created and what they're looking for in a hire. The
interviewer is quite likely to be an engineer already on the team.

What they want you to convince them of is that you have the technical skills
to fill the role. If you start talking about ROI and business value, it can be
seen as a red flag that you're from a more "soft" background like business
informatics, and not a good fit for the position.

Of course, if you're getting hired by someone who _doesn 't_ have a specific
technical role they're trying to fill, or doesn't know what exactly they're
looking for, the situation will be different. But that is not usually the case
at chip-design firms.

------
nawitus
I thought the general advice is to call yourself a software engineer.

~~~
Glyptodon
I hate the trend of calling people who code 'engineers.' It's just not a good
title for anything to do with software. And invariably people who embrace its
usage seem to be trying to compensate or ignorant of what a real engineer
actually does or is.

~~~
jjsz
The trend extends to other words. Sometimes I hear Programmers calling
themselves Computer Scientists or Computer Engineers [1] [2] [3] when in
different cases they are a Developers or a Hacker. Which they get wrong too.
You are what you are. of you're acting another role you should state that
you're playing that role not that you are.

Ex. Computer Scientist, who can fill the role of a Programmer.

This discussion keeps popping up [4] [5] , but the definitions are clear. I
believe there's a Wikipedia article somewhere that explains all the
differences.

[1] In Puerto Rico [2]
[http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/undergrad/academics/degrees/cs-
vs...](http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/undergrad/academics/degrees/cs-vs-cen) [3]
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer)
[4]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5936652](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5936652)
[5] [http://blog.hartleybrody.com/hacker-developer-
engineer/](http://blog.hartleybrody.com/hacker-developer-engineer/)

~~~
chc
What's the difference between a computer scientist filling the role of
programmer and somebody who is both a computer scientist and a programmer? If
you can fill the role of X competently, why can you not rightly be said to be
an X?

~~~
jjsz
You're X AND Y. Not just Y. Just like someone here on HN who worked on their
double bachelors of Math AND Physics while there was a minor called Math-
Physics. S(he) worked hard for that and.

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laurentoget
I am suprised the author does not mention growing a beard and wearing sandals
among his career advice. That sure has kept me from having to interact with
the likes of Patrick McKenzie.

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dschiptsov
First of all, taking patio11 too seriously is a sing of having inadequate
mental representation of so-called reality.

Ironically, there is some unintentional truth is his blogpost - one really
shouldn't call oneself programmer, because what he described is a dumb coder.
Programmer could realize what is blogging, not vise versa.)

A programmer (one who understands how things works and why) will easily avoid
such scenarios like ending up in a coding sweatshop or toxic things like PHP,
Java or JavaScript. It is obvious that one should avoid certain things, like
one avoids scams, frauds or just wrong things.

Real programmers, such as rtm, pg (god forbid!) sysoev would always find a
niche for oneself and a project to do. The difference is that _they
themselves_ would choose what to program and why, not someone else.

Another point is about whose opinion one should value and why. Programmers
usually does not care what "talking-heads" are broadcasting, intuitively and
correctly anticipate that there would be zero useful or even interesting
information for them. It is like to read, say, Oracle's press-releases and PR
pamphlets about mysql instead of actual Changelog files.

So, right, do not call yourself programmer if you're mere a coder or blogger.
There is some truth in it.)

~~~
_yosefk
You know, somehow your comment conveys a uniquely Russian atmosphere, making
me feel slightly nostalgic.

