Archive for the ‘Developer Skills’ Category

Let’s Be Independent Together

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

The Christmas classic ‘Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ is basically one big bundle of awesomeness, but this is a personal favorite:

Hermey: Hey, what do you say we both be independent together, huh?
Rudolph: You wouldn’t mind my – red nose?
Hermey: Not if you don’t mind me being a dentist.
Rudolph: It’s a deal.

There are people who see the world as a zero-sum game.

That would mean that in order for you to be successful, I would have to fail.  And then in order for you to be more successful, I would need to fail more.

It’s the reason why everyone scrambles when a pinata is broken because there’s a finite amount of candy on the ground and in order for you to get some, the other guy needs to get less.

One thing that contributes to that mentality is that programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity, or their skill level.  At best, they are paid based on their ability to negotiate.  At worst, they are paid based on how old they are.

If programmers were paid based on their skill level or productivity, or something that even remotely resembles value to the company – what would be different?

If programmers were hired based on what they could do and not what they said, how could everything not be better?

  • You could spend less time on value-less things that you hate to do, like resumes and more time on honing your craft
  • Companies could spend less money on recruiting and hiring techniques that are notoriously horrible at predicting success and get back to building software

Obviously, this is a step up for the currently under-valued great developer who toils away thanklessly, buried in a team of non-starters.  Even if this were a slight step-down for a more junior developer, at least there would be a clear path ahead where competency and achievement would be rewarded instead of having to play the corporate games and politics.

The only person this would not help is the person who is not productive nor skilled and has no desire to become so.  To them I will say: your life is about to get a whole lot harder.

Things are in full swing at the Code Anthem HQ and the excitement is building.  Code Anthem is going to change the way developers are hired, for the better.  Get ready.

Posted in Developer Skills | 4 Comments »

Old Programmers VS Young Programmers

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Heard this before?

Old programmers are out-dated and outmoded.  All they want to do is program in Cobol and they don’t know anything about modern technologies, as in, ones from this decade.  It takes them half a day to write an email, the other half is spent checking stocks.  And yet, they get more money and higher positions just because they are older.

Or this?

Young programmers are immature and think they know everything, but they don’t know anything.  They think that just because they wrote little programs in college, that they know how to build complex business software better than me.  They’re always telling me what to do, as if I wasn’t once bright-eyed and bushy tailed myself, but now I use my experience to work smarter.

Yes, I went there.

The Self-Esteem Police would say that’s not nice and we shouldn’t talk about that and gee gosh, can’t we all just get along?  Here at Code Anthem, we’re pro reality so we’re talking about it.

The reality is that there are crappy developers of all ages.  And good ones of all ages, too.

We know that and that’s why “education” is not a solution.  We can’t teach people “all old programmers aren’t outdated” and “all young programmers aren’t ignorant” because we know that already.  We’re jaded, not stupid.

These generalizations are clearly not true all of the time, but it’s true often and that’s why the generalization sticks around.

People my age often don’t ask the fundamental questions. When people say things to me, I actually check every one of them. I would encourage you to challenge every assumption. – Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google on TechCrunch

For every one older programmer talking about Ruby and Git there’s several more spouting incomprehensible business-babble or hacking together some monstrosity with a billion LOC.  For every bright and productive young programmer, there’s several more yammering away about the latest acronyms and Web 2.0 and have no idea how to make useful software.  The generalization is there because it’s often true.

The solution is not to cower from the reality of the situation but to face it head-on.

You can become a student and explorer at any age. If you count us older folks out this time, I think you’ll be disappointed to find out that some of us really do get it and have the energy and ambition to create great software. – Dave Winer, Scripting News from Java is a Brand

At whatever age you are, what can you do to provide more value to your business with better technology and better ideas?

Innovation + Usefulness

Inspiration + Experience

Creativity + Application

That is how programmers can come together.

Tags:
Posted in Developer Skills | 14 Comments »