Don’t Call Yourself a Programmer 1

90% of programming jobs are in creating Line of Business software

Software solves business problems. Software often solves business problems despite being soul-crushingly boring and of minimal technical complexity.

Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things

Producing beautiful software is not a goal. Solving complex technical problems is not a goal. Writing bug-free code is not a goal. Using sexy programming languages is not a goal. Add revenue. Reduce costs. Those are your only goals.

You really want to be attached to Profit Centers because it will bring you higher wages, more respect, and greater opportunities for everything of value to you. It isn’t hard: a bright high schooler, given a paragraph-long description of a business, can usually identify where the Profit Center is. If you want to work there, work for that. If you can’t, either a) work elsewhere or b) engineer your transfer after joining the company

Don’t call yourself a programmer

Instead, describe yourself by what you have accomplished for previously employers vis-a-vis increasing revenues or reducing costs. If you have not had the opportunity to do this yet, describe things which suggest you have the ability to increase revenue or reduce costs, or ideas to do so.

You are not defined by your chosen software stack

A good engineer has a track record of — repeat after me — increasing revenue or decreasing costs.

Co-workers and bosses are not usually your friends

You should be a good person to everyone you meet — it is the moral thing to do, and as a sidenote will really help your networking — but do not be under the delusion that everyone is your friend.

You radically overestimate the average skill of the competition because of the crowd you hang around with

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.

“Read ad. Send in resume. Go to job interview. Receive offer.” is the exception, not the typical case, for getting employment

There are many reasons why most hiring happens privately. One is that publicly visible job offers get spammed by hundreds of resumes (particularly in this economy) from people who are stunningly inappropriate for the position. The other is that other companies are so bad at hiring that, if you don’t have close personal knowledge about the candidate, you might accidentally hire a non-FizzBuzzer.

Networking: it isn’t just for TCP packets

Networking just means a) meeting people who at some point can do things for you (or vice versa) and b) making a favorable impression on them.

Strive to help people. It is the right thing to do, and people are keenly aware of who have in the past given them or theirs favors. If you ever can’t help someone but know someone who can, pass them to the appropriate person with a recommendation. If you do this right, two people will be happy with you and favorably disposed to helping you out in the future.

Academia is not like the real world

If you’re reading the rest of this, you know that your resume isn’t the primary way to get job interviews, so don’t spend huge amount of efforts optimizing something that you either have sufficiently optimized already (since you’ll get the same amount of interviews at 3.96 as you will at 3.8) or that you don’t need at all (since you’ll get job interviews because you’re competent at asking the right people to have coffee with you).

How much money do engineers make?

In general, big companies pay more (money, benefits, etc) than startups. Engineers with high perceived value make more than those with low perceived value. Senior engineers make more than junior engineers. People working in high-cost areas make more than people in low-cost areas. People who are skilled in negotiation make more than those who are not.

How do I become better at negotiation?

a. Remember you’re selling the solution to a business need (raise revenue or decrease costs) rather than programming skill or your beautiful face.

b. Negotiate aggressively with appropriate confidence, like the ethical professional you are. It is what your counterparty is probably doing. You’re aiming for a mutual beneficial offer, not for saying Yes every time they say something.

c. “What is your previous salary?” is employer-speak for “Please give me reasons to pay you less money.” Answer appropriately.

d. Always have a counteroffer. Be comfortable counteroffering around axes you care about other than money. If they can’t go higher on salary then talk about vacation instead.

e. The only time to ever discuss salary is after you have reached agreement in principle that they will hire you if you can strike a mutually beneficial deal. This is late in the process after they have invested a lot of time and money in you, specifically, not at the interview. Remember that there are large costs associated with them saying “No, we can’t make that work” and, appropriately, they will probably not scuttle the deal over comparatively small issues which matter quite a bit to you, like e.g. taking their offer and countering for that plus a few thousand bucks then sticking to it.

f. Read a book. Many have been written about negotiation. I like Getting To Yes. It is a little disconcerting that negotiation skills are worth thousands of dollars per year for your entire career but engineers think that directed effort to study them is crazy when that could be applied to trivialities about a technology that briefly caught their fancy.

Your most important professional skill is communication

The dominant quality which gets you jobs is the ability to give people the perception that you will create value. This is not necessarily coextensive with ability to create value.

Communication is a skill. Practice it: you will get better. One key sub-skill is being able to quickly, concisely, and confidently explain how you create value to someone who is not an expert in your field and who does not have a priori reasons to love you. If when you attempt to do this technical buzzwords keep coming up (“Reduced 99th percentile query times by 200 ms by optimizing indexes on…”), take them out and try again. You should be able to explain what you do to a bright 8 year old, the CFO of your company, or a programmer in a different specialty, at whatever the appropriate level of abstraction is.

You will often be called to do Enterprise Sales and other stuff you got into engineering to avoid

When you have meetings with coworkers and are attempting to convince them to implement your suggestions, you will also be doing Enterprise Sales. If getting stuff done is your job description, then convincing people to get stuff done is a core job skill for you. Spend appropriate effort on getting good at it. This means being able to communicate effectively in memos, emails, conversations, meetings, and PowerPoint (when appropriate). It means understanding how to make a business case for a technological initiative. It means knowing that sometimes you will make technological sacrifices in pursuit of business objectives and that this is the right call.

Modesty is not a career-enhancing character trait

You are an engineer. You work magic which makes people’s lives better. If you were in charge of the database specifically on an important project involving people then heck yes you lead the database effort which was crucial for the success of the project. This is how the game is played. If you feel poorly about it, you’re like a batter who feels poorly about stealing bases in baseball: you’re not morally superior, you’re just playing poorly.

All business decisions are ultimately made by one or a handful of multi-cellular organisms closely related to chimpanzees, not by rules or by algorithms

People are people. Social grooming is a really important skill. People will often back suggestions by friends because they are friends, even when other suggestions might actually be better. People will often be favoritably disposed to people they have broken bread with.

People routinely favor people who they think are like them over people they think are not like them.

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.

At the end of the day, your life happiness will not be dominated by your career

Either talk to older people or trust the social scientists who have: family, faith, hobbies, etc etc generally swamp career achievements and money in terms of things which actually produce happiness. Optimize appropriately. Your career is important, and right now it might seem like the most important thing in your life, but odds are that is not what you’ll believe forever. Work to live, don’t live to work.