8 ms·

There is no future in software development as a job. Move to a management position quickly, network, make friends with decision makers, don't spend too much tim

• noway421 9y ago
  I really hope this has some elements of satire in it.
  • bitL 9y ago
    I wish... I worked for many companies everyone wanted to get in, and am still approached by big 4 ones G/FB/AP/AM (no MS as I rejected their offer already). What I observed is that consistently the ones that move to the top are the ones that master the practice of appearance, backstabbing, instigating fear of "missing the train" in superiors, throwing peers under the bus when fitting, betraying trust, sensing and adapting to prevailing winds, and most importantly making their superiors feel happy (I even experienced how a female colleague arranged a large deal with another company by having an affair with their VP, then got rewarded by becoming a head of a new office - I quit in disgust). It's Roman empire game all over again, software is no longer nerd/geek game (only if you wish to become a slave to psychos). If you still want to experience BS-free environment, move to bleeding edge AI/ML/robotics instead, that might have some 15 years future before it becomes another nightmare and all failed manager-types from other fields move in.
    • marktangotango 9y ago
      I have noticed there is a stark contrast between those who are aware of the political environment and those who aren't. You seem to be hyper aware and 'plugged in' to hear these stories. Most developers just write code and post memes on the team slack/hipchat channel, completely oblivious to things going on around them. You should blog about some of this, changing names and obfuscating to "protect the innocent" so to speak. Also, read up on the Gervais Principal if you have not :)
      • bitL 9y ago
        Maybe it's that half of my family are politicians/lawyers, many of them leaning towards high-performing psychopathy and observing their behavior since being a child, their attempts to control me, expressing frustration I figured out their game and deny them, and then observing the same at work with those "ambitious persons", thinking anyone that does work is an idiot and should be handled like a child in a kindergarten, has something to do with me being hyperaware of what is going on around me. Frankly, one of my favorite things in the office was to emit bubbles of incomplete information to individual persons and observe who gets to know that piece of information, mapping alliances at work - they were oblivious of being tested, always triumphant they knew better and it was just fun to simulate a clueless person on my side just to understand how did they exactly operate. Try it, it's fun and a quite harmless "game people play".
        • cliffy 9y ago
          That second paragraph makes it sound like you picked up some of those psychopathic tendencies. It doesn't seem healthy to play those types of games with people, as harmless as it may be. Yes, the reality of life is that it's not a meritocracy or even within a stone's throw of it. There's a fine line between acknowledging the reality of it and succumbing to it. The abyss gazes also.
        • crush-n-spread 9y ago
          The comments you wrote in this thread really hit me. I truly appreciate your writing them down, and as other posters have said, writing a blog post about this would be really helpful to us. What you're saying is true. No one cares about the tech.
  • bbcbasic 9y ago
    Nope. It's not far from the truth.
  • marcosdumay 9y ago
    Well, if it does, I can copy and paste it here under my name without the satire.
• angelbob 9y ago
  This is very cynical, but not basically wrong.
• taway_1212 9y ago
  > wear objects of power (like rings) The "one ring to rule them all" approach...
• kzisme 9y ago
  > If you really need to make software (like I do), make your own company and license/sell your work instead for >500% more than what would be your salary. The hardest part about this (for me) is finding a project/product to begin working on. I'm assuming you came to that sort of idea while working for others (which seems like the best way to learn).
  • yeukhon 9y ago
    For me, I can't do the front-end stuff, so I am stuck with not able to do anything with my ideas. This is where the networking part would help.
    • imron 9y ago
      > For me, I can't do the front-end stuff Why not? What's stopping you from learning?
      • yeukhon 9y ago
        I tried many times, I simply doesn't seem to be good at it.
        • bigjimmyk3 9y ago
          I'm in a similar situation, but don't think of this as an unsolvable problem: 1. Find people who are great at it and be interested in how they do it. I think of this as learning to read good design before you write it. They may be interested in how you do what you do as well. 2. For me, one of the most productive steps was learning the basic mechanics of the bootstrap CSS framework. It did not make me better at designing beautiful web pages, but it did help me make something minimally usable (i.e. not repulsive) that lets me get my ideas roughed out. With a few days of learning, you may be surprised by what you can do. 3. If the best you can do is a cookie cutter design that lets you get started, congratulations! You can get started! What I mean is, I have felt what you are feeling, and there are ways around the problem. Good luck!
  • 9y ago
• draw_down 9y ago
  I knew you were joking when you said our field used to be a meritocracy.
• deleted 9y ago
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• scriptkiddy 9y ago
  This is some of the worst advice I've ever seen. Do this if you want to die sad and alone with nothing but your money beside you I guess. The last sentence is actually not bad advice though.
  • gdulli 9y ago
    Yeah this is how the world gets Donald Trumps.
  • bitL 9y ago
    It used to be better, now if you aren't running your own software company you are treated as a 3rd class citizen and you have to become sleazy "Saul Goodman" to prosper. I am super disgusted by the state of affairs right now, which is why I am running my own businesses, but don't expect this would get any better as the computing tech innovation pace has slowed down to a crawl, stabilizing existing power structures for the next 50 years.
    • scriptkiddy 9y ago
      I guess it depends who you work for. I prefer to work at small new companies until they get off the ground. Then I shift to the next small new company. Small meaning < 30 employees for the whole organization. Pay isn't as great, and the work is definitely more under pressure, but I find that the only thing expected of me is quality work. I don't have to worry about trying to climb ladders or schmoozing management. I understand that not everyone has the skill set to do what I do, but I think that if you're tired of Mega Corp social engineering, taking the pay cut for more personally rewarding work is a great path to go down. After all, quality of life has very little to do with what you have beyond a certain threshold and more to do with what you make of it. I get paid less than other developers in my area, but I work entirely from home and I choose the technologies, architecture, language, etc.
      • bitL 9y ago
        I actually tried them all, ranging from megacorps that were darlings of techies and Wall Street to nimble startups with amazing tech. It was politics everywhere, at startups even more nepotistic/cronyistic than in megacorps (e.g. seeing a wife of a cofounder and CEO wasting money on getting selfies with some marketing pseudo-celebrities instead of doing real marketing, and knowing I can't say a word because she basically controlled her husband).
• MaybiusStrip 9y ago
  This is like reading advice from an alternate reality. Almost all the VPs, senior managers, principals, etc. that I've encountered in my career are poorly-dressed nerds, not ring-wearing, macho douchebags. If you are a politician in software, you will eventually get found out by someone competent and get the boot. The only way you can succeed as a politicking fraud is to hop jobs every-time the people around realize you can't actually do anything, or ride sinking ships. Even if some completely broken companies, this was good advice, it would be a recipe for a pretty pathetic existence.
  • bitL 9y ago
    I agree it's a pathetic existence, which is why I am stating it plainly here as our field is becoming exactly as "any other field" quickly. You'd be surprised what goes on behind the scenes at the top level of most tech companies... Most boards of directors are comprised of non-tech members, bringing their own distortions everywhere. The only force we had was the pace of innovation, and that is no longer happening so massively in software as we reached the end of Moore's law, and only few bright spots are still on like AI/ML/robotics where companies can't afford to cross the "bozo event horizon".
    • MaybiusStrip 9y ago
      That's just not my experience at all. But clearly, it's been yours. Perhaps there are two very different sides to this field, in which case my advice is to keep looking if you find yourself on the wrong one. From where I stand, software engineering has been an absolute boon. I have friends who are doctors, lawyers, consultants, traders, writers, salespeople, marketers... On nearly every metric -- pay per hour, amount of bullshit I deal with, variety and interest -- my job beats theirs. I started coding when I was 10 years old because I was a big nerd who wanted to make video games. I never, ever thought I'd make a top 3% salary 5 years out of college doing something I love. I'm tremendously grateful for that. I've been really successful by just being good at what I do, and that's mostly what I've seen other successful people do around me. At the end of the day, unless you own your own labor, someone else will be profiting off of it. The lower down on the ladder you are, the bigger the gap between the value you produce and your income. But that being said, software is not such a bad place to be relative to other fields.
• ryandrake 9y ago
  This is both cynical and exceedingly true. It's something I totally missed early on as a naive developer-puppy who just assumed that doing a good job was enough. The politics tend to be even worse in smaller companies where everyone knows everyone and it's harder to carve out your little corner of expertise and hide/ignore the drama.
  • runT1ME 9y ago
    Maybe this is true, but plenty of big companies are hiring tons of engineers... so I don't know how this is true universally.
• AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  > There is no future in software development as a job. Wrong. I've been at it for 30 years. It's not all roses, but it's still pretty good. The key is to be doing something where 30 years of experience is worth more than 5 years of experience. I'm in embedded systems, and the experience matters there (to enough people, even if not to everyone). Web programming? I'm less convinced that it matters there. > Move to a management position quickly... It is my explicit career goal to never become a manager. I've seen what that looks like, and I don't want it. I might make more money if I did, but it's not worth it.
  • bitL 9y ago
    At some point your brain stops working, you won't be able to compete with fresh graduates, the capability:wage ratio will be very low in your case; you'd get a prompt boot, never to be able to be employed on the same level again. Experience in our field has negative value and unless you get another M.S./PhD every 10 years to demonstrate you are still on top, you are toast.
    • AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      False so far, and I'm 55. I kick the rear end of fresh graduates. They can type a lot faster, turn out more lines of code per day. Great. I don't write the bugs that they write, so I don't have to take the time to find and fix them. I don't make the design mistakes that they make, so I don't have to fight the design flaws to get things done. They work harder; I get more done, and I get paid accordingly. And if you think that the answer for "your brain stops working" is to go into management, all I can say is that I'm glad you're not my manager...
      • bitL 9y ago
        You are probably in 1% of lucky ones. Imagine you have a bad year (sickness, family issues etc.) and you don't have management that is used to you around (e.g. there is a reshuffling). How long would you manage to stay? You should put this into your equation. I also dislike being a manager but I am more capable manager than all managers I've been under (maybe I am just unlucky but I don't think so). We all know the best teams self-organize and don't need managers, yet all companies enforce some power structure around to keep control, and reward mainly members of that power structure.
• deleted 9y ago
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• iopuy 9y ago
  I absolutely disagree. There is no future in software development as a job How can you make such a blanket statement? Software is a more lucrative position for more people now than ever in history. You want to be a manager?? Who will you be managing?? Programs that write other programs??
  • bitL 9y ago
    Programs will write other programs, there is extensive work on this problem in progress with some nice low-hanging fruit available in research already. The future will need genius-level swengs only, all mundane/boilerplate/lookup tasks will be done by semi-automated systems and most swengs won't be needed anymore. I am working in this field and can clearly see where it goes and we finally have means to accomplish it within 1 generation. If you aren't involved in AI/ML/robotics, you are going to be most likely sorry, fighting for low-income developer jobs for those that can't afford automation tools.
    • cookiecaper 9y ago
      We go through this once a decade. The problem is a fundamental byproduct of the disconnect between humans, to whom mathematics and logic are foreign concepts that take consistent work to internalize and apply, and machines, for whom ambiguity, context, and perspective are foreign concepts that take consistent work to "internalize" and apply. Call me a philistine, but I don't really believe we will ever get the natural->logical language mapping perfect enough to obliterate the need for developers on a massive scale. New languages beget new possibilities, which companies want to employ people to exploit, and so on. Higher-level languages have "obsoleted" the task known as "programming" over and over again, to the point where there will often be 4-5 "automatic programming" layers between the code written by a person and the code that a physical machine executes. It's been 35+ years since your average developer would write machine code directly (i.e., without depending on an "automatic programming" environment (aka "a compiler") under the covers). There will always be a need to translate natural language into logical language.
      • bitL 9y ago
• cookiecaper 9y ago
  >Basically, don't hack computers but people around you. Ding ding ding! I agree with most of your advice, but this is the heart of it. People are very basic machines. Your job as an employee is ONLY to a) make your boss feel good and b) make your boss look good. Protesting this is simple naivety. The sooner you internalize and accept it, the better off you will be. I have met multiple men who've lost everything at retirement age because they were naive and allowed themselves to be lulled to a false calm by slick workplace politicians. These events are _not_ pretty. In software, there is a natural merit barrier to performing even the minimal job functions that can allow us to confuse it for a meritocracy. This is why slick MBAs are reluctantly forced to accept people with basic hygiene problems inhabiting corners of their offices. But mistaking this for actual respect for merit is fatal faux pas. This is a simple reality that most of the rest of the world was forced to accept during their first jobs out of high school. Software engineers are spoiled, and far too many of us allow it to go to our heads. >There is no future in software development as a job. You're getting some push back on this because it's not really universally true. It depends on the individual's goals and ambition. You absolutely can spend 30 years as an employed software developer if you're happy with where that leaves you (and a large number of people are, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that). However, if you want to be more than an employee/pawn, if you want to make decisions, if you want to get more than a pittance of the proceeds -- you must accept and realize that your field of operation must be human psychology, and it must be correctly applied in its various forms (politics, marketing, etc.). The sooner this is accepted, the better. Literally just in the last couple of weeks, I watched a multi-million dollar company with dozens of employees get wrested away from a competent (if complacent) engineer by useless, image-obsessed political hacks. The kicker? That's not the first time it's happened to him. Do not let the small successes that people are forced to give based on merit go to your head, or you'll end up like him.
• eikenberry 9y ago
  This is the truth if you are locked into only working at fortune 500 companies (ie. large enterprise shops). Once you branch out from those to small/mid-sized companies you find a lot more variation and not so much stupidity. I find mid-sized companies tend to be the sweet spot between minimizing stupid politic and receiving decent pay.
• d1ffuz0r 9y ago
  >There is no future in software development as a job. this
• throwaway_4564 9y ago
  Just wanted to add that bitL vision is the actual truth even if the cynical aspect has been singled out. What bitL describes is the single most important factor in career advancement for a lot of software companies I've seen.
• ionised 9y ago
  This is a great post. Read it and do the opposite of everything it says.