4 ms·

Cross posted from the blog's comments: Stop calling them programmers. That's the first step to motivating them. Your job is not synonymous with the act; there

Cross posted from the blog's comments: Stop calling them programmers. That's the first step to motivating them. Your job is not synonymous with the act; there is a lot more to application development than the actual writing of the code.

mahmud 16y ago
Coding might not be the be-all end-all competence, but technical "maturity" is essential for communication with programmers. And the appropriate designation of developers, as such, is very important. I consult with businesses for software development, and it's crap like this that wastes 10-20 minutes of my time on every conference call. There is a whole layer-cake of bureaucracy around titles and how they're tossed around, and I have to spend that time figuring out which of these analysts/developers/leads/specialists/architects can actually code or admin. It sucks to be in mid deliberation, stream-of-consciousness reporting about what you have done, giving a sermon without shell-completion .. when you get this faint suspicion that the audience doesn't know what you're talking about. When you tell me you have your three developers on the line, I am gonna talk to them like developers. It might sound patronizing, but I am very close to just starting each call with "so, which one of you guys can code?".
gaius 16y ago
Indeed; it's the same as calling people "X resources" where X is a programming language, operating system etc. As I often say, people who do this don't like it much when you do it to them.
bitwize 16y ago
Why? I call myself a programmer. Calling myself anything else anything else (e.g., "developer") seems to be sweeping the issue of what my actual work product is under the rug. My work product is working code. Not design documents. Not architectural diagrams. Code. This goes double for my actual job title ("software engineer"; software is hardly an engineering discipline!) Let me put it this way: When writing a novel, there's a whole host of activity that goes on besides putting words on paper (or in a word processor). Yet we still call writers writers.

mahmud 16y ago

Coding might not be the be-all end-all competence, but technical "maturity" is essential for communication with programmers. And the appropriate designation of developers, as such, is very important. I consult with businesses for software development, and it's crap like this that wastes 10-20 minutes of my time on every conference call. There is a whole layer-cake of bureaucracy around titles and how they're tossed around, and I have to spend that time figuring out which of these analysts/developers/leads/specialists/architects can actually code or admin. It sucks to be in mid deliberation, stream-of-consciousness reporting about what you have done, giving a sermon without shell-completion .. when you get this faint suspicion that the audience doesn't know what you're talking about. When you tell me you have your three developers on the line, I am gonna talk to them like developers. It might sound patronizing, but I am very close to just starting each call with "so, which one of you guys can code?".

gaius 16y ago

Indeed; it's the same as calling people "X resources" where X is a programming language, operating system etc. As I often say, people who do this don't like it much when you do it to them.

bitwize 16y ago

Why? I call myself a programmer. Calling myself anything else anything else (e.g., "developer") seems to be sweeping the issue of what my actual work product is under the rug. My work product is working code. Not design documents. Not architectural diagrams. Code. This goes double for my actual job title ("software engineer"; software is hardly an engineering discipline!) Let me put it this way: When writing a novel, there's a whole host of activity that goes on besides putting words on paper (or in a word processor). Yet we still call writers writers.