> Long story short: programmers can do things which meaningfully affect marketing outcomes And... while much of it's been said before... if you call yourself a

> Long story short: programmers can do things which meaningfully affect marketing outcomes And... while much of it's been said before... if you call yourself a programmer, very likely you won't be at the table when decisions about marketing are made in the first place. Might even be on the page linked above, but one of patio11's big suggestions is not to call yourself a programmer. I probably still use the label for myself in some situations, but often when coming in to new consulting projects (solo or with someone else), I'll say something technical, then answer some questions, and I usually get "you don't look like a programmer" or "you don't sound like a programmer", in a 'disbelief' sort of tone. As trivial as it sounds (and it's not, it took years of fighting the 'jump to tech' habit/comfortzone), talking to people about 'the project' at a business/operations/value level is where to start out. "How does it work now? What are you trying to do? Where are the pain points?" etc. Being able to jump down in to the technical weeds when appropriate is a huge bonus - you can talk to their technical staff as well as the rest of the staff and be a bridge. Was doing some work for a company with a main office and mobile workers (mobile folks are out in trucks doing outdoors work - delivering, planting, landscaping, etc). Each dept head knows their stuff, but I was actually a bit surprised that one of the core office staff - been there more than 10 years, and is the main point of contact for the field workers - had never been to their loading dock to see how they worked. (the dock was, for years, about 1000 feet from her office). As I'm asking questions and trying to determine best approaches for some rework, there was almost no one outside of the owners and one other person who'd actually been to all parts of the company. I went out in the truck with one of the field guys for a few hours... but I'm also a "programmer"... this was revolutionary for them (no one who'd pitched solutions to them had ever been in the field before). If you want to be treated like a programmer, call yourself a programmer and behave like one. If you want to be able to give more value to a company/client, do more than a programmer would. But... it's hard to do that in most companies as an insider - you're tasked with XYZ, and your intruding on others' territories when you poke around too much (that was my trouble when working at traditional companies). I want/need to know how the whole thing works, but info sharing is sometimes the only way some people can exert control over their areas.