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Comment by zellyn | Hacker News Reader

I was afraid I'd end up in a corporate IT department in a big company that does something other than technology as its main thing.

In Mikey Dickerson's talks about fixing Healthcare.gov he talks about two strains of programming: that descended from a more engineering mindset, and that descended from the IT department. (I'm paraphrasing badly: I'll try to find a better link when I have more time.) I guess I was using "Silicon Valley" as shorthand for the former.

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If at all possible, you want to work where you're a net benefit and somehow directly visibly producing output the company is selling, not where you're a net cost.

Note how the word "computer" doesn't appear in that sentence; it's not unique to computer programming.

Said in traditional business-speak:

Work in a profit center, not in a cost center.

Thats a really nice way to phrase a sentiment I, and I would guess many other HN'ers have long felt.

I'm on the Shared Systems team at Square, and was on Abuse prevention at YouTube, so I pretty much seem to only land in cost centers :-)

But I get to build RPC services and other cool infrastructure in Go.

I work at an NGO that manages investment in farming. We have beuracracy bigger than most governments.

Still get to write cool stuff in Go, Node, Elixir or whatever else takes my fancy and tinker with IoT hardware during work hours :-)

I've been there. You are nothing but a commoditized resource when you are in a "corporate IT" job. That being said programmer-centric jobs can be found anywhere outside SV.

How do you switch from one strain to another? How do you know what strain you work in?

I am working for a large bank this summer in San Fran on their main website. This site has an Alexa score in the top 25 for the US, and is in the top 100 overall. They have said I would be working in NodeJS, as they are rewriting large portions of the site with node. Will this project most likely contain people of the Engineering, or IT mindsets?

IT mindsets.

If you're building a website for a bank, it is definitely IT work. Nobody sees you as anything but a cost center.

>How do you switch from one strain to another?

End up around people that already have that strain, get their attention, and become friends so you can learn and they can teach. You unfortunately just can't teach yourself everything.

It sounds like another form of pedigree selection. Or maybe dividing the field up into "us vs. them". Pretty understandable sentiment if you get pushed into fixing Healthcare.gov like he describes in one of his talks and working with guys arguing about tickets not existing because they're on different ticket systems and people with zero motivation to build a decent product. Wastage is immense in IT from the sounds of it in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Vc8sxhy2I4

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