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Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

The one piece of advice I would give myself 15 years ago:

In the corporate world be very good at administration. You only need to just be good enough at programming to not get fired. Everybody has opinions on software techniques and nobody measures anything, so it’s really just a popularity/tool game. The only goals are retain employment or promote out of software, being good at software is just a distraction from the goals.

If you want to be excellent at programming do it as a hobby and set your expectations right that it’s only a hobby.

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I really hate that attitude. It's so self-defeating. The only way to ever advance your career is by becoming a worthless little middle-manager parasite? I'd rather quit. I know that's the common belief: just program long enough that you never have to do it again and then you get a cushy job telling other people what to do and spending hours in worthless meetings coming up with short-sighted "initiatives" to pump up your bullshit metrics so you can climb the ladder-of-shit even higher and play your ridiculous game over and over again while sucking the blood out of the work that real employees are doing. Unfortunately you might even be right that that's the optimal strategy for some kind of psycopathic narcissist who only cares about making as much money for as little work as possible. But some people want to do more with their professional life than to become a slimy little worm parasitizing the hard work of others.

Your attitude towards management is self-defeating too. Good managers make sure people aren’t working on the wrong problems, they clear barriers, and the defend the team from distractions from above.

It doesn’t match my experience. I developed features faster than the rest of my team and implemented a bunch of practices that are not known in the industry. As a result we delivered more and I got promoted.

Also be vary of someone saying that just because things aren’t measured it is just an opinion. Most important decisions you make won’t be measurable (a lot will though), that does not mean there aren’t good and bad decisions.

Could you expand a bit on what you mean by administration?

Not OP but I would say, generally non-engineering things that keep the business people happy. Project planning, delegating tasks, dashboards and metrics (customer feedback, if you can acquire it, is a big plus), setting and meeting deadlines, and knowing how to sell yourself.

There's that old (and very true) wisdom that if you solve a complex problem in two days, the business people won't think "wow, this guy is so smart and hard-working for solving that in 2 days." They will think "oh, this problem must not have been very hard to solve. Let's assign him extra work." Being a good engineer only gets you so far, career-wise.

Writing ample clear documentation, precision of communication, dutifully fulfilling all timesheets, logging of work performed, attending all requested meetings, and always delivering work on time.

The paperwork matters far more than the actual work. Having your Jira tickets (or whatever) up to date and highly granular, and organized into all the taxonomies of sprints/epics/etc, and of course actually communicating status with teammates, tends to be significantly higher-valued than any actual code you're getting done, at least as far as winning brownie points and promotions are concerned.

This resonates well with my thinking. Programming I do for money is quite different from programming I do as a hobby.

If I wouldn't keep them separate, I would lose passion to it fairly quickly.

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