Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

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> "I'm just this guy who used to enjoy tech, now I would rather build bicycles. I still work in the tech industry, for the money, but I no longer call myself a "technologist"."

Actually, I love that. If our company was a little further along and I could afford to hire him I'd make an approach.

I don't think tech is the be-all and end-all of things, it's a tool we use. I prefer to have a techie who is able to feel the tactile quality in the process of bicycle building (bespoke frame-building through to just getting your hands dirty piecing components together) as I'd hope such an eye would course through everything that person did.

If he's a tech guy with 20 years experience, and that eye for a quality build and the aesthetic utility in a bicycle, then I'd be keen to see whether his work reflects it.

Companies go through phases, and the beg, borrow and steal... and poor package and renumeration... is the first phase and we should all seek to get beyond that quickly.

A business should be sustainable. To me that means that the costs of the business should be able to be fully met and not externalised: a good package for good people is part of that. As soon as it's possible to, that should be in place... because if we're not building a sustainable business then what are we doing?

> I don't think tech is the be-all and end-all of things

Absolutely agreed. I just wrote about this recently[1], arguing that to be the best programmer, you really need to do something else as a specialty, and have programming simply as your trade. Programming is a value enhancer on another skill, and (in my opinion) is less value if it's the only thing you can offer. Effectively, your skill caps out at some point, and to continue increasing your impact you need to draw on something else too.

[1] http://www.drtomallen.com/1/post/2013/03/more-than-a-program...

That's easier said than done. Programming is such a hard and specialized field, that very few people can be fully competent at it and have another field of business expertise. There are two general paths to that:

1. Study CS in school, get employed as a programmer in an unrelated industry and attempt to absorb industry knowledge from your coworkers outside the IT department (easier to do at a small company). Industry knowledge will inform your code projects and put them in context, but your job is still to write code and not to participate in business decisions.

2. Study business admin or econ in school, get employed in marketing or operations, and attempt to learn programming on the side. You can use programming skills to write personal automation scripts and maybe some internal productivity apps to share with your colleagues, but will not be asked or trusted to work on any production codebase as that is not part of your job description, and they already hired dedicated programmers to do that. You do not have a lot of time to work on coding anyway, because you have other responsibilities.

Things can get more fuzzy at a small company where people tend to wear more hats. But at most big companies, job descriptions are pretty specialized, and programming either is your job or it isn't.

"That's easier said than done. Programming is such a hard and specialized field, that very few people can be fully competent at it and have another field of business expertise."

I find it telling that both of your paths include school. Life is a better teacher than school will ever be; the person you're describing may be hard to find straight out of college, but after a few more years of life, they will tend to broaden their horizons (and have hobbies that don't include programming).

For what its worth I think you're creating a false dichotomy here. I literally studied Econ in undergrad and quickly landed at a telco as a dev. My 'on the side' self education of programming landed me a software engineer role because the analytics that came with my non-traditional developer skills made for good problem solving cred. 8 years later, I'm wearing architecture/analysis/developer hats on a daily basis with a senior title.

The point is this comment serves as a microcosm of this thread; a faceoff between stereotypes of a boring, big company with benefits and sexy startup with lottery ticket potential. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between. There really is work, even outside of the Valley, that solves real (fun!) problems with real compensation. To assume only two paths to whatever personal definition of success in this field is limiting your options.

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