Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

A few comments:

1. To me, however, a programmer is who I'm looking for, while a resume full of revenue increases and cost reductions sounds like an "anomalously high-cost parasite who types some mumbo-jumbo into Excel and PowerPoint, claiming credit for others' work". This is in no small part because you are a programmer. The vast majority of people who pay other people for work that involves programming are not programmers (and that does not make them any less smart, or any less lucrative.)

2. Abstracting a greater point from Ron Garret's career history is tricky, if only because the vast majority (by which I mean myself) of programmers will never reach his level of competence.

3. There is absolutely a chance that the value of the company which employs you will increase by ten times over the course of your employment. This chance is vastly overestimated by workers, especially in startups.

Overall, I think Yosef is misconstruing a lot of patio11's original points (though the points Yosef makes, especially about forming relationships with coworkers, are still quite true.) Perhaps the biggest takeaway: the path to success in a chip architecture career is entirely different than the path to success in a SaaS/freelancing career.

My replies to your points:

1. Do you have stats? In absolute terms, a whole lot of people hiring programmers have programmed themselves. How do you know the other people hiring programmers are "the vast majority"? (I sincerely wonder about it. I cited two numbers by two bloggers, one says it's 80% of the cases, the other says 90%. I have no idea, but I intuitively feel it's less than 50%. Are there real stats?)

2. I mentioned Ron Garret because I replied to an article mentioning him and Google as a proof of something that this example actually disproves, not because I thought it's a good example to generalize from.

3. I agree, which is why I said that people overvalue early option grants (hoping for the value to rise tenfold which it probably won't); I added to that an explanation why late option grants past the point where value can possibly rise tenfold are undervalued (because the money you make is the difference in prices, which rises with the absolute value of the stock price even if the growth rate goes down.)

I said near the end that I'm not sure I'm reading the original article as intended so you could say I misrepresent it; what I am pretty sure of is that a whole lot of people read it very closely to the way I'm reading it in my reply, and I'm writing for those people.

Your "biggest takeaway" is exactly what I'd like the takeaway to be; all I'm saying is that SaaS/freelancing career is not the only path to succeed in "programming", and that there are other paths you might want to take and you'd behave differently if you took them.

1. There are far more non-programmers than programmers. Even with a correlation between being a programmer and hiring programmers, it is plausible that the vast majority of hiring managers are non-programmers. This becomes more plausible if you step back a layer to the budget allocation for headcount rather than specific hiring decision.

Isn't it also plausible that after the first programmer hire (by non-programmer), any subsequent hiring will at least involve this first programmer?

I would even go as far as saying that an 'expert opinion' from a programmer would typically be involved in the hiring decision (be it from an external consultant, a friend or what not). Given that the non-programmer would typically realise they don't have themselves the skills to evaluate programming abilities or CVs.

> Isn't it also plausible that after the first programmer hire (by non-programmer), any subsequent hiring will at least involve this first programmer?

Definitely. You'll generally have to convince a programmer of your competence. Once you've passed that test, you may also have to negotiate with a non-programmer for your salary. At that second stage is when you want to be able to convince someone of your ability to multiply dollars.

I'm not aware of many places (nor have I worked anywhere) where non-programmers hire programmers. Occasionally a hiring manager or some type is involved but as a facilitator at best.

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