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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

ability to use computer code as leverage to accomplish things that capitalism cares about

For the people that ultimately pay the bills, this is the only thing that matters. They don't give a shit what technology you know or what a nice guy you are. They just want it done. To them, the ability to understand their domain, communicate effectively, and get things done is far more important that how you do it. I regularly hear from people who say, "I need x fixed/working/solved. We use y. If you don't know y, then figure it out."

Languages and technologies are only important to CTOs and recruiters. The point when you get beyond them and start talking to their bosses is when your career will really take off, not when you learn a "better language".

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If that was the only thing that mattered, how do some consultants make 3x others, with exactly the same performance or worse?

While the people who pay the bills think that's the only thing that matters, your ability to confidently market yourself as providing perceived value plays a big part in your payment or salary negotiations, regardless of the actual value you provide.

Unfortunately I, like many others in our field, suck at this. Strangely, I've always found it easier to to market the work I do than to learn to market my own value. I can't even write a short bio without feeling like I'm stepping out of line.

> I can't even write a short bio without feeling like I'm stepping out of line.

150% agree. I had to write a bio when I judged a hackathon last month. It took 2 hours two write, what ultimately became one sentence.

In my talks with programmers, a lot of the disconnect is the perception that there's "legitimate work" on one hand and "marketing" on the other. While one may understand the importance of marketing at an intellectual level, the technical mind may still have an aversion to actually doing it.

My suggestion: replace the word "market" with "communicate" in your thinking. So:

"your ability to confidently communicate your value plays a big part in your payment or salary negotiations"

So it's not marketing, it's kind of like writing docs for end users. Still not coding, but a little further from "marketing". A small change, but it may give some mileage.

Exactly.

I feel like the term "marketing" is often used by not-so-great communicators to fill a gap of understanding of how value is communicated by those who are doing good business as a result.

I think the same goes for companies. E.g. a user friendly phone, tablet, computer or maybe just a very usable website, is not more expensive because of 'marketing', but because it does a better job communicating with the end user and thus creating a better perception of value to the customer.

What you are talking about?

The biggest personal shift for me came when I realised that marketing is not about me, my experience and the marketing copy on my website. It's about giving things of value to other people. Maximise the value you give to others and the number of people you give it to, and the "marketing" takes care of itself.

Languages and technologies are only important to CTOs and recruiters.

Even at the CTO level, languages and technologies more of a strategic business decision than a raw technical decision. Questions like:

* can we hire enough programmers of quality in this language?

* is there sufficient support available for these technologies?

* is the technology sufficiently mature?

Selection of a core technology can't be purely a "wow, cool" decision at that level, although it may factor in to what kind of programmers you are likely to get (e.g. see pg's old article "The Python Paradox" http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html)

The author of Real World Haskell has a startup that uses Haskell. I don't remember the exact quote, but it is in part to weed out crappy developers. http://functionaltalks.org/2013/06/10/brian-osullivan-runnin...

Jane St. Capital also does this to some extent by using OCaml, but I don't think that was the primary motivation.

PG has made similar comments about the use of Lisp. It doesn't really scale to the IBMs and Googles of the world, though.

This is key. If you think you'll want to or have to hire an 800 person staff then you're going to lose developer quality and will be served by picking languages which are already common on the market.

[...] people that ultimately pay the bills [...] don't give a shit what technology you know

Of course they do. Imagine trying to convince a CTO of a 20-strong company to switch to another, better suited for the business task at hand, programming language for a project with 1+ MLoC written over a course of couple of years.

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