Respect

I have a friend who worked at Goldman Sachs up until their manager called them on Christmas Eve and demanded they drop everything and get to the airport ASAP for a big meeting. There was no meeting and upon reaching the airport they were told their job was safe and to go home and enjoy their Christmas. Those who did not report were fired upon returning from vacation.

Do we hear about that kind of stuff ever happening to devs? (Well, outside the gaming industry)

And my rule is to quit jobs if I have to work weekends and I don't see the c-staff in there as well. Even if they have no work to do; if they screwed up badly enough that I'm working they better not be fucking off with their kids or hobbies.

[1] http://abovethelaw.com/2012/10/the-160k-plus-club-which-law-...

The errors seem like the result of either poor text-to-speech software or mild dyslexia. They don't really detract from the content.

Here's what I've got so far:

Software development is, at its core, a terribly frustrating profession. You're lured in with promises of being a lone hacker building a billion-dollar website overnight in your dorm and hear about the excitement of building a new product or even embarking on a new project for a client. It's only later that you find out that most people who stay up all night hacking away on side projects never ship them (or if they do, they never make a dime) and that most of your work is going to be maintaining and updating code rather than writing your own from scratch. Eventually, you fall into some sort of coping mechanism such as the pomodoro technique, Agile development, or some other poor solution to the fundamental problem of the profession. The problem is that the software development industry hates software developers. It really hates us and, if you think about it, that makes sense, because we can make a lot of demands to business types that others simply can’t.

Recently, the industry has tried to curb our influence by outsourcing our jobs. It was thought that business could just hire seventy-five (75) percent off their staff offshore for one-third of the price and use that as downward price pressure in the domestic market. Though that hasn’t gone as well as some would have liked, it certainly hasn’t failed completely. Still, the results were less than stellar and a lot of business are now hitting pain points with foreign development, causing many of them to bring their dev projects back home. But, these businesses don't want a seventy-five (75) percent price increase overnight, so what’s a slick talking, frugal businessman to do?

You sell the lone hacker myth and hand out little bottles of Facebook-style startup Kool-Aid. After all, it turns out that a lot of young programmers have an inflated sense of their abilities and can be easily manipulated into working what amounts to unpaid overtime. Only an idiot would put a young developer on an hourly wage when they could instead give him a set salary with unrealistic deadlines to squeeze the extra work out of every penny. Well, guess what? It worked! These young developers will work 50-60 hour weeks for their businesses and still promise to work harder next week. Better still, if they have a personal event or other issue, they will even apologize for that rare 40 hour week! You've got to love kids! You must be so happy. Look at all the value you can show your investors and how modest the L side of your P&L is!

But wait, something seems wrong. It’s been about a year and your dev is becoming a little harder to work with. He’s starting to mention things like vacation tim. Doesn’t he know that <insert random month here> is super important for <insert company name here> and it’s crunch time? Sure, it was crunch time the month you brought him on and pretty much every month after that, but isn’t that just the nature of the business? Worse still, he is out the door every day after his eight hours – is he no longer committed?

Then, it happens. Your dev up and bails on you. Maybe he gives you two weeks of notice; maybe he doesn’t. Either way you're down a dev and probably not sure why. Well, the answer varies based on the dev – it could be family, a better offer, or any other reason. But, there is a commonality in most of these cases: on some level the dev figures out that the economics just don’t make sense; at least not if he is to work the hours that you expected. Before wondering what happened ask yourself this: if that dev were a lawyer or CPA would you have expected the same type of “commitment”?

Let’s face it no business manager would think about asking for the level of commitment and self-sacrifice that is commonly asked of software developers of a lawyer or CPA. The reason is simple: most businessmen value lawyers and CPAs – they respect them and see them as professionals. The see them as professional adults where developers are just overgrown teens in their eyes. The sad part is that we allow this. We have created the youth culture around “hip” development technologies that allows this sort of age discrimination against more mature developer while simultaneously promotes the abuse of young developers. It’s time that we as software developers demand the same respect that other professionals get and end these age issues.

We are of course not blameless in this lack of respect. Whenever a dev shows up to a meeting in a hoodie or gaming tee, he sends the message that he is not a professional. So please give the hoodies to the Salvation Army and throw on a polo. Also, you are not a “rockstar”, “ninja”, or “code samurai”. You are, however, a “Software Developer”, Software Engineer”, or “Programmer”, so make sure your business card has one of the latter titles on it rather than the former and use the more professional title in conversations. One more thing. Keep your conference presentations PG13 and please don’t make sexual comments; that goes double for dongle jokes. If we can all act like professionals maybe we will be treated like professionals.

I can't stand reading all these whiny diatribes. Ask all your fellow non-STEM friends and you'll see how much they'd rather be in your position.

Even if it's just on those all-day-meetings days where you interface with your PM and other biz types...

"Don't dress for the job you have, but rather the job you want".

The second worst would be not attempting to brush your hair or teeth after getting out of bed.

The third would be not taking showers at a frequency high enough to overcome your personal natural tendencies to actually, physically, smell badly.