Hacker News Reader

Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

Once you run the company it doesn't matter what you call yourself. That is probably a great topic for another essay, assuming PG hasn't written it already.

It might matter what you call the company or the product, however, since that is the brand that the people who pay you are seeing.

Programmers are so literal. Let me try and translate: When Patrick says "don't call yourself a programmer" he isn't necessarily saying "never use the word 'programmer' in the same sentence as your own name". What he's saying is: When someone asks you what you do all day, don't just say "I program... stuff" or "I program in Lisp". What do you program? Why? What value do you create thereby?

View on HN

Right. I might say "I'm a computer programmer", but I usually say it right after "me and five other guys track everything about all video plays for ESPN.com" or a rough equivalent.

See, there you go, that is awesome.

I'm a programmer. I program things. What, specifically, changes pretty frequently still. Going into detail can be useful when trying to score social points from the smalltalk question of "So, what do you do?" But depending on what you program, I think for most people "programming" is sufficient compared to "I currently write software to manage an elastic computer server farm running data analysis jobs for people."

In fact I think the former "programming" can give you more social cred--if you program things the other person can't comprehend an immediate use for, it may hurt you. "Oh you're one of those people that don't do anything useful." If they really want to know, they'll ask, and ask for more details if they care.

Of course, I agree in general that when whoring yourself out to the corporate world it's best to make yourself sound as important as possible as long as possible, which is basically what I got from Patrick's post. "Programmer" doesn't contain enough information to make you seem important enough in BigCo. It's fine for scoring social points.

I think the point is to make your job description less technical, not more. You're not a programmer, you're "the guy who made $X for your company last Y".

That's a good point, it's not just about what you do, the effects matter. But again it fits into the scoring social points game and making yourself look extra important to companies.

It's not just social points, it's access to fulfilling work. The better you do at conveying your unique value, the more likely you are to find someone who's willing to pay you appropriately for work that's right at the edge of your abilities. If you don't market yourself properly you'll be stuck on an HR salary scale (e.g. Programmer III at 105% of standard compensation) doing fungible work.

Doesn't that depend on what sort of job you're trying to get? If someone is hiring for embedded systems development, and your resume has no details about your technical skills, but lots about Providing Value, there's a good chance they're going to wonder if you're technically qualified. They certainly won't be impressed if your attitude in the interview is: ok, sure, I don't yet know all of these details, but anyone can pick up a language in 3-4 weeks; did I mention I'm really good at creating business value?

If you were a carpenter, you wouldn't tell your friends "I hammer things all day", you'd tell them that you make things out of wood. I'd argue that the fact that you spend your day "programming" is more of an implementation detail of the bigger picture that your job is to create software.

If you were a carpenter, you'd tell your friends you're a carpenter.

If you were a janitor, you'd tell your friends you're a sanitation worker.

If you were a stripper, you'd tell your friends you're an exotic dancer.

Patio is saying we should say "engineer" instead of "programmer" because programmer has similar connotations to janitor.

In my experience, 'engineer' has closer connotations to janitor than 'programmer'. Certainly in the UK, engineering as a profession has a big image problem because the average person doesn't distinguish between e.g. a heating engineer (who fixes the boiler) and say, a civil engineer (someone with a Masters degree + 4 years professional experience and accreditation).

People I know who are programmers all have professional jobs and by and large are earning more than those I know who are engineers. That's probably not a representative sample of 'programmers' though.

tl;dr: 'engineer' doesn't sound too professional either, at least in the UK. IMO Software Developer sounds better than either, and that's what I tell people I am.

In North America an engineer is either a train operator, someone with a university degree in "Engineering", or a programmer. So you can see the difference.

What you describe as an engineer would probably be called a technician here in the US - somebody with a relatively specialized skill set whose responsibilities are mainly operation or maintenance of equipment or systems.

Or to put in a comic-friendly way: "It's not who you are, it's what you do that defines you".

Agreed, I'm doing programming.

Another way to frame this point -- that's kind of like asking a novelist what they do, and having them answer "I type out sentences, in English".

No, even if they started with "I'm a full-time writer", they'd follow up with "well, I've had two novels published -- I guess you'd categorize it as literary fiction? -- and I'm finishing up the draft of a third."

If you are a "programmer", what does that mean? Do you do anything of value? To whom? Do you know? Or do you program whatever you're told to program (inasmuch as you can figure it out, and it's their problem if the specs were bad) because that's how you earn your paycheck?

If you're in the latter category, and that's the only thing you grasp about the work you do, that's a pretty big limiter on your future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com