I've been working in the industry for 20 years - I think at this point no one is going to look at the bottom of my resume and see what my degrees are. A data science degree might open a few doors or at least prepare me adequatlely for a few jobs that are not great fits for me today.

I think grad degrees are worth the time you put into them, I'm a believer in structured learning. Some people learn well on their own, some don't. I do OK but I have found that when I learn subjects on my own I have gaps because I don't necessarily explore every branch in the tree.

R&D is a really sweet spot to be in. You're continuously making new stuff, people are always happy to talk to you and see what you have cooking, you often are making people happy (at least in the short term) and often when you get a prototype working you get to throw it over the wall.

Being on the other side of that wall is sometimes good, sometimes, bad, kinda depends I guess.

The worst case is where there's no wall and you're asked to R&D stuff and also support everything you ever made even though most of them were never polished past prototype stage. Don't ask me how I know about that.

As a person on the other side of the wall it is often hard to explain why it's going to take you 3 months to polish a prototype, when the prototype itself was made in, say, 1 month. But that's sort of the reality of it.

My last job was in a "Innovation Group". My boss basically combed the company looking for stuff for us to work on. It was great. We'd get an idea and I'd go into a cave for a week or a month and come out with something cool that people would use. I really loved that job and am still pissed I got laid off.

Yes, middle management and its relation with Gervais principle and the delivery trap are worth considering.

About R&D is something I've thought about it. Do you have some tips or advice in how transition to that role?

That was theoritically my job at hyper global megacorp - except other groups rarely used our ideas - especially our biggest "customer" - the company website and all it's business-related side functions.

But the guy over all that was more than happy to say he used our stuff, which made my boss happy because it kept us funded. We'd have a handoff meeting, all smiles and everyone enthusiastic, and then they'd just do whatever they were going to do anyway.

If a group did use our idea they'd almost immediately customize it so much that our big plans of sharing it or making it extensible would go out the window.

I worked at home full time, had nothing to do, and I've never been more miserable at a job. I need the pressure/payoff of building production apps that people actually use. I like a little R&D as a breather between crunchtime projects. But I quickly get listless.

In my situation I have a particular area of expertise that is fairly rare. The company I work for has a need for that expertise. I went through their interview process which included coding challenges. I can’t really say I planned this all out like developing that area of expertise it all just kind of happened. So ...

— Be very diligent about increasing your technical knowledge and deciding what “road” you want to travel down. I will admit I kind of lucked out. Technology advances so rapidly it is definitely not an easy task to anticipate where things are headed. I hope that makes sense.

— Look to leverage your technical knowledge into roles you want to have.


Seems pretty simply stated but not necessarily easy to carry out. My experience is that many companies are just confused as to what they actually need in dev roles. Furthermore, they don’t really know how to acquire the talent they actually need. So your goal is to acquire the expertise and do a lot of due diligence. Not enlightening but that is all I have.

This is a legitimate take imo. I have to do a lot of promoting my ideas and soliciting ideas from other folks. I am involved with a small company though.

The point made in Developer Hegmony is the performers in the delivery cycle are basically sht on and taken advantage of for the most part.

I have basically found that competence just means that you'll be given increasingly more and larger tasks to do. If you don't find a way to stem the tide, in my case, I just end up leaving jobs when it gets to be too much and I can't make it stop. I'm trying to avoid that happening again now, going OK so far, basically just increasingly saying "no, we can't do that in this time frame" instead of just making it happen again and having the pace accelerate.

Thank you, it makes sense

Indeed, in the book, overperforming developers are called idealists or clueless, and they are taken advantage for opportunists or sociopaths

Here the author has some articles https://daedtech.com/defining-the-corporate-hierarchy/

Quote:

This is a drawing by a cartoonist named Hugh MacLeod that’s ingenious in both simplicity and cynicism. Drones at the bottom, ruthless manipulators at the top, and a creamy center of interesting folks in between. These are the ones that think they’re going to make it to the top.

At my previous employer during one of my reviews, the manager I reported to volunteered that he had gone as far as he was going to go in the company in a tone of lament. I thought to myself wtf is he telling me this for, I don’t care actually. Why should I? It isn’t like we were friends or anything (far from it ). I now think after reflecting on my interactions with him and his statement to our department that he believed everyone thought he was a great leader. I didn’t and I am fairly certain other members in his department didn’t either but I don’t complain about the boss too much so I don’t know how they felt for sure. As is pointed out in Developer Hegemony, that manager had lost perspective by identifying himself with corporate values, process, and culture thus placing an undue importance on them.

I think you guys are overly cynical, and I hope I never get that way.

I am a bit of a quandary about what to do about my career. I feel I am stagnating already. I want to move into an individual contributor role but am really doubting my actual skills lately. In fact, I can't shake the feeling that I've developed none. This is stemming from having just taken a "devops" quiz which should have been renamed "AWS quiz" because I knew absolutely 0 of it and it was all AWS related.

Right now this quarter is slow, nothing came through in our pipeline so I have no projects. So I've been spending weeks basically just waiting around for something interesting to happen. I'm not sure how much more of it I can take. I do spend a lot of time reading and looking at tutorials but I'm not sure how much I'm really retaining or actually learning.

I know I've learned a shitload in the last year and a half compared to where I was when I graduated. I know my way around a nix system and am extremely comfortable using vi + command line utils. I can read C and half a dozen other languages and know what's going on. I've become proficient in bash and shell scripting.

What now? I feel I'll crash and burn at any interview. I keep coming up with excuses not to do it. If I could pick anything, I'd want to lead a small team where I still make individual contributions. Sort of like what I'm doing now, except for a company that's actually doing something. How realistic is that?

If not that I'd settle for a pure individual contributor role. But I am a bit of a control freak so I don't know how well I'd do being managed closely. I guess right now I am living sort of the dream - I don't have much to do, I get paid to educate myself and occasionally run projects, I get to play with some tech, I have unlimited time off, and I get paid decently. Yet I'm still absolutely miserable and bored and feel worthless.

Me too. I read a bit of one of those blog posts and it was silly. There’s probably some truth to it for some organizations but it’s far from some standard fact of life.

It’s extra silly for software engineers right now because it’s an industry where the ‘drones’ can make crazy good money without any of the management stuff. And if a company treats you poorly you have options. Obviously the system still sucks in lots of ways, yadda, yadda, yadda.


My impression is that there’s a **** ton of interview resources out there. Use them for a few months to figure out how to nail like 80% of tech interviews. You’ll already do fine on any non tech questions.

I think it would be extremely hard to get a team lead role with your experience. And if you get it, I think it’ll be extremely hard to do well. Just my $0.02.

My plan in your place would be to work really hard at interview prep. Get a job at a fast growing company as an IC. Do whatever you can to learn fast and try to get promoted to team lead in 1-2 years.




From the little I know of your company there are a ton of red flags. It doesn’t seem likely to survive for very long and in many ways the longer you stay the harder it’s going to be to get the next job. Especially if you’re laid off and need something pretty quickly.

Good advice thank you. Any sites in particular?

last night I had a business drink with a former colleague who seemed to know a lot more of what's going on behind the scenes than I, and for two hours straight he implored that I GTFO ASAP, don't even wait one second. And I didn't even tell him any of this. It was kind of a scary convo - I felt I was either being let go or the company was imminently insolvent. But you guys have said that when it's time to go, I'll know, and I think it's clearly time.

It's a theory and yes, it is cynical, and the author states this "Gervais principle is cynical but accurate to the point of tragedy."

But at the same time he brings to reality this theory and renames the archetypes , drones or losers are called pragmatists, sociopaths are called opportunists, clueless are called idealists.

And He points them in terms of what the modern corporate structure has done to them.

For pragmatists they have lost hope in the organization, for idealists they have lost perspective, opportunists have lost ethic.
And you can see similar groups and most organizations


Well, this is what the author points out in what developers should be doing.

After all the main point of developer hegemony is that developers aren't in charge of software industry.

it's is led by high executives that never have programmed and don't know how to program.

Ummm... this is clearly not true. And if your world view is based around this belief, it’s clearly flawed.

Edit: Second paragraph in particular. I’d argue the first paragraph is also partially wrong - but you could probably no true Scotsman it into being true.

it's false cause executives aren't or because they know programming?

What I believe is that in theory nobody is in charge, but in practice, CTO,CIO and CEOS are who make the bigger decisions.
And they don't program in its current role, if they ever did, it was long time past that.

Also I don't think, in most of the cases, they know how to make a efficient enviroment for a development process

Upper managment don't see developers like experts and they prefer to listen to an "agile coach" instead of listen to experimented developers

You're moving the goal posts like 30 yards (and still wrong). A whole bunch of executives of the worlds biggest companies have a programming / engineering background. The idea that these people have "never programmed" is absurd. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple (I think?), and so on... These companies were generally built with the executive team being tightly involved in the technical side of things - often even as the company grew to a significant size.

It's also just constantly getting easier. The cloud - things like AWS - allow technical people to get started building and selling things without massive amounts of up front capital.

Anyway, here's my hot take. Books / talks / blogs that tell a bunch of people that they're "pragmatic" for not being promoted/advancing in their career and that their bosses are just "naive simpletons" are all about collecting money by the age old method of telling people what they want to hear.

Sounds like JJ is an idealist

Those companies are run by business people, and people with technical background at the top, like I said later, if they ever programmed, they stopped.
I can't talk how is to work there, but I don't see is a good enviroment for a developer

On your take, so why people isn't advancing? lazy? not smart? do they ever want to?
You don't know what they want to hear or not.

And books are knowledge, if there is good advice there or not, each person is the judge

pd. also it's not my idea bring negativity or sadness here, just for some reason I like these topics

Hah, use to be an idealist. Now I'm a pragmatist I guess. .

I just don't have much patience for people that ***** about stuff like this in tech. Even more so when it's based off of a bunch of silly claims like the software industry is being led by executives that have never programmed.

Nope, an idealist who believes blindly in the software industry

Read the book, there is a chapter for you

I don't know the good interview prep sites - but I feel like people mention them in here pretty regularly.

You're a start-up with no projects in the pipeline, it seems pretty likely that things aren't looking good financially. And it's generally not easy to fundraise at this stage without any sort of product success. Add in some advice from people that probably know more than you - I'd move up the priority of your job search.

My favorite part of the internet is when people say stuff like this to me. It gives me great personal amusement. I wonder what ever happened to Deuces, he use to be the best at this.

mmm, and what would you expect? you are calling me alot of things

cynic, silly , that I talk ***,

You don't even know me