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  We trade a lot more than just time to practice our craft

I was recently having one of those “life, the universe and everything” conversations with a close industry (web) friend.Mid-conversation I dropped that I’d identified three kinds of stress that we face as creators – it felt somewhat poetic at the time, so I thought I’d take some time to describe it.Physical, the kind of stress you’re under when you’ve been eating poorly, drinking too much, exercising too little, or working too long. We’ve all been there but for the most part, it’s manageable.Mental, you’ve got things floating ...

1,527 0       PROGRAMMER STRESS CREATOR EMOTIONAL STRESS


  What I learned from Google - You Get Fifteen Years

four years ago I was in Mountain View, California, interviewing for a position with Google.It was an odd sort of interview.  Lots of puzzles, math-like challenges, and code.  Lots, and lots, and lots of code.What struck me at Google wasn’t the challenges.  Nor was it the office environment, the cafeteria, or the mini-swimming pool, all of which were impressive.No, what struck me were the people.All of the people I met — and I mean all of them — had this sort of early-twenties look to them.  Like the characters in Microserfs, these were “firsteesâ...

2,688 1       PROGRAMMER TECHNOLOGY CAREER TRANSFORM LIFETIME


  How I Became a Programmer

I posted a very brief response to a post on HackerNews yesterday challenging the notion that 8 weeks of guided tutelage on Ruby on Rails is not going to produce someone who you might consider a "junior RoR developer." It did not garner many upvotes so I figured that like most conversation on the Internet it faded into the general ambient chatter. Imagine my surprise when I woke up to couple handfuls' worth of emails from around the world asking me what I did, how I did it, and how I got a job. I'm assuming, judging by the relatively small amount of mail I got from a random ...

8,893 0       METHOD PROGRAMMER ADVICE STUDY


  Why do business analysts and project managers get higher salaries than programmers?

People get paid less than their employers' "reservation price" (the most they would ever pay), and more than their "marginal product" (the least they would ever work for). Your actual pay on that spectrum is based on your bargaining power, relative to your employer.Say your services to your company are worth $1000 a day. Under the gun, he would pay you that if he had no other choice. Say you would work for $100 a day if you had no other options. That's your range.Say you're new and independent and unknown, and your boss is Google. Google has more bargaining power, because they can just wait an...

2,890 0       PROGRAMMER SALARY DIFFERENCE PROGRAM MANAGER BARGAIN POWER ECONOMIC


  Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

The most productive programmers are orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers. But salaries usually fall within a fairly small range in any company. Even across the entire profession, salaries don’t vary that much. If some programmers are 10x more productive than others, why aren’t they paid 10x as much?Joel Spolsky gave a couple answers to this question in his most recent podcast. First, programmer productivity varies tremendously across the profession, but it may not vary so much within a given company. Someone who is 10x more productive than his colleag...

2,180 0       PROGRAMMER SALARY EFFICIENCY PRODUCTIVITY NOT MATCH


  I am a programmer

Admitting that may be career suicide, or possibly it will cost me dearly because 'software engineers' are raking in the big bucks these days, but the fact of the matter is that I'm a programmer. It's what I do best and it is the job title that I associate with most because it feels as though the biggest chunk of me will always be most likely to blurt that out when people ask me what my job is. That I like to program definitely helps.So instead of choosing some fancy title for what it is that I do because that might possibly make me a bit more money I chose to embrace it, and I have yet to regr...

1,766 0       PROGRAMMER SKILL FUTURE REQUIREMENTS SOFTWARE ENGINEER


  The Book That Every Programmer Should Read

No, it’s not Knuth’s “The Art of Programming”. I’m talking about quite an easy-to-read (compared to TAoP) book, which, in fact, does not require any engineering or mathematical background from the reader.I am talking about C. Petzold’s “CODE”. It is a truly remarkable book about how computers work. Let me explain why I think this book is so awesome.The book starts from the very beginning, from explaining what code is, bringing several examples, like Morse code and Braille’s system. It then goes on to explain how ele...

2,675 0       CODE PROGRAMMER BOOK MUST READ C. PETZOLD


  Why learning Haskell/Python makes you a worse programmer

I've found, contrary to what you sometimes read, that learning Python and Haskell has not improved my programming using other languages. Haskell in particular, being so different from imperative languages, is supposed to give new insights into programming that will help you even when you are not using the language. My current experience doesn't exactly tally with this, and here is why:Demotivation.I find I think in Python, and even in Haskell to some extent, even though I have used Haskell very little. I constantly find myself wanting to use idioms from these languages, or noticing h...

2,921 2       PYTHON PROGRAMMER BAD BAD PROGRAMMER HASKELL