Comment by bryanrasmussen
3 years ago
so when will we declare this advice outdated? Or extremely limited.
The first thing that is outdated, the advice is basically don't be a programmer be an expert in something the company needs. The thing is in the modern world the company often needs programmers more than it needs the other expertise, hence the big salaries we earn getting hired to solve problems.
>There are companies which create software which actually gets used by customers, which describes almost everything that you probably think of when you think of software. It is unlikely that you will work at one unless you work towards making this happen.
I mean, I've never done anything to try to be writing customer facing software but, aside from some international standardization work, that is all I have ever really worked on.
I think between 2011 and now that stuff changed, and maybe it was already very well on the way to changing in 2011 but the person who wrote this wasn't aware it was changing.
> The first thing that is outdated, the advice is basically don't be a programmer be an expert in something the company needs. The thing is in the modern world the company often needs programmers more than it needs the other expertise, hence the big salaries we earn getting hired to solve problems
I was a boring old “enterprise programmer” from 1996-2016. I belatedly started moving into more “architect” type roles where I was brought in to lead by example and while I was still hands on, I was hired to solve more strategic issues and lead initiatives.
Fast forward to today and now I’m a “cloud architect” working in the consulting department at $BigTech.
Right now I’m working on a “DevOps” project that required a few relatively trivial Python scripts as part of the design. Most of my time has been spent “consulting”.
ChatGPT was able to spit out every Python script that I needed correctly and all I had to do was tell it - this is the input I want and this is the output I need.
It got me 100% there with code that didn’t require the AWS SDK (boto3). It does have some understanding of the boto library. But it isn’t perfect.
Yes I know how to program. But I only started making real money when I could talk to “the business” and know what to program.
This more or less describes my career trajectory up to the point of belated moving into architecture roles. It’s encouraging to hear that such a winding career path can eventually make its way $BigTech. Cheers