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'I Just Need a Programmer'
theodp writes "As head of the CS Department at the University of Northern Iowa, Eugene Wallingford often receives e-mail and phone calls from eager entrepreneurs with The Next Great Idea. They want to change the world, and they want Prof. Wallingford to help them. They just need a programmer. 'Many idea people,' observes Wallingford, 'tend to think most or all of the value [of a product] inheres to having the idea. Programmers are a commodity, pulled off the shelf to clean up the details. It's just a small matter of programming, right?' Wrong. 'Writing the program is the ingredient the idea people are missing,' he adds. 'They are doing the right thing to seek it out. I wonder what it would be like if more people could implement their own ideas.'"
We should unionize. Conservative rhetoric aside, labor unions provide training, institute quality standards and work procedures.
The partnership system in the steamfitters and pipefitters unions could be emulated as pair programming is often much higher quality than code produced by lone programmers, or ad hoc hastily-assembled teams.
Think of it as a contracting outfit, only with the hefty cut that normally goes to the contract brokers -- going directly into your pension plan -- a REAL pension plan -- which you get to take with you from job to job.
Training, standards, a partner system, pensions, health plans. All the things we could get small businesses off the hook of having to provide.
And, union labor could actually undercut the likes of TekSystems and Adecco in a fair fight, lol.
The idea and the marketing are what makes the product successful.
As much as I agree that programmers tend to overestimate their importance -- a trait that pretty much every job category shares to one degree or another -- I think the idea is of negligible importance compared to the marketing.
A lot of people like to think that having a good idea and having it first is terribly important. And while that is occasionally true, it's mostly wishful thinking. Henry Ford didn't get rich by inventing the automobile. Someone else did that. He didn't even get rich by inventing the assembly line. Someone else did that, too. He got rich by extending credit to his customers: he invented the car payment. And once he did all this, a bunch of other companies came along and did more or less the same thing, and they made vast sums doing it, too. And the story repeats itself through the following century with radio, television, computers, refrigerators, and all the other technological advances we presently enjoy. Even with patents, inventing something and inventing it first just doesn't matter all that much. (Which is not to say that it doesn't matter at all.)
The same applies to the myth of the indispensable man (or woman). By himself, Henry Ford couldn't have done squat. He needed a considerable number of people with a broad range of skills just to get off the ground. And quite likely, any or all of them could have been replaced by other people without materially affecting the outcome.
Those of us who aren't magnates believe these myths because they allow us to believe an even bigger myth: that we can, as lone individuals, change the world. This is almost never true, allowing for rare exceptions like assassinating an Austrian archduke. Those who are magnates believe these myths because they allow magnates to believe that they are self-made men, ignoring the labor and intelligence of the thousands who helped put them there.
If good ideas were all it took to strike it rich, almost everyone would be rich already.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Amen to that, brother.
I started my own company. The idea was good, and I had confidence in myself to create the program by myself.
I left my job and started out on my own. My wife (and my 2 year old too) was also full supportive.
I completed the coding and testing part. It took me close to a year, but I finished it.
It works great, everybody who saw the program (including one MNC), said it is very well done.
After that it came to marketing and sales.
I went to an MNC where I previously worked. They said they are interested and pulled me around for 4 months before they stopped answering my calls.
And by then - after 1 year - I got tired and lost my will.
I started fighting with my wife everyday for very small reasons. Pressure from parents/relatives/friends etc to look for a job etc. Not from my wife though.
I relented, and I joined a startup - actually I went there to sell my product, and they were very impressed and asked me to join them.
It has been a year now. I have a fully done product with me. I have not gone to sell it to more than 3 clients.
It is something I regret, and regret a lot. But I now understand, with experience, that starting a business is not about coding or even having the idea.
It is about perseverance and patience. Which I sorely lacked.
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
Hey, it's us programmers who are supposed to bring all that expertise on the table, get paid next to nothing, listen to verbal abuse day in and out, and in the end have a battle about getting paid at all or not, and when you are winning that battle, they threaten to sue you on court for demanding to get paid for work. Not only that, but they expect that if you start a job and you spend 1hr doing it, you may not charge for it at the following days anymore, but even a 1000hr job has to be done on that initial stretch. If that's not enough, they hire you on a hourly basis, but expect you to work at project terms, thus denying any right to pay a dime before you accomplish 1500hr job to get paid for the 150hrs owed.
Sometimes they put the payments on ridiculous terms which they do anything to stop you from achieving so that there would be a snowball's chance in hell they'd have a bad conscious to not paying you.
And if you happen to get all of that right, client decides in the end "this idea was bad, so this implementation must suck and you suck as a coder, thus we don't need to pay you", stays quiet for couple months, then implement your alternative idea to get the system done on minimal work.
Ofc, for a programmer "rush" and "hurry" are just feelings and do not exist, and programmer's 24hr day is actually a 48hr day and programmers don't need to sleep. Programming neither is a job which requires special skills, knowledge or way of thinking. Programmers also work each day faster, so you can just keep increasing the load on a infinite loop. They are efficiently semi-robots as they have no emotions but are still capable of creative thinking.
They are also masters of all fields of knowledge, experienced veterans. All of them know marketing & advertising, business leadership, how any industry works and rocket engineers along with being programmers.
If you do happen to agree to pay them, you don't need to pay the local rates, because you can get programmers so much cheaper from far asian countries. Not only that, but they never have a problem accomplishing a 500hr task in 1 week.
But most of all, programmers are telepathic and knows what you want without telling you.
You know what's the irony here? This was all based on my experience. I've been always avid coder, done lots of cutting edge stuff, just for fun or to profit myself. I finally went to work as a programmer because i needed that income. Took me a bit over 1½years to burn out, then finally first proper vacation and few freelancing clients to stop completely and refusing even very high paid jobs. Now i only code for friends, and even that with extremely long schedules. The best thing was that the income was worse as a full time coder than as a logistics worker in a warehouse! I quite literally earned more as logistics worker during the brief 2months i temped there before going as a programmer.
The sad part is that i actually liked working as a programmer, and i liked to have a little bit of hurry. I was 110% fine with that, but the loads kept increasing faster, and owner of the company was a total asshole. He basically told me that it's a illusion that i'm in a hurry, after i had worked 3 months constant overtime and my workload had doubled or tripled during that, some of which i WANTED to do, but the amount of work started to become a bit too much and i became stressed out. Final stretch was the owner of company gave me bullshit written warning. He refused to give me even average industry salary based on the fact that he wanted to make me a partner in that company - Basicly asking money for shares of unknown value, so that i would work for smaller salary. I was earning so little than under 100euros spending to fix my home computer took 4+ months to get together that money, after all gas to get to work and back and food are more important costs.
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