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Career Advice: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer
Ian Lamont writes "Patrick McKenzie has written about the do's and don't's of working as a software engineer, and some solid (and often amusing) advice on how to get ahead. One of the first pieces of advice: 'Don't call yourself a programmer: "Programmer" sounds like "anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo." If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired.' Although he runs his own company, he is a cold realist about the possibilities for new college grads in the startup world: 'The high-percentage outcome is you work really hard for the next couple of years, fail ingloriously, and then be jobless and looking to get into another startup.'"
I'm self employed, and even though my boss is jerk he's not going to fire me because I call myself a programmer.
If it's one thing America's taught me it's that doing useful work is the worst way to earn money around these parts.
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In casual conversation among people who wouldn't know the nuances of the various "programmer"-like terms, I do say, "I'm a programmer." It gets the point across simply that most people understand.
If I'm in a semi-professional setting of white collar adults, I usually say "software developer."
On a resume or among those who know the industry standard, I say "I'm a software engineer" because that's my title.
If it's tied to a conversation that might have career potential, I give the true classification at work: senior software engineer.
Because, you know, the 1000+ currently open job postings for keyword "programmer" on Monster.com are just a perfect example of situations where people are already looking to fire you. After all, that's why they created the posting, just so they could waste company resources and fire someone.
/sarcasm
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
In Canada, it's illegal to practice engineering, or call yourself one, without a engineers license. There's nothing worse than retards who get a college degree in programming and start calling themselves "engineers". It's an insult to every actual certified engineer in the world.
. . . and 'real' engineers everywhere weep. Obviously every case may be unique, but calling yourself one thing which has a set of implications does sort of slander professionals in the field whose titles you are trying to snag.
It doesn't matter if your first job leaves you unemployed and searching again in a few years. It matters that you're working with people who are smarter than you are and learning how to actually program and write software effectively. Job security? Pay? If you end up as an undifferentiated code monkey left to your own devices or, worse, fighting a monstrous legacy code base and bureaucracy that you're powerless to alter *cough*IBM*cough... you can very easily find you've crippled the rest of your career. At best, the work will be a dull slog.
Go for the startup, if they sound like they have some idea of how to do things right and will offer you meaningful professional development. If you can't take a career risk at this point in your life, when do you think you will be able to? And then for Job #2, you'll have some Skills. You'll be infinitely more employable. You might even be able to look at the monstrous legacy codebase and say, with the authority of experience, that this stinks and there's a better way to do it and yes you will do that refactoring, and you won't hate your job.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Too many people in IT don't know the first thing about writing code. I think things are changing though. Companies seem to realize you can get by with less people that can do more if your workers can actually program.
Calling oneself a "programmer" tells us exactly what we want to know when we're looking at candidates. So many people put C, C++, Java, C# or whatever on their resume and can't even write a simple for loop.
Patrick McKenzie isn't right about how he describes businesses and employees. We see resumes all the time where someone highlights how they saved their last company six, seven, or eight figures. We don't want to hear that. We want to hear that you have the skills needed to do the job we're hiring you for.
He also isn't right about the language not mattering. It's much easier to go from low level languages to higher level languages than vice versa. If someone was an expert in VB or Python, we would be very hesitant to hire them for a position that required coding in C. And if someone can pick up a language in just a few weeks, then they should do that before they apply to jobs asking for that skill set.
That's why I put "20th Level Code Rogue/Network Warlock" on my resume.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
No, it's called a divorce :P
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I'm a programmer. I have been for over 25 years.
I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon of "software engineer". I think it's as ludicrous as "sanitation engineering."
Any employer who thinks "programmer" is a derogatory or lesser term is too blinded by buzzwords for me to be happy working for them anyhow.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.