Developer hegemony

Metadata

• Author: Erik Dietrich
• Full Title:: Developer Hegemony
• Category:: 📚Books
• Finished date:: 2023-02-02

Highlights

The point that countless managers and execs had missed in their haste to replicate exactly the success of these pioneers of agile was that if you hired smart, creative people, they would find the most effective ways for themselves to work. (Location 103)

From their interest in agile ceremony, it was apparent they understood that massive batch planning of software work wasn’t possible. (Location 169)

You all know programmers that, literally, do not know how to program computer software. This means that we all know people who earn a comfortable wage adding absolutely zero value to anything. (Location 411)

Kid wants to be Justin Bieber? Pfft. Thirty-year-old wants to be Mark Zuckerberg? Sure, why not? Keep working hard, kicking butt, and acing those performance reviews, and someday you’ll get there! Pfft. (Location 519)

So these high-level sociopaths overpromote a handful of the low-level losers who put forth disproportionate amounts of effort. (Location 549)

These former losers enter the clueless ranks of middle management to act as a buffer. The remaining losers can’t really hate the promoted clueless because the clueless aren’t calculatingly taking advantage of them. The clueless believe that they’re on track to be CEO while the losers and the sociopaths both know that’s absurd. In the The Office, Michael Scott represents this archetype—incompetent, fanatically loyal to his company, and clearly not headed for the C-suite, whatever he might think. (Location 550)

The clueless so genuinely believe in the organization and its wisdom that it’s impossible for the losers to hate them. (Location 568)

These are people from whom you can expect to hear pithy consolation narratives like, “I don’t live to work—I work to live.” The (Location 596)

“lumpenproletariat,” and it refers to mercenaries and criminals that are products of the system, so to speak. It’s easy to think of the CEOs and jet setters of the corporate world as bourgeois, but resist this temptation. Mid-level managers (clueless) are the corporate bourgeois, while line-level employees (losers) are proles. Sociopaths are lumpenproles. (Location 609)

Working 50 percent more your entire career to eventually get paid fifteen thousand more per year is an abysmal deal, compared not only with opportunists’ deals but also with minimum effort, lower-wage pragmatists’ (Location 633)

the best current technique they have as part of the hiring process gives candidates a test that simulates work they would actually do, but it only explains 29 percent of a candidate’s future performance. (Location 741)

Opportunists know that sitting on either side of the interview table is a bad deal. (Location 758)

On the flip side, a thumbs up to a candidate that flames out quickly and spectacularly will stick to the person who did the hiring. And worst of all, if they give too many thumbs downs for whatever reason, they start to be viewed as ineffectual leaders that can’t attract and staff talent. (Location 760)

But on a long enough timeline (and assuming you aren’t an idealist), the pragmatists around you drop their guard and start to provide a glimpse into their world of moral victories, labor shortcuts and thinly veiled, familiar disdain for the company. They’ll tell you knowingly that the boss tends to leave early on Fridays during the summer and that no one would be any the wiser if you did the same. (Location 776)

The pragmatist shoots for security and predictability, so he works just hard enough to sustain the status quo without risk. (Location 784)

you’ll find yourself surrounded by people who define their lives almost entirely by valuations that are external and usually tangential to the company. They extract meaning from life elsewhere (Location 789)

Getting dates isn’t easy and the attempt may mean embarrassment, so it’s a lot safer to create a choice narrative around not trying in the first place. (Location 800)

The reason for this is simple. Idealists fuse their identities with the company’s identity. I’ll discuss this more in a bit, but suffice it to say that this fusion means idealists are competing with one another to be the top guru of the company’s culture. (Location 898)

Part of losing perspective is being willing to delay gratification and make irrational sacrifices (Location 905)

So what’s the danger to the entry-level knowledge worker in hitching to a company? It’s not that she’ll put in extra effort without compensation, which can be a rational, medium-term play. It’s that she’ll get distracted by the lights, noises, and fun rides at (Location 948)

It’s that she’ll blink and ten years will have expired. (Location 950)

Being the resident expert on Acme Inc.’s weird internal SAP installation may net a lot of water cooler cred at Acme Inc. But Beta LLC hiring managers are going to raise a skeptical eyebrow and say, “And that helps me how?” (Location 953)

And so the idealist manages to squander an entire career, toiling away for a company that views him working hard to level up as a sign that he should never level up. (Location 960)

He slams up against a glass ceiling that applies only to those who play by the company’s rules—a (Location 961)

There may be a moment late in the idealist’s career when he doubts that he got a fair shake. But by the time this happens, it’s far too little far too late, and the temporary cognitive dissonance is utterly crushed by the opportunity cost of a wasted life. (Location 963)

When you figure out that (said in The Matrix’s spoon kid voice) “There is no awesomeness test,” the only decision left is whether you wind up an opportunist or a pragmatist. (Location 976)

an opportunist becomes an opportunist the day he figures out that, at the core of things, no one in any position of power or authority at the company really knows what they’re doing any better than he does. (Location 991)

But then something happens. The organization gets too big for the co-founder oligarchy model to be practical. Or maybe the co-founders don’t want to manage people directly. (Location 1086)

Managers take care of details with which their employers cannot be bothered. Owner-opportunists employ people managers when they can no longer be bothered with the grunt-pragmatists. (Location 1111)

You grant him the gift of vicarious ownership. (Location 1131)

Forty-hour-per-week employment is a completely risk-maximized, non-diversified arrangement. (Location 1164)

The cult of hours is the modern corporate incarnation of the Protestant work ethic, a principle in which hard work and frugality are viewed as the soul’s salvation. The general idea of the Protestant work ethic is, “If you’re not enjoying yourself, you’re doing good.” (Location 1216)

say this because once you advance to a certain place within a company, the performance review stops being a thing. (Location 1237)

But for those who perform adequately, the company will figure out whether it can afford a raise or not, how much of one, and then create a performance review narrative that supports the financial decision. (Location 1268)

The fact of the matter is that I wasn’t so much moving toward better opportunities as I was moving away from situations that wearied me. (Location 1393)

After that, however, I was never able to last very long. I would go through the interview process and be sold on the sorts of problems being solved and the approach the companies were taking to solving them. I would hire on, flush with enthusiasm and ideas for how to tackle the challenges facing us. And then I would work cheek-by-jowl with coworkers, navigating corporate processes and office politics that chipped away at my tolerance until I couldn’t take it anymore. The force of the psychic friction would quickly outweigh my enthusiasm for the problem and the value I thought I could add. I would lose faith in the company and its people, as constituted. (Location 1400)

why aren’t organizations worth our faith? Somewhere between mission statements like “we want to bring the best gosh-darned widgets to the masses” and the realities of these organizations, a major disconnect happens. The corporations are less than the sum of their parts. Why is that? (Location 1411)

The earliest incarnation of the corporation was almost certainly formed as a way to guarantee legacy—a way to establish an institution that survived the mortality of its founder. In a very real sense, it’s commercial religion. (Location 1446)

Taylor bequeathed upon us the idealist layer of the organization. (Location 1657)

We still use Gantt charts, and we still tend to assume that line-level grunts are children whose arrival at nine and departure at five needs to be carefully managed, lest they steal precious minutes from the big guys upstairs. (Location 1754)

I had created this favorable career situation not by paying dues and working hard for companies. Rather, I owed my position to working hard for myself—putting in seventy-hour weeks to earn a graduate degree while working full time; building a formidable network of people that remembered me well; moonlighting and freelancing; starting a blog; creating developer training videos; and maintaining a constant and open inquiry as to the availability of better paying, better titled jobs, notwithstanding the “disloyal” branding this could have earned me, from the company perspective. (Location 1823)

“programmer” is invariably a line-level labor position. Being (Location 1884)

Success for the idealist thus becomes a matter of doing the work in front of the right people and doing it in such a way as to demonstrate their utter enthusiasm for and gratitude toward the company and their superiors. It involves willingly donating the best years and mental effort they have to what amounts to a corporate tithe above and beyond their expected work input. All of this happens for the duration of their careers, and the whole effort is successful as long as they can keep “I’m a very important person at Acme Inc.” as a core piece of their identity. (Location 1928)

the advice isn’t “decide that you’re an opportunist rather than a pragmatist or idealist…profit!” The advice is to become an opportunist, meaning that the path to opportunism is not one of learning the right things to do or say for a given scenario, but rather it is a path of becoming a different person in the corporate context than you might otherwise be. (Location 1953)

This transformation into an opportunist is, at its core, about altering your perception of yourself. You need to stop viewing yourself as a software engineer II or a QA specialist or a dev manager. You need to stop viewing yourself as an employee of your (or any) company and start viewing yourself as the owner of your own personal brand and operation. You are an island. You are other. (Location 1972)

“Why would I do that? What’s in it for me?” (Location 1978)

More likely than not, an opportunist in this position would wind up putting in those hours anyway. After all, he is a business with a single client, and that client is negotiating down the price of his labor. He really lacks the leverage to say no, so he says yes. For now, anyway. But he also files that away and endeavors constantly to acquire more leverage and to improve his bargaining position. (Location 1978)

high-risk blueprint for how to wind up in the C-suite. You’ll find your way there, if you can stomach it. But you’ll also probably lose a job or two along the way and do some things that keep you up at night. (Location 1995)

The industry seems to offer unquestioning acceptance of the premise that these processes, beliefs, and principles made the consultants successful without considering that these consultants would probably enjoy success with just about any process since they were really good at what they did. (Location 2091)

The most basic paradox of corporate Scrum is thus the edict from on high to be autonomous, but not so autonomous as to stop listening to edicts from on high. (Location 2102)

It’s ironic because the lack of trust subverts the foundational autonomy that agile methods call for, and it makes team mediocrity a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Location 2105)

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine a boss. Does the boss account for yesterday’s and today’s work to his peers and superiors every day? Does anyone “pair” with the boss? Does the boss have a “boss master” telling him how to behave during meetings? (Location 2127)

that it’s happening all around us, most prominently at organizations like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. These companies are building pools, and we think it’s so cool to be building pools that we put up with absurd interviewing processes and subject ourselves to false scarcity, depressing our wages. (Location 2149)

The tragedy of corporate Scrum is that the very behavior that gets us branded as good developers also limits our career prospects and forces us to remain in subordinate positions. (Location 2159)

Being a good developer—participating gamely in team activities, learning enough algorithm trivia to pass interviews, being attracted to the best organizations using the coolest tech, and so on—is bad for your career. The real tragedy of all of this is that the current corporate structure forces you to choose between being a good developer and having a good career. (Location 2162)

You fail when you make yourself an open book and indicate the need to account for every detail of your work day. (Location 2165)

You succeed when you stop doing all this and become other—when you start treating your employer not as a larger group with a larger cause, but as a temporary business partner that is an equal. (Location 2167)

If you’re a programmer seeking to be an opportunist, you need to start figuring out how not to be a programmer in the near future. (Location 2169)

Simply showing up to work each day and being a programmer falls into that same category. Servant leadership and team-first behavior in line-level positions is the stuff idealists are made of, but showing up and being a programmer (without an exit strategy) can characterize both idealists and pragmatists. (Location 2181)

Opportunists are busy figuring out how to stop being considered programmers, even if it means potentially getting fired. (Location 2183)

The journeyman idealist swaps faith in the company for faith in the nebulous concept of the technical meritocracy. His company is the programming industry in general, spread across all companies and domains. (Location 2199)

He trades the corporate carnival cash of nicer cubicles for industry carnival cash of higher Stack Overflow scores. (Location 2212)

But only the opportunist understands that the shortest distance between “junior programmer” and “CTO” isn’t through the wide-band spectrum of software development positions. (Location 2259)

The opportunist programmer thus learns that it’s better to hang out with the project managers and distance herself from her fellow developers. (Location 2267)

You also need to swallow whatever joy you extract from correct, elegant implementations and adopt a willingness to sacrifice Cadillac quality for time to market. (Location 2276)

You must sell out and believe in selling out, (Location 2278)

Programming is not a calling, and it’s not a craft. It’s just automation that increases top line revenue through product or reduces bottom line costs through efficiency. (Location 2279)

obvious role of the manager in a large corporation is the paternalistic one of micromanagement in the Taylor sense. But the manager serves an additional function at scale in a corporation—namely, she is an information conduit. (Location 2333)

Being judged on the basis of output is a massive governor on your career progress, set to a very low speed. As a pragmatist, you shrug and do your best to produce a little more output. As an idealist, you understand the importance of narrative, but only as spoon-fed to you by the organization. As an opportunist, you need to create one for yourself that suits your career ambitions. (Location 2379)

But to do that, you have to get away from delivering; you have to escape the delivery trap. (Location 2381)

The main thing is that you want to begin replacing your delivery responsibilities with other meta-responsibilities, ala management. Once you do this, there’s nothing particularly measurable about what you’re doing, and it becomes a matter of crafting your narrative. (Location 2397)

Part and parcel with doing the meta-work is selling that work to those in a position to help you. (Location 2401)

Opportunists realize that there’s no such thing as a company outside of tax and legal documents. In other words, opportunists don’t view themselves as a tiny company dealing with a massive one. Rather, they view themselves as a tiny company dealing with a large population of other tiny companies. (Location 2439)

perceiving failure situations early and maneuvering idealists into place to take the fall for you). (Location 2464)

Little things like tons of contacts and recommendations on LinkedIn can actually help. (Location 2499)

Make her life better somehow, then look for reciprocity. (Location 2532)

“What if I were a small business?” (Location 2567)

Never, ever be in a position where being patted on the head and tossed a treat is an acceptable substitute for compensation for the value that you bring. (Location 2603)

Like a ship, lack of motion earns you barnacles for your (lack of) trouble. (Location 2639)

All transfers can be spun as taking on new challenges, graduating to more responsibility, or even staging victorious retreats. Suckers and idealists go down with the ship. Sharks like you swim away and live to fight another day. And most importantly, they don’t stick around long enough to get noticed for a hoard of accumulated feel-good carnival prizes. (Location 2644)

when interviewing dev managers, organizations deal in narratives and feelings far more than you’re used to. (Location 2851)

Opportunists ceding ethical high ground generally don’t experience a crossing-the-Rubicon moment, like Anakin Skywalker killing Mace Windu. The death of their ethical purity is one of a thousand cuts. (Location 3031)

With a portfolio of clients and prospects, I can push back or refuse requests without putting my entire livelihood at stake. In the corporate context, I cannot. (Location 3058)

It’s against this backdrop that I predict the freelancer and custom app dev shop start to dominate the technology space. A picture emerges of organizations having their automation and development needs met by legions of freelancers and specialty software shops of various sizes. It’s a more harmonious form of labor specialization. (Location 3129)

The first property of the developer opportunist is that he recognizes writing code is a means to an end. (Location 3299)

Now consider what marketing yourself would look like. You’d head to user groups and introduce yourself to people. You’d build a website with a blog and publish to it. You’d establish yourself as having expertise in some particular area or niche. And you’d do it all knowing that the payoff would come much later. (Location 3323)

Our value proposition is that we provide expertise in efficiency. (Location 3596)

business. You don’t come to us when you’ve planned the details of your site. You don’t even come to us when you think you need a site. Rather, you come to us the moment that someone says, ‘It’d be a lot easier if our customers could order stuff online.’ You’re talking there about making your operation more efficient, and efficiency is our specialty. We’ll be the judge of whether you need a site or not and, if you do, how it should work and what its ‘spec’ needs to be.” (Location 3629)

Efficiencers are to business and software development what DevOps is to development and operations. (Location 3685)

The customer now agrees to a rate for the work rather than a price for the deliverable. (Location 3756)

But if you’re adding productized services to your offering portfolio, you enter a different mode of operation. You’re doing something repeatable enough that you don’t need to completely punt on effort/cost estimation. (Location 3760)

value-based billing, and while it’s a nice alternative to other billing models (Location 3771)

You can even continue to offer custom app dev as an upsell to your normal offering. That’s less strategic in and of itself, but the expertise required to furnish a productized service offering will ensure the discussions remain strategic. (Location 3775)

The most important thing is to position yourself as a business expert that can bring automation to bear. (Location 3777)

niching around a specific area of expertise, (Location 3788)

As efficiencers, I propose that we avoid viewing margins on other people’s work as the only (or even a desirable) way to scale. With that central assumption cast aside, we can revisit others. (Location 3847)

The members of efficiencer firms are partners. (Location 3867)

scale up their delivery capabilities. (Location 3869)

That happens via trial, recommendations, and networking. Everyone’s contributions to the organization’s profits can easily be measured. (Location 3869)

I encourage you to anchor these firms around a niche—a productized service or at least a highly targeted service. (Location 3927)

If you have a more tactical need for automation work, then I’d look to the freelance market and bring on subcontractors for spot work. (Location 3939)

Labor specialization is the reason we’re not all still wandering around wearing animal skins and eating wild edibles that we gather from fields. Civilization requires specialization. (Location 4064)

There is a tried and true organizational play for cost reduction: converting something a vendor does into something an employee does. (Location 4223)

this is the approach to software developers when IT is a pure cost center for a company. (Location 4229)

Efficiencer firms are bootstrapped and self-sufficient, meaning they’re profitable from the outset. The members of efficiencer firms are partners. All members execute on the organization’s value proposition and have Skin In The Game. Instead of employing pragmatists, they delegate to vendors. They don’t rely on absurd practices like job interviews to scale up their delivery capabilities. That happens via trial, recommendations, and networking. (Location 4264)

Everyone’s contributions to the organization’s profits can easily be measured. They only grow as long as that remains true. The firm is comprised of opportunists. Anyone who would normally be a pragmatist is instead a vendor. This in turn eliminates the need for an overenthusiastic buffer of managers and senior people. (Location 4267)

Traditional app dev consultancies bill hourly, and they grow by capturing margin on employee labor and reinvesting it in the company (Location 4273)

In other words, going back to the pyramidal organizational structure, they grow by adding more pragmatists at the bottom of the pyramid. (Location 4275)

put it more bluntly, if you sell someone else’s hourly labor as a product, the person providing that labor is hardly credible as a partner. They figure that, if the laborer was actually strategic, why would he be making $50 per hour for strategy work worth at least four or five times that amount? That doesn’t seem very strategic. (Location 4279)

These firms will offer more profitable, more autonomous, more dignified, more fulfilling work to software people. And that, in turn, will make it more difficult for these other companies to staff software people. (Location 4299)

Look first for pure process solutions. (Location 4394)

Look for process improvements and existing solutions first. Then contemplate what sorts of commercial off-the-shelf products could help. (Location 4396)

You’ll be surprised by how often you get shot down, even with a bulletproof case. This is to be expected since you’re a developer and no one is used to business strategy coming from developers. (Location 4399)

This is a human cognitive bias known as effort justification, wherein your value of the “in” crowd and its selection process goes up substantially in proportion to the barriers to entry. (Location 4484)

Demand is such that doing some crazy stuff with Excel macros can get you a steady job writing code. (Location 4523)

Find a company that lets you get your name out there and raise your own profile. (Location 4545)

No matter what the future looks like for us and for you, you’re going to need a reputation and a network. If someone will pay you to start building that, then you’ve effectively worked out a deal where you get paid to market yourself. (Location 4556)

Tim Ferriss posits that you can do your forty-hour-per-week job in five to ten hours per week, (Location 4608)

One of the biggest growth industries imaginable is going to be products and services that help make it easier to go efficiencer. (Location 4737)

risk-pooling mechanisms. (Location 4740)

The entire advantage of the corporation is tied up in risk mitigation, (Location 4744)

so when it no longer provides that, it will no longer have pragmatists. (Location 4744)

Any time you have more than two humans in a room together, you have politics. (Location 4760)

their main area of expertise seems to be software development rather than solving a specific business problem. This is something her firm could work on changing as they moved toward being true problem solvers. (Location 4775)

As we begin to have automation experts—efficiencers—that understand both business and software development, we’re creating a legitimate profession. (Location 4811)

And we’re creating a profession that doesn’t make sense to staff in-house. (Location 4812)

Or does it make more sense to call someone that specializes in automating sales and distribution of appliances to take care of it for you? (Location 4816)

Likewise staggering is the amount of money to be made by showing up, shaking your head, and saying, “What you’re doing is ridiculous. Let me help.” (Location 4818)

Dishwashing companies will continue to employ software folks the same way that they employ a staff lawyer, if they’re big enough. But those staff members will become generalists that coordinate with (Location 4821)