Lions get a better deal: take pride
and fuck it.
Ok, to be serious... I perceive a dissonance here.
On one hand, we're essentially a degraded tribe. Most software engineers work for managers. We're not a profession, we don't pick our tools, and most of us work on uninspiring bullshit and are subjected to Brownian Management that has one team digging holes and another filling them in.
Management has its place, but in most companies it's a class of intermediate extortionist thugs who keep talent down: you support my career goals, or you're gone yesterday. Only the most progressive companies (Valve, Github) trust engineers to work directly for the company. No wonder our industry is so fucked.
On the other hand, the fact that Yahoo bought a small team of high-schoolers for $30 million and canned the product means that there is a lot of value in what we do. As engineers, we have a lot of muscle. We're good at something for which the world has almost infinite demand (not "programming" only, but the more abstract talent of solving problems and improving shit.) We're just terrible, as a class, at negotiation. We need to get better. We also have a tendency to want to put our heads down and ignore "the boring business stuff", then we get pissed when non-technical executives drink our autonomy milkshake. We need to stop that, too.
Ok, to be serious... I perceive a dissonance here.
On one hand, we're essentially a degraded tribe. Most software engineers work for managers. We're not a profession, we don't pick our tools, and most of us work on uninspiring bullshit and are subjected to Brownian Management that has one team digging holes and another filling them in.
Management has its place, but in most companies it's a class of intermediate extortionist thugs who keep talent down: you support my career goals, or you're gone yesterday. Only the most progressive companies (Valve, Github) trust engineers to work directly for the company. No wonder our industry is so fucked.
On the other hand, the fact that Yahoo bought a small team of high-schoolers for $30 million and canned the product means that there is a lot of value in what we do. As engineers, we have a lot of muscle. We're good at something for which the world has almost infinite demand (not "programming" only, but the more abstract talent of solving problems and improving shit.) We're just terrible, as a class, at negotiation. We need to get better. We also have a tendency to want to put our heads down and ignore "the boring business stuff", then we get pissed when non-technical executives drink our autonomy milkshake. We need to stop that, too.