IT Meritocracy. Part 5: Wooing the Rich and Influential.

Who Would Take You Under His/Her Wing?

Thanks for reading my series about fewer programmers doing and earning more. Alright, you have the superior equipment and you trained yourself to pedal in a higher gear. What’s next? I already talked about it in the post I just linked, comparing programming to sports. It’s enrolling in a pro competition to win the pro prize. So, is it your responsibility or someone else’s?

Yes, everyone knows, the demand for pro athletes in our field (software) is higher than ever — regardless of the number of code monkeys in today’s IT. Slave labor doesn’t work — to build anything real. Only to log hours to make staffing middlemen their commissions. Worse, a lot of things need to be rebuilt after such man-hour-driven amateur commotion, making pros even more important.

The demand itself doesn’t get one hired. Or the startup magically funded. You are still asking a lot — for someone to build the environment around your specific strengths, matching them against the specific customer demand you probably have a very vague idea about. Someone needs to show you the way and find those customers for you, right? Let’s talk about it.

For starters, the majority of the Earth population is not technical. Especially at the top: the rich and influential individuals in a position to build the productive and rewarding environment you crave. Despite all of the HR dissertations to invest in “human capital”, recognize someone’s potential, etc. the rich (or even half of your coworkers) will never understand your specific strengths, let alone match them against the tasks you excel at. They don’t know your ideal projects, and they don’t care.

Do they have to? Even if investors, business development professionals, and others in the money-making business genuinely wanted to get into your head and finance a project tailored to your specific strengths, what most of today’s geeks offer? Yet another messenger or blog platform aka “social network”? An online game like Pokemon Go? Even (better than Google’s) search — still expected to be free. All of those offerings were initially devoid of any revenue model — people with money care about. I certainly would.

Should software be free? A lot of it is entertainment: not a necessity by definition. Nothing is free of course. I don’t know if deception is just a passing phase for our civilization, or as we become more advanced technologically, the truth is too complex to comprehend and thus needs some lie facades. The unsubsidized mobile phones are too expensive and need contracts, the prices need to end with $.99… Or this is just American thing?

Shouldn’t everyone pay all bills in full like I do? Or treat credit cards and home equity as a source of income? Not just individuals. The “bailed out” corporations and even the government itself.

I am not venting. Only a fair and straightforward pricing model can back engineering effort and ultimately the meritocracy. Ever thought about your compensation from that perspective? If everything starts from lies to the end customer, are you surprised it proliferates all the way to developers, and your boss has to play salary games with you?

The issue is deeply rooted in inadequate technology, as always. To be noticed and taken under one’s wing you need to be a key performer (so called “rockstar” , etc.) i.e. a generalist (Google term) capable of delivering a product completely on your own like Zuckerberg and many others did. They weren’t pawns inside some “team”, were they? However at the current conventional technology level one developer (you) can only build relatively simple single-purpose consumer apps (messengers, blogs, games, etc.) of an entertainment and personal productivity kind, that everyone expects for free.

So what revenue should pay a decent programmer salary if your product is free? The only things people in the money-making business can tack on are ads and other marketing — pushed onto your expected to be significant user base. Which, unless you are the first (and others cannot catch up within a couple of months) depends solely on marketing, not your product’s features or quality.

Why marketers need your superior programming skills? They can woo unsuspecting teenagers and target other wide (meaning the lowest common denominator) demographics with any sh_t. If your creation is used solely as a marketing vehicle to deliver ads and subliminal messages, how is it better than thousands of mediocre blogs, messengers, and games, used forthe same exact purpose? Whether their creators envisioned it or not.

Silicon Valley “exits” is marketing of a different kind. Hype nevertheless, if not an obvious fraud. “Funded” Silicon Valley startups don’t need your programming. They need nominal CTOs: scientists with MIT and CalTech degrees or the “ex-Googler” equivalent of said academic credentials.

What it means for you? You are back to statistics/luck of the masses noticing your clever product (Zuckerberg’s case) or networking to approach important people with your charisma (Musk’s mid-90s focus). Nothing’s wrong with either approach. They’ve been around forever. It’s just not something, we, engineers, do. We invent, plan, and build essential (for our customers) products and services — instead of “whatever” marketed to unpredictable masses or vaporware promises of great future sold via personal relationships and kickbacks to allegedly clueless big corporations looking to burn some extra cash.

Most People In Control of Your Compensation Are Not Technical

Why everything is about marketing anyway? If you think things are bad today, Google founders struggled big time during the allegedly easy (to woo VCs with a simple website idea) late 90s. Recall that era. All renowned industry experts i.e. Forbes analysts put their bets on two things.

The B2C future of the Internet seemed to be firmly footed in non-porn, though similarly styled “portals” like Yahoo, that mastered the art of disguising informercials as news, among filling every available square inch of screen space with ad banners.

The circa-1998 B2B technology of tomorrow was a vague (never materialized) idea of automatic web service hubs exchanging XML, structured according to some bloated and useless (unfortunately only in an engineer’s eyes) “industry standards” like MISMO and HL7, written by semi-government bureaucrats.

No one needed a better search. Yahoo and AltaVista had theirs, offered to their website visitors as a courtesy, as every visitor’s sacred duty was to read infomercials and click ad banners. Is that a big surprise? We are either consumers or workers to the “economy”. All business schools view it (when not explicitly equated with the stock exchange) as a combination of two things: advertising (Yahoo) and manufacturing support: mainframe-era supply chain, HR, and other ERPs now communicating via XML Web services. A blank (search) website without any ads? Blasphemy.

Even if your technical vision is legit, most people with money to take you under their wings are not technical. They are going to play in their sandbox, interested only in things they understand e.g. stuff they studied in business schools: marketing, manufacturing control, (nano) trading, etc. Now, you can take a class on elevator pitches to woo a complete stranger with your complex technical idea in 20 seconds, or you can find a soulmate salesperson cofounder like I did, and start self-funded.

Be wary of “people with ideas”. It is non-programmer’s world. Outsiders don’t know how hard it is. They naturally value only something they know. E.g. a typical “idea man” seeking developers thinks, that a $20/hr freelancer is going to develop an all-in-one ERP. They call it a “website”. They think the lion share of funding should go towards the marketing sorcery because programming is easy: a commodity skill. Just a “website”, right?

I’ve seen lots of crappy prototypes, produced by freelancers for “people with ideas”. Prototyping is great. It validates the idea. After which the prototype should be discarded — replaced with the solid Version One. Unfortunately almost all of the prototypes I came across, survived for a couple of years until everything started falling apart and the company was looking for a Messiah (to pay him/her a whopping $10K over their most expensive code monkey) to save the project by “fixing a few glitches”… My typical “midsize startup” (an oxymoron) interview back in the day.

I don’t know about you, but I got tired of those crappy interviews with the second in command: typically some nephew freelancer promoted to the CTO, afraid of me pointing out the core design flaws to his uncle. I got tired of waiting for that uncle to team up with me initially — instead of some “smart kid” nephew. I’ve met enough of “people with ideas” to know better. I don’t think they can notice me right in front of them in broad daylight.

Non-technical founders with an MBA degree and less dignified “people with ideas” often blame the CTO for refusing to “embrace growth” e.g. scaling SaaS customer-wise, since (unlike generic blogs, messengers, and games) almost every new B2B customer needs a couple of unique features never factored into the original freelancer-developed prototype.

I understand those “CTOs” reluctance and slow response. Every quickly hacked together, let alone based on wasteful headcount-centric conventional B2B technology prototype requires almost a complete rewrite to add a new feature its freelancer developer wasn’t prepared for. Then it would be another complete rewrite for the next feature, and for the next one, and so on, and so forth. Imagine half of your car disassembled and reassembled to just change oil. That’s what the stagnated for 20 years conventional enterprise software development technology offers. Good for consulting (man-hour) revenue. Bad for startups.

Isn’t it really the moment of truth? Revealing, that some smart kid “nephew” or whoever the “uncle” found, thinking programming is a commodity skill - to develop “a” “website”, is incapable of delivering the robust ERP-caliber product the market needs, let alone priced for SMBs.

It is not the primary CTO’s job to develop the prototype to validate the idea. A prototype should be a byproduct of delivering an industrial-grade software — unheard of and vastly superior to all competitors offerings. How? Not (just) by assembling the “team” and managing it. By inventing the unheard of technology to do the heavy lifting —e.g. effortlessly automating all seemingly unique new customer requests. Instead of throwing rounds of funding to mitigate for conventional technology shortcomings.

“Damn, I Cannot Believe How Lucky I am”

I wish the economy wasn’t “cyclical”, driven by infamous boom and bust cycles, putting us at the mercy of stock market speculators. I wish you to never experience recession layoffs. I’ve survived two recessions in the US: the dot-com bubble burst of the early 2000s and the housing market collapse of 2008. Wondering what happens? Here is a typical scenario.

If you are ambitious, you’ll surely negotiate the top salary, meaning you’ll be at the top of the recession layoff list: being dumped at the first sign of economic downturn. It doesn’t matter if your skills are unique or you are otherwise super-important for the project, and the core company business will stop without you.

First, the decision is made at the highest, CFO’s level, way above your direct managers. The CFO knows nothing about you, other than being “overpaid” in his mind, since you don’t have an MBA or, chances are even “reputable” in MBA circles technical degree e.g. from MIT.

Second, unlike us, programmers, used to running if-then statements in our heads, CFOs and other MBAs are not overly logical to correlate the cause and effect: the project crashing and burning without you. They are also defensive confronted by a more logical person like you. “I told you so” reasoning doesn’t work there. They’d rather cope with the (money) losses.

It’s not their money anyway. The losses are paid out of magical limitless corporate funds. Losses are used to hedge against taxes. They written off via bail-outs. It’s a different, crooked world largely devoid of economic logic nowadays. In any case they won’t hire you back even if everything crashes and burns without you.

The chances are you’ll be forced to accept a pay cut somewhere else. Alright, it’s not the end of the world. You start low and prove yourself again, right? Your new employer will surely realize your value. Absolutely agree. Will it reward you for your hard and smart work? A “good question”, right?

Enough with that corporate crap. Forget about work. Let’s go to the club… bar, party, beach, or another place you meet attractive girls. Or boys, whatever. So you meet one: pretty, smart, and fun in bed. After finding out the latter overnight, you are woken up in the morning by the smell of the tastiest breakfast in your life. Is your immediate thought going to be “I will work three jobs to make that angel the happiest girl on Earth”? In a romantic Hollywood movie, sure. In real life, the chances are, you’d think something along the lines of “Damn, I cannot believe how lucky I am”.

Exactly what your employer is thinking: “How did I find that genius so unbelievably cheap?”. Taking things for granted is human nature. Start packing, and the real negotiation begins.

Recruiting vs. Poaching.

Are you hiding from recruiters, annoyed by the broken English of badly formatted Indian bodyshop emails and worthless calls of brain-dead American sourcers? None has ever offered you even a decent lateral move i.e. a comparable salary somewhere else. And since most readers of my posts do not work for Amazon or Google, you must be irritated with their algorithmic interviews, right? Who codes algorithms daily? Like… manually? Instead of using one of already developed libraries.

In other words you don’t want to be “recruited”: by Indian bodyshops operating out of smelly NJ apartments or Google HR, doesn’t matter. Recruiting is not for you. Or me. I respect that.

Google has a different hiring route, bypassing the long line of perfect GPA “tiger cubs” competing in algorithmic textbook cramming. It “poaches” engineers, hiring them without insulting technical testing, since a poaching-worthy candidate is already known for his/her achievements (portfolio). Lean self-funded startups like ours can only afford to hire someone with a relevant portfolio. That’s how you want to be hired, don’t you? For your work instead of crammed algorithms.

Well, show me your work instead of largely unverifiable abbreviations in the resume. I need your help with a specific problem. Convince me that you’ve solved a similar automation problem in the past — the only thing that matters to a smart employer, that is going to respect you and pay you well.

Want to work for me: a startup founder that still programs? Or you want to keep working for average non-technical morons, easy to fool with your resume abbreviations and “years of experience”? The problem they are looking for coders, not creative engineers — reflected in your compensation. You’d be lucky to get even $5K over average — reminded of that every day: “how much we pay you”. You’d be lucky to survive the next recession, laid off first due to being the most “expensive” developer in the team.

Worst of all, you’d be submerged in exactly the same smelly sh_t, you hated at your previous job: untangling the hopeless spaghetti typed by hundreds of code monkeys — the main reason, you struggle to impress good employers with a real portfolio of work. Sounds familiar? Wonder why you are stuck career-wise, job-hopping from one dysfunctional employer to another? You have nothing to offer to good (geek) managers like myself. What did you do in your spare time? Crammed some trendy abbreviation’s tutorial hoping the outsourced code monkeys will never learn it to compete with you at your next job?

Do yourself a favor next time you finish your eight-hour estimated bug fixes in 15 minutes. Look around, ask your end users, pause and think… Then pick a real business problem and plan, how you’d solve it with the technology of your choice. Not for your cheap employer. You’ve reached your cap. You’d get a pat on the back at best, though most likely a raised brow why you are not fixing the sh_t assigned to you.

Solve that problem. Do it for your portfolio — to impress a good employer at your next interview. It doesn’t need to be your work domain. Pick a mobile app you want to improve. Look for volunteer work (programming). Just don’t sit and wait for your boss to give you something you can show off in the future. Because all your boss wants you to do is fix layers of spaghetti by writing more spaghetti. And reporting your hours.

I was in a similar situation 10 years ago — struggling to portray my sh_tty bug-fixing work experience at interviews. Wondering, why I go from one sh_tty employer to another. Why Google and Amazon don’t want me. Still don’t — with my predominantly enterprise expertise.

It wasn’t fair. The bugs I fixed were critical. They saved hundreds of thousands in eliminated and averted production downtime. I refactored every piece of code I touched trying to prevent other bugs from happening. I was faster and not just 10x… I was 100x more efficient than the majority of the team: bodyshop-supplied code monkeys, an “expensive” American “resource” like myself was tasked to clean up after. But it didn’t matter for good employers.

I was stuck in the same diaper-changing “specialization” — up until I quit the corporate rat race. My official salary is zero at the moment, but I do different things now. Show me your work — different from the sh_t your employer is paying you for.