I guess the entire thing is I like building working systems.
I love talking to business folks, I love when I can do that “git init”. I love that new AWS account smell and molding a complete architecture.
Now I can do a lot more if it by myself. It was a time problem before - not a knowledge problem
What has made me valuable for 30 years is an ability to go from business goal -> to working implementation. They can pay someone a lot less than me (or any American - I’m in no way bragging about comp) to code.
Companies don’t pay my employer the bill rate they charge for me based on how well I code. While I’ve been expected to produce production level code as part of my job across 5 companies in the past decade not a single one asked me to write a line of code as part of the interview. They were much more concerned about ability to get things done.
Ironically, even the job at BigTech that landed in my lap was all behavioral (AWS ProServe). I damn sure didn’t get that job because of my whopping two years of AWS experience at the time. Most of my answers for “tell me about a time when…” were leading non AWS projects.
I’m not bragging - I’m old. My competitive advantage should be more than just my coding ability.
> What has made me valuable for 30 years is an ability to go from business goal -> to working implementation.
Look, it seems we are at about the same level of industry experience. I'm not even a f/time programmer anymore, and haven't been for some time (technically, I'm a professional problem solver, I suppose).
I am saying that, while I don't need to delve into details (unless it's a hobby project), what makes me valuable (in a similar position that you have, except that I don't write a line of code) is the current ability to program.
I (and you, no doubt) would be useless in the type of position that you are in if you didn't sweat blood earlier in your career getting things right while programming.
What I am saying is that my entire value proposition is built on a high skill level in programming. Letting those skills atrophy is, in my opinion, devaluing myself.
I hate to sound like a broken record. But I consider my skillset at 51 all of the things I said that involve getting from signed contract to happy customer at the end. I’m actually slowly working on moving even further up and becoming halfway competent at pre-sales.
You cdn substitute customer for “the business”.
When you step back “the code” is the smallest part. Once I learned how to take a holistic view of the entire system - I specialize in AWS architecture + app dev - including how to deal with people.
In enterprise dev - no one cares about the code - they care about functionality. They never cared about the code. In large tech companies they have to care about the code.
As a manager though, I bet you understand the architecture, the politics, the business, the security posture, the financial implications, etc of everything you are responsible for.
Wouldn’t you agree that your skillset is more valuable than your coders? Again with the assumption that you aren’t working in BigTech or equivalent where every optimization is at a scale that it matters.
I love talking to business folks, I love when I can do that “git init”. I love that new AWS account smell and molding a complete architecture.
Now I can do a lot more if it by myself. It was a time problem before - not a knowledge problem
What has made me valuable for 30 years is an ability to go from business goal -> to working implementation. They can pay someone a lot less than me (or any American - I’m in no way bragging about comp) to code.
Companies don’t pay my employer the bill rate they charge for me based on how well I code. While I’ve been expected to produce production level code as part of my job across 5 companies in the past decade not a single one asked me to write a line of code as part of the interview. They were much more concerned about ability to get things done.
Ironically, even the job at BigTech that landed in my lap was all behavioral (AWS ProServe). I damn sure didn’t get that job because of my whopping two years of AWS experience at the time. Most of my answers for “tell me about a time when…” were leading non AWS projects.
I’m not bragging - I’m old. My competitive advantage should be more than just my coding ability.