I have meetings, I write documents. I offer sage advice on best practice. That's it. It's not IT anymore, it's just make-work.
My careers have followed a similar route. When I graduated from college, I took a particular job because I didn't want to sit in an office all day. But as I got better at that job, my work increasingly became telling other people how to do the work, and ten years later I ended up in the office most of the time.
I quit that job to start my own company, again, so I could have the freedom to do things outside of an office. And again, as more people joined the company, I spent more time managing the company and writing reports and doing things other than being hands-on with the thing I started the company for. After another ten years, I closed the company.
Now I'm happy writing code. And another ten years in, my job is increasingly not about writing code anymore, but about ideas and processes and meetings and telling other people how to do things. The heads of departments completely unrelated to mine invite me to their meetings just so I can listen and write reports about what I heard later. Now, no matter how hard I try, I spend more time in Microsoft Word than writing code.
There seems to be something about the business world that removes people from the jobs they're good at. Sure, lots of people strive to be the Senior Lead Corporate Upstairs Middle Manager Grade IV. But some people are just happy doing work, and at some companies it's hard to stay in those roles.
At this point in my life, I'd rather be Lazlo Hollyfeld than Professor Hathaway.
> There seems to be something about the business world that removes people from the jobs they're good at.
There's not much business value in just having one person be really good at something. It doesn't scale. The state of coding and information technology means you can't maintain exponential or even logarithmic scaling of your own abilities to produce business value. At some point, the only real thing left to do is to do your best to produce more people who can do what you do. 10 people that are 15% as good as you will outproduce you.
10 people that are 15% as good as you will outproduce you.
That only seems to make sense if those 10 less-productive people make one-tenth the salary of the single productive person.
I've seen this in action. I know of a company that hired a whole room full of know-it-all high school drop-outs to write code, rather than one or two trained college graduates. That company went out of business in a matter of months.
The economics of software development completely abstract out the costs of developer salaries. Software is not a capital-intensive industry, it's labor-intensive. They don't need to wring costs out of the production pipeline, they need to wring more production out of it. Any added cost is worth it.
Companies all want to have software biz economics, but few of them actually know how to run a software business. A room full of high school dropouts is each going to have 1% of the productive capacity of one top-level resource. College grads will have roughly 5%. With decent leadership and mentoring that can go up to 10%. Within a few years they'll hit 10-15%, becoming 'senior engineers'. Title inflation happens because titles, and their requisite salaries, don't matter for the industry. It's the same in finance, so you see a zillion vice presidents.
It makes no sense for a company with hundreds of devs to take a top-level resource and waste their talents on writing code. Top level resources write code to stay sane and relevant, not because the company needs their code.
My careers have followed a similar route. When I graduated from college, I took a particular job because I didn't want to sit in an office all day. But as I got better at that job, my work increasingly became telling other people how to do the work, and ten years later I ended up in the office most of the time.
I quit that job to start my own company, again, so I could have the freedom to do things outside of an office. And again, as more people joined the company, I spent more time managing the company and writing reports and doing things other than being hands-on with the thing I started the company for. After another ten years, I closed the company.
Now I'm happy writing code. And another ten years in, my job is increasingly not about writing code anymore, but about ideas and processes and meetings and telling other people how to do things. The heads of departments completely unrelated to mine invite me to their meetings just so I can listen and write reports about what I heard later. Now, no matter how hard I try, I spend more time in Microsoft Word than writing code.
There seems to be something about the business world that removes people from the jobs they're good at. Sure, lots of people strive to be the Senior Lead Corporate Upstairs Middle Manager Grade IV. But some people are just happy doing work, and at some companies it's hard to stay in those roles.
At this point in my life, I'd rather be Lazlo Hollyfeld than Professor Hathaway.