Do call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2013)

McKenzie (original article's author) worked probably a decade outside a major center of tech R&D before taking a job at Stripe. A lot of his advice is written from that viewpoint. It's valuable because a lot of the world operates as he describes. I think the big lesson is that life inside industry clusters (finance/media in NY, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, oil and gas in Houston) is quite different from life outside. In industry clusters, jobs are way more specialized, standards…

First, I want to acknowledge that neither article was actually about who gets to call themselves a software engineer. That said, clearly that's all the HN comments are going to be about , so I'm diving in. I call myself a software engineer because it makes me feel smart and important. To me, that's the only difference between an engineer and similar jobs. I don't want to heap scorn on people who make sandwiches at subway, like many will use…

Thanks to low interest rate and phenomenal paradigm changes in the last 15 or 20 years, the tech sector has grown so much that engineers with three years of experience can become "tech leads" or "staff engineers" who spend most of their time drawing boxes or "aligning" whatever in meetings. Day in and day out, the most valued engineers are either in meetings or on their way to meetings. To this point, these engineers are ally TPMs and PMs with…

(2013)