# Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice



## Prime_Coder (Jan 3, 2012)

> If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity.  It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering.  This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer.  The goal is to make you happy, by filling in the gaps in your education regarding how the “real world” actually works.  It took me about ten years and a lot of suffering to figure out some of this, starting from “fairly bright engineer with low self-confidence and zero practical knowledge of business.”  I wouldn’t trust this as the definitive guide, but hopefully it will provide value over what your college Career Center isn’t telling you.
> 
> 90% of programming jobs are in creating Line of Business software: Economics 101: the price for anything (including you) is a function of the supply of it and demand for it.  Let’s talk about the demand side first.  Most software is not sold in boxes, available on the Internet, or downloaded from the App Store.  Most software is boring one-off applications in corporations, under-girding every imaginable facet of the global economy.  It tracks expenses, it optimizes shipping costs, it assists the accounting department in preparing projections, it helps design new widgets, it prices insurance policies, it flags orders for manual review by the fraud department, etc etc.  Software solves business problems.  Software often solves business problems despite being soul-crushingly boring and of minimal technical complexity.  For example, consider an internal travel expense reporting form.  Across a company with 2,000 employees, that might save 5,000 man-hours a year (at an average fully-loaded cost of $50 an hour) versus handling expenses on paper, for a savings of $250,000 a year.  It does not matter to the company that the reporting form is the world’s simplest CRUD app, it only matters that it either saves the company costs or generates additional revenue.
> 
> ...



Read more : Source article


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## Garbage (Jan 6, 2012)

Thanks for sharing. Nice article.


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## rhitwick (Jan 6, 2012)

Hey...great article. Some harsh truths are there which HRs won't allow us to tell to the new joinees.


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## buddyram (Jan 6, 2012)

lengthy article ...
but will spare some time for this soon


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## Vyom (Jan 7, 2012)

The most awesome article I ever read, to understand the "actual" way the workplace works in today's life. The points seem so exact, and the office politics explained in a good and interesting manner.

The article goes better with each para, and explains some of the crude facts of office life in a direct and "to the face" way. Great share. Thanks Prime_Coder.

Would like to quote a part that helped me a lot, deciding whether to go for .Net or Java 



> Do Java programmers make more money than .NET programmers?  Anyone describing themselves as either a Java programmer or .NET programmer has already lost, because a) they’re a programmer (you’re not, see above) and b) they’re making themselves non-hireable for most programming jobs.  In the real world, picking up a new language takes a few weeks of effort and after 6 to 12 months nobody will ever notice you haven’t been doing that one for your entire career.  I did back-end Big Freaking Java Web Application development as recently as March 2010.  Trust me, nobody cares about that.  If a Python shop was looking for somebody technical to make them a pile of money, the fact that I’ve never written a line of Python would not get held against me.


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