“Code is a liability”
“Don’t solve problems with code that can be solved in other ways”
“Code is grunt work, I’m an architect”
“Projects fail from people problems, not technical problems”
There’s truth to all of these, and yet the people who repeat them dogmatically are often programmers or managers with ultra inflated titles who write blog posts or emails all day ;)
They probably didn’t even like programming and saw it as a fast track to management.
I’ll take the real programmers who get stuff done, thanks.
If you get developers who get stuff done well - sales people have so many stupid ideas that implementing these would hurt my brain.
Imagine implementing everything that pushy sales people throw at developers.
I only agree that "code is a grunt work" is wrong simplification but picking out which code is really valuable to write is still in my opinion much more important than just slinging out code.
My idea is that there is no "work smart or work hard" - first you have to make sure code to be written is valuable and then you work hard to code it.
> “Code is a liability” “Don’t solve problems with code that can be solved in other ways”
In my experience managers tend to parrot those, but it is almost always coders (technical managers who get their hands dirty still count) who actually knew when a problem can be solved without code in an elegant, scalable, way.
Again IME, when managers are left to their own devices for those decisions it's often "send an email telling users they can just [mis]use feature X for that", or "yeah just install Intercom and support will handle" or "ask users to open a support ticket to perform this feature". Solutions which will often creates more problems for support people, customers/users, non-technical users, or even developers later because often they have have to do something with non-structured chat data.
My impression as well. My thoughts then are usually something like the following questions:
"Oh? Have you really sought out all the good resources and learned from them? Multiple different paradigms? Countless projects exploring ideas? Many different languages, learning their concepts? How come you stopped liking to code? What made you lose liking to make the computer do your bidding? Did you ever really like it? If you did not, did you really go all the way you were able to, in order to explore all the things? Do you really know as much as you claim to know? Or have you been 10 years in the same <you all know what lang here> mainstream OOP job and only feel like your time spent doing the same thing over and over again warants you a senior title and you should move on to management, because 'there is nothing more to explore'?"
I do not usually ask these questions. I rather observe and might indirectly poke for some knowledge. When I do ask some of those questions, I usually get a reply like "Meh, programming language does not matter, it is all the same." -- The usual "I don't want to have to learn more." type of response. There are many variations of this response, for paradigms, concepts, programming languages, you name it. Usually there is some overly broad generalization in it, overloooking benefits, that one approach might have over another, because they never tried or learned that approach and have no experience with it. When I hear that kind of response then I know what I am dealing with.
The person is free to show by their words and actions, that they actually _do_ have that knowledge. Otherwise I will just accept, that this person does not love coding the way I do and that they do not have a drive to go all the way of exploring so many different concepts and things. That's totally fine, coding might not be for them, or they might not like it to the same degree (and they do not have to), or they might not have been as lucky as I was and did get continuously in touch with new exciting things to learn about. Maybe they did get stuck in that <you all know what lang here> OOP drudge and did really not see anything new any longer.
Whatever it is, I just hope people don't simply assume, that just because "they have been coding a in the past for x years", their experience is the same I have. I do not mean in experience quantity levels (years), there surely are many people longer in this hustle than me, but in individual experiences and concepts one gets in touch with, when exploring off the main road. There is so so much to explore and learn about. One can probably learn ones whole life and not have seen it all.
There’s truth to all of these, and yet the people who repeat them dogmatically are often programmers or managers with ultra inflated titles who write blog posts or emails all day ;)
They probably didn’t even like programming and saw it as a fast track to management.
I’ll take the real programmers who get stuff done, thanks.