I received this advice quite a bit and it took me a while to understand it.
Early in my career I worked with a few folks who had PhD after their names. I don’t have a PhD so I was completely unaware of what that really meant and how to value it. Almost exclusively they were pompous, sucky programmers and dbas, and project managers, and other roles common in profit center tech companies making software.
I thought PhD was a signal for dummy based on my super small sample of 20 or so people.
I eventually got to work with a ton of awesome PhDs and realized that I was wrong and scientists working in their field leveraging their life passion of study is very different than someone having a PhD and working outside their element.
I think this is the basis for how many people view programmers. They just see the person who cranks out a billion lines of SharePoint and costs them a lot and don’t even get to experience a world where a programmer creatively removes the need for a billion lines of SharePoint.
So there’s different kinds of programmers. My current idea is to call myself a programmer and describe my roles and outputs in a way that people can assess if that’s something that helps them or not.
I generally don’t think labels and titles mean too much by themself and actively want people who think that to avoid or misinterpret my profile as I probably don’t want to create something with them.
Early in my career I worked with a few folks who had PhD after their names. I don’t have a PhD so I was completely unaware of what that really meant and how to value it. Almost exclusively they were pompous, sucky programmers and dbas, and project managers, and other roles common in profit center tech companies making software.
I thought PhD was a signal for dummy based on my super small sample of 20 or so people.
I eventually got to work with a ton of awesome PhDs and realized that I was wrong and scientists working in their field leveraging their life passion of study is very different than someone having a PhD and working outside their element.
I think this is the basis for how many people view programmers. They just see the person who cranks out a billion lines of SharePoint and costs them a lot and don’t even get to experience a world where a programmer creatively removes the need for a billion lines of SharePoint.
So there’s different kinds of programmers. My current idea is to call myself a programmer and describe my roles and outputs in a way that people can assess if that’s something that helps them or not.
I generally don’t think labels and titles mean too much by themself and actively want people who think that to avoid or misinterpret my profile as I probably don’t want to create something with them.