Background

I’m going to discuss an important topic that affects everybody in tech: diversity.

No, this won’t be some preachy post about how diversity is great and how you should be a better human being. Rather, I’m going to tell you about the things I’ve experienced working on diversity – particularly the interesting events of the last few days that happened internally at Stack Overflow.

It’s no secret that the tech industry is not that diverse. It’s mostly dominated by white males, with a few women and minorities making appearances. Those who do enter the industry as a minority often feel marginalized and excluded.

In February of 2015, I was promoted to Engineering Manager at Stack Overflow. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move .

There are tons of things I’ve learned so far, some of which I’ve learned the hard way. There’s also a world of difference between managing code, and managing people who code. Your day to day work routine changes completely. You define success differently. You feel a little bit like you just rebooted your career and are starting over at the bottom of the skills ladder. It’s intimidating.

I was working on my fireplace this past weekend. Specifically I had just finished ripping down the old surface to the red brick, and then preparing the brick surface with a layer of thinset for tiling. I spent all of Saturday cutting tiles and then placing them on the fireplace surround and hearth. Even with help it took 11 hours to do, and about 8 hours of it was measuring and cutting tiles.

Today an article was brought to my attention. One that, at the time of writing this post, had hit the front page of various sites (including Hacker News) and had been shared over 2,600 times. The article is On Secretly Terrible Engineers , which is a criticism of the tech industry and the mentality which it holds towards hiring both new and experienced developers/engineers.

Spoiler: I strongly disagree with most of this article. If you aren’t open to debates and discussion, quit reading here and return to your normal activities.

A Job Listing

Let’s say you were walking down a street one day and noticed an ad for help wanted. It is posted in the window of a bakery. It reads:

HELP WANTED:
Need a baker for FT work. Must be familiar with modern baking methods such as ovens, barbecuing, and deep fryers. 5+ years experience with the Super 6 commercial baking oven required (aside: came out in 2014). Nice to haves include experience with butcher’s blocks, chopping meat, and making candles.

Intro

We’re just two days from a brand new year and yet the primary measurement of a developer’s skill seems to be the same as it was 20 years ago. The most important classification to most companies is job title, as I talked about in great detail in my last post . The job title is acquired via working for a veritable slough of credentialist companies whose HR departments break it down very simply:

Intro

I’ve had a good career so far. I began working full-time as a programmer in 2008. At that time my title was Junior Developer. I had a decent boss and cool co-workers, and I cut my teeth on Java and .NET. It was a good experience. After 2 years at that gig, I felt that it was time to move on.

I contacted recruiters, and one eventually found me a promotion: Systems Analyst. It came with a decent pay bump and so forth, as well as the luxury of dropping “Junior” from my job title. As this was a good deal all around, I took the offer.

Intro

Like many of you, today I watched the Apple media event in which they announced both the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch. I’m not going to talk about the watch, but instead about the phone.

For years Apple has been a true cachet brand. They are a luxury item that is sought after for status and image. I don’t blame anyone for owning an iPhone: they’re reasonably sexy and you get to show off the Apple branding. Good on you.

Intro

Almost exactly 1 month ago today I found myself on a video call with Joel Spolsky. It feels insane to write that, even now, as it was a banner moment in my career. For me it was the equivalent of meeting a movie star who I had idolized since I was old enough to know what movies were. There had always been this Joel Spolsky guy throughout my career that I regularly read about and whose opinions on software development agreed with mine, and suddenly I was talking with him face to face. It was awesome.

The Problem

I think that most devs would agree when I state that the definition of success in the corporate world of development places less emphasis on “good” code and more emphasis on “working” code. Working code is code that can be released to production on or before the deadline, regardless of performance or even bugs in most cases. As a developer, you ultimately feel as if you’ve failed when you toil for nights on end to meet steep deadlines and churn out crappy code. As a business, however, you’ve succeeded when you hit the deadline. My experience tells me that the typical metric upon which development teams are measured is often not quality of code or unit tests or even performance, but instead ability to meet deadlines and deliver solutions to clients. You’ve failed when you do not meet the deadlines and thus piss off the clients/customers. Your job has become a veritable boolean result with the outcomes of true and false. Deadline met? True. Deadline missed? False.