Sometimes folks will tell you to think about your value proposition – what actual benefit you bring to the table – as a software developer. That could be to negotiate your salary, interviews or promotions. It could be as a freelancer or consultant. It could also just be a way to let you get included in a really cool project (“hey, I can help you out!”)
So what’s your value proposition? What do you actually bring to the table?
They say that programming is the art of getting things working, while software engineering is the art of keeping things working.
That sounds like most programmers aren’t good at keeping things working. Which is true.
If you build to keep things working, you’ll have a superpower, one that very few software developers have. I’ll explain.
But first I need to tell you about Scarpe.
On Mastodon, FullStack Ruby asks:
It’s a strange sort of environment to be living in as a Ruby programmer.
On the one hand, so much momentum behind low-level “systems” programming languages with strong, static typing.
On the other hand, the “future of programming” is guiding the education of...
There’s an old lightning talk from RubyConf 2019 that I love, about how there’s no such thing as knowing your computer “all the way to the bottom.” At no point does it stop being a stack of leaky abstractions.
An unsuspecting fellow emailed me in response, asking, “yes, but isn’t there one, final...
A fellow recently asked me for advice about running a Ruby workshop. And folks, I had forgotten I knew so much about it before he asked!
Before Rebuilding Rails had a video class, I had written a lot of the material for Rebuilding Rails workshops that I gave at Southeast Ruby and at Railsconf. I...
A gentleman on Twitter suggested that to make a new SaaS app, you should do these things:
This is pretty good...
I started working for myself at the beginning of February, after taking a month off. For close to eight years I sold my book as essentially a hobby business. It made around $40,000 over those years, which certainly isn’t terrible. It’s been doing slightly better since I started actually putting time...
My favorite article on salary negotiation of all time talks about “fully-loaded costs” of an employee. The idea is that when figuring what it costs a company to employ an engineer (or whoever) it’s short-sighted to just take their salary and multiply by time. Patrick suggests that “a reasonable guesstimate is between 150% and 200% of their salary” and that the “extra” tends upward as salary does. Of course it depends on benefits and whatnot.
Many people think that’s complete baloney. Specifically, they tend to think that the “extra” is fixed (e.g. $30k extra,) rather than a large and increasing percent of salary.
But when you’re negotiating salary, or otherwise asking, “what does an employee’s time cost a company?” he’s right. Let me explain why.
Occasionally, you’ll see people put up a “why you should hire me” page, such as the one that got Jason Zimdars a gig at 37signals. These pages are effectively sales pages for people, though they read a little differently from a sales page for a book.
(If you don’t believe that a “hire me” page is a sales page, I recommend reading a bit more Patrick McKenzie.)
Most frequently you see pages for less-established entry-level people — people who try using a sales page because they have to, not because they want to.
And I thought, “hey, what if I tried that?” As a great fictitious man once said, “we try things. Occasionally they even work.”
So when my last company went out of business, I put a “hire me” page together. I had a little breathing room before missing a paycheck and reasonable savings. Why not try it?
Hey, tech companies. Hey, engineers working at tech companies.
There’s a great post by Chad Fowler going around with a job description for an engineer we’d all love to work with.
He says he can’t find any of those engineers to hire. Spoiler: neither can your company. I’m going to tell you why not, and what it would take to fix it.
