The company owns you, well, for 40-hours a week at least. Signing a contract constrains you to putting all of your eggs in a single basket in exchange for wages, health benefits, retirement, and maybe a few other perks. Along these lines, the author makes a strong point on the contradiction of what Human Resources truly is:

I’ve been experiencing this for over a decade now. What’s most disturbing is the realization happens much faster these days. I’m always excited about the possibilities of a new job, team, and better way of practicing the craft only to be severely disappointed in the end or — worse — completely mislead during the interview process.

The word, corporation, stems from Latin and Middle English to mean a group of people working together for a common purpose. Interestingly, the way some treat corporations today is very much like a form of commercial religion. Yet, ancient civilizations found a way to gather people for a common, commercial, purpose which would allow the merchants/business people of those times to create a lasting legacy through name (or family name) that would live on through media and historical records of those times. Might not be as great as pyramids, temples, statues, etc. of past leaders but it was a legacy none-the-less.

I’ve always liked the terminology originally used during this time to describe the experience of one advancing in the craft. I’ve tailored the terminology to be more gender neutral as follows:

For craft specialization, a guild would be used to establish levels of quality. Unfortunately, quality was a by product, since profit by paying into the guilds to be a member or lobbying for more influence within the city was the stronger driving force. The duties of members and the guild itself could be broken down as follows:

Guilds were initially formed, during the rise of cites and more cosmopolitan life styles, as way to fight against taxes levied by the lords of a town. By banding together, the guild had a way to fight back and the lords had to stand down in order to get access to the goods and services they wanted.

With the rise, and fall of guilds, so entered mercantilism as a way of nations to protect their commercial influence. This meant precious metals, as a form of currency, started to fall by the way side as national currency in the form of paper started to proliferate. This, in turn, gave rise to chartered companies which introduced to new concepts:

This separation of ownership from source of profit was a big leap in those days.

The industrial revolution introduced the mass production of identical goods which was something a crafter couldn’t do. The difference between the two is that with crafted works, they were unique and more costly (still are), while mass produced goods were identical but cheaper.

Frederick Winslow Taylor was a thought leader and influencer during the Progressive Era (1890 - 1930) who wrote The Principles of Scientific Management. This book was highly influential in shaping the modern corporation.

From the author:

Yep.

A neat observation is that Taylor was pioneering the lean startup 100 years before The Lean Startup was written. He was definitely not the most upstanding of all people since he thought of unskilled/uneducated laborers as unintelligent and introduced the Motivation 2.0.0 carrot and the stick as mentioned in Drive which, sadly, is still in use to this day.

Tangentially, Henry Gantt was a disciple of Taylor’s work and thus was born the Gantt Chart.

Labor unions are the succession of Taylorism and had been around for a couple of centuries in the form of trade unions. Trade unions were also the successor of guilds.

A few quotes of note:

Thankfully, the days of corporations are waning. It is now possible, as a knowledge worker, to start your own company and scale — thanks to Cloud Computing — with very little investment or upfront cash. It only requires mastery of your craft and the discipline to run the marathon.

I understand why servant leadership is a complete fallacy in a established corporate hierarchy. Yet, if you care to lead by example — with integrity — as a mentor to others and see them grow, that kindness can lead to unexpected downstream opportunities for you and the apprentice. The corporation will benefit too but that would be a happy side effect beyond the human to human connection.

There are two forks in the road:

Titles such as "software engineer", "senior software engineer", "tech lead", etc. are still forms of grunt, low-level, labor. As for "principal engineers", these are the idealists that are put in charge of committees and/or standards documents. They might not even require extra pay incentives but only the title of making it seem like they’ve arrived. Which, sadly, I’ve been only to realize the title was a faux title and ended up leaving the company that gave me that title in extreme disappointment.

Programmer Idealists come in to flavors:

Fluff titles, as mentioned above, to watch out for:

Opportunist, on the other hand, use a will to power mindset and utter some rather harsh words:

The author makes the claim that in order to advance, you must step into more leadership positions and distance yourself from being a software engineer. You can always leverage these skills for further advancement without showing it but the focus should be on spending time with project managers, data scientists, and learning the language that stakeholders enjoy hearing. Not my cup of tea, at all, but if you are on the management track and wanting to climb the corporate latter, this a path in which you will throw your soul away in the process.

To gain status/title, you need to escape the delivery trap — because you are beholden to doing the work and delivering on time — you have sell the story of how you met the goals through Herculean efforts. What’s interesting is that a team who consistently delivers on time but is boring will lose to a team that procrastinates, works crazy hours, and tells a harrowing story of how they pulled off the impossible. I feel is this is a load of crap…​but there is some truth to being able to use stats and graphs to show how your contributions stand above the rest. Metrics for code quality, test suite speed, etc will help in that endeavor.

I would rather be known for improving the quality and output of other engineers in addition to the systems I work on. Essentially, working myself out of a job. Not following the path as described above. Also, I should be clear, Eric is pointing out what this looks like should you sell your soul.

This chapter is very much about being the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Definitely not my cup of tea since you are suppose to give off the air of someone who acts, and talks like someone several stations above your current title as a grunt programmer. Examples:

Whatever you do, don’t threaten. You have to make your boss’s life better and then look for reciprocity in return. Quid pro quo. Always be looking for options to leverage that will put you in a good light while benefiting you and your boss/company.

Carnival cash is any perk which is devoid of value outside the walls of the company you work for. Examples:

Interestingly, I guess I’m an opportunist in this situation due to the sheer disgust of thinking about Employee of the Month Awards. In addition, so is All Hands Meetings which I also loath.

In regards to meetings, pretending to be too busy to attend is another example of how an opportunist might get out of such a meeting.

Interestingly, when given carnival cash, you can deflect it in a modest way by saying it should go to your team and those who made all of it possible. For instance, without your immediate team, you wouldn’t have been able to accomplish what you are being recognized for so it should go to them. This generosity goes well for the pragmatists, wins favor with the idealist for being a team player, and shows the opportunists you don’t believe in any of this non-sense.

Several examples of saying "no" are espoused here. Some ethical, some borderline ethical, and one entirely unethical. What’s important to be aware of is the extremely asymmetrical relation of power you have with your boss or even the entire leadership chain. You have to build up enough leverage through other means which might include invaluable technical skills, deep knowledge of a complicated system, good at quickly debugging and diagnosing bizarre or intermediate errors, etc. Any or all of this gives you more leverage to say no to situations that might be harmful to your career.

You have to consider yourself as something other than a basic employee. Interestingly, I’ve been thinking this way for years and always thought I was alone in this regard.

This is definitely something I don’t want to do or even condone. Later, in the book, the author points out more ethical courses of action.

These are good questions to ask yourself:

The career path for someone who truly loves programming and joy of the craft is an insane one and completely stacked against you.

Modern corporations are truly feudalistic societies. Interesting to know that I’ve been thinking and saying this for years and neat to have it confirmed in this book.

Corporations are not considered to have personhood but they do have personalities which stem from the legacy of the founder and subsequent ego. Sadly, today’s corporations are growth driven with an intense pathology to scale at all costs. Although, there is an alternative which is a B Corp which Alchemists, itself, is striving to become.

The thing is that we don’t have to live this way! With the modern global economy it’s possible for us to live and work for ourselves however we want. We don’t have to be serfs to a feudal lord/lady. We have all the means of living on our own if we just stick to shear determination and persistence.

By moving away from having a single boss and by being an entrepreneur, you go to having multiple bosses (i.e. clients) which allows you to diversify by not putting all of your eggs in one basket.

Author’s Prediction: The need for software engineering talent and good engineering, in general, will give rise to autonomous developer opportunist. Companies will farm out work to these individuals or small shops.

The developer opportunist does not give up hope, perspective, or high-minded ethics. They hold fast to knowing they control their destinies. The following are a few examples:

A developer ubermensch has a love of the calling and craft with the following traits:

All of the above generates demand not because you might be the most skilled, smartest, or most technically knowledgeable. It’s because you position yourself to identify what others value and then uniquely deliver that value in a consistent manner.

As a point of clarity, the constructs of a business are:

This means building the actual product/service is only 20% of the initial work which definitely puts everything into a sobering perspective.

We have to master all five of the above constructs in order to flip the script, manage the business, and deliver commercial value all on our own.

When you compare the software engineering to other professions, especially those before the Industrial Revolution, like doctors, lawyers, etc. they have all mastered and taken control over their business domain. They don’t have to submit to all of the C-level title nonsense such as CEO, CIO, CFO, CTO and so forth controlling them. They are all of those things already. If necessary, they’ll partner up with other experts in the field and delegate anything they don’t understand to others that will support them.

Software engineers, on the other hand, don’t do this but we have the means to and much more. Not only can we delegate and replace manual tasks, we are the also the masters of efficiency. We can always augment and automate what we don’t have time for in a reliable and consistent fashion.

In the future, as the owner of your own firm, you would not allow a client to dictate any of the following:

You have to offer a productized service through value pricing. Value pricing allows you to sell the same thing over and over for a known price. This is necessary in order to avoid the pitfalls of charging hourly rates (i.e. staff augmentation) or fixed bids (consuming 100% of the risk on an unknown project). By the way, Jonathan Stark is a successful entrepreneur who’s worth checking out if you want to learn more about value pricing.

Lastly, you also have to position yourself as an expert in automation and efficiency to be successful.

I really like the breakdown of what makes this kind of organization/collective a successful one because I’ve come to the same conclusion as well. This is what this site is all about, after all. The following qualities make up this kind of collective:

By focusing on the above, this opens you up to greater potential for happiness and opportunities that Tim Ferriss calls lifestyle design in the 4 Hour Workweek:

When outsourcing or overwhelmed by the work you might be doing in a collective like this, make sure to reach out to your social network for help. This could be people you’ve worked with before, good engineers wanting to moonlight for extra cash, or people that have a reputation to keep.

As for interviewing, the following gels well with what I’ve written about in the past as well:

These organizations do the following instead:

From Matt Heusser:

Answer:

When it comes to education and training of new engineers, our industry is broken and has been for some time. There are three paths into our industry, roughly:

All of the above, except for maybe the self-taught, are not equipped to survive in the industry because they are missing so much more than the rudimentary skills they picked up in school. They still need to know how to be good communicators, work with others, implement requirements successfully, recover from production failures, work with customers, manage projects, and so much more.

There is no school that provides that today but maybe that will change in the future.

The fix, as iterated over above, is to find ways to partner with the developer opportunists. Recognize they are experts at efficiency; are independent thinkers and problem solvers, and can work/live however they want to get the job done. Focus on the outcome, not how they live, hours worked, or where they work.

The path to freedom can start with small steps: