Re: How management sees you

Last Update: 15.02.2019. By Jens in Newsletter

Reader Sunil wrote to me regarding yesterday’s email that he loves coding and does not want to do anything else and if that is ok?!!

Sure. Definitely.

The is no right or wrong. Do what aligns with your goals.

However, even if you want to code all day long, I’d make some minor adjustment to that over time. Learn to talk to biz people in their language and think in business outcomes and not in fancy tech. Besides that code all the time you want. You will be different from the other devs and so stand out to management. Why is that important?

Two reasons. First, they often don’t like tech people because of their tech gibberish. I talked about that before. If they like talking to you and feel comfortable around you, they trust you more. Yeah, we are all humans, even we devs :-) So, when they need something they will come to you because they understand you and your opinion is valued.

Second, if you don’t stand out in a positive way, you are like the rest of the coding folks for them. And if you can’t distinguish things you’ll end up shopping by price. In this case, most often for the cheapest because of, you know, cutting costs. If companies cut costs it quite often affects stupid stuff like catering for external meetings or firing expensive devs for getting cheaper ones. I bet you all have seen one of those outsourcing experience in real life. Pure coding ranges on the level of cleaning the office. Necessary but with unwanted costs. I know I generalize a lot here, so please bear with it. It is obvious they need it but they can’t tell nor see the differences, so they shop by price. And it is not only the upper management who has no clue of IT in general, nope it is even the IT managers who think so. Just as I saw it yesterday in action again.

To make that clear, devs are often seen as necessary and essential and as long as there is a big ROI they will pay a premium to that. So, you are not even near a cleaning staff salary. But as long as you were put into the same category your chance is high to face the same problems. Disappointing, right? It was for me. Maybe not for you and that’s fine too.

Whatever you chose there is no right or wrong, just make it an informed intentional decision.

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