How management sees you

Last Update: 14.02.2019. By Jens in Newsletter

Was in a long meeting today helping a customer pitching a project proposal to their customer and once again, I made an observation I’d like to share with you.

To give you some background. 10 people with two having a development background and the others manager or project managers or from sales. They were from the IT department though and not from a business unit. The goal is finding a new supplier for the maintenance and development of an old legacy system. It’s a bunch of apps solving particular problems in that space. Sorry, can’t give more details. However, my customer was only pitching for a lead role and not maintenance and further development tasks; so essentially architecture roles and no coding at all.

Now comes the interesting part and why I am sharing that with you. At some point in the meeting, those managers realized they use my customer as the tech lead and give out the coding parts to way cheaper alternatives. Those lightbulbs that went on… Yeah, they might save costs, maybe not. But it clearly showed how much coding skills are valued. It is just seen as a pair of hands and you can buy those cheap. What they valued are expertise, both domain, and tech leading.

Think about it.

If you want to be a coder or more is your choice, just make it intentional. Depending on your decision you have to act differently.

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