What's your deal?

Publish Date: Dec 31 '17

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Hi everybody,

I'm trying to maximise the value of my posts to the dev.to community but I don't know that much about you guys and gals.

Tell me your deal by answering the following 4 questions in the comments (it shouldn't take more than a minute):

How many people work as software developers at your company including you?
How many people work for your company in total (< 10, 10 - 50, 50 - 100, > 100)?
How many years have you worked as a professional software developer?
(optional) Is there anything you'd like me to write about that could help you advance your career or increase your effectiveness? What problems or roadblocks are standing in your way? What are your biggest challenges?

If you're not a professional software developer, I'd love to hear from you too. Are you a student? Or a professional in another field who does a little programming as part of your job? Or a hobbyist? Designer? Manager? Write a quick sentence with your answer in the comments.

I'll tally your responses and share a summary with everyone in a week. Thanks!

Regards,

Blaine

Comments 15 total

Frank CarrJan 1, 2018
1. Unemployed/Freelance at the moment, so it's just me. Most places I've worked it's varied between 2 to 5 developers per team. The number of teams, at most, were about 10, usually 3 or 4 teams.
2. I've worked at companies that had less than 20 employees and at companies that had over 20K. Mid-sized ones between about 200 and 1000 total employees with good revenue streams were the best to work at because they offered the best stability, benefits and flexibility.
3. I've been professionally developing software since 1988, so 30 years. Programming itself, a bit longer. I wrote my first program in 1978 as part of a math class assignment.
- Blaine OsepchukJan 1, 2018
  
  Hi Frank,
  
  Thanks for all the details and for being brave enough to be the first to respond.
  
  I looked through dozens of profiles but they aren't very informative so I hope you're the first of many.
  
  Happy new year.
Steven WashingtonJan 1, 2018
1. 4 full-time. Good tight-knit team! Naturally most of our projects (mostly website builds) have limited scope, though we have other, contracted teams to help share the load when things get busy.
2. 150 - 200 (Dev/digital work isn't the only thing we do, haha)
3. Hopped on right out of the gate of college in 2010, so coming on 7.5 years now. Started off doing Flash game development, melding that with Unity and HTML5 game development, and the job morphed to doing more standard website/webapp builds. Lots of Wordpress.
4. I'm still sort of navigating this mid/senior-level dev thing I've got going on. I'm still gaining the knowledge to figure out the right questions to ask here. Luckily I feel like at my current position I have flexibly to explore and try new things. Small team and (relatively) quick projects keeps us agile and on our toes.
- Blaine OsepchukJan 8, 2018
  
  Hi Steve, thanks for sharing your comments.
  
  You might be interested in an overview of my approach to becoming a wildly successful small business programmer. It's aimed at devs like you working in a small team in predominantly non-tech businesses. I haven't published this stuff on dev.to so you can only find it on my website. I'd love to know what you think.
  
  Cheers.
Paweł RucińskiJan 1, 2018
Hi Blaine,
1. I am working in a company which consist of 3 offices. In my office, I am working with ~20 devs. In the whole company, it is about ~200. In terms of a project I am working on, we have 10 devs. So it depends on what scope you are asking :)
2. Again, in my office, it would be 10 - 50. In company - > 100.
3. 4 years after graduation.
4. I am asking myself, very often, how to evaluate my influence on a project, or on a company. Is there a proper tool or method for this?
Thanks for posting, your articles are very helpful to me, to understand some mechanisms which rule projects in long terms.
- Blaine OsepchukJan 8, 2018
  
  Hi Pawel, thanks for your kind words.
  
  I don't think there's one right way to evaluate your influence on a project. But when I interview software developers for positions with our company I ask them if they've ever "moved the needle" for their company. Some people have but most haven't.
  
  But that's how I evaluate my own influence. I ask myself how much positive change I've had on the direction of the company. If you can point to a graph of your company's revenue stream where it suddenly jumped up and say that you caused that, then you moved the needle. Refactoring to patterns and code cleanups rarely move the needle. But coming up with an idea for a new product line or a new market for an existing product can definitely move the needle.
  
  For example, I once implemented a cost accounting system so we could make pricing decisions based on math (instead of making educated guesses) and that definitely moved the needle. I once created a GIS predictive model (machine learning), which a division of my company used to land a big new client, which also moved the needle.
  
  The truth is that very few things you do as a dev will move the needle unless you are actively looking for the constraint in your company and working to increase your effectiveness. It's a deliberate act vs just showing up and doing what you're told.
  
  Cheers.
Eljay-AdobeJan 1, 2018
1. about 10,000 in some dev capacity (including black box testers, white box testers, user experience designers, quality developers, et cetera).
2. about 16,000 employees total.
3. professionally since 1984. I wrote my first program -- well, technically, I contributed changes to an existing program called Oregon Trail -- in 1976, on the TIES system, which was an HP minicomputer written in HP 2000A BASIC.
4. I'm interested in agile engineering practices, clean code, comparisons of light-weight management processes (like Scrum) "in theory" contrasted to "in practice", functional programming (specifically of languages designed for functional programming foremost, rather than doing awkward functional programming in non-functional programming languages), domain specific language (the development thereof), all sorts of programming languages, evolution of the industry as there is more cloud, more web-based applications, more technologies.
- Blaine OsepchukJan 8, 2018
  
  I died of dysentery (among other things) many times during my lunch breaks in elementary school so that's awesome that you had a hand in that game (and thank you for your comments).
Fida MuntaseerJan 2, 2018

1: Currently just 3 people are working as software developers.
2: 50 - 100 people work for my company in total.
3: I am working as a professional software developer for around 3 years.
4: I am an android application developer, so currently struggling to decide what to prioritize next (iOS/Multi-platform/Web) as only Android skills doesn't seem to be future-proof for my career.
- Blaine OsepchukJan 8, 2018
  
  Hi Fida,
  
  I like John Sonmez's thoughts on specializing in a career path. Becoming a specialist makes you much more valuable than being able to do a little of this and a little of that.
  
  I've specialized all the way down to maintaining and extending legacy PHP web apps for small businesses. This is where I'm an expert. And I wouldn't make as much money (at least at first) if I tried to move to android development for example.
  
  So you might be interested in going deeper instead of wider but it really depends on your circumstances.
leobJan 3, 2018
1. One (I run a one man business - freelance software dev)
2. See #1
3. About 30 years (still handled punch cards and paper terminals for a brief period!)
4. What are your biggest challenges? - Focus, productivity, seeing the forest for the trees, deciding what's important and what not, still trying to find my ideal 'niche' I suppose ... running my business in a more productive, more profitable and more efficient way
- Blaine OsepchukJan 8, 2018
  
  Thanks for you comments, leob. Based on 4 you might benefit from reading the Effective Executive. It's my favorite business book of all time. I wrote a series of blog posts on applying its concepts to programming, which might interest you.
  - leobJan 9, 2018
    
    Hey that's cool, I'll check it out ... thanks!
    
    P.S. 5 minutes later, I've checked it out ... smallbusinessprogramming.com/what-...
    
    Great writeup, but I wonder if this also solves my problem (well I think it's one of my problems) of not only managing my time effectively but also to decide WHAT to spend my time on. There's too much stuff and only 24 hours in a day (and then again you shouldn't be working 24 hours in a day even when you could).
    
    Especially in the software development world there are so many trends, fads, new things all the time, you can spend 24x7 just following all the news about new tech. You need to be able to decide "will this benefit my bottom line" and you need to make choices or choose your 'niche'.
    
    Or should you? You could also be successful as a "generalist" but I'm starting to believe that presenting yourself as a specialist might ultimately "sell" better. Everybody and their brother sells themselves as a "full stack developer", it's lost all meaning. I know I have a broad skillset but telling a customer "I'm quite good at anything you throw at me" doesn't quite cut it, it's too vague.
    
    So this is actually more about about strategy (making strategic choices) than about efficiency (working efficiently once the choices are made).
    
    Bane of the modern 'homo sapience', too many options for anything you can think of ... choices, choices, choices.
    
    But ultimately you should not think TOO much about choices because it leads to analysis paralysis. The best advice I've read about this said you need to build and contribute stuff (attitude of "make" and "give back") - doesn't really matter what you do as long as you do something (productive).
Blaine OsepchukJan 8, 2018

Hi Arden, you might be interested in an overview of my approach to becoming a wildly successful small business programmer.

I'm a business school graduate so I have a slightly different take on things than most programmers. Maybe you'll find something there that resonates with you.

Cheers.

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Blaine Osepchuk @bosepchuk

What's your deal?

Comments 15 total