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Read through that article as well and I have to say it rings scarily true. To use the article's vocabulary, I wish there were more "Finder" roles out there. Most companies have plenty of "Implementor" and "Solver" roles, but nobody's looking for "Finders". Finding the right problem to solve is often the domain of the founders and execs because of course, they are oh-so-smart and always just innately know what the company should be working on! I consider myself a decent programmer, and I love doing it. I used to program professionally, and still do so at home all the time as a hobby. But I have a hard time imagining myself coming into work and doing it for a living anymore. I got sick of implementing someone else's half-baked ideas and not having even a tiny say about what we're building, who it's for, what the most important features are, where we should spend our time, etc. It was all: Close this ticket. Fix this bug. Implement this feature using this binary tree here and that data structure there with these fields. JUST TYPE IT IN and don't worry if the product will be successful. Most places treat software engineering as data entry. The glorious Product Managers got to do the creative work! So I moved over to the product management side to get those things and that's great. But it's still not a "Finder" role. You don't have enough time to both find and solve the problem, and you don't have the autonomy to do it right. You're too busy running around talking to 'stakeholders', smoothing over things with marketing, reviewing ad copy, sitting in strategic synergy meetings, battling with the UI designers, and trying to keep sales from selling something you don't have. And, at the end of the day, you still don't have that autonomy or creative control, since there's always someone higher up the food chain who just wants you to do it their way and write them a report about it. It seems in tech your choice is between being an implementer-monkey and being a sock-puppet. |