Developer Hegemony: The Future of Labor by Erik Dietrich

Author:Erik Dietrich [Dietrich, Erik]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
Publisher: DaedTech
Published: 2017-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 37: Advancement

The entirety of Part 3 traced the evolution of the corporation to its current state. The entirety of Part 4 to this point has defined how to attain success in that current corporate state. Mainly, this revolves around coming to think of oneself as “other”—a lonely business entity moving among others that see themselves as part of a larger, illusory whole.

Think back to the beginning of Part 3 to understand the deep irony at play here. One succeeds in the modern corporate context by rejecting the very bedrock upon which the whole construct is built: founder legacy. In a sense, you might consider yourself something of a Trojan horse with this approach.

I mention this because I get that the mission seems daunting. Throughout this part of the book, I’ve suggested that you isolate yourself while engaging in high-risk and possibly depressing activities. Maximize external options, steer clear of organizational praise, figure out good ways to say no to those around you.

The question becomes how, specifically, does one pull all of this off? What does it look like to climb inside this horse, have Acme Inc. wheel you past the pragmatist guards and idealist bureaucrats, and to hop out among the inner sanctum of opportunists? In this chapter, I’ll lay out a more tangible approach. This chapter guides you from line-level programmer through avenues of advancement.

As I mentioned earlier, the first thing you need is your escape plan. Take a deep, sad sigh, resolve to leave your professional programming days behind, and pick out something else to do. Specifically, go job title/description shopping. You do not want to shop for the job of your dreams. Rather, you want to plan your road map away from delivery.

Here’s the best way to way to approach this. Look around you for opportunists not directly responsible for delivering anything. These will be folks with management or higher roles who do not guzzle the founder legacy kool-aid or worry about the company’s mission statement. Pick a few of these folks out that are not yet in the corporate stratosphere; this won’t work if you pick the CIO of a 40,000-person company. Study them a bit. What titles do they have? What educations? Past jobs?

Using these folks, build a composite of what you want to be doing in, say, five years. Then work backward. If you see a dev manager role five years in your future, what would three years in your future need to look like? And whatever you do, don’t answer something like that with “principal architect” or anything else that requires piercing the journeyman idealist veil. I said three years, not thirty.

In fact, that’s the key thing that separates this blueprint from garden variety high-powered career advice. Anyone ambitious and goal-oriented will tell you to have vision and work backward. But the reality is that you need to have vision, work backward and avoid the self-defeating, stack-ranking world of techie chest thumping.

I can get you started with two fairly obvious paths to pursue: consulting and project management.

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