“You are a cool developer, go and ask for more money” - we will tell managers how the world works


    I read another article about the "psychological traits of developers." And enough for me. As always, this article suggests recognizing yourself in one of the “bad guys” antipatterns, understanding that I’m hitting the business, and finally starting to “improve”. I've recognized myself in every type. I am a rock star, and a soldier, and incompetent, and a sword in the manager ... In short, everything looks so that no matter how much a developer and person I dream to be, business will see a problem here.


    You know what? Let them go to hell.


    If my dream is to solve many problems, write high-quality code, use the latest tools - it hurts, then I will deceive the employer, because on other conditions I am not ready to exist in this industry. Suddenly, my life, its quality and meaningfulness are much more important to me than the interests of the conditional Luxoft, Epam, Google, MS, and indeed who do not care. And I'm lying better than managers analyze.


    It has always been a very difficult question for me - is it possible to build a good career in IT without ceasing to be a good person. Now I think it’s impossible. I cannot live in the interests of an abstract corporation, it just so happened that in the first place for me are my interests.


    All these things - “being a good person”, “company interests”, “personal interests”, “dream to write a high-quality code” - seem obvious and do not require explanation. And if you dig into their essence, you can go cuckoo. But I buried myself and now I’ll tell you what I’ve come to.



    So you get up in the morning, crawl to the bathroom to brush your teeth, make coffee, drink, and are going to work, where again there is a mountain of tasks that you were asked to solve. Why solve them? Just to get a reward for this?


    This is not a question of what you have found important. Rather, why did you decide to think that something should be important to you?


    “Doing something important” is so necessary out of the box that if I decide to lie in bed in the morning without getting up, say a year, they will consider me an asshole. If I voluntarily lie at home for a year and do nothing, although physically capable of it - firstly, I will most likely die, and secondly (if I survive by a miracle), I cannot bear the burden of social pressure. Even the closest people will refuse me. Mom and Dad will cry because they gave birth to a moral monster and are embarrassed to talk with their friends whose children are productive fellows. The wife will leave, friends will forget.


    And thirdly, I can’t stand my own self-abasement, because I have absorbed it with my mother’s milk - you can’t do anything and not consider something important. This is such a basic task that the brain quickly translates it into the category of the subconscious, like blinking and breathing.


    It is clear that all such conversations quickly come down to a discussion of instincts, the need to survive, dominate, fascinate people, so that everyone would like to have sex with us and so on and so forth.


    Let's say voluntarily lying on the bed for a year - this is nonsense at the level of biology. Therefore, we got up and went to solve the problems that, at best, they thought up for themselves, at worst - which others thought up on us. Business tasks. For example, write good code.


    Here is my company, it has a name, logo, pages on the Internet, employees, customers. In the end - the building where everyone is sitting, a desktop, a monitor. I just imagined - what if the building, workers and customers remained, but everything related to the business disappeared from our memory. With memory, the whole business would disappear. It turns out that nowhere but the memory of several people, this business did not exist. The business was a general agreement that it exists. A little manipulation of inventors.


    Even if a business does things that can be felt, it is still a collective fiction that everyone believed in and it became real. And this is not retrograde and not a call to return to the analog world.


    Such inventions all around - borders, laws, morals, brands, money. These are all just fictional connections between the imaginations of different people. It so happened that the modern social world is a construction of millions of collective myths, which are based on the condition that we will certainly support the agreement with deeds. But to say now that business, money, brands does not exist, is like telling a caveman that there are no spirits.


    If suddenly for some fantastic reason we all stop following these fictions at once, everything will collapse. Catastrophe! No one wants to change money, no one will work in a team for a common great value, because it does not exist. And this is not a matter of survival. I can survive and dominate without following collective goals.


    That is, going to work in a business (owner or employee), we believed in the illusion of working for the illusion, so that the illusion grows and develops endlessly, because if it does not develop, it will not ward off the loan taken from the future and collapse. We design things so that other people can do their things, so that we do our things again, so that they do their own again, and so on to infinity.


    Breaking the vicious circle means doing nothing, and nothing can be done.


    Maintaining an illusion for the sake of doing at least something is collective and cannot be otherwise. And this led to a strange phenomenon. Each person is conditionally divided into two - self individual and function in the team. And the conflict between the two personalities gave rise to a bunch of social stresses and mental disorders.


    I know that doing things in a team is a must, but it infuriates me if they see in me only a function and put the values ​​of business above my comfort. They say to me that you either share the values ​​or you don’t fit. Come back when you share.


    I think, in fact, everyone pretends that business interests are more important than personal ones. When a leader says that his developers didn’t do the feature, because the managers had planned for a long time (in fact, the developers had played with the design) - this is a sham. Such cases are everywhere. Yes, that’s not right. But what choice do we have if the lies work, but the truth is not? And what is the meaning of the word “lies” if the business itself with its great goal is just a fairy tale. What difference does it make if it is needed, just to maintain the circulation of money, on which the illusion of maintaining interaction is built.



    To glue people-functions came up with different management practices. Then they were given fashionable names - adjaili, scrum and so on and so forth. We start the sprint, move on to the next sprint, enjoy the release and the fact that the collective idea feels real. Then we move on to the next sprint, which is part of a large sprint - an endless stream, the goal of which is to remain endless.


    And if my irrational desire to write good code suddenly interferes with the opinion of the collective mind about infinite and non-stop growth - a protest is ripening in me. After all, to do something well once and for all is essentially to stop and lie on the bed. And then self-awareness as part of a tremendous mechanism can bring pain, although at first it brought joy.


    I said that business as an illusion exists in our heads and cannot exist without us. But we all understand that a world where inventions have disappeared - countries, borders, economies, books, companies - is fantastic. In fact, this is not an illusion that does not exist without us, but we without it. And then she begins to control us. Eternal business - and we are its consumables, which are easily replaced in the market. Lord, we are eight billion. There is always an Asian who is cooler than you.


    Managers do not like indispensable developers, only they live in a world where every good developer is indispensable in his own way. Managers have a pipe dream that people have exactly as much ambition as the company needs at any given moment.


    It is ridiculous that weak developers do not like business even more. Even in the worst case scenario, companies will continue to hire the irreplaceable. They have no choice, they will simply hold thousands of meetings, trainings, introduce CoC, “faceless code” and other nonsense to teach us how to become ordinary cogs.


    Want a world without the irreplaceable? Easy. There will not be linux, C #, TypeScript, F #, Kotlin, Java, JS. They were made indispensable. Do not like the irreplaceable, wali to another sphere. Rock stars work here.


    Awareness of the interchangeability of me as a function is not what I like most as an individual. It’s unpleasant to be aware of yourself as a template that is built into an established fictional mechanism. When a rock star developer is told that the manager has figured out how to neutralize the corners harmful to the general idea, the rock star developer is bombed.


    Everyone who puts their individuality above collective good is bombed.



    This is a no-exit situation, and it gives rise to stress. It’s painful to push yourself into the team, questions arise - and why the hell is that? Why do we constantly develop, grow, carry your values, what should we finally do and what is the point?


    Sometimes this leads to bad thoughts that cannot be spoken of by law.


    The search for meaning in a fictional idea resembles a dictionary game. You find the definition of the first word. Then the definitions of the words that make up the first definition. Then the following definitions and at some point you realize that the words begin to refer to themselves. And then you realize that you are inventing things, staring at a white background with black squiggles.


    There is one cool feature in the mind. It puts up barriers for which it does not consider it necessary to cross. You suddenly lose the emotional connection with your thinking and understand that there is no point in the further work of the brain - it just starts wasting energy. The brain convinces you that you are engaged in useless mental chewing gum. This is called destructive reflection, re-thinking, the search for deep meanings and more.


    Too often, I hear from friends, “No, buddy, you can’t think like that, otherwise life will turn into hell. The world is not simple, but somehow you have to live. ”


    Somehow it is necessary to live because it is necessary, and it is better if this belief does not raise doubts and emotional attachment. Having come a long way from contradictions, stresses and conflicts, I came to an excellent solution.


    Spit in the face of business, convince stupid managers that I am indispensable, knock out a bigger salary and do as I feel good. It is unlikely that something could be worse than dying, to realize - you gave your life to other people's fictions.


    I am a very talkative person, and because of this I always get more money than my introverted colleagues (you know where the torch and pitchfork are). It seems incredibly unfair to me, and this is what I do: I go to them and say, “Subject, you are a fucking developer, go and demand more money. What the hell are you getting so little ?! ” They go, and they are given their cache. I have five such dudes on my account, and a dash of two will convince me that this is wrong. Harmful to business? Maybe. But I can and do.


    Now it is very difficult to become a good developer. In my case, these were and are hundreds of sleepless nights spent studying development. And you, those who decided that he is the "business", will have to pay for it, and not stuff me with fairy tales about values ​​and the common good.


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