1149 Dealing With Bad Managers In The Development World - Simple Programmer Podcast
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♪ Welcome to the Simple Programmer Podcast ♪ ♪ Making complex programming simple and fast ♪ ♪ With everything from career advice to philosophy ♪ ♪ It's the Simple Programmer Podcast ♪ - Hey, what's up? John Sonmez here from simpleprogrammer.com.

Hey, I just want to give a quick thanks to one of our sponsors at Simple Program, which is DevMountain Bootcamp. You should go check them out. The link is in the description. They are a coding bootcamp and they can teach you web development, iOS development, UX design, a lot of good stuff. I get a lot of feedback

from a lot of you out there that email me and have told me about DevMountain, so I decided to check them out myself. I like what I found. I like their programs. They offer some 12-week intensive programs. They also offer some after-hours programs, which I know that some of you will like. Go check them out. You can see the link in the description below, DevMountain Bootcamp. A big thank you to them for sponsoring Simple Programmer. Today, I got a question about what does the software development work field look like? What is real software development like?

Some of you don't know what it's like to actually work as a software developer, so I'm going to try to answer that here. Anthony says, when I was looking into buying clean code, a couple of people were debating saying, while clean code is good practice, it makes you slower. Your manager slash boss won't appreciate it. He says, someone stated also that many managers still measure your productivity by how many lines of code you have. I understand that some managers are bad,

but they're saying that most of them are still old school. Even though you shouldn't trust everything people say on the internet, this isn't the first time I've seen it. He says here that he's 19 years old, has no work experience apart from his parents' business. The reason for that is because he's under a visa that doesn't allow him to work. If I had work experience then maybe I would be able to answer this myself. Thank you. There's definitely going to be places where—

Companies are dumb and managers are dumb and they're going to measure a programmer's skill and quality based on the number of lines of code that they write. There's going to be places like that.

There's fewer of them today. It might depend on where you are in the world. I'll give you that. I think that there's more of those in India and in Russia, not to pick on places, but just from my experience. It's just something that I've seen. It's something in the culture. Software developers in India that write to me all the time write about how they're being browbeaten by their superiors. That's just—

kind of the environment there. I can't speak to all environments, but I can say this. I'll say that this is just an overarching principle in life that I subscribe to, that I highly encourage you to subscribe to, which is you could call it karma if you want, but it's essentially this. If you do the right thing, good things will happen to you.

Yes, you could game the system and you could focus on producing as many lines of code as possible. Maybe you would climb up the ranks as a superior developer because you're writing some shit code, but you're writing a ton of it.

Maybe you'd work at some company where they'd be like, "Oh, you're great because you're writing all this code even though you're writing all these bugs and it's highly unmaintainable mess and it's not the right thing to do." Yeah, people climb up the ladder that way all the time.

But, they also fall. When they fall, they don't have much to fall back on because they've gamed the system. They haven't actually developed the skills. They're not actually good. They've just figured out that there's a loophole. What's up, guys? John Sonmez here from simpleprogrammer.com. I want to tell you about my free blogging course that you can sign up for at simpleprogrammer.com forward slash pblog.

Now, this free blogging course is going to tell you how to create a blog to boost your career. It's something that you definitely don't want to miss. Thousands of developers have already gone through the course, the free course that you're going to get by email, and have learned how to create a blog to boost your career, to make more money, and even to grow their own side business. It's something that every single developer should do, especially if you're a web developer. You should have your own blog. I'm going to show you exactly how to do it, how to be successful, how to get traffic,

everything that you need to know about creating a blog and even making money from it, just go to simpleprogrammer.com forward slash pblog to sign up now. Once again, it's simpleprogrammer.com forward slash pblog. There's some way that they're being judged and they figure out how to gain that system. They really don't have any value. I think there's an Einstein quote where he says, try to be a man of value. Try to be a person of value rather than

I don't remember exactly what the quote is, but it's a good one. Look it up. Someone leave a comment and tell me what the quote is. Anyway, the point is this. The point is this.

I believe 100% and I'll go all in on this is that if you're doing the right thing, if you're producing quality, if you're providing value to people, it will come back to you 100-fold. It may take time. It may take commitment. It may take persistence, but if you're consistently producing value, it's going to come back to you. Again, when I started this YouTube channel, right?

A lot of people said, "Well, this is kind of like—I don't know. You're not going to make money doing this. You're spending a lot of time. It doesn't make sense." Right? "You have 100 subscribers. What are you doing? Why are you wasting your time? You should be spending your time making Pluralsight courses where you're making a shit ton of money. You can check out my Pluralsight courses here. Might as well plug them." I said, "No, no, no. Okay, look. If I'm here and I'm creating YouTube videos.

I'm honestly creating a lot of value for people. In time, good shit is going to happen. Good stuff is going to happen when I do that. It has. This channel has grown. It actually makes a decent amount of money just the channel itself aside from the other parts of Simple Programmer.

I'm able to impact a lot of people and who knows what's going to happen in the next 3 or 4 years or 5 years down the road, but it's because my focus is on creating value. I'm not optimizing. I'm not doing SEO. There's a little bit of SEO, but essentially my strategy with this channel is just to create really good value so that people are like, "Man, you should have more subscribers." They're like, "You should be doing some stuff to have more subscribers." I'm like, "No, no."

It'll come, trust me. It'll come if you're creating value. Good things will come. That's what I would say about this is that like yeah, you can game the system. Yeah, you can figure out—and I'm not saying don't be strategic. Obviously, you got to have some kind of common sense. You got to be pragmatic and practical, but ultimately,

If you're going to go into the field of software development, if you're going to be a software developer, write good code. Focus on producing the best value that you can for your employer. Your employer might not recognize what good value is. They might think that however many lines of code that you write and you can try and educate

them on that, but ultimately, ultimately by producing good value, even if some people don't recognize it, you're going to get further in life. You're going to get further in your career. You're going to feel more satisfied and fulfilled in life. The good things will come and they'll come back 100-fold.

If you give it enough time, that's the investment that I would highly recommend that you make. Again, some people would call it karma. I don't know what you call it. I just say you do the right thing and good things happen to you. That's my belief. What comes around goes around. It always seems to get you in the end. There you go. That's what I got to say about that.

By the way, I haven't—some of you have been watching this channel and you're like, "Man, that's a pretty awesome shirt that John is wearing. Where can I get one of those?" Just click here or there will be a card and you can go to store.simpleprogrammer.com and you can get one of these shirts about trusting the process. If you want to know more about trusting the process, do a search for Trust the Process on Simple Programmer and you'll find plenty of stuff on there. All right. If you haven't subscribed already, click that Subscribe button. I'll talk to you next time. Take care.