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If you market yourself, the labor-sales process goes much differently.
If you’re technical and not buried beneath layers of idealists in the corporate context, you’re in that position because you’ve charted your own course.
Pragmatists resign themselves to whatever work gets dumped in their laps, telling themselves that work is work is work. Idealists enthusiastically accept whatever gets dumped in their laps, reasoning that their superiors and the organization know best. To join the ranks of developer opportunists, you need to start qualifying your work and managing your pipeline.
And the reason for this is critically important to keep in mind for the rest of the book and in contemplating your own fate. She’s in such demand not necessarily because she’s the most skilled, smartest, or most technically knowledgeable. She’s in such demand because she does an incredible job of identifying what others value and positioning herself uniquely to deliver that value. Superior technical prowess helps, but developer opportunism, predicated upon options and granting autonomy, comes from understanding of and fluency with business.
the path to collective developer opportunism starts with looking at the whole of business in a whole new light. Accept its necessity, embrace its existence, respect it enough to learn about it, and make yourself into a complete businessperson whose trade happens to be software.
As long as we fetishize unmarketable levels of knowledge of arcane technologies, we will continue to be managed.
Developer hegemony will come from using our leverage to remake facets of business, like sales, according to our preferences. If you don’t like sleazeball sales, weird accounting practices, and sloppy organizational operation, don’t complain, and definitely don’t ignore them. Take over and fix it. We’re not trying to bamboozle suckers into generating commission for us in our roles as middlemen. We have too much leverage for that to be necessary. And we have this leverage by virtue of the fact that we’re efficiencers, whether we realize it yet or not.
More established knowledge work professions first encountered the corporation as a customer and not a master.
“No, no, no,” you say. “That’s not how we do business. You don’t come to us when you’ve planned the details of your site. You don’t even come to us when you think you need a site. Rather, you come to us the moment that someone says, ‘It’d be a lot easier if our customers could order stuff online.’ You’re talking there about making your operation more efficient, and efficiency is our specialty. We’ll be the judge of whether you need a site or not and, if you do, how it should work and what its ‘spec’ needs to be.”
This should be true within a product compny as well
To put this concretely, if you started an efficiencer firm, you would not take specs, and you would not take wireframes, and you would not take direction on software. Software (and by extension, automation/efficiency) is your area of expertise, not your client’s. In the future, this is how more and more software will get written.
Instead of telling our clients “the baby hasn’t turned and you’re going to need a C-section,” we say, “All right, just give us a spec for how the birth needs to go, and we can do anything you want!”
In time and materials, you, as an app dev firm, say, “Gosh, I dunno—that’s a complex project. We’ll just start working and it’ll cost $100 per hour. We think it’ll take 5,000 hours, but that’s just a guess.” The customer now agrees to a rate for the work rather than a price for the deliverable. Guess what. That makes the customer really interested in what you’re doing during those hours. It’s the only measure they have for managing risk.
Everyone’s contributions to the organization’s profits can easily be measured. They only grow as long as that remains true.
Now, when you find these people, contrive of experiments that will let you see if they’ll work out and fail fast otherwise. Peel off a tiny slice of work, pay them to do it, see how it goes, and keep an open dialog. If it goes well, offer up consecutively larger slices. This works.
This list might seem prohibitive, but it really just means they avoid the mindless, grow-like-cancer mandate of the standard corporation. They can’t bring on headcount so that the owners can profit off of the margins generated by grunts (by definition, pragmatists).
So the idea of entrepreneurs and leaders directing peoples attention and efforts can also be seen as selfish if you consider that they get a cut of the profits
Companies will continue to operate the way they operate. They’ll have investment capital, massive payrolls, mind-numbing status calls with 200 people on them, and all of the things that we know and love about them. And they’ll continue to need software, including companies that build Mars robots. I just think that, when they do, they’ll call more and more frequently on efficiencer firms instead of on recruiters to find them rockstar ninja embedded heroes with twelve years of C.
Is it good for the company that the developers are not committed to the company's vision?
Secondly, consider software product companies.
This is touched only so lightly although this sould be the most interesting aspect imo.
This might sound like a brash prediction, but even without many efficiencer firms today, this already happens. Software developers are often held to different rules within organizations, simply because they’re hard to replace. We’re already unwittingly using our leverage to get our way. Imagine what it starts to look like when we do it deliberately.
This is a human cognitive bias known as effort justification, wherein your value of the “in” crowd and its selection process goes up substantially in proportion to the barriers to entry.
Ideally the organization where you land will have a process of finding talent that’s saner than the traditional job interview. Maybe you’ll find yourself discussing whether you and the prospective organization can make money together, like efficiencers.
Find a company that lets you get your name out there and raise your own profile.
Today, we live in a world where the pragmatist engineers, developers, and designers create all of the efficiency and have all of the means of production for doing so. This, in turn, means that we have all the leverage. Let me now state the implication that generates in no uncertain terms. We have absolutely no need for owners and managers, for traditional opportunists and idealists. And we’re just starting to figure that out.
Humans will collaborate in corporate structures more reminiscent of atoms assembling into molecules and decomposing than of the early-twentieth-century global conglomerates. In a world where communication and autonomy are easy, pyramid structures make little sense. We’re ready for something new.
Efficiencer firms and things that look like them will not steal anyone’s hope, because the partners can always earn advancement in direct proportion to the measurable success of their efforts.
How much is imlproving the build process worth? What about e.g. setting up a linter?
