Recently I stumbled upon this article. And, of course, this part made me think.
Instead, describe yourself by what you have accomplished for previously employers vis-a-vis increasing revenues or reducing costs.
And I thought "What??". My reaction was also triggered by a call I once had with a kind of aggressive HR. He started as usual, but then went on with how bland my resume was and described me what he wanted to see with exactly the same words. He wanted my job descriptions to reflect how I increased revenues or reduced costs for the companies I worked for. That caught me completely off guard. I’ve never thought about my job from such a perspective.
And while I can completely understand how and why the market would like to look at everything from this angle, I simply can’t do it. Yeah, everything is a product. The whole world is a big market where there’s supply and demand. And all the participants compete to be more efficient, more profitable.
I get it and you can’t avoid it. But there are a couple of things I consider here:
Any kind of company, team, union, whatever has its actors doing their line of work. They are cogs in those machines. And if they are properly aligned and in the right context, they work better. One does not need or have to manage others or intrude into their work. That’s the thing with teams, every member does what they can do best. A programmer simply doesn’t have neither time nor enough competence to think about the company’s profits. Anybody can have an opinion on anything, but it’s simply not part of their job — to think about the financial prosperity of the company. How to cut costs or make profits? Ask the CEO, marketing or finance guys. That’s why they are there for. If a programmer is responsible for a company’s prosperity, it’s either their company or he’s partly working as a manager already.
You don’t do something just because you know it will bring you profit. Most of the time, people do stuff, because they like it. It’s as simple as that. Yeah, it’s up to the market to come up with weird-ass evaluations, but it doesn’t change anything in terms of how people choose their professions or hobbies.
If someone wants to look at the world around them under a microscope with a calculator and analyse the efficiency and try different approaches to be the most efficient cog in the machine, well I don’t mind at all. But this doesn’t mean that everybody should switch to this mathematical approach. Many people just like doing shit they are doing.