You are too technical
This week was a little bit fun for me. I had this incident where one of our clients has had a meeting with us and in the process he made joke about my technical skills–as in they the business owners use us the coders to do their stuff. It was indeed a bad joke, but it led me into writing this post. I wanted to share with you how extremely excited I am of being a programmer and the myth behind “technical term”.
I have heard this too much lately and I wanted to shed some light on this, it is also quite related to my other post on the joy of coding. This part is very ambigtious and hard to define.
If i’m the owner, everything for me looks technical; be it business or engineering. I’m a programmer (i’d love to be known for that actually!), the business and the marketing part looks so technical for me–and i’d expect the same for the business to consider me technical.
some technicals are more technicals than others
i’m a programmer, but I also run my own business (now Solus, and others before). i’m still socially awkward and i hate meetings, and i wear some really weird stuff. i look exactly the typical stereotype “geek” picture. And I have seen so many “business” guys trying to exploit that. I code, quite a lot perhaps and i run an open source company. But, i know business. You cannot fool me.
I worked and contributed to many projects in the past years. Tons of them have failed. I launched three startups, on different domains. I know business, quite well. I know for a fact that the engineering part is as important as the business part. There narrative that “geeks” cannot run businesses, or “geeks” cannot understand “business” is flawed, and utterly wrong. It cannot help that the biggest companies in the world are software companies, and were made by “geeks”.
I cannot with good conscious understand as to why business can be considered more crucial than technical. This argument is extremely irritating for me, as a geek and a business owner.
Your technical business expertise is not better than my technical engineering one
trivia
I write this post after a lovely encounter with a fellow programmer today. I met someone very enthusiastic about code and they give me a nice reminder of our early days at G&I (note: G&I will turn 4 years this March!)
Software helped me build things. Stuff that I’m very proud of and I enjoyed every second while doing that. Our journey was very exciting, we were always very close to completely fall off, yet to be saved somehow!
Years later and I still enjoy my naivety of being “just a programmer”.
Hover over the image to read the caption– not sure how that works on mobile though!
