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

I read another article about "psychological types of developers." And I have enough. As always, in this article they propose to find out about myself in one of the “bad guys” antipatterns, to understand that I am hitting business and finally begin to “get better”. I've recognized myself in every type. I am a rock star, a soldier, an incompetent one, and a sword to the managers ... In short, it looks like that no matter what developer and person I want to be, business will see the problem here.

You know what? Let it go to hell.

If my dream is to solve many problems, to write quality code, to use the latest tools is harmful, then I will deceive the employer, because I am not ready to exist in other industries. Suddenly, my life, its quality and meaningfulness are much more important to me than the interests of conditional Luxoft, Epam, Google, MS, and generally do not care who. 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 IT career without ceasing to be a good person. Now I think it is impossible. I cannot live by the interests of an abstract corporation, it just so happens that in the first place for me are my interests.

All these things - “being a good person”, “interests of the company”, “personal interests”, “the dream of writing quality code” - seem obvious and do not require an explanation. And if you dig in their essence, you can go kukkhuy. But I dug in and now tell you what I came to.

Here you get up in the morning, crawl into the bathroom to brush your teeth, make coffee, drink, go to work, where again there will be a mountain of tasks that you have been asked to solve. Why solve them? Just to get a reward for it?

It is not a question of what you find important to yourself. Rather, why do you decide to think that something should be important to you?

“It is important to do important things” out of the box, so 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 a year at home and do nothing, although I am physically capable of it - firstly, I will most likely die, secondly (if I miraculously survive), I cannot bear the burden of social pressure. Even the closest people will refuse me. Mom and dad will cry because they have given birth to a moral monster and are ashamed to talk with their friends, whose children are productive fellows. My wife leaves, friends will forget.

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

It is clear that all such conversations are quickly reduced to discussing instincts, the need to survive, dominate, fascinate people, so that everyone would like to have sex with us and so on.

For example, voluntarily lying on the bed for a year - this is nonsense at the level of biology. Therefore, we got up and went to solve problems that, at best, we thought up for ourselves, at worst - that others thought up for us. Business challenges. For example, write good code.

Here is my company, it has a name, logo, Internet pages, employees, customers. In the end - the building where everyone is sitting, the desktop, the monitor. I have presented it - what if the building, the workers and the clients remained, but everything connected with the business disappeared from our memory. With memory, the whole business would disappear. It turns out that nowhere but the memory of a few people, this business did not exist. Business was the general agreement that it exists. Small manipulation of inventors.

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

Such fictions around - borders, laws, morals, brands, money. These are all simply fictional connections between the imaginations of different people. It turned out that the modern social world is a construction of millions of collective myths that are based on the condition that we will definitely support the contract with deeds. But to say now that business, money, brands — does not exist; it’s like telling a cave man that there are no spirits.

If, all of a sudden, for some fantastic reason, we all stop following this fiction all at once, everything will collapse. Catastrophe! No one wants to change with 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. Survive and dominate I can and 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 would grow and develop endlessly, because without developing it would not discourage the loan taken from the future and collapse. We develop things so that other people can do their things, so that we can do our things again, so that they can do their things again, and so on to infinity.

Breaking the vicious circle means doing nothing, and doing nothing is impossible.

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

I know that it is imperative to do business in a team, but it pisses me off if they only see a function in me and put business values ​​above my comfort. They tell me you either share 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 the lead says that his developers didn’t make a feature, because the managers had been planning for a long time (in fact, they were developing with the design), this is a pretense. Such cases everywhere. Yes, this is not correct. But what choice do we have if a lie works, 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, simply 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 - adjayles, scars, and so on. We start the sprint, move on to the next sprint, rejoice in the release and the fact that the collective idea feels real. Then 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 the infinite and non-stop growth - protest ripens in me. After all, to do something well once and for all is essentially to stop and lie on the bed. And then awareness of oneself as part of a huge 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 the 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, and we without it. And then she begins to rule us. Business is eternal - and we are its consumables, which are easily replaced in the market. God, we are eight billion. There is always an Asian who is cooler than you.

Managers do not like irreplaceable developers, only they live in a world where every good developer is irreplaceable in his own way. Managers have an impossible dream, so that people have exactly as many ambitions 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, the company 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 to become ordinary cogs.

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

Awareness of replacing me as a function is most disliked by me as an individual. It is unpleasant to be aware of yourself as a template that fits into a well-established fictional mechanism. When a rock star developer is told that the manager has figured out how to neutralize his corners, which are harmful to the general idea, the developer of the rock star is bombing.

All those who put their individuality above collective advantage are bombing.

This is a situation without exit, and it creates stress. It is painful to push yourself into the team, questions arise - why the hell is that all? Why do we constantly develop, grow, carry your values, what should we do in the end and what is the point?

Sometimes this leads to bad thoughts, which can not be spoken of by law.

Finding meaning in a fictional idea resembles a game with a dictionary. You find the definition of the first word. Then the definition of the words of which the first definition consists. 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.

In the mind there is one cool feature. It puts barriers for which it does not consider it necessary to move. You suddenly lose your emotional connection with your thinking and realize 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 a useless mental chewing gum. This is called destructive reflection, rethinking, searching for deep meanings and so on.

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

It is necessary to live somehow because it is necessary, and it is better if this belief does not cause 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, convincing stupid managers that I am indispensable, knock out a bigger salary for yourself and do as well as I do. It is unlikely that something could be worse than, dying, to realize - you gave your life to other fiction.

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

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