#armchairing

[archidev-blog]

"We built an app... so you see can any data you want any way you want"

Cool story, but i think I've seen it before. It had a bad ending :(

[archidev-blog]

Should you charge for thinking?

Or stated another way: As an employee does thinking count as a billable?

tldr; YES!

Please consider these definitions for this article:

Opinion: Non-measurable; from a person; what you choose to both listen to and consider.

Facts, graphs: My opinion

Mechanical contribution: What you do when you are following a plan that is "fully specified".

Finished: When applied to your mechanical contribution; that moment when it satisfies the requirements. (Absence of flaws is a requirement)

Skill: Inverse of the time it takes you to finish your mechanical contribution. Eg -- If you have higher skill than your colleague then your colleague will take longer to finish the same piece of work than you.

When you are young your level of skill is low. It takes you long to finish tasks and your code reviews are often painful. As you grow as a developer your skill increases rapidly for a long time (I suspect ~ 6-10 years) until you start reaching a plateau. After this point, your skill only increases gradually. You are only marginally better at delivering work then colleagues that might be much younger.

Right at this point in their careers I see a lot of senior people leaving the industry entirely. It is my opinion that competing against young colleagues in this space is very hard because they can stay up later and keep on going longer than I can. It's easy to think you are losing your mojo.

However, you have experience. And it is this experience that can make you valuable if you can turn them into requirements. I'm thinking of requirements like these:

Maintainability

Adaptability

Efficiency

...

Sometimes this experience manifests itself automatically without conscious effort and it seems like your senior colleagues are just light-years ahead of you in their ability to crank out the most amazing features in the fewest numbers of lines.

But this is often invisibly preceded by a lot of time in front of whiteboards or flip-charts or hands-behind-the-head looking at the ceiling. It's when you are appearing to be doing nothing that you are creating actual value.

And it is this process that earns you your high salary.

(PS -- Nirvana is when you can communicate these extra requirements to younger colleagues.)

(PPS -- I suck at writing >_< )