A place for programmers of all languages to come and chat, show off what they've done, and general shop talk.
Do I still count as a programmer?
Hi there,
For those who don't know, I'm the CEO here at Imzy and a long time developer. This creates a problem, a problem that I've been facing for years:
I am terrible at valuing my time when I am not programming.
I've been a programmer in the tech industry for a long time, since the 90s, and over that time I've done a lot of programming and have learned when I'm having a good day and when I'm not having a good day.
Then a few years back, I ventured off into non programming land and started doing more product/managment type work, and now do even more of that, including investor relations and all the other good stuff that comes with being a CEO.
I think I'm doign an OK job at being a CEO, but I rarely, if ever feel like I've been effective at the end of the day ... unless I've been programming. This also increases my anxiety greatly when I don't feel effective.
Moral of the story, don't veer off the path of being a developer.




I know exactly what you're speaking of. I'm not a CEO, but I've been in various technical lead positions that have taken me away from my own true love of programming and it too made me anxious.
I think part of that anxiety comes from being more vulnerable. As CEO, there's certainly more at stake here. If you fail, what do you do next? As a programmer, if a job doesn't work out, there are tons of opportunities out there in the tech world. Probably not so many ads for "CEO of a startup that tanked" in Dice, right?
OK, now that I'm done blowing sunshine up your skirt, I'm going to tell you to stay the course.
You've done something risky, but great in its own right here. You've taken the next step that most of us programmers will never do. And face it, a lot of us wouldn't be so damned employable if it weren't for startup CEOs doing their thing.
The other thing to keep in mind is that most CEO, leaders in general, really have no idea what they are doing. Proof positive is in the current US presidential race. I'm pretty sure you're a better leader than any of our current choices.
So keep at it. But maybe pick up Angular or Swift in your spare time. :-)
Haha, thank you! I don't have any spare time though!
That...makes no sense. If devs never veer off the path they never found companies like Imzy.
I'd argue you shouldn't veer off the dev path UNTIL you have learned how to value your contributions/time BEYOND having tangible results at the end of the day.
I wish I were better at this! It's a struggle!
God I feel this. I'm now Chief Digital Officer, over a team of developers, designers, and content/social media folks, and to be perfectly honest, when I'm in the code, I slow my devs down. It's just hard to let go, especially when my daily management duties are far down the fun scale from actually creating something. It's hard to take as much pleasure from leading as it is from doing.
Yeah exactly. I have the urge to dive in and help with heavy optimizations, but instead I'm making myself do things like write reports to help teams etc. Things that get me into the data, feel
technicalbut don't fuck anyone else up.We'll see if it works!
BTW, I'm playing around with chartio lately, am pretty impressed!
You might be interested in this project a friend of mine works on:
http://www.fastforwardlabs.com/
Scroll down to FF02 "Probabilistic Methods for Realtime Streams".