Many programmers fear an MBA—the master of business administration. These are people who will corner you by the watercooler and tell you about seed funding, venture capital, and stock option dilution. Run!
But the truth is, the master programmer has to know a thing or two about business. Much like our investigation into other roles within the company, it pays to understand the context of your work: When is my product going to ship? Who’s going to buy it? How does the company make money from it?
As a programmer, most of your contribution is toward the product. This chapter, accordingly, takes a product-heavy bias. Even if you program internal systems—for example, the trading software used by an investment firm—you can consider your software a product whose customers happen to be inside the company.
I’m not looking to give you an MBA, of course. We’ll cover just the high points you’ll want early in your career:
We start with your first, most pressing issue: Tip 27, Get with the Project focuses on practical advice for estimating and scheduling your work. Time is money, and the company tracks both closely.
Tip 28, Appreciate the Circle of (a Product’s) Life looks at the product as it evolves over time. Your job looks a bit different depending on where your product currently lives within this cycle.
Then we get into purely business matters. Tip 29, Put Yourself in the Company’s Shoes addresses what the company is doing and why we programmers have jobs.
Finally, something the MBA’s b-school doesn’t like to admit, Tip 30, Identify Corporate Antipatterns points out some recurrent patterns of business gone wrong.
18.118.144.12