Good Software People Have to Lie Through Their Teeth to Get a Job

The Sad Reality

If you’re a talented software professional who understands and practices modern, effective approaches to collaborative knowledge work, you face an unpleasant reality – you likely have to lie through your teeth in job interviews to have any shot at getting hired. And if you have any integrity, you probably won’t (won’t lie, won’t get hired).

The root of the issue is that many hiring teams, managers, and organisations commit a profound “category error” – they mistakenly treat software development like a more familiar form of work that it fundamentally is not. So the cutting-edge practices that make sense for collaborative knowledge work sound like utter – and alien – nonsense to them.

Examples of Alien Approaches

This forces software development cognicsenti into an impossible choice: either pretend their field is just another flavour of manufacturing/construction/etc. that aligns with woefully outdated management dogma. Or stick to their guns, speak truth about their highly unique and dynamic domain, and get immediately rejected as fringe lunatics.

Let me illustrate with examples of legitimate yet “incredible” “wonko” approaches:

The “Constant State of Ship”

At high-performing software companies, code is shipped to production constantly, sometimes multiple times per day. Concepts like “releases” or “launch dates” are laughable antiquities from machine-age models of work.

Continuous Delivery

Elite software teams can automatically build, test and deploy code on every commit that passes automated checks – without manual gatekeepers. But to old-school minds, this sounds like reckless spontaneity instead of disciplined craftsmanship.

The Interview Reaction

Try pitching those kinds of modern practices in a job interview and watch eyes glaze over in bafflement. You’ll get pelted with scepticism about “stability,” “quality,” “risk,” etc. Poor performers always obsess over mitigating challenge instead of updating their working models.

Lying to Get Hired

So to pass interviews, superb software professionals have to dumb it down and play make-believe about pushing gigantic, monolithic releases every 6-12 months after “hardening” periods – Industrial Revolution edicts that no longer apply.

It’s maddening to have to deny the realities of cutting-edge knowledge work to be taken seriously. But that’s the tax we pay, trapped in an industry riddled with obsolete dogma.

Consequences

This dynamic creates a catch-22: organisations hire either liars lacking ethics, or candidates lacking current expertise in effective modern software practices. Neither is a viable choice for building an effective engineering team. Do they want impostors or ignoramuses on their teams?

By filtering out leaders who grasp the unique dynamics of collaborative knowledge work, firms doom themselves to inefficiency, delays, and poor quality software. The very candidates with competencies to uplift them get screened out as “unbelievable” or “reckless” based on obsolete manufacturing/construction/service analogies.

Organisations must decide whether they want to cling to personnel working under antiquated models of development, or embrace competent people optimised for the fundamentally different nature of software’s collaborative value creation. Their ability to deliver high-quality, continuous value through technology hinges on making the right choice here. Discarding modern software ideas in favor of outmoded perspectives will only perpetuate disappointing outcomes.

The implications for these organisations’ ability to deliver valuable technology solutions are profound.