If you're a programmer, what exactly is your job?

If you work for a commercial organisation then you are there to turn code into money.

That might be by automating a long-winded process, so it frees up someone's time to work on something else. It might be by collating important data to help the company make better decisions. It might be by creating a new product that can be exchanged for money.

But ultimately, it's all the same thing.

You write code.

That code improves the company's bottom line.

If it doesn't then you're not doing your job.

The difficulty for many of us is that bringing in money isn't just a function of engineering. It's a function of marketing, sales, worldwide conditions, what our competitors are doing, the weather and the sales of bucket hats in New Zealand.

So our attempts to control the engineering process, and our moaning about "interference" and deadlines that are imposed on us from other parts of the business are actually taking an incredibly narrow view of what our purpose is. Management, meetings and all those other overheads that seem to get in our way, that seem to stop us doing our job, are actually an attempt to make sure we stay on track with our actual job.

Which is converting code into money.