Why you should, but probably won’t hire me
Many industry experts know who I am and what I’m capable of. I get things done that others can’t because I’m not afraid to bend the rules established by so-called “experts” who believe that their way is the best way. I understand that they see other programmers as robots that should do things their way, they believe it is their job to get technology to do what they want it to do, the way they want it but there is no one solution that can solve every problem. Not only doesn’t a Turing machine exist, but it cannot exist as anything more than a concept since by definition it is infinitely large. Toptal Software Engineering Network want’s me to market their service by making a blog about why I want to join their community, well here it is.
Just the other day I spent about an hour debating the scientific method and the reality that it cannot in itself resolve a paradox. Not all problems are logical, some require fuzzy logic, some require out-of-band technologies, and some simply require pure randomness to achieve the desired result. Genetic algorithms are a good example of this, they don’t use the scientific process, they randomly mutate until they either converge to a solution, or diverge to a state where the system cannot solve the problem.
Luck and intuition cannot be discounted, and neither can the infinite monkey theorem. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard the excuse “It works the way it needs to but …”. No one benefits from excuses, either it works or it doesn’t. Sure we can play code-gulf and perform infinite optimizations but who wants to pay for that? I have also seen many IT professionals who flat out deny technologies simply because they don’t understand them. Many of my clients don’t understand anything about the code I write either, yet they use it every day without any problems.
My work ethic is fairly simple. If you request something that I believe I can do, it is legal, and fixes more than it breaks I’ll do what I can to produce it. If I believe it is impossible, not within my capability or better handled by a specialist, regardless of the cost, that’s the solution I’ll suggest. It is true that I don’t know every technology you want me to know, there are over 100,000 developers in the world producing code faster than any human can read it. I probably can learn a specific technology quickly, I have 15 years of related experience to build upon.
The reason I want to join the Toptal Software Engineering Network is simply because the world should know what they’re missing. Lack of funding, lack of marketing skills, and corrupt politics has successfully kept me in a dark corner of this world where only a courageous few know what I’m capable of. Sure, your probably not going to hire me if you want me to do something unethical, and your not going to hire me if you want a robot that just blindly does things your way without questioning it. If you really want something to work the way you envision it, you probably should hire me, but you probably won’t. I know this makes me sound like a narcissist ego-maniac, but I’m really not. My entire life I’ve needed to perform 2 to 5 times better than everyone else just to be taken seriously, and even that doesn’t help due to the amount of black-balling and slander I’ve faced in this industry.
