You don’t get paid to write code

It’s a sentence, that is very obvious to many. However, truly understanding and following this mentality changes your work completely.

You don't get paid to write code,
you get paid to develop a product.

As software developers we love to write code and try new things. We want to play with technology. It’s fun. It’s creative. It’s exciting. Specifically, when a lot of people start using our code. But they are not using our code. They are solving problems, by using our developed solutions.

It doesn’t matter if we work on an open-source projects, a SaaS solution, a small mobile app, or a boring government website. In fact, let’s take this little personal website of mine as an example.

I am using Hugo and Github pages to “develop” this website and serve it to you. You most certainly couldn’t care less about it. It might be interesting because you have never heard of Hugo. But you are not here for that. You are here to find out more about a video that I made on Youtube or other stuff that I have published somewhere else. It is about the quality of material that I publish, not the tools that I use.

The difference between our “writing code and a develop product”-attitude is the work around the code to get a certain outcome. You can write a twitter clone over a weekend, probably with a lot more user functionality than twitter itself. But the user experience will be non-existing. On all devices? Probably not very well supported, but somewhat useable.

It is also a lot of work. In fact, a lot of work in very different departments, than coding alone. A product needs marketing, it needs support for people who have questions. It needs to have updates. It needs to be communicated to users, people need to be convinced to pay for it, so that the income can be used to pay for all of the above. Because, it quickly becomes obvious, a one-man show can only do that much.

That’s the reason why a lot of software projects don’t sell well on themeforest and other websites. You can create the theme, the template, the plugin. But you don’t have the marketing, sales and support resources available. Maybe it’s too expensive, maybe the skill to do it yourself is not there, maybe there is no time. There can be 1000 reasons, why not. So, what is the result? We published code. Not a product. No one pays for code. Customers pay for solution.

Anyhow, I think the message is clear:

Focus on the solution and the quality that is expected from the solution. If you must write 100 lines of code or 10 – it doesn’t matter.