Hi Kelsey,

Thank you for sharing your story. It’s very unfortunate that they didn’t give you a chance at your first company. However, as you well know, software development is an all consuming occupation. Software engineers in their free time read books about new computer languages, talk on forums or write blogs about their coding adventures, hang out on Pluralsight to learn new frameworks or truly enjoy watching livecoding.tv.

A person that is founding non-profits or is a board member of some organization, ie engages in MBA like activities is usually not perceived as an engineer, but more of a product manager or some other less technical occupation. An engineer likes engineering and not much else. I think to an extent your frustrations are a function of how you portray yourself. For starters, if your headline is “Developer at GoSpotCheck, Java code monkey and Livecoding contributor”, trust me nobody will have any doubts that you are an engineer. As it is right now, people may wonder — are you a management person (board member), are you an enterpreneur (co-founder) or are you coder (developer). I am sure you are all three, but a lot people that have to pay salaries especially managers and recruiters don’t think you can be all three. They want you to be one thing and to be pretty good at it.

Best of luck,

Stephen