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Just fucking figure it out

scriptmag.com

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Re: Just fucking figure it out

#81

Post by gruseom »

palish wrote: post #69
daniel-cussen wrote: post #11

I've always sort of admired people in the entertainment industry for their ambition and determination. Someone who is taking time off studying CS at Stanford and trying to make a company work is not taking a risk of remotely the same magnitude as someone dropping out of highschool, getting a GED, and working in the music industry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesha#Childhood_and_youth ). If you're a programmer, you…

Kesha described herself in an interview as being "very studious" in high school; she would drive to Belmont University to listen in on Cold War history classes after school and achieved "near perfect" SAT scores.[7] However, she dropped out at age seventeen and earned her GED afterward.[9] She left school after being convinced by Dr. Luke and Max Martin to return to Los Angeles to pursue a music career. They had rece…

Ha. A friend of my father-in-law used to be a Montreal hipster. She and her husband ran a folk club (folk was the indie rock of the day) and Robert Zimmerman came through before he'd changed his name to Bob Dylan. His show was ok. Annette told him, "Kid, you need something to fall back on. Go back to college!" She was fond of recounting her spectacularly wrong moments. (The other was when Leonard Cohen played Suzanne for her and she told him it was dreck and asked him who wrote it.)

Re: Just fucking figure it out

#82

Post by nostrademons »

ramanujan wrote: post #75
patio11 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contributing patches to Rails is exactly what I am thinking of when I say this: it is a lot of work, visibility for new contributors is poor, and the main beneficiaries are going to be for-profit businesses. Yet I hear otherwise very savvy people telling unemployed CS grads that they should build up their github profiles by, e.g., doing patches to Rails. That strikes me as an astoundingly poor use of one's time -- yo…

Hmmm. If someone put on their CV that they got patches into Rails (or another large, popular OSS project) you wouldn't think of that as a pretty big plus?

Relative to what? I'd think of it as a big plus compared to a guy who never contributed to anything outside of his immediate job duties. I wouldn't think of it as a big plus compared to someone who started Rails, or who wrote Mongrel, or who founded his own startup, or even someone who worked for Google or PayPal.

I suffer from the same cognitive biases as everyone else. Even though I know intellectually that getting patches into Rails now is probably harder than starting Rails was, I'm still more impressed by the guy who started Rails.

Re: Just fucking figure it out

#83

Post by shawnzizzo »

I love the message and the attitude in this article. Although it's about writing in the entertainment industry, I like that it's part of the Hacker News list. The point of this article (To get where you want, you have to make sacrifices and work your ass off) is applicable across anything in life. As a hacker, as an athlete as a business person, etc.

This is hard to do. Why do you think there's such a short list of people that are absolute "guns" at their trade?

Re: Just fucking figure it out

#84

Post by billswift »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #67
DannoHung wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The amount of good content that is generated by writers is overwhelming and, in fact, incredibly easy to ignore. Not saying you can't point to success stories of people who produced their own stuff. You can just point to more stories of people who lost a lot of money producing their own stuff and have nothing to show for it. Building relationships certainly seems to be a more reliable way to go about breaking into…

As many famous screenwriters have been at pains to point out, a movie is a very, very large collaborative enterprise by at least a dozen departments full of people, the leader of any one of which can make or break the results. What this means is: There are a lot of bad movies made from good scripts. Don't assume that the quality of the average finished film is representative of the quality of the average script, let…

That's nothing new. Read what Heinlein has to say about the making of Destination Moon in 1949 in his Guest of Honor Speech at the Rio de Janeiro Movie Festival twenty years later. It was published in the posthumous tribute collection, Requiem.

Re: Just fucking figure it out

#85

Post by FiddlerClamp »

gregpilling wrote: post #79
joezydeco wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know it's funny you mention that, because I just finished reading an AV Club interview with the producers of the original Saw movies. It was one thing to have a script passed around from place to place, but these guys went the extra step and made a 5-minute short to demonstrate the concept. Telling people you're talented and showing them you're talented are two different things, and it's surprising how few people…

So you are suggesting that people who want to make movies should create a trailer as a MVP? interesting concept.

Isn't that how Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow got made?

Re: Just fucking figure it out

#86

Post by bphogan »

patio11 wrote: post #66
gamble wrote: post #27

I know nothing about the entertainment industry, but this idea of 'putting in your dues' by working your way up from a menial position based on personal relationships has always seemed naive. Either you can do something or you can't, and working as a dogsbody isn't going to impart those skills. This advice seems like the equivalent of telling someone who wants to be a game programmer to start in the QA department. Yo…

I know nothing about the entertainment industry, but this idea of 'putting in your dues' by working your way up from a menial position based on personal relationships has always seemed naive. I get very, very worried when I see "contribute to OSS" as career advice, for exactly this reason. No, we won't pay you, but if you could grind out some boring glue code for the frameworks that our for-profit businesses use to m…

I don't want to hire people who "paid their dues" but I do want to hire passionate people, and those that contribute to OSS seem to be the ones actually interested in programming, and that gives them a higher chance of getting along with me and others.

Someone can tell me all sorts of accomplishments on their resume. They can tell me about some cool NDA or Intranet project they wrote lots of code for. But I can learn a LOT more about their skills from their Github page.

So when I tell students to get into OSS, it's not to get free labor or to make them "pay their dues". It's to give them a better shot.

Re: Just fucking figure it out

#87

Post by fhe »

gamble wrote: post #27

I know nothing about the entertainment industry, but this idea of 'putting in your dues' by working your way up from a menial position based on personal relationships has always seemed naive. Either you can do something or you can't, and working as a dogsbody isn't going to impart those skills. This advice seems like the equivalent of telling someone who wants to be a game programmer to start in the QA department. Yo…

I once watched an interview of Ang Lee (crouching tiger, brokeback mt. the best director of our time, this is from my twice academy winning professor). Lee told of his early days as a director, when he simply couldn't get any gig for six years. (he stayed home, took care of the kids, and did a lot of cooking.) but he stuck with it, and eventually got some money to make a small budget movie that went on to win some international award, which launched his career. Looking back, he said something to this effect, "of my classmates who studied to be directors, the only ones who ended up being directors are the ones who stuck with directing all the way. Those who found jobs as editors, or critics,.. Those were the lucky ones who found stable jobs. But 20 yes later, they were still editing or crtiquing. None made it to directing their own films. Only the ones who stuck with it."

Re: Just fucking figure it out

#88

Post by ZeroGravitas »

patio11 wrote: post #66
gamble wrote: post #27

I know nothing about the entertainment industry, but this idea of 'putting in your dues' by working your way up from a menial position based on personal relationships has always seemed naive. Either you can do something or you can't, and working as a dogsbody isn't going to impart those skills. This advice seems like the equivalent of telling someone who wants to be a game programmer to start in the QA department. Yo…

I know nothing about the entertainment industry, but this idea of 'putting in your dues' by working your way up from a menial position based on personal relationships has always seemed naive. I get very, very worried when I see "contribute to OSS" as career advice, for exactly this reason. No, we won't pay you, but if you could grind out some boring glue code for the frameworks that our for-profit businesses use to m…

You could say the same about getting a degree, and you actually pay for the privilege in that case. But in both cases it's an okay signal that you're not going to be a total loss, which gives you a leg up on all the other folk who haven't proved anything about their worth (even if they're actually better than you). In theory the more qualified you are the easier it is for you to meet these goals.

It also sounds, with they way you put it, that it's the leaders of Project X, telling you to contribute to Project X in order to be hired by the leaders of Project X. Which is, or would be, scummy but I've never seen that advice. Usually it's leaders of project A saying that you should contribute to X, Y or Z because when they or similarly tech savvy people are hiring they'll consider that a good signal, all the more so if it's a project related to your work).

Re: Just fucking figure it out

#89

Post by mturmon »

gamble wrote: post #38
rauljara wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I know nothing about the entertainment industry..." Then maybe you shouldn't speak about it as if you do. I have heard the same advice in this article from a number of people working as tv writers (either reading articles, or as part of my mfa in creative writing), and it does seem like the vast majority of them only got where they are by "working their way up". The idea that you can just make something good enough…

Is working for someone as a personal assistant really 'building relationships', though? I suspect that personal anecdotes are poor proof in this case because the huge number of low-level employees who pay their dues and get nothing out of it are hardly in a position to give advice on how to break into show business. On the other hand, if most people are trying to get in through relationships, then you would expect th…

I don't think anyone meant personal assistant. The acronym "PA" means "production assistant". A good description is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_assistant

Re: Just fucking figure it out

#90

Post by rmc »

patio11 wrote: post #66
gamble wrote: post #27

I know nothing about the entertainment industry, but this idea of 'putting in your dues' by working your way up from a menial position based on personal relationships has always seemed naive. Either you can do something or you can't, and working as a dogsbody isn't going to impart those skills. This advice seems like the equivalent of telling someone who wants to be a game programmer to start in the QA department. Yo…

I know nothing about the entertainment industry, but this idea of 'putting in your dues' by working your way up from a menial position based on personal relationships has always seemed naive. I get very, very worried when I see "contribute to OSS" as career advice, for exactly this reason. No, we won't pay you, but if you could grind out some boring glue code for the frameworks that our for-profit businesses use to m…

Contribute to OSS is good for your CV as a way to separate you from the loads of CS graduates who are not passionate about programming. There are people who have CS degrees who can't programme. If you have contributed to OSS then you are probably not one of them.
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