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Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

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Re: Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

#61

Post by reroute1 »

swyx wrote: post #16
forrestbrazeal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor choice of words on my part. Should have said something like "easily-grasped value prop". You want a very short elevator pitch for what you do, that makes it clear what value you provide. I think of Corey Quinn, whose pitch is "I fix your AWS bill." Short, easily-grasped, specific.

this exactly. but Corey can also pitch himself in anywhere from 30seconds to 30 minutes. Marketing Yourself is about adjusting your message to your audience/situation, and it can and should be practiced because you do not leave things like this up to chance. (the public draft: https://www.swyx.io/writing/marketing-yourself/ ) this is obliquely referenced in the book, but i believe the most effective pitch is if you c…

Can you not use buzzwords non stop and have a book with real content? And stop talking like a cult leader to these clowns

Re: Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

#62

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

gautamdivgi wrote: post #58
bluntfang wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coding isn't the hard part of your job, it's convincing people that outsourcing isn't going to result in good outcomes. The reason why they won't result in good outcomes: * maintenance is hard * writing quality code is hard * CI/CD is hard * requirements gathering is hard etc.

How much success have you had? Not trying to be snarky - but the problem in corporates is there are no "lag indicators" of success. The success of a manager is defined as getting to a specific cost structure, there is no measure if that cost structure delivers the results. And in a lot of big corporations what's good for your career and what's good for the company may not be the same thing.

Corporations won't stop outsourcing because of reason, but they will stop outsourcing because of feelings.

I like to hammer down on issues with contractors by basically minimizing the issue: "who cares if our customers couldn't access our product for 3 hours due to an outage? we're saving so much money by outsourcing!".

It's a simple way to get people on your side because noone would like to agree that 3 hours of outage is a good thing.

Re: Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

#63

Post by [deleted] »

quicklime wrote: post #36

> The Coding will always be the easiest part of a Coding Career I'm a little triggered by this headline. I understand what it means, and I agree there's some truth to it. It can be good advice when given to developers who haven't yet figured out that their job is not exclusively to write code. But in my company (which is a big non-tech corporate) I've noticed that a similar phrase often gets used by non-technical peo…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

#64

Post by claudiulodro »

swyx wrote: post #57
claudiulodro wrote: post #33

Please don't take this the wrong way; I am genuinely curious. As far as I can tell, you've been a professional developer for approximately 2 years. What qualifies you to instruct people how to manage their dev career, let alone charge $40+ for the advice?

i think its a fair question and you've been very polite about it :) I basically deal with it by being super open about it (it's pretty much the first thing anyone knows about me) and letting people decide if they still want to read me or not. enough do. in a free market, that's plenty. so the question then becomes: what confidence do I have in what I think I know? it comes from 3 places: - Empirical foundation: study…

Thanks for clarifying. I think I will give it a read, even if just to see what your fresh perspective looks like. The personal branding stuff sounds very interesting and useful also.

EDIT: I would like to note that the IMHO most mentally and technically difficult part of a developer career is maintaining the same mission-critical legacy codebase for years at a time. That's not something I really expect to get a lot of insight around from this book and your personal experience, but I'm also not sure what exactly advice around that problem would look like (probably just the tried-and-true military motto of "embrace the suck"). Either way, just my 2 cents about coding careers.

Re: Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

#66

Post by swyx »

TurboHaskal wrote: post #35

I've just read the table of contents and I think I want to get off this industry.

i'm sorry i made you feel that way. this is far from the only valid perspective on the industry and I'd be interested in reading what you prefer/enjoy instead.

Re: Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

#67

Post by kubanczyk »

quicklime wrote: post #36

> The Coding will always be the easiest part of a Coding Career I'm a little triggered by this headline. I understand what it means, and I agree there's some truth to it. It can be good advice when given to developers who haven't yet figured out that their job is not exclusively to write code. But in my company (which is a big non-tech corporate) I've noticed that a similar phrase often gets used by non-technical peo…

> The Coding will always be the easiest part of a Coding Career

The Coding will sometimes be the hardest part of a Coding Career.

Since people are throwing around authoritatively-sounding statements here, anyone interested is cordially invited to use mine.

Re: Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

#68

Post by maps7 »

claudiulodro wrote: post #33

Please don't take this the wrong way; I am genuinely curious. As far as I can tell, you've been a professional developer for approximately 2 years. What qualifies you to instruct people how to manage their dev career, let alone charge $40+ for the advice?

Agreed. If the author had 40 years experience I would pay attention but 2 years experience is nothing. Maybe it should be sold as "what to expect in the first 2 years of your career".

Re: Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

#69

Post by swyx »

canadev wrote: post #28

This book looks interesting. I'd like some advice on whether it will be useful for me. I've been a professional dev for over ten years and I have a CompSci degree from a respected university. I'm getting paid principal engineering salary for a moderate sized city in the U.S. and I work remotely from Canada in a fairly cheap cost-of-living city at a small company (far from Silicon Valley salary, but pretty damn high f…

you have more experience than i do, so your call on deciding whether you have a superset on this content. all i can offer is, if you do choose to check it out and decide it is not for you, I will honor your refund request.

Good luck! I am certainly always on the side of developers working on themselves.

Re: Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

#70

Post by stephc_int13 »

swyx wrote: post #57
claudiulodro wrote: post #33

Please don't take this the wrong way; I am genuinely curious. As far as I can tell, you've been a professional developer for approximately 2 years. What qualifies you to instruct people how to manage their dev career, let alone charge $40+ for the advice?

i think its a fair question and you've been very polite about it :) I basically deal with it by being super open about it (it's pretty much the first thing anyone knows about me) and letting people decide if they still want to read me or not. enough do. in a free market, that's plenty. so the question then becomes: what confidence do I have in what I think I know? it comes from 3 places: - Empirical foundation: study…

All of this seems kinda legit, learning and be open and using both your experiences and your interactions with others to fix or reinforce your assumptions, but this is not what people usually expect to find in a book...

I still have the feeling that there is a bit of greed here, trying to find shortcuts, this is not blatantly wrong but I have the intuition that this is a potentially harmful mindset, not unlike the Move Fast and Break Things mindset.

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