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Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

learninpublic.org

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Re: Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

#71

Post by swyx »

kamaal wrote: post #50
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?

Haven't read the book, but by reading the table of contents, it does look like it is essays on commonly known topics to most programmers. Stuff like reading books, training frequently, exposure to Machiavellian strategies, perennial interview practice, side projects etc is already known to most programmers who are aware and actively seeking improvement. One thing that I like to see most programmers pay importance to…

i agree! (the final chapter is basically what you said here) unfortunately i need to learn that too before i can write it.

Re: Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

#72

Post by swyx »

itqwertz wrote: post #48

I typically don’t trust anyone who uses the word “coding”.

naming is hard... so the background on this is that the book was originally called "Cracking the Coding Career" for the alliteration and for the mirror with "Cracking the Coding Interview". I nearly even shipped with that name - until Gayle McDowell got in touch and said this would break her trademark. So I had to tweak it. I considered maybe a dozen other names but believe it or not they were worse :(

Re: Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

#73

Post by kwanbix »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #62
gautamdivgi wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 out…

But in my experience I have never seen cases where you really save money. The outsourced dev charges less, yes, but the outsourcing company needs to make money. But let's say what was 10 an hour, now it is 5. In my experience is that what used to take 1 hour, now it takes 2 or even 3. In the end, hardly any savings.

Re: Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

#74

Post by jayrice257 »

swyx wrote: post #72
itqwertz wrote: post #48

I typically don’t trust anyone who uses the word “coding”.

naming is hard... so the background on this is that the book was originally called "Cracking the Coding Career" for the alliteration and for the mirror with "Cracking the Coding Interview". I nearly even shipped with that name - until Gayle McDowell got in touch and said this would break her trademark. So I had to tweak it. I considered maybe a dozen other names but believe it or not they were worse :(

Naming is hard when you have to rely on marketing and gimmicks to sell an idea instead of content... like this "book"

Re: Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

#75

Post by elliotbnvl »

Congrats on the launch, Shawn!

I'm frustrated and saddened by the amount of negative comments here from doubters, burnt out folks, and cynical engineers. I want to weigh in with a positive perspective.

I've been following Shawn for a while now (from a distance) and I have to say, seeing his name pop up in more and more places has certainly been an intriguing experience. He went from being nobody a few years ago to being somebody worth listening to very quickly.

He's built up a lot of good will with me just from what he's posted that is freely available, so it's a little frustrating to see other people bashing / looking for problems as soon as he releases something with a price tag. I personally have benefited a lot from his "learn in public" approach (more from his example than from his advice!!) and have had multiple posts hit the front page of HN by "learning in public", from which I've learned further (it's a positive feedback loop).

Full discloser, I haven't read this book, but the interesting thing is that he's only recently started monetizing this exposure. That rings true to me of somebody who knows what they're doing and has real value to bring to the table.

For people who are saying "But he doesn't have enough experience," bear in mind that this book has ~1400 references to other peoples' experience. I trust that way more than I do one person's singular viewpoint, even if that is backed up by 40 years' worth of experience.

Also, before anybody tries to call me out – this is a 100% spontaneous response and I had no idea Shawn's book was out until I saw this post on the front page of HN.

Re: Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

#76

Post by jayrice257 »

acemarke wrote: post #38
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?

As a bystander but friend of Shawn's, I can say that over the last few years he has demonstrated an incredible ability to quickly learn and master concepts, then pass that information on to others. I've seen him go from someone who didn't know anything about web dev at all, to a master of what's going on with React and its ecosystem. He's added expertise on Svelte and other tools as well. Shawn excels at a lot of "bi…

Hey, your own "tutorials" and "educational blog" look like total garbage. Maybe that's why you support each other.

This guy is possibly qualified to write a bad "book" about marketing, why is this shit on HN

Re: Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

#78

Post by swyx »

claudiulodro wrote: post #64
swyx wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

thank you for having an open mind, and also being willing to say what others are already thinking, but doing it nicely :)

agreed on the maintaining legacy bit. I spent some time on that in the sr dev chapter, but it was mostly collating what others have said. i think its impt that jr devs be aware this is a big part of the job, and also that "technical debt" often pays incredibly well because it is so challenging and the skillset to handle it well is so rare.

Re: Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

#79

Post by foota »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #60
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…

To be honest, the technical problems are the easy thing in most companies since they just need a simple CRUD app and anything you do will be magic to most people regardless. The politics are the difficult part of most work in this industry. Everyone has an agenda (which is not a bad thing) and serving multiple agendas will make your technical problems even worse.

Just because something (a simple CRUD app) seems simple to you, doesn't mean it'll be easy for everyone, in particular if you don't know what the quick ways are of doing it.

Re: Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

#80

Post by geochronology »

I'm curious enough about some of the content in this book that I'd consider reading it if the price was cheaper (maybe $10-15 or so).

Unfortunately this book seems too all-over-the-map to be particularly useful to where I'm at in my own coding career: about 18 months into it.

There are two pieces to this book if I read the marketing pages correctly: * First, the overplayed trope of "How to get hired as a Pr0gRaMmar!!!1" -- a cottage industry nearly as large as the field of engineering itself * Second, the less-played trope of, "Here are some actionable ways to develop your career path under the severe time constraints that an engineering career will present you with"

If this text were more exclusively drilled down into the second topic rather than the first, I'd probably make the purchase.

However, I don't feel like spending time reading through a lot of things that I either already know, or that don't apply to me.

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