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Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

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Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#101

Post by AlexC04 »

watermelon0 wrote: post #93
AlexC04 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a funny coincidence is that I've been thinking about almost exactly this for a little while. Just in the last two weeks I decided to create a podcast where I interview the exact types of developers who optimize SQL inside business apps. In fact, literally just last night I recorded and uploaded (to YouTube and the various podcast platforms) episode zero. Not an actual interview yet, but a statement of purpose…

Sounds interesting. However, I already found two other podcasts with the same name. I have searched on Spotify and Castbox, but didn't find yours there.

Thanks! I've been able to find it on a few platforms so far, but I'm distributing via anchor.fm

https://anchor.fm/ship-it

I'll have to find a way to differentiate my ship-it from others for people searching.

I'll probably have to rename it, but in the short term I'm going to let it ride.

Better to focus on quality interviews for now. (I think)

Edit: I just looked over the emails that anchor sent me and some of them say it could take as much as a week for the first listing to appear.

It's probably not showing up because it was like 1am last night when I finally hit the publish button on a non-test episode for the first time.

I'll keep an eye on this though. Thanks.

It's the exact type of hiccup that had me not wanting to self-promote before I had 10 episodes online.

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#102

Post by Klinky »

Swizec wrote: post #64
piokoch wrote: post #60

"Don't try to make a career out of optimizing the SQL queries to display a preference page on a line of business app at a company that no one has ever heard of. That is not the straightforward path to having other people learn you are capable of doing meaningful work." This is so sad. Optimizing that SQL might require being really clever and can bring enormous value for the company that maybe nobody heard about but m…

I think you misunderstand the thrust of that argument. It’s not the nameless company that’s the problem, it’s the business result of your work. What looks better on a resume? 1. I optimized SQL queries for Nameless Corp to improve admin interface load times by 20% 2. I optimized SQL queries for Nameless Corp to increase profits 20% If possible, always work on some version of option 2.

How do you even know the actual impact you had on revenue/profits? Engineering is often many layers removed from customer interactions, sales and accounting. Some companies have complex and opaque revenue channels. Frankly I take any claims of direct revenue/profit growth/generation with a grain of salt. Typically at best, you're wildly guessing, at worst, you're outright lying.

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#103

Post by mockingbirdy »

stanmancan wrote: post #95
punnerud wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you “improve admin interface load times by 20%” do the calculation on what that is in saved time and possible money over 5 years. Then you have both. You should of course have someone in management agree to your numbers and approve that you can use it on your CV.

Unfortunately saving time/money is not as sexy as increasing revenue. I learned this once by creating a tool at a telecommunications company I was working at. It made it significantly faster for Technical Support to initiate a Remote Desktop session with a customer. We ran reports on how many RDP sessions we started per month; and recorded how much time the tool saved. At the time it was estimated to save about $2.1M…

This is the kind of inefficiency that startups can use to get ahead of established competitors. So don't be sad, this is just a reminder to be an entrepreneur.

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#104

Post by ImaCake »

jefftk wrote: post #76

"This could mean working on particular projects within the organization which like external visibility (e.g. Android) rather than projects which don't (e.g. AdWords plumbing -- presumably Google will pay you a lot of money to do that, but consider it compensation for not being able to talk about it)" Perhaps counterintuitively, as far as I know, people who work on Ads internals aren't paid any more than people who wo…

This maybe just an observation that life isn't fair. Some jobs both pay more, are more enjoyable, and look better on your resume. Some people are attractive and successful. It is definitely worth keeping this in mind when considering your career, a difficult job doesn't automatically accrue karma faster than an easy job.

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#105

Post by stanmancan »

kostarelo wrote: post #98
stanmancan wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately saving time/money is not as sexy as increasing revenue. I learned this once by creating a tool at a telecommunications company I was working at. It made it significantly faster for Technical Support to initiate a Remote Desktop session with a customer. We ran reports on how many RDP sessions we started per month; and recorded how much time the tool saved. At the time it was estimated to save about $2.1M…

> Nobody cares how much you saved in time because it doesn’t get reported anywhere. It shows up on no important metrics. Sales going up by $100K is sexy. Admins handling an extra ticket per day because the interface is quicker isn’t. I don’t get that. Solving an extra ticket per day should somehow correlate with either revenue increase(indirect) or cost saving(direct), right?

Revenue increase; unlikely. Cost savings? Yes. But does it?

Managers want big teams. It makes them look good. Having 15 direct reports looks better than having 10. That means the manager needs his people to be efficient enough to look good on paper, but inefficient enough that he gets to hire more people. Having a bigger budget and higher headcount makes him look good.

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#106

Post by stanmancan »

mockingbirdy wrote: post #103
stanmancan wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately saving time/money is not as sexy as increasing revenue. I learned this once by creating a tool at a telecommunications company I was working at. It made it significantly faster for Technical Support to initiate a Remote Desktop session with a customer. We ran reports on how many RDP sessions we started per month; and recorded how much time the tool saved. At the time it was estimated to save about $2.1M…

This is the kind of inefficiency that startups can use to get ahead of established competitors. So don't be sad, this is just a reminder to be an entrepreneur.

Absolutely!

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#107

Post by ddulaney »

theshrike79 wrote: post #99
AlexC04 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a funny coincidence is that I've been thinking about almost exactly this for a little while. Just in the last two weeks I decided to create a podcast where I interview the exact types of developers who optimize SQL inside business apps. In fact, literally just last night I recorded and uploaded (to YouTube and the various podcast platforms) episode zero. Not an actual interview yet, but a statement of purpose…

Please don't start another podcast. Or if you absolutely must, please provide a text version of the content. Podcasts aren't searchable, they aren't skimmable and their content isn't indexed in search engines. Text is.

On the other hand, podcasts can be listened to in the background, while text must be actively read. There are pros and cons to each format as a consumer, not to mention differences in production workflow.

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#108

Post by ImaCake »

bckr wrote: post #24
GavinMcG wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the book titled "The 48 Laws of Power."

I recommend this book. It is literally Woo ("winning over others") but in the best way. It's advice for the softest, least-scientific domain I can think of, namely navigating the social dynamics of life, including the poetics of other people's egos. Each "law" is illustrated vividly with examples from history and given caveats/inversions, so that it could be called "48 dynamics that you should think about if you want…

Frankly, this looks like the playbook of sociopaths. I would use this book to figure out what bad actors would use to manipulate me.

If you want a book that teaches you how to get what you want while also not being a shit person I would recommend "How to win friends and influence people". The thrust of that book is that people helping each other results in mutual benefit that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#109

Post by jspash »

theshrike79 wrote: post #99
AlexC04 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a funny coincidence is that I've been thinking about almost exactly this for a little while. Just in the last two weeks I decided to create a podcast where I interview the exact types of developers who optimize SQL inside business apps. In fact, literally just last night I recorded and uploaded (to YouTube and the various podcast platforms) episode zero. Not an actual interview yet, but a statement of purpose…

Please don't start another podcast. Or if you absolutely must, please provide a text version of the content. Podcasts aren't searchable, they aren't skimmable and their content isn't indexed in search engines. Text is.

Naively I would think that there must be a service out there that auto-generates transcriptions from podcasts. Youtube already do this for (some) videos. The output isn't perfect, but it gets about 99% of the words correct.

So my suggestion to OP wouldn't be "don't do the podcast". Instead I would say "do the podcast, but consider that it might not be searchable without a bit of extra effort".

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#110

Post by hibikir »

piokoch wrote: post #60

"Don't try to make a career out of optimizing the SQL queries to display a preference page on a line of business app at a company that no one has ever heard of. That is not the straightforward path to having other people learn you are capable of doing meaningful work." This is so sad. Optimizing that SQL might require being really clever and can bring enormous value for the company that maybe nobody heard about but m…

It's not that maintenance has no marketplace value, but that it's only really valuable when the system is on fire.

I've optimized that kind of SQL statement, and it paid really well, but only because it was at a point where it was causing a whole lot of pain, so the fix provided CEO-visible relief. What is not a great use of your time is to preemptively fix issues like this, unless it's somewhere so system critical that engineering effort is going to be rewarded regardless.

But even then, you might want to do something in a way that is easy to sell later in your career. You want to at least be able to say: Remember how sold his innovative system at , and HN wonder why this talk existed, as there's no way this solution could scale? Well, they were right, it didn't scale, and I was the one that replaced it with something good, piece by piece, without anything falling down.

And that's the reason you don't get a lot of high quality maintenance work happening at most places. The vast majority of systems in the world are just not worth the engineering effort to build very well. And even in companies that can afford to do this kind of work, you will see a lot of effort spent shuffling engineers across projects, as a team that has high visibility tasks in a quarter might not have any the next.

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