141–150 of 274 posts
Okay, I guess as someone with hard-won expertise I'm duty-bound to take slight exception to this line: Put a backpack on and you can walk into any building at any university in the United States any time you want. First, the nitpicking: Technically you can't get into Harvard's excellent libraries without actually (a) being a Harvard student, or (b) working for Harvard. (And if you're a programmer, I'm not sure which…
I'm new to the startup game, and most of my hunches that Ive formed over the past 6+ months are proved true by this post. This is insanely good advice in this post, one of which involves modesty and confidence. I'm never going to be modest from here on out and will act like a pompous douche when deemed necessary. I see people act this way ALL the time, and I figured people could see right through their bullshit. Appa…
The question you have to ask yourself is "am I an exceptional software developer?"[1]. If you are at all unsure about that then the answer is probably no (the fact you are even on here at all worrying about these things indicates the answer is no).
Given that you are not exceptional, the first thing to do is stop listening to the career advice of exceptional people: they base their advice on their own personal experience[2]. They were able to start their own successful companies, or got well rewarded and promoted/hired for top jobs at the large companies, because they are exceptional. 'Restrained confidence' won't get you very far if you don't have extraordinary skills to make you stand out; you will be competing with many others of similar skill level who are quite happy to play the 'pompous douche' character, to lie about their experience and skills and so on. That problem you solved last week that saved the company X$? Your 'pompous douche' colleague has already taken credit for it. You will be annihilated by these competitors every time unless you play the game because bosses and recruiters won't even realise you exist.
Or you could go your own way, if you are happy struggling to pay the rent every month (please don't go this route if you have family/children).
The final 'nuclear' option is to quite the entire industry for one that is less psychopathic, but I've yet to identify such an industry; if you find it please let me know.
[1] as the article points out, if you are referring to yourself as 'programmer' or 'software developer' then you have already gone wrong
[2] this is also why you shouldn't listen to people like Steve Jobs when they give a graduation speech telling you to 'take big risks because it will all work out in the end'. No shit it all works out if you are Steve Jobs, but you aren't Steve Jobs. They don't get people who took huge risks and crashed and burned to give graduation talks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technically, the employee would not be fired right away. He or she, however, would be red flagged for close observation by being put on a Performance Plan. Basically, a PP is required to legally fire you. For example, if you had a bad record of coming in at a consistent time, they could put you on a PP. In this PP (which you would have to sign as a condition of further employment), there would be a contract for comin…
Basically, a PP is required to legally fire you. Where are you talking about? Laws vary, even among the states in the USA.
- Only be interested in increasing profit or reducing cost
- Don't care about what you do unless it conflicts with the above
- Treat people you meet as commodities
- Produce cruddy code, because "good enough" is all that matters
- Good engineering is not a "profit center"
- Don't bother keeping up with new programming languages or new techniques
>> ”What is your previous salary?” is employer-speak for “Please give me reasons to pay you less money.” Answer appropriately. What is the proper approach to answering this question?
If this is early stages of the hiring process, then just move the discussion on, "It's OK, but other things are more important to me than salary..." then ask a question about something you are interested in - vacation days, free lunches, opportunities for travel, whatever.
If you do disclose numbers at early stages, and your number is over budget, to the point where it will need the approval of senior management, then you'd better hope you're #1 on their candidate list by a good margin. No one wants to go to senior management, cap in hand, to ask for a budget extension for someone they've not yet worked with. It's too big a risk unless your reputation precedes you.
I'm new to the startup game, and most of my hunches that Ive formed over the past 6+ months are proved true by this post. This is insanely good advice in this post, one of which involves modesty and confidence. I'm never going to be modest from here on out and will act like a pompous douche when deemed necessary. I see people act this way ALL the time, and I figured people could see right through their bullshit. Appa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "One of the things that I see among hardworking smart people is they somehow tend to use 'difficult work' as a yardstick to measure 'good work'. Difficult work need not necessarily be good work. Unfortunately if you fall for this, you will end up wasting a lot of time, effort and energy over years and at the end wonder why you are not as rich as someone who does has half the difficult work as you do." A connection…
True, but when entering a new line of business, the ability to solve difficult problems is a competitive advantage that a small start-up can leverage against a large company. "Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way. At Viaweb one of our rules of thumb was run upstairs. Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, b…
The problem is few people take it as a gospel truth that if the problems you work on are difficult you've got win bigger than the guy working lesser difficult problems.
This goes even further with some people who consider the only way to win big is to work with difficult problems.
That is when people get it completely wrong.
Back in the day, John Carmack would micro-blog on the finger protocol ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol ). finger johnc@idsoftware.com got you Carmack's .plan file, a well-written and, for a time, frequently-updated journal of whatever programming challenges he happened to be facing at the time. finger @idsoftware.com got you the id corporate directory, a simple list of about 20 names and titles. The onl…
It does matter in so far products come and go and you don't want to accumulate knowledge on a product that's going to disappear from the market.
I worked with SGI IRIX from 1991-1996. The company has since gone bankrupt twice and IRIX has disappeared from the market. All the knowledge I accumulated on IRIX is worth nothing because it's no longer in demand. Practically noone still has IRIX machines in production.
In 1996, I switched to Linux. It had a vibrant community and you could feel it's growing rapidly. Turns out that knowledge is still valuable.
So it's really important for engineers to keep a close eye on the marketplace: If something's getting out of business or out of fashion, stop investing time in it. Instead, be on the lookout for stuff that's growing. In general, open source stuff has a longer lifetime because it can be forked if need be, wheras proprietary stuff is often problematic as companies change their mind on a whim. HP/WebOS is a recent example.