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Writing a book: is it worth it?

martin.kleppmann.com

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Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#121

Post by frant-hartm »

st1x7 wrote: post #101
alextheparrot wrote: post #3

Martin deserves every penny of his hard-work on Designing Data Intensive Applications. Experienced engineers can easily use the book as a reference and you can give the book to smart junior engineers to give them a great foundation. Honestly, the best technical book I’ve ever owned.

Can someone expand on why the book is so good? I found it very unremarkable but it's recommended so much around here that I suspect that I've missed something important.

Just out of interest. What technical book do you find remarkable?

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#122

Post by Retric »

dredmorbius wrote: post #97
Retric wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shift in skills tends to be advantageous to the new experts not the old ones. The great books on using slide rules have already been written, but their unlikely to find a new following. Java applet‘s and a host of other tech is simply not coming back. Which is why experts often become advocates, they want their skills to remain relevant.

If one presumes a culture with an increasing overall complexity level, then the circumstance is not one of simply obsoleting technologies and skillsets being replaced, but of competition among multiple essential skillsets. Complexity expands to meet all constraint boundaries.

Society is still largely bound by the human intellect. So, I don’t think overall complexity is actually increasing significantly. It’s more a question of how obvious the complexity is.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#123

Post by brendangregg »

haswell wrote: post #96
auggierose wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds to me like a good way to weed out bad employers. If they think of a book as a negative, they probably have a few chips on their shoulders. Also, you sound overly modest to me.

Disclaimer: I haven't written a book. > Also, you sound overly modest to me. This was my reaction as well. Absolutely no offense to the parent comment, but this sounds like a combination of being overly modest + getting bitten by dumb behaviors by bad companies. There's also a big difference between: - Strut into the interview. Drop a copy of your book on the table. "I literally wrote the book - hire me" And - "Tell…

Right; the person saying "I literally wrote the book - hire me" is saying it matters most, and I think that approach is likely to backfire.

There are multiple problems with that attitude, including: 1) You probably aren't hired to write books, so what matters most is other things you'll be doing. 2) There are really good books and really bad books, so saying you wrote _a_ book doesn't carry the weight you may think. Was it good?

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#124

Post by manojlds »

yroc92 wrote: post #76
brendangregg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure if I showed up to a performance engineering job interview and said "I wrote the book on performance," as though that was what mattered most, I'd be shown the door. In my opinion it would be horrendously arrogant. In fact, I interviewed at Google while I was writing Systems Performance for Prentice Hall, and I never mentioned it in the interviews for that reason. In such interviews I'm focused on what…

A prototypical Hacker News reply.

It's not from a typical HN'er, but it's from someone who the typical HN'er hopes engages in a conversation.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#125

Post by swyx »

Murkin wrote: post #88

Very different experience for me. Wrote a book about Redux ( https://leanpub.com/redux-book ) brought about $15K for 4 months of work. (Granted, did no marketing at all) It always feels strange to say "I wrote a book" and it never seemed to really impress tech people or cause an inflow of consulting work. But it is very fun and you get to really get into the tech (other projects, sources, blogs, testing ideas). Prob…

15k is pretty good for no marketing!

i feel that self published book authors should all have a "marketing partner" since they all seem so shy about marketing

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#126

Post by selestify »

aliceryhl wrote: post #118

I have spent probably thousands of hours writing random responses helping people on forums, just because its the thing that I do to procrastinate. For example, this year I wrote more than 4000 posts on https://users.rust-lang.org/ and 19000 messages on the help channels in a few Discord servers. I'm probably the world expert at spotting the mistake in small snippets of Rust code at this point. I honestly wish I was a…

As someone just getting started on Rust, I’m grateful for people like you helping the newbies out with our little snippets of code. So thank you, even if we haven’t interacted yet :)

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#127

Post by snypox »

libraryatnight wrote: post #116
kevstev wrote: post #44

He kind of touches upon it, but there is a lot of value in being able to go into an interview and literally being able to say about a topic "I wrote the book on it." It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it. I used to have several guys on my team that had published books- and they were great, and were constantly getting contact…

We hired this guy who wrote a book on the thing the team he was hired for managed. He was a nightmare. He was just insufferable. People would ask questions and he would suggest they read his book. He would mention his book in every meeting. He would tell people they couldn't do things they'd already done and then back-peddle that it wasn't possible when he'd written his book. It was just a huge drag. He managed to al…

Okay, well I guess that’s a bad experience. I don’t think it invalidates the fact the usually book authors should be somewhat knowledgable - of course it doesn’t automatically mean that all of them is good to work with.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#128

Post by abhgh »

kevstev wrote: post #44

He kind of touches upon it, but there is a lot of value in being able to go into an interview and literally being able to say about a topic "I wrote the book on it." It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it. I used to have several guys on my team that had published books- and they were great, and were constantly getting contact…

I am sure this is mostly seen as a positive but this can also backfire in an interview, and later, at work (I see a sibling comment addresses this). If a person leads with saying he has written a book on a topic, and then is unable to provide adequate responses to basic questions, the panel opinion goes south very soon. I have seen this happen.

Think of it as when a candidate claims she knows a language X well, but then is unable to answer reasonable questions around X. Saying you have written a book is like this claim, except dialing up expectations to the max.

Not saying advertising a book is a bad idea, but be aware of the expectations you are setting up.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#129

Post by freedomben »

brendangregg wrote: post #71
kevstev wrote: post #44

He kind of touches upon it, but there is a lot of value in being able to go into an interview and literally being able to say about a topic "I wrote the book on it." It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it. I used to have several guys on my team that had published books- and they were great, and were constantly getting contact…

I'm pretty sure if I showed up to a performance engineering job interview and said "I wrote the book on performance," as though that was what mattered most, I'd be shown the door. In my opinion it would be horrendously arrogant. In fact, I interviewed at Google while I was writing Systems Performance for Prentice Hall, and I never mentioned it in the interviews for that reason. In such interviews I'm focused on what…

> Another interview I had years ago, after telling them about my first book, the interviewer said "so you know the theory, but can you put it in practice?" The assumption being "those that can do, those that can't write books." I was in a worse position for letting them know about it.

I am routinely amazed at the arrogance shown by interviewers. Even people that are usual humble and great to work with get in that position of authority and judgment and suddenly act different. It's a very disappointing aspect of human nature.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#130

Post by PragmaticPulp »

libraryatnight wrote: post #116
kevstev wrote: post #44

He kind of touches upon it, but there is a lot of value in being able to go into an interview and literally being able to say about a topic "I wrote the book on it." It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it. I used to have several guys on my team that had published books- and they were great, and were constantly getting contact…

We hired this guy who wrote a book on the thing the team he was hired for managed. He was a nightmare. He was just insufferable. People would ask questions and he would suggest they read his book. He would mention his book in every meeting. He would tell people they couldn't do things they'd already done and then back-peddle that it wasn't possible when he'd written his book. It was just a huge drag. He managed to al…

Similar experience here. We interviewed a guy who kept referring to his book on the subject, experience he gained during writing the book, and so on. We took the bait.

> He would tell people they couldn't do things they'd already done and then back-peddle that it wasn't possible when he'd written his book

This was the core problem: Modern technologies and frameworks move fast. His book was about the state of the art five years ago, but it was woefully out of date for what we were doing. That didn't stop him from trying to exert superiority over the more knowledgeable team members.

Some of us read his book. It wasn't even a great resource on the topic. Re-reading the Amazon reviews, I have to believe most of the positive reviews were bought or fabricated.

Since then, I'm cautious about hiring anyone who tries to portray themselves as an expert in the field. And if you're hiring an author, at least read part of their book during the interview phase.

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