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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)

#51

Post by Nextgrid »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #3

> [W]ork at higher profile companies/organizations -- AmaGooFaceSoft, startups or small companies with anomalously high profile (locally, nationally, whatever), or in positions where by your nature you're exposed to lots of people. This advice is generally already followed. It's far more competitive when applying for roles with high visibility or companies with high brand recognition.

> It's far more competitive when applying for roles with high visibility or companies with high brand recognition.

The work is also often terrible. The companies know they are desirable and know they can treat their people like shit and get away with it because they've got a queue of suckers happy to replace anyone who has had enough and quit.

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

#52

Post by jcrites »

blinkymach12 wrote: post #18

Hey Patrick! Thanks for the article. "Producing Artifacts" is definitely what we called that at Fog Creek, and I think our cousins at Stack may have used a different term but followed much the same spirit. I didn't realize until now that that was a term from our little software microcosm, I had assumed it was one of the terms that was known broadly in the startupverse. I definitely came to my opinions around it throu…

FWIW it's definitely a term I've heard in the same context in multiple FAANG companies. You want to be able to show people what you've done.

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

#53

Post by tedunangst »

davnicwil wrote: post #12

As is typical of patio11 this is all great stuff. One subtlety I'd venture to emphasise for people just getting started with building things and putting stuff out there, though, is that you should expect the impact of and return on any one of these things to be far from linear. That is, the 'stacking bricks' metaphor may not apply so much. Yes, you should produce stuff on a regular cadence, and everything you produce…

Nobody cares about a brick wall one brick high, but you're not going to make a wall 20 bricks high without a row of bricks on the bottom.

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

#54

Post by andrewem »

acapybara wrote: post #22
miguelmota wrote: post #15

I agree with the post for the most part. It's important to feel that your work is acknowledged to feel worthy. I disagree with this statement however: > I prefer being upfront with people rather than doing the "It is easier to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission" route a lot of folks suggest. Asking your employer if you can work on a side project is like asking them if you can play golf on the weekend. It's y…

> If you're not sure that your employer will screw you over then get something in writing. This might be a good indicator that you should leave your employer. If you don't trust that they won't screw you over... Granted, I know that's easier said than done. But we should all aim to put up with less of this kind of shit from employers.

I agree we should all aim to put up with less of this, but even with an employer you trust there’s no guarantee they won’t run into money trouble and sell to a larger company which takes a harsher view.

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

#55

Post by jodrellblank »

Waterluvian wrote: post #49

"The social expectation is that the company insulates the employee from all risk..." At a cost of 30-50 extra hours per week, what exactly does this mean and what does it get me that I don't already get at my North American job?

> "Japan is famous for its "lifetime employment" system, and the law here is very protective of employees. Many multinationals have tried to fire an unnecessary or problematic employee in Japan, only to see that employee sue for reinstatement and damages (and, in most cases, win)."

- one of the summaries from https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=japanese+companies+don%27t+...

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

#56

Post by Waterluvian »

jodrellblank wrote: post #55
Waterluvian wrote: post #49

"The social expectation is that the company insulates the employee from all risk..." At a cost of 30-50 extra hours per week, what exactly does this mean and what does it get me that I don't already get at my North American job?

> " Japan is famous for its "lifetime employment" system, and the law here is very protective of employees. Many multinationals have tried to fire an unnecessary or problematic employee in Japan, only to see that employee sue for reinstatement and damages (and, in most cases, win). " - one of the summaries from https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=japanese+companies+don%27t+...

Thanks. Was not aware of that side to Japanese employment.

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

#57

Post by drorco »

currymj wrote: post #50
gwgundersen wrote: post #4

I like this framing. In graduate school, I worked for 2+ years before my first paper was published. In that time, I passed my PhD qualifying exam, took classes, wrote code, read papers, learned math, and so forth. Yet when I applied for internships, I received no interest from employers. I suspect this was because I had no concrete signal that I knew anything in my field. While working on my second paper, I started b…

your blog is very high quality and i've enjoyed it in the past (Metropolis-Hastings post especially). however there's a problem if everybody is going to do this, if it becomes standard that you want to have a blog in order to promote yourself during a job hunt. i think this is why search results are cluttered with a proliferation of largely useless "awesome X" GitHub repositories, repetitive bad Medium articles on ba…

Then Google will need to build a better search engine, otherwise people will just move to a search engine that can get them the better results.

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

#58

Post by endymi0n »

sjg007 wrote: post #26
dzolob wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened to me when I left academia. No “real credentials”. Math expert with strong computer background (phd, published papers, years of experience in research/teaching) didn’t said more than “one year data science ‘masters’ abroad”. It took me quite some time to translate my expertise into marketable skills. Before that, I got passed on even for entry level positions.

While a PhD can do the work, you really want the PhD to direct the work and explore new related things. A lot of this will depend on where you apply. That being said the market for data scientists has exploded in the past 2 years. 3-5 years ago things were different. Part of this is due to maturation of the tooling and the development of data platforms with organizations building out their data pipelines etc...

Thing is, while PhDs are usually by far the biggest domain experts you'll get, the absolute majority of them comes absolutely ill-equipped to lead anything, as university rarely teaches any skills in project, people or resource management skills, business sense, opportunity cost and presentation.

I've had disastrous outcomes going by credentials for leadership positions and these days only hire for demonstrated results on a real-world project.

Just my personal anecdotal evidence points me towards stellar academic success having a slight negative correlation with on-the-job performance. People who prefer building things with impact over citation rubber points usually don't survive in academia long enough for enduring a PhD.

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

#59

Post by loosetypes »

_huayra_ wrote: post #40
nnmg wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree and had a very similar experience in graduate school. Writing about my experiences and things I had learned (technical and project management) had a huge impact on my ability to demonstrate my knowledge and is without a doubt why I quickly received two job offers before defending my phd (biology/neuroscience). I think papers are a really poor way to demonstrate the huge amounts of work you've done unl…

This is one thing I messed up during my grad school studies. Now that I have a "real job", getting the ball rolling on blogging about what I'm looking into / learning about is harder (although that is still a convenient excuse). Thank goodness I have been meticulously keeping track of what I've learned in Org mode for years. I've just gotta dredge that old database for some blog posts (starting with why folks who are…

I’d be interested in hearing those considerations.

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

#60

Post by piokoch »

"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 might be providing some not so sexy but useful service for half of the country.

I've never heard about company that is building software that runs nearby power plant, but certainly this company is much more useful and have more positive feedback for the society than something "sexy" like Facebook.

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