The OSS value is overstated. You can just copy someone else's and claim you did it.
Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
61–70 of 278 posts
Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
#62"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?
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan... has more background on this and other aspects of business life in Japan. A few excerpts:
> Need to file paperwork with City Hall? Someone from HR can do it for you. Salarymen don’t file tax returns — the National Tax Agency and HR work out 100% of the paperwork on their behalves. Insurance? Handled. Pension? You’re sorted. Immigration, for those very rare salarymen who are also foreigners? Your CEO has written a letter to the Minister of Justice for inclusion with the paperwork that HR has put together, and you won’t even have to carry it into the office.
> We’ve mentioned that your company considers it its responsibility to see you appropriately married. That is not the sole way in which the company may try to arrange companionship, but let’s table that issue for the moment. When you get married, your boss will give the longest speech at your wedding, praising your diligence on that last project and bright future with the firm. Perhaps eight or so coworkers will show up. They’ll also take up a collection for you if a parent should pass away, come visit if you’re hospitalized, and offer to intercede if you should have trouble with your wife or children. You are, after all, one of the family.
> The stability is superior to even tenured professors or civil servants in the United States, though. Eliminating your position will result in, at worst, your transfer into a division optimized to shame you into quitting. Incompetence at one’s job bordering on criminal typically results in one’s next promotion being to a division which can’t impact shipping schedules and has few sharp objects lying around.
Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
#63"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…
Some of the most satisfying work I've done has been optimizing very difficult SQL queries for clients nobody has heard of.
I guess I don't really care about optimizing my career in the way Patrick is suggesting.
Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
#64"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.
Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
#65I 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…
Not necessarily. OP wrote a blog about their research paper. That is by definition a nov or rare topic.
If people use any kind of horse sense when choosing blogging topics they will either choose something:
1. Unique, or
2. Where what they have to contribute beats what already exists
To be sure, anything poorly done is clutter. But this applies to the work product itself too. If someone writes garbage, superfluous blog posts, why would you expect good research from them?
Despite the massive amount of information that exists the world certainly does not have enough good, specific information yet.
Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
#66"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…
Some of the most satisfying work I've done has been optimizing very difficult SQL queries for clients nobody has heard of. I guess I don't really care about optimizing my career in the way Patrick is suggesting.
It's a false dichotomy. You can work on deep technical problems and provide lots of value.
Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of the most satisfying work I've done has been optimizing very difficult SQL queries for clients nobody has heard of. I guess I don't really care about optimizing my career in the way Patrick is suggesting.
It's a false dichotomy. You can work on deep technical problems and provide lots of value.
I think the question here is whether this value needs to be publicly visible.
Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
#68"If you cannot build things you can show at work, you should build things you can show outside of work."
BS. This line of thinking is why our industry is so toxic.
If you want to work on programming-related topics in your free time, great! If not, great! If an interviewer expected me to work on programming-related projects in my free time, I would immediately end that interview and probably never work at that company. We need to normalize people doing other things in their free time.
You also don't need to be productive each week(end) on top of work. There are times when we're more productive and times when we're less productive- and that's perfectly fine. Some people are more driven, which is fine. But there is more to life than work.
Japanese (and Korean) work culture is highly toxic even by American standards. It should not be the basis of anything for deciding how to live one's life. It's sad to see this rhetoric coming from someone who actually has a family.
Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
#69https://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo/ is a dead link
Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
#70I 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…
Civil engineers don't have to build bridges in their back yards or write blog posts about I beams; their education is presumed sufficient for an entry level job. Why can't tech work like this? Do students need to form some kind of union and agree not to talk about extracurricular programming to interviewers for their first job?