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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)

#71

Post by the_only_law »

jimmaswell wrote: post #70
currymj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You also can’t become a civil engineer through a 6 month boot camp or from studying and building things on your own time.

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

#72

Post by beforeolives »

I was hoping that we were moving in the opposite direction where people aren't expected to show off side projects, ship something every week or work for a famous company in order to be successful. If this article is good advice, that makes me a bit sad about the state and direction of the industry.

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

#73

Post by Trasmatta »

nightski wrote: post #66
Trasmatta wrote: post #63

Earlier 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.

Those examples I was giving did provide lots of value, to the client. The section from the article was talking about optimizing for visibility. Deep technical problems with lots of value are not always visible, and I think it's fine to build a career around those types of things.

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

#74

Post by the_only_law »

beforeolives wrote: post #72

I was hoping that we were moving in the opposite direction where people aren't expected to show off side projects, ship something every week or work for a famous company in order to be successful. If this article is good advice, that makes me a bit sad about the state and direction of the industry.

I'd argue you don't, depending on what you consider "successful"

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

#75

Post by andrewzah »

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?

This is related to Japanese work culture, not extra work hours. It just happens that Japanese work culture also has much higher hours worked compared to the US or Europe. In my opinion it's absolutely insane.

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

#76

Post by jefftk »

"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 work in more visible/desirable parts of the business.

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

#77

Post by motles »

Another way to look at it is - you can work on those SQL queries and deep technical problems, but you can't stop short at checking in the code and not telling anyone, or only mentioning it to your colleagues for engineering cred. Show people the performance impact, how much better the user experience is now. Especially those who are likely to trumpet it to the rest of the company (managers, sales people, marketing people, executives).

I used to be an engineer and now I'm a product manager (since 1 year ago). It's so funny being on the otherside and seeing how engineers claim "well not everything is demo-able, it's hard to quantify customer value" and in reality, I'd say 80% of the stuff they work on could be explained in a way that still has a visible outcome to me and to customers. But they want to write user stories like "As a developer, I want to refactor the controller manager to use new rust traits from the bind system blah blee bloo". But then during demo time, they show that actually now, a new feature that wasn't working before now works.

Guys. Lead with what you are going to actually change in the product that you can show me, not the technical change you are making. I know it's hard to get out of the details/weeds - but if you can uplevel a bit to what is going to be different when I'm done with this - sell that!

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

#78

Post by jefftk »

jimmaswell wrote: post #70
currymj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As someone who has interviewed hundreds of entry-level developers, the range of skills/talent/ability is enormous.

I expect you would have a hard time getting top students to join your union.

(On the other hand, I don't care at all about side projects or seeing code on GitHub. I want to see how you solve a realistic problem that I have seen dozens of other people take a crack at for comparison.)

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

#79

Post by jefftk »

graeme wrote: post #65
currymj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bl…

I don't think this is entirely true. Getting in the habit of writing, even if a lot of it is things other people have said better, means that when you do have something novel to say you will be much more practiced.

My experience is that when people try to only write the good posts they don't end up publishing things, but if they write hundreds of posts dozens will be good.

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