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…
another good way to become a little bit "internet famous" is to create and maintain a useful open-source project. IMHO, this is more future proof in the technology space since you can gradually evolve a project but a book can become obsolete if it focuses on a specific technology rather than fundamentals.
Writing a book: is it worth it?
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Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#82He 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…
On the flip side, be careful when claiming skills on your resume. You may just encounter an interviewer who wrote the book on that topic who decides to ask you a few questions about it...
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#83For the last two years, I was able to make ends meet writing books, even though the Czech market is rather small (10 million speakers).
The key was having my own e-shop and a set of readers who come to read the blog. Once people buy directly from you, the whole balance shifts. Normally, distributors and bookshops take a large cut before sharing a slice of profit with you. Avoid them and the whole thing turns profitable.
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Specialties are fractal. It’s much easier to be the expert on something that 1,000 people do than something 1,000,000 people do. However, by making expert knowledge accessible it’s likely that far more people discover they really should be doing whatever it is you’re an expert at.
Sure. But the skill remains in competition with all other skills --- some specialisation or specialisations must shrink for another to grow. With a century of universal compulsory education, US adult literacy rates have difficulty cracking 91%.[1] That's about 10 million people with no effective English literacy. (Some are literate in other languages.) Some other industrialised countries see similar results, though m…
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.
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#85He 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…
On the flip side, be careful when claiming skills on your resume. You may just encounter an interviewer who wrote the book on that topic who decides to ask you a few questions about it...
> You may just encounter an interviewer who wrote the book on that topic who decides to ask you a few questions about it...
Nothing wrong with that. I see it as a conversation starter.
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#86Shamelessly plagiarizing from the Is Y Combinator worth it? comments.
Gist: Writing a book is worth it.
But, it depends more on you than on the book.
Isn't that true for pretty much everything in life?
Yes. That doesn't change the truth of it.
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the flip side, be careful when claiming skills on your resume. You may just encounter an interviewer who wrote the book on that topic who decides to ask you a few questions about it...
> You may just encounter an interviewer who wrote the book on that topic who decides to ask you a few questions about it... Nothing wrong with that. I see it as a conversation starter.
I felt that way too, until the interviewee had no answers to some simple questions about the topic.
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#88Very 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 would do again one day
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sentiment (though I didn't think of it in quite this fashion) is why I set up a bi-weekly project management meeting at my last office, and tried to set up something similar for technical people. The PM meeting was not a status reporting meeting. It had no management beyond the PMs (that is, no supervisors proper). The entire purpose was to facilitate sharing information across project boundaries (technical, pro…
> That sentiment (though I didn't think of it in quite this fashion) is why I set up a bi-weekly project management meeting at my last office, and tried to set up something similar for technical people. At my last office, I set up something very similar for our org with similar success. Your PM procedural problem case is a perfect example down to the complaining about having to attend a meeting they weren't required…
I wanted the technical meeting because that was actually the weak spot for the org. Each team was isolated from each other to a greater than necessary degree. And no team was really "world class". But several had a phenomenal grasp of some aspect of development that the others lacked. I wanted to breakdown the, largely, artificial barrier between teams and better spread this knowledge and capability.
In the end, I quit before I could realize that, and what did happen (after I left) was more like you describe. Several teams basically did what you describe and set up their own internal learning and instruction approaches. But that doesn't help across the org, the bad teams are still bad. And the problem, mostly, wasn't the people but the time. They needed an opportunity to step back and think, and the firefighting they'd gotten stuck in was neverending. An hour every couple of weeks to hear and learn from others would've benefited them greatly.
Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?
#90He 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…
Just having a book that you've written on any topic listed somewhere on your resume is nearly always a positive. It is kind of like having a college degree in that it shows you can start something and finish it.
way more people finish college than publish a book though. It's a higher-level signal IMO, even a self-published book is a massive accomplishment that shows huge dedication.