Discussed at the time:
Don't End The Week With Nothing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7179098 - Feb 2014 (101 comments)
Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
91–100 of 278 posts
Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The pithy way I tell people is that they should only do a PhD if they can't NOT do a PhD, i.e. they feel so compelled to work on a specific thing and have found an advisor who will advise them but ultimately let them do their own thing to a great degree. The only other viable option is to find a tenure-track junior professor who really has their stuff together (including their work ethic and emotional intelligence; often the latter can be lacking).
One also has to consider the time cost of doing a PhD, and whether spending the equivalent time working would have gotten them further not only in career, but also salary. Between a) people who go from undergrad to a job and don't really keep pushing themselves, b) people who go to grad school to hopefully skip to a more interesting job post-PhD, and c) people who go from undergrad to a job but really push hard to learn new skills (e.g. presenting at conferences, blogging about it, etc), option C is generally leaps and bounds ahead of the other two.
A PhD is worth considering if the thing you're interested in most is not really used widely in industry (perhaps some PL stuff?).
Also, prospective PhD students need to consider that there is a very asymmetric relationship between advisor / advisee compared to a normal job. If my job starts treating me like dirt, I can tell them to shove it and quit ASAP because I know that my skills can get me another job in short order. With a PhD, it is almost impossible to quit a PhD and then pick it up again if you and your advisor have some sort of falling out; every future PhD position will look at the prior "failure" with suspicion, losing the nuance of issues besides the actual work that triggered the separation.
Basically you need to really understand why you want a PhD (and whether you could do better towards your ultimate career goal without it), and if that's a "yes" you need to really make sure you can get along with your advisor for years. A strong advisor can "compensate" for a weak student (i.e. get them through the program), and a strong student can compensate for a weak advisor (e.g. students who basically do their own thing from the get go, and have high-ranking perpetually absentee advisors who do more research bureaucracy than research and advise by way of ominous single-word emails), but if both are weak it's a recipe for disaster, and only the student gets hurt.
Getting a visa into a country via graduate studies is definitely a good reason (especially in the US it seems), but often an MS is sufficient (except if one tries to get in on the green-card fast-track via the O1 visa, which requires an exceptional PhD track record).
Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
#93"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…
What's a funny coincidence is that I've been thinking about almost exactly this for a little while. Just in the last two weeks I decided to create a podcast where I interview the exact types of developers who optimize SQL inside business apps. In fact, literally just last night I recorded and uploaded (to YouTube and the various podcast platforms) episode zero. Not an actual interview yet, but a statement of purpose…
Sounds interesting. However, I already found two other podcasts with the same name.
I have searched on Spotify and Castbox, but didn't find yours there.
Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you “improve admin interface load times by 20%” do the calculation on what that is in saved time and possible money over 5 years. Then you have both. You should of course have someone in management agree to your numbers and approve that you can use it on your CV.
That’s why I said profits not revenue. Specifically to capture that 1 & 2 might be the same work :)
Just talking in terms of business impact puts you miles ahead of other candidates in many eng jobs. Especially for levels above junior. Very important to have engineers who (want to) understand why they do what they do.
Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you “improve admin interface load times by 20%” do the calculation on what that is in saved time and possible money over 5 years. Then you have both. You should of course have someone in management agree to your numbers and approve that you can use it on your CV.
Unfortunately saving time/money is not as sexy as increasing revenue.
I learned this once by creating a tool at a telecommunications company I was working at. It made it significantly faster for Technical Support to initiate a Remote Desktop session with a customer. We ran reports on how many RDP sessions we started per month; and recorded how much time the tool saved. At the time it was estimated to save about $2.1M in time savings every year, at a time when the Tech Support queues had long waits.
Couldn’t get any traction with management. Had some grassroots growth internally until we were asked to shut it down since it was an unofficial tool.
Meanwhile they would chase sales campaigns or marketing stunts that might result in $50-100k in new sign ups.
Nobody cares how much you saved in time because it doesn’t get reported anywhere. It shows up on no important metrics. Sales going up by $100K is sexy. Admins handling an extra ticket per day because the interface is quicker isn’t.
Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
#96I 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.
As far as I'm aware, working for prestigious companies will always be prestigious. I don't think that will ever go away, for any industry. I don't think it's necessary, though.
Unfortunately there is still pressure to work on open source projects and/or blog about programming-related things in one's free time. I think this article has a lot of bad opinions from someone who works way too much, and expects other people to work full work weeks (or 90+ like them) and still do personal projects on the side.
Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
#97"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.
a blog post about it might make a great complement
Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you “improve admin interface load times by 20%” do the calculation on what that is in saved time and possible money over 5 years. Then you have both. You should of course have someone in management agree to your numbers and approve that you can use it on your CV.
Unfortunately saving time/money is not as sexy as increasing revenue. I learned this once by creating a tool at a telecommunications company I was working at. It made it significantly faster for Technical Support to initiate a Remote Desktop session with a customer. We ran reports on how many RDP sessions we started per month; and recorded how much time the tool saved. At the time it was estimated to save about $2.1M…
> Nobody cares how much you saved in time because it doesn’t get reported anywhere. It shows up on no important metrics. Sales going up by $100K is sexy. Admins handling an extra ticket per day because the interface is quicker isn’t.
I don’t get that. Solving an extra ticket per day should somehow correlate with either revenue increase(indirect) or cost saving(direct), right?
Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
#99"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…
What's a funny coincidence is that I've been thinking about almost exactly this for a little while. Just in the last two weeks I decided to create a podcast where I interview the exact types of developers who optimize SQL inside business apps. In fact, literally just last night I recorded and uploaded (to YouTube and the various podcast platforms) episode zero. Not an actual interview yet, but a statement of purpose…
Please don't start another podcast. Or if you absolutely must, please provide a text version of the content.
Podcasts aren't searchable, they aren't skimmable and their content isn't indexed in search engines. Text is.
Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
#100I 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…
> "i think this is why search results are cluttered with a proliferation of largely useless "awesome X" GitHub repositories, repetitive bad Medium articles on basic ML topics, and so on."
This is such a sad way to view blogging and Github contributions...
There's nothing wrong with people writing bad articles. In fact everyone writes badly to begin with.
The same goes for Github contributions, everyone starts off with demo repos and broken projects.
The beauty of the internet is that it is infinite and you can build up your skills in blogging and coding over time.
It's the job of search engines to reveal quality results, not for people to only contribute quality results...