Rands recently wrote a post called “Your Culture is Rotting”. The short version is that he thinks if people are nervous about HR, it’s a sign of a culture problem. I partially agree - but I think being nervous about HR is perfectly normal and should be expected. It’s the degree of nervousness. Here...
This isn’t really my blog post – it’s Brian Brushwood’s. But as his blog slowly, visibly decays, it makes me want to keep a copy somewhere I’m sure I can find it. So, here it is:
Hey gang,
Lately a lot of young magicians have been asking me for advice, which has caused me to remember one of the most valuable correspondences of my life: one of the most mind-blowing letters I ever received, chock-full of insights that to this very day guide my career and philosophy in both creating and performing magic.
This is a pretty long post, but with Teller’s permission, I’d like to share with you the secrets he gave me 14 years ago to starting a successful career in magic.
Recently Chad Fowler wrote a great job description for a software engineer. I replied that a person like that is currently un-hireable in Silicon Valley.
Another fellow asked me, how would I change the list for technical instructors rather than straight-up engineers?
And if they offered something...
Recently, John Sonmez wrote about software development, and specifically claimed project managers don’t tend to do anything useful.
To be fair, sometimes he’s right. And you always have to watch out for “meta-work” – telling people what to do instead of doing things.
But I believe project managers...
Hey, tech companies. Hey, engineers working at tech companies.
There’s a great post by Chad Fowler going around with a job description for an engineer we’d all love to work with.
He says he can’t find any of those engineers to hire. Spoiler: neither can your company. I’m going to tell you why not, and what it would take to fix it.
An ambitious young programmer asked me recently, “how do I balance learning new specialties with producing good results?” It’s a great question, and a hard balancing act.
It took me too many years to learn this. I hope the rest of you learn it much faster than I did.
If you find a project that your management considers highly productive that uses a new-to-you technology, then you can learn and be productive. That’s a best-case scenario, but it happens semi-often.
Watch for it, just in case.
As you’d expect, those opportunities are often reserved for the programmers who play the politics game best — if you do well, many of those will mysteriously open up to you.
But let’s say you can’t get that, not yet.
Next best is to have a perceived-as-high-value activity that doesn’t take all of your time. This is much, much easier than it sounds. If you can do that, you can declare your own old-Google-style 20% time, especially if you don’t declare it out loud. The keys to being perceived as highly productive are, roughly:
1) Be sure to ask your managers, and occasionally their managers, what the company values. Patrick McKenzie’s article talks about doing this during your interview — and yes, do that, but don’t stop doing it once you work there.
Also, ask business-critical groups (e.g. Sales, Marketing) and politically powerful groups (e.g. Product, Finance) what they get from Engineering. You ask because they remember the stuff they value and forget the stuff they don’t. So their answers will not be a good match for what Engineering thinks that Engineering gives them. Their answer tells you what you want to be working on. Those are projects they consider valuable and noteworthy. If you do a good job on projects like that, they will remember you personally. At least, they will if you do steps 3 and 4 correctly.
There’s a lot to developing software on a team that universities don’t traditionally teach you. If you’re already strong at theory and skills and you know you also need lots of practice, what else should you be doing to prepare?
Developing on a team requires a lot of people skills. Junior software...
Hello, new software engineers! Welcome to the (slightly) dysfunctional BigCo family.
Some of you are coming from Ruby, some Java. A few of you still think we should rewrite everything in Node.js. The whole company, down to the last one-off script.
Good.
We’ve been doing things our way for a...
