
Don't End The Week With Nothing - austengary
https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/do-not-end-the-week-with-nothing
======
thu
The disparity between the U.S. and Belgium is huge:

I have a nice GitHub public profile. I am a capable and experienced Python and
Haskell developer. I am building Reesd
([https://reesd.com](https://reesd.com)), a redundant storage service made of:

    
    
        - Several Docker containers, linked through Open vSwitch,
        - Web frontend,
        - SCP reimplementation with account permissions
        and bucket plan limits, and on-the-fly SHA1 check,
        - Redundant backend store,
        - Background jobs to check files SHA1 to detect early corruption,
        - Payment done through Stripe (almost done),
        - HAProxy,
        - Email through mandrill,
        - I'm working on adding PostgreSQL synchronous replication.
    

I think I have largely proved myself to possible employers. Still it is
excessively difficult to find a job without moving abroad: the belgian market
for non-Java/.Net/C# developers is small. Search for a Python developer
position, you'll find 1 or 2 public postings. And they will offer you a
ridiculously small salary since the market is on their side.

When I see the perks you are offered in the SV this is crazy. And then you
have posts like these to move you forward. A chance HN is accessible abroad :)

B.t.w. it's maybe the third time that I post Reesd as part of a comment on HN.
I think it made sense to include the link in my comment; but still, is it ok
to do so regularly even if the subject makes sense ?

Edit: hey, thanks for the replies!

~~~
joshdotsmith
This is Hacker News. If you can't post a relevant link in a comment to
something you built yourself, then I just don't know anymore.

~~~
BlackDeath3
For what it's worth, I agree. If you have something cool to share, then by all
means, do!

------
luu
For a decade, I've gone after the most interesting thing I could find without
regard for visibility. My current job is the most interesting thing I've done
so far, but it's likely that my employer won't disclose my current project
until after another company publicly discloses they're doing the same thing.
Looking at how that's worked for other systems/infrastructure projects around
here, I doubt I'll be able to talk about my job for N years, where N is a
significant fraction of a decade.

Now that I'm a year out from my previous job, I can talk a bit about what I
did back in the 2010 timeframe. By the time I'm able to talk about what I did
for them in 2012, it will be ancient history.

And yet, my career has been full of interesting work and I regularly get
inquiries for neat sound jobs based on (as far as I can tell) nothing more
than my having a pulse. It's true that, on occasion, someone who's familiar
with my work contacts me. But much more often, it's someone who has no idea
what I've done who's desperate to hire because, nowadays, everyone is
desperate to hire.

I expect that, one day, the job market will cool down and I'll have a bit of
trouble finding something I really enjoy. But, from where I am now, the
tradeoff seems worth it, even if that day is tomorrow.

~~~
vonmoltke
Some of the most interesting things I have ever worked on I will probably
never be able to talk about. I worked on airborne surveillance radar signal
processing algorithms (MTI and SAR), and that is about as far as I can go.
Really sucks sometimes, too, because I hear about many similar "new" problems
on here that we were dealing with years ago.

While I was in that black hole[1], though, I got bupkis in the way of
inquiries if I didn't publish my resume on Monster or Dice. Even then I rarely
got anything but clueless, spammy recruiters. It took me almost two years of
active searching to get out of there. Being in that black hole in the first
place was a serious impediment to getting out of it.

[1] I am now openly in the NLP world.

~~~
twobits
" Really sucks sometimes, too, because I hear about many similar "new"
problems on here that we were dealing with years ago."

Humanity is so pathetically wasteful :-/

------
swanson
I'm paraphrasing Merlin Mann, but another benefit of this approach in a day-
job environment is that you demonstrate you are capable and deserving of doing
cool work.

When a shiny Rails project is coming down the pipeline, is it more likely to
be staffed by someone who hasn't done Ruby before or the engineer who's got a
personal Rails project on her GitHub and blog posts about lessons learned?

Who is top of mind when a client comes in and needs a mobile app built? The
person who gave a lunch-and-learn talk about iOS last week.

Want to take a week to explore a new framework instead of getting stuck on
maintenance work between billable projects? Well, if you have a track record
of producing artifacts of value it is a much easier sell to $MANAGER.

------
dkrich
I would add: work on high-profile (read, important to senior stakeholders)
projects within your current company. When a person above you's livelihood is
reliant on how you perform, doing well will get you promoted at light-speed
compared to people who work on stuff important to a small, junior group of
people. Seriously, if you have a doubt about whether the project is important,
go up at least two levels in your company and figure out where his/her
interests lie and start aligning your efforts with those interests.

~~~
rprospero
On an intellectual level, I understand the importance on working on the high
profile projects, but I'm not sure how to do it without feeling, well
sociopathic.

As an example, a friend of mine recently lost his job. His co-workers had a
similar attitude and focused on the high profile work the the CEO cared about
(e.g. industry conferences, television ads). My friend focused on more junior
level tasks (e.g. tech support, maintaining the corporate website). He even
had some tasks with negative prestige (e.g. unclogging toilets).

When a change in the tax code altered the company's finances, my friend was
fired. Within a month, the company had lost half their clients as support
calls were going unanswered, the website was down, and clients who visited in
person encountered an office that smelled of feces. None of my friend's tasks
were high profile, but they were all critical to the health of the company.

I know that I'll be rewarded better if I do the high profile tasks instead of
the drudge work. However, the drudge work still has to be done. Should I
ignore the drudge work and let the organization fall apart around me or should
I convince some other person to perform the drudge work for which they won't
be rewarded?

~~~
nostrademons
The way I prefer to think of it is: it is not your job to protect people
(particularly senior management) from the consequences of their decisions.
Make your decisions in your own best interest; it is up to the organization to
make sure that your interest aligns with theirs.

Google used to have a severe problem where code refactoring & maintenance was
not rewarded in performance reviews while launches were highly regarded, which
led to the effect of everybody trying to launch things as fast as possible and
nobody cleaning up the messes left behind. Eventually launches started getting
slowed down, Larry started asking "Why can't we have nice things?", and
everybody responded "Because you've been paying us to rack up technical debt."
As a result, teams were formed with the express purpose of code health &
maintenance, those teams that were already working on those goals got more
visibility, and refactoring contributions started counting for something in
perf. Moreover, many ex-Googlers who were fed up with the situation went to
Facebook and, I've heard, instituted a culture there where grungy engineering
maintenance is valued by your peers.

None of this would've happened if people had just heroically fallen on their
own sword and burnt out doing work nobody cared about. Sometimes it takes
highly visible consequences before people with decision-making power realize
there's a problem and start correcting it. If those consequences never happen,
they'll keep believing it's not a problem and won't pay much attention to it.

~~~
patio11
_The way I prefer to think of it is: it is not your job to protect people
(particularly senior management) from the consequences of their decisions._

That's a really, really good line, and also a good guiding principle.

 _None of this would 've happened if people had just heroically fallen on
their own sword and burnt out doing work nobody cared about._

Slight disagree here: it was entirely possible that many people could have
sacrificed their health, happiness, and quite possibly lives to the altar of
Google's code quality... and changed absolutely nothing about Google's
trajectory because Google would neither have noticed their efforts nor, had it
noticed them, cared. That's not one of my periodic elbow swipes at Big Daddy
G, by the way, that's just Life At A Megacorp. It was substantially the same
way at my old day job -- I managed to convince myself that with just a few
more hours and a few more tech talks and a little more quiet politicking I was
going to get us on the Modern Web Applications (TM) bandwagon, and yet, seen
from the clarifying distance of a few years, I bet it is highly likely that
you'd have to be really adept with the subversion command line to find traces
of my lasting impact on that company as employee #4,256.

This is one reason I really prefer (personally) working for smaller companies.
I like knowing that the stuff I work on matters. (And I totally get that there
exist compensating differentials for working at Google, both for you
personally and the other Googlers. You've previously mentioned "It feels great
to have millions of people use something I made with my own hands", and I
agree, that does sound awesome, and it's a flavor of awesome which will likely
not be accessible to me for quite a while if ever due to the don't-work-
for-e.g.-Google decision.)

~~~
nostrademons
I think your "slight disagree" is exactly my final point: if you fall on your
own sword and protect people from the consequences of their decisions, nothing
will change. Perhaps I worded it awkwardly.

There's actually another major reason why I'm working for Google: I feel that
I learn more when I'm exposed to lots of other smart people who are all
working on cutting-edge stuff. There are skills I can learn and have learned
here - scalability, internationalization, accessibility, security, management,
maintaining good relationships with partners in the face competing goals and
stressful projects, etc. - that I simply could not learn if I were on my own
or in a small company. There are also skills you've learned that I'm somewhat
jealous of, like marketing, but I figure that I can pick many of them up on my
own time or soon after quitting. And the combination of those skills will
(hopefully) make me much more effective if I do decide to strike out on my
own.

I thought it was interesting that your article focused a lot on your
reputation within other people's minds, and less so on what's going on in
_your_ mind. Both of them are important, but I would rather learn how to do
good work first and then prove to other people that I'm doing good work than
prove to other people that I'm doing good work but not learn any more. I think
I came dangerously close to the latter back in 2008 when I was #2 on the HN
leaderboard, but fortunately realized there was a shitload of stuff I didn't
know. And actually, I'm hoping there's a time in my future where I get to
realize how little I know again.

------
cotsog
Reminds me of the "No more zero days" post on reddit:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/1q96b5/i_jus...](http://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/1q96b5/i_just_dont_care_about_myself/cdah4af)

------
nicholas73
Curious, how did you end up as a salaryman in Japan? Do they treat a drop-in
foreigner as potential lifers as they would a Japanese recruit straight out of
college?

~~~
patio11
Foreigners interact really quirkily with many Japanese societal norms. My
company proposed hiring me as a salaryman (正社員) at our interview. I was
flabbergasted, having assumed that they would naturally only consider me for
contract employee status (契約社員). You don't want to be a salaryman but you
_really_ don't want to be a contract employee.

My future boss made it clear (for the first of many times) that he intended on
dealing with me squarely, in a fashion which is _not universal_ among all
Japanese employers, and that I had skills and educational attainment closest
to his salarymen and thus I should be a salaryman. He asked if I understood
what he was asking for me. I said that I did, that I was honored, and that
owing to my age and situation I didn't think I could promise him that I would
reside in Japan continuously until my retirement. He said that he understood I
had particular circumstances and would accept the possibility of me leaving at
some indefinite point in the future as long as it was, say, 4 years off,
seeing as he was sticking his neck out for me. I told him that 4 years was a
long time for an unmarried 25 year old and asked if 3 was acceptable. We shook
on it, so to speak.

To my bosses' enduring credit, they were _scrupulously_ fair in dealing with
me as a Japanese salaryman, despite that being almost shockingly abnormal at
many Japanese firms, and they made it _quite_ clear that everyone else was to
deal with me in the same fashion or they'd find out what a Japanese
multinational will do on behalf of a wronged employee.

[Edit to add: If people detect notes of conflicting opinions from me regarding
salarymanhood, it's largely because that _one specific_ bit of Japanese
corporate culture -- loyalty -- really resonated with me.

Feudalism is a pretty effed up system, too, but aside from all the Game of
Thrones Except In Real Life bits it had its own peculiar beauty to it. I sort
of feel like that about salarymandom.]

How I got hired there is a long story. I think I've told it on HN and
elsewhere before.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Thanks for this post. I'm always fascinated by culture/work intersection
points.

------
ogreyonder
In regard to working on side projects:

> Just ask. The worst they can say is "No."

And that's where I have to ask: what do you do when they say no? I followed
this advice a year back or so and it essentially put the brakes on any serious
side-projects. I work for a big company that you've absolutely heard of.

~~~
boyter
You do it anyway. So long as its outside normal working hours and whoever you
are working for's market it will be fine.

Otherwise big companies could claim they own the the capitol improvements to
your property which you do on your own time.

Generally don't be a dick and work on your stuff while at work and you will be
fine.

~~~
nostrademons
In a "big company you've absolutely heard of" it can be very hard to claim
that you are outside of your employer's market. Several such big companies
define their market as "everything tech-related".

(Whether this would stand up in court is dubious, but do you also want to go
up against a billion-dollar company's crack legal team in court?)

Also, I've heard the main issue isn't actually getting sued, it's that VCs or
investors won't even touch you if there's the slightest hint that you might
not own your code. If your side-project takes off it's nice to be able to
enlist other peoples' help instead of miring yourself in legalities.

~~~
boyter
Unless you are shooting to make 100 million a year, any company I have heard
of (thinking Google, Microsoft, Apple etc..) will not consider that a big
enough market and you should be fine.

Agree with the VC thing, but assuming you are doing it outside of work it
shouldn't be a huge problem, but check with a lawyer.

------
seancoleman
Similarly, within a company you should aim to work as close to the product &
customer as possible in a revenue-generating role instead of support roles
classified as overhead including LOB applications, internal tools, etc.

~~~
dba7dba
Earlier in my career, I was warned IT was hated by management because it's
seen as a black hole of budget. My advise is stay away from IT as a career. Go
with a career where you can create something that's marketable.

~~~
matwood
Management doesn't hate IT, they hate cost centers. Like patio11 says above do
not be a programmer, but be someone who generates revenue (or cuts cost) using
software. Align your interests with managements interests of cost saving and
revenue generation and management will love you.

It is not always easy though. A lot of management simply does not understand
what is possible with IT. That is where the communication angle comes in (and
business savvy). It is ITs job to not just do the work, but to help the
business understand what is possible with great IT work. Having a great IT
department working with business can be a huge multiplier and competitive
advantage when done properly.

~~~
dba7dba
As an IT worker (network admin, helpdesk, server admin), you can only cut cost
so much. Often you need periodic infusions of capital to function.

But for a programmer, every line of code you write is used to bring in
revenue.

That's how management (edit: mainly in tech startups) sees it.

~~~
dba7dba
patio11, Haha. Sorry but most of my career has been in dotcoms and startups.
Never in a traditional corporation. So my view may be a bit biased but they
pretty much valued programmers as kings (of course better ones are treated
better), much as hospitals treat doctors as kings.

~~~
__--__
... no. they make programmers feel like kings so they don't mind giving up
their nights and weekends working for free.

~~~
dba7dba
Did you know IT guys work nights/weekends? You can't bring down an email
server to patch it during a regular business hour.

------
mooreds
Hmmm... I wonder if everyone followed this advice, would it have the side
effect of decreasing pay for the high profile jobs (like API evangelist,
someone working on Android, etc) relative to the less public jobs (Build Guy,
adwords engineer)?

I'm guessing so. That'd be an interesting outcome.

~~~
beat
The "build guy" thing stung for me, as it's been much of my career. Shit rolls
downhill, man. It's a job that only gets recognized when it goes wrong.

~~~
mooreds
I've never been the "build guy" full time, but I have been the developer who
enjoyed/took care of the process/version control/scripting. It is worth saying
that there is a great series of best practices, etc, that are worth
documenting (and publicizing) around builds. (Even if it is hard to justify
investment in improving builds sometimes.)

~~~
beat
I've certainly enjoyed the technical challenge of bringing in best practices
and better tools, and I've really enjoyed playing the emissary between dev and
ops (a co-worker once called me a "one man DevOps team"). But the fact that
there's no visibility until things go wrong - there's a real problem with the
responsibility/authority ratio in that role.

------
Raj123123
Summary: work on things you can later show off

I think this is great oversimplification of the real world and see 2 problems:
1) There are many jobs that simply do not allow the inner secrets or secret
sauce to be made public. Even a supposedly open company such as Google does
not publish the exact formula for its biggest secret sauce (search ranking).
Sure the PageRanking patent formula is public, but this only gets one so far -
the actual ranking is much more complex and involves many more factors -
otherwise SEO would have been automated long ago. 2) How long until companies
recognize that employees are leveraging publication of their work and thereby
work to stop it (e.g. enforce policies). Many corporations readily recognize
that a large problem is turnover and spend significant amounts to try to
prevent it and then hire new employees - what is to stop them from creating
and enforcing policies to prevent employees from all external publications?

~~~
jimbokun
That's a huge impetus for _increasing_ turnover. All your employees talented
enough to publish something worthwhile will leave as soon as they get another
decent offer somewhere allowing them a little more recognition.

~~~
Raj123123
strict policy of not publishing anything related to your employment.

Keep the employees busy filing useless internal TPS reports

~~~
infinite8s
You aren't going to keep any of your good employees that way.

------
jarofgreen
Interesting comments about GitHub. What do you think about using GitHub for
code hosting and issue tracking but having a separate website that you want to
be the main presence for a project? I've literally just done that while Open
Sourcing a successful project I've been working on for almost 2 years.

------
mathattack
Awesome post!

I like his comments about building human capital, reputational capital, and
social capital. This is forgotten by many folks. It's not just the cash.

I also like the importance of working on things you can show and share, and
that people can see.

------
badman_ting
I can't really deny that this is good advice, but boy I really would just like
to write code for a few hours a weekday and leave it at that. I have a good
job so if you "need proof" (besides talking to me) that I'm a damn good
developer, well I guess you won't be hiring me.

~~~
ben336
I don't think the argument is that you need to "have proof". Its that the work
you do during the weekday isn't amassing you long term value. If you lose your
job/want to do something else, you have minimal "credit" beyond the ability to
hold down a job to apply elsewhere, and any provable skills you've gained in
the process. Writing code outside work isn't the only way to gain "credit",
just one way of several that he mentions in the piece.

------
seestheday
Anyone have experience or suggestions on how to do this within analytics? I
currently do do web/social/paid media/crm analytics for a large company you
have definitely heard of. I'm not just thinking of my current situation
though, I'm interested in pursuing this long term so any and all suggestions
are welcome.

~~~
bigiain
At a previous job/business, we built a quite large revenue stream doing
analytics and A/B testing for clients by demonstrating the effectiveness on
charity jobs.

See if you can convince $large_company to let you do (and most importantly,
talk about) side projects for reputable charities (perhaps giving credit to
$large_company as well as taking it for yoursef) or for friends
businesses/startups.

The other thing I see working well for friends/colleagues is presenting at
conferences/meetups. We've got a "Web Analytics Wednesday" meetup here in
Sydney, and a pretty much continual flow of web design/development related
meetups/mini-confs/industry-specific groups. See if you can pitch "I want to
present some of what we at $large_company do to people in $industry at $event"
to your boss.

~~~
seestheday
Thanks, I've had success at web analytics Wednesdays. I don't have one in my
local city, but I have organized one and it had a great turnout. Speaking at
conferences and on panels has been good as well, but my company is on a
downturn right now, so travel & conferences are locked down for the time
being.

I REALLY like the idea of showcasing side projects. I do some web development
and hosting for several non profits associated with my extended family.
Historical Associations, political websites (ranging from the left to the
right), my wife's recipe blog, a christian campground, etc.

I'm going to start digging into the analytics for them and blogging about it.
It's definitely worth my time, and small amounts of cast for some SEM
campaigns to showcase those skills.

Thanks for triggering this thought process. Genuinely appreciated.

------
itengelhardt
He's so right about the whole "work on things you can show to the next
prospect" thing. I wish my 20-year-old self would have known that.

------
maerF0x0
On some level [http://geekli.st/](http://geekli.st/) is right on the money
according to this post.. Show off the things you did. Even if it's small
("Added replica set to mongodb cluster") .. Over time the cards add up to
expertise.

------
iterable
Investment banking is the same way. 100 hour+ weeks for weeks on end.

------
stefek99
»there's less of the "we own everything you think of at any point in your
employment" nonsense these days«

Wish me luck, I've just signed to such a contract :)

~~~
pjscott
Depending on where you live, that may not be enforceable. In California, for
example, stuff you make on your own time, without using your employers
resources (etc.), belongs to you, and your employer has no say in the matter.

(I am not a lawyer and don't have a citation for this, so take it with a grain
of salt.)

------
beat
I saw this when it hit my email earlier today. I was actually planning on
sending patio11 a thank you note for it later, just because it rings so true
for me.

------
huangc10
A bit off topic (or maybe not). How does one become a salaryman in Japan?
*edit or rather, how easy is it to get a software job in Japan?

------
lukeholder
Does this mean if I work from home I am less visible and should reconsider?

~~~
crpatino
It depends, but mostly yes.

As a remote worker, people won't come to like you. They won't necessarily
dislike you either, just not form bonds with you on the basis of spending 8+
hours together every day. You won't get a share of their "Dunbar budget", so
to speak.

If you are really, really good, there is no reason to think this will affect
you. You earn your place in terms of your contribution, which may be the raw
amount of work you perform, but you can use force multipliers to. By over-
communicating, and in general having the disposition to help out people.

On the other hand, if your work is average or below average, I believe it's
far easier to hide in plain sight at the office; blending with the crowd,
being seen at least putting the hours.

------
jammmuel
It's pretty simple. Do what you love doing. If you don't, move on. I love what
I do. It's not a about money. It's about doing good by doing what you love.

~~~
GregBuchholz
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7084381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7084381)

~~~
jammmuel
There is some truth in this, yet I'd describe myself as fortunate and
passionate, not elite.

------
kimonos
True! Because doing what you love to do and making others happy are ways of
living life to the fullest.

------
jhh
That wasn't a very good essay. Kind of sad that it gets voted so high.

First and foremost it's way way too long for little actual content.

