

If You Want a Job Tomorrow, Cultivate Your Career Today - citizenparker
http://blog.polyglotprogramming.com/2009/11/6/cultivateyourcareertoday

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mavelikara
The article seems to take the ageism in the industry for-granted. Excellent
article, otherwise.

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gaius
Ultimately hiring decisions are made in most organizations by people who got
out of tech and into management early in their careers and believe that that
is the "successful" career path. When they look at an older engineer, they see
someone "unsuccessful" (and either don't care about or more likely don't even
understand his or her technical accomplishments).

This isn't going to change any time soon and it's wise to prepare strategies
in advance.

~~~
mavelikara
You might be right, but I would like to see more discussion on the topic. Is
the ageism a result of actions by non-programmers, or are programmers
contributing to it too?

Few days ago a guy complained about having to write code during the job search
process. Most comments I read here on HN were not sympathetic to him. He was
advised not to send out as many resumes, show more passion etc etc. "Show some
code" is a totally different request than "Show me the code for this exact
problem I made up" - yet many programmers here were commenting as if they have
never had to do a job search.

My point is that before blaming others, it might be good for the community to
introspect and see if the cause is truly from outside.

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stuff4ben
I like what he says about learning a new language every year and I sincerely
_want_ to do that. However if you're in a Java shop and are learning
Ruby/Python on your own, how do you keep from forgetting it. If you don't use
it, you lose it right?

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omouse
The important thing is to learn the concepts and structures that programming
languages indirectly talk about.

If you understand the differences between the OO _concepts_ in Java, Ruby and
Python, then you'll find it easy enough to pick up the surface layer (the
syntax) of the languages.

~~~
gaius
This is true but a large part of "knowing" a language is knowing its standard
library, where to find the function you need, and which of several similar
functions is the exact one you want. The syntax you can learn in a day, but
the libraries need time.

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danut
The list of things to do seems shortsighted to me. I can't imagine guys like
Donald Knuth or Linus Torvalds caring much about agile methods and the new
language of every year. I think it's more like a list of things to do that
worked for him.

Other than that I agree with the main idea of the article...

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randallsquared
Guys like Knuth and Torvalds are not primarily concerned with gaining
employment, because their resumes are already pretty much at peak
impressiveness. There are not many people in their class. The alternative to
spending all your time on the project that you're famous for (if, for example,
you are _not_ famous...) is to spend time doing some of these things.

~~~
nostrademons
I've got a follow-on question related to this though:

If you _do_ have all the skills he listed, how do you make the leap into doing
real top-level creative work?

For example, one of the top links on Hacker News now is a profile of Brad
Fitzpatrick, and it's pretty much accepted that he's done some industry-
changing work (LiveJournal, memcached, Mogile, OpenID, Pubsubhubbub, etc.) But
if you were familiar with his work c. 2002, it wasn't all that impressive.
Yeah, he was a good programmer, but he just ran a website with some modest
success. Several of us have done the same.

I've heard the same applies to other leading programmer luminaries, eg. John
Carmack.

Somewhere along the line, some programmers start really distinguishing
themselves while others remain merely "good". And I don't think it has to do
with ploughing all your efforts into one project. People like Brad
Fitzpatrick, Jamie Zawinski, Paul Buchheit, or Rob Pike are known for
_multiple_ contributions. Is it just the cumulative effects of time, or is
there something specific they do with their time that propels them from good
to great?

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randallsquared
I don't know how to be successful on that level, but I've a hunch that paying
more than the slightest attention to things like "job", "resume", etc severely
lowers your chances. Also, one thing I noticed while reading Coders at Work
recently: while some people are brilliant, some seem like they're merely good,
and happened to make the right decisions. Those decisions always seemed to be
the risky ones, but we don't see what similar decisions they went the other
way on, nor the hordes of similar programmers who were cautious or unlucky.

And maybe there aren't such hordes. I dunno.

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motters
Good article, but also guard against excessive egotism. People who think
they're big shots because they started an open source project, have a blog
have some followers on Twitter are not always that great.

