
Unsolicited Advice is a Valuable Clue - brm
http://powazek.com/posts/1778
======
swombat
_No one’s happiest at work. Ever._

A minor nit-pick perhaps, but I am happiest when I'm working. Fair enough, I
work for myself, from home, on my own business (and other endeavours), but I'm
happiest when I'm doing that. I can go on holiday, and enjoy those, but
nothing feels quite as good as a quality day of hard, productive work.

~~~
fraying
Heh. I almost qualified that to say "unless it's their company." But since the
article is for those interviewing, it's a given that it's not their company,
so that happiness won't be theirs.

------
albertcardona
In even shorter than the article: when interviewing for a job and you are
given advice for free, the advice describes how it is to work there.

~~~
inerte
Can we please stop with the one-liners article summaries? Pretty please?...
I've read the thing, summaries just waste screen space and my time...

What happened anyway in the last week that this is becoming so popular?

~~~
mechanical_fish
They waste very little screen space and time (by design). And they can _help_
those of us who always read comments first. Just because you don't like them
doesn't mean nobody likes them.

What _really_ wastes time is clicking through some link and reading five
paragraphs of something that turns out to either be linkbait, or something
that many of us have seen a dozen times before. Of course, many people think
that the solution to this problem should be "never submit something that's
similar to something that's been submitted before", but that turns out to be
wrong, because new people arrive all the time, and they _need_ an education in
the basics. And the basics keep getting updated with new examples and new
variants -- sometimes I really would rather read a restatement of something
Fred Brooks said in 1978 than the Fred Brooks itself. But sometimes I
wouldn't, because I'm too busy.

Perhaps the rise of these summaries demonstrates that submission titles aren't
being crafted well, or that the technique for linking to stories is missing a
"teaser" feature. Ever notice how many magazine stories have both a clever
title and a short, one-or-two sentence teaser that talks a bit about what the
story is actually about? (Nonfiction book titles utilize a variant of this
strategy: a clever first title and a descriptive subtitle, separated by a
colon, as in "Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the
Opening of the American West"). Many submissions have clever titles, but often
what we really want is the teasers.

~~~
ph0rque
hmmm... maybe along with the title field, there should be another summary
field (limited to, say, ~300 characters?) that people other than the author
are able to edit.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Yep. That's the ticket. When you see something happening over and over on a
website, sometimes it means that the users are struggling to invent a missing
feature.

Of course, sometimes that feature is one that _makes certain users give
certain other users money in exchange for counterfeit Viagra_. But not, I
think, in this case.

~~~
10ren
But the beauty of the minimal _Hacker News_ design is that users can create
their own idioms on top of it, that, in effect, become part of the design - a
domain specific design, or DSD, if you will. Crystallizing a common idiom into
an explicit _feature_. with explicit design, would enforce a common interface
upon all users, which despite its benefits would reduce the raw power and
flexibility of the minimal design - a step along the road to _Blubber News_.
;-)

But seriously, it's a good idea; but why not do it within the current design?
That way, you get voting on the summary too. Herring's point about RSS could
be accomplished by including the top comment in it...

~~~
derefr
Polls originally started this way, and _did_ crystallize, specifically, I
think, because they went against the whole "comment karma is a real, useful
measure of participation" idea. Likewise, just restating the article-but-
shorter shouldn't be rewarded--pretend we're all in a sixth-grade English
class: "Talk _about_ the assigned reading; don't just say what happens."

