
Building an empire with a single brick: Meet Patrick McKenzie - rmason
http://blog.bench.co/blog/patrick-mckenzie
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WestCoastJustin
Previous post @
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9381187](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9381187)

Worth a read. Patrick is an awesome dude. He helped guide me through some
tough pricing decisions. Highly suggest checking out his blog and also his
comments on this site. Solid Gold.

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vinceguidry
> Patrick is unabashed about how much learning on the job he’s done over the
> course of his career.

My feeling is that as soon as you have your first tech job, never learn
anything again on your own dime. If it's not a labor of love, it's not labor
worth paying for yourself. If a company is not willing to let you learn a
technology on the job, that company is not worth working for. I landed a .NET
job once with no prior .NET or even statically-typed, compiled language
experience. (don't call them 'object oriented', my new filter is calling C++ /
Java / C# "object-oriented languages". If you do this in a Ruby job listing, I
will mock you mercilessly before adding you to my blacklist of companies I
will never work for) My resume was mostly Linux sysadmin and contract web dev.

After that gig, I interviewed at a media company that wanted experience in a
CMS that I had just finished building out at that C# job, but turned me down
because I didn't also have experience in their similarly-obscure e-commerce
solution. Completely satisfied with how that turned out.

