
To All the Jobs I Had Before - ingve
https://elisabethirgens.github.io/notes/2020/09/to-all-jobs-i-had-before/
======
montenegrohugo
Took a read through her notes, I kind of like them. Short, concise, a bit all
over the place but in a way that feels 'authentic'. It also helps that I'm not
being sold anything - I feel like everything and everyone is doing that
nowadays, and it's exhausting.

> I learnt how constraints affect the system as a whole. If the elevator or
> any other part of the system was too slow, the entire production would grind
> to a halt. You truly grasp the concept of work flow when it is physical.
> Boxes clogging the conveyor belts, pallets queueing up with no floor space,
> lines of people literally just having to wait because their work stations
> are blocked from progress.

Really liked this paragraph, was very easily visualizable. Factory lines at a
standstill because some cog in the machine is broken - tonnes of smelly fish
sitting around, frustrated workers yelling about, clanging of machinery and
the waves of the sea in the background.

In software we work with things that are just so _abstract_, it's nice to just
be able to understand a system and it's flaws at a glance. It's nice to be
able to see/hear/smell/touch what is wrong, what is right - in software, the
most common way we get data is through text. Sometimes we even see a 2D image
that (usually badly) represents some complex concept.

But it's not the same. I wonder if there is a way to change this.

~~~
secondcoming
For a great visualisation of this kind of thing check out the game Factorio!

~~~
bregma
Better yet, a visual programming language based on Factorio.

------
robertakarobin
I lead-taught General Assembly's web development bootcamp for a year and a
half. My students included a retired Air Force colonel, an orthodox Jewish
grandma, and a guy who used to write FORTRAN in the 70s, in addition to lots
of people in their 20s and 30s.

We came to realize that one of the most important things our students needed
to learn is that their previous careers were an asset that gave them a
significant edge over their competition in the job marketplace. They weren't
jumping ship and starting their careers over; they were expressing their
skills in a different way.

Coding is just a part of being a programmer. Unless you're working for
yourself, by yourself, a bigger and more important part is being able to
communicate with others about what you're coding. As an employer, given the
choice between a competent developer who knows how to communicate an idea and
work with others, and a "rockstar"/"ninja"/"master hacker" developer who
doesn't, I'll take the former choice every time.

Whether you're switching to technology from being a waiter, a salesperson, a
graphic designer, or whatever, the experience you gained from your prior jobs
is hugely valuable.

------
quicklime
The variety of jobs that the author has had in her career is impressive.

I consider myself lucky in that I'm reasonably marketable on the job market -
I'm ok at interviewing and I've worked at a few FAANGs (including Amazon). But
I recently got turned down for a job because I "don't have enough AWS
experience".

It feels like the only way to change a career is 1) get a job doing _exactly_
what you were doing before (e.g. React dev), 2) _at that job_ , do something
tangential for a while (e.g. UX design) and then 3) with that experience, go
and find a new job in the new field.

How does someone go from working in elderly care, to a fish factory, to a
design agency, etc.?

~~~
C4stor
When you start to accept salaries that are a fraction of what a software
engineer makes, motivation and general skills become more relevant than
specialization.

Said differently, if I'm gonna pay you 300k per year, you'd better have the
exact skills I search for. For 30k per year, showing up every day ready to
lift heavy things for 8 hours is sometimes all you need (certainly not true
right now during the COVID crisis).

~~~
_jal
> you'd better have the exact skills I search for

How often does that work out for you? Because I've gotten lucky a couple of
times and found people who were really good matches, but I've never found an
exact match.

We look for people with a demonstrated ability to solve problems in the space
they'll be working, who can learn as they go, with the soft skills and
demeanor to mesh with the team.

We end up settling a lot.

~~~
C4stor
It worked in the sense that when I was part of recruiting software developers,
the resumes we received were all people having previously wrote code in their
life. A significant part of them had wrote code in a fashion similar to what
we're looking for (c# for a java codebase let's say as an example). A small
fraction had used some of the technologies we used already.

My brother in law has a painting shop. Right now he want to recruit a
sandblaster. He'll literally hire anyone with enough muscles to pick up the
tool and ready to show up everyday at 6am for 8 hours of sweating.

What you call "not an exact match" is already matching precise criteria in
fact. I bet you have interviews ! You don't need an interview to get a
sandblaster job. You just have to show up a morning at my brother in law
company and lift the sandblasting tool ^^

So yeah, SW are recruited - even if we don't see it that way - with pretty
stricts criteria. Would you hire someone that has never booted a computer in
his life ? Never wrote a line of code ? Never learnt an algorithm in any
fashion ? Settling for you maybe is sometimes hiring a java dev for a haskell
job. Somewhere else it's hiring a former butcher for a painting one (the guy
is pretty good apparently!).

~~~
ghaff
It's not just developer jobs.You go into higher level professional jobs and
you're usually looking for some fairly specific experience. (Arguably at the
highest levels you're looking more for people who can broadly make
organizational impact, but stick to individual contributors to keep things
simple.)

When I look around my broader group, I'm a bit of an outlier even in a lot of
engineers would say we all do "marketing." But there are relatively few other
jobs I could hit the ground running with at a senior level. What I do is very
different from demand generation, marketing campaigns, etc.

If someone is right out of school who cares. But you're not going to pay me
senior level compensation for a job I don't really know at a detailed level.

------
dvirsky
My short list from 15 years of non tech work:

* I grew a couple acres of Zucchini with my dad when I was in middle school, and learned about profit margins, middlemen ripping you off, cost of labor and the basics of business. We did it as a hobby, did almost all the work ourselves (besides paying some neighborhood kids to help us in picking), ended up almost breaking even (a ~$50 loss) after a few months. Never did it again :)

* Worked on an assembly line for Motorola after high-school, assembling taxi two way radios. Learned about how companies operate at scale and how you can optimize processes at every point (I found an optimization to some manual assembly process that reduced the probability of defects in the assembly and got recognized for it).

* Worked for a few years as a writer and editor in print media. I've learned so much about how the world operates and power dynamics, I can't begin to detail it. But a good lesson was that anyone is just a couple of phone calls away, and that you need to maintain a social graph. Also got an affinity for meeting deadlines I've still yet to completely shake off despite years in tech where no deadline is ever met. In print media a deadline is a deadline. I've also learned how to tell a story in a compelling way which is a skill that's still important.

* Worked in content in the early days of the web. Learned how powerful of a medium it was and realized it's going to take over the world, and that what I really love to do is coding (which I was doing as a hobby since childhood).

~~~
eindiran
Growing a few acres of something seems like a very cool project. Did you /
your dad already have the land before you decided to try it out? Do you think
you would have done it again if you had made money? Would you recommend it as
a project to someone else?

~~~
dvirsky
We moved to this sort of village where our house had a few fields, and I think
my dad entertained the idea of trying to do it seriously (he did have past
experience but was working in a different field and had an unrelated
university degree). In the end it was just a lot of hard work, some of it fun
(I got to drive a tractor at 14!), but most of it was tedious and not very
rewarding. I guess had we turned a little profit this would make us more
incentivised, but also about a year later we moved away to a city so it wasn't
practical anymore.

I'd recommend starting with a pretty small field and not going commercial on
the first try.

------
GCA10
We should start a thread with other lessons from supposedly dead-end jobs.
I'll offer the following from a couple teenage summers as a hardware-store
clerk at minimum wage:

\- Start out friendly when you're interacting with someone you've never met
before. It usually works out well.

\- Don't spew BS answers when you don't know something. Seriously. Just own up
to your knowledge gap and see if someone else can help.

~~~
Kluny
\- Working in a car lot: when you dent the fender of the $200,000 Mercedes, go
tell the boss instantly. That's the only way you're going to keep your job.

\- Working in a print shop: set up a system to check your work, double check,
and triple check it. You can fix mistakes in code, but it's a lot hard in
print.

\- Installing Windows 7 on new PCs for government employees: follow up as many
times as needed. Don't assume it's anyone else's job to help you do yours.
They have important work to do, and you need to work around them. Don't expect
people to be eager to turn over their computer to a co-op student, even if
they're getting a shiny new one.

~~~
klenwell
\- A summer cleaning bathrooms at Disneyland: eliminate smells at their
source. Applies to code, too.

\- College catering kitchen: don't mistake pickled ginger for sliced turkey,
even if you haven't eaten all day.

------
irjustin
> To this day, I don’t try to impress with my suggestions

This was me 10 years ago. I'd try to "impress" people with the final result by
not asking any questions and praying that they were just as excited as I was
about the magic I created in a vacuum.

It took me a long time to unlearn that. Fight through asking questions -
getting negative, sometimes awkward feedback.

Thankfully, I grew up - slightly.

~~~
mgkimsal
re: 'fighting' through questioning...

Just the other day, I had a PM say "why do you question/argue so much? Just do
what they say. If it's wrong, you can then say 'I told you so'".

I can not really square that circle. I spent many years earlier not
questioning things up front, just rushing ahead and doing stuff, then
inevitably it was 'wrong'. I've been doing this a long time now, and
questioning up front saves time. It does come across as 'arguing' sometimes, I
know - I've raised my voice more than once.

I wanted to turn the question around and ask "why do my
questions/input/suggestions _always_ get argued with and fought against? Can
you just run with my input for a week or two, and if I'm wrong, you can say 'I
told you so'?" I didn't throw that back, as I'm not sure it would have been
taken well.

I had replied "you can say I told you so" thing isn't just me saying "see, I
told you so", it ALSO means I'll be having to clean up the 'original' way of
doing something and rebuild it the 'right' way, which puts everything behind
schedule and wastes money and time.

~~~
SaltyBackendGuy
> I can not really square that circle.

I have similar experience. When I was in the military I was very "Sir, yes
sir". Nowadays, I need to understand what / why I am doing what I am doing.
It's worked well for me in hyper growth environments and not so well in
established companies where people don't question the status quo.

I could be wrong here, but generally I see two types of people. People who
care about what they're doing and people who don't (missionaries vs.
mercenaries).

The trick is to not come off combative or argumentative. Tricking people into
thinking something was their idea has worked well for my personal journey.

~~~
constantine42
100% "The trick is to not come off combative or argumentative". But I've never
had to worry about "Tricking people into thinking something was their idea".
It is always their idea, I just refine it.

I'm 15 years in and my PM puts me on special high profile cases, be it a new
project or a failing one. She will literally tell the customer "We've got
'insert name' on this. He will ask a lot of questions and it may take him some
time to complete, but rest assured that when he's done, it will be exactly
what you need."

No pressure, right? I need to communicate very clearly about everything. If I
feel there's a risk, I call it out EARLY. My PM wants to get out ahead of any
issues and have all the resources that I need ready to go when I need them.

The upside of all of this is I have a "get out of jail" card. Because my PM
and leadership know that it's actually done when I say it's done, they
encourage me to take my time and do it right. Overtime, what's that? They know
the mind fogs when someone works too much. I'll get scolded if I work too
much.

Even when only working 30 hours a week, I find myself quite spent. I have no
idea how people work 40-60 hours a week and still have the energy to go out
and do anything.

------
alexilliamson
> I learnt to prefer discovering the limits early, then proceeding to be
> creative within those. I don’t get thrilled about what we could potentially
> do with unlimited time and twice the number of people. I genuinely get most
> excited by what we can do here and now with the resources we have.

I'm curious what other people feel about this. It is also my tendency to be
creative "within the box", but I always feel a vague pressure to be more
enterprising and expand scope so that we can get more headcount.

~~~
geocrasher
The authors appreciation for working within limits speaks to me, and resonates
deeply within. This is how my own creativity works. For example when I'm
embarking on a project where I'm going to build something, I'm not interested
in what's possible if I have unlimited resources. I'm interested in what's
possible using the tools and materials on hand, with very little brought in
from the outside.

To me it's part of the "hacker" mindset- doing 90% as good with 10% the means.

------
leetrout
I really resonate with the bit on creative constraints. I, too, enjoy working
with some constraints compared to being faced with constant decisions to make
when options are endless.

~~~
arexxbifs
Mark Ferrari (graphics artist on Lucasfilm games such as Loom and Monkey
Island) said (roughly): "If someone gives you limitless resources and asks you
to create the Pietà, you will dabble in all fields and become expert in none.
If someone gives you a stick and two pieces of string and asks you to create
the Pietà, you will stretch that stick and those pieces of string as far as
you can."

~~~
Kye
I found this out with Minecraft and WorldEdit. I spent more time tinkering
than building without any resource constraints in creative mode and with a
tool to make huge changes.

Survival mode, even with monster spawns turned off, forces a constraint, and
all the cool stuff I've built happened there. I can't just lop off the top of
a mountain and lay out a perfect rectangle or square building. It has to grow
and evolve from the blocks I collect on the available landscapes.

------
vsskanth
>I learnt that organisations consist of people and decisions do not
materialize out of thin air. You can often impact more than you think, even if
you feel like you have no say at all. Companies can have the most rigid power
structures in place, and it is still possible to push, prod, nudge, plant
ideas.

How ?

~~~
groby_b
I mean, buy her a beer ;)

But also, through lots of coalition building. You find allies. You find people
up in the power structure who are willing to talk.

Core skill: Separating your upset from looking for a solution. Yes, you hate
that particular idea, it might be actively harmful, you're deeply upset - but
if you want to achieve change within the company structure, ranting and
railing won't get you there.

Core skill: Understanding the other side. Ask questions. Deeply understand why
things are the way they are, or have been decided this particular way. What
are the constraints, how is the business impacted?

And then you collect your allies. You formulate a plan that achieves a better
outcome, but still addresses what the concerns are. You start socializing that
plan with people in management you are closer to. If it has merit, they will
sooner or later introduce you to higher-ups _they_ trust. Rinse. Repeat.

It's a long process. Especially the first time. But once you've done it once,
you'll become better at it, and you already have a network of trust.

~~~
vsskanth
Thank you. Very insightful.

------
boltefnovor
>> Buy me a beer and I can tell you the story of when I intentionally got
myself fired to dispute illegal work contracts.

I question the wisdom of posting this publicly. Should she ever need a job,
fact is employers read this stuff but she’ll never find out that posts like
this influenced their decision. It may not be right, but it’s what happens.

~~~
baron_harkonnen
I have a hard enough time getting potential employers to read my resume let
alone look at my github work. In theory you may be correct, but my experience
has been the vast majority of employers don’t bother.

~~~
boltefnovor
I know for a fact they read your personal internet posts once they get close
to employing you.

And you’ll never know that they did.

~~~
secondcoming
How do they find out your online usernames aside from Facebook and LinkedIn?
I've never been asked to supply them as part of a job interview.

~~~
TeMPOraL
You most likely gave them your e-mail. Also often (in this industry, at least)
online username can be gleaned from Facebook or LinkedIn URLs.

Having that, it's trivial to discover your wider on-line presence if you have
one (and never bothered hiding your identity).

As for who would bother doing that? I guess it depends on company hiring
practices (particularly on the amount of interviews), but in every company
I've worked in so far, someone would bother doing a little research on a
prospective interviewee.

------
jonstaab
Great little takeaways. The early bits remind me of my own job history — I
also worked on a fish processing barge, using a forklift and being constantly
stymied by the elevator bottleneck. The next job I did, I also got myself
fired to protest what I discovered to be an illegal internship.

I think Elisa learned more from the experiences than I did though, she seems
like a very thoughtful person.

------
brailsafe
7 Years freelance, and 4 years at an agency. If you're here, I'm curious at
what point did you decide your career as a devloper started and why was it not
7 years ago?

------
sunstone
With every different job you do, you (should) learn something new and useful.

------
XargonEnder
I learned that outside the US and Canada they say learnt instead.

------
sebastianconcpt
_Fun times. Buy me a beer and I can tell you the story of when I intentionally
got myself fired to dispute illegal work contracts._

WTF? Evil.

