Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

You are not just a good frontend engineer you are a good frontend engineer that is competing with other good frontend engineers. You lack professionalism (it sounds like) so you lose against those guys.

Good luck, at some point you either find the place that works for you or you learn expand your skills. Seems like you need to improve your tolerence for down time. It could be worse

If you've got someone who is largely autonomous and can wear multiple hats, steering them in a single direction may be more tricky than a specialist that doesn't seek work outside their remit.

* "Have Fun at Work" by William L. Livingston -- Livingston provide examples of how organizations are often incapable of hiring the people who might help them most.

* "The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet" by Mickey Z. -- This book is more in the category of seeing how bad so many creative people have it (until perhaps we get a basic income some day, Star Trek replicators for subsistence, a gift economy, and/or better government planning).

* "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us" by Dan Pink: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_Ab...

* "Punished by Rewards" by Alfie Kohn: http://www.alfiekohn.org/punished-rewards/

* "The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black (which reflects your point in another comment on "giving in to a job"): https://web.archive.org/web/20161031034600/http://whywork.or... "Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes."

Contrast with notions of "full employment". Or, sadly, also most of what Silicon Valley is up to these days...

About a decade ago, I sent that last link to an Apple recruiter who contacted me -- never heard back. :-) Not that I am a "Steve Jobs" or would want to be one, but, as with Livingston's point, would Apple hire a Steve Jobs as an employee? Almost certainly not. See: http://careerfuel.net/2013/06/if-apple-wouldnt-hire-steve-jo...

Though for balance, on the value of working together with others even in difficult circumstances, see "Buddhist Economics" by E.F. Schumacher: http://www.centerforneweconomics.org/buddhist-economics "The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."

I've collected some more ideas on making workplaces better here: https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations...

From what you describe, if you can't find a direct match to what you would like to do, you may want to consider being frugal and then earning what money you need to live in a low-stress part-time occupation with the rest of your time then available for what you really want to do. Have you ever considered, say, cleaning carpets to make ends meet? https://web.archive.org/web/20030807105050/http://www.unconv... "More than a few people agree the best career would be one which provides challenge, intellectual stimulation, and rewards for quality work. Many however, would be surprised to discover they can have all of those benefits and more in some of the unlikeliest of careers. Case in point: I'm a professional carpet cleaner. Some people think this is a second-rate career. I don't agree with them. Carpet cleaning gives me challenges, intellectual stimulation, and many other rewards. To prove this, permit me to walk you through one of my work days. ..."

If instead you focus on "selling [yourself] to contract shops", you may find this book Aaron Erickson useful: "The Nomadic Developer: Surviving and Thriving in the World of Technology Consulting".

Assuming your skillset is good, run, don't walk, away from those idiots.

If you have 3 primary skill sets you should have 3 focused resumes.

If you want a position that requires a generalist, the only/best fit would be founder. In almost all other circumstances, companies hire for a problem and not general optimizations. Even if they need a generalist.

I would posit that you have a marketing problem and not a skills mismatch problem. The noise to signal ratio on your resume may be making it seem to not match any position.

I suspect the answer is that our culture is confused, we want people who are smart and well rounded to also be useful. And the ugly side of it is, we want clear class divisions. One would never refer to law school or medical school as "vocational".

And which is why they should be moved out of the College of Engineering and placed into the college that has mathematics. Curiously enough, the only school he mentions where he can reliably know their grads have programming experience actually does place CS under mathematics.

I think being able to program basic tasks should be a requirement for all engineering programs. They all require a course in CS - mostly not because they want ME's to know CS, but they want them to be able to program basic things.

Yet, many/most engineering grads are really poor at it. I feel for any given engineering degree program, we should make all seniors who have declared they will graduate that semester to take a basic exam on very basic concepts that all grads of that program should know (strong emphasis on the word "basic"). If it's acceptable for them not to know basic material in an introductory class, then remove the class from the curriculum!

Example: I was in a top 5 school helping an grad student in CS do basic probability homework. We were disagreeing on the correct answer, so I suggested he write a simple program to simulate it and compare with his calculated answer.

This is the simplest program possible: A for loop, and a random number generator.

He had no idea how to do it.

I'm not picking on him because he's a CS student. I think it's a valid question for people in all engineering programs that involve introductory programming courses. What's the point of making such a course a mandatory requirement if they can literally do nothing based on that knowledge?

Similarly, an electrical engineer who does not know, say, Kirchoff's laws should not be allowed to graduate.

Yes, I do think universities are for education, but if they cannot apply what they learned, they are not educated.

It doesn't even have to be "real" research: I just expect more than classes which have you regurgitate what you learned to pass. And yet that's all you need to get a CS degree. It's a bit like learning to write by filling in blanks.

- Graduate of the North Avenue Trade School

(* Most times)

So yes, after that you can't start as a Senior Java Developer but I think you have a very good foundation to quickly pick up other Object Oriented languages.

So you do not have to teach the latest hyped language to give students the ability to programm. Instead you can use clean languages to teach CS and let your students excercise them to show you that they understood what you taught them.

I suspect there is just a cultural issue, where the CS faculty doesn't want to do that style of teaching. I had a professor hand out debugging assignments because that was part of the industry feedback they'd gotten, but only the one professor listened to the feedback.

Look, the reason that all the students go to university is to make money. Like 90%+ of undergrads go there to make money so whether it "technically" should be a monastery of cloistered academics pondering the universe (based on some high minded notion of what learning "ought" to be for) is besides the point. University costs a shit ton of money and people (the vast majority) pay it so they can have a decent life.

And the fact that universities are, on the whole, teaching skills that do not help their students accomplish this means either A) they are actively misleading their students B) university is a class indicator more than a place to learn (I can spend huge amounts of money so I'm probably not poor and black - which sucks for all sorts of reasons) or C) they don't understand that teaching academic CS, as opposed to programming, is not what industry demands (so they suck at what they're selling).

These are the people who, quite literally, are billing themselves as the "smartest guys in the room". If that's the case they can well stop sucking at their bloody job!

You were free to construct a degree out of proofs rather than source code if you wanted, but those of us who desired a more practical education could fill our days with systems programming.

"I consider computer science to be the art and science of exploiting automatic digital computers, and of creating the technology necessary to understand their use. It deals with such related problems as the design of better machines using known components, the design and implementation of adequate software systems for communication between man and machine, and the design and analysis of methods of representing information by abstract symbols and of processes for manipulating these symbols. Computer science must also concern itself with such theoretical subjects supporting this technology as information theory, the logic of the finitely constructable, numerical mathematical analysis, and the psychology of problem solving. Naturally, these theoretical subjects are shared by computer science with such disciplines as philosophy, mathematics, and psychology."

http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/65/26/CS-TR-65-...

It is important that historic knowledge is respected for the context it provides, while outside knowledge is equally respected for the deeper context and data behind it.

Unfortunately, this change often means generalists lose jobs in favor of specialists as a company grows if there isn't a good place for them, or if they don't rise to management. In fact, even early managers can be displaced by outside managers who come in with more management experience. And this is not inherently a bad thing for the company (while it may be for the employee getting bumped). The people that take a company from point A to point B are rarely the same people that take it from point B to point C.

Debt vs. equity is always a case-by-case situation. Debt is cheaper but comes with strings attached. Equity is pricey but more flexible.

It's essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I assume you don't start up a company with your own money is that it can fail and personally bankrupt you in the process. Because of that, it would hinder your judgement? Not sure. Maybe someone can fill me in on that.

    > I think lots of industries are ripe 
    > for "habit-ifying", and I'm going 
    > to pursue that further. Brilliant 
    > insight.

Not talking you down - just reminding you never to forget the moral angle.

If you're interested in learning more about this stuff, I highly recommend reading it.

But when an innovation requires a change in customer behaviour, no such advantage applies, and the gates are open to new entrant. The book calls this disruptive innovation (and is the source of that term).

The companies listed all become successful due to such innovations.

I don't think "obvious" in the conventional sense is a real category, because no two people would agree the same things are obvious.

I've noticed that this is a common thing - it's very rare for someone who has spent years in a particular area to sit down and distill things that have become obvious to them over time in a way that can be taught to newcomers.

A new grad's compensation is often equal and some times greater than someone who's been in the trenches for 20 years. I don't know any other profession with this absurd inversion. And with a few notable exceptions, the idea that someone with 5 years of experience is Senior-anything is ridiculous. I remember myself at 5 years out, I didn't know shit compared to today. Yet, adjusted for location-cost of living and inflation, I'm making today about what I made back then. The compensation plateau is very real, I assure you. You'll probably find out in 20 years or so.

EDIT: There also wouldn't be so much persistent discussion about ageism in tech either, if experience was valued/compensated.

And in five years you'll be making about as much as you're ever going to make. I believe that was at least part of the point.

There is a reason software developer is consistently ranked as one of the best possible jobs.

As a corollary: I'm a developer who likes talking to and working with customers, doing UX research, etc. However, since the idea (which may or may not be correct) is that most programmers would rather work by themselves or at least have a project manager or something shield them from the customer, I'm unlikely to be able to find a job in which I can combine programming with customer interaction, even though I'm convinced that this could be valuable. But: only if an organisation is amenable to it.

People should be allowed to leave the industry for some amount of time without being marked as damaged goods.

In fact, based on how poorly technical interviews have evolved, I have no faith that a hiring manager wouldn't just blindly ignore all candidates with an employment gap on their record after reading posts similar to yours, and that really is a damn shame. It's not a humane practice.

> Technologists tend to severely underestimate the difficulty and expense of creating software, especially at companies which do not have fully staffed industry leading engineering teams ("because software is so easy there, amirite guys?")

That, in my experience, is very true. Teams are staffed to "we can make it work, maybe" not "we can actually engineer something"; the second bullet, to me, says, "you need to charge more than you think you do, because you're underestimating the costs of doing it, in particular, of doing it well."

The norm for techies is to underprice their offerings (based on underestimating the difficulty and expense of creating, selling, and supporting software). This leads to even "successful" companies closing because they weren't built to be financially sustainable.

One way of making a company sustainable is to charge a sustainable price (which is typically "more" than initially apparent).

For B2B solutions, value is more tied to how much it would cost a customer to implement your solution instead of buying yours. But even a startup founder who's been an engineer for many years might not have a clear picture of how much the previous projects they worked on cost their employer. They only see their own hourly rate or salary (which already might be low) and don't see the total cost of development, the cost of infrastructure, personnel for ongoing support, etc. Engineers notoriously under-price startup offerings because they lack the broader perspective to accurately value their creations.

His argument basically is that, businesses/consultants/employees fail because they charge/bill/demand in salary negotiations too little WAY more often than they fail for charging too much. Therefore, you should charge more than all of the decision making biases in your head say you should charge.

So, the point isn't too extract as much money from other people as possible. It's too charge more than you'd otherwise be comfortable charging because, even when you do, you may still be under-charging relative to the actual costs required and value provided.

How exactly do you, as a programmer without knowledge of the employer’s or client’s business, determine what a piece of software is worth to them?

You have no idea. So you use various heuristics which are more easily available but misleading, like “what are other people being paid?”

If you’re paying yourself, then sure, go ahead. But if you want someone else to pay you, then it should be based on what they think it’s worth. Why should they care what you think it’s worth?

No it doesn't. It's a pricing hypothesis. It says nothing about the presence or absence of profits.

You might think that there is a market for $15/h skilled developers, but there probably isn't. There is a huge market, however, for NewStartup CEOs looking for dev at $15/h.

They'll keep running in circles until they find something on their budget, or they don't. But they'll not raise prices. Beware of those.

The gist is that while you (as the average B2B startup) can estimate how valuable your product is to your average customer, you will most likely vastly underestimate the cost of replacement for such a system. In other words, if your sales pitch goes well and they like the product but think to themselves "How much would it cost us to build this ourselves?" you will underestimate this cost from the outside. This is because the cost of replacement is a reasonably good proxy for a price ceiling and by being aware of it you can get a much higher average selling price.

ie: There were multiple ways that Google could have executed their goal of building a search engine (engineering, sales, etc). Even if you come up with a 'better' idea, it may not be successful/valuable if you execute it poorly and make the wrong decisions.

i.e. "when executing"

But yes, other things being equal, the execution of a good idea is more valuable than the execution of a bad idea.

Well, first of all, this isn't true. Google and FB aren't so profitable because of a distribution monopoly. They're profitable due to network effects.

There's so much stuff on the internet that it's a problem of discovery, which is why Google became so dominant.

Surely there are situations where not many people are going to think of the idea and being first to move on it is very important

...such that both the idea and the execution are important. You can't execute well on something that you weren't able to come up with.

This is false.

Most open source development is paid work. Many people "get into open source" by accepting a regular day job.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/for-50-percent-of-devel...

> You radically underestimate (...) the instrumental benefits to you of publishing it (much you know that other people do not).

(He is saying, at least, that) you will benefit (more than you estimate) from publishing things you know (that others don't).

For instance, if you consistently put out good pieces on your past experiences in the software industry as a PM, then your current experiences as a software business owner, you will gradually become widely known as the guy who gives advice about what you shouldn't be doing in your software career or software business.

This was essentially how Joel Spolsky grew his audience through his blog -- turning his knowledge into published pieces. His blog audience combined with Jeffrey Atwood's blog audience were instrumental to getting StackOverflow off the ground.

You never know, but having an existing audience can be an incredible enabler for getting your future ventures off the ground.

1) Most open source software written and released today

2) Most open source software you use

The code in category #2 is much older on average.

Most people here use bash every day, but as far as I can tell, there's about one person behind it, who doesn't get paid for it (Chet Ramey).

And you're right that a lot of projects start free, and then get commercial contribution once they are valuable. Linux, git, hg, and Python all fit that profile.

In the "non-company" category, I would put Linux, git, hg, gcc, Apache. A lot of people still use Apache. nginx was in this category too until very recently.

SVN is interesting because it was started by a company (CollabNet), but I believe they diverged and the company no longer had much economic interest in it.

Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that the story is really complicated. It's not as simple as what's in that Tweet.

https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...

- Words are important. Choose them carefully. Hear them carefully.

- "Tolerating everyone but the intolerant" is no real tolerance at all.

- Only being "free" to hold your views in private, is no real freedom at all. Freedoms of speech and association and religion must be public freedoms if they are to be meaningful in any real sense.

- There's a continuum that exists between equality and freedom. Governments and society can more-or-less choose where they sit on the continuum, but can't move more towards one value without trading off some of the other.

- Prices agreed to by individuals in a free market (read: without coercion) are a statement each individual is making about the value of the good or service being traded. What's a "fair wage" for mowing lawns? What's a "fair price" for a watermelon? How much is "too much" profit for a legal firm? Capitalism is nothing more than a recognition that built into humanity is a desire to trade what you have for what you want, and a declaration that the Free Market is the most economical (read: efficient) way for humans to fulfill that desire. Following on from the previous axiom, you can certainly declare a "fair price for watermelon", but you're removing the freedom of individuals to decide for themselves how they value the world around them.

- Be highly skeptical of anyone handing out pitchforks. And learn to recognize when you're being handed one in a news article, youtube video, reddit comment, political ad, etc., etc.

- When you feel like the world is full of people who aren't changing their values fast enough, remember Chesterton's Fence[0]. In the main, the world around you exists the way it does for a reason (or for a plethora of reasons), and if you don't understand that reason, you're less likely to understand what the right fix is.

- Debt (of all kinds: student, mortgage, business) is a promise you're making about your future. The older, more formal term for a loan is a "promissory note".

- Before you make any promise, consider your ability to predict and control the future.

- Constraints are natural pressures, disadvantages, and discomforts that can be helpful in decision-making. Don't avoid painful situations.

(I think those last three make a powerful argument for bootstrapping startups instead of chasing VC funding or debt.)

- We will always have "bad" laws. There is no one set of guidelines which humanity will ever discover that will cleanly cover all use cases and will be agreed upon as being right by everyone.

- Humans are moral creatures. Whenever anyone uses the word "should" or "ought" in a sentence, they're making a moral statement. Hawking may be a world leading physicist, but when he declared philosophy to be dead, there's a reason philosopher's all around the world shot milk out their noses[1].

- You can't legislate morality. But in a democracy, legislation is the lowest-common-denominator of the morality of the governed. This means that just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's moral. It also means that in a society which encourages diversity of values, you'll have less common ground upon which to legislate.

- Don't act surprised when someone is ignorant of a fact or subject which you know. Help them understand it with humility.

- Don't hesitate to disclose your ignorance of a subject to someone who can help you learn more about it. They may not want to point out your ignorance, and silently pretending you do understand it only keeps you from learning new things.

- Corporations are people. Or more precisely, its impossible to separate out the corporate entity's values and behavior from its owners' values and behavior.

- As much as possible, have your mind made up how you will handle pressure to compromise on your values before you're in a tenuous situation.

- Don't worry about "missing out". FOMO is terrible justification for doing things you wouldn't otherwise do. Though this isn't an argument against spontaneity.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton.27...

[1]: https://www.quora.com/How-are-philosophers-reacting-to-Steph...

On the other hand, the current approaches clearly don't work very well, and everybody knows it, but nobody seems to be interested in seriously thinking about what we need to do differently. (patio11 and tptacek are notable exceptions)

https://pando.com/2014/03/30/court-docs-google-hiked-wages-t...

Germany was also being worn thin on supplies. It's not as if they were in perfect shape minus allied bombings.

Also, the Nazi ideals weren't terrible in the way a business idea was terrible. Many people bought into it.

Though they were effective at killing large numbers of (defenseless) people…

Also they didn't lose the war because of some flaw in their ideology, they lost due to manpower and industrial shortages (inflicted by Soviet and Allied militaries) that limited their ability to wage war.

For more, I recommend watching the Hitler Channel (err History Channel). [3]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths...

[2] http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20170903-why-people-think-ge...

[3] https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii

So then Hitler stopped listening to his generals, and went on to micromanage the war, and made one terrible decision after another.

• Not invading Britain before starting a war with the USSR, where Germany was outnumbered by over 3-1.

• Focusing the Russian invasion n Moscow instead of the far more important strategic objective of Kursk's oil fields. Not only did Germany needed more oil, but Kursk was also nearly the USSR's only supply. They got close to Kursk, but didn't destroy tthe oil fields when they fell short, and Germany's war efforts was handicapped by oil shortages the rest of the war. Your air force can't use it's superiority if it can't leave the ground, and neither can your tank commanders if their tanks can't start.

• Sending a million man army to attack Stalingrad when it had little strategic value, then abandoned it, losing every single man. When you are outnumbered 3-1, you can't fight wars of attrition, every man counts.

• Rejected the Army's plan to liberate Ukrainians and recruit them to fight as allies against the USSR. This would have almost evened the man-power disadvantage with a fresh supply of soldiers who hated the USSR. Instead he declared them sub-human, ordering them liquidated to make "living space" for Germany, and turned Ukrainian resistance behind German lines into a devastatingly powerful asset of the USSR.

• Ordered the ME-262, by far the worlds fastest fighter, to be launched with bomb mounts that slowed it substantially so it could only be used as fighter bomber, while Germany was being bombed relentlessly and had lost command of it's own skies.

• Wasting huge amounts of resources on wonder-weapons such as the V1, V2, that had almost no impact on the Allies war efforts.

• Also includes the Maus and Tiger Tanks, which sucked resources away from building more of their best tank, the Panther.