Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

Sorry you're getting downvoted on this post. I found your data point useful. Even though I disagree that there are enough podcasts serving the senior developer / corporate programmer niche, being made aware of the existence of "podcast exhaustion" is valuable, and the discussion convinced me that a transcription service is worth it.

I'd hate for negative attention to result in a chilling effect on your decision to voice your opinion in future.

I can't remove your downvotes, but I can say thank you a second time.

I'll take that on board! Thanks.

For Episode 0 I did post the full text of my script in the description, but I do think that for the actual interviews I won't be able to afford a transcription service for a while.

For the last few years though, I've been getting a fairly significant proportion of my ongoing professional development via the medium.

I think it scales well in terms of being able to get access to some of the greatest minds I know without creating an undue burden on my guests OR myself as a father to a 2-year old with a mortgage and a day job.

I am 100% willing to commit to writing rich descriptions that address the topics discussed in advance though. As part of the editing process I'll need to rewatch my own interviews a few times anyways, so it isn't a significant amount of extra work to provide a perfectly reasonable value add that I like to see on the pods I listen to.

Thanks!

On the other hand, podcasts can be listened to in the background, while text must be actively read. There are pros and cons to each format as a consumer, not to mention differences in production workflow.

Naively I would think that there must be a service out there that auto-generates transcriptions from podcasts. Youtube already do this for (some) videos. The output isn't perfect, but it gets about 99% of the words correct.

So my suggestion to OP wouldn't be "don't do the podcast". Instead I would say "do the podcast, but consider that it might not be searchable without a bit of extra effort".

Not at all harsh! And super super valuable. So genuinely, thank you for this.

SEO and discoverability are critical.

It is abundantly clear to me that I've got to workshop the name.

The categories are

- "say-able" can a listener hear the name and find the right one without a spelling mistake?

- is it unique enough to have a top slot search result?

- does it explain what it's about in the title?

- Would someone in the target audience instantly know what it was about if they saw it in a list of 800,000 podcasts? (The number of different pods out there according to a research report I read before deciding I still wanted to do it)

"Ship it" is a reference to the thing they (sometimes) say on GitHub when your pull request is accepted.

The icon has the "ship-it squirrel"

I thought that was cut and referencial so people in the know would recognize it instantly.

It also has a special place in my own heart because I first learned about it when a pull request I sent to one of the Microsoft as-net docker repos. In the version of the story I remember Scott Hanselman himself commented on the PR and said "lgtm :shipit:"

Which on GitHub translates into a picture of a squirrel dressed up as a gangster.

Based on the rules above I rename to "LGTM: the podcast about delivering code for professional programmers"

Maybe just "LGTM - the programmer podcast"

Thanks again. I'm going to work on it.

Edit: or maybe I rename to "LGTM shipit"?

Note: I wanted to thank you again for these data points. I appreciate that you didn't have to put that effort in and I have now officially decided to go with "lgtm: shipit"

And I even made an issue in the github repo to thank you for this effort.

https://github.com/AlexChesser/lgtm-shipit/issues/15

I expect this repo to be a really good place to write readmes, articles in the wiki, put the transcripts, if at some point I get enough money to pay github for LFS ... maybe I even upload the raw content? I have to think about that last bit because I'm considering just going with the MIT license so maybe I don't want my raw content released under MIT.

Who knows? It seems a lot more appropriate to put a programmer-podcast into github than a wordpress blog.

Thanks! I've been able to find it on a few platforms so far, but I'm distributing via anchor.fm

https://anchor.fm/ship-it

I'll have to find a way to differentiate my ship-it from others for people searching.

I'll probably have to rename it, but in the short term I'm going to let it ride.

Better to focus on quality interviews for now. (I think)

Edit: I just looked over the emails that anchor sent me and some of them say it could take as much as a week for the first listing to appear.

It's probably not showing up because it was like 1am last night when I finally hit the publish button on a non-test episode for the first time.

I'll keep an eye on this though. Thanks.

It's the exact type of hiccup that had me not wanting to self-promote before I had 10 episodes online.

Thank you!

Arguably that means you have bad easy-to-game metrics. I wouldn't call what many (most?) Googlers do "impactful". More like "Let's keep a bunch of smart people busy so they don't get hired by our competition"

If the service you built withers away when you move to a different team, it was a pet project that The Business doesn't care about (because it has zero impact). Literally the definition of a bullshit busywork job :)

How is this a counterpoint? The above is advice to developers seeking to improve their career, not executives at large public companies making hiring policy decisions.

The fact that goog is well known for starting projects then killing them, suggests to me they don't really appreciate the measurable impact of their work.

The PM you worked with should be able to answer this question. If they can’t, your project is likely a waste of time.

The signal from a hiring standpoint is that you asked and cared about this. Engineers who will just do whatever are less useful/impactful than engineers who push back and care about the value they’re delivering. Even if it’s sometimes fuzzy to estimate.

This should be part of the product spec or even tech spec. If you cannot measure the impact, why're you working on it?

Huge grain of salt. More like a red flag. I don't want BS artists like that anywhere near me.

it’s _very_ easy to calculate your impact, or the one of your team, when you work on meaningful projects. if that’s not the case, you are probably working on non-essential things.

If optimizing an internal tool can raise profits by 20%, I don't understand your disagreement. The comment you're replying to mentioned profits vs. unnoticed efficiency, not internal tools vs. consumer-facing software.

If it makes a big impact, it makes a big impact.

> If you're great at optimizing SQL, probably just doing that in any place you can get your hands on will make a pretty big impact.

This seems like an argument that there are no priorities and no things that are more important than other things. I don't think you believe that.

> If the takeaway is, "never work on internal tools," I've worked at companies where the internal tools were more valuable than anything customer-facing.

Yes, but they're exceptions.

> Overall impact is more helpful than resume points, IME, especially when references are involved.

The vast majority of the best paying jobs out there (FAANG), don't care at all about references.

It's a big world, it depends a lot in which circles you move around, I guess.

Unfortunately saving time/money is not as sexy as increasing revenue.

I learned this once by creating a tool at a telecommunications company I was working at. It made it significantly faster for Technical Support to initiate a Remote Desktop session with a customer. We ran reports on how many RDP sessions we started per month; and recorded how much time the tool saved. At the time it was estimated to save about $2.1M in time savings every year, at a time when the Tech Support queues had long waits.

Couldn’t get any traction with management. Had some grassroots growth internally until we were asked to shut it down since it was an unofficial tool.

Meanwhile they would chase sales campaigns or marketing stunts that might result in $50-100k in new sign ups.

Nobody cares how much you saved in time because it doesn’t get reported anywhere. It shows up on no important metrics. Sales going up by $100K is sexy. Admins handling an extra ticket per day because the interface is quicker isn’t.

That’s why I said profits not revenue. Specifically to capture that 1 & 2 might be the same work :)

Just talking in terms of business impact puts you miles ahead of other candidates in many eng jobs. Especially for levels above junior. Very important to have engineers who (want to) understand why they do what they do.

Thing is, while PhDs are usually by far the biggest domain experts you'll get, the absolute majority of them comes absolutely ill-equipped to lead anything, as university rarely teaches any skills in project, people or resource management skills, business sense, opportunity cost and presentation.

I've had disastrous outcomes going by credentials for leadership positions and these days only hire for demonstrated results on a real-world project.

Just my personal anecdotal evidence points me towards stellar academic success having a slight negative correlation with on-the-job performance. People who prefer building things with impact over citation rubber points usually don't survive in academia long enough for enduring a PhD.

> thought most of the work was boring

It’s my biggest problem, both with people who want trendy frameworks, and myself who was bored with work in my younger years (til I started drinking and made changes and created my company). “From a million dollars, anything is your passion” is quite true (was it Joel on Software?), but IT is quite boring when evolving at the lower levels.

I’ve loved the book “Tribal leadership” which defines levels of career,

1-Almost dropout;

2-Bored worker (apathetic victim, but delivers work - This was me);

3-Working like an as but executing on your own skills (“lone warrior” - This is me now);

4-Executes well with a mentor above and mentoring below, which pushes the organization forward by “belonging” to the social fabric;

5-Executes for others - Creates relationship between people so they can execute together - that’s the “startup ecosystem” or corporate leader style, those people often look like gurus amazed by the smartness of people in their ecosystem, which, if they are contagious and humble, becomes true leadership.

I believe these attitudes are somehow commonplace along academia, but I think it extrapolates to several disciplines, including software development or engineering.

There is a misunderstanding between where on the abstraction layer you are standing and how smart you are. The commonplace along mathematicians is that, as we are standing pretty low, we are the smartest of them all, and since there is basically no interaction with people in other layers, this belief gets comfortably reinforced.

Smarts comes in different flavors, and realizing that yours is just one of many and does not work at all in other contexts is hard. Treating others like morons and acting bored is a lousy way to deal with it.

>didn’t have the technical ability to get anything into production

This is the biggest problem with fresh graduates.

i see what you're saying and perhaps i shouldn't have been so negative in my original post.

I think that people who want to write or code shouldn't be afraid to put imperfect work out there.

But if to apply for a job you also have to produce "content" to build your brand, I maintain that this is not a good outcome.

> There's nothing wrong with people writing bad articles. In fact everyone writes badly to begin with.

It's ok to write badly in the beginning. It's less ok (to say the least) to publish the bad writing in the Internet and decrease it's mean quality level in result. Of course, by now the cat's way out of the bad and Internet is mostly low-effort, low-value crap. Arguably, it's been this way since the very beginning. In terms of quality and curation it's basically the digital equivalent of a wall in a public restroom. But still, I find scribbling on such walls to be in poor taste...

I think it becomes a problem when people do those things because it's required to stay competitive, and not out of genuine interest.

We understand and can certify how bridges are constructed. Someone from the government can come in and check your work reasonably quickly and make sure it’s up to code. There’s a “trust” step and a “verify” step. And it often takes a lot of time to do iteration.

Software engineering isn’t like that. Not only are the tools changing every year, but 95% of the work in a project isn’t actually design or construction, it’s figuring out what the client wants or the product should be! Requirements are discovered as construction happens because most of the time software is solving a business problem not a physics problem.

There’s no certification because there isn’t something to standardize. Every company has different problems, technical solutions are always changing. Interview processes are trying to look at generic problem solving + communication + ability to translate some easy algorithmic idea into code. They don’t do a great job of assessing that, but the point is that two CS degrees can look identical on paper but there’s so much fuzzy interpersonal/business/requirement-assessment work that basically isnt captured at all by a degree, and is really hard to demonstrate on a resume.

You also can’t become a civil engineer through a 6 month boot camp or from studying and building things on your own time.

As someone who has interviewed hundreds of entry-level developers, the range of skills/talent/ability is enormous.

I expect you would have a hard time getting top students to join your union.

(On the other hand, I don't care at all about side projects or seeing code on GitHub. I want to see how you solve a realistic problem that I have seen dozens of other people take a crack at for comparison.)

If you want to make as little money as a civil engineer does, go for it.

I don't think this is entirely true. Getting in the habit of writing, even if a lot of it is things other people have said better, means that when you do have something novel to say you will be much more practiced.

My experience is that when people try to only write the good posts they don't end up publishing things, but if they write hundreds of posts dozens will be good.

I work on a well established, closed source, trade secrets style e-commerce site. I can never seem to think about anything I could write up that would not involve me reworking everything to be more general. I also think it would largely boil down to a Stack Overflow link. I am doing more management now, so that might make this problem a little easier to solve for me.

I’d be interested in hearing those considerations.

Well said. The biggest products I've designed for my employer came from times when I could sit around and think. Being a little bored means having time to try things and build some MVPs. Having every minute of my day scheduled means I don't do anything creative.

> and grow to be some of the biggest companies in the world.

Japan does have some of the biggest companies in the world and it's not a free market here, not by a long way, competitiveness isn't something particularly needed internally (monopolies and cabals abound) and possibly not externally either, if conditions are right.

> The other aspect is that the lower the value of an employees time the more the business will be happy to have them undertake repetative tasks as the cost of them doing it is lower than the cost of the work to automate.

The stereotype/joke about fax machines being prevalent isn't based on a myth. Don't assume things work the way they would in the West.

I think when this conversation comes up, a lot of different things get overloaded. There are classes of "work" where output linearly scales (more or less) with input: For example, if you;re a truck driver, time spent with your butt in the driver's seat probably corresponds very tightly to your mileage per day and even deliveries per day (and therefore profit)

But given this is mostly a software-centric message board, software engineering and tech in general I have not observed much correlation at all between amount of input (work) and output (profit, success, happiness, etc). The expanse is wide open, the decision-tree of ways to approach a problem is nearly infinite, and choosing an approach to go down almost always incurs an opportunity cost of solving the same problem in a much better way. I've seen this a lot with lots of founders: They are so motivated and have enormous reserves of energy to "work", and while they are legitimately "working" in a certain sense (writing code, hustling for investment, planning business strategy, etc), it's often work that functions like a greedy algorithm: Stuck in local maxima, stuck in ruts, inflexible, etc and having a very hard time pausing, reflecting, and being judicious with their time, energy and focus. I call this the "Bias of Doing Work"

What mission is this important?

Yes. It's hard to find a good one.

Yeah, I know. I just don't feel that it's constructive to complain about it. I don't deny it; I just won't let it stop me.

Despite all that, I have it real good. I am able to do work that I love (and not get paid a dime for it), and live a life that includes friends, health, wonder and joy.

I may not be a TED-talkin', man-bunned, skinny-jeans-wearin' jargonaut, but the folks that end up working with me are very, very happy to do so.

I've (not exaggerating) been shipping (as in "delivering finished product") software my entire adult life.

That tends to make my work speak for itself.