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.

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.

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!

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".

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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.