5 ms·

The single most important thing you must do to improve your programming career

31 points by pchristensen 19y ago

sanswork 19y ago
I often say that starting to smoke was my lucky break career wise. When I got my first IT job it was a very low level help desk job with a big 3 consultancy. I smoked though so I was often in the smoking lounge/smoking area with the other smokers and we would naturally chat. This chatting/familiarity got my name around enough that I was able to get extra chances to move ahead and was out of the call centre and into a development job in no time at all. I did finally quit though. Now I got for the smoke breaks I just leave the smokes out of it. I get the same benefit with only having to risk second hand smoke a couple times a day.
- xlnt 19y ago
  there is no evidence that second hand smoke is dangerous, so don't worry about it.
  - rms 19y ago
    >there is no evidence that second hand smoke is dangerous, so don't worry about it. regardless of what studies may have said or not said, it seems obvious that it is not good.
    - xlnt 19y ago
      it's not obvious that it's significant. we shouldn't waste our time worrying about tiny things. for example there is uranium in the ocean. it's a lot as an absolute figure. but it's very dilute, nothing to worry about.
      - rms 19y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_smoking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_smoking Please refute. Good luck. If you're basing your post on a Penn and Teller Bullshit episode, they now say they were wrong. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrub3dt7R5U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrub3dt7R5U
        xlnt 19y ago
        pick one study or argument, which is the best, and i'll look into it more carefully. the wikipedia article is lengthy, and contains errors, but if i point one out you will presumably say there's another part that's better. that's fine, but let's skip that step and go straight to the part you wish to stand behind.
        rms 19y ago
        Doesn't seem worth the effort for something I'm really convinced is right beyond a shadow of a doubt. I don't even think being proven wrong could convince me to change. It seems like a good idea for society to say bad things about tobacco. I'll leave the argument at "fix the wikipedia article."
    - mynameishere 19y ago
      regardless of what studies may have said or not said, Good one. I like that honest approach to inquiry: Fuck science.
      - deleted 19y ago
        [deleted]
      - Herring 19y ago
        re: parent - it's called sarcasm, people.
        xlnt 19y ago
        but the parent of the sarcastic post wasn't actually anti-science at all.
deleted 19y ago
[deleted]
spydez 19y ago
Anyone know what a "presentation deck" is? He says it's the most important thing it the world to have for a talk you give, but it's the first I've heard of it...
- raganwald 19y ago
  That would be a "deck of slides." Nowadays it's a keynote, open office, or that-other-thing file, but once upon a time it was a set of 35mm transparencies you would load into a carousel. Stacked up, they looked a little like a deck of cards, thus the nickname "deck." You can probably find one (and someone old enough to remember when they were called decks) in a museum somewhere.
  - wanorris 19y ago
    I'm old enough to have presented from transparencies on an overhead projector, though I've never had occasion to present using an actual slide carousel. BTW, I'm not sure I understand why you think it's so important to present with a Powerpoint (or similar). I tend to think Powerpoints get overused, and I often like to present working just from notes (3x5 cards, since I'm bad at memorizing) or from a demo when appropriate. What's the win of working with a deck, in your view?
    - raganwald 19y ago
      There are two questions: what's the best presentation for a given subject and audience, and what's the best way to improve your skills. IMO, a good presentation with whatever-you-call-the-visuals is more difficult to do well, therefore that's what I think you should practice. Speeches and demos are always easier to give. They may be more appropriate for certain subjects, no doubt.
    - notauser 19y ago
      Slides can help: - Add structure in a visual way. - Provide graphics to illustrate your points (including code). ...and really that's about it. I keep my slides to one graphic or max five words, plus a little flow chart of progress through the presentation along the bottom. Depending on what I am talking about I might use as many as 2 slides a minute, but usually one every 2-3 minutes. This is the same for monthly reporting (twenty graphs, with a page number on each) through to conference speaking (scripted and learned, lots of pictures, little navigation helper on each page).
redorb 19y ago
The article is the basics of presentations, to bad all it is presenting is the opportunity to buy a book through amazon
- raganwald 19y ago
  IMO the article is worse than "the basics of presentations," actually doesn't say anything about how to present, it merely explains that it is a skill worth improving. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide whether an article that spends half of its time explaining why presentations and the other half explaining how to present is better or worse than an article that tries to make one point succinctly and stops.
menloparkbum 19y ago
I disagree with this advice in the general sense. There is a trend right now in Silicon Valley to have all manner of meetups and presentations. I've worked with tons of these guys and the majority of them are not going anywhere. You still need something worthwhile to present. A top-notch presentation about another new Ruby DSL for migrating data from MySQL to PostgreSQL is not going to help your career as much as writing Anywhere.FM in 3 months. If your work is good enough, you can always get someone better than you to do the talking. Improving your communication skills can't hurt but it isn't the single most important thing you can do.
- michael_dorfman 19y ago
  It depends on your role in the organization. I've hired a lot of coders in my time, and I have to say that (given a baseline of competence) I'll hire communication skills over additional coding prowess pretty much every time. For a coder who is part of a team (and not the founder of a start-up) you can't "always get someone better than you to do the talking." In most corporate situations, coders who can't effectively communicate with their peers or supervisors are essentially worthless, regardless of how slick they code.
- DanielBMarkham 19y ago
  I think you misread the article. The article was about improving your programming career, not creating solutions, forming a startup, becoming a great programmer, etc. To improve a career, you need to communicate better. It didn't say that it was the single most important thing to do overall. It was specifically about career advancement. Even in the startup arena, there are lots of capable coders who have created awesome solutions who just don't know how to connect and communicate to the right people. After all, it's not the idea -- heck, it's not even the code, it's the ability to communicate effectively to people that makes a startup run. You can have the next best thing to sliced bread and if you're not able to communicate (market, sell, persuade) it doesn't really amount to much, right?
  - comatose_kid 19y ago
    I'd still disagree. Empirically, it seems that career success in programming happens to people who approach a technical problem in a novel way (eg - ZFS, gmail, Asterisk, off the top of my head). Communication is important, but it is secondary. Of course, if your definition of career success is ascending through various ranks of management, I can see your point.
jrockway 19y ago
> The single most important thing you must do to improve your programming career ... stop reading social news sites and start writing some (&#@!ing code?
morbidkk 19y ago
the more you grow as a programmer your power to abstract things improves; with little more effort you can convey the same thing vividly to fellow programmers/managers and that is what this article talks about. you cant communicate effectively if you dont hold the authority over the subject or havent done significant handson on the same topic.
SwellJoe 19y ago
Wow. The Jobs Reality Distortion field existed even in 1984. The crowd was going apeshit over a pitiful demo--the Amiga was already being shown to press in '84 and was released less than a year later...I certainly knew that the Mac wasn't all that impressive at the time. My Commodore 64 even had 16 colors and could talk using SAM, and the C64 scene demos blew away everything that Mac slideshow was doing. But the crowd is simply orgasmic. How does he do it? What is it that Apple people are seeing that makes them so excited by everything Jobs demos? Really, it's something I've never understood...I see overpriced underpowered machines, and yet, for fans, every Apple product is a little piece of heaven. So, obviously, I'm managing to miss the point of the article pretty resoundingly, but oh, well.

31 points by pchristensen 19y ago

I often say that starting to smoke was my lucky break career wise. When I got my first IT job it was a very low level help desk job with a big 3 consultancy. I smoked though so I was often in the smoking lounge/smoking area with the other smokers and we would naturally chat. This chatting/familiarity got my name around enough that I was able to get extra chances to move ahead and was out of the call centre and into a development job in no time at all. I did finally quit though. Now I got for the smoke breaks I just leave the smokes out of it. I get the same benefit with only having to risk second hand smoke a couple times a day.

xlnt 19y ago
there is no evidence that second hand smoke is dangerous, so don't worry about it.
- rms 19y ago
  >there is no evidence that second hand smoke is dangerous, so don't worry about it. regardless of what studies may have said or not said, it seems obvious that it is not good.
  - xlnt 19y ago
    it's not obvious that it's significant. we shouldn't waste our time worrying about tiny things. for example there is uranium in the ocean. it's a lot as an absolute figure. but it's very dilute, nothing to worry about.
    - rms 19y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_smoking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_smoking Please refute. Good luck. If you're basing your post on a Penn and Teller Bullshit episode, they now say they were wrong. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrub3dt7R5U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrub3dt7R5U
      - xlnt 19y ago
        pick one study or argument, which is the best, and i'll look into it more carefully. the wikipedia article is lengthy, and contains errors, but if i point one out you will presumably say there's another part that's better. that's fine, but let's skip that step and go straight to the part you wish to stand behind.
        rms 19y ago
        Doesn't seem worth the effort for something I'm really convinced is right beyond a shadow of a doubt. I don't even think being proven wrong could convince me to change. It seems like a good idea for society to say bad things about tobacco. I'll leave the argument at "fix the wikipedia article."
  - mynameishere 19y ago
    regardless of what studies may have said or not said, Good one. I like that honest approach to inquiry: Fuck science.
    - deleted 19y ago
      [deleted]
    - Herring 19y ago
      re: parent - it's called sarcasm, people.
      - xlnt 19y ago
        but the parent of the sarcastic post wasn't actually anti-science at all.

deleted 19y ago

[deleted]

spydez 19y ago

Anyone know what a "presentation deck" is? He says it's the most important thing it the world to have for a talk you give, but it's the first I've heard of it...

raganwald 19y ago
That would be a "deck of slides." Nowadays it's a keynote, open office, or that-other-thing file, but once upon a time it was a set of 35mm transparencies you would load into a carousel. Stacked up, they looked a little like a deck of cards, thus the nickname "deck." You can probably find one (and someone old enough to remember when they were called decks) in a museum somewhere.
- wanorris 19y ago
  I'm old enough to have presented from transparencies on an overhead projector, though I've never had occasion to present using an actual slide carousel. BTW, I'm not sure I understand why you think it's so important to present with a Powerpoint (or similar). I tend to think Powerpoints get overused, and I often like to present working just from notes (3x5 cards, since I'm bad at memorizing) or from a demo when appropriate. What's the win of working with a deck, in your view?
  - raganwald 19y ago
    There are two questions: what's the best presentation for a given subject and audience, and what's the best way to improve your skills. IMO, a good presentation with whatever-you-call-the-visuals is more difficult to do well, therefore that's what I think you should practice. Speeches and demos are always easier to give. They may be more appropriate for certain subjects, no doubt.
  - notauser 19y ago
    Slides can help: - Add structure in a visual way. - Provide graphics to illustrate your points (including code). ...and really that's about it. I keep my slides to one graphic or max five words, plus a little flow chart of progress through the presentation along the bottom. Depending on what I am talking about I might use as many as 2 slides a minute, but usually one every 2-3 minutes. This is the same for monthly reporting (twenty graphs, with a page number on each) through to conference speaking (scripted and learned, lots of pictures, little navigation helper on each page).

redorb 19y ago

The article is the basics of presentations, to bad all it is presenting is the opportunity to buy a book through amazon

raganwald 19y ago
IMO the article is worse than "the basics of presentations," actually doesn't say anything about how to present, it merely explains that it is a skill worth improving. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide whether an article that spends half of its time explaining why presentations and the other half explaining how to present is better or worse than an article that tries to make one point succinctly and stops.

menloparkbum 19y ago

I disagree with this advice in the general sense. There is a trend right now in Silicon Valley to have all manner of meetups and presentations. I've worked with tons of these guys and the majority of them are not going anywhere. You still need something worthwhile to present. A top-notch presentation about another new Ruby DSL for migrating data from MySQL to PostgreSQL is not going to help your career as much as writing Anywhere.FM in 3 months. If your work is good enough, you can always get someone better than you to do the talking. Improving your communication skills can't hurt but it isn't the single most important thing you can do.

michael_dorfman 19y ago
It depends on your role in the organization. I've hired a lot of coders in my time, and I have to say that (given a baseline of competence) I'll hire communication skills over additional coding prowess pretty much every time. For a coder who is part of a team (and not the founder of a start-up) you can't "always get someone better than you to do the talking." In most corporate situations, coders who can't effectively communicate with their peers or supervisors are essentially worthless, regardless of how slick they code.
DanielBMarkham 19y ago
I think you misread the article. The article was about improving your programming career, not creating solutions, forming a startup, becoming a great programmer, etc. To improve a career, you need to communicate better. It didn't say that it was the single most important thing to do overall. It was specifically about career advancement. Even in the startup arena, there are lots of capable coders who have created awesome solutions who just don't know how to connect and communicate to the right people. After all, it's not the idea -- heck, it's not even the code, it's the ability to communicate effectively to people that makes a startup run. You can have the next best thing to sliced bread and if you're not able to communicate (market, sell, persuade) it doesn't really amount to much, right?
- comatose_kid 19y ago
  I'd still disagree. Empirically, it seems that career success in programming happens to people who approach a technical problem in a novel way (eg - ZFS, gmail, Asterisk, off the top of my head). Communication is important, but it is secondary. Of course, if your definition of career success is ascending through various ranks of management, I can see your point.

jrockway 19y ago

> The single most important thing you must do to improve your programming career ... stop reading social news sites and start writing some (&#@!ing code?

morbidkk 19y ago

the more you grow as a programmer your power to abstract things improves; with little more effort you can convey the same thing vividly to fellow programmers/managers and that is what this article talks about. you cant communicate effectively if you dont hold the authority over the subject or havent done significant handson on the same topic.

SwellJoe 19y ago

Wow. The Jobs Reality Distortion field existed even in 1984. The crowd was going apeshit over a pitiful demo--the Amiga was already being shown to press in '84 and was released less than a year later...I certainly knew that the Mac wasn't all that impressive at the time. My Commodore 64 even had 16 colors and could talk using SAM, and the C64 scene demos blew away everything that Mac slideshow was doing. But the crowd is simply orgasmic. How does he do it? What is it that Apple people are seeing that makes them so excited by everything Jobs demos? Really, it's something I've never understood...I see overpriced underpowered machines, and yet, for fans, every Apple product is a little piece of heaven. So, obviously, I'm managing to miss the point of the article pretty resoundingly, but oh, well.