5 ms·

> It's specific to company cultures, not Americans in general. I think some cultures have an ingrained mistrust of the idea that some people are so far above o

by dkarl 7y ago

> It's specific to company cultures, not Americans in general. I think some cultures have an ingrained mistrust of the idea that some people are so far above others. Perhaps that attitude forces a false humility onto geniuses, but it works as a cultural inoculation against blowhards and pretend superheros. In the U.S., I think we have a complicated melange of different influences ranging from the New England protestant stereotype who would never tolerate such people to the South which I think cultivates an unfortunate craving for Great Man saviors (which can manifest on the small scale, like one engineer gathering a cabal of awed worshipers in an engineering organization, or on the national scale with politicians.) These are broad stereotypes, and I think cultural and geographic mixing in the U.S. makes accurate generalization impossible, but different people have different gut reactions to people who make implicit or explicit claims to greatness, and I think these gut reactions are culturally ingrained in childhood. Companies can cultivate a culture, but I don't think that will override whether a person responds to grandiose self-presentation with aversion or craving.

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
I’m in a really strange place. The last couple of years, I’ve been “refactoring” myself, to pivot from being a manager (I ran a C++ image processing shop for a long time), to being an engineer (specializing in native Apple device programming in Swift). For years, I never needed to self-promote. The people that mattered knew all about me; warts and all. It wasn’t important for anyone else to be impressed. I am now working towards hanging a shingle as a contract engineer, and I need to let folks know why they should pay me for my work and experience. It’s really difficult to talk about myself and what I can do, without it sounding like boasting; yet that’s what I’m expected to do. I am really, really honest, which is, apparently, absolutely worthless in today’s business environment. The Japanese really liked it, but no one else seems to find it at all appealing. I’m not one of those “brutally honest” people that ends up making a pariah of themselves, but I have a very stringent code of personal ethics that I follow. All that is to say that I’m not good at the “humblebrag.” If I’m good at something, I simply say that I’m good at it. I don’t claim expertise at anything I don’t know, and I don’t make promises I don’t plan to keep. You don’t last long at a Japanese company, if you are full of hot air. I’m way past the Dunning-Kruger Peak, and the Jon Snow Trough. If I say I can do something, I mean it. I won’t say I can do something that I can’t do. It’s that simple.
- dkarl 7y ago
  I once interviewed a guy who was technically adequate but who was a complete snake oil salesman in the coding interview. He couldn't solve one particularly difficult problem, which was totally fine (most people we hired couldn't solve it) but he blustered a lot trying to verbally convince us that his solution was correct even after we pointed out a case it failed on. Then he tried to Jedi mind trick us into thinking we had agreed that his solution was correct, and when that didn't work, he spent the rest of his time drawing complicated diagrams that had no apparent bearing on the problem and muttering random theoretical terms under his breath while waving away our attempts to help him make progress. Finally, when we told him our time was up, he said, "Well, it looks like I've encountered a problem I can't solve" ...dramatic pause... "WHICH RARELY HAPPENS." When we discussed this behavior afterwards, my boss's response was, "Don't worry about it. He's been working as a consultant for the last couple of years, and consultants have to act like that. It's a survival thing." So... yeah. I think you are going to have to think very hard about what you CAN say that will produce the same effect as the things you won't say. I suspect there are a lot of things that aren't literally true or false that you could say to communicate to people that they will be in good hands with you. If you decide to give it up in the end, I think people will be very sympathetic to you applying for a permanent position as a developer and saying that you tried contracting and decided you weren't cut out for it. I think most people working permanent jobs in software engineering can't imagine themselves succeeding as contractors and will admire that you even tried it.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
    I’ve already figured out that it’s worthless to even try looking at permanent positions. No one wants to hire anyone over 40 as an engineer. After a series of insults and attempts at humiliation, I realized the deal. It’s a very different world from the one I left, when I joined that Japanese company. I won’t lie, and I won’t compromise my personal integrity. If that means that no one will want to hire me to develop their critical must-not-fail products, then so be it. It's surprising to learn that people actively seek out folks with compromised ethics for these types of gigs, but it's a funny old world. I’ve already reconciled myself to the fact that this means that I may never work for anyone other than myself; which is acceptable, but not ideal. I just find it rather personally offensive to encounter this kind of willful self-destructiveness. I have the skills and experience to make a lot of money for people. I’m quite willing to take risks with startups, and have a truly vast array of experience in many, many disciplines (which is usually fairly valuable for things like startups). I have tremendous self-discipline and integrity (You get that, when your boss is 7,000 miles away, and doesn't speak English), clean up pretty well, and am used to selling complex ideas to powerful, skeptical, conservative managers. I'm a top-shelf writer, having been writing since I was a child. I'm a very good architect, having developed infrastructure-level systems that have lasted decades (If you order the current SDK for DSLRs from my alma mater, you will find a module in there that I designed in 1994, and I've also developed a really big open-source infrastructure for NPOs, that is becoming the worldwide standard after more than ten years). My GitHub ID Activity Log is solid green. My entire career has been delivering software (as opposed to just “writing” software), I don’t have a need for ego-gratification, I’m fine with a very reasonable compensation, and am mostly doing this because I simply love software development. If I say all that in an interview, though, it's assumed that I'm lying, even though I have a vast open-source portfolio of hundreds of thousands of lines of hand-crafted, ultra-high-quality, single-origin, small-batch (and also really big-batch), artisanal code, over a decade of commit history, in dozens of repos and gists, hundreds of pages of documentation, reams of articles, blog posts, and other examples of top-quality writing that describe, in detail, how I work, think, design, assess risk, test and deliver. It's all up-to-date, too. My last checkins will probably happen later today. I'm working on delivering a new Bluetooth explorer app to the App Store. It looks like today is Submit Day. It's my experience that no one will even glance at that. I think it's kind of crazy. I would have killed for that kind of data on prospective hires. I’m actually perfectly fine, doing my own thing, but I find that I miss being on a team.

by dkarl 7y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago

I’m in a really strange place. The last couple of years, I’ve been “refactoring” myself, to pivot from being a manager (I ran a C++ image processing shop for a long time), to being an engineer (specializing in native Apple device programming in Swift). For years, I never needed to self-promote. The people that mattered knew all about me; warts and all. It wasn’t important for anyone else to be impressed. I am now working towards hanging a shingle as a contract engineer, and I need to let folks know why they should pay me for my work and experience. It’s really difficult to talk about myself and what I can do, without it sounding like boasting; yet that’s what I’m expected to do. I am really, really honest, which is, apparently, absolutely worthless in today’s business environment. The Japanese really liked it, but no one else seems to find it at all appealing. I’m not one of those “brutally honest” people that ends up making a pariah of themselves, but I have a very stringent code of personal ethics that I follow. All that is to say that I’m not good at the “humblebrag.” If I’m good at something, I simply say that I’m good at it. I don’t claim expertise at anything I don’t know, and I don’t make promises I don’t plan to keep. You don’t last long at a Japanese company, if you are full of hot air. I’m way past the Dunning-Kruger Peak, and the Jon Snow Trough. If I say I can do something, I mean it. I won’t say I can do something that I can’t do. It’s that simple.

dkarl 7y ago
I once interviewed a guy who was technically adequate but who was a complete snake oil salesman in the coding interview. He couldn't solve one particularly difficult problem, which was totally fine (most people we hired couldn't solve it) but he blustered a lot trying to verbally convince us that his solution was correct even after we pointed out a case it failed on. Then he tried to Jedi mind trick us into thinking we had agreed that his solution was correct, and when that didn't work, he spent the rest of his time drawing complicated diagrams that had no apparent bearing on the problem and muttering random theoretical terms under his breath while waving away our attempts to help him make progress. Finally, when we told him our time was up, he said, "Well, it looks like I've encountered a problem I can't solve" ...dramatic pause... "WHICH RARELY HAPPENS." When we discussed this behavior afterwards, my boss's response was, "Don't worry about it. He's been working as a consultant for the last couple of years, and consultants have to act like that. It's a survival thing." So... yeah. I think you are going to have to think very hard about what you CAN say that will produce the same effect as the things you won't say. I suspect there are a lot of things that aren't literally true or false that you could say to communicate to people that they will be in good hands with you. If you decide to give it up in the end, I think people will be very sympathetic to you applying for a permanent position as a developer and saying that you tried contracting and decided you weren't cut out for it. I think most people working permanent jobs in software engineering can't imagine themselves succeeding as contractors and will admire that you even tried it.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
  I’ve already figured out that it’s worthless to even try looking at permanent positions. No one wants to hire anyone over 40 as an engineer. After a series of insults and attempts at humiliation, I realized the deal. It’s a very different world from the one I left, when I joined that Japanese company. I won’t lie, and I won’t compromise my personal integrity. If that means that no one will want to hire me to develop their critical must-not-fail products, then so be it. It's surprising to learn that people actively seek out folks with compromised ethics for these types of gigs, but it's a funny old world. I’ve already reconciled myself to the fact that this means that I may never work for anyone other than myself; which is acceptable, but not ideal. I just find it rather personally offensive to encounter this kind of willful self-destructiveness. I have the skills and experience to make a lot of money for people. I’m quite willing to take risks with startups, and have a truly vast array of experience in many, many disciplines (which is usually fairly valuable for things like startups). I have tremendous self-discipline and integrity (You get that, when your boss is 7,000 miles away, and doesn't speak English), clean up pretty well, and am used to selling complex ideas to powerful, skeptical, conservative managers. I'm a top-shelf writer, having been writing since I was a child. I'm a very good architect, having developed infrastructure-level systems that have lasted decades (If you order the current SDK for DSLRs from my alma mater, you will find a module in there that I designed in 1994, and I've also developed a really big open-source infrastructure for NPOs, that is becoming the worldwide standard after more than ten years). My GitHub ID Activity Log is solid green. My entire career has been delivering software (as opposed to just “writing” software), I don’t have a need for ego-gratification, I’m fine with a very reasonable compensation, and am mostly doing this because I simply love software development. If I say all that in an interview, though, it's assumed that I'm lying, even though I have a vast open-source portfolio of hundreds of thousands of lines of hand-crafted, ultra-high-quality, single-origin, small-batch (and also really big-batch), artisanal code, over a decade of commit history, in dozens of repos and gists, hundreds of pages of documentation, reams of articles, blog posts, and other examples of top-quality writing that describe, in detail, how I work, think, design, assess risk, test and deliver. It's all up-to-date, too. My last checkins will probably happen later today. I'm working on delivering a new Bluetooth explorer app to the App Store. It looks like today is Submit Day. It's my experience that no one will even glance at that. I think it's kind of crazy. I would have killed for that kind of data on prospective hires. I’m actually perfectly fine, doing my own thing, but I find that I miss being on a team.