8 ms·

He kind of touches upon it, but there is a lot of value in being able to go into an interview and literally being able to say about a topic "I wrote the book on

He kind of touches upon it, but there is a lot of value in being able to go into an interview and literally being able to say about a topic "I wrote the book on it." It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it. I used to have several guys on my team that had published books- and they were great, and were constantly getting contacted about other jobs, and even to write other books. They all said the actual book itself made them no money beyond their initial (small-hardly five figure) advance, and in terms of dollars per hour they probably would have been better off getting a fast food job, but it opened up a lot of doors and made them at least a little bit "internet famous."

markshead 6y ago
Just having a book that you've written on any topic listed somewhere on your resume is nearly always a positive. It is kind of like having a college degree in that it shows you can start something and finish it.
- ticmasta 6y ago
  way more people finish college than publish a book though. It's a higher-level signal IMO, even a self-published book is a massive accomplishment that shows huge dedication.
franze 6y ago
If you do any kind of consultancy, writing and publishing a big is part or the normal careere path.
rllearneratwork 6y ago
another good way to become a little bit "internet famous" is to create and maintain a useful open-source project. IMHO, this is more future proof in the technology space since you can gradually evolve a project but a book can become obsolete if it focuses on a specific technology rather than fundamentals.
- tasogare 6y ago
  Obligatory: https://mobile.twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en https://mobile.twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?la...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- goostavos 6y ago
  Meh, I expected this was true. However, after 6(?) years of maintaining a moderately popular project (~10k stars), it hasn't amounted to much real external value. It has never come up in interviews, it has never led to any job offers, it's mostly just a thing I work on for free which people happen to like. Which is too bad. I want money!
  - yesenadam 6y ago
    Do tell - what is the project?
  - pbronez 6y ago
    It’s your job to highlight your relevant skills and experience during interviews. It’s especially important to be proactive about unusual experience that canned questions won’t hit, like an OSS project you run or a book you wrote. Remember that having something good is NEVER enough. You HAVE to tell people about it. Case in point - you don’t even link the project in your comment! I can’t even begin to give you specific advice because I don’t know anything about your project beyond its age and basic popularity tier. Maybe it’s super relevant to me and I would benefit from bringing you in for some consulting. We’ll never know because you didn’t mention the crucial details. Here are some generic things you can try: - Don’t be afraid to mention your specific project in relevant settings, like this forum or an interview. - Use examples from your project to answer questions (“Sure I know about X, I considered using that when my project needed Y, and my benchmarking eventually suggested Z was better in that instance”) - List the OSS project on your resume like a job (“Primary Maintainer, MyLibrary, 2012-. Designed, Implemented and Maintained a library with 12,000 github stars. Reviewed and merged 300 community pull requests. Implemented CI/CD...”) - Identify corporate users of your OSS and proactively offering consulting - Speak at conferences/meetups focused on your programming language/ framework /industry - Blog about the project and your experiences with it
ghaff 6y ago
>It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it. And I'd add that this is the real value IMO of going with a name publisher--which is otherwise a bit of a mixed bag. Fairly or not a lot of people mentally make at least a bit of mental deduction for a book published independently.
- dvt 6y ago
  This would be nice if it were actually true. My credentials are pretty top-notch (including writing one book, and editing another) but I still get asked to invert binary trees. I love writing (and I’m working on another book), but other than maybe getting you in the door, you’ll still have to deal with typical tech interview nonsense.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I haven't switched companies since I've written books (and am not a developer anyway) so I can't say about technical interviews. But it's definitely helped me in other ways within my company, with partner companies, etc.
brendangregg 6y ago
I'm pretty sure if I showed up to a performance engineering job interview and said "I wrote the book on performance," as though that was what mattered most, I'd be shown the door. In my opinion it would be horrendously arrogant. In fact, I interviewed at Google while I was writing Systems Performance for Prentice Hall, and I never mentioned it in the interviews for that reason. In such interviews I'm focused on what value I can bring to the company -- what problems I can help them solve in the future. I'm not there to coast on my prior reputation. Also, regarding "overcome the hurdles": those hurdles are now practically non-existent with various publishers. This results in books on the topic that should never have been published. I could explain in more detail, but there's a lot of negative connotations with technical book authorship, which I work to overcome in such interviews and in roles. Does the author care more about working on their reputation than working for the company? Did the author only write the book to make an exaggerated name for themselves for the benefit of job interviews? (As you suggested in your opening sentence :-) I personally only write books when I'm already the expert on the topic, and it's a way to share my expertise. Another interview I had years ago, after telling them about my first book, the interviewer said "so you know the theory, but can you put it in practice?" The assumption being "those that can do, those that can't write books." I was in a worse position for letting them know about it. And of course, there can be positives for writing books. You are showing a willingness to share your knowledge with others. (You can do that in blog posts as well.) Edit: added missing word "interview"
- coliveira 6y ago
  I think you have some problem of low self esteem or have been brainwashed by the anti-intelectual crowd. Of course writing a book is not a magical think, but it shows that you have technical knowledge about the subject (if the book is any good). Any reasonable employer would be glad to have this kind of people. If they don't, I would suspect that it is a sweatshop.
- auggierose 6y ago
  Sounds to me like a good way to weed out bad employers. If they think of a book as a negative, they probably have a few chips on their shoulders. Also, you sound overly modest to me.
ipython 6y ago
On the flip side, be careful when claiming skills on your resume. You may just encounter an interviewer who wrote the book on that topic who decides to ask you a few questions about it...
- mandeepj 6y ago
  > You may just encounter an interviewer who wrote the book on that topic who decides to ask you a few questions about it... Nothing wrong with that. I see it as a conversation starter.
  - ipython 6y ago
    I felt that way too, until the interviewee had no answers to some simple questions about the topic.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      At least you caught a lie, which at least to me is a red flag that the interview is over and I know to look for excuses to downgrade the score I give to HR, thus ensuring no offer is made no matter how many people we need to hire.
libraryatnight 6y ago
We hired this guy who wrote a book on the thing the team he was hired for managed. He was a nightmare. He was just insufferable. People would ask questions and he would suggest they read his book. He would mention his book in every meeting. He would tell people they couldn't do things they'd already done and then back-peddle that it wasn't possible when he'd written his book. It was just a huge drag. He managed to also be terrible in other ways and has since been canned. I pity any future applicants that come into an interview with the managers that had to deal with that guy planning to lean on their book during the interview. There's a good 50 people in the company with a real bad taste in their mouths from him.
- snypox 6y ago
  Okay, well I guess that’s a bad experience. I don’t think it invalidates the fact the usually book authors should be somewhat knowledgable - of course it doesn’t automatically mean that all of them is good to work with.
  - mrlala 6y ago
    Yes, but... unless you are hiring an absolute EXPERT on that topic and that was the purpose of hiring the person.. I bet that could turn out very poorly. I mean it's in general like if you hire a PhD into a role that needs to cover a lot of areas, can't be super detailed in anything, and needs to get stuff done as opposed to pure research.. that can turn out poorly.
  - libraryatnight 6y ago
    Agreed, I just wanted to share my own experience and perspective
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  Similar experience here. We interviewed a guy who kept referring to his book on the subject, experience he gained during writing the book, and so on. We took the bait. > He would tell people they couldn't do things they'd already done and then back-peddle that it wasn't possible when he'd written his book This was the core problem: Modern technologies and frameworks move fast. His book was about the state of the art five years ago, but it was woefully out of date for what we were doing. That didn't stop him from trying to exert superiority over the more knowledgeable team members. Some of us read his book. It wasn't even a great resource on the topic. Re-reading the Amazon reviews, I have to believe most of the positive reviews were bought or fabricated. Since then, I'm cautious about hiring anyone who tries to portray themselves as an expert in the field. And if you're hiring an author, at least read part of their book during the interview phase.
abhgh 6y ago
I am sure this is mostly seen as a positive but this can also backfire in an interview, and later, at work (I see a sibling comment addresses this). If a person leads with saying he has written a book on a topic, and then is unable to provide adequate responses to basic questions, the panel opinion goes south very soon. I have seen this happen. Think of it as when a candidate claims she knows a language X well, but then is unable to answer reasonable questions around X. Saying you have written a book is like this claim, except dialing up expectations to the max. Not saying advertising a book is a bad idea, but be aware of the expectations you are setting up.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it. That would seem to depend on the publisher, and the business arrangement, as to whether it really signals anything (though I suspect that often hiring managers might not know enough to correctly interpret the signal.) Obviously, if the book is a success and widely-known for its technical merit, that's a positive signal, but that's different than just getting a book published. Even where getting over the hurdles to get a book published signals something, there's a question of whether it signals something relevant to the job you are hiring for. The hurdles of getting a book published (where they exist at all, e.g., outside of what is essentially vanity publishing or a close approximation) aren't particularly similar hurdles to those encountered in most technical jobs even when the book is on a subject close to the job duties.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> He kind of touches upon it, but there is a lot of value in being able to go into an interview and literally being able to say about a topic "I wrote the book on it." A lot of it depends on the publisher. If it is for example OReilly, I would be impressed. If it is Packt, I would not be impressed at all. Some publishers do a much better job of screening and providing editorial support and technical reviews so that if an author is published by them, I can have confidence that the author is a subject matter expert. Some publishers are little more than self-publishing and so I would not have confidence that the author was an expert.

markshead 6y ago

Just having a book that you've written on any topic listed somewhere on your resume is nearly always a positive. It is kind of like having a college degree in that it shows you can start something and finish it.

ticmasta 6y ago
way more people finish college than publish a book though. It's a higher-level signal IMO, even a self-published book is a massive accomplishment that shows huge dedication.

franze 6y ago

If you do any kind of consultancy, writing and publishing a big is part or the normal careere path.

rllearneratwork 6y ago

another good way to become a little bit "internet famous" is to create and maintain a useful open-source project. IMHO, this is more future proof in the technology space since you can gradually evolve a project but a book can become obsolete if it focuses on a specific technology rather than fundamentals.

tasogare 6y ago
Obligatory: https://mobile.twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en https://mobile.twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?la...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
goostavos 6y ago
Meh, I expected this was true. However, after 6(?) years of maintaining a moderately popular project (~10k stars), it hasn't amounted to much real external value. It has never come up in interviews, it has never led to any job offers, it's mostly just a thing I work on for free which people happen to like. Which is too bad. I want money!
- yesenadam 6y ago
  Do tell - what is the project?
- pbronez 6y ago
  It’s your job to highlight your relevant skills and experience during interviews. It’s especially important to be proactive about unusual experience that canned questions won’t hit, like an OSS project you run or a book you wrote. Remember that having something good is NEVER enough. You HAVE to tell people about it. Case in point - you don’t even link the project in your comment! I can’t even begin to give you specific advice because I don’t know anything about your project beyond its age and basic popularity tier. Maybe it’s super relevant to me and I would benefit from bringing you in for some consulting. We’ll never know because you didn’t mention the crucial details. Here are some generic things you can try: - Don’t be afraid to mention your specific project in relevant settings, like this forum or an interview. - Use examples from your project to answer questions (“Sure I know about X, I considered using that when my project needed Y, and my benchmarking eventually suggested Z was better in that instance”) - List the OSS project on your resume like a job (“Primary Maintainer, MyLibrary, 2012-. Designed, Implemented and Maintained a library with 12,000 github stars. Reviewed and merged 300 community pull requests. Implemented CI/CD...”) - Identify corporate users of your OSS and proactively offering consulting - Speak at conferences/meetups focused on your programming language/ framework /industry - Blog about the project and your experiences with it

ghaff 6y ago

>It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it. And I'd add that this is the real value IMO of going with a name publisher--which is otherwise a bit of a mixed bag. Fairly or not a lot of people mentally make at least a bit of mental deduction for a book published independently.

dvt 6y ago
This would be nice if it were actually true. My credentials are pretty top-notch (including writing one book, and editing another) but I still get asked to invert binary trees. I love writing (and I’m working on another book), but other than maybe getting you in the door, you’ll still have to deal with typical tech interview nonsense.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I haven't switched companies since I've written books (and am not a developer anyway) so I can't say about technical interviews. But it's definitely helped me in other ways within my company, with partner companies, etc.

brendangregg 6y ago

I'm pretty sure if I showed up to a performance engineering job interview and said "I wrote the book on performance," as though that was what mattered most, I'd be shown the door. In my opinion it would be horrendously arrogant. In fact, I interviewed at Google while I was writing Systems Performance for Prentice Hall, and I never mentioned it in the interviews for that reason. In such interviews I'm focused on what value I can bring to the company -- what problems I can help them solve in the future. I'm not there to coast on my prior reputation. Also, regarding "overcome the hurdles": those hurdles are now practically non-existent with various publishers. This results in books on the topic that should never have been published. I could explain in more detail, but there's a lot of negative connotations with technical book authorship, which I work to overcome in such interviews and in roles. Does the author care more about working on their reputation than working for the company? Did the author only write the book to make an exaggerated name for themselves for the benefit of job interviews? (As you suggested in your opening sentence :-) I personally only write books when I'm already the expert on the topic, and it's a way to share my expertise. Another interview I had years ago, after telling them about my first book, the interviewer said "so you know the theory, but can you put it in practice?" The assumption being "those that can do, those that can't write books." I was in a worse position for letting them know about it. And of course, there can be positives for writing books. You are showing a willingness to share your knowledge with others. (You can do that in blog posts as well.) Edit: added missing word "interview"

coliveira 6y ago
I think you have some problem of low self esteem or have been brainwashed by the anti-intelectual crowd. Of course writing a book is not a magical think, but it shows that you have technical knowledge about the subject (if the book is any good). Any reasonable employer would be glad to have this kind of people. If they don't, I would suspect that it is a sweatshop.
auggierose 6y ago
Sounds to me like a good way to weed out bad employers. If they think of a book as a negative, they probably have a few chips on their shoulders. Also, you sound overly modest to me.

ipython 6y ago

On the flip side, be careful when claiming skills on your resume. You may just encounter an interviewer who wrote the book on that topic who decides to ask you a few questions about it...

mandeepj 6y ago
> You may just encounter an interviewer who wrote the book on that topic who decides to ask you a few questions about it... Nothing wrong with that. I see it as a conversation starter.
- ipython 6y ago
  I felt that way too, until the interviewee had no answers to some simple questions about the topic.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    At least you caught a lie, which at least to me is a red flag that the interview is over and I know to look for excuses to downgrade the score I give to HR, thus ensuring no offer is made no matter how many people we need to hire.

libraryatnight 6y ago

We hired this guy who wrote a book on the thing the team he was hired for managed. He was a nightmare. He was just insufferable. People would ask questions and he would suggest they read his book. He would mention his book in every meeting. He would tell people they couldn't do things they'd already done and then back-peddle that it wasn't possible when he'd written his book. It was just a huge drag. He managed to also be terrible in other ways and has since been canned. I pity any future applicants that come into an interview with the managers that had to deal with that guy planning to lean on their book during the interview. There's a good 50 people in the company with a real bad taste in their mouths from him.

snypox 6y ago
Okay, well I guess that’s a bad experience. I don’t think it invalidates the fact the usually book authors should be somewhat knowledgable - of course it doesn’t automatically mean that all of them is good to work with.
- mrlala 6y ago
  Yes, but... unless you are hiring an absolute EXPERT on that topic and that was the purpose of hiring the person.. I bet that could turn out very poorly. I mean it's in general like if you hire a PhD into a role that needs to cover a lot of areas, can't be super detailed in anything, and needs to get stuff done as opposed to pure research.. that can turn out poorly.
- libraryatnight 6y ago
  Agreed, I just wanted to share my own experience and perspective
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
Similar experience here. We interviewed a guy who kept referring to his book on the subject, experience he gained during writing the book, and so on. We took the bait. > He would tell people they couldn't do things they'd already done and then back-peddle that it wasn't possible when he'd written his book This was the core problem: Modern technologies and frameworks move fast. His book was about the state of the art five years ago, but it was woefully out of date for what we were doing. That didn't stop him from trying to exert superiority over the more knowledgeable team members. Some of us read his book. It wasn't even a great resource on the topic. Re-reading the Amazon reviews, I have to believe most of the positive reviews were bought or fabricated. Since then, I'm cautious about hiring anyone who tries to portray themselves as an expert in the field. And if you're hiring an author, at least read part of their book during the interview phase.

abhgh 6y ago

I am sure this is mostly seen as a positive but this can also backfire in an interview, and later, at work (I see a sibling comment addresses this). If a person leads with saying he has written a book on a topic, and then is unable to provide adequate responses to basic questions, the panel opinion goes south very soon. I have seen this happen. Think of it as when a candidate claims she knows a language X well, but then is unable to answer reasonable questions around X. Saying you have written a book is like this claim, except dialing up expectations to the max. Not saying advertising a book is a bad idea, but be aware of the expectations you are setting up.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it. That would seem to depend on the publisher, and the business arrangement, as to whether it really signals anything (though I suspect that often hiring managers might not know enough to correctly interpret the signal.) Obviously, if the book is a success and widely-known for its technical merit, that's a positive signal, but that's different than just getting a book published. Even where getting over the hurdles to get a book published signals something, there's a question of whether it signals something relevant to the job you are hiring for. The hurdles of getting a book published (where they exist at all, e.g., outside of what is essentially vanity publishing or a close approximation) aren't particularly similar hurdles to those encountered in most technical jobs even when the book is on a subject close to the job duties.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

> He kind of touches upon it, but there is a lot of value in being able to go into an interview and literally being able to say about a topic "I wrote the book on it." A lot of it depends on the publisher. If it is for example OReilly, I would be impressed. If it is Packt, I would not be impressed at all. Some publishers do a much better job of screening and providing editorial support and technical reviews so that if an author is published by them, I can have confidence that the author is a subject matter expert. Some publishers are little more than self-publishing and so I would not have confidence that the author was an expert.