5 ms·

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

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.
- haswell 6y ago
  Disclaimer: I haven't written a book. > Also, you sound overly modest to me. This was my reaction as well. Absolutely no offense to the parent comment, but this sounds like a combination of being overly modest + getting bitten by dumb behaviors by bad companies. There's also a big difference between: - Strut into the interview. Drop a copy of your book on the table. "I literally wrote the book - hire me" And - "Tell me about yourself" ... "Well, I'm bla bla bla, passionate about xyz, oh, and passionate to the point that I wrote a book about xyz if you're interested in the details" If you're an arrogant ass, yeah, the book is a liability. But unless you really dislike the thing you wrote and want to squash it, the fact that you wrote a book at all, much less the subject, says something about you as a person. Others in this thread have talked about the positive signals this sends so I won't re-hash those here.
  - brendangregg 6y ago
    Right; the person saying "I literally wrote the book - hire me" is saying it matters most, and I think that approach is likely to backfire. There are multiple problems with that attitude, including: 1) You probably aren't hired to write books, so what matters most is other things you'll be doing. 2) There are really good books and really bad books, so saying you wrote _a_ book doesn't carry the weight you may think. Was it good?
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      I think the problem is for most technical areas and for most technical books the writer has not literally written THE book on the subject, they have at best written A book on the subject - of people who have written the book on the subject I can think of, off the top of my head: Donald Knuth Harold Abelson and the Sussmans - a few others but you get the picture, most subjects do not have a definitive book.
    - jacques_chester 6y ago
      > You probably aren't hired to write books, so what matters most is other things you'll be doing. This is true, but some employers will allow you to write on company time. As Kleppman notes, value created by books squirts everywhere, only some of it onto the author, which can be distinct from value landing on their employers. I've been working on Knative in Action for the last year because Pivotal (now VMware) liked the idea that it would happen under their flag. (Your books are quite excellent, by the way.)
yroc92 6y ago
A prototypical Hacker News reply.
- ahmedalsudani 6y ago
  I don’t think you realize who the author of that reply is. There’s nothing HN typical about him :)
  - bluGill 6y ago
    I don't know either. His history shows some extensive knowledge about the types of things I'd expect readers of hacker news to know. Or course there are a lot of beginners, but the goal is to discuss things people like him are interested in. I aspire to write posts as helpful and detailed as his comment history shows.
    - freedomben 6y ago
      He's got some creds: http://www.brendangregg.com/ http://www.brendangregg.com/
    - kristopolous 6y ago
      He's a programmer with a Wikipedia page. There's like what? Maybe 60 of those? I've long ago accepted I'd never make that list. If it ever happened I'd probably commit myself to an asylum immediately because it'd be 1000x more likely I had actually finally cracked and started hallucinating things. Actually let's be real. Being a famous programmer is probably within my reach. I lack the discipline, focus, and dedication to spend the right amount of time on the right parts of the right projects. If this is possible for me to fundamentally address and within my capacity (still questionable) than doing things of deep impact is probably feasible. Even if it isn't, I should do it anyway. I avoided children and marriage so I'd never have to choose safety over taking risks. So, take, more, risks. Now is the only time there ever will be. I should print out those last 2 paragraphs and read it aloud in front of my bathroom mirror every day.
    - shaklee3 6y ago
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
To give a different perspective: I co-authored a technical book 19 years ago. It is listed on my resume, but i don’t mention it at interviews because it was so long ago. Last year at a job interview, the interviewer told me he still had my book. I got the job.
bluGill 6y ago
If someone has a problem they probably are seeking you out because you wrote the book, in which case you already have the job (unless HR discovers something bad) and the purpose of the interview is to convince you to take the job not the other way round! They already know you wrote the book and are hoping your pay isn't too much. This is the most valuable reason to write a book for most authors (there are other good reasons to write a book, but the rest typically don't produce $$$). When the above doesn't apply you still need them to know you wrote the book because sometimes they will look up the book and a good book will overcome your bad interview. The exception to the above is when you are bored of the topic and are interviewing for something completely different. In that case you hide it because they might assume you will leave for a better job in your field latter - after all you wrote the book in something else so you must be valuable.
zerkten 6y ago
> 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. This is a real problem. People writing some really bad quality tech books from certain publishers. I'm not going to trash the publishers because some of the authors care about writing good books (rather than being able to say they wrote something) and do it with little editorial help. They produce something which would have been better in other circumstances.
dhruvkar 6y ago
The book would open doors to GET TO the interview, probably not much past that -- exactly for the reasons you stated.
- brendangregg 6y ago
  Yes, I'd think books can help open the interview door. But then it's about proving you can do the job.
freedomben 6y ago
> 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. I am routinely amazed at the arrogance shown by interviewers. Even people that are usual humble and great to work with get in that position of authority and judgment and suddenly act different. It's a very disappointing aspect of human nature.
kevstev 6y ago
>I'm pretty sure if I showed up to a performance engineering job 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. Heh- you are quite accomplished I see from some googling. And I have to be honest, I fail to see how having an Addison Wesley book under your name in any context could be seen as a negative- the guys I was referring to were writing "Learn the MEAN stack in 21 days" type of books. But yeah I of course agree that you don't slam a copy down in the opening of the interview and try to use the fact that your name is on it as your primary selling point- its really more to get you in the door and have people reach out to you about interesting opportunities you might otherwise not have found out about. You might just be running in much more intense circles than I am, but the number of people who have written a technical book is small enough that I have ran across only a handful in my career and my reaction was much more about surprise and delight than worrying about the motives behind it, but YMMV I guess.
- brendangregg 6y ago
  The problem is encountering a hiring manager who treats book writing as a red flag: perhaps the candidate is more interested in self promotion and vanity projects than doing real work; perhaps they are too "academic" and don't have real experience; perhaps their book is one of these trash books that is nothing more than the open source docs (that the author didn't write) hastily thrown together; etc. That's not to say the candidate won't get the job, but that they get grilled harder in the interview to overcome these suspicions. I only mentioned this in the first place as a counterpoint to the idea that books may have a lot of value in an interview. I think it has value in _getting_ the interview, but you might find the interview is now a little bit harder. And thinking that your book matters most may sound too arrogant. I have recommended that people write books over the years (I'm not anti-book!): I just wouldn't list the interview as a perk. A big perk is getting to help people worldwide (my books have been translated into other languages), including those who don't have access to bay area conferences or other local experts. Another perk is assembling a technical review team of fellow experts and working on the draft with them, listing to their feedback and learning from their experiences to improve the book.
zacharycohn 6y ago
There are ways to say you wrote a book without being arrogant about it.
mobattah 6y ago
Brendan, I attended a talk you gave at AWS Re:Invent 2019. You need some serious, serious help. No company should ever be speaking to you like that. You should be showing companies the door, not the other way around. Early on in my career I learned most tech companies are absolute garbage and are not worth working for. You're worth a lot more than they are, brother.
- brendangregg 6y ago
  Thanks for attending my talk and the comment! I hope you've had a chance to run some BPF tools and get some performance wins. :)
shaklee3 6y ago
For what it's worth, your name alone has become quite famous in the performance world, and that's due to your blog posts and books. I would be a bit shocked if an interviewer for that field didn't know you.

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.

haswell 6y ago
Disclaimer: I haven't written a book. > Also, you sound overly modest to me. This was my reaction as well. Absolutely no offense to the parent comment, but this sounds like a combination of being overly modest + getting bitten by dumb behaviors by bad companies. There's also a big difference between: - Strut into the interview. Drop a copy of your book on the table. "I literally wrote the book - hire me" And - "Tell me about yourself" ... "Well, I'm bla bla bla, passionate about xyz, oh, and passionate to the point that I wrote a book about xyz if you're interested in the details" If you're an arrogant ass, yeah, the book is a liability. But unless you really dislike the thing you wrote and want to squash it, the fact that you wrote a book at all, much less the subject, says something about you as a person. Others in this thread have talked about the positive signals this sends so I won't re-hash those here.
- brendangregg 6y ago
  Right; the person saying "I literally wrote the book - hire me" is saying it matters most, and I think that approach is likely to backfire. There are multiple problems with that attitude, including: 1) You probably aren't hired to write books, so what matters most is other things you'll be doing. 2) There are really good books and really bad books, so saying you wrote _a_ book doesn't carry the weight you may think. Was it good?
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    I think the problem is for most technical areas and for most technical books the writer has not literally written THE book on the subject, they have at best written A book on the subject - of people who have written the book on the subject I can think of, off the top of my head: Donald Knuth Harold Abelson and the Sussmans - a few others but you get the picture, most subjects do not have a definitive book.
  - jacques_chester 6y ago
    > You probably aren't hired to write books, so what matters most is other things you'll be doing. This is true, but some employers will allow you to write on company time. As Kleppman notes, value created by books squirts everywhere, only some of it onto the author, which can be distinct from value landing on their employers. I've been working on Knative in Action for the last year because Pivotal (now VMware) liked the idea that it would happen under their flag. (Your books are quite excellent, by the way.)

yroc92 6y ago

A prototypical Hacker News reply.

ahmedalsudani 6y ago
I don’t think you realize who the author of that reply is. There’s nothing HN typical about him :)
- bluGill 6y ago
  I don't know either. His history shows some extensive knowledge about the types of things I'd expect readers of hacker news to know. Or course there are a lot of beginners, but the goal is to discuss things people like him are interested in. I aspire to write posts as helpful and detailed as his comment history shows.
  - freedomben 6y ago
    He's got some creds: http://www.brendangregg.com/ http://www.brendangregg.com/
  - kristopolous 6y ago
    He's a programmer with a Wikipedia page. There's like what? Maybe 60 of those? I've long ago accepted I'd never make that list. If it ever happened I'd probably commit myself to an asylum immediately because it'd be 1000x more likely I had actually finally cracked and started hallucinating things. Actually let's be real. Being a famous programmer is probably within my reach. I lack the discipline, focus, and dedication to spend the right amount of time on the right parts of the right projects. If this is possible for me to fundamentally address and within my capacity (still questionable) than doing things of deep impact is probably feasible. Even if it isn't, I should do it anyway. I avoided children and marriage so I'd never have to choose safety over taking risks. So, take, more, risks. Now is the only time there ever will be. I should print out those last 2 paragraphs and read it aloud in front of my bathroom mirror every day.
  - shaklee3 6y ago

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago

To give a different perspective: I co-authored a technical book 19 years ago. It is listed on my resume, but i don’t mention it at interviews because it was so long ago. Last year at a job interview, the interviewer told me he still had my book. I got the job.

bluGill 6y ago

If someone has a problem they probably are seeking you out because you wrote the book, in which case you already have the job (unless HR discovers something bad) and the purpose of the interview is to convince you to take the job not the other way round! They already know you wrote the book and are hoping your pay isn't too much. This is the most valuable reason to write a book for most authors (there are other good reasons to write a book, but the rest typically don't produce $$$). When the above doesn't apply you still need them to know you wrote the book because sometimes they will look up the book and a good book will overcome your bad interview. The exception to the above is when you are bored of the topic and are interviewing for something completely different. In that case you hide it because they might assume you will leave for a better job in your field latter - after all you wrote the book in something else so you must be valuable.

zerkten 6y ago

> 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. This is a real problem. People writing some really bad quality tech books from certain publishers. I'm not going to trash the publishers because some of the authors care about writing good books (rather than being able to say they wrote something) and do it with little editorial help. They produce something which would have been better in other circumstances.

dhruvkar 6y ago

The book would open doors to GET TO the interview, probably not much past that -- exactly for the reasons you stated.

brendangregg 6y ago
Yes, I'd think books can help open the interview door. But then it's about proving you can do the job.

freedomben 6y ago

> 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. I am routinely amazed at the arrogance shown by interviewers. Even people that are usual humble and great to work with get in that position of authority and judgment and suddenly act different. It's a very disappointing aspect of human nature.

kevstev 6y ago

>I'm pretty sure if I showed up to a performance engineering job 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. Heh- you are quite accomplished I see from some googling. And I have to be honest, I fail to see how having an Addison Wesley book under your name in any context could be seen as a negative- the guys I was referring to were writing "Learn the MEAN stack in 21 days" type of books. But yeah I of course agree that you don't slam a copy down in the opening of the interview and try to use the fact that your name is on it as your primary selling point- its really more to get you in the door and have people reach out to you about interesting opportunities you might otherwise not have found out about. You might just be running in much more intense circles than I am, but the number of people who have written a technical book is small enough that I have ran across only a handful in my career and my reaction was much more about surprise and delight than worrying about the motives behind it, but YMMV I guess.

brendangregg 6y ago
The problem is encountering a hiring manager who treats book writing as a red flag: perhaps the candidate is more interested in self promotion and vanity projects than doing real work; perhaps they are too "academic" and don't have real experience; perhaps their book is one of these trash books that is nothing more than the open source docs (that the author didn't write) hastily thrown together; etc. That's not to say the candidate won't get the job, but that they get grilled harder in the interview to overcome these suspicions. I only mentioned this in the first place as a counterpoint to the idea that books may have a lot of value in an interview. I think it has value in _getting_ the interview, but you might find the interview is now a little bit harder. And thinking that your book matters most may sound too arrogant. I have recommended that people write books over the years (I'm not anti-book!): I just wouldn't list the interview as a perk. A big perk is getting to help people worldwide (my books have been translated into other languages), including those who don't have access to bay area conferences or other local experts. Another perk is assembling a technical review team of fellow experts and working on the draft with them, listing to their feedback and learning from their experiences to improve the book.

zacharycohn 6y ago

There are ways to say you wrote a book without being arrogant about it.

mobattah 6y ago

Brendan, I attended a talk you gave at AWS Re:Invent 2019. You need some serious, serious help. No company should ever be speaking to you like that. You should be showing companies the door, not the other way around. Early on in my career I learned most tech companies are absolute garbage and are not worth working for. You're worth a lot more than they are, brother.

brendangregg 6y ago
Thanks for attending my talk and the comment! I hope you've had a chance to run some BPF tools and get some performance wins. :)

shaklee3 6y ago

For what it's worth, your name alone has become quite famous in the performance world, and that's due to your blog posts and books. I would be a bit shocked if an interviewer for that field didn't know you.