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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 soun

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.)
  - cnst 6y ago
    The main difference is the reason that a senior engineer or VP gets hired. It is not to write code by themselves. It is to help other people do it. For this, being a walking encyclopedia certainly helps. Of course, there's probably a correlation with being able to solve the programming puzzles in such a situation, too.

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.)
- cnst 6y ago
  The main difference is the reason that a senior engineer or VP gets hired. It is not to write code by themselves. It is to help other people do it. For this, being a walking encyclopedia certainly helps. Of course, there's probably a correlation with being able to solve the programming puzzles in such a situation, too.