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"Don't try to make a career out of optimizing the SQL queries to display a preference page on a line of business app at a company that no one has ever heard of.

• Trasmatta 6y ago
  Some of the most satisfying work I've done has been optimizing very difficult SQL queries for clients nobody has heard of. I guess I don't really care about optimizing my career in the way Patrick is suggesting.
  • nightski 6y ago
    It's a false dichotomy. You can work on deep technical problems and provide lots of value.
    • beforeolives 6y ago
      I think the question here is whether this value needs to be publicly visible.
    • Trasmatta 6y ago
      Those examples I was giving did provide lots of value, to the client. The section from the article was talking about optimizing for visibility. Deep technical problems with lots of value are not always visible, and I think it's fine to build a career around those types of things.
      • ac2u 6y ago
        Still don’t really understand what your objection here is. As the parent to your comment said: the OP never said don’t do it, they just said don’t stop once the code is checked in and follow up by pointing out the value to others incase it’s not obvious.
      • nightski 6y ago
        I wasn't disputing what you said, kind of agreeing with it actually. Although as a consultant for over a decade myself I have to make an effort to make sure my work is visible. I'm not sure I could lurk in the shadows with no one seeing the value I create and still get paid :)
        • yarcob 6y ago
          Do you actually get most of your work from promoting yourself to strangers via Github or similar? In my experience, if you do good work, it's usually not that hard to get more work even without a public showcase of your work. Your clients will come back the next time they need to get a job done. Your clients also tell others about you, and word-of-mouth is extremely valuable advertisement. I guess promoting yourself on Github and on personal blogs is one way to go about it, but real life personal relationships shouldn't be undervalued in my opinion. Most consultants I know have a surprisingly bare website.
  • tosh 6y ago
    a blog post about it might make a great complement
  • alisonkisk 6y ago
    Patrick uses his tech skills in service of marketing guru with a Personal Brand. What works for him isn't for everyone.
• Swizec 6y ago
  I think you misunderstand the thrust of that argument. It’s not the nameless company that’s the problem, it’s the business result of your work. What looks better on a resume? 1. I optimized SQL queries for Nameless Corp to improve admin interface load times by 20% 2. I optimized SQL queries for Nameless Corp to increase profits 20% If possible, always work on some version of option 2.
  • type_enthusiast 6y ago
    If the takeaway is, "never work on internal tools," I've worked at companies where the internal tools were more valuable than anything customer-facing. If you're great at optimizing SQL, probably just doing that in any place you can get your hands on will make a pretty big impact. Overall impact is more helpful than resume points, IME, especially when references are involved.
    • oblio 6y ago
      > If the takeaway is, "never work on internal tools," I've worked at companies where the internal tools were more valuable than anything customer-facing. Yes, but they're exceptions. > Overall impact is more helpful than resume points, IME, especially when references are involved. The vast majority of the best paying jobs out there (FAANG), don't care at all about references. It's a big world, it depends a lot in which circles you move around, I guess.
      • type_enthusiast 6y ago
        Disclaimer: I do work at a FAANG. I'm not sure what circles you're talking about. "References" in the traditional sense may not be an important thing. But certainly being able to back your resume claims – whether with skills from that experience, or with people who will vouch for you – is important. If it wasn't, we could all just put "Optimized SQL and improved profit 20%" (or anything else) on our resumes, no? I participate in interviews from time to time. I don't ask a lot of trivia-type algorithm questions, but I do try to size up where a candidate has invested their effort so far. Have they invested it in trying (and learning) to solve problems? Or have they invested in in padding their resume? I'll take the former over the latter every time, even if they don't have a bunch of brag-points on their resume. That's just me, though shrug
• alexc05 6y ago
  What's a funny coincidence is that I've been thinking about almost exactly this for a little while. Just in the last two weeks I decided to create a podcast where I interview the exact types of developers who optimize SQL inside business apps. In fact, literally just last night I recorded and uploaded (to YouTube and the various podcast platforms) episode zero. Not an actual interview yet, but a statement of purpose and a placeholder so I can hopefully have a small audience on release day. (I'm hoping for about 50 subs by the time I launch the first) I was 100% not going to promote on HN until after I had at least 10 episodes published... but fundamentally it was born out of a desire to attempt to solve for the "unsexy" programmer. Anyway: https://youtu.be/9mmgfxSeqPA https://youtu.be/9mmgfxSeqPA Or you can search for "Ship It" on your favorite podcast platform. In terms of feedback, any and all is welcome, though I've got a personal preference for constructive feedback as opposed to just telling me that my stupid face looks really stupid. :)
  • watermelon0 6y ago
    Sounds interesting. However, I already found two other podcasts with the same name. I have searched on Spotify and Castbox, but didn't find yours there.
    • alexc05 6y ago
      Thanks! I've been able to find it on a few platforms so far, but I'm distributing via anchor.fm https://anchor.fm/ship-it https://anchor.fm/ship-it I'll have to find a way to differentiate my ship-it from others for people searching. I'll probably have to rename it, but in the short term I'm going to let it ride. Better to focus on quality interviews for now. (I think) Edit: I just looked over the emails that anchor sent me and some of them say it could take as much as a week for the first listing to appear. It's probably not showing up because it was like 1am last night when I finally hit the publish button on a non-test episode for the first time. I'll keep an eye on this though. Thanks. It's the exact type of hiccup that had me not wanting to self-promote before I had 10 episodes online.
      • alexc05 6y ago
• hibikir 6y ago
  It's not that maintenance has no marketplace value, but that it's only really valuable when the system is on fire. I've optimized that kind of SQL statement, and it paid really well, but only because it was at a point where it was causing a whole lot of pain, so the fix provided CEO-visible relief. What is not a great use of your time is to preemptively fix issues like this, unless it's somewhere so system critical that engineering effort is going to be rewarded regardless. But even then, you might want to do something in a way that is easy to sell later in your career. You want to at least be able to say: Remember how <famous architect> sold his innovative system at <famous conference>, and HN wonder why this talk existed, as there's no way this solution could scale? Well, they were right, it didn't scale, and I was the one that replaced it with something good, piece by piece, without anything falling down. And that's the reason you don't get a lot of high quality maintenance work happening at most places. The vast majority of systems in the world are just not worth the engineering effort to build very well. And even in companies that can afford to do this kind of work, you will see a lot of effort spent shuffling engineers across projects, as a team that has high visibility tasks in a quarter might not have any the next.
• tibiahurried 6y ago
  This is exactly what makes the difference between a seasoned and experienced engineer vs "follow the latest nodejs lib kind of guy" ... I learned a lot exactly when doing non sexy stuff that nobody else wanted to do. For instance, when it comes to optimizing an obscure query and make the whole system run twice as fast ... you will learn DB internals, and how the DB engine heuristic works when determining whether to use or not and index etc .. All things that are now part of my senior experience and knowledge and for which I am paid much more than a junior :) My best advice would be : do the hard stuff, the stuff that people don't want to do. Make yourself valuable to the company. People will come and ask for you. That's the best way to learn and also have more leverage to ask for increase+stocks. Knowledge is power. Everyone can pickup any new shiny framework in just a couple of days. That's not hard.
• kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj 6y ago
  If you do unsexy work you will get paid unsexy money. If you have a passion for something thats great but if you want to earn a lot of money you will need to play the game.
• ianai 6y ago
  I would suspect the company that designed the software for your local power plant is either a huge mega corporation or their name is on the front of the building or both. It’s not like their work is niche to the point of being esoteric. It’s just not FAANG. Also not targeted to consumers.
  • bumby 6y ago
    You’d be surprised how much industrial automation is not built by relatively small contractors. To your point, they tend to use “mega-corp” systems (e.g., Rockwell Automation hardware) but the actual logic is often written by small companies that bid out the project (or are subcontracted to for various reasons not necessarily related to technical acumen). I haven’t personally worked o power plants but have been involved in various safety critical automation builds related to factories, hospitals, high energetic test stands etc. often, the code is maintained by a technician who isn’t either an engineer or classically trained computer scientist. Not to say those credentials are a must, but it makes more sense why the code I witnessed had so many bad practices in it
• nicbou 6y ago
  I worked on highly visible internal work. Improving your colleagues' quality of life can be highly visible.
• wvh 6y ago
  This is probably the main struggle of my professional life: to see the difference and find the balance between doing a Good Job and doing a Sellable Job. Creativity and perfection of craft versus efficiency and economy. This balance is one of the most important things to get right when evaluating prospective job environments, especially when you're more on the thorough end of the spectrum.
• dqpb 6y ago
  I think his point is that working on deep internals (rather than client facing products) is difficult to show off. I think this is true, because you would have to do extra work beyond what your being paid to do, to make it show-off-able. However, look at Brendan Gregg for example. He works on deep internals that would be very hard to show off without putting extra effort into sharing his knowledge. But since he does make that effort, he’s seen as an industry leader for his skill set.