4 ms·

Unsolicited Advice is a Valuable Clue

30 points by brm 18y ago

albertcardona 18y ago
In even shorter than the article: when interviewing for a job and you are given advice for free, the advice describes how it is to work there.
- inerte 18y ago
  Can we please stop with the one-liners article summaries? Pretty please?... I've read the thing, summaries just waste screen space and my time... What happened anyway in the last week that this is becoming so popular?
  - mechanical_fish 18y ago
    They waste very little screen space and time (by design). And they can help those of us who always read comments first. Just because you don't like them doesn't mean nobody likes them. What really wastes time is clicking through some link and reading five paragraphs of something that turns out to either be linkbait, or something that many of us have seen a dozen times before. Of course, many people think that the solution to this problem should be "never submit something that's similar to something that's been submitted before", but that turns out to be wrong, because new people arrive all the time, and they need an education in the basics. And the basics keep getting updated with new examples and new variants -- sometimes I really would rather read a restatement of something Fred Brooks said in 1978 than the Fred Brooks itself. But sometimes I wouldn't, because I'm too busy. Perhaps the rise of these summaries demonstrates that submission titles aren't being crafted well, or that the technique for linking to stories is missing a "teaser" feature. Ever notice how many magazine stories have both a clever title and a short, one-or-two sentence teaser that talks a bit about what the story is actually about? (Nonfiction book titles utilize a variant of this strategy: a clever first title and a descriptive subtitle, separated by a colon, as in "Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West"). Many submissions have clever titles, but often what we really want is the teasers.
    - ja2ke 18y ago
      When I read those summaries I feel like I'm reading HN's equivalent of "first post." They also often read less like true summaries and more like one sentence newspaper movie reviews, which, coupled with the "first post" feeling, makes me question people's motivation for posting them.
      - albertcardona 18y ago
        I wanted to encourage people to read a well-thought blog post on job interviews and the meaning of free advice given there. And yes: I posted a comment because without comments I wouldn't read a link in the first place, and others may think likewise. So that's my motivation.
        ja2ke 18y ago
        That's fine. So many of the one sentence summaries (including the one for this article) read to me as being very dismissive, or as if the author hopes that their comment will encapsulate so much that you can glean the information or "learn the lesson" of the parent article through the summary, and now don't need to bother reading the post. If that wasn't your intent, then awesome, points to you. It is definitely how they almost always read in my mind, though. I know the HN community is growing and the spread of topics pushed to the front page is expanding, but the original point of letting a user type in a headline and then letting the community vote up interesting ones should in theory at least alleviate the need for a summary. I compared the summaries to "first post" because they often feel like someone is posting them simply to post. On HN you obviously couldn't "post for the sake of posting" with an actual First Post, but typing up a sentence summarizing the first or last paragraph of the post is probably close to the bottom of an innocuous "post just because you can" contribution.
      - mechanical_fish 18y ago
        First: Obviously even a one-sentence capsule review contains far more relevant information than the words "first post". They are not at all the same thing. Second: If 200 new movies came out every day, the one-sentence newspaper movie review would be a much more highly respected genre. Third: What does motivation have to do with it? If a cult of Cthulhu worshipers arrives on the site and tells me that their god demands that they provide neat capsule summaries of content as a guide for those of us who are deciding what to read, why should I care what their motivation is? Unless it turns out that reading their prose brings me face to face with a hitherto nameless existential dread that will haunt me throughout my days, in which case I'll probably downmod them. [1] Finally: If someone posts an inaccurate capsule summary, rebut it. Such an exchange could end up being more interesting than the article itself. The reason I come to HN is to watch HN community members react to things. --- [1] It is also important that no goats be harmed in the making of Hacker News. Their blood donations must be strictly monitored by ASPCA veterinarians.
  - jodrellblank 18y ago
    One of my recent comments was a summary of a post. I think it's my most voted up comment of my entire time at HN - a post wherein I went out of my way to try and add near enough nothing at all. It suggests that people value me not saying more than saying. Compared to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466917 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466917 which took some effort. No votes at all and one reply which managed to avoid everything I wanted to talk about. When writing said summary comment, I started off wanting to say "Look look, you have to look at that, it's brilliant, it's not the usual "my opinion about X" blog post!", but a summary seemed more fitting. On the iPhone, I read comments first because they load and render quicker, and like concise summaries. It's not extra content as such, but it is a contribution.
- swombat 18y ago
  The above comment is a summary of the article. (there, even shorter)
swombat 18y ago
No one’s happiest at work. Ever. A minor nit-pick perhaps, but I am happiest when I'm working. Fair enough, I work for myself, from home, on my own business (and other endeavours), but I'm happiest when I'm doing that. I can go on holiday, and enjoy those, but nothing feels quite as good as a quality day of hard, productive work.
- fraying 18y ago
  Heh. I almost qualified that to say "unless it's their company." But since the article is for those interviewing, it's a given that it's not their company, so that happiness won't be theirs.
- jodrellblank 18y ago
  Where was I reading about a study showing that whatever people said, their observed behaviour shows a lot of (most?) people show more signs of happiness at work than not at work?

30 points by brm 18y ago

In even shorter than the article: when interviewing for a job and you are given advice for free, the advice describes how it is to work there.

inerte 18y ago
Can we please stop with the one-liners article summaries? Pretty please?... I've read the thing, summaries just waste screen space and my time... What happened anyway in the last week that this is becoming so popular?
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  They waste very little screen space and time (by design). And they can help those of us who always read comments first. Just because you don't like them doesn't mean nobody likes them. What really wastes time is clicking through some link and reading five paragraphs of something that turns out to either be linkbait, or something that many of us have seen a dozen times before. Of course, many people think that the solution to this problem should be "never submit something that's similar to something that's been submitted before", but that turns out to be wrong, because new people arrive all the time, and they need an education in the basics. And the basics keep getting updated with new examples and new variants -- sometimes I really would rather read a restatement of something Fred Brooks said in 1978 than the Fred Brooks itself. But sometimes I wouldn't, because I'm too busy. Perhaps the rise of these summaries demonstrates that submission titles aren't being crafted well, or that the technique for linking to stories is missing a "teaser" feature. Ever notice how many magazine stories have both a clever title and a short, one-or-two sentence teaser that talks a bit about what the story is actually about? (Nonfiction book titles utilize a variant of this strategy: a clever first title and a descriptive subtitle, separated by a colon, as in "Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West"). Many submissions have clever titles, but often what we really want is the teasers.
  - ja2ke 18y ago
    When I read those summaries I feel like I'm reading HN's equivalent of "first post." They also often read less like true summaries and more like one sentence newspaper movie reviews, which, coupled with the "first post" feeling, makes me question people's motivation for posting them.
    - albertcardona 18y ago
      I wanted to encourage people to read a well-thought blog post on job interviews and the meaning of free advice given there. And yes: I posted a comment because without comments I wouldn't read a link in the first place, and others may think likewise. So that's my motivation.
      - ja2ke 18y ago
        That's fine. So many of the one sentence summaries (including the one for this article) read to me as being very dismissive, or as if the author hopes that their comment will encapsulate so much that you can glean the information or "learn the lesson" of the parent article through the summary, and now don't need to bother reading the post. If that wasn't your intent, then awesome, points to you. It is definitely how they almost always read in my mind, though. I know the HN community is growing and the spread of topics pushed to the front page is expanding, but the original point of letting a user type in a headline and then letting the community vote up interesting ones should in theory at least alleviate the need for a summary. I compared the summaries to "first post" because they often feel like someone is posting them simply to post. On HN you obviously couldn't "post for the sake of posting" with an actual First Post, but typing up a sentence summarizing the first or last paragraph of the post is probably close to the bottom of an innocuous "post just because you can" contribution.
    - mechanical_fish 18y ago
      First: Obviously even a one-sentence capsule review contains far more relevant information than the words "first post". They are not at all the same thing. Second: If 200 new movies came out every day, the one-sentence newspaper movie review would be a much more highly respected genre. Third: What does motivation have to do with it? If a cult of Cthulhu worshipers arrives on the site and tells me that their god demands that they provide neat capsule summaries of content as a guide for those of us who are deciding what to read, why should I care what their motivation is? Unless it turns out that reading their prose brings me face to face with a hitherto nameless existential dread that will haunt me throughout my days, in which case I'll probably downmod them. [1] Finally: If someone posts an inaccurate capsule summary, rebut it. Such an exchange could end up being more interesting than the article itself. The reason I come to HN is to watch HN community members react to things. --- [1] It is also important that no goats be harmed in the making of Hacker News. Their blood donations must be strictly monitored by ASPCA veterinarians.
- jodrellblank 18y ago
  One of my recent comments was a summary of a post. I think it's my most voted up comment of my entire time at HN - a post wherein I went out of my way to try and add near enough nothing at all. It suggests that people value me not saying more than saying. Compared to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466917 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466917 which took some effort. No votes at all and one reply which managed to avoid everything I wanted to talk about. When writing said summary comment, I started off wanting to say "Look look, you have to look at that, it's brilliant, it's not the usual "my opinion about X" blog post!", but a summary seemed more fitting. On the iPhone, I read comments first because they load and render quicker, and like concise summaries. It's not extra content as such, but it is a contribution.
swombat 18y ago
The above comment is a summary of the article. (there, even shorter)

swombat 18y ago

No one’s happiest at work. Ever. A minor nit-pick perhaps, but I am happiest when I'm working. Fair enough, I work for myself, from home, on my own business (and other endeavours), but I'm happiest when I'm doing that. I can go on holiday, and enjoy those, but nothing feels quite as good as a quality day of hard, productive work.

fraying 18y ago
Heh. I almost qualified that to say "unless it's their company." But since the article is for those interviewing, it's a given that it's not their company, so that happiness won't be theirs.
jodrellblank 18y ago
Where was I reading about a study showing that whatever people said, their observed behaviour shows a lot of (most?) people show more signs of happiness at work than not at work?