Programmers: What To Do If You Get Fired | Hacker News Reader

Programmers: What To Do If You Get Fired

gilesbowkett.blogspot.com

78 pointspetercooper58 comments

This was great. I'm not commenting on the message (though I liked that too, he wrote enough caveats in there to make it responsible.)

I mean the writing was great. I laughed at least 3 times, and grinned most of the rest of it.

It's a really long sales letter. True.

But it also has at least three stories in there that are so entertaining that even if you're a bored millionaire taking a break from counting the vintage restored cars in your airport hangar, and need no career advice at all, you should still probably read the post.

(no affiliation w/Giles or his enterprises)

I've studied direct mail a little bit, and one of the more counterintuitive things is that generally long sales letters perform a lot better than short ones. I believe the recommended length for letters by mail - at least in the past - was 5-6 pages.

Perhaps it's people falling prey to a time-spent version of the sunk cost fallacy?

I kept seeing the title... I knew it was coming... I kept reading and reading. Bam, "give me money." It was very clickbank-esque in a way. An almost useless story because the part that you really want is being sold. We (programmers) wanted to know what to do if we get fired, not read a story about getting fired. I mean the message is there: "improve your job searching skills," but a 12 year old could advise that as a smart career move.

Furthermore, if a person must be advised to make a top-notch resume, or that having your name in google and not being associated with child pornography sites is a good idea; maybe they shouldn't be a programmer. Labeled: common sense... no amount of money can purchase that. Sure they get over one boundary and make it to the next obstacle, but where will their advisor be when its time to work as a team or develop a project? There's a certain amount of mathematics, logic, and the ability to find information on your own required in programming.

Then again programming these days is not the glorious lines of c and inline-assembly I imagined taking over the world while reading through the quakeworld source as a teenager.

It should also be noted that Giles works in Los Angeles. Having spent 5 years in LA as a developer, I can tell you companies there are absolutely desperate for talent.

Contrast this with a tech heavy area like Boston, where competition is greater. A number of my peers graduated with CS degrees and had to deliver packages for UPS to make ends meet.

Nobody in America is more mobile than recent college grads. And yet "a number" took jobs with UPS but none apparently thought to move to LA?

Seriously?

CA appears to be imploding. I went to a college in LA in the early 90s. I recall it with the warm fuzzy lens time provides, particularly in the winter, but the property values need to be heavily discounted by the government's debt, built-in long-term deficits, and basic insanity of being run by contradictory mandates. And they have not been, at least not yet.

Some people don't know about the opportunities.

Some people value being near family.

Some people are just afraid of change.

The entire discussion is making me want to finish an essay I started five months ago, when I left LA. But in short, there are up sides and down sides of relocating to an area with high demand; there's usually a reason for the demand.

I, for one, didn't know LA was like that. Granted, I also wasn't looking, but I can't think of one of my classmates that moved out there from here over in the East.

What a long-winded ad.

Yes, why is HN driving traffic to an ad?

Because Giles is a cult of personality. He's the Matt Lesko (http://bit.ly/cEUsK5) of Hacker News. You know every fiber of his being is lousy and watching him makes you a worse person, but his outrageous suits keep your eyes glued.

In other words, he's a linkbaiter.

Maybe it's an answer to the ad problem. Don't try to make content funded by ads, just make ads that look like content.

I agree with this, but I frame it differently:

You're going to make a lot of stuff. Some you will give away, some you will charge for. You pretty much HAVE to give _some_ stuff away not because we live in a post-Napster, open source apocalypse where everybody expects things to be free, but just because you need something to get people to give your idea/song/software a chance.

As I have a lot of friends in bands, I often come back to music: "You will make a lot of music. You will probably give most of your recordings away, with the exception of special packages now and then. You will probably almost always charge for your live performances, with the exception of a few special occasions. You will regularly make some thing related to your art and charge for it (screen-printed posters, sweathshirts, etc.)"

People who make any kind of intellectual property can basically put it in one of two buckets:

* stuff i will charge for

* stuff i won't charge for, but is used to attract attention/keep people feeling involved

The difference between the two isn't arbitrary, but it isn't exactly based on qualitative difference. It's mostly based on distribution, limitations of medium, and a stuff like that. You'll probably tend to give away stuff that's easy to pass around, and charge for stuff that's not. Not in a piracy-centric mindset, just thinking mostly of friction, etc. It's entirely possible the thing you charge for doesn't take more work to do than the things you don't charge for.

I don't see it, myself. He's selling a video file, and those move around like water.

It's true that video files aren't so hard to pass around. But it's way harder to pass videos around than a blog post links.

My main point is was related to your interesting "ads that look like content" observation:

That there can be little difference between the things that many people give away (ads), versus the things they sell, especially in terms of labor by the creator.

You know every fiber of his being is lousy and watching him makes you a worse person, but his outrageous suits keep your eyes glued.

Kinda harsh, no?

Have you read the first quarter of the article? If there were a Programmer's Tool Academy, he could just read that as his introduction speech.

Ok, yeah... but, as someone who actually writes long form sales pages, I'm impressed. He nailed the shit out of it. I bet he'll make a mint on this page.

I'm not; I didn't even make it to the end.

I saw the headline bolded(old trick) two+ times and knew this guy wanted money. I almost closed the page then, but read on for the sake of procrastinating learning objective-c and getting to post this comment.

He's perfected the art of clickbank. I was waiting for the 2d photo of the woman to pop up in the corner and audio to start blaring over my speakers on why his advice would be pure ROI once I reached the first buy button.

I read it as a sort of parody. The point of the article wasn't to sell the video but to demonstrate how to sell the video. It's a lesson on advertising in the form of an add. Very clever.

Some things were a little over done, but I'd assume that it's to emphasise techniques.

And yet by doing so, he sells the video. Unless we see another article pop up in the next few days "selling the video," I think we have to assume this was it.

Wow. I don't think even Zed Shaw has ever gotten fired in such a spectacular manner.

Abrasive personalities can sometimes be a good thing, but "I've got getting new jobs so well figured-out that not even behavior which was borderline insane ever stopped me from getting a new job." is probably a huge warning sign.

Giles Bowkett is funny, outrageous, and entertaining. His brand of humor probably isn't for everyone but to me it's a sign of someone who's imaginative enough and not afraid to think things through without being constrained by convention. I think I'd like working with him.

Also, he DID state clearly that the cream-soda-throwing incident was unacceptable. Admitting to and learning from your mistakes is almost better than not making them.

He does sound interesting, and like a fun coworker.

However, you must admit that if working with him, you must update your prior probability of "work being interrupted by a SWAT team and an not-coincidental family of rabid ferrets."

I gotta be honest and go against the pack here: the cream soda incident is all sorts of hilarious, that alone made me give the guy several points.

I could never bring myself to fire someone over something as ridiculous as that. It's way too freaking funny to take real action against.

Perhaps my appreciation for that sort of thing is yet another reason why I've never gotten along with normal people in the rest of the business world...

Some of us don't like corporate monoculture. Give me insanity any day over the rat race.

The most important thing I gleaned was that next time I'm arrested in New Mexico, I'll try to be very, very, clear, that I'm a non-smoker.

I only read 1/4 of it, but definitely enjoyed the read :)

Have worked with a few fellows just like described in this post. Temper tantrums, throwing chairs, yelling and verbally hostile, etc.…

Would never hire somebody with that type of track record.

Smarts and programming chops is good and all, but one needs to "play well with others".

I don't know about hiring him as a programmer, but I would definitely hire him to write sales copy.

The paragraph that hooked me has not been addressed in other comments. That is:

  Most programmers I know seem to respond to job searches
  by learning new programming languages. The logic there is
  pretty weak. "I can't get a job with a language I know, so
  why don't I see instead if I can get a job with a language
  I don't know." Learning new languages is a good thing, but
  there's a time and a place for everything. It's never a
  matter of your skills being stale; there are still COBOL
  jobs out there. If you're good at programming, and you
  can't get a job, the skill to improve is not your
  programming skill but your job-getting skill. If you've got
  a task that requires two skills, and you have one of those
  skills down solid, but you suck at the other skill, the
  thing to do is not spend even more time perfecting the
  skill you already have down solid.

As someone looking into programming jobs after a long period of not doing too much programming, I'm interested in what people think about this sentiment.

That paragraph kind of struck me too. I know I have thought that I need to learn new programming languages in order to get a job. Its hard not to think that when the majority of programming jobs have very very specific requirements on languages and technologies that you MUST KNOW in order to apply, despite the reality of the skills of the person hired.

Giles is commenting in this thread, but his most recent account got hellbanned 2 days ago — and that's at least his 4th hellbanning. He didn't even do anything this time.

You'll have to turn on [showdead] in your profile to see them.

Why in the world would someone want to be coached by a jerk who refuses to work and assaults people who disagree with him!

This reminds me of how we talk about identifying talent and how it is difficult in the software industry.

Here is a hint: You might want to ask people, “Have you been fired for any of the reasons Giles Bowkett has been fired?” If the answer is yes, you're probably better off not hiring.

Ah, the long-winded ad marketing approach in action... Being highly entertaining also meant I read it even though I have no intention of obtaining, nor need of, the product at this time. Thanks, Giles.

There actually is something worth reading in that long post (starting around paragraph 10).

That being said, the author's "personality" is very transparent through the whole post. Need I say more?

The video linked from the post (http://vimeo.com/9945353) was very disappointing. It promises 'PageRank in 5 lines of Ruby', but delivers nothing more than the mathematical definition of PageRank rewritten in pseudo-code. Not helpful at all.

I'm calling it pseudo-code because it can't possibly work as written, as it would just recurse infinitely. Your time is better spent reading the actual paper:

infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

It looks very similar to Timothy Ferris brainquicken product presentation : http://brainquicken.com/main/Brain-Quick.html

good god i'm not reading all that - anyone have a summary?

"I have gotten fired for many ridiculous things. I am good at still getting hired. Buy my movie on how to do this."

Summary: It's essentially a very long ad for a self-help-style presentation about being awesome/valuable so you get the awesome jobs. It is reasonably entertaining in parts, though.

Data points:

* As pointed out by others, the people hiring programmers may not be so hot at it

* As pointed out by others, the exact same skills can get you a really cool job, or a really bad job.

* _Getting a job_ it a totally different skill than _Doing a job_

* Regardless of your programming skills (which i'm not here to talk about), i may be able to help you with your _job getting skills_ .

* New Mexico: Wack

Personal anecdotes:

* i got fired for a bad reason that wasn't my fault

* i got fired for a good reason that was my fault

* i got fired once because of a combination of my own issues and the innate lameness of an environment

* One time some crazy circumstances beyond my control, combined with a mild legal infraction on my part, led to hijinx

The message:

* Being appealing isn't magic.

* Being found isn't magic

* I'm not awesome, just skilled

* I can help you get the same skills with one of three services you can pay for

* don't just believe me, here are some examples

Hmm, this is not a tongue-in-cheek poke at internet marketers?

I want my time back

Sorry - take it up with the submitter.

My question is this: how do you figure out which assets to create?

I have picked it works like so: 1. Is there something that annoys you, or a crazy idea that comes into your head? 2. Actually do something about it, unlike all the people out there who don't.

This is why the Ruby (esp. Rails) community only works for startups that pay in "equity."

Down-mod if you want, but I've been running a 20 employee company for more than six years and have recently moved contract work from PHP to Python due to the unprofessionalism in the Ruby community (I would have preferred Ruby if it had a better scene).

Our internal products are also mostly PHP or Python. Same reason.

Here is my personal anecdote:

All the flaming of other language communities has turned me a bit off Python -- your comment here is an example.

Disclaimer: I haven't written a page of Ruby code but read a book or two, if I change language environment again it will probably be something functional.

(Please keep the language wars on slashdot, or something. :-( Too low information/noise ratio.)

Edit: Idiom in better English.

You're more likely to get downmodded because your first premise is provably false.

I'm sorry you ran into unprofessional people in the Ruby community, and you're perfectly within your rights to use whatever technology best suits you and your business, but comments like this are inflammatory and counterproductive.

It's the facial hair. If Matz and his followers had more facial hair, the Ruby scene would rock. I know he may be doing the best he can, but the fact remains: programming languages are awesome in proportion to the beardiness of their creators and cheerleaders. K&R? Check. Guido? Check. John McCarthy? Check. Wall? Moustache but no beard, so half-sucky but tolerable. Stroustrup? Trimmed down a lot, so good but not truly awesome. The Lua guy? Worse than Matz. Java, PHP, and JavaScript? You can see the faces! The skin!!!11! And let's not forget COBOL, the only language to develop actual estrogen poisoning.

What's the beard coverage fraction at your company?

In defense of Larry Wall's moustache, it's awesome in a way that either Sonny Bono or Thomas Magnum could be proud of.

His moustache needs no defending. It is indeed awesome. It's just not a beard.

Reminds me of a scene from the TV series "Cheers". Norm is at the bar.

"Jesus. Socrates. Plato. What did they have?"

The bartender shrugs.

"I'll tell you. Sandals, that's what. Most all your great thinkers had great footwear."

Beards and sandals? Could be the basis for the next programming evolution.

The first thing you will need to get started with Emacs is a beard. --Wilhelm Bierbaum, Dec. 22 2009

http://twitter.com/wilhelmbierbaum/status/6936568390

You see unprofessionalism. I see creativity.

Fortunately, you moved from PHP to another good language - most of us in the Ruby world have a lot of appreciation for Python. You never hear good Ruby people badmouthing Python. Programming language selection doesn't have to be based on ad hominem.

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