I was interviewing for a job in a startup last year. The interview was going well then I was asked what have you launched. I wasn’t able to say anything and that was the end of what could have been a partnership.  I have to remind myself that good enough is good enough and that making complicated things are hard and thus strive for simplicity. For a lot of programmers simplicity is harder than complexity. Here are a few advice on getting to completion, advice I extremely need to become a success.

4 Simple Principles of Getting to Completion

Simplify to get it done.

“If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, then this is the best season of your life.” ~Wu-Men

Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter.

When I hear about a great idea that a friend has, I get excited. I can’t wait to see that idea become reality.

Then I ask about the idea a few months later, and it often is not one bit closer to completion.

Ideas stop short of becoming reality, and projects seem to drag on endlessly, because of one thing: complexity.

via 4 Simple Principles of Getting to Completion | Zen Habits.

Wow we are being penalized for our reliability.  I have a strange feeling that data analyst / programmer / consultant would be closer to doctors/lawyers than engineers.

The newly organizing groups could call themselves professions, and not simply resurrected medieval guilds, because their members’ mastery of a new body of knowledge gave them claims to a competence beyond the amateur’s reach. Doctors could take advantage of the new breakthroughs in germ theory and anesthesia, engineers of refinements in industrial technology. “A strong profession requires a real technical skill that produces demonstrable results and can be taught,” a sociologist named Randall Collins wrote in a history of educational credentials. “the skill must be difficult enough to require training and reliable enough to produce results. But it cannot be too reliable enough to produce results. But it cannot be too reliable, for then outsiders can judge work by its results.” Indeed, when historians try to explain why engineers have never become as pretigious and independent as doctors or lawyers, one of their answers is that the engineer’s competence is too clearly on display. (When a patient dies, the doctor might not to be blame, but if a bridge, falls down, the engineer is.)

via The Case Against Credentialism – James Fallows.

I’m officially scared!

The persistent devaluation of experience and skills. Any developer can tell you that not all C or PHP or Java programmers are created equal; some are vastly more productive or creative. However, unless or until there is a way to explicitly demonstrate the productivity differential between a good programmer and a mediocre one, inexperienced or nontechnical hiring managers tend to look at resumes with an eye for youth, under the “more bang for the buck” theory. Cheaper young 'uns will work longer hours and produce more code. The very concept of viewing experience as an asset for raising productivity is a nonfactor — much to the detriment of the developer workplace.

According to one 20-year telecommunications veteran who asked to remain anonymous, when high-tech companies began incorporating more business-oriented managers into their upper tiers, these managers were not able to accurately assess the merits of developers with know-how: “It is nearly impossible to judge quality work if you never did it yourself,” he says. “The latest fad was the idiotic belief that management was generic, a skill that could be taught at school and could then be sent anywhere to do any management job.”

Another way in which experience is actually seen as a flaw rather than a virtue: Hiring managers are unable to map how 10 years of experience in one programming language can inform or enhance a programmer's months of experience with a newer technology. Instead, they dismiss the decade of experience as a sign of inflexibility or being unable to keep up — an assumption that penalizes IT pros for being present during the last 10 years of their jobs.

As former Intel CEO Craig Barrett once said, “The half-life of an engineer, software or hardware, is only a few years.” With this kind of attitude at the top, there's no cultural incentive to foster a hiring strategy that rewards experience or longevity.

via The painful truth about age discrimination in tech.

I got terminated as a tester on my first job out of college. I was out of work for 3 months. Although 3 months was a relatively short time compared to other people’s experience it was too long for me. Nobody can really get you out of that funk your in, the feeling of uselessness , incompetence. After a month I was beginning to have serious thoughts of questioning how good I really was at anything. I don’t know but I believe if it stretched to 6 months I may have accepted jobs I wouldn’t have considered a couple of weeks before. This is why the reluctance of Barack Obama to help the unemployed of his country in the scale that FDR did is really heartless and gutless of him.  I could go on and on but this would just be an angst , sorrowful filled post. Suffice to say whenever I can’t get myself to work harder I just remember my last evaluation and a fire lights within me. To end in a lighter note after that job I was able to get a job as a programmer again and I can say that I did well. In  a lot of ways I shined. So have faith that God has better plans for you.

Strong evidence suggests that people who don’t find solid roots in the job market within a year or two have a particularly hard time righting themselves. In part, that’s because many of them become different–and damaged–people. Krysia Mossakowski, a sociologist at the University of Miami, has found that in young adults, long bouts of unemployment provoke long-lasting changes in behavior and mental health. “Some people say, ‘Oh, well, they’re young, they’re in and out of the workforce, so unemployment shouldn’t matter much psychologically,’” Mossakowski told me. “But that isn’t true.”

via The Recession is Dead, Long Live the Recession: Life Without Jobs : Casaubon’s Book.

Working Right

Research reveals that autonomy, competence, and relatedness are the key to loving what you do. So how do you get them? There are different answers to this question, but the strategy that I keep emphasizing on Study Hacks has two clear steps:

1. Master a skill that is rare and valuable.

2. Cash in the career capital this generates for the right rewards.

The world doesn’t owe you happiness. Your boss has no reason to let you choose your own projects, or spend one week out of every four writing a novel at your beach house. These rewards are valuable. To earn them, you must accumulate your own career capital by mastering a skill that’s equally rare and valuable.

It’s important, however, that you cash in this capital, once accumulated, for the right rewards. The word “right,” in this context, is defined by the traits of SDT. In other words, once you have something valuable to offer, use it to gain as much autonomy, competence, and relatedness as you can possibly cram into your life.

via Study Hacks » Blog Archive » Beyond Passion: The Science of Loving What You Do.

What if I suggested this to a stranger (obviously beautiful) who wanted more time with family and friends? Think I’d get slapped in the face?

Q.

What do you like best about your job and what do you like least about it? – lost_fan

A.

I loved the free time that the job allowed me. I was able to travel and spend time with friends and family. I disliked the dishonesty and secrecy.

via SuperFreakonomics Book Club: Allie the Escort Answers Your Questions – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com.

I find that i keep meeting young professionals who fantasize about freelancing. When I hear their reasons I cringe.  In reality what most people want is to not work. Read the whole thing its an interesting look at what maybe the future of work.

The middle of the 20th century was the age of the great employer: Mainstream success was a stable job at a single company, steadily ascending from middle to upper management. That began to change in the 1970s and 1980s, for reasons that were social as well as economic: American conglomerates began to face stiff foreign competition, and the country accustomed itself to – and even began to celebrate – a more mercurial, less cosseted brand of capitalism. The Organization Man was replaced by the worker as free agent, one who might with little regret leave a job when a competitor gave a better offer, or who might be left jobless when his company merged with another. The arc of the average career trajectory grew more fractured.

What we’re seeing today, says Thomas Malone, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the author of the 2004 book “The Future of Work,” is a further shift. The growing freelance workforce, he argues, is made up of people who see themselves not as having a single job so much as having several at once. To describe the current change, Malone borrows an image that the sociologist Alvin Toffler used to describe the earlier one.

“One of the things [Toffler] said was that we should move from the idea of a career as a linear progression up the ranks in a single organization to that of a career as a portfolio of jobs that you hold over time in a series of different organizations,” says Malone. “What I’m just now realizing is that many people today see their career portfolio including a combination of jobs at the same time.”

via The end of the office… and the future of work – The Boston Globe.

When you work in IT you hear this a lot, hell I’ve said this a lot of times years ago. Then you realize that being an introvert is not the best thing for someone who wants to freelance. This is a nice point by point takedown of the most common reasons people want to freelance. Interesting read.

Freelancing Is the Best Job Ever

But, it’s also the hardest and most demanding job ever. It can be frustrating because you have no one else to share the business duties with. People, including clients, misunderstand what you do and may not think you’re a real business who charges real rates for real work.

That being said, I do believe it’s the best job ever. Really, I wouldn’t go back to a full-time job, even if they offered me a six figure salary. Like everything else, it has it’s drawbacks but it also has lots of good perks.

The important thing is to make sure you really like working independently and you have the drive to do this all by yourself. The freedom and satisfaction from being able to control your own career is reward in itself.

via 12 Reasons You Shouldn’t Freelance | FreelanceFolder.

The problem is really to work an extra 20 hours per week on self improvements means you have enough energy to to expend in self improvement. This is why I am limiting myself to jobs within 30 minutes from my house optimistically and within 1.5 hours with traffic. If the commute is too long I’m too tired to study/self improve. Life is too short to waste on a commute.

At the time I was finishing Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers, a book that digs deep into the stories and counter-cultural explanations of successful people. Having someone so close to my context tweeting about a topic related to the book I was reading helped me see something I hadn’t noticed before. I’ve spent years trying to make sense of how a person evolves from a novice programmer to an accomplished software developer. And up until now I haven’t paid enough attention to the raw number of hours spent deliberately working to improve oneself. Uncle Bob calls us to work a sustainable pace in our day jobs (40 hours), so we have time (20 hours) to improve ourselves in the off-hours. Most people don’t do that, though. It’s not considered normal. People who spend time doing more of what appears to be their job in the off-hours are seen as obsessed or workaholics. Maybe we are, there is some grey area there, and I know I’ve taken it too far before. One of the ingredients to being an outlier, though, is an opportunity to work hard. Sure, many outliers have had some good breaks, like being born in the right decade (American entrepreneurs in the 1830’s) or even the right month (Canadian junior hockey players in January), but that luck only provided them with an opportunity to work hard at something that they wanted to do.

via Red Squirrel’s Nuts – 50% Time.

I’m in IT and this is so fucking true. It’s the Usual Suspects, a small group of people who frequent the message boards, go in study groups for the newest technologies, the same people who go to meetups and technology sharing. This is why although I think highly my skills when compared to most people in my field, I am humbled whenever I am with people of this small group; Compared to them I’m such a n00b.

Deliberate Practice for the Rest of Us

Colvin, being a business reporter, points out that this sophisticated understanding of performance is lacking in the workplace.

“At most companies,” he argues, “the fundamentals of fostering great performance are mainly unrecognized or ignored.”

He then adds the obvious corollary: “Of course that means the opportunities for achieving advantage by adopting the principles of great performance are huge.”

It’s this advantage that intrigues me.  To become a grandmaster requires 5000 hours of DP. But to become a highly sought-after CRM database whiz, or to run a money-making blog, or to grow a campus organization into national recognition, would probably require much, much less.

Why? Because when it comes to DP in these latter field, your competition is sorely lacking.

Unless you’re a professional athlete or musician, your peers are likely spending zero hours on DP. Instead, they’re putting in their time, trying to accomplish the tasks handed to them in a competent and efficient fashion. Perhaps if they’re ambitious, they’ll try to come in earlier and leave later in a bid to outwork their peers.

via Study Hacks » Blog Archive » The Grandmaster in the Corner Office: What the Study of Chess Experts Teaches Us about Building a Remarkable Life.