There's a sea of non-enthusiastic programmers who liked coding as a hobby
Stagnating technological progress, blog of Alexey Guyzey and podcast with the creator of Humans of NY
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Cool places I surfed this week:
Coding professionally and coding as a hobby are very very different
A few months ago, I completed a 2-month internship at a startup (Series B). I had only ever worked on some fun personal projects and this would have been my first time coding at a professional level in the industry. I was more than thrilled.
But after the internship.. well, I was less than enthusiastic about getting a job there.
And that was quite a bit of an existential crisis.
Last day, I came across this Medium’s Daily Digest email that sent a suggestion for an article titled - I just don’t want to be a software developer anymore, I opened it.
It starts with - I still love coding, but I hate this industry.
Me: “OH DAMN”
If I won the lottery would I still code? I would, but it would not be like work. It would be projects I enjoyed.
I could feel her.
Because it’s not really “passion” they are looking for, but people who are merely willing to endure long hours. They aren’t really looking for the person who spends a few hours on the weekend on an open-source project, they are looking for the person who comes home from work and spends all night on it.
30k claps, 114 responses. I am not alone.
I had to dive deep after this.
I looked at the author’s Medium profile - Melissa Mcewen.
I found another popular article of hers - Coders Should Fear What Happened To Writers.
And then that article linked to a different article - Confessions of an Ex-Developer.
All of these articles are about how software engineering jobs failed hobby coders. There’s a sea of people who coded for passion but found their coding jobs frustrating.
Why you should dive deep:
* I just don’t want to be a software developer anymore has 30k claps on Medium - that’s A LOT of claps. It shows deeply this resonates with the people.
* One of the responders said that this article was not about the tech industry but about the modern working life.
* Oh and talking about the responses section - they are worth reading themselves. Completely filled with people venting out their own frustration.
* Even if you can’t relate/don’t agree with what these articles present, it is true for a lot of people.
We are living through a stagnating technological progress
Don’t you think that we are living in the golden age of tech? Smartphones, Internet, Netflix and everything. I sure did.
But lately I’ve been reading some very smart people argue the opposite - that we are in a technological slump.
A few weeks ago, I linked to a podcast with Peter Thiel as guest.
“Go into a room and subtract off all the screens. How do you then know you’re not in 1973?”
I came across this article, written by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen together, titled - We Need a New Science of Progress. (Patrick Collison is the brilliant CEO and co-founder of Stripe. Tyler Cowen is probably one of the most famous economists of our time.)
These kinds of examples show that there can be ecosystems that are better at generating progress than others, perhaps by orders of magnitude. But what do they have in common? Just how productive can a cultural ecosystem be? Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than Japan or Boston? Why was early-20th-century science in Germany and Central Europe so strong? Can we deliberately engineer the conditions most hospitable to this kind of advancement or effectively tweak the systems that surround us today?
Patrick Collison has even created a new page on his personal website dedicated to this idea. Here, he mentions the above article as being a sequel to another article, written by him and Michael Neilsen - Science Is Getting Less Bang For Its Buck.
Why you should dive deeper:
* The Science of Progress article has stirred a very lively debate amongst some very smart people.
* “..physicists judged every decade from the 1940s through the 1980s as worse than the worst decade from the 1910s through 1930s. The very best discoveries in physics, as judged by physicists themselves, became less important.” - Is Science Stagnant?
I discovered Alexey’s blog some 4 months ago and signed up for his email list.
I came across his blog once again when he recently sent an email mentioning that 2 of his articles have got on the front page of Hacker News.
One of them is How Life Sciences Actually Work. It’s his independent research into the field that has been shared by a LOT of people online. As I was too far away from the topic covered in this article, I found it boring.
But the second one — Every productivity thought I have ever had, as concisely as possible — that made me put him in the newsletter.
You never wake up at work having forgotten to fill out to dos for the day and feeling slightly depressed.
However awesome you feel you are, this does occasionally happen at home.
Home is the default place. Home lacks intentionality, which means that sometimes you will feel that “I need to do something” rather than “I will do something something specific right now”.
Having no clear idea what to do next increases the probability that you won’t feel like following all the rules you came up with massively. The only solution I know is to avoid working from home as much as you can.
This is one of those blogs that I want to visit again and again because everytime I do so, I find a new hidden gem.
Here are 2 of my favourite articles:
1. What You Should Do With Your Life? Directions and Advice
2. Why You should Start a Blog Right Now
Oh and his resume is super interesting. Like look at his coursework section:
it includes Calculus, Linear Algebra, Abstract Mathematics, Statistics 1 & 2, Econometrics, Macroeconomics 1 & 2, Microeconomics 1 & 2, Development Economics, Accounting, Corporate Finance, Neuroscience, Evolutionary Genomics, Deep Learning.Why you should dive deeper:
* Remember Tyler Cowen from above - one of the world’s most famous economists? He often mentions Alexey’s articles in his popular blog - Marginal Revolution.
* Remember Patrick Collison from above - cofounder of Stripe? Even he recommends Alexey’s blog!
* Oh and just please look at his resume! I haven’t seen any resume like it. Are we even allowed to have such a diverse resume??
* His (n+1)th mention of the book How To Fail At Almost Everything and Still Win Big got me to buy the book (he said, it was “probably the most important book I’ve ever read”). Yaay, I’m excited!
Podcast Notes: podcast with Brandon Strandon of Humans of NY
I talked about Humans of NY in one of the first editions of Good Surfer.
This is an episode of the Tim Ferriss Show with Brandon Strandon as the guest where he tells the story of how he started Humans of NY.
Here are some of the most inspiring parts of that story:
* After loosing his first job at the stock markets, he decided that he was going to spend the foreseeable future trying to make just enough money where he could control his time, instead of spending his time trying to make money.
* His criteria for success would not be profit, but enjoyment.
* To help make ends meet after losing his job, Brandon collected around $620 every 2 weeks in unemployment from the government (this was in 2008). This was enough for cheap rent in Brooklyn, where he soon moved, and very, very cheap food.
I came across this through Podcast Notes’ newsletter.
Why you should dive deep:
* Humans of NY is a blog that features micro-stories from the lives of common people whose stories would be inconspicous. You might know about the local copies of this initiative like Humans of Bombay and Humans of <Your_city>.
* “If nothing mattered but how I was spending my time, what would I be doing? What would be most nourishing for me in any given moment?”
That’s it from me this week!
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