Navigating the Job Market
Interviewing
The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0)
Red Flags in Data Science Interviews
Analyzing 89 Responses to a SQL Screener Question for a Senior Data Analyst Position
SQL Window Functions to Pass a Data Analytics Interview
Understanding Compensation
The Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation
9 Terms You’ll See In Your Startup Equity Offer—And What They Actually Mean
Liquidation Preference: Your Equity Could Be Worth Millions—Or Nothing
Negotiating
Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued
Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer
How Not to Bomb Your Offer Negotiation
Data Careers
Data and engineering oriented career advice.
I don’t know as much as I’d like about woodworking, but my impression is that it is not so much a single discipline as a vast array of specific skills. None of these are particularly difficult by themselves, but knowing which tool or method to use at each stage and carrying out each one cleanly and efficiently takes years of practice. Data carpentry, which I’ve been practicing in one way or another for about 15 years (though never as my official responsibility), is likewise not a single process but a thousand little skills and techniques.
Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice
If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity. It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering. This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer.
I’ve done this a few times myself now; start out as an early or first infra engineering hire, build the stack, then build the team, then manage the team, then … leave and start it all over again. I get antsy, I get restless. I start to feel like I know what I’m doing (… a telltale sign something’s wrong). It’s a good cycle for people who like early stage companies, or have ADD. But I don’t see people talking about it as a career path. So I’m here to advocate for it, as an intentional and awesome way of life.
While tuning models, visualization, and analysis make up some component of your time as a data scientist, data science is and has always been primarily about getting clean data in a single place to be used for interpolation.
For better or worse, the world l runs on Excel, Java 8, and Sharepoint, and I think it’s important for us as technology professionals to remember and be empathetic of that.
‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups
If you personally want to grow as fast as your company, you have to give away your job every couple months.
Miscellaneous unsolicited (and possibly biased) career advice
Honestly, I feel like I’ve mostly benefitted from luck… If I could give my 12 years younger self a bunch of career advice, here are some of those things.
All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people
It’s intriguing that the stuff that really seems to make a difference in the quality of software never seems to be about software.
Elitism as the Mid-Career Growth Engine
Technical excellence begins in wonder but is honed by disgust… In other words, to grow in the mid-career, you must become an elitist.
The tenets of this technical elitism are: 1) You believe there are higher and lower tiers to the practice of your craft, and 2) You aspire to be — or at least admire others being — in the higher tier.
Things To Know About Engineering Levels
I would urge you not to make most, if any, career decisions based on levels or titles that are offered you.
Following the overt mechanisms of advancement is neither sufficient nor necessary.
Career Values and Principles
A few values and principles that can help drive your career.
The drive is internal: if something could be better, why shouldn’t it be better? If something could be faster, why shouldn’t it be faster?
I often have people newer to the tech industry ask me for secrets to success. There aren’t many, really, but this secret — being willing to do something so terrifically tedious that it appears to be magic — works in tech too.
Don’t End The Week With Nothing
If you take no other advice from me ever, ship something. You’ll learn more shipping a failure than you’ll learn from reading about a thousand successes. And you stand an excellent chance of shipping a success – people greatly overestimate how difficult this is.
Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
Tell me something new that I can do that I couldn’t do before, O Astronauts, or stay up there in space and don’t waste any more of my time.
Some people can apply skills in the combinations necessary to move projects forward, and others cannot,
Following these steps will inevitably result in an oversimplified document. Subtleties will be neglected. Caveats and corner cases will be omitted. What ifs will be left out. That’s OK.
- Always start by understanding what your customer (or stakeholder or employer) actually wants. It’s often not what they tell you and must be discovered.
Strong Opinions, Weakly Held — a framework for thinking
We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress!
Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems
The prescription must be that if there’s something you want to do a lot of and get good at—like write, or fix bugs—you should try to do it faster.
When the studio owner heard I was going to Berklee, he said, “I graduated from Berklee and taught there, too. I’ll bet I can teach you two years of theory and arranging in only a few lessons. I suspect you can graduate in two years if you understand there’s no speed limit.”
One of my heuristics for growth is to seek out the magicians, and find the magic.
You and Your Career
Towards building a meaningful career over the long haul.
Hamming, “You and Your Research” (June 6, 1995)
- A phenomenal talk that goes beyond academic research and serves as a guide on how to do great work.
Cargo Cult Science: Some remarks on science, pseudoscience, and learning how to not fool yourself.
- Caltech’s 1974 commencement address by Richard Feynman.
So I wish to you—I have no more time, so I have just one wish for you—the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.
This to me is the joy of a forty year career: things that seem hard early on become easy a decade in, and I can only imagine what it will look like two or three decades in.
If you’re trying to build a satisfying, resilient, multi-decade career, then building a pyramid-shaped one will serve you far better.
There are two ways to be comfortable breaking rules: to enjoy breaking them, and to be indifferent to them. I call these two cases being aggressively and passively independent-minded.
The aggressively independent-minded are the naughty ones. Rules don’t merely fail to stop them; breaking rules gives them additional energy. For this sort of person, delight at the sheer audacity of a project sometimes supplies enough activation energy to get it started.
Fred was the most creative, most productive, and happiest person I have ever known.
Charlie Munger: The Psychology of Human Misjudgment
I sought good judgment mostly by collecting instances of bad judgment, then pondering ways to avoid such outcomes.
Just like in financial markets, some human capital is easier to price and trade than others. This is not about the absolute value of your skills or experience, but how easily the market can assess and exchange them.
How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You)
This post isn’t me giving you career advice really—it’s a framework that I think can help you make career decisions that actually reflect who you are, what you want, and what our rapidly changing career landscape looks like today.
The Gervais Principle: The Office According to The Office
The Office is not a random series of cynical gags aimed at momentarily alleviating the existential despair of low-level grunts. It is a fully realized theory of management that falsifies 83.8% of the business section of the bookstore.
Life
A few favorites here…
Books
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character)
I always do that, get into something and see how far I can go.
Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others.
Honest people are a refuge: You know they mean what they say.
Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck
When should you think that you may be able to do something unusually well?
So far, every time I’ve asked you why someone is acting insane, you’ve claimed that it’s secretly a sane response to someone else acting insane.
Cook free or die.
Blogs
Wait But Why, some favorites:
-
Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think
-
Why Procrastinators Procrastinate, How to Beat Procrastination, and The Procrastination Matrix
Slate Star Codex, some favorites:
Misc favorites:
-
This slow death is what allows for change: take control of it, encourage it. Murder yourself to make room for yourself.
-
The best periods of my life have been defined by engagement, and my worst moments by lack of it.
There’s a real dignity and grace to people who are super talented and super nice.
-
To a young person, just entering on adult life, the world seems full of “insides,” full of delightful intimacies and confidentialities, and he desires to enter them. But if he follows that desire he will reach no “inside” that is worth reaching.
-
Every thought about giving and taking advice I’ve ever had, as concisely as possible
Podcasts / Videos / Talks
Why you should define your fears instead of your goals
The hard choices — what we most fear doing, asking, saying — these are very often exactly what we most need to do.
This is Water by David Foster Wallace
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.
David Foster Wallace on Ambition
I played real serious tennis when I was a child. I played it enough to start to feel like it was beautiful. One of the interesting things about playing competitve sports as a child is that you confront your own limitations rather starkly at a certain point.
Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over.