Oh ok, then I'll win the lottery, trip over a cure for cancer and land inside a supermodel.
That has to be one of the most vapid pieces of advice I've ever heard. It reeks of quintessential motivational-self-help-guru-dom. It sounds like great advice, but when you break it down, it brings absolutely nothing concrete to the table. He might as well add 'Water is wet, so take off your clothes before you jump into the beach'.
Everyone, including 'Ryan', already knows this.
I would usually ignore something like this, but doling out buzzword laden one-liners like 'Networking is not a dirty word' seems to have become a trend these days. Restating the obvious in memorable sentences doesn't help anything. What does help is taking his resume, deciding if he can hook him up, and directing him towards a contact he knows, since he's in the same field as Ryan. You know, actual concrete help.
Or maybe it's the smug 'see how well I condense my ideas into 2 lines? that's just too cool to ignore' attitude dripping all over this self-promotional article.
P.S. You know what's even shorter - 'Sorry. I have no clue how to help you.' It's just one line!
I don't agree. I've met plenty of people, especially in tech, who won't spend time broadening their horizon. At my previous job, a couple of my colleagues attitude was, "I was hired with no experience during the .com boom, I've taught myself VB, then forced to transition to C#, and I get by fine so I don't need to know anything new."
At my current job, we're doing "boring" J2EE stuff, but not a day goes by without someone in the office discovering something new and exciting, and talking about it. We've tried three times to crowbar some Scala into the project, just to see if it sticks (it didn't, unfortunately), we're all excited about Ruby and Python and we know how they stack up against Java.
That's building skills before you need them. If my colleague from the former job is fired, he will need to land exactly the same position somewhere else, while we're much better aligned to switch to something else.
I never said people shouldn't build their skillset. Of course we should broaden our skillset. What I said was it's one of those incredibly obvious truisms that we're taught from the age of 4. So merely stating it doesn't help 'Ryan' in any way whatsoever, since Ryan already knows it.
Instead, I would have preferred to see Ramit look over Ryan's resume, whip out his rolodex and see if he can hook him up somehow, given that Ramit is in the tech field. And if he can't, direct him towards someone who can. Basically, give him some actual help.
"I don't agree. I've met plenty of people, especially in tech, who won't spend time broadening their horizon"
But 'learning things before you need them' is a different thing. It should be something like "always keep learning towards your goals". And that's what people do. Unfortunately different people have different goals and motivators. That's why many will stay away from books and from exciting new stuff, as long as they still get to keep their job.
Since you talked about Scala, when I worked on my last Java project for a former employer (a period that lasted like a year) the architecture and the tools (imposed to us by upper management) were so bad, that I was desperate to find new things to alleviate the pain (that's when I read Code Generation in Action). When I got into a data-mining project I read something like 4 books in the research phase.
Nobody likes learning for the purpose of learning. It's a painful process if the learned skills aren't applied (not to mention that memory tends to garbage collect useless information).
I doubt it. Our brains aren't designed that way (I even saw studies about it, but right now I can't search for any, 'working). There are always other motives for doing it.
For example I'm learning new things out of belief that doing it will improve my life in some way. I liked computer science because of the thrills of building things, and I keep on learning to break my own limits, always wanting to build better applications / algorithms. Seeing the results of my work makes me really happy (that's not too uncommon among us developers I believe). I also liked math in college because I've always enjoyed solving puzzles, and for the satisfactions of doing it before the others did.
I dunno. I watch and enjoy documentaries on subjects I've got no particular interest in, and will likely never come across again. What's my motive there, if not learning for the sake of learning?
PS: Our brains aren't designed, 'that way' or any other.
Ahmen, I'm currently employed in a company that is attempting a metamorphosis from failed e-retail reseller into a "social shopping" startup. The code that's been acquired is absolutely awful, however, and I'm consistently confused.
Coming is as a Graduate CS + Phil I'd had no experience in Web-dev and this was reflected in a reduced income offer, which I accepted grateful in the knowledge that it's a leg on the ladder and I'd have the chance to get involved in a web enterprise project and learn a great deal. Sadly this has not been the case.
After just over 6 months I have been passed from pillar to post and received literally NO training whatsoever. Our code implementation is a spider's web Java/Stuts2/Springs/Hibernate setup that boggles the mind of both senior developers (who's combined brain power spent 3 hours trying to figure out the specifics of checkbox implementation on our architecture.... seriously - 3 hours!)
I'm really beginning to see that my limitations as a developer are more imposed by upper-middle management and the lack of interest my fellow developers seem to have in my skill set (they actually ignore me when I ask for help most the time (and it isn't because it's a rtfm issue - it's usually because they are still trying to unravel this awful code!))... I'm looking forward to a time when I can recapture that invigorating enthusiasm for collaboration and learning that came so easily at Uni.
and in regard to "that guy" in the office (some other comment post on this thread) - my favourite excuse for not being able to help is "oh, I don't know - I'd have to look at the code"
..... even though he's sat next to me! but still we're on an svn!!!.... how is that an excuse for not helping a fellow dev!? would you be able to help /without/ looking at the code!?
I actually know exactly what you mean -- if I had just stumbled upon this post, I would probably think the same thing.
I wrote this for my community, who know exactly what I mean: Don't try to charge $ too early, focus on the long term, invest in yourself and be entrepreneurial, etc. Many of them have read my articles from years ago that go into detail on this.
But for people that just clicked through and are seeing this for the first time, I can understand the skepticism.
Hopefully this doesn't make you think of my site as just another guru-blah-blah-blah site, because my readers have really done some amazing things -- saving millions, starting companies, automating their money, etc -- over the years.
If you had replied to Ryan with the thoughtfulness you display here, your post would have come across far better. You are giving very banal advice in a rude way to a guy who is temporarily down on his luck for very understandable reasons. Sorry but I called you a douchebag in your comments section (You can take it off)
I didn't mean to offend you. My apologies if you were. It was the smug attitude that really got me to comment.
Still, I stand by my point - there are so many ways for people to offer concrete help for people in need and all I'm seeing is one-liner advices being bandied about. Especially considering the fact that Ryan seems to be a reader of your blog and already knows your advice regarding 'being rich'. He was obviously looking for more.
I can make you a vast list of books that are pretty well-received, but still unadulterated bullshit from cover to cover. I'd have proved nothing relevant either.
(Just to be clear: I'm not implying Ramit's book is or isn't bullshit - just that it's entirely beside the point)
I agree with you on that. However, I did think the advice about not acting like every other job candidate is particularly good and something many people fail to realize
One of the most important differences between rich people and non-rich people: Rich people plan for things before they need them, while others are caught treading water when something bad happens. Think about how to apply this to your life.
If I'm being really optimistic, I can take this to mean, rich people become rich because they plan ahead and non-rich people stay non-rich because they don't. I have to be really optimistic to read it that way and it's dubious advice anyhow.
So let's take the analogy a bit further. We have a person treading water. They know they need to figure something out because they can't tread water indefinitely. Then something bad happens. Crap, maybe a shark shows up or a lightning storm rolls in, whatever it is, it's not cool. Ramit Sethi leans in to give this poor person some advice. "Let me tell you something. You could be rich right now if you had just planned ahead."
This reminds me of the guy at work whose proposed solution to any problem is "well, this would never have happened if we'd done X." You know the guy.
O Rly? Well okay, we'll just invent a time-machine, go back in time to when this stupid decision was made, convince those in charge not to make it, and then make some other stupid mistake.
I think it's very valuable to analyze and to learn from mistakes, but in the middle of a crisis, you need to first get out of the crisis.
The real problem is that financially speaking, most of the US is in crisis-mode all the time, without even realizing it.
Most USians won't get rich (by US standards), but many more might be able to get out of the living month-to-month quagmire.
I'd like to apologize in advance to the 7 respectable recruiters left in the United States before I say:
Most headhunters are slime.
They are low level bottom feeders who are rarely capable of producing value for anyone else and can only produce income for themselves by engineering a scarcity situation where none would otherwise exist. They don't give a flying fuck about you or the companies except to "not bite the hand that feeds them". Now that times are tougher, they will resort to anything to make a buck, because they think they have to. Ethics and value mean nothing to those who have no ethics and produce no value.
Just a few of the "tricks" they are pulling these days:
They will list a job on the internet that doesn't exist just to collect your resume. They will lie about it until they are caught.
They will change critical details about a job to make it difficult to identify the company so that no one "goes around them" (when they don't have an exclusive).
They will edit your resume to suit their needs, not yours.
They will use you to show an example of an overpriced person so that they can easily place someone else.
They will make up total bullshit in order to protect "their turf", hoping that you're an idiot and will buy in to it. (I recently had a headhunter tell me I MUST go through them with a vendor referral to one of their clients. Huh?)
If you're lucky enough to find a good recruiter that can actually make something happen for you, hang on to them for dear life (that is until they switch careers). Otherwise, stay clear. Don't waste your time with job board entries placed by recruiters (I know, most of them are).
You're much better off getting up off your butt and going out and meeting people on your own. Do this without restriction. You never know when the person you met at a party, breakfast, or BBQ may be the one to send you your next job or contract. YOU are always your best recruiter.
You're much better off getting up off your butt and going out and meeting people on your own.
Since I've been in the recent job market (about a year now), I've found similar numbers of (apparently) helpful recruiters and sleazy ones. Even if the ratio were 1-in-20, it would still be better for me and people like me to use recruiters. To be clear, "people like me" here refers to those of us who strongly dislike networking, gladhanding, and basically pretending to be interested in people we know nothing about except that they might be able to help us get a job at some point. While it's not nearly so strong as my dislike of meeting new people, my aversion even to interacting with people I already know is strong enough that I regularly fail to keep in touch with family and close friends for months or years at a time. Fortunately, I have very understanding friends. :)
"basically pretending to be interested in people we know nothing about except that they might be able to help us get a job"
No! No! No!
This is not what I meant and I apologize if I inferred it.
Pretending's got nothing to do with it. On this or any other subject.
You do not "network" (or whatever you want to call it) to "get a job" or to "get" anything for that matter. You network because you are a human being.
If you are extremely introverted or dislike being among others, fine. Many of us here are either like that or once were. I understand. I suggest you give it a try. You may be the best assembly programmer in the western hemisphere, but you are still a human being. You are already hard wired to interact with the rest of us. It's not really that big a deal.
Getting business referals is a natural byproduct, not the purpose, of normal human interaction. The more you interact, the better your chances. The better for everyone.
(As an aside, if you "pretend" at anything, prepared to get clocked, sooner or later. Pretending is an investment in nothing.)
Oh, I don't dislike being among others, all the time. I dislike meeting new people a bit, and since "networking" involves meeting as many new people as possible, it's basically a shorthand for the part of social interaction I dislike. :) I'm not "extremely" introverted or anything; it's just that going through recruiters has seemed to be a more pleasant avenue than meeting dozens or hundreds of new people over the same period.
We disagree about pretending, too. Pretending is the quickest way to changing your personality, distasteful as it is in the short term. Want to be more optimistic, happier, more outgoing? Start acting as though you are right now, and you'll move in that direction. Pretending is 80% of social interaction, too, as far as I can see. "Hey, how are you, today?" is, in the vast majority of cases, a pretense of being actually interested in my day. If you want to find out how many people are pretending, answer in detail rather than just saying "Great!" or some such answer. I sometimes answer in detail, anyway, because I forget that virtually everyone else is pretending (or because I'm not paying enough attention to consciously respond correctly), rather than interested, and this almost always ends awkwardly. :)
Indeed. I think I only learned how to small-talk and "network" as a parlour trick (like Fry).
Fortunately I am able to form deep and meaningful friendships; anything above an acquaintance level is possible, but requires hard work. Yay introverts. =P
If "networking" means talking to headhunters then I feel better about not doing it. I've never understood the concept of "networking" as just talking to somebody socially and giving an elevator talk or whatever. It reduces the entire process to schmooze, and lots of people talk a good line of bullshit. (Yeah, I'm shocked and disillusioned by the fact that people are shocked and disillusioned by the fact that some of their favorite bloggers are crap programmers.) Schmooze is a valuable talent, but it has very little to do with programming, so it would seem foolish to let your hiring practices be influenced by it. I assume that anyone considering hiring me won't care whether I'm referred by a headhunter or submit my resume directly, since it tells them nothing about how good a developer or coworker I am.
The only network I value is the network of people I've actually worked with, plus their friends. How would anybody know whether I'm a good developer and a good coworker without working with me, or talking to somebody they trust who did work with me, or (much less accurate, but better than "networking") actually interviewing me and asking me hard questions?
I have dealt with exactly one good headhunter. They are rare and to be treasured. They understand that if they help you out today, you may bring them big business in the future. The one I worked with explicitly pointed out that they were my pimp at the time, but could be my client in the future :)
If that's the full text, those reply emails aren't very long at all. Yeah, they get into details that aren't very important, but they are pretty reasonable, especially considering he's unemployed in a dry spell. Maybe everyone else just has less patience.
A reminder of how brutal unemployment is at the margin. A 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate is not a huge jump statistically but when you are looking for work on the ground it is thousands more people chasing the same job as you.
My group is trying to fill several software engineer positions and at least one DB engineer position.
Don't get excited; we were recently told we can now only hire internally to our technology megacorp. That pretty much makes the task hopeless, but we didn't have much success hiring externally, either. It just means a bigger pile of internal resume spam from people who don't even claim to have the skills we need. Yes, this is the classic "we're hiring and can't find good candidates" counterpost to the classic "I've got mad skills and experience and can't get a job" post.
Or rather, it's an offer. Does anyone want to hear why we're having trouble finding candidates and my advice for people wondering how to get this kind of job?
I don't understand the point of this article or why I'm seeing it here.
As far as I could tell, the author got an email from a friend looking for help and instead of helping him, he decided to humiliate him on the internet.
There, same advice, but far less writing (and far less self-congratulatory, please-read-my-article-while-I-masturbate-over-how-superior-I-feel-compared-to-this-poor-dude bullshit).
Oh ok, then I'll win the lottery, trip over a cure for cancer and land inside a supermodel.
That has to be one of the most vapid pieces of advice I've ever heard. It reeks of quintessential motivational-self-help-guru-dom. It sounds like great advice, but when you break it down, it brings absolutely nothing concrete to the table. He might as well add 'Water is wet, so take off your clothes before you jump into the beach'.
Everyone, including 'Ryan', already knows this.
I would usually ignore something like this, but doling out buzzword laden one-liners like 'Networking is not a dirty word' seems to have become a trend these days. Restating the obvious in memorable sentences doesn't help anything. What does help is taking his resume, deciding if he can hook him up, and directing him towards a contact he knows, since he's in the same field as Ryan. You know, actual concrete help.
Or maybe it's the smug 'see how well I condense my ideas into 2 lines? that's just too cool to ignore' attitude dripping all over this self-promotional article.
P.S. You know what's even shorter - 'Sorry. I have no clue how to help you.' It's just one line!