I've given up caring about contributing to a lot of open source projects for this exact reason. The 'committees' and vast majority of the committers are usually generally just people from the big companies that are paid to work on it. So anything that isn't part of their roadmap gets a distant back seat.

And its not anybody's fault - its still better than the companies keeping everything closed source - but it makes it very frustrating and unsatisfying to work with.

Random anecdote about Joel Spolsky - I met a couple of people that worked at FogCreek (back before Stack Overflow) and they had a pretty negative opinion of him. Although I can't remember the details of the conversation and what their specific complaints were except that everytime he tried to touch code he'd screw it up. Which I didn't take too seriously as that probably becomes every technical CEO at some point or another.

It's not obvious at all. Which I probably should fix since it's not stated anywhere on my LinkedIn.

No brainer to reply back; tell her you're in school but would love an internship opportunity in something with mobile and that you would be happy to be interviewed.

Win win situation, you get to be interviewed by Google and get to see what they think about you. If you do bad in the interview, its not a big deal because you can always be interviewed again and you learn from the first one.

@candybar I think that a popular blog, would help but also would any sort of social interaction online; puts you in contact with developers. I'm not sure how much 'x' is better than doing 'y' for opening doors in starting a product company in technical consultancy but 'x' and 'y' are both better than NULL.

Why get involved in open source stuff, unless seeing the project as something you will be using for something that excites you or being interested in it.

There is lots of money in consulting and age with experience puts you as a candidate.
So much money in it, that competition is probably fierce; where having a very social personality is needed. Active twitter account with Linkedin, linking to interesting blog posts or your own seems like no brainer.

candy, is the design of design good?

i liked TMMM

i don't think it's delusional, especially if you have good, unique content.

i would say, however, that having good, unique content is no guarantee of success, but you know that. still no reason not to do it, especially if it's something you enjoy.

This.

I was contacted by a google recruiter a few years back when I was not available to switch over.

Sent back a mail stating that while I was flattered being contacted by them, I would not be able to switch for the foreseeable future due to being in an active contract. Also wrote I would gladly get in touch once my situation changes.
After the contract finished up, I contacted the same person again and was able to set up an interview within two weeks.

While I didn't make it past the 2nd round, it was easy sailing to get an interview at least.

I haven't read that one either.

This is a good point - at this point I'm not doing anything beyond posting here and hacker news under a pseudonym, which is somewhat counterproductive for networking. I could also go meet people at conferences and meetups and what not. For me though I think a blog would feel more like I'm producing something whereas general networking stuff would feel wasteful and not as satisfying because I'm just not conditioned to think of socializing as productive work.

I'm reasonably confident that I can produce worthwhile content if I put in the effort but I'm not as confident that I can present/market it well enough to get traction or that I can stick to it consistently if I feel that no one's reading it, like Larry was talking about.

it's probably not worth it then, because you're thinking about it as an investment of sorts, and i think if you crunch the EV numbers on effort, time, marketing, etc vs the probability of networking contacts or future job offers, etc, it won't work out. there are probably much better uses of your time for those purposes.

i think it's something you do because you enjoy putting your thoughts down, and having anyone read it and get something out of it. and anything further would be gravy.

EDIT: btw, i'd read it fwiw

I agree with this, doesn't seem worth it if you think of it as an future gain.
Only way to approach anything in life is doing it because you want to do it.

If you do it and really enjoy it than continue to create blogs but I wouldn't go doing it unless you get life EV out of it.
Enjoyment of creating them and not as a chore or it seems silly when other networking opportunities are available with less time requirements.

Just posting ! Thanks guys

Do you have a company blog you can contribute toward?

It is something I would really enjoy doing but that's not enough - there are a lot of things that I would enjoy greatly that I don't get to do. I've led a very distracted life so far but at this point, anything that doesn't contribute significantly to ultimate life goals has to take a back seat even if it's enjoyable. That's behind my questions about the ROI, not that it's something I'd be forcing myself to do.

No - on the engineering side, I'd have to be the one starting it and a company blog, even if it existed, would have to focus more on the industry/product stuff instead of my sausage factory musings. Our owners also tend to overvalue IP and worry too much about our competitors figuring out how we do things, which also limits what can be published on our company blog.

Btw, thanks for all the replies - they've been very helpful!

If you guys ever need to run a personal proxy or some general "server in the cloud" at all times, this seems unbeatable:

http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/02/sca...-40-per-month/

edit: lol they apparently don't have a DC in the US, so for now probably for euros only.

just to clarify, my position is not quite as hardline as iosys. i don't believe you should never do anything in life you don't enjoy -- selling out is fine if the price is right (though in reality it's often a trap you don't see). anyway, as a pure ROI investment it probably doesn't work out. but it might be close enough that you can reasonably make a case to do it, and then you'll get to do something you enjoy, and if you doesn't work... well, you just ran bad!

i have many such gems on rationalizing yourself into procrastination via fun hobbies. good idea for a blog?

would it be bad or at least worse to rationalize yourself into doing nothing versus something, if you're too worried about whatever you do not leading to high enough returns?

good news on the integration of gender into programming front:

http://developers.slashdot.org/story...to-programming

I will definitely be doing something and I'm weighing options beyond software blogging. If I do nothing with extra time, I tend to overthink and overreach at work, often into brick walls and as a result become less productive, more irritable and generally more stressed. Producing things, whether code or blog posts or articles or whatever, tends to have a stress-relieving effect for me. I do tend to overthink but I don't really have an analysis paralysis procrastination problem.

They are comparing apples and oranges - gender disparity in programming, at least as far as I've observed, is worse in the US than in the rest of the world.

I see programming as a fundamentally blue collar profession for smart, underprivileged people without connections or other great options and I think more women being attracted to it probably has to do with lack of opportunities for smart women in these countries, whether in law, medicine, high finance, business administration, public administration, etc, which are more prestigious, better paying, and/or have more job security worldwide than programming.

A while back ITT we talked about the "pre-planned vacation" thing when starting a new job. It was talked about in some OOT thread that I couldn't locate recently and everyone said it was an A+ "life trick" (couldn't find it in that thread though on a quick search). Suzzer was one of the main proponents.

So now I'm starting a new job and they'll probably be okay with me doing this, I mentioned it before accepting. But I'm second guessing it. Why do I want to lose a large amount of money with an unpaid week plus? This is assuming they don't "look the other way" and just let me take it, which seems doubtful as it's a bigger company. Am I doing it for long-term sanity and because it's my one last chance for extra time off for quite a while, even if unpaid? Or is there some "trick" to it that I'm missing?

in my experience, the larger the company, the more in the red you can put your PTO

How do you mean that? I don't want PTO in the red, I'd rather just take it unpaid if those are the two options.

Meaning if you're at zero pto, you take forty fours of PTO, get paid for forty hours of PTO, then start accruing from negative 40 hours

Yeah that's what I told my boss. They basically gave me two free weeks and pretended I was working.

First I was really worried about getting in trouble. I told my boss twice and he sent an email to someone in HR.

Then eventually I got the message to just let it drop. I thought my boss was pretty awesome after that but then learned he's just really lazy and that was the path of least resistance.

I've done negative PTO and it sucks because you don't get another vacation for like 2 years.