[gwgundersen]

I like this framing.

In graduate school, I worked for 2+ years before my first paper was published. In that time, I passed my PhD qualifying exam, took classes, wrote code, read papers, learned math, and so forth. Yet when I applied for internships, I received no interest from employers. I suspect this was because I had no concrete signal that I knew anything in my field.

While working on my second paper, I started blogging. In the language of this article, I started generating public intellectual capital for myself. I have definitely experienced the effects of this capital on subsequent job hunts. Now I can point people to my blog to demonstrate knowledge, technical skills, and communication skills beyond the scope of my peer-reviewed work. Furthermore, there is no question about who contributed to my blog, and when I learn something new, I can externalize that quickly.

[dzolob]

This happened to me when I left academia. No “real credentials”. Math expert with strong computer background (phd, published papers, years of experience in research/teaching) didn’t said more than “one year data science ‘masters’ abroad”. It took me quite some time to translate my expertise into marketable skills. Before that, I got passed on even for entry level positions.

[sjg007]

While a PhD can do the work, you really want the PhD to direct the work and explore new related things. A lot of this will depend on where you apply. That being said the market for data scientists has exploded in the past 2 years. 3-5 years ago things were different. Part of this is due to maturation of the tooling and the development of data platforms with organizations building out their data pipelines etc...

[endymi0n]

Thing is, while PhDs are usually by far the biggest domain experts you'll get, the absolute majority of them comes absolutely ill-equipped to lead anything, as university rarely teaches any skills in project, people or resource management skills, business sense, opportunity cost and presentation.

I've had disastrous outcomes going by credentials for leadership positions and these days only hire for demonstrated results on a real-world project.

Just my personal anecdotal evidence points me towards stellar academic success having a slight negative correlation with on-the-job performance. People who prefer building things with impact over citation rubber points usually don't survive in academia long enough for enduring a PhD.

[sjg007]

Like I said depends on the company.

[laichzeit0]

Well I had a “math expert” join my team recently and the problems were: they couldn’t work in a team, verbally expressed their intellectual superiority to everyone else, didn’t have the technical ability to get anything into production, could not follow instructions from superiors, thought most of the work they were given was “boring” and invented their own projects to work on, etc. I don’t know if that type of attitude is acceptable in academia, but it won’t work in industry. So now I’m extremely cautious about on boarding anyone without a proven track record at working outside academia. I simply don’t have the time to “manage” someone like that, shit had to get done.

[laurent92]

> thought most of the work was boring

It’s my biggest problem, both with people who want trendy frameworks, and myself who was bored with work in my younger years (til I started drinking and made changes and created my company). “From a million dollars, anything is your passion” is quite true (was it Joel on Software?), but IT is quite boring when evolving at the lower levels.

I’ve loved the book “Tribal leadership” which defines levels of career,

1-Almost dropout;

2-Bored worker (apathetic victim, but delivers work - This was me);

3-Working like an as but executing on your own skills (“lone warrior” - This is me now);

4-Executes well with a mentor above and mentoring below, which pushes the organization forward by “belonging” to the social fabric;

5-Executes for others - Creates relationship between people so they can execute together - that’s the “startup ecosystem” or corporate leader style, those people often look like gurus amazed by the smartness of people in their ecosystem, which, if they are contagious and humble, becomes true leadership.

[dzolob]

I believe these attitudes are somehow commonplace along academia, but I think it extrapolates to several disciplines, including software development or engineering.

There is a misunderstanding between where on the abstraction layer you are standing and how smart you are. The commonplace along mathematicians is that, as we are standing pretty low, we are the smartest of them all, and since there is basically no interaction with people in other layers, this belief gets comfortably reinforced.

Smarts comes in different flavors, and realizing that yours is just one of many and does not work at all in other contexts is hard. Treating others like morons and acting bored is a lousy way to deal with it.

[kybernetyk]

>didn’t have the technical ability to get anything into production

This is the biggest problem with fresh graduates.

[currymj]

your blog is very high quality and i've enjoyed it in the past (Metropolis-Hastings post especially).

however there's a problem if everybody is going to do this, if it becomes standard that you want to have a blog in order to promote yourself during a job hunt.

i think this is why search results are cluttered with a proliferation of largely useless "awesome X" GitHub repositories, repetitive bad Medium articles on basic ML topics, and so on.

I hope we don't end up in the world where everyone has to do this... there's certainly a diminishing social utility.

[gitgud]

> "i think this is why search results are cluttered with a proliferation of largely useless "awesome X" GitHub repositories, repetitive bad Medium articles on basic ML topics, and so on."

This is such a sad way to view blogging and Github contributions...

There's nothing wrong with people writing bad articles. In fact everyone writes badly to begin with.

The same goes for Github contributions, everyone starts off with demo repos and broken projects.

The beauty of the internet is that it is infinite and you can build up your skills in blogging and coding over time.

It's the job of search engines to reveal quality results, not for people to only contribute quality results...

[currymj]

i see what you're saying and perhaps i shouldn't have been so negative in my original post.

I think that people who want to write or code shouldn't be afraid to put imperfect work out there.

But if to apply for a job you also have to produce "content" to build your brand, I maintain that this is not a good outcome.

[killtimeatwork]

> There's nothing wrong with people writing bad articles. In fact everyone writes badly to begin with.

It's ok to write badly in the beginning. It's less ok (to say the least) to publish the bad writing in the Internet and decrease it's mean quality level in result. Of course, by now the cat's way out of the bad and Internet is mostly low-effort, low-value crap. Arguably, it's been this way since the very beginning. In terms of quality and curation it's basically the digital equivalent of a wall in a public restroom. But still, I find scribbling on such walls to be in poor taste...

[gitgud]

> "It's less ok (to say the least) to publish the bad writing in the Internet and decrease it's mean quality level in result"

This presumes that the "mean quality level" of the internet is actually important. With the scale of the internet now, it literally doesn't matter how many bad articles are uploaded, as search engines filter what is good/bad for you (whether or not search engines are good is another story). 1,000 results or 10 billion results you'll only look at the top 15 anyway...

> "In terms of quality and curation it's basically the digital equivalent of a wall in a public restroom"

This analogy assumes that there is limited physical space and people will be subjected to reading it, the internet is much different and a lot of content will never get advertised or even read.

So my question for anyone with this line of thinking is, how would you know when your writing has improved and ready to be published? I think the best way is to write and publish often and look for feedback.

[nicbou]

I think it becomes a problem when people do those things because it's required to stay competitive, and not out of genuine interest.

[jimmaswell]

Civil engineers don't have to build bridges in their back yards or write blog posts about I beams; their education is presumed sufficient for an entry level job. Why can't tech work like this? Do students need to form some kind of union and agree not to talk about extracurricular programming to interviewers for their first job?

[beisner]

We understand and can certify how bridges are constructed. Someone from the government can come in and check your work reasonably quickly and make sure it’s up to code. There’s a “trust” step and a “verify” step. And it often takes a lot of time to do iteration.

Software engineering isn’t like that. Not only are the tools changing every year, but 95% of the work in a project isn’t actually design or construction, it’s figuring out what the client wants or the product should be! Requirements are discovered as construction happens because most of the time software is solving a business problem not a physics problem.

There’s no certification because there isn’t something to standardize. Every company has different problems, technical solutions are always changing. Interview processes are trying to look at generic problem solving + communication + ability to translate some easy algorithmic idea into code. They don’t do a great job of assessing that, but the point is that two CS degrees can look identical on paper but there’s so much fuzzy interpersonal/business/requirement-assessment work that basically isnt captured at all by a degree, and is really hard to demonstrate on a resume.

[the_only_law]

You also can’t become a civil engineer through a 6 month boot camp or from studying and building things on your own time.

[krageon]

You can surely become a very poor civil engineer that way. Perhaps nobody wants one, because the average quality is so much higher, but nothing stops you from calling yourself that.

[jefftk]

As someone who has interviewed hundreds of entry-level developers, the range of skills/talent/ability is enormous.

I expect you would have a hard time getting top students to join your union.

(On the other hand, I don't care at all about side projects or seeing code on GitHub. I want to see how you solve a realistic problem that I have seen dozens of other people take a crack at for comparison.)

[alisonkisk]

If you want to make as little money as a civil engineer does, go for it.

[graeme]

Not necessarily. OP wrote a blog about their research paper. That is by definition a nov or rare topic.

If people use any kind of horse sense when choosing blogging topics they will either choose something:

1. Unique, or

2. Where what they have to contribute beats what already exists

To be sure, anything poorly done is clutter. But this applies to the work product itself too. If someone writes garbage, superfluous blog posts, why would you expect good research from them?

Despite the massive amount of information that exists the world certainly does not have enough good, specific information yet.

[jefftk]

I don't think this is entirely true. Getting in the habit of writing, even if a lot of it is things other people have said better, means that when you do have something novel to say you will be much more practiced.

My experience is that when people try to only write the good posts they don't end up publishing things, but if they write hundreds of posts dozens will be good.

[graeme]

I agree, and you’re actually supporting my argument with additional reasons against OP haha.

But in the case of a research blog about a new research paper I think my point above trends closer to true, as the novelty of the subject guarantees novelty of the blog.

[drorco]

Then Google will need to build a better search engine, otherwise people will just move to a search engine that can get them the better results.

[nnmg]

I totally agree and had a very similar experience in graduate school. Writing about my experiences and things I had learned (technical and project management) had a huge impact on my ability to demonstrate my knowledge and is without a doubt why I quickly received two job offers before defending my phd (biology/neuroscience). I think papers are a really poor way to demonstrate the huge amounts of work you've done unless you stay in academia (and probably not even then).

[_huayra_]

This is one thing I messed up during my grad school studies. Now that I have a "real job", getting the ball rolling on blogging about what I'm looking into / learning about is harder (although that is still a convenient excuse).

Thank goodness I have been meticulously keeping track of what I've learned in Org mode for years. I've just gotta dredge that old database for some blog posts (starting with why folks who are similar to me should really consider not going to grad school...).

[zikzak]

I work on a well established, closed source, trade secrets style e-commerce site. I can never seem to think about anything I could write up that would not involve me reworking everything to be more general. I also think it would largely boil down to a Stack Overflow link. I am doing more management now, so that might make this problem a little easier to solve for me.

[Consultant32452]

I had one of these blogs years ago and I found the questions I had to look up were great subjects for blog posts. Many of them wound up being pretty basic: thread safe singleton in java, sort a list, etc. This isn't a PhD thesis, it doesn't have to be profound, you're just trying to demonstrate you can write some code and communicate.

[zikzak]

I don't think I did a good job of articulating my point. By the time I wash out all the domain specific stuff, I believe I am left with a post that is even less valuable than a link to a Stack Overflow discussion about the same issue. Does that make sense? What value am I adding to the world if I spend an hour typing up my thoughts on this and I could have just linked to SO? Also, my blog traffic is effectively 0 people. I don't think it is wrong for others to do so, it just isn't the right thing for me.

EDIT - sorry, I missed the fact that we are talking about producing a blog as a proof that I understand and think about programming in a certain way (e.g. as useful to people evaluating me)... You are absolutely right, then, and I withdraw my objection.

I am not currently looking for work but if I were, I think a blog focused on dev would be more valuable than my collection of half-baked github repos. Food for thought.

[loosetypes]

I’d be interested in hearing those considerations.

[_huayra_]

The pithy way I tell people is that they should only do a PhD if they can't NOT do a PhD, i.e. they feel so compelled to work on a specific thing and have found an advisor who will advise them but ultimately let them do their own thing to a great degree. The only other viable option is to find a tenure-track junior professor who really has their stuff together (including their work ethic and emotional intelligence; often the latter can be lacking).

One also has to consider the time cost of doing a PhD, and whether spending the equivalent time working would have gotten them further not only in career, but also salary. Between a) people who go from undergrad to a job and don't really keep pushing themselves, b) people who go to grad school to hopefully skip to a more interesting job post-PhD, and c) people who go from undergrad to a job but really push hard to learn new skills (e.g. presenting at conferences, blogging about it, etc), option C is generally leaps and bounds ahead of the other two.

A PhD is worth considering if the thing you're interested in most is not really used widely in industry (perhaps some PL stuff?).

Also, prospective PhD students need to consider that there is a very asymmetric relationship between advisor / advisee compared to a normal job. If my job starts treating me like dirt, I can tell them to shove it and quit ASAP because I know that my skills can get me another job in short order. With a PhD, it is almost impossible to quit a PhD and then pick it up again if you and your advisor have some sort of falling out; every future PhD position will look at the prior "failure" with suspicion, losing the nuance of issues besides the actual work that triggered the separation.

Basically you need to really understand why you want a PhD (and whether you could do better towards your ultimate career goal without it), and if that's a "yes" you need to really make sure you can get along with your advisor for years. A strong advisor can "compensate" for a weak student (i.e. get them through the program), and a strong student can compensate for a weak advisor (e.g. students who basically do their own thing from the get go, and have high-ranking perpetually absentee advisors who do more research bureaucracy than research and advise by way of ominous single-word emails), but if both are weak it's a recipe for disaster, and only the student gets hurt.

Getting a visa into a country via graduate studies is definitely a good reason (especially in the US it seems), but often an MS is sufficient (except if one tries to get in on the green-card fast-track via the O1 visa, which requires an exceptional PhD track record).

[loosetypes]

Really insightful, thank you

[ZephyrBlu]

Your blog is pretty cool!

How did you "[generate] public intellectual capital" though? Posting your blog places, or just by virtue of being able to refer to the blog in your resume it helped your job hunts?