[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.