I was hoping that we were moving in the opposite direction where people aren't expected to show off side projects, ship something every week or work for a famous company in order to be successful. If this article is good advice, that makes me a bit sad about the state and direction of the industry.
As far as I'm aware, working for prestigious companies will always be prestigious. I don't think that will ever go away, for any industry. I don't think it's necessary, though.
Unfortunately there is still pressure to work on open source projects and/or blog about programming-related things in one's free time. I think this article has a lot of bad opinions from someone who works way too much, and expects other people to work full work weeks (or 90+ like them) and still do personal projects on the side.
I mean this is like saying models don't need to be beautiful, or "beauty" doesn't mean being attractive. Those things are ridiculous, of course.
If you don't have anything cool to show or talk about, and other people do, obviously they will get more attention and money. How are people supposed to know how valuable you are?
Totally agree. To me it feels like it’s talking around the problems in the industry. The solution to good work being ‘unmarketable’ isn’t to stop doing good work. We can’t all be fighting to do the kind of work that ‘looks’ good, and we shouldn’t have to.
Search Engine Optimisation has destroyed the usefulness of search engines. If you search for a recipe or you’re looking for blog posts about a particular technology, you’re more likely to end up on something useless that _looks_ good according to x criteria (or has paid) rather than what you’re actually looking for. Good work gets buried because of the process. The problem isn’t the good work.
Valuable work being perceived as not valuable highlights that the ‘market’ and the processes are wrong. Something isn’t right here if we have to dedicate al our time to SEO-big our careers. I don’t want to bend over backwards to cater to the ever changing fashions dictated by a market that doesn’t know or care to separate the wheat from the chaff. If I have to focus my career on work I hate and/or spend a significant amount of time building a portfolio of ‘side projects’ to ~hack my career~ to impress ...someone who can recommend me for a job (based on work I hate), I’m going to end up doing work I hate for a company who doesn’t understand software or developers, and who is part of the problem. Realistically I’m not going to (and I have no desire to) be one of those ‘rockstars’, so where does following the ‘completely lean into the capitalist crap’ advice leave me? Nowhere I want to be.
