Side project I made after leaving a large company; a free statistics package that bridges the gap between Excel and actual coding (R, Python). In the corporate world we used Minitab or a similar package with an expensive enterprise license.
Once I moved to a smaller one and was doing analytics on the side, I didn't have the budget for such things so.... I made my own version...
Never really had the time to build out a full set of features or promote it. We probably could have grabbed a piece of low-rent district for analytics software.
Empirically, I'm getting about the same results from my 1 page and my 2 page CV, based on call back rates, funnel progression, and interviewer comments. Go ahead and use two pages if the incremental content is relevant to your overall pitch.
(In my case the extra material is relevant... I've run pricing at five companies, which is usually a massively cross-functional job. Unlike my typical competitor, I've also mastered most of the supporting technical, accounting, and commercial disciplines... which makes me a one stop shop for serious pricing problems.)
My recruiter invites have been dropping at a exponential rate once I passed age 45. LinkedIn is apparently a fairly efficient platform for age discrimination.
Most paintings don't have (much) value. Behold my latest work, the brown ring of quality... do I hear... 5 cents?
A few paintings have value, primarily due to the fame of the artist or the history of the piece (It hung <place>). Supply is frequently capped by the fact the artist is dead...
Simple English Translation: We cannot trust any publicly posted claims about product performance, since they have effectively been cherry-picked by the marketing / legal team.
Bad claims can be take down, thus the only remaining claims are good ones.
Cool - can anyone provide a quick list of alternatives?
And most of these tests are basically bullshit, in terms of real world impact.
What's the contest here? Who's most desperate, most willing to sacrifice their life and health for pennies on the dollar?
Seriously. I'm a middle aged guy with kids and parents to take care of. I'm not in a position to spend 30 hours / week doing bullshit puzzles & memorizing an algo book for crap that is basically irrelevant to my job.
You know what I'm good at?
- Spotting the bug before it happens, by watching how the team interacts and who is checking their work...
- Parsing client requirements and finding what matters
- Duct tape engineering so we can hit a go-live date when everything else is a smoking pile of delayed dog-shit...
- Talking the client into dropping a feature that we can't deliver and pivoting into something we already have...
Generally of far higher value than some brain teasers...
It started well and devolved into a bitter rant about the universe. So... here's some perspective from a career on both sides of the table.... (manager and engineer)
- For many teams and personalities, it is very hard to ship anything without a deadline. (as a solo founder, I actually use this psychology on myself to stay on track.)
- Short chunks and deadlines work better than longer ones.
- Peer pressure is a powerful stimulant.
- Your time is not of equal value. You don't really have seventy hours of quality work in a week. You've got maybe 15 "truly inspired" hours, 25 "grind it out" hours, and a lot of filler, face time, and paper shuffling after that. If you're smart, you slip in some employer funded personal growth & education time into that mix.
The classic mistake is to screw up the mix. I actually run into this as a freelancer. My rate for "truly inspired" time (real thinking about theory, architecture, influencing others, lecturing, or consulting on high level topics - eg. I must be fully present and prepared) is between $150 - $500 per hour (depending on the degree to which I'm inspired by the topic in question; $500 if I couldn't give a crap, $150 if I'm truly interested), "grind time" is $75 - $90 (you're paying for work without face time or deep insights, done at my convenience), and I'm unsure how to sell people filler, face-time, and paper shuffling. My typical solution is to go take a nap.
By the way... once you deduct pitching and running the business (10 hours, mix of inspired & grind), that means a freelancer REALLY has only 20 - 25 hours of useful time to sell in the course of a week. Past that, you're either working much harder than an employee or trying sub in filler and hoping your client doesn't notice it...
The typical employee is selling 15 - 25 hours of grind, perhaps 5 of inspired time (if you're lucky) and as much filler and self-directed time as you can get away with. From an employee satisfaction perspective, inspired is a win, filler / self-directed time is neutral to a win (depending on how well you entertain yourself), grind is a negative. Grind time is less onerous if you feel like you are accomplishing something in the process.
My goal as a boss is to get as much grind / inspired time for my buck as possible, since that's what generates output. (employee development matters but is a complex payback balancing future productivity / retention / motivation; filler doesn't really help me at all) The essential management challenge is spotting people slipping filler into a day and telling them to get back to grind. Good bosses protect your inspired time. Someday I'll hopefully get to work for one again.... (LOL)
There's nothing REALLY wrong with doing an 80 hour sprint one week if you can engineer some paid downtime later. I have weeks where I'm exploited and - to be fair - others where I'm massively overcharging my employer. It evens out.
Side project I made after leaving a large company; a free statistics package that bridges the gap between Excel and actual coding (R, Python). In the corporate world we used Minitab or a similar package with an expensive enterprise license.
Once I moved to a smaller one and was doing analytics on the side, I didn't have the budget for such things so.... I made my own version...
Never really had the time to build out a full set of features or promote it. We probably could have grabbed a piece of low-rent district for analytics software.