> Management is the difference between your work seeming like its a valuable contribution to a bigger picture, or that it's a pointless sisyphean exercise in futility cynically driven by profit or ignorance.
Wait, this one is an objective property of the product you're working on, right?
I understand that fashion is a pure coordination game, so you would expect every website to look the same, but man, this style of illustration that is absolutelyeverywhere gets annoying very quickly. (Or is it just me?)
On the contrary, I think most other industries do this (i.e. hire people based on mostly insane criteria).
I think programmers are more reflective and analytical than people from other industries, so programming as an industry gets a lot of flak from the inside, but I really believe it's no better anywhere else.
"Half of programmers can't program! What's wrong with this industry?" Half of everyone is completely and utterly incompetent at whatever they're paid to do, why do you think we're special? Programmers just happen to notice these things.
"The interview process is broken!" Yeah, so it is everywhere else, programming is just the only industry where someone would possibly even care about whether something is insane or not.
I'm also in the Harry Potter generation; I was 8 years old when the first book came out. I remember my grandma recommending it to me at the time. It sounded like "kid stuff", so I didn't pay much attention to it and went back to reading Asimov.
I finally read this "kid stuff" years later, in my mid-twenties, and I liked it very much!
Everything has been written about multiple times, don't worry about it.
If your blog is the first place where a reader runs into a particular information or insight, they will find it valuable, even if chronologically, someone else wrote about it first.
There are like three people in the world who have original ideas (the only example I can think of right now is Robin Hanson), but the number of people with successful blogs is much higher.
Wait, this one is an objective property of the product you're working on, right?