My Year in Review: 2019
susanjfowler.comNot really related to tech, but I find it interesting that she went from software engineering to being an editor for the New York Times and writing books.
That being said once you've been a whistleblower, even for good reasons, sadly, it is probably harder to find another job in your previous area of expertise...
Being an editor at the New York Times is far ahead of almost any job in tech I can think of, at least in my value scheme.
It's almost like a blank cheque in terms of following your interests. Sure, you need to cover the routine stuff on your beat. But the Times is among the few that can and will still devote enormous resources to go deep on issues that matter. And as the editor, you're basically who gets to decide what matters.
In terms of social standing, her job would probably outrank anyone except CXOs at FAANG, at least in my social group.
Even for salary, it's among the few positions in journalism that is competitive with tech. I seem to remember mid 6-figure salaries being quoted in the past, although there is probably high variety, with some editors and authors being their own sort-of "brand".
The only downside is that you don't get to write code if that happens to be your passion. In that regard, it's similar to transitioning to management in tech. But the Times has been doing quite a lot of data journalism and interactive storytelling and the like. So if you really want to, you could probably come up with ideas that get you back into a text editor at least some of the time.
Her whistleblowing doesn't seem to me the kind that should create distrust. It's not as if she taped conversations relating to financial practices. She stood up to a company culture that a lot of qualified observers thought toxic.
Anyway, it's well that she sounds cheerful. She seems to have been quite good at what she did in tech, and I hope that she will consider going back to it.
[edit: corrected spelling of "observers"]
I find it weird that on her main page [0], she has put a large photo of hers with the title "Whistleblower". I mean, since when did whistleblowing become a profession/job?! And for someone who's supposedly working in the tech industry, does it really reflect good on the person to identify herself mainly as a whistleblower?
Whistleblower is the title of her book.
> That being said once you've been a whistleblower, even for good reasons, sadly, it is probably harder to find another job in your previous area of expertise...
She got a job at Stripe after leaving Uber. I expect that she chose to work for the NYT.
"Susan Fowler joined Stripe to found and edit Increment"
Curious: Do people find value in reading increment? I've tried reading it a few times but have often found it to be too many words for too little deep insight. Would love to be convinced otherwise though.
Probably not.
Some people will certainly regard you as a red flag (which is good, because you will not want to work for those) but others will hold you in higher regard or even first get to know of you because of what you did and the publicity surrounding that.
Since job interviews are so much about standing out from all other candidates, having done something outstanding seems like an excellent way to increase your chances of getting a job.
You don't have to be liked by many. You just have to really click with a few. Being meh for everyone is when the job search gets really hard.
Some might hold you in higher regard, but probably that won't help you much in the interview process. Raw skill is what you'll lean on most of the work day, that's what they'll primarily judge you on. If they have two potential hires with equal skill but one has that on her resume, they'll go with the safer one. (I like Susan, I'm just trying to reason if being a whistleblower truly is benefit or not.) Most (thriving) employers are raw capitalists by selection pressure. Taking on extra risk by letting red flags pass through is not something top teir startups can afford.
"Whistleblower" is not a trait that some humans possess and that you have to begrudgingly deal with or be acutely aware of. No one is manically looking for things to blow a whistle on. They do it in response to (perceived) injustice and overwhelming opposition.
When you hire a former whistleblower you can simply be the judge of that. Do you think this person acted reasonably when they blew said whistle? If the answer is yes, I can not think of a reason why you would not want an independent, courageous and critical thinker/doer working for you, specially if it's a startup.
At least that is what everyone keeps asking for in their job offers.
> If the answer is yes, I can not think of a reason why you would not want an independent, courageous and critical thinker/doer working for you, specially if it's a startup.
Risk and trust. I wholeheartedly support whistleblowers and the principle behind it BUT I also understand why a former whistleblower may get rejected because of that. It's all about risk and trust.
Sure, that person was completely in the right and independent, courageous, etc.. but why should I take on the risk that going forward that person would be enabled to decrease the threshold of what is whistleblowing material or have a change of heart wrt to ethics/politics and then going ahead to disclose something which can cause the company financial harm. An example would be the nowadays popular contracts with the government.
Colleagues may have a trust issue with this person. Considering that people may take something the wrong way or misunderstand a comment, etc.., why would I want to interact with someone who can harm my career or make me famous for the wrong reasons? Ever had a colleague which when entering a room everyone became silent? Yeah, that.
Most writings I came across from former whistleblowers acknowledge the fact that it's often career suicide. It's not right, but it's the hard truth. Which makes whistleblowing more admirable IMHO.
Also depends on the level you're at. At lower and pure IC levels, sure, but at higher levels hiring C-suite/VP/Director+ is also about changing vision and sending a message. So I can see why having something (that's just controversial and not a pure negative) can be a plus.
Writing is in many ways programming other people. It also has structure, function, and interaction. Not so different.
The "coding is the same as writing" meme really should stop being subscribed to. It's soo different.
It’s true. When you’re writing, nothing will tell you when your thoughts don’t compile. You just have to deploy and deal with exceptions bubbling up to your end users.
You read your writing to yourself and other people. That is how Mark Twain did it.
"Twain frequently read drafts of his work aloud to his family, judging its effectiveness by their ..."
"When you’re writing, nothing will tell you when your thoughts don’t compile."
There are actually programs, like IDEs, that will catch syntax errors and stylistic errors in writing. Executing the writing program is as simple as having the story read to you via a text-to-speech or human labor. That an end user doesn't appreciate the writing is no different than when a user of a UI finds it unintuitive.
I have used one or two of those and found them worse than useless.
What programs are you thinking of?
Isn't this how things work in dynamic languages like Python?
How about providing evidence and reasoning instead of spouting off?
are you referring to industry retaliation? maybe she has PTSD about her experience as an engineer getting sexually harassed
Writing was one of my goals for 2019. Couldn't write a single piece. A mix of impostor syndrome and lack of discipline I guess. Sometimes I get nice ideas about something to write and then when I start typing I think, 'this is just bad' or 'no one is going to like this'.
To the people who write: how do you decide what to write about? Do you play and research with tools and thoughts, and write about that? Or mostly about things you actually do at work?
In order to be able to write, you need to have something you actually want to say on something you are actually interested in. Writing, is about expressing ideas, so you need some sort of idea, and then you need strong convictions and opinions surrounding that idea. What you DON'T need, is to be unique, smart or good at the technical aspects of writing. If you believe this to sound wrong, just read an Op-Ed in NYT.
You also have to face the idea, that maybe you actually don't want to write. HN is obsessed with writing for the sole reason that it ostensibly builds clout and ultimately makes you more money and validates you as "an important person".
If after all of this, you still want to write, but you really don't have a strong opinion or idea, choose a topic, research it, and share it.
Also, again maybe you need to expand your interests and try and pick an ideology so that you have opinions on things. Listen to a lot of people/podcasts/books with strong opinions, form friend groups with people with strong opinions, fight them on their ideas by researching counters to their opinions. Take stances and argue from a position that you don't believe, etc. This could be anything from gender in tech, to free markets vs regulated markets, to TDD is good vs TDD is bad, to Remote is good vs Remote is bad, etc, etc.
Agree with this. I felt the same about writing, but eventually found that having strong feelings about my chosen topic helps a lot.
I’ve never been able to write for the sake of writing, so I only author posts when I feel strongly about the topic. There are days or weeks when I don’t care to write anything and that’s ok. Eventually you run across something interesting and BAM, you can barely type fast enough to keep up with your thoughts.
Not my own answer, but here's a fun story from the always-fascinating Robert Sapolsky (renowned neuroscientist, author, and a beloved teacher) telling us about how he got into writing[1]. (NB: it's a transcript of a verbal conversation, not a written response; hence the "Sos" and the slight meandering. I found the full transcript to be interesting.)
Interviewer: Where did that [ability to write] come from? I mean, did you begin writing for school – all of a sudden in third grade you got this delight?"
Sapolsky: Naaa...
Sapolsky: [...] I was OK with writing, and throughout college I didn't have a writer's block. So I had friends who would pull their hair out over it, and that was sort the central organizing emphasis of their life, and I never had a writer’s block. It was something that I was OK at, but nothing I took any great pleasure in. I never took a literature class in college, or any English course or anything.
And I was not particularly into writing, and it was not until after I finished college—right after, a week after graduation—I went off to Africa for a year and a half to begin to get my field work started, which I have been doing ever since for twenty-five years and it was fairly isolated site, where a lot of the time I was by myself. I would go 8 to 10 hours a day without speaking to anyone, I would get a mail drop about once every two weeks or so, there was no electricity, there was no radio, there was no anything, and I suddenly got unbelievably, frantically dependent on mail. So as a result you wind up sending letters to every human that you have known in your life in hopes that they would write back to you.
So what would happen is, all I could afford at the time were like these one-page aerogram things that you could sort of get in these big stacks, and something vaguely interesting would happen every couple of days or so. So you would write to somebody about it, and then you would write to the next person about it, and you would realize that before the end of the day, you had just written 25 versions of it, each of which was a page and a half long. [...]
[1] http://web.stanford.edu/group/howiwrite/Transcripts/Sapolsky...
Writing is Thinking — Learning to Write with Confidence: https://blog.stephsmith.io/learning-to-write-with-confidence...
Sounds like you wrote this comment just fine. Do that, but more!
There was a blog post by her that I happen to read, called "Life Without a Destiny"
https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/5/21/life-without-a-d...
What she wrote there totally resonated with me and stayed with me from the day that I read. It was as if she managed to put what I have been wondering into words.
As an aside, what a great 2019 reading list!
Wow. Thats more than book/week. Is it really possible to absorb that amount of information. Won't you simply forget what you read in a very short time after, like almost immediately.
A lot of it is fiction, so I would assume it is for enjoyment. No need to remember all of it.
Unfortunately, much of what we read isn't retained. However, the small amount that is retained compounds, so it's not a lost cause.
> she was denied a formal education–yet went on to obtain an Ivy League degree
Now an editor at NYTimes. Amazing resolve.