This week - career advice.

Don’t call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2011) - the first out of three from patio11. The main idea is to view yourself as a contributor and bringer of value to the organization you’re a part of, rather than a programmer. There’s other good stuff in there like not being defined by a software stack, and general job finding advice.

Salary negotiation: make more money, be more valued (2012) - the second out of tree from patio11. The main idea is to get good and proactive at salary negotiations, rather than be non-combat about it.

Salary negotiation and job hunting for developers (2016) - the final article from patio11. This is mostly a summary of the previous two, but this is important stuff and well worth repeating.

Big company vs startup work and pay (2015) - this is Dan Luu doing an interesting comparison between big companies and startups. First off you should follow his blog - it’s one of the best tech career blogs. Spoiler - big companies come out way ahead of startups in general, for both interesting work and for pay, especially if you play your cards right. It is a temporary thing though, and as far back as 7-8 years ago, things were much more balanced.

Developer hiring and the market for lemons (2016) - again an article by Dan Luu. It analyzes why it is so hard to find good developers and to be found by good companies as a developer. It’s certainly much more complex than an brief article like this, but the information asymmetry between candidates and companies distorts the hiring market much like in the classic “Market for lemons” economics paper.

Google infrastructure security design overview (2017) - part of the docs for the Google Cloud Platform. Security in depth to say the least. Worth keeping in mind next time somebody argues about the “cloud” not being safe etc. How many homebrew datacenters can do half of this?