Thanks for this article, Erik. And your wife's sketches are indeed cool!
I have a question. Do you think it's not worth for Bob to have a strong profile on landscape overflow which shows a certain type of mastery and expertise or the problem is more with his style there?
I'll have to beg your pardon in advance because the metaphor gets a little thin from "Bob the landscaper" to "Bob the developer."
In short, my opinion is that building a strong profile like that is a waste of Bob's time. It's a way to impress his competitors/peers -- not his buyers. Landscaping buyers will go to Angies List or Facebook and read reviews from other buyers. They don't care whether his peers are impressed enough by his property grading skills to give him a silver badge.
It's a little more nuanced in the programming world, though. You can hang out your shingle as a freelance programmer, but continue to find work the way employees do: resume alphabet soup, strong Stack Overflow profile, job (er, gig, I guess) interviews.
In this world, I think the strong Stack Overflow profile is still not a good use of time, but for different reasons. It's not a bad use of time because it won't work. It's a bad use of time because it will work... to keep you applying for jobs as a laboring resource to be plugged into a team, rather than as a standalone expert.
In other words, if you go independent, this isn't how you want to be evaluated: with the actual buyer of your services delegating evaluation of you to one of your peers. You want to appeal to the actual buyer: the CIO/VP of Software Engineering/etc. And that person, like the landscaping service buyer, isn't going to drill into Stack Overflow to browse your answers tagged Postgres or whatever.
Thanks for this article, Erik. And your wife's sketches are indeed cool!
I have a question. Do you think it's not worth for Bob to have a strong profile on landscape overflow which shows a certain type of mastery and expertise or the problem is more with his style there?
I'll have to beg your pardon in advance because the metaphor gets a little thin from "Bob the landscaper" to "Bob the developer."
In short, my opinion is that building a strong profile like that is a waste of Bob's time. It's a way to impress his competitors/peers -- not his buyers. Landscaping buyers will go to Angies List or Facebook and read reviews from other buyers. They don't care whether his peers are impressed enough by his property grading skills to give him a silver badge.
It's a little more nuanced in the programming world, though. You can hang out your shingle as a freelance programmer, but continue to find work the way employees do: resume alphabet soup, strong Stack Overflow profile, job (er, gig, I guess) interviews.
In this world, I think the strong Stack Overflow profile is still not a good use of time, but for different reasons. It's not a bad use of time because it won't work. It's a bad use of time because it will work... to keep you applying for jobs as a laboring resource to be plugged into a team, rather than as a standalone expert.
In other words, if you go independent, this isn't how you want to be evaluated: with the actual buyer of your services delegating evaluation of you to one of your peers. You want to appeal to the actual buyer: the CIO/VP of Software Engineering/etc. And that person, like the landscaping service buyer, isn't going to drill into Stack Overflow to browse your answers tagged Postgres or whatever.
Thanks for your detailed answer, Erik!