I'm dying to start a blog to write about coding, projects, occasional unrelated observations. I'm at grad school (finishing this summer) and will likely try and start something myself afterwards. It seems a good time to begin writing.
As a small part of this, I'd like to relate my time as a typical drone at a medium sized software company and how my current decisions are shaped by that period. Maybe it's boring but it feels important to me. My concerns are:
* Anything I write will obviously be about Initrode (let's call it) as this has been my only 'real' job (not counting vacation work).
* Friends/bosses/colleagues at Initrode are almost certainly going to find and read it, and I'm still in touch with a number of people from there.
* That my experiences include: Numerous common programming abominations (the big ball of mud!), obsession with processes, highly paid employees who simply existed to forward emails to other employees. The slow strangling of all that was good in the firm. Great material for writing.
I admire people who can be so blunt about their former workplaces, eg: Joel Spolsky writes about Viacom, Zed Shaw in his CUSEC '08 talk (I know he's maybe an extreme case, but still his talk really rings true), Steve Blank's recent article "The Elves Leave Middle Earth". All these people, however, are far more important/successful/senior than me (mid 20s). Even keeping things quite mild I'd be worried about burning my bridges, and damaging future prospects.
Should I worry? Will this even help with the 'right' kind of companies? Should I write anonymously (I'd prefer not to)?
As a small part of this, I'd like to relate my time as a typical drone at a medium sized software company and how my current decisions are shaped by that period. Maybe it's boring but it feels important to me. My concerns are:
* Anything I write will obviously be about Initrode (let's call it) as this has been my only 'real' job (not counting vacation work).
* Friends/bosses/colleagues at Initrode are almost certainly going to find and read it, and I'm still in touch with a number of people from there.
* That my experiences include: Numerous common programming abominations (the big ball of mud!), obsession with processes, highly paid employees who simply existed to forward emails to other employees. The slow strangling of all that was good in the firm. Great material for writing.
I admire people who can be so blunt about their former workplaces, eg: Joel Spolsky writes about Viacom, Zed Shaw in his CUSEC '08 talk (I know he's maybe an extreme case, but still his talk really rings true), Steve Blank's recent article "The Elves Leave Middle Earth". All these people, however, are far more important/successful/senior than me (mid 20s). Even keeping things quite mild I'd be worried about burning my bridges, and damaging future prospects.
Should I worry? Will this even help with the 'right' kind of companies? Should I write anonymously (I'd prefer not to)?
Thanks, and Merry Christmas.