I disagree with this advice in the general sense. There is a trend right now in Silicon Valley to have all manner of meetups and presentations. I've worked with tons of these guys and the majority of them are not going anywhere. You still need something worthwhile to present. A top-notch presentation about another new Ruby DSL for migrating data from MySQL to PostgreSQL is not going to help your career as much as writing Anywhere.FM in 3 months. If your work is good enough, you can always get someone better than you to do the talking. Improving your communication skills can't hurt but it isn't the single most important thing you can do.
First, +1. I think there is a lot of room for debate around this subject, and frankly this was exactly the debate I hoped to provoke (which is why I included a video of Jobs introducing macintosh, a product he really did not create in the engineering sense).
Should we be like Woz? like Jobs? Should we strive for a partnership like Woz + Jobs? Hire a "Sales Animal" and a PR firm as Paul has described doing with his company?
And what is the role of an incubator/angel/YCombinator? Can it help programmers focus on programming? Or is there something really fundamental in "communicating well" that is necessary to successfully creating programs?
I think there's a lot of room for discussion around this, and I hope it's as productive for you to weigh the various options and outcomes as it has been for me in my life.
I've hired a lot of coders in my time, and I have to say that (given a baseline of competence) I'll hire communication skills over additional coding prowess pretty much every time. For a coder who is part of a team (and not the founder of a start-up) you can't "always get someone better than you to do the talking."
In most corporate situations, coders who can't effectively communicate with their peers or supervisors are essentially worthless, regardless of how slick they code.
The article was about improving your programming career, not creating solutions, forming a startup, becoming a great programmer, etc. To improve a career, you need to communicate better. It didn't say that it was the single most important thing to do overall. It was specifically about career advancement.
Even in the startup arena, there are lots of capable coders who have created awesome solutions who just don't know how to connect and communicate to the right people. After all, it's not the idea -- heck, it's not even the code, it's the ability to communicate effectively to people that makes a startup run. You can have the next best thing to sliced bread and if you're not able to communicate (market, sell, persuade) it doesn't really amount to much, right?
I didn't misread the article. I disagree with it. While he mentions improving communication skills in the general sense, specifically the article seems to be about presentations and public speaking. I don't think this is the most important thing you can do to improve your career.
In fact, within the spectrum of interpersonal communications, you are probably better off learning how to schmooze on a personal level before you hone your presentation skills.
I'd still disagree. Empirically, it seems that career success in programming happens to people who approach a technical problem in a novel way (eg - ZFS, gmail, Asterisk, off the top of my head). Communication is important, but it is secondary.
Of course, if your definition of career success is ascending through various ranks of management, I can see your point.
I often say that starting to smoke was my lucky break career wise.
When I got my first IT job it was a very low level help desk job with a big 3 consultancy. I smoked though so I was often in the smoking lounge/smoking area with the other smokers and we would naturally chat. This chatting/familiarity got my name around enough that I was able to get extra chances to move ahead and was out of the call centre and into a development job in no time at all.
I did finally quit though. Now I got for the smoke breaks I just leave the smokes out of it. I get the same benefit with only having to risk second hand smoke a couple times a day.
it's not obvious that it's significant. we shouldn't waste our time worrying about tiny things. for example there is uranium in the ocean. it's a lot as an absolute figure. but it's very dilute, nothing to worry about.
pick one study or argument, which is the best, and i'll look into it more carefully.
the wikipedia article is lengthy, and contains errors, but if i point one out you will presumably say there's another part that's better. that's fine, but let's skip that step and go straight to the part you wish to stand behind.
Doesn't seem worth the effort for something I'm really convinced is right beyond a shadow of a doubt. I don't even think being proven wrong could convince me to change. It seems like a good idea for society to say bad things about tobacco.
I'll leave the argument at "fix the wikipedia article."
Wow. The Jobs Reality Distortion field existed even in 1984. The crowd was going apeshit over a pitiful demo--the Amiga was already being shown to press in '84 and was released less than a year later...I certainly knew that the Mac wasn't all that impressive at the time. My Commodore 64 even had 16 colors and could talk using SAM, and the C64 scene demos blew away everything that Mac slideshow was doing. But the crowd is simply orgasmic.
How does he do it? What is it that Apple people are seeing that makes them so excited by everything Jobs demos? Really, it's something I've never understood...I see overpriced underpowered machines, and yet, for fans, every Apple product is a little piece of heaven.
So, obviously, I'm managing to miss the point of the article pretty resoundingly, but oh, well.
That would be a "deck of slides." Nowadays it's a keynote, open office, or that-other-thing file, but once upon a time it was a set of 35mm transparencies you would load into a carousel.
Stacked up, they looked a little like a deck of cards, thus the nickname "deck." You can probably find one (and someone old enough to remember when they were called decks) in a museum somewhere.
I'm old enough to have presented from transparencies on an overhead projector, though I've never had occasion to present using an actual slide carousel.
BTW, I'm not sure I understand why you think it's so important to present with a Powerpoint (or similar). I tend to think Powerpoints get overused, and I often like to present working just from notes (3x5 cards, since I'm bad at memorizing) or from a demo when appropriate.
What's the win of working with a deck, in your view?
- Provide graphics to illustrate your points (including code).
...and really that's about it. I keep my slides to one graphic or max five words, plus a little flow chart of progress through the presentation along the bottom. Depending on what I am talking about I might use as many as 2 slides a minute, but usually one every 2-3 minutes.
This is the same for monthly reporting (twenty graphs, with a page number on each) through to conference speaking (scripted and learned, lots of pictures, little navigation helper on each page).
Uh... could it be that the author copied this comment and pasted it into the article when he realized that the word "deck" isn't commonplace? If I see him, I will be sure to ask him which came first, the comment or the update to the article.
the more you grow as a programmer your power to abstract things improves; with little more effort you can convey the same thing vividly to fellow programmers/managers and that is what this article talks about.
you cant communicate effectively if you dont hold the authority over the subject or havent done significant handson on the same topic.
IMO the article is worse than "the basics of presentations," actually doesn't say anything about how to present, it merely explains that it is a skill worth improving.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide whether an article that spends half of its time explaining why presentations and the other half explaining how to present is better or worse than an article that tries to make one point succinctly and stops.
