This is a read only archive of pad.okfn.org. See the shutdown announcement for details.

howtoget How to Get a Job Like Mine
Como conseguir um emprego como o meu
Source: https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget

Talk, as prepared, for the Tathva 2007 computer conference at NIT Calicut. (Additional notes.)

Translations: 日本語

The American writer Kurt Vonnegut used to always title his talks "How  to Get a Job Like Mine" and then proceed to talk about whatever he felt  like. I'm in a bit of the opposite situation. I was told I could talk  about whatever I felt like and I decided that, instead of pontificating  for a while about the future of the Internet or the power of mass  collaboration, the most interesting thing I could talk about was  probably "How to Get a Job Like Mine".
O  escritor americano Kurt Vonnegut sempre costumava a chamar suas  palestras 'Como Conseguir um Emprego Como o Meu' e entao prosseguia  falando sobre o que ele se sentia a vontade. Estou um pouco numa  situaçao contraria a dele. Foi me dito que eu poderia falar sobre o que  eu quisesse e eu decidi que, ao inves de falar omposamente por um tempo  sobre o futuro da Internet or o poder da colaboraçao das massas, a coisa  mais interessante qque eu poderia falar era provavelmente 'Como  conseguir um emprego como o meu'.

So how did I get a job like mine? Undoubtedly, the first step is to  choose the right genes: I was born white, male, American. My family was  fairly well-off and my father worked in the computer industry.  Unfortunately, I don't know of any way of choosing these things, so that  probably isn't much help to you.
Entao como eu consegui um emprego como o meu? Sem duvidas, o primeiro passo foi escolher os genes corretos: sou branco, homem e americano. Minha familia tinha boas condiçoes (checar) e meu pai trabalhava na industria de computadores. Infelizmente, eu nao conheço nenhuma maneira de escolher essas coisas, então será de muita ajuda para voce. 

But, on the other hand, when I started I was a very young kid stuck  in a small town in the middle of the country. So I did have to figure  out some tricks for getting out of that. In the hopes of making life a  little less unfair, I thought I'd share them with you.
Mas, por outro lado, quando comecei eu era uma criança presa numa pequena cidade no meio do pais. Entao tive que descobrir alguns truques para sair de la. Na esperança de fazer a vida menos injusta para voce, eu achei que eu compartilharia eles com voce.

Step 1: Learn
Primeiro: Aprenda

The first thing I did, which presumably all of you have already got  covered, was to learn about computers, the Internet, and Internet  culture. I read a bunch of books, I read enormous numbers of web pages,  and I tried stuff. First I joined mailing lists and tried to understand  the discussions until I felt comfortable jumping in and trying to  participate for myself. Then I looked at web sites and tried to build my  own. And finally I learned how to build web applications and I started  building them. I was thirteen.
A primeira coisa que eu fiz, o que todos voces provavelmente já descobriram (checar), foi aprender  sobre computadores, a Internet, e a cultura da Internet. Eu li varios livros, li uma quantidade enorme de pagina na web, e tentei coisas. Primeiro eu me inscrevi em listas de e-mail e tentei entender as discussoes ate que eu senti confortavel em me envolver e tentando participar eu mesmo. Entao eu olhei websites e tentei contruir o meu proprio. E finalmente eu aprendi como constuir aplicativos web e comecei construi-los. Eu tinha treze anos de idade.

Step 2: Try
Segundo: Tente

The first site I built was called get.info. The idea was to have a  free, online encyclopedia that anyone could edit or add things to or  reorganize, right through their web browser. I built the whole thing,  added lots of cool features, tested it on all sorts of browsers, and was  very proud of it. It actually won even a prize for one of the best new  web applications that year. Unfortunately, the only people I knew at the  time were other kids in my school, so I didn't really have anyone  writing a lot of encyclopedia articles. (Luckily, several years later,  my mother pointed me to this new site called "Wikipedia" that was doing  the same thing.)
O primeito site que eu construi se chava get.info. A ideia era termos uma enciclopedia livre, online que qualquer um poderia editar ou adicionar coisas or reorganizar, tudo a partir do seu navegador. Eu construi a coisa toda, adicionei varias caracteristicas legais, testei em todos tipos de navagadores e estava muito orgulhoso dele. Ele, na realidade, ate ganhou um premio como um dos melhores aplicativos web novos naquele ano. Infelizmente, as unicas pessoas que eu conhecia naquela epoca eram outras crianças da escola, entao eu na realidade nao tive ninguem escrevendo varios verbetes enciclopedicos. (Por sorte, muitos anos depois, minha mãe me mostrou esse novo website chamado "Wikipedia", que estava fazendo a mesma coisa.)

The second site I built was called my.info. The idea was that instead  of having to scrounge around the Internet for news from all sorts of  different web pages, why not just have one program that went and grabbed  news from all those web pages and put them in one place. I built it and  got it working, but it turned out I wasn't the only one who had that  sort of idea at the time -- lots of people were working on this new  technique, then called "syndication". A group of them split off and decided to work on a specification for this thing called RSS 1.0 and I  joined them.
O segundo site que eu construi chamava-se my.info. 

Step 3: Gab
Terceiro:

It was summer and I was out of school and didn't have a job, so I had  a lot of free time on my hands. And I spent all of it obsessively  reading the RSS 1.0 mailing list and doing all sorts of odd jobs and  whatever else they needed someone to do. Soon enough, they asked me if I  wanted to become a member of the group, and I ended up becoming a  co-author and then a co-editor of the RSS 1.0 specification.

RSS 1.0 was built on top of this technology called RDF, which was a  bit of a source of heated debate on the RSS lists, so I started looking  more into RDF, joining the RDF mailing lists, reading things and asking  stupid questions and slowly starting to figure things out. Soon enough, I  was becoming known in the RDF world and when they announced a new  working group to develop the next RDF spec, I decided to sneak on.

First I asked the working group members if I could join. They said  no. But I really wanted to be on that working group, so I tried to find  another way. I read the rules of the W3C, which was the standards body  that operated the Working Group. The rules said that while they could  reject any requests to join from an individual, if an organization that  was an official member of the W3C asked to put someone on the working  group, they couldn't say no. So I looked down the list of W3C member  organizations, found the one that seemed friendliest, and asked them to  put me on the Working Group. They did.

Being a Working Group member meant weekly phone calls with all the  other members, lots of mailing list and IRC discussion, occasionally  flying off to odd cities to meet in person, and lots of all-around  getting-to-know people.
I was also a true believer on the subject of RDF, so I worked hard to  get other people to adopt it. When I saw that professor Lawrence Lessig  was starting a new organization called Creative Commons, I sent him an  email saying he should use RDF for his project and explaining why. A few  days later he wrote back saying "Good idea. Why don't you do that for  us?"

So I ended up joining Creative Commons which ended up flying me out  to all sorts of conferences and parties and so on where I ended up  meeting even more people. Between all of this people were starting to  know who I was and I was starting to have friends in lots of different  places and fields.

Step 4: Build
Quarto: Construa

And then I left it all and went to college for a year. I attended  Stanford University, an idyllic little school in California where the  sun is always shining and the grass is always green and the kids are  always out getting a tan. It's got some great professors and I certainly  learned a bunch, but I didn't find it a very intellectual atmosphere,  since most of the other kids seemed profoundly unconcerned with their  studies.
But towards the end of the year, I got an email from a writer named  Paul Graham who said that he was starting up a new project, Y  Combinator. The idea behind Y Combinator is that you find a bunch of  really smart programmers, fly them out to Boston for the summer, and  give them a little bit of money and the paperwork to start a company.  They work really really hard on building something while you teach them  everything they need to know about business and hook them up with  investors and acquirers and so on. And Paul suggested I apply.

So I did and I got in and after lots of pain and toil and struggle I  found myself working on a little site called Reddit.com. The first thing  to know about Reddit was that we had no clue what we were doing. We had  no experience in business. We had hardly any real experience in  building production software. And we had no idea whether or why what we  were doing was working. Every morning we woke up and made sure the  server wasn't down and that our site hadn't been overrun by spammers and  that all our users hadn't left. 

When I first started at Reddit, growth was slow. The site was put  online very early -- within weeks of starting work on it -- but for the  first three months it hardly got above three thousand visitors a day,  which is about baseline for a useful RSS feed. Then, in a couple weeks  of marathon coding sessions, we moved the site from Lisp to Python and I  wrote an article about it for my blog. It got a lot of attention --  Hell hath no fury like a Lisp fan scorned -- and even today I still run  into people at parties who, when I mention that I worked at Reddit, say  "Oh, the site that switched from Lisp."

Around that time traffic really started taking off. In the next three  months, our traffic doubled twice. Every morning we'd wake up to check  our traffic graphs and see how we were doing -- whether the new feature  we'd launched had gotten us more attention, whether word of mouth was  still spreading our site, whether all our users had abandoned us yet.  And every day the number grew higher. Although we couldn't shake the  impression that we seemed to grow faster whenever we took a break from  doing actual work on the site.

We still had no idea how to make money. We sold t-shirts on the site,  but every time we made a little bit of money on those we spent it on  ordering more t-shirts. We signed up with a major Web ad representative  to sell ads on our site, but they never seemed to be able to sell any  ads for us and we rarely made more than, literally, a couple of dollars a  month. Another idea we had was licensing the "Reddit technology" to let  other people build sites that worked like Reddit. But we couldn't find  anyone who wanted to license it from us.

Soon, Reddit was getting millions of users every month -- a number  that far surpassed the average American magazine. I know that, because I  was talking to a lot of magazine publishers at the time. They all  wondered how Reddit's magic could work for them. @@ At first, we just  said yes to everything they suggested. And, fortunately for us, that  worked out, since we could program faster than they could write up an  official contract for what they wanted.

In addition, online news sites started noticing that Reddit could  send them vast amounts of traffic. They somehow thought they could  encourage this by adding "reddit this" links to all of their articles.  As far as I know, adding such links doesn't actually improve your  chances of being popular on Reddit (although it does make your site look  more ugly), but it did give us lots of free advertising.

Soon enough, the partnership talks turned to talks of acquisition.  Acquisition: the thing we'd always dreamed of! No longer would he have  to worry about making money. Some company out there would take over that  responsibility in exchange for just making us all rich. We dropped  everything to negotiate with our acquirers. And then it stayed dropped. 

We negotiated for months. First, we argued over the price. We  prepared plans and spreadsheets and went to headquarters to make  presentations and had endless meetings and phone calls. Finally, they  refused our price, and we walked away. Then they changed their tune and  we finally shook hands and agreed on the deal -- only to begin  negotiating on some other key point, only to walk away again. We must  have walked away three or four times before we finally got a contract we  could agree to. We must have stopped doing real work for six months.

I started going crazy from having to think so much about money. We  all started getting touchy from the stress and lack of productive work.  We begun screaming at each other and then not talking to each other and  then launching renewed efforts to work together only to have the  screaming begin again. The company almost fell apart before the deal  went through.

But eventually, we went into the offices of our lawyers to actually  sign all the documents and the next morning the money was in our bank  accounts. It was done.

We all flew out to San Francisco and begun working at the offices of  Wired News (we were purchased by Condé Nast, a big publishing company  which owns Wired, along with many other magazines). 

I was miserable. I couldn't stand San Francisco. I couldn't stand office life. I couldn't stand Wired.  I took a long Christmas vacation. I got sick. I thought of suicide. I  ran from the police. And when I got back on Monday morning, I was asked  to resign.

Step 5: Freedom
Quinto: Liberdade

The first couple days without a job were odd. I hung around the  house. I took advantage of the San Francisco sunshine. I read some  books. But soon I felt like I needed a project again. I started writing a  book. I wanted to collect together all the interesting studies I'd  found in the field of psychology and tell them, not as research results,  but as stories. Every day I went down to Stanford to do research in  their library. (Stanford is a great school for psychologists.)
But one day I got a call from Brewster Kahle. Brewster founded the  Internet Archive, an incredible organization which tries to digitize  everything it can get its hands on and put it all up on the Web. He said  he wanted to get started on a project we'd talked about in the past.  The idea was to collect information on all the books in the world in one  place -- a free wiki. I got right to work and over the next couple  months I began calling libraries, roping in programmers, working with a  designer, and doing all sorts of other odd jobs to get the site online.  That project ended up becoming Open Library and a demo version is now up  at demo.openlibrary.org. Much of it was built by a very talented Indian  programmer: Anand Chitipothu. 

Another friend, Seth Roberts, suggested we try to find some way to  reform the higher education system. We couldn't really agree on a good  solution, but we did agree on another good idea: a wiki to tell students  what different jobs are like. That site should be launching soon.
Then another old friend, Simon Carstensen, sent me an email saying he  was graduating college and wanted to start a company with me. Well, I'd  been keeping a list of companies I thought were good ideas and pulled  the top one off the list. The idea was this: make building a web site as  easy as filling in a textbox. Over the next few months we worked and  worked to make things simpler and simpler (and a little more complex as  well). The result, which launched a couple weeks ago, is Jottit.com.

I also signed up to mentor two Summer of Code projects, both of which  were stunningly ambitious and with much luck should be launching soon. 
I also decided I wanted to get into journalism. My first print  article got published the other week. I also started a couple blogs  about science and begun working on an academic paper of my own. It  builds upon a study I did a while back about who actually wrote  Wikipedia. Some people, including Jimmy Wales, the kind of public  spokesman of Wikipedia, claimed that Wikipedia wasn't such a big  distributed project after all but instead was only written by around 500  or so people, many of whom he knew. He had done some simple studies to  back this up, but I ran the numbers more carefully and found the  opposite: the vast majority of Wikipedia was created by new editors,  mostly people who didn't even bother to create accounts, adding a couple  sentences here and there. How did Wales make such a big mistake? He  looked at the number of changes each user made to Wikipedia,  but didn't look at the size of the change. It turns out there is this  group of 500 who makes an enormous number of changes to Wikipedia, but  all of their changes are quite small: they do things like fix spelling  and change formatting. It seems much more reasonable to believe that 500  people went around editing much of an encyclopedia than it does to  think they wrote it.

Words of Advice
Conselhos

What's the secret? How can I boil down things I do into pithy sentences that make myself sound as good as possible? Here goes:
    
1. Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.
1. Seja curioso. Leia muito. Experimente novas coisas. Eu acho que muito do que as pessoas chamam de inteligenca refere-se, sinteticamente, a curiosidade.
2. Say yes to everything. I have a lot of trouble saying no, to an  pathological degree -- whether to projects or to interviews or to  friends. As a result, I attempt a lot and even if most of it fails, I've  still done something.
2. Diga sim para tudo. Eu tenho um grande problema para dizer nao, em um grau patologico -- seja para projetos ou entrevistas ou para amigos. Como um resultado eu tento muitas coisas e mesmo que a maioria das coisas falhe, eu ainda consigo concluir algumas.
3. Assume nobody else has any idea what they're doing either. A lot  of people refuse to try something because they feel they don't know  enough about it or they assume other people must have already tried  everything they could have thought of. Well, few people really have any  idea how to do things right and even fewer are to try new things, so  usually if you give your best shot at something you'll do pretty well.
[fazer]
I followed these rules. And here I am today, with a dozen projects on my plate and my stress level through the roof once again.
Eu segui estas regras. E aqui estou eu hoje. com uma duzia de projetos no meu prato e meu nivel de estresse no teto novamente.
Every morning I wake up and check my email to see which one of my  projects has imploded today, which deadlines I'm behind on, which talks I  need to write, and which articles I need to edit.
[fazer]
Maybe, one day, you too can be in the same position. If so, I hope I've done something to help.

Talvez, um dia, voce tambem possa estar na mesma posiçao. Se isso acontecer, eu espero que eu tenha feito algo para ajudar.