The best worst job in the world: we are looking for a habra

What work can be better, than to write on Habr about development? While someone is preparing his big break in the evenings, then right during working hours you share interesting things with the community and get benefits from it.

What work can be worse, than to write on Habr about development? While someone is writing code all day, then you look at these people and lick your lips, and saw your pet project in fits and starts in the evenings.
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Every year we ( JUG.ru Group ) hold more and more different conferences for developers, so now we are looking for another employee (in addition to me and olegchir ) for texts in our Habrablog. To make it clear who we need and what this person expects, I described what it all is like when your job is to write texts for developers in a corporate blog on Habré.

What is the slope?

What do I love about this job? Although the goal of any corporate blog is to help the company, here it does not mean “writing enthusiastic advertising texts about how awesome it is”. On Habré this simply does not work. Here another works: to write interesting and useful posts for the community, where the mention of your activity looks appropriate.

One can write at least ten times without arguments “our conferences are wonderful and incredible,” and this is just no one will read. And you can publish a text transcript of the report from the last conference, people will reach for useful information for them - and at the same time they will understand with a real example what you can see at the event and whether they want to go for it next time.

If I were required to continuously write texts consisting of an advertising bulshit, I would very quickly want to hang myself. Fortunately, instead, I write texts on the subject of our conferences, where at the end there is just a small postscript “since you are attracted to this text about mobile development, pay attention, here is the conference about it”.

Another advantage of this job is that you communicate with a lot of cool people. When part of your work is to interview someone of the scale of John Skit , you listen to his answers with bated breath, and at the end he says “thank you for the questions, it was interesting”, you catch yourself thinking “wait, I get paid for it "?

Well, and a bonus for fans puzomerok: when writing habraposta - your work, and you publish them often, you can reach the first place in the ranking of habra users. And then you start getting weird private messages!

What is the difficulty?

But all these buns do not mean that everything is perfect. The main challenge is as follows.

On the one hand, it is clear that the more you know about development - the better for such work, and if you are very immersed in any particular topic, then just in connection with it you can write something cool.

But at the same time, we have a number of conferences in different areas (from Java to testing), so each author has several events to cover at once, and a new one can be added at any time. And this means that you will not be able to limit yourself to your favorite topic and will have to go into a completely different, much less familiar one. And at the same time our conferences are rather hardcore, their visitors are not the first year in the industry, so the content should be of interest to experienced developers.

Being senior in several directions at once is generally unrealistic. Now add to this that you also work not as a developer: you can devote some part of your working time to code so as not to break away from the subject area, but this is not the main activity. And add to this the regularity of the output of posts: if people who write on Habr at the call of the soul, can spend months writing about one topic before composing the text, then it will not work that way.

How can you write anything in such conditions that could interest experienced developers?

It may seem that everything is completely gloomy, but there are some working options.

How to live?

First, although you cannot write about many topics without long-term personal work experience, there are plenty of those that do not require it.

There is a new version of Java, and developers are interested in "what has changed there"? For a normal post about this requires the ability to write in Java, but it does not require months of experience specifically with the new version. In this new version of Java appeared REPL-tool JShell? Since it is new, even a tutorial will be useful for experienced developers, and before writing it, it’s enough to indulge with JShell for an hour or two (the “months” in the REPL simply have nothing to spend). GitHub made private repositories free? Of course, I would like to immediately inform the habrousers about such news, and then it will take some time for research (so that the post is not from one line), but also modest.

Secondly, if you burn with a certain topic and you understand it deeply, then this is also wonderful. Yes, it will be impossible to write about it every day, more often you will have to deal with something else - but when, among other things, your favorite topic comes up, knowledge will be useful here. Oleg was picking on Graal in Javov even before it became fashionable, so he willingly asked Chris Talinger, who worked with Graal, about things like inline parameters - well, well: in the end, Oleg is interested in others too.

And thirdly, you can not be limited to their own competence, connecting someone else. For example, in an interview format where you need not to know all the answers in the world, but to be able to ask questions. The most interesting people from all over the world come to us at the conference, from the .NET-legends of Jeffrey Richter to the head of Kotlin Andrey abreslav Andrey Breslav , it is a sin not to ask such people. It turns out a solid win / win: and the interviewer is interesting, and Habr's readers (our record was an interview with the same John Skit , which gathered more than 60,000 views), and the speakers themselves on the eve of the conference are usually happy to be interviewed, and for the conference this is an obvious benefit.

Of course, in order to question such people, certain knowledge is also required - but the scale of the demands is quite different.

Another way to share someone else's competence is the already mentioned text transcripts of reports. It also happens that one of our speakers publishes a blog post in English, and we, by agreement, translate it into Russian. In such cases, it is required to understand the text, but it is not required to be an expert capable of writing it.

What does this lead to?

From my own experience I want to say that with such work you look at IT from a rather interesting perspective.

In general, it can be offensive: some kind of movement occurs everywhere, people saw interesting things, and you look at all this “outside”, ask questions, and finally you understand something superficially about each of these things, but in the implementation details you do not understand - to figure it out, you would need to constantly work with it. In the same place, in the depths, for sure, too, there is a mass of interesting, to see all of this at a glance just provoke!

But at the same time, losing in depth, you win in the breadth of coverage - and this is also valuable. If you work on a specific role in a particular project, you see everything through this prism: something does not come into view at all, you see something from the side (“testers are those bad people who break my beautiful code”). And when you write about different things, you see very different things, and not “from the side”, but from a bird's-eye view: you can't see the details, but the overall picture in your head is taking shape. I talked (both within the framework of the interview and just at our conferences) with a lot of completely different people: from compilers to testers, from “googles” to startups, from writing to Kotlin to writing to Kotlin himself.

The JS developer may be curious to read habrapos from the world of C ++ (“what do they have?”), But it will be overwhelmed with materials in the main direction and will not get to these non-core materials. For me, almost all areas of the profile, in my work can be useful to any text read about the development and testing.

I feel that in a certain sense I was very lucky: unlike most people, I can follow the life of the development as a whole during work hours with interest.

Who do we need?

From all this it follows that a person for such work requires a rather peculiar one.

He (or she) should have a good understanding of the development, but at the same time willingness to engage not in the development itself.

Understanding development is required not only in terms of code, but also in terms of community life. You need to speak the same language with the developers and know what they care about.

You need a combination of initiative and performance. On the one hand, there are standard tasks that require implementation (for example, we have the traditional posts "top-10 reports of the last conference"). And on the other hand, we want you to offer ideas of interesting texts yourself, and not just wait for instructions.

Of course, you need to be able to write: both in terms of literacy, and in terms of "so that it is interesting." We appreciate texts that look not just like a dry technical tutorial, but really fascinate. Say, if you have a personal life story that somehow intersects with the topic of the material, it can be an excellent introduction.

Flexibility is also required: now we are primarily concerned with texts on .NET and testing, which is why people with relevant competencies are especially interested, but priorities may change. In addition to Habr, we sometimes publish on other platforms, and we also need to be able to adapt to this (the essence remains the same, “texts for developers”, but the format may differ).

And although nobody requires us to work during off-hours, IT geeks will feel right in their place, who in their spare time saw the pet-project for the soul or read about IT: this does not solve working problems directly, but ultimately helps to solve their more effective.

If everything written above does not scare you away, but you are interested, and you want to know more details or respond - both can be done on the vacancy page on HH or My Circle .