The other day, I was listening to a podcast featuring one of my favorite thinkers, Harry Miree - a drummer/YouTuber known for his work with LoCash, Boom City, and most recently as the tour drummer for HARDY. Harry’s introspective nature offers a unique perspective on a career path I’ve always admired from afar: the professional musician (professional in the sense that he gets paid to play in bands that don’t bear his name)1.
A particular segment of the podcast struck me. Harry and the host were discussing aspiring musicians who move to Nashville to break into the music industry:
“I remember asking everyone [what they were doing in Nashville], the Barista or the Uber driver or whatever… they’re all just like ‘I moved here to play drums, I’ve been here a couple years, and I’m just waiting on the gig’. And I would ask all of them ‘where can I check out your playing; where can I see you or listen to you?’ and they all went ‘well there’s a demo, it’s on cassette though and the thing is the bass player was like sick that day so this time is not that good and you know…’ I mean there’s all this qualifying! Nobody said like ‘oh right here – look at this video’. And I hate qualifying things… if I have to send something to someone and I have to qualify it, I’m not going to send it; I’ll just redo it until it doesn’t need an explanation… I realized right away that everybody I met here that didn’t have a gig was doing this qualifying thing, and I thought ‘cool, I’m not even going to say I’m a drummer to anybody until I have a video that I like of what it looks like and sounds like and feels like for me to play the drums’. So with all the little money I had, I paid this lovely videographer $25 an hour to come to my house and just point a Canon Rebel at me and I recorded myself playing a song, and I did it once a week…” (source)
The key takeaway? The best way to break into an industry is to demonstrate what your work looks like, allowing potential employers to see your capabilities firsthand.
This concept resonates deeply with me, both personally and professionally. While I don’t make music for a living, I do make software2, and my experience has shown that creating and publishing quality work has been invaluable when seeking new opportunities. I’ve secured numerous interviews (two of which led to new jobs!) where the hiring team mentioned noticing me because of my GitHub or this blog. On the flip side, as someone involved in recruiting and hiring engineers, I always look forward to exploring candidates’ websites, blogs, and other online artifacts. In my experience, a strong open-source project can absolutely tip the scales in a candidate’s favor during hiring decisions.
Outside of work, I volunteer as a career mentor for my alma mater3. One piece of advice I frequently offer is to “publish the things you build.” For students just starting their careers with limited work experience, the best way to stand out among the growing crowd of CS graduates is to publish projects that showcase their skills. It’s never been easier to build something cool with software and put it online. I don’t want the students I work with to make the same mistake as the musicians Harry mentions – having plenty of talent but failing to compile a demonstration of that talent in a digestible way. As with many things, the easiest way to start standing out from the crowd is to just do things.
However, sometimes just doing things isn’t enough on its own. After hearing Harry’s interview, I read this post4 by my boss, James Hawkins, which succinctly summarized another concept that Harry’s interview had me pondering – when it comes to personal branding, it’s often better to go the extra mile and do something truly good. Harry discusses this at length in the podcast, lamenting the trade-off musicians face between creating “great art” and producing something that’s good enough to release. He observes that many musicians fail to showcase their abilities effectively because the process of doing something good is challenging, and the creative burden of not knowing when something is good enough to publish often prevents people from creating anything at all.
I believe this rings true – personal branding is a valuable asset for anyone in their career, and I agree with both James and Harry that it’s worth making something good if you’re going to put in the effort at all. However, as I encourage the students I mentor, every journey starts somewhere. Getting into the habit of publishing things that are “good enough” and consistently improving is an excellent way to enhance your skills overall. It’s not always easy to put yourself out there, but I don’t think it should be! Challenging tasks are worth doing, and I believe that investing extra time in enhancing your personal brand with examples of your work tends to have outsized positive impacts on your life and career – the return on investment can be substantial.
While nothing I’ve said here is groundbreaking or particularly novel, I felt compelled to write about it because these ideas have been noodling around in my mind since watching the podcast. I figured the best way to process my thoughts would be to take my own advice and just do the thing. After all, that’s what personal branding and growth are all about – consistently putting your work out there and trying to improve with each iteration.
I love music and for a while thought pretty seriously about trying to do it as a vocation – I went to college on a music scholarship, played in the jazz band my entire time there, and have played in various bands throughout my life. I eventually abandoned my musician dreams to settle for a more stable career, but I’ve always had immense respect for folks who devote themselves fully to a creative pursuit in a professional capacity. ↩
There are obvious differences between professional musicians and professional software developers, but I think the parallels between the creative pursuit of making music and the creative pursuit of building good software hold strongly enough that this perspective is pretty transferrable. ↩
I partner with the Whitman Career Center, where I advise computer science undergrads on how to break into tech. ↩
I know, I know – I’m a corporate shill, but I love my job and my coworkers. Come join if you want to love your job, too. ↩