[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How to think about direction in life/career?
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: How to think about direction in life/career?
I'd like to hear some ideas on how to get myself unstuck. Before I
get into it, I want to recognize how privileged this whole story
is, and that myself 15y ago would laugh at how much this reeks of
1st world problems. I'm having a hard time deciding what to do,
both personally and professionally. Personally, I'm conflicted
about lifestyles I want to obtain. One day I'm ambitious and want
to devote my life to building generational wealth, only to dream of
a humble house and spending my time cooking simple meals. It's not
that I think I wouldn't find some happiness in any of those
possibilities - what bothers me is that I cannot completely decide
where on that spectrum I'd like to aim for. A good example of this
is the question of living in the US (on H1b/L1) vs. Europe, where I
bounce between the two on a weekly basis, making it hard to either
move or come to peace with where I am and move on. Professionally
it's a similar story. I started coding in middle-school, and
acquired generalist skills by working on many things throughout
high school / college. I was and still am ambitious, albeit I
lately started understanding it's a double-edged sword in a way.
Now I'm in late-twenties, came to FAANG straight from school,
working on distributed systems at scale. My job is good, I get
enough opportunities, get recognized very often, and there's room
for me to grow. The shipping velocity and lack of accountability is
not great but I don't think I can impact the culture enough for a
meaningful change. Organizational overhead is frequently a mess and
building trust with an ever-changing list of line managers and TLs
takes away too much energy. Looking around, there aren't too many
people I like or am excited about working with, but that tends to
change often. I used to think there were times where all I wanted
to do was clear - learn more about databases, or build distributed
systems, or coach and mentor peers, or get more money, or build
effective teams, or start a self-bootstrapped side business to
squeeze more money out of my skills, etc. I used to be more excited
about tech as well, now it all seems less meaningful. In the past
year or so, I've struggled to define a meaningful & fulfilling
direction. My answer to "what do you want to do?" is rarely
consistent for more than a few days in a row. I now realize I never
really knew what I was after, and I was just lucky to be happy with
whatever I had stumbled upon. Do I want to pursue being a depth IC,
manager, founding engineer in startups, or even a founder myself?
Hard to control scope in these decisions. Thinking this over day-
to-day is a recipe for anxiety and endless analysis-paralysis.
Most of my life I have had to work hard to create opportunities for
myself, and open as many doors as possible. I was lucky to open
quite a few. I now understand that I need to deliberately close
some of the doors to move forward, and it goes against what got me
here, hence so much friction. I'm looking for fresh perspectives
on conceptualizing or thinking about situations like this.
Frameworks that peers and mentors often provide assume that I know
what I want to do, and are concerned more with how to do it. How
do I limit the scope of my decisions? How do I ensure I can
backtrack in case of a bad decision? What is even a bad decision?
How to find things (or thing) that I want to do and be sure to do
it for longer than a week? How do I commit without looking back?
How to think productively about dependencies between these
decisions? Curious to hear stories as well. Where were you stuck,
and how did it play out? Many thanks, HN.
Author : genmaicha123
Score : 17 points
Date : 2022-04-09 21:00 UTC (2 hours ago)
| samh748 wrote:
| A great great book that helped me with this: _Designing Your
| Life_ by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
| (https://designingyour.life/the-book/).
|
| I first got exposed to it during a career navigation workshop
| that showed us this video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SemHh0n19LA&ab_channel=TEDxT...
|
| They also published a follow-up called _Designing Your Work Life_
| but I haven 't read that one.
| dinopete wrote:
| Two thoughts here, one is that finding a different job that you
| find more fulfilling - maybe in some sort of mission driven or
| tech for good type company might be good. The other is that it
| sounds like you might benefit from speaking with a coach of some
| sort, they can be great at helping you find your way.
| testingwaters4 wrote:
| Do you have any hobbies outside of work? Are you pursuing or
| maintaining any strong relationships with friends and family? I
| think you're a little wrapped up in finding your sense of being
| and happiness and satisfaction in your career, and you should
| branch on to find other sources too. Don't get me wrong, your
| work can still be a source of all of that, you might just need
| more sources. With hobbies, you can find new challenges and
| problems and milestones and that provides direction, which takes
| the burden off your software/job for providing it all. Good to
| hear you're actively taking care of yourself.
| jaynetics wrote:
| From what you're saying, it seems like working on something nice
| with nice colleagues might be more fulfilling for you now than
| working at the bleeding edge of tech for the best salary.
|
| Some decisions might also seem more consequential to you than
| they are. Whatever job you pick, it will still be a job. Wherever
| you go, people will have the same basic interests and needs.
|
| Many seemingly big decisions are also kind of reversible. If you
| quit your current job, you can always get another equally okay-
| ish job at a megacorp. If you move somewhere else, you can also
| move back. Only if you plan to start a family you might want to
| be close to your relatives, but YMMV.
| gtvwill wrote:
| "Most of my life I have had to work hard to create opportunities
| for myself, and open as many doors as possible. I was lucky to
| open quite a few."
|
| But did you really? To me it reads like you got to the circle of
| doors at the start of your career, opened one (tech) and the ran
| down that hallway full pelt. You've got plenty of doors to
| open...but they are all in one narrow realm. Imho it sounds like
| you have a really narrow concept of what work/career is and what
| different jobs entail. Maybe take a year out and go do something
| completely different. Who knows maybe you like working in
| tech...but maybe you love hanging off the bough of a boat as it
| sidles along a dock to moor and your jumping over to tie it on
| 10x more than coding, your not gonna know if you have no exposure
| to the experience.
|
| I took the opposite path, worked all kinds of jobs that aren't
| tech(mining, out at sea, movies). It helped me narrow down what I
| want...and firmly set in stone what I don't want. Maybe thats
| what you need? I dunno I find the concept of locking into one
| career especially early on incredibly daunting. You only have one
| life, imho you wanna try experience as many polar opposite things
| in it as possible to suss out what they are like before you lock
| into one. I couldn't think of anything worse than spending say 40
| years in a career to discover on a whim that I enjoy something
| else more (I mean hell, I discovered I love stuff like
| concreting, who'd a thought shoveling sand for 8 hours and making
| concrete look like rocks was so much fun!?).
| asdadsdad wrote:
| Wow! I'm in a similar boat, especially regarding the US v. Europe
| thing, and I realized I'm very divided between a life that most
| people would think is made of the "good choices", and one that
| could go "less optimal", but will probably help me figure out
| what I like better. Staying in the US got very predictable in
| terms of what my journey will look like 5,10 years to come, and I
| got less interested in that, even though, and I know it's a
| privileged position, it will most certainly guarantee I get paid
| more than any other place. However, there's something about
| taking the plunge and finding out what it could possibly look
| like in Europe, and maybe trying to make it financially "work"
| there too. I've acquired a certain level of professional
| confidence in myself over the years that made me believe I can be
| very successful in Europe too, and I've been wanting to try a
| better social life. I've been living here for almost a decade,
| and at this point I feel like I've tried all that the country can
| materially offer me, but in a smaller scale. I did college, NYC,
| the beach life, and everything in between, and I want to
| experience something else.
| togaen wrote:
| Just start doing things. You can't figure this stuff out by
| thinking about it any more than you can figure out how to ride a
| bike by thinking about it. You're young, you're 29. Can't decide
| between 10 things you want to do? Spend a year doing each of
| them.
|
| Always remember: indecision is a decision. The worst thing you
| can possibly do is nothing. That wastes time. Time is a resource
| you are always losing and you never get back. Use your time. Make
| decisions. If they turn out bad, make different ones. Just make
| decisions and execute on them.
| togaen wrote:
| https://youtu.be/KL2T0XRzWUI
| contingencies wrote:
| Find your other, have a kid. The rest will sort itself out.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-04-09 23:01 UTC)