[HN Gopher] If you don't design your career, someone else will (...
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If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
Author : TheAlchemist
Score : 362 points
Date : 2025-12-22 10:27 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gregmckeown.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gregmckeown.com)
| hwhehwhehegwggw wrote:
| I would take it one step up and say if you don't design your life
| intentionally your career will.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Juniors fall into this pitfall so quick. Our newest hire
| actually set boundaries early on and I was pleasantly surprised
| nottorp wrote:
| So it's the kind of work place where you _have_ to set
| boundaries? :)
| fifilura wrote:
| What workplace is not?
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| You need to set _your_ bounds in every single workplace,
| because no one workplace can set the right boundaries for
| _everyone_.
| y-curious wrote:
| "Set your own boundaries, or someone else will do it for
| you"
|
| Turtles all the way down
| ramon156 wrote:
| I think this mostly speaks about setting boundaries with
| your higher-up, which is revolved around you.
|
| So, I guess it would be "Turtles all the way up"
| ramon156 wrote:
| We work in different timezones so it's a mess. Either
| people give up their morning or they give up their evening
| time.
|
| I'm at the bottom of the chain here and have no authority
| to change this. Given that I'm being let go soon there's
| not much reason for them to care about my mental state
| either.
|
| But from the time I've been here, yes, you need to set
| boundaries or they'll do it for you. It seems like most PMs
| are used to talking to robots, because that's how they talk
| to us lately.
| madduci wrote:
| I hope they were work-life balance boundaries
| georgeburdell wrote:
| Disagree. This kind of comment is furtively pulling up the
| ladder behind you. Do as I say not as I do. Junior is the
| time to learn as much as possible and take risky bets (and
| suffer accordingly). When I was in a junior in a factory, the
| night shift knew me well. Nowadays, I've pared it back to 50
| or so hours per week, because I now have a family, which is
| fine but it came at the cost of basically zero time to learn
| or do things other than what my manager asks.
| kamaal wrote:
| This is a correct view point to have.
|
| As you get to the downswing of your career, you should have
| already worked and made enough mistakes to have most of
| your experience. You must cruise on that experience when
| you are older.
|
| When you are old, that is not the time to work and make
| mistakes.
|
| That is, most of the heavy work must be done as early as
| you can. Eat that frog.
| nasmorn wrote:
| I agree. When new programmers come from uni they
| sometimes barely did any programming. So at some time in
| their life they got to actually put in the time and learn
| how to be a competent developer. It is obviously great if
| you can do it on somebody else dime in a 9 to 5 but if
| you can't get that you should just put in the time and
| learn. In the end you can at best get paid for the value
| you can create and if you are incompetent that is not
| going to be a lot
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Junior is the time to learn as much as possible and take
| risky bets (and suffer accordingly). When I was in a junior
| in a factory, the night shift knew me well.
|
| That would require a whole, separate article.
|
| Many (most?) juniors grinding like that in a major company
| will work hard to get nowhere. Speaking from experience.
| Yes, I learned some lessons:
|
| 1. Get a different job. Deadend jobs definitely exist, and
| are quite common.
|
| 2. Ignore senior folks who say "You're whining. It's crappy
| everywhere. Just learn to take it."
|
| Number 2 has been wrong every single time someone said it.
|
| > Nowadays, I've pared it back to 50 or so hours per week,
| because I now have a family,
|
| This is not the endorsement you think it is. I've done
| quite well by insisting on 40 hour weeks. I'm going to
| assume you're doing much better than I am, because
| otherwise it seems like a life wasted.
|
| Don't get me wrong. If you want to go much farther than I
| have, you likely will have to grind and work hard _and_
| smart _and_ be lucky. But I assure you - most of the people
| I know who worked hard are not in a better position than I
| am (or if they are, the difference is incremental).
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| You realize "pairing it back to _50 hours a week_ " is not
| a great outcome don't you?
|
| If I graduated post 2012 instead of 1996, I would have tied
| my horse to a safe BigTech company and made a lot of money
| in cash and liquid RSUs long before I joined a bullshit
| startup that statistically wouldn't have gone anywhere.
|
| Hell I made that choice at 46 when my youngest (step)son
| graduated. I chose to work at BigTech instead of getting a
| meaningless "CTO" founding engineer position at a startup.
| paganel wrote:
| Statements like this one come for a position of privilege,
| which is to be expected on a forum like this one targeting
| techies who are most probably solidly middle-class, but just
| wanted to point that out. More exactly, most of the (normal)
| people are NOT in the position of designing their lives,
| believing otherwise is, again, tainted by said position of
| privilege.
| integralid wrote:
| You either misunderstood or we disagree fundamentally.
| Everyone can and should design their life. Of course richer
| people have a lot more choices, and poorer people a lot more
| constraints, but everyone can make informed choices.
|
| Believing "most of the normal people" have no agency is
| condescending.
| bboozzoo wrote:
| Oh they have agency. They also have bills to pay, families
| to take care of and many other obligations that folks of
| privilege do not need to be bothered with. It is
| immediately obvious how privileged we are compared to many
| others who are not a liberty of designing their lives or
| careers.
| integralid wrote:
| >They also have bills to pay, families to take care of
| and many other obligations
|
| I honestly don't get your point. I also have bills to pay
| and a family to take care of. Almost everyone does. I
| can't just quit my job and spend my life sunbathing on a
| sunny island, even though that sounds way better than my
| office job.
|
| The number of people who have so much that they don't
| ever need to worry about bills or affording a family is
| tiny, even among HN users. This is also not what
| "designing your life" is about.
|
| To be clear, I acknowledge my privilege - I have a
| relatively high salary (but not US-high, not even 6 USD
| figures) and don't need to worry about day-to-day
| survival. I just fundamentally disagree that there is
| some threshold below which people can't make decisions
| about their own life or career.
| paganel wrote:
| > I just fundamentally disagree that there is some
| threshold below which people can't make decisions about
| their own life or career.
|
| Stuff happens to you and to one's family that you just
| cannot "strategize" your life around just like that,
| unless you have (some, a good amount even) money, this is
| just how things are. If you haven't ever been in that
| place consider yourself very lucky.
| DrPimienta wrote:
| I'm going to add my perspective here, I'm new to the
| website and have noticed people here might not fully
| understand not having any opportunity and what that is
| like. My mother, father, and grandparents all died before
| I was 19. I was homeless for a bit, and slept behind
| bushes while working at a local Kmart. I would have
| stayed homeless if not for some friends (that I barely
| knew then) inviting me to rent an apartment with them
| (they did not know about my situation).
|
| The one thing I had going for me was that my grandmother
| prepaid my college tuition. So I scraped by working
| bullshit jobs, completed college, and now in my 30s I'm
| doing sort-of okay as a programmer for a start up (the
| pay here is bad, which is why I'm here).
|
| It was awful getting here and I was always one small step
| away from being permanently homeless or dead. Maybe he
| didn't mean it like this, but a "normal" person means a
| person living in poverty in China or Indian or wherever
| else, and they all have it even worse than me.
|
| I'm writing this here because, not you, but others on
| this website tend to just give some form of "bro, just
| stop sucking so bad if you want to improve your life" and
| it doesn't seem like they really understand what having
| no option is like.
| the_af wrote:
| I don't think it's condescending to believe a large number
| of people mostly cannot design their lives. At best they
| can try to make it better for their children, if at all.
|
| Why is this condescending? It's not their fault, it's how
| the system works and their bad luck in not being born into
| a more privileged position. For people who cannot make ends
| meet, trying to make ends meet takes most of their
| available time and energy, there's not much left to ponder
| about life's choices.
|
| What it is, in my opinion, is terribly unfair. I agree with
| the GP commenter that us here mostly ignore this reality.
| And that's OK, clearly TFA is aimed at privileged people
| like us, not most people.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I don't think it's condescending to believe a large
| number of people mostly cannot design their lives. At
| best they can try to make it better for their children,
| if at all.
|
| If they have children, barring some violent
| circumstances, then they've already participated in
| designing their life.
|
| This is not a binary issue. All of us have choices and
| make decisions (feeding family, paying rent, not robbing
| a bank - all of these are _choices_ ). Yes, people in
| privileged positions have a much larger "choice space".
| And yes, plenty of underprivileged folks simply refuse to
| pursue the choices they have. Both these things can be
| true.
|
| But sure - no one is denying that some folks exist who,
| either due to their own design or otherwise (e.g. health
| issues), may be stuck and their agency is significantly
| diminished.
| the_af wrote:
| > _If they have children, barring some violent
| circumstances, then they 've already participated in
| designing their life._
|
| This is not the kind of design we're discussing here;
| "not having children" is usually a privileged, informed
| decision which most people are not in a position to make.
| It's certainly very far from "designing your career".
| Regardless, a lot of people don't have much choice here
| either, through a system conspiring on denying them
| choices (see: anti-abortion and anti-sex education
| lobbies, a health care system that conspires against
| their free time and energy, etc).
|
| There's an illusion of choice, especially to us
| pontificating from our privileged lives, but no real
| choice.
|
| > _But sure - no one is denying that some folks exist
| [...] their agency is significantly diminished._
|
| _Most_ folk, not _some_.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > This is not the kind of design we're discussing here
|
| It certainly seems to be.
|
| > "not having children" is usually a privileged, informed
| decision which most people are not in a position to make.
|
| As I said - barring some violent circumstances, having a
| child, or at least the actions leading up to it, is a
| decision one makes.
|
| > It's certainly very far from "designing your career".
|
| This thread is not about designing one's career, but
| designing one's life. See the top level comment.
|
| > Regardless, a lot of people don't have much choice here
| either, through a system conspiring on denying them
| choices (see: anti-abortion and anti-sex education
| lobbies, a health care system that conspires against
| their free time and energy, etc).
|
| I've yet to meet someone who is not underage and doesn't
| understand that having kids is a consequence.
|
| Sure, poor education and lack of abortion play a role,
| but none of that negates the fact that _the person had a
| choice_. It 's exceptionally insulting to those who made
| different choices that led to positive outcomes to be
| told that people _just like them in the same
| circumstances_ didn 't have a choice.
|
| Sorry, but your stance is very much coming across as
| privileged, who is trying to sympathize with people you
| don't understand. It's a very different perspective when
| you actually come from the background you're claiming
| didn't have a choice.
| the_af wrote:
| > _As I said - barring some violent circumstances, having
| a child, or at least the actions leading up to it, is a
| decision one makes._
|
| This is simply a falsehood you believe.
|
| Or rather, it's a very constrained, mostly unfree
| "choice", with a lot of pressure from society telling
| them it's the wrong choice to make, barring them from
| access to abortion, contraception, and in many cases
| decent access to health and education. In many cases they
| are not even aware the choice existed, because it was
| concealed from them. I'm not sure if you are even aware a
| lot of people are not sure how babies _come to be_.
|
| It's easy to claim everyone has access to these choices
| when you are, well, privileged.
|
| > _Sure, poor education and lack of abortion play a role,
| but none of that negates the fact that the person had a
| choice._
|
| It absolutely negates it.
|
| > _It 's exceptionally insulting to those who made
| different choices that led to positive outcomes to be
| told that people just like them in the same circumstances
| didn't have a choice._
|
| Statistically, very few do. The odds are stacked against
| them. So it's not insulting at all; what's insulting is
| claiming from a privileged position that they "had a
| choice".
|
| > _Sorry, but your stance is very much coming across as
| privileged_
|
| Nope.
|
| > _It 's a very different perspective when you actually
| come from the background you're claiming didn't have a
| choice._
|
| Let me guess: your family was starving and dirt poor,
| your siblings were all addicts, but you managed to
| overcome this, educate yourself, and raise yourself to
| entrepreneurship. Is this where this is going?
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Or rather, it's a very constrained, mostly unfree
| "choice", with a lot of pressure from society telling
| them it's the wrong choice to make, barring them from
| access to abortion, contraception, and in many cases
| decent access to health and education. In many cases they
| are not even aware the choice existed, because it was
| concealed from them. I'm not sure if you are even aware a
| lot of people are not sure how babies come to be.
|
| > Statistically, very few do. The odds are stacked
| against them.
|
| I've already acknowledged much of these circumstances,
| right from my first comment. It doesn't change the very
| trivial fact that engaging in such behavior is a
| _choice_. Nor does it change the fact that virtually
| everyone has choices. I 'll repeat what I said:
|
| "Yes, people in privileged positions have a much larger
| "choice space". And yes, plenty of underprivileged folks
| simply refuse to pursue the choices they have. Both these
| things can be true."
|
| As I said, even if you have kids, deciding whether you
| will feed them or let them starve (with all its
| consequences), is still a choice. Unless there are mental
| health issues involved, the person is making choices.
|
| > Let me guess: your family was starving and dirt poor,
| your siblings were all addicts, but you managed to
| overcome this, educate yourself, and raise yourself to
| entrepreneurship. Is this where this is going?
|
| No. But I didn't have easy access to contraception and
| abortion. And I was not a big outlier in the choices I
| made.
|
| And let's be real: The majority of people who come to me
| and complain that they didn't really have a choice did
| not have siblings who were all addicts, coming from a
| dirt poor starving family.
|
| Arguments from extremes are not helping you.
| the_af wrote:
| > _It doesn 't change the very trivial fact that engaging
| in such behavior is a choice. Nor does it change the fact
| that virtually everyone has choices._
|
| Quite the contrary, it does change it.
|
| > _As I said, even if you have kids, deciding whether you
| will feed them or let them starve (with all its
| consequences), is still a choice._
|
| It's very hard to take you seriously after this.
|
| > _Arguments from extremes are not helping you._
|
| This isn't about me or you; I don't need help. And you've
| just made an extreme argument which I quoted above.
|
| By the way, it amazes me you consider the real world "an
| argument from extreme". I suppose from a very limited
| sample one might draw the same conclusion as you.
| aduty wrote:
| They're just speaking from their own place of privilege.
| hollerith wrote:
| I never considered that angle because no one ever explained
| it to me. It feels like this "privilege" concept explains a
| great deal about society. It is like a master key.
|
| Someone recently told me about Jesus and the fact that he
| died to cleanse my sins. I never heard that one before
| either.
| KronisLV wrote:
| In regards to the review part:
|
| What helps me is keeping around my TODO.txt month by month, as
| well as a lot of screenshots and images of the things I find
| relevant for sharing in stand ups and meetings and such (as well
| as presentations).
|
| So if I need to review the past month/year (e.g. when I want to
| update CV/site or catch up with management), it's just a matter
| of going through a bunch of text and images without a lot of
| unnecessary fluff, like digging through Jira. Maybe if I want to
| get the approximate time/effort spent on particular stuff, based
| on the amount of activity there.
|
| Alongside that, it's also nice to document stuff that was
| particularly good, or all the ways software broke in (and what
| broke how often), as well as stuff that pissed me off and made me
| want to quit (sometimes people/mindsets, sometimes tangible code
| or practices).
|
| When the default is just going with the flow and not documenting
| anything and doing no self reflection, every improvement upon
| that helps.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| GPT was actually pretty good for this use case until 5.2
| kneecapped its long term memory and now its more aggressive
| about pruning ( very annoying as wide recall now has to be
| explicitly invoked ).
| xianwen wrote:
| Very interesting! Do you organize screenshots and images by day
| and by topic?
| KronisLV wrote:
| Currently not really, at least not for the weekly status
| meetings.
|
| Typically I'll have a folder with a bunch of numbered files
| in the order that I want to talk about them, since it's
| easier to just quickly share my screen and run through then
| when I want to let others know what I've done, for example
| along the lines of: 01-migrate-gulp-grunt-to-
| vite.png 02-vue-prebuild-script-check-unused-
| translations.png 03-java-add-compile-memory-limit-
| ide.png 04-server-update-python-for-ansible.png
| ...
|
| If I need them for like a yearly performance review, then
| I'll probably do a pass where I group them into named folders
| and write a doc loosely following those topics, given that I
| might work on similar improvements and fixes across more than
| just 1 week. Pretty low friction daily and also when I need
| more structure.
| Swizec wrote:
| My favorite lens on this comes from Hamming:
|
| > It is well known the drunken sailor whos taggers to the left or
| right n independent random steps will, on the average, end up
| about sqrt(n) steps from the origin. But if there is a pretty
| girl in one direction, then his steps will tend to go in that
| direction and he will go a distance proportional to n. In a
| lifetime of many, many independent choices, small and large, a
| career with a vision will get you a distance proportional to n,
| while no vision will get you only the distance sqrt(n). In a
| sense, the main difference between those who go far and those who
| do not is some people have a vision and others do not and
| therefore can only react to the current events as they happen.
|
| Just a tiny bit of bias towards a direction will get you very far
| very fast.
|
| I once modeled+visualised this with a bit of javascript[1] and
| it's quite surprising to see the huge difference from even a tiny
| multiplication factor on each random/probabilistic decision.
|
| [1] https://swizec.com/blog/your-career-needs-a-vision/
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| It is not something I share very often, because people assume a
| lot when I do, but von Braun[1] shared a similar idea. Ignoring
| for a moment his past, one cannot say that he had no
| achievements further supporting position noted by OP.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Aim_at_the_Stars
| clrflfclrf wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Aim_at_the_Stars
|
| > Despite his moral quandaries, von Braun participates in the
| Nazi's V-2 rocket program during World War II to further his
| ambitions in rocket engineering. The film carefully depicts
| his efforts to reconcile his love for scientific exploration
| with the knowledge that his work is being used for
| destructive purposes.
|
| I have a similar short story idea where a person of the
| calibre of Elon Musk who works so hard is made to feel and
| see his successful moonshot projects being used for
| destroying and subjugating nations. This would be similar to
| Oppenheimer. Another twist I can take with the story is Hero
| "Elon" knows about this outcome but still in the hope of
| change in institutional ideology over decades hopes for
| better use for his technology. In the movie Watchmen,
| Ozymandias feels the pain of millions he is going to kill to
| save future billions.
|
| Watchmen: Killing millions to save billions
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu2DdkOxLNs
| raincole wrote:
| Wait, are you saying that for a symmetrical random walk, the
| expected distance is of the order of sqrt(n), but even for a
| slightly biased random walk (like 0.5000001 chance to take
| right) it's of the order of n?
|
| Edit: well of course it is. I was thinking expected position
| (which should be 0) not distance
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| yep
|
| "expected distance" is average abs(coordinate), so for biased
| walk (and big enough time) it's simply abs(bias)*time, and
| for unbiased it's deviation==sqrt(variance)
| raincole wrote:
| Oh right, makes sense.
| jeffwass wrote:
| The "expected distance" is not what you think here.
|
| For a binomial distribution of probability p and (1-p), after
| N steps the expectation value of right steps is Np.
|
| The _Variance_ is Np(1-p), so the standard deviation (or
| Root-Mean-Square) scales as Sqrt(N).
| y-curious wrote:
| This is a lovely mental model and also makes me feel a host of
| existential dread. I had a semblance of vision before gen AI
| and I think that vision needs serious revision
| ptero wrote:
| Which is fine. Goals shift and can even completely disappear,
| forcing you to pick another one. But having and pursuing long
| term goals at most times is still the ticket for success. My
| 2c.
| NegatioN wrote:
| I also really treasure that quote. Your visualization really
| made it hit home again though.
|
| It does make me reflect on this piece I wrote 9(!!) years ago
| though, which hasn't completely materialized. I think I'm due
| for a re-alignment of priorities.
|
| https://www.jrishaug.com/Who-do-you-want-to-be/
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| The vision doesn't have to be accurate, it just has to be
| directional
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| Taken out of context, this line seems like a valid
| description of our ethos these days lol.
| elric wrote:
| This reminds me of a take on art, that goes something like
| "you don't need talent, but you do need to have taste". Taste
| is the same kind of driver as direction in this case.
|
| Probably butchered the quote, can't remember who said it, but
| the message stuck.
| elevatortrim wrote:
| I think the beauty of this quote is working more than its
| content.
|
| Most people, even when they do not sit down and think about it,
| follow one of the two career paths:
|
| - Some people will actively pursue the next logical progression
| (senior, lead/manager, head/vp, exec).
|
| - Some will happily stay in their position unless the next one
| is offered to them.
|
| Being deliberate will always work better compared to being
| random, but it is not like all people who succeed in their
| careers deliberately planned to get where they are.
|
| I would even guess that for the vast majority of successful
| careers, competency and luck played a much bigger role than
| being deliberate about it.
| tayo42 wrote:
| > would even guess that for the vast majority of successful
| careers, competency and luck played a much bigger role than
| being deliberate about it.
|
| I think this is true. I had a while where my career was doing
| really well constant steps up, I was learning, getting
| promoted, was working on great projects and problems that
| were engaging and led to easy promotions. Then I got a new
| manager and it was downhill. Then I got a new job and the
| problems are insignificant and there's no room for growth of
| any kind. If my latest job was earlier in my career my career
| would be very different.
| xeromal wrote:
| I never really had a plan for a career but I never settled. I
| borderline almost did at my last job as it paid enough and I
| loved the people like family but the move from that job
| landed me in the most interesting and well paying job I've
| had yet. Luck totally played a part in most of my jumps and
| the ones I thought were good were often bad and the ones I
| wasn't interested in ended up being the most interesting.
| amelius wrote:
| That's basically diffusion versus drift.
|
| But I think it is the wrong view, as generally people do move
| into the direction they want to go. Take a person doing
| plumbing but wanting to be in art. The problem is not the
| direction, the problem is taking the first step.
|
| In general, many people dislike changing jobs, so they don't
| take steps. The steps are the problem, not the direction.
| lbotos wrote:
| You don't know anyone in your life that "talks big game?
|
| Or someone else that "can't get their stuff together?"
|
| A lot of people never even "move".
| clrflfclrf wrote:
| Drift made me think of electron drift under applied voltage
| or electric field.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Ok but how do you know that the pretty girl isn't a succubus?
| grim_io wrote:
| That's just a bonus.
| monkeydust wrote:
| I have generally had strong vision in my career but this year
| due to external forces at play at work I have been much more
| reactive to the chaos and generally felt off the whole year,
| this was a nice mental model to step through, liked the
| visualization.
| haritha-j wrote:
| It's a lovely metaphor, but I find myself at odds with the
| logic. What you sacrifice with vision I think is flexibility to
| respond to serendipity.
| xandrius wrote:
| Vision is not a dictator, it's just having half an idea of
| where you'd love to be in X years.
|
| It can and probably will move as you age and gain experience.
|
| But if you're thinking you'd love to be your own boss and, as
| you have that vision, you find something much more
| interesting, you can still re-assess.
| haritha-j wrote:
| That's a good point. I find it very hard to find the
| optimum balance between flexbility / vision.
| xandrius wrote:
| Don't let optimum be the enemy of good and enjoy the
| ride.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| My entire professional life/career has been a tension
| between trying new things/opportunities and trying to be
| intentional in what/where/when/how I make changes. I'll
| probably be done in about 10 years so I'll let you know
| how it worked out then.
| rubslopes wrote:
| This resonates with me.
|
| Three years ago, I left academia after finishing my PhD in
| Economics, frustrated by how little real-world impact my
| hard work seemed to have. I moved into IT, wanting to build
| things that would be more immediately useful and practical.
| Still, the dream of using science to create positive change
| never left me.
|
| I was invited to work with AI at a company that develops
| software for the public sector. It wasn't the dream (I
| wouldn't be using my academic expertise) but it felt like a
| step closer. At least I'd be providing tools to support
| people who directly affect others' lives. From the start, I
| told my boss that I hoped someday to offer not just AI
| tools, but real socioeconomic statistical analysis as a
| service for the public sector. And while I've been happy
| working with AI, I've always sought out opportunities on
| projects that were more data-driven.
|
| Three years later, some clients expressed interest in
| having our AI chatbot provide real-world socioeconomic data
| analysis. My boss just gave me a promotion to lead both the
| AI team and this new socioeconomic data initiative.
|
| I was reflecting the other day on how fortunate I am, my
| dream "chased me." But it wasn't simply luck. I had always
| stayed attuned to the opportunities that arose.
| onion2k wrote:
| That's really nice, but the point where the vision is should
| move too. You learn as you progress. What you enjoy changes.
| The entire industry moves. Being focused on the goal you
| defined 30 years ago is _almost certainly_ wrong for most
| people.
| reactordev wrote:
| I can't emphasize this enough. Every 5 years or so I reassess
| what my goals are and refocus my vision on where I want to
| apply my skills.
|
| Things change fast in our industry so being able to pivot to
| something nearby is paramount for maintaining a career in
| this field.
|
| Not everyone has the fortune to spend 15 years at a FAANG or
| other large corporation. Sometimes you have to build it.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Every five years or so, my wife asks me, "What do you need
| to learn now for the next five years of your career?"
|
| It's the same as what you do, except I need the reminder...
| kamaal wrote:
| >>Being focused on the goal you defined 30 years ago is
| almost certainly wrong for most people.
|
| I think there are certain things that are not likely to
| change, and must be aimed for. For starters, being healthy,
| proactively working towards a retirement nest egg, so that
| you don't end up homeless and starving in case things go
| south too fast.
|
| There are many such things I hold as things I would want
| several years from now. Good health, free time and enough
| money to not need a job to just put food on the table, and a
| roof above my head.
| monkeydust wrote:
| >> Good health, free time and enough money to not need a
| job to just put food on the table, and a roof above my
| head.
|
| Sound like the utility function for a lot of people I would
| say.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| After ~15 years, I've realized that no good things come to
| you without sustained focus / attentiveness, and gentle
| pressure in the direction of attention. What everyone here is
| saying is "be closed loop", vs the drunkards "open loop".
| Combined with a bit of progress every day, it's (so far, at
| least) magical what happens.
|
| Another bit to consider: It took a long time to realize that
| basically everyone wants basically everyone to succeed, as
| long as incentives align. It was very easy to imagine I was
| swimming upstream early in my career - especially my early
| mentors urging me to _specialize_ to find success. My initial
| temptation was to "specialize" in hot/attractive topics in
| an effort to be the "indispensable X authority". But my PhD
| advisor urged me to "not swim in red water", where the
| incentives are inherently conflicting - everyone wants to be
| "the X person".
|
| Much better to find a team working on a good problem
| _somewhat like the ones you want to solve_ and just push
| along with them. You can save yourself a _lot_ of energy by
| slotting yourself into a system that aligns with your
| preferred direction of travel, even if only a little bit. The
| current carries you.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| I always wondered about that.
|
| Seemed like everyone was doing topics in the "red water"
| and felt useless to not.
|
| I found my areas of interest were the "red water" of 20
| years prior and there was little left and it didn't solve
| problems relevant to industry.
|
| Quit PhD and got a job where I was grossly underpaid until
| the next one.
| brightball wrote:
| I literally fell into anti-fraud and email security back in
| 2012 and spent a totally unexpected chunk of my career
| around those topics.
|
| The amount of people I've heard of say they want to go into
| email security is very small.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I think this demostrates a far more important perspective
| than "have a vision" - which is easy to explain and
| almost impossible to execute, which is be curious,
| intentional and open to lots of things. The curious &
| open part leads you to new oppportunities, and the
| intentional part helps you figure out how to evaluate &
| where to go next.
| lanstin wrote:
| This sounds like much better advice. Trying to plan out a
| tech career over decades seems like very premature
| optimizing. Being curious and making sure you keep
| learning is not only very pleasant, it's useful. And when
| the tech changes, fine, no problem. Most of the big
| features of my life have not been plannable ahead of
| time.
| nrvn wrote:
| Exactly. You can "have a vision" to accelerate full speed
| and hit the hard wall and just before going full throttle
| you are offered an opportunity to enter an open door
| around the corner which you have never even thought
| about. And that door helps you discover a new vision,
| that might stick for lifetime.
|
| Also, while the original advice about "vision" sounds
| reasonable, it also sounds a bit dogmatic. The filpside
| of "career vision" is "tunnel vision". And life is not
| deterministic, it has a much more probabalistic nature.
| Hence, curiosity and open mind.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Great point, and great blog post (as usual).
|
| PS Tangent - FYI there's a typo "Minset" should be "Mindset" in
| the reference to your book. HTH
| bad_username wrote:
| I don't think jus the raw distance (from here) is the metric to
| necessarily optimize for. It may be more useful to throughly
| search the nearby area, for example - especially if you feel
| you're in a good neighborhood already.
| clrflfclrf wrote:
| https://www.sciencenews.org/article/sharks-use-math-hunt
|
| A new study suggests that some sharks and other marine
| predators can follow strict mathematical strategies when
| foraging for dinner. The work, reported online June 9 in
| Nature, is the latest aiming to show whether animals
| sometimes move in a pattern called a Levy walk.
|
| Unlike random motion -- in which animals take similar-sized
| steps in any direction, like a drunk stumbling around -- Levy
| walks are punctuated by rare, long forays in any direction.
| Draw a Levy walk on a graph, and its squiggly pattern echoes
| a fractal, the mathematical phenomenon whose shape remains
| similar no matter the viewing scale.
| mhb wrote:
| Premature optimization would like a word.
| agentultra wrote:
| Hamming was also writing from a highly privileged position. He
| was able to work at Bell Labs for the majority of his career.
| That just doesn't exist today.
|
| _The Art of Doing Science and Engineering_ is a great book but
| it needs context. The last edition was released in 1994.
| Programmers had a lot of labour power back then.
|
| Today though? The median house costs more than a third of the
| median income. Inflation has raised costs of living to
| unsustainable levels. And for programmers there have been
| hundreds of thousands of layoffs since 2023 and a low number of
| job openings.
|
| I don't think it's unreasonable to take what job you can get or
| stay in a job you don't care for until the trade winds return.
| Swizec wrote:
| > Hamming was also writing from a highly privileged position.
|
| Hamming had a lot of career capital. He was the only person
| in the world with his track record. If you needed his kind of
| research/output/teaching/etc, he was the person you needed.
|
| Cal Newport talks a lot about this. Great books.
|
| Have something [unique/valuable] to offer and you'll be
| surprised how many doors it opens. Yes it takes time to
| stairstep your way there. A fresh grad has less career
| capital than a seasoned engineer with a track record of
| building billion dollar companies.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| This is a framing issue. You can't control the times, but
| good advice is applicable in good and bad times. If Hamming
| was operating from a "good time", it should be true that his
| policies are also applicable in the "bad times".
|
| His advice to "work on the worlds hardest problems" was
| spoken to people who had worked their way past the initial
| difficulties. General advice to "Move towards important
| problems", which is precisely the same thing, applies in good
| and bad times, and is very likely to produce in you a
| valuable expertise.
| yobbo wrote:
| It's not about good or bad times. All compasses are broken
| so any particular direction you believe you are walking
| deliberately might as well be uniformly random.
|
| "Direction" and "design" are probably the wrong metaphors
| for careers.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I think it is better for your mental health to see
| yourself as having some agency. You certainly have some,
| though how much we can debate. But saying something like
| "all compasses are broken" sounds so defeatist that I
| worry you are experiencing depression.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| Personally, I find the advice useful. Most who provide a
| framing for causes of success either do not place it in
| relation to anything, or relate it primarily their own
| situation, and their argument becomes susceptible to
| interpretation as survivorship bias. Some try to extend
| their argument to cover more cases, but can be seen as
| overconfident based on limited experience. It's hard for
| one writer to "prove" what general success rules are.
| miltava wrote:
| Is this still a valuable read today (specially taking it into
| account)? It's been in my reading list for a while now but
| I'm always postponing :|
| raybb wrote:
| I read/skimmed it this year. I don't feel it was worth it.
| The first few and last few chapters have some nuggets but
| for the most part it's pretty highly technical stuff that
| feels not super relevant or interesting for a software
| engineer today (in my opinion).
| kace91 wrote:
| >I don't think it's unreasonable to take what job you can get
| or stay in a job you don't care for until the trade winds
| return.
|
| Having a goal does not seem at all at odds with weathering a
| storm. Your choices can then be what you learn in your free
| time, or what horizontal moves you make at that job, or which
| people you get closer to, for example.
| nospice wrote:
| > Programmers had a lot of labour power back then.
|
| Huh? Back then, there was very little glamor to software
| engineering. Computing just wasn't serious enough. There was
| relatively little competition, salaries were unremarkable,
| and sure, you could land a job for life, but _that still
| exists today_. If you are an IT guy for a lumber mill, a
| regional ISP, or a grocery store, it 's not going to be as
| cutthroat as Big Tech. It's just that you're not gonna be
| making millions.
|
| We're pretending that this type of cozy tech jobs don't exist
| anymore, but they do. They just don't come with IPOs and
| RSUs.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| When I got into the industry over 20 years ago, it was
| unheard of for an IC software engineer to retire early.
| Unless you got extremely lucky like working at Microsoft or
| Apple pre-IPO, you just weren't making the kind of money big
| law or doctors made.
|
| That is not the case now. Yes the competition is incredibly
| fierce but the pay has skyrocketed.
| agentultra wrote:
| There were a lot of factors that went into making salaries
| sky-rocket. One of those was leverage: there was more
| demand for skilled programmers than there were available.
| You also had the ZIRP era from 2008-2021ish. If you could
| write fizz buzz and breathe you could get a good paying
| job.
|
| In the 90s inflation-adjusted salaries were still rather
| high. A 75k USD salary in 1995 is roughly 150k USD today.
| And the median house was less than a third of your income.
| And in the 90s there was even more demand for programmers.
|
| The early 2000s were a bit rough unless you were insulated
| inside Google and big tech.
|
| But 2025 is a very different landscape. I've talked to lots
| of highly talented developers who've been consistently
| employed since the early 2000s who have been on the job
| search for 9 months, a year.
|
| It's one thing to have a goal for one's career but it's not
| like you can wait around to find that perfect opportunity
| forever, right?
|
| Some times you have to find something and work. It might
| not fit into your plans for your career but it might
| provide you with the income you need to keep your family
| afloat and maybe let you indulge in a hobby.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| >In the 90s inflation-adjusted salaries were still rather
| high. A 75k USD salary in 1995 is roughly 150k USD today.
| And the median house was less than a third of your
| income. And in the 90s there was even more demand for
| programmers.
|
| Right but how many programmers were making even _150k_
| back then, even if they were 10x geniuses? I don 't think
| even high level ICs at IBM or Microsoft were making that
| much. Even inflation adjusted, that's lower than the
| _medain_ at FAANG these days.
| DrPimienta wrote:
| Look man, life was unironically just better for everyone
| back in the 90s. Minimum wage, median wage, highest
| earners, if you do the math everything was cheaper and
| wages were comparatively higher. Gas, food, electricity,
| housing, it was all cheaper. There were fewer regulations
| and less bureaucracy.
|
| The buying power of a programmer in the 90s was much,
| much higher than an average programmer today.
| eastbound wrote:
| Comparatively cheaper, no. Americans could afford a lot
| of things, but the average American home looked like
| Malcolm in the Middle, and not so much more fancy for the
| higher class. Meanwhile in 2025, people have immense
| furbished kitchen (I'm European so I always notice that
| in abs-training-bro-youtube-slop, I'm not talking about
| influencers here) and living rooms, order food deliveries
| all the time, and perhaps some americans could access the
| number of flights that we saw in movies like Die Hard
| (going from NYC to SF to see a wife), but that was
| unimaginable for Europeans. We're seeing wealth levels
| that are unimaginable, and global poverty has receded so
| much that the UN overhauled their definition to redirect
| their efforts towards human rights rather than hunger.
| DrPimienta wrote:
| No, the average 30 year old American owns far less than
| the average 30 year old American did in the 50s, 60s,
| 70s, 80s, and 90s. Owning a home in a safe community is
| what is most important, and most young men can't seem to
| get that. Things are getting worse.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| >Look man, life was unironically just better for everyone
| back in the 90s.
|
| It was not. Programmers were not buying Porches and
| living in luxury neighborhoods or retiring early.
|
| Watch Office Space. Being a programmer was a low status,
| averagely paying job.
|
| Was life better back in the 90s for the average
| programmer? Maybe? Housing was certainly cheaper, I'll
| give you that. But for exceptional engineers was it
| better?
|
| Did programmers show up to work to have a barista make
| them a gourmet coffee, have catered lunches, free
| massages, all the meanwhile getting paid hundreds of
| thousands of dollars extra per year in RSUs? I don't
| think so.
|
| There's no way an exceptional engineer had a better
| quality of life in the 90s than they would today. There
| was no FAANG, no deca-corns, no big tech giving near as
| many perks and comp. It just wasn't comparable.
| gbacon wrote:
| > ... but it's not like you can wait around to find that
| perfect opportunity forever, right?
|
| > Some times you have to find something and work ...
|
| Rather than waiting for a perfect choice, I read Hamming
| as reminding us that are making choices all the time and
| cannot avoid doing so. Even not choosing, _e.g._ ,
| staying in a less-than-ideal role, is a choice. Given
| that we have no choice but to choose, Hamming suggests
| knowing up front where we want to go in the long term and
| biasing choices in that general direction.
|
| Swizec mentioned Cal Newport elsewhere[0], and Newport's
| recommendations around lifestyle-centric career planning
| provide an interesting bridge between your comments about
| occasionally needing to weather a storm and Hamming.
|
| Some view titles, particular projects, or certain roles
| to be worthwhile goals in themselves. "I just graduated
| law school, so I want to make partner at a big NYC law
| firm" is a goal that a motivated new attorney might set.
| Does that career goal serve her if she despises traffic,
| subway travel, and apartment living? Newport advocates
| beginning with a vision of an ideal lifestyle and working
| backward from there by setting career goals to achieve
| the desired lifestyle.
|
| Where he may be in a conflict with Hamming is warning
| people about what he calls the grand goal theory, of
| which the fresh law school grad aiming at partner shows
| the pitfalls. Hamming's advice will help you go far.
| Newport warns that if you're going to go far, be sure
| it's in the direction you want to go.
|
| In the case you mentioned of someone who is long-term
| unemployed, having _a_ job that produces income is
| certainly nearer to any Hamming career goal and any
| Newport ideal lifestyle than that person's present
| circumstance of draining savings or, worse, accumulating
| debt for basic living expenses.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46354790
| dayvid wrote:
| It ultimately doesn't change the advice. Strongly deciding I
| wanted a career change led me to putting in some extra time
| and tripling my income. It's easier if you can reduce
| obligations and noise and focus on what matters to optimize
| for whatever you want. It may not be easy, but you have some
| degree of power to alter your trajectory to some extent
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Do people actually perform a random walk though? All terrain -
| both metaphorically and physically - is not equal, so wouldn't
| a more accurate description be 1. float on the water and go
| where the current/tides take you, or 2. decide when you're
| going to paddle against it towards the lighthouse? or more
| simply, "most people walk downhill"?
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| > n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about
| sqrt(n) steps from the origin
|
| AKCSHUALLY
|
| The root of the mean of the squared distances is sqrt(n).
|
| The phrase as you quoted is the mean of the absolute distance.
| In general those are different. I don't know the latter from
| memory, and a quick look at the wikipedia page for Brownian
| motion doesn't have it.
| aoeusnth1 wrote:
| You're right, sqrt(E[d^2]) > E[|d|] because of Jensen's
| inequality. The latter is about 0.8 sqrt(N).
| moffkalast wrote:
| Tonight on Top Bit: I formally verify a theorem, James designs
| a dbms, and Richard writes a blog.
| BrokenCogs wrote:
| What a terribly flawed model. Being opportunistic can be
| classified as "vision" too.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| No one else will.
| kstenerud wrote:
| Kinda reminds me of an interesting scene from the Netflix series
| "Castlevania"
|
| "If you don't have your own story, you become part of someone
| else's."
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MofDRVtRec
| fifilura wrote:
| I don't think the random sailor analogy is a perfect fit.
|
| If you guide your own direction too strictly you will both risk
| moving yourself into a dead end, but also miss out on unexpected
| opportunities.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| But your opportunities depend partially on what you can
| actually do. In other words, optmize for your strengths, refine
| what works, remove what doesn't. Opportunities will come, but
| if you are not prepared based on your own predispositions, they
| are wasted on you anyway. Direction of the sailor of the sailor
| is but one factor in this.
| kbrkbr wrote:
| I enjoyed this article and think it's good advice, and I also
| think that the punchline (title + last sentence) is wrong. Not
| that it makes a big difference, I just treasure texts more that I
| feel the author thought through to the last detail.
|
| If you don't design your career, in most cases I guess no one
| will. In the comments are good examples, like the random walk of
| the drunken sailor. The cases in which you could use the phrase
| "someone else designed it for me" in a meaningful way seem rather
| rare to me.
| keiferski wrote:
| The main thing missing from this IMO is an element of chance or
| randomness, the ability to incorporate "unknown unknowns" into
| your life. The most interesting people I've come across have had
| a variety of jobs, many of which they knew absolutely nothing
| about when starting out. There is a genuine value add when you've
| worked beyond the same white collar profession your entire
| working career.
|
| In other words, the problem in designing your life is that you're
| almost always going to pick things you already know. Maybe that
| gets you to the peak of your current profession over twenty
| years...but maybe some other job is actually a lot more
| fulfilling to you.
|
| I'm not sure how to incorporate this into a young person's real
| life experience, but I do think gap years, varied internships,
| volunteering, etc. are probably a good start.
|
| I recently listened to a podcast with a guy that wrote a book
| advocating that young people spend 4 years getting a pilot's
| license, working on a ranch, becoming an EMT, and various other
| useful skills/jobs. That seems like a great idea, although I
| didn't like the hostility to traditional college he had in
| offering this plan.
| tock wrote:
| Do you have a link to that podcast? Sounds interesting!
| keiferski wrote:
| I forget the exact podcast, as I think he did a few different
| interviews. Might have been this one?
|
| https://www.artofmanliness.com/people/fatherhood/podcast-108.
| ..
|
| The book itself is called The Preparation.
| Xunjin wrote:
| In a society where everything needs to be optimal, randomness
| is seen as a mistake.
| keiferski wrote:
| Yeah and even if you're totally uninterested in "having an
| interesting life" and just want to maximize income/job
| prospects, I think you can make the argument that a little
| bit of randomness is actually the optimal path because it
| increases your luck surface area.
|
| For example - working in a well-rated fine dining restaurant
| over a summer while you're studying computer science seems
| totally unrelated and not optimal. But maybe that unique
| experience is what stands out on your resume, and maybe the
| knowledge about wine or food you acquired there builds a
| connection with an investor or manager, years down the line.
| boilerupnc wrote:
| And that's the tragedy. It should be viewed as a feature, not
| the bug. Curiosity and willingness to mix it up is where the
| serious innovation resides. Cross cutting concepts more
| easily happen when you've done/experienced/seen/felt
| different stuff ... period.
|
| I tell my son all the time that I couldn't predict what I'm
| doing now ... 3 years prior. I didn't have this insight or
| awareness but after running the SW/IT marathon for 25 years
| here we are. Trust your instincts, they weren't developed in
| a vacuum. The more you explore, the more insights pop in your
| mind and every 3 years or so, a change presents itself for
| you to affirm or deny.
| esafak wrote:
| Optimal by whose criterion?
| Xunjin wrote:
| Financial capitalism, monetary value, the maximization of
| profit.
| baxtr wrote:
| Societies that promote experimentation will - in the long run
| - become superior.
|
| Because: The interesting things that give you leverage are at
| the frontier of knowledge. In business, as well as, in
| science.
| Peroni wrote:
| >The main thing missing from this IMO is an element of chance
| or randomness, the ability to incorporate "unknown unknowns"
| into your life.
|
| 100% this. When I started working in recruitment, it was
| literally intended to be a temporary means to an end. I
| stumbled across Hacker News back in 2010 and accidentally
| uncovered a niche (tech startups) that has resulted in a career
| where over the past 15 years has evolved into holding VP level
| roles at YC startups to now running my own successful
| recruitment and HR advisory business for startups. I can
| legitimately attribute that entire path and growth to
| accidentally stumbling across this website and couldn't
| possibly have guessed the impact it would ultimately have on my
| career.
| nicbou wrote:
| In Quebec we have a sort of college between high school and
| university where you are forced to take "bullshit classes"
| along with the stuff you chose to study. Mine included
| philosophy, Spanish, photography, canoeing, and a few others.
| At the time it felt like a diversion, but it was a welcome
| introduction to something other than computer science.
|
| In my first year of university, a senior grabbed me by the
| shoulders and told me that I _have_ to try an internship or
| semester abroad. One thing led to another and I have just
| celebrated 10 years in Germany. It led to my current career,
| which is not at all what I studied.
|
| To answer your question, I think that it requires a certain
| curiosity, and an appetite for experimentation. I feel like the
| system is teaching kids the opposite of that.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| I wish cegep, or an interstitial school where you have a year
| or 2 to just take tons of unrelated courses, was more common.
| So much focus is put on universities as job training that
| they lose a part of what historically has long made them
| special --- learning for the sake or learning.
| elbear wrote:
| Another way to put it: don't focus on distance but more on
| behaving in tune with yourself.
| neuralkoi wrote:
| A lot of us live our lives according to the expectations of
| others (our parents, society, etc) because this is all we know
| how to do at first and what the "system" reinforces through
| school, career, etc. and this difference between what we want to
| do and what we actually end up doing can end up causing lots of
| suffering to ourselves (and to others).
|
| I've seen fear as the primary obstacle to trying something
| different when the current route is not working. It's really hard
| to step outside the comfort zone in those situations.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| Not just fear of failure, but fear of disappointing people,
| losing status, or admitting (to yourself and others) that the
| plan you've been following isn't actually working
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| My 2c as someone who has ended up in a non-traditional career
| track, mostly doing my own thing and getting paid for it.
|
| While you definitely need a higher than average tolerance for
| uncertainty, the big thing is just not seeing all the options.
| Many choices are occluded by the options _presented_ to you by
| employers, the educational system, etc. The spectrum of
| careers, which is a continuous higher-dimensional blob of
| "things you can do to make money", is systematized in such a
| way that while there are paths to unusual career outcomes, most
| of those paths can not be expressed.
|
| You may on some level want to reach some career or lifestyle
| goal, but often the path to that destination isn't obvious, and
| it's definitely never presented to you as an option among the
| things you can choose, and more than likely you'll have few if
| any role models or people to ask for guidance if you find
| yourself on that track.
| NoiseBert69 wrote:
| I'd more say: if you don't care about your career yourself -
| someone else with interest conflicts will
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| This reads a bit like classic self-help, but there's a solid
| point hiding underneath the platitudes. Most careers do get
| shaped by inertia: the projects you say yes to, the skills you
| accidentally accumulate, the expectations other people quietly
| set for you
| bebb wrote:
| I find that's a good reason, other than looking for an increase
| in salary, to seek out new employment opportunities every few
| years, while nudging your resume more towards the career you
| want rather than the career you've experienced.
| cardanome wrote:
| I do something similar for development of me as a human being. I
| ask myself how can I improve, what kind of person do I want to
| be, how can I help make the world a better place.
|
| My "career" is just a means to an end to put food on the table.
| Also being in my 30s I think I have mostly maxed it out anyway.
| Sure I might increase my wage a little bit but all in all as for
| being an IC it is a good as it gets. Sure there is always room
| for improvement but I am already constantly the person with the
| most technical skills in the room so it would not grant me any
| benefit.
|
| I don't think your "career" needs to be a major focus in your
| life once you are set up at least. Especially if you don't do any
| meaningful work that actually helps people like being a doctor or
| teacher or something.
|
| In the end my work just makes someone else richer, it doesn't
| have any meaning. It does not make the world a better place.
| Probably a worse place sometimes. I just do it to not starve.
| zwnow wrote:
| > In the end my work just makes someone else richer, it doesn't
| have any meaning.
|
| This is something I struggle with a lot. I left companies
| before, because the job felt meaningless and making some rich
| guy richer doesn't sound meaningful to me. I am trying to come
| up with a business idea I can work on on the side, that
| actually is supposed to make the world a better place, but I am
| struggling to find anything I have enough experience in to
| pursue.
|
| I am leaning towards activism now, because that is probably the
| most achievable thing to do for me. Just building info sites
| nobody reads, trying to make non tech people aware about how
| Amazon, Google and so on makes life worse for everyone. Or how
| anti privacy laws are probably a bad idea.
|
| But that does not feel fruitful either. My everyday life is
| consumed by the desire of having some kind of impact, making
| the world better.
| ta1024768 wrote:
| > trying to make non tech people aware about how Amazon,
| Google and so on makes life worse for everyone. Or how anti
| privacy laws are probably a bad idea.
|
| I think a majority of people already know this, that's why it
| feels fruitless. Also more negativity ("these companies are
| bad because of x, y, z") will also make you feel negative.
|
| Why not make those sites, talk to those non-techy people, but
| provide _some_ form of thing they can do to make an impact in
| a tangible way, not just "don't use amazon", links to sites
| that put together local info for small areas, catagories of
| smaller online sites that you can use instead of amazon or
| something.
|
| > My everyday life is consumed by the desire of having some
| kind of impact, making the world better.
|
| Do you have something tangible you can look back on that you
| did last week that helped achieve this vision? If not, what
| small thing can you do this week?
| zwnow wrote:
| > Do you have something tangible you can look back on that
| you did last week that helped achieve this vision? If not,
| what small thing can you do this week?
|
| Not too sure, I am pretty delusional about the impact part.
| I want to achieve something big but have zero ideas on what
| I could start with. I have a ton of time and want to use it
| for something I actually believe in, the difficulty is in
| finding something I actually believe in...
| cardanome wrote:
| > But that does not feel fruitful either. My everyday life is
| consumed by the desire of having some kind of impact, making
| the world better.
|
| It nearly impossible to achieve substantial change alone. The
| key is to be organized with others, to find a community.
|
| Now, I don't mean joining a political party, especially not
| at first. That can be important work but also very soul
| crushing
|
| I am talking grassroots-level, local groups that work on a
| concrete topic, preferable something that concerns you
| personally. It is important to get into doing things as
| quickly as possible, be it organizing a small protest or
| maybe just a get together.
|
| With this you will gain practically experience and you will
| find other people that share your goals and with whom you
| will struggle together.
|
| Now, for the long term, you will also need to actually read
| political theory, you will have to get organized with people
| that have a more concrete strategy on how to create change
| but I generally would urge you to avoid analysis paralysis
| and focus on gaining practical experience first.
|
| Building community is really the key.
| zwnow wrote:
| I'm trying to avoid community unfortunately. I was never
| really accepted anywhere, whether is be online spaces or
| irl and I am not the person to socialize and do stuff with
| people. Also don't want to rely on people or having people
| rely on me.
| cardanome wrote:
| > I was never really accepted anywhere
|
| I felt the same way before I got my diagnosis for my
| neurodivergency. I mean I still do but it got better
| because I know now why I get rejected and are better at
| finding people I can fit in with.
| underlipton wrote:
| If you make a lot of money doing something that makes the world
| a worse place sometimes, and your goal is to simply "not
| starve," you can probably find something else to do which
| fulfills that requirement while also making the world a better
| place instead.
| g947o wrote:
| I planned to get out of my current company and stop wasting my
| life two years ago.
|
| The job market and my visa status meant that it's either
| impossible or I need to make significant sacrifices.
|
| So that's life.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Wondering if working as a contractor is any different. you
| won't stay longer than 6-12 months on a project and you can
| safely say goodbye without having to explain a gap in your
| resume
| g947o wrote:
| Visa.
| paulcole wrote:
| Why didn't you make the significant sacrifices?
| jcims wrote:
| This is one of those areas where family starts to influence
| decisions. My wife and I had kids between 24 and 28. From
| that point forward, 'supporting the family' took priority
| over personal fulfillment.
|
| Now that our kids are grown and self-supporting, it's wild
| how much simpler the risk calculation is. But at 52 with
| engineering manager being the dominant role in my CV, not
| particularly appealing to the small companies making big
| moves that I'm interested in.
| paulcole wrote:
| Nobody with a family has ever found a way to make a
| sacrifice and leave a job they felt was wasting their life?
| socketcluster wrote:
| I have a really hard time designing my career in tech because I
| believe that people already have more options than they need or
| can afford.
|
| What people need aren't more options. What they need is MONEY;
| which is the ability to obtain the options which exist. And the
| only way to give people more money is through political means.
| This is why I was interested in crypto; it seemed to get straight
| to the point...
|
| I later quit crypto due to too much corruption in the space and
| launched a mainstream startup with a co-founder centered around
| helping people find 'the perfect job' but I quit as co-founder
| because the idea of it almost makes me want to vomit now.
|
| The system is firing people en masse. The system itself doesn't
| want people to have jobs... So me, trying to work against the
| system by offering a solution that operates within the system
| feels futile and like gaslighting users and myself. It's selling
| a dream. There is no perfect job. Reality is our socio-economic
| system doesn't even have a shitty job for you... Let alone a
| perfect job... And most jobs seem like bullshit jobs anyway.
|
| It's extremely hard to find an idea that's both truly useful and
| profitable these days. That's a shame because that's exactly what
| I want to do with my life but I feel like this does not align
| with what is possible within the current system. I cannot find
| any such opportunities in the tech sector.
|
| Someone told me I should get into politics but again if I think
| about what the typical politician does, I feel nauseous. The only
| kind of politician I could possibly be is the honest kind that
| gets assassinated... And of course I don't want that. Besides,
| nobody would fund me... My hitman would probably have an easier
| time raising funding to 'take me out' of politics than I would
| raising funding to get into it.
| ramon156 wrote:
| I resonate so much with you. I'm in the middle of getting my
| product out for people to use and naively kept thinking that a
| good product means people are interested.
|
| I need to integrate with tools that prematurely deny me because
| I'm not a big company. I basically already lost, despite my
| tool being much more reasonable and maintainable (I've worked
| at the competitors and it was a mess).
|
| The world doesn't care about good products, they just care
| about how it looks. Big companies look good, you don't. It got
| me demotivated early on. You really need thick skin to start
| selling a product.
| socketcluster wrote:
| Your last paragraph is an interesting way to frame it.
|
| I also think it's true; what appeals to people is something
| superficial. The product has to be highly optimized to
| generate an initial 'wow' factor. But it's almost impossible
| to create such 'wow' factor without sacrificing something
| fundamental about the product.
|
| The goal is to make such a good first impression that people
| will pay for your product and then will keep convincing
| themselves and their friends that your product is great...
| When it's not because actually there are many better
| alternatives out there which are higher quality and provide
| more flexibility.
|
| Among financially successful products, I see a lot of rigid,
| inflexible, low-quality products. They create a 'wow' factor
| by removing complexity; also removing flexibility...
| Targeting a specific psychological bias... These products
| seem 'easy' and magical at first but what makes them easy
| also makes them inflexible and fundamentally useless. Because
| flexibility is what gives a competitive edge... But
| flexibility also scares people away.
| JanisErdmanis wrote:
| I have also fallen in this trap by thinking that a good
| product that addresses the needs of users would make it
| wanted. But coming so far with no traction to show I
| seriously doubt my prospects of bridging the gap between from
| the needs to the wants.
| ursAxZA wrote:
| When I buy clothes, I always "choose" the outfit the mannequin is
| already wearing.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| > Many years ago I followed this process and, without
| exaggeration, it changed the course of my life. The insight I
| gained led me to quit law school, leave England and move to
| America and start down the path as a teacher and author. You're
| reading this because of that choice. It remains the single most
| important career decision of my life
|
| That "decision" required a safety net most will never have
|
| Designing your career isn't about self introspection, it's about
| leverage
|
| And leverage is stolen from the invisible hands that keep your
| world running while you journal
|
| The problem isn't individual, but systemic: why is the freedom to
| choose rationed so narrowly?
|
| For a lot of people, work isn't a career to design, it's survival
| math
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| Its that time of the year again huh. The times for unfilled news
| years aspirations.
| te_chris wrote:
| Also see Feedback Analysis, by Peter Drucker from Managing
| Oneself - https://hbr.org/2005/01/managing-oneself
| esafak wrote:
| https://www.thecompleteleader.org/sites/default/files/imce/M...
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| "The crime which bankrupts men and nations is that of turning
| aside from one's main purpose to serve a job here and there."
|
| As a former career contractor who took probably 7 commercial jobs
| I didn't care about for every 1 creative job I wanted to do but
| for which I was underpaid, this feels deeply true.
| etothepii wrote:
| Deliberate planning is great but serendipity is important too.
| Some of the richest people I know made most of their wealth as a
| consequence of being in a position to act* when opportunities
| presented themselves.
|
| My guess is that it's important not to be overly focused on the
| intermediate goals and the more debt you have the less able you
| feel to take risks.
|
| *it may be more appropriate to say start than act as in the two
| cases that immediately come to mind they were both 10+ year
| journeys.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| I've spent my career chasing jobs that had kept me employed for
| over 20 years so I can support a family. Unfortunately I have had
| to let the 'system' take me where I am needed so I can pay my
| bills. It is life.
| paulcole wrote:
| If you don't design your career, someone else will.
| FromTheFirstIn wrote:
| If you don't support your family, no one else will
| paulcole wrote:
| I find that when decisions are very minor, people love to
| have tons of options to select from. When decisions are
| much more impactful and high stakes, people seem to love
| finding ways to convince themselves there are no options
| and that they must proceed down a single path out of
| necessity for how the world is.
| maciejzj wrote:
| From the perspective of someone in their late 20s, the timing of
| this article feels quite off when entering 2026. The reality has
| become far different from the gist of what is presented here.
|
| Career paths and opportunities have been getting broken and
| changing so much in recent years that I find it hard to plan
| anything. I don't even know what kind of "goal" is sustainable,
| let alone what the path towards it is.
|
| The only sensible career that seems to offer a steady trajectory
| is medicine. Apart from that, my most successful peers were the
| ones that followed immediate money and speed-ran into owning some
| kind of real estate, which is a game changer. Besides that,
| people try to do as many side hustles as possible and diversify
| their income to save as much as they can and brace for a possible
| recession. I find it hard to apply any of these 8 steps in such
| volatile reality.
| underlipton wrote:
| I wouldn't even say medicine. Neither Baby Boomers nor the
| current American healthcare system have 30 years left in them;
| that means that, unless you're already in your 40s or 50s,
| you're going to see the bottom fall out of that sector mid-
| career.
|
| This is a political failure. It has nothing to do with
| individual decision-making and everything to do with poorly-
| managed incentives for appropriate 21st-century investments.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| I agree. I'm 51. I'm hoping to end up like Ben Kenobi. Say
| f%%% this and die after having a good life and letting the
| younger generation take over.
| danielfalbo wrote:
| > We have a sense of what we would most love to do but we
| immediately push it aside. Why? Typically because "it is not
| realistic" which is code for, "I can't make money doing this."
|
| Reminds me of PG's "How To Do What You Love"[1]
|
| [1] https://paulgraham.com/love.html
| alexpotato wrote:
| So a bit of my thoughts + open to suggestions from other folks on
| HN.
|
| I've been a DevOps/SRE essentially my entire career and almost
| always in Finance (banks, FinTech startups, multiple hedge funds
| etc) and most recently in crypto.
|
| It's seemed that for SWEs the path was always something like:
|
| - junior
|
| - team lead
|
| - manager
|
| - manager of managers
|
| - CTO (or VP of Engineering etc)
|
| For SREs/DevOps it always felt a bit fuzzier after manager and
| most of the manager of managers I know ended up being that role
| in an "infra" department (e.g. k8s, networking etc).
|
| I would love to know what folks with my background ended up doing
| later in their careers/age mid 40s and above?
|
| (all of this is even more fuzzy due to LLMs/AI and part of me
| feels like it's time to start pivoting into some kind of IRL
| service or manufacturing role given the speed at which things are
| developing. e.g. maybe I should buy a bakery...)
|
| Open to all kinds of stories and suggestions here as would most
| likely benefit me and also lots of other folks reading the
| comments.
| jonpurdy wrote:
| > I would love to know what folks with my background ended up
| doing later in their careers/age mid 40s and above?
|
| I'm 41 now, started working in education but pivoted back to
| tech quickly (DevOps specifically) since tech is a better match
| for me.
|
| After a few years, fell upwards into management then pivoted
| into Technical Program Management roles where I've remained
| since. Love this since I get to interact with teams of people
| working in my program(s) but don't have the responsibilities of
| a people manager.
|
| Personally, my roles focus on infrastructure and things at
| least loosely related to my DevOps background. Worked at two
| blockchain companies (I've been into blockchain tech since
| 2012) but considering moving into green energy somehow.
|
| I think in most cases including yours: choose roles based both
| on interest and total compensation. And it's a lot easier to
| get roles (especially TPM roles) if you're already technically
| competent in that particular field (in your case FinTech and
| crypto).
| alexpotato wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion!
| GuB-42 wrote:
| This is a very "live to work" article.
|
| Is it wrong to have your career on autopilot if you are satisfied
| with your job? Clearly, the author wasn't, switching from law to
| becoming a teacher/writer. So I guess that the article makes
| sense in this context.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I can want a decent work/life balance, but I also want to not
| be in a dead-end job. I can give _some_ thought to my career
| (not being on total autopilot), and also have my job in balance
| with the rest of my life.
| elric wrote:
| > This is a very "live to work" article.
|
| That's not the impression I got. It's about wanting a career
| that's meaningful to you. Whatever that means to you. Maybe
| your answer to "What would I do in my career if I could do
| anything?" is working 9-5 without a care in the world. That's
| totally valid.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _Is it wrong to have your career on autopilot if you are
| satisfied with your job?_ "
|
| Only if you don't mind the career equivalent of CFIT1 when a
| mountain turns out not to be where your maps said it was. I'll
| wager that a lot of former Flash developers weren't expecting
| Apple to cause Flash to die out.
|
| 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_flight_into_terrain
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| This reminds on the sentence of a former boss, who said: "if you
| do not take care of your money, someone else will do"
| d--b wrote:
| Here's my two cents: career-driven people are assholes.
|
| You're welcome.
| aristofun wrote:
| The general sentiment of being aware about your career and
| decisions is true.
|
| But this reminds me of what I hate about modern corporate
| "culture" the most. And what is broken about it the most.
|
| Im speaking about the rat race. Tge fact, that you have to waste
| a noticeable part of your work time, effort and energy to sell
| your work instead of doing it. To the point where good salesmen
| make a "career" and become your bosses without any correlation to
| their work abilities or even management skills. Those are very
| good at designing their careers.
|
| As a result the more corrupted the company with this style of
| internal management the more reliable it drowns in a swamp of
| ineffectiveness.
|
| In a well functioning company or society "building a career"
| shouldn't be a goal nor priority. It should be the natural
| outcome (more or less) of a "job very well done" that is a true
| priority.
|
| Yes we're not in a perfect world. But at least we should try to
| reach our ideals rather than promoting rat race mentality as a
| norm.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > To the point where good salesmen make a "career" and become
| your bosses without any correlation to their work abilities or
| even management skills.
|
| The few times I've seen this actually happen at a company, it
| was not the kind of company I wanted to work for long-term
| anyway.
|
| If the company is so broken that the wrong people are being
| promoted while the right people are being ignored constantly,
| there will be bigger problems than you simply missing a
| promotion.
|
| The one startup I worked for that had this problem chronically
| (combined with some nepotism) did a bee-line run straight for
| insolvency and then collapsed. Everyone on the ground floor saw
| it coming. Some people still tried to race for promotions and
| upward career trajectory there, but the smart ones invested
| their effort in getting out.
|
| That said, I've also worked at some companies where the right
| people were getting promoted but there were groups of people
| with sour grapes he were always upset it wasn't them. It's
| never something everyone agrees on.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Every single major tech company that I am aware of
| (admittedly only two from 1st and 2nd hand knowledge) require
| you to submit a promo doc showing you "operating at the level
| you want to get promoted to". You only can show that by
| getting those plum opportunities and that only happens
| through building the right relationships with the right
| people and knowing how to navigate corporate culture.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| How will someone know what you're doing if you don't tell them?
| There is an entire theory called the "luck surface area" that
| says you need to do the work and tell people you did the work.
|
| https://modelthinkers.com/mental-model/surface-area-of-luck
|
| There is another similar school of thought that the only thing
| that matters in your career are "results and relationships". It
| took me way too long to figure all of this out. But once I did,
| it made my life much easier and it made it much easier to
| navigate within my company and getting opportunities on the
| outside.
|
| During the last ten or so years as a "developer" without doing
| a single coding interview because I do know how to sell myself
| (and deliver)...
|
| 1. I've gotten three jobs where the new manager/director/CTO
| hired me as one of their first technical hires to lead major
| initiatives
|
| 2. Got a job at BigTech without any coding interviews even
| though my job required hands on keyboard coding as part of the
| job - cloud consulting specializing in app dev (yes full time
| direct hire with bonuses and RSUs)
|
| 3. Left there and had a job within a week as a staff consultant
| (full time) with another consulting company.
|
| I'm not smarter than anyone else, I learned how to network,
| talk the talk and play the game.
|
| On another note, you don't and shouldn't get a promotion based
| on doing your current job well. Just because you are a good
| developer doesn't mean that you have the skills to lead other
| developers. That's the entire point behind the "Peter
| Principle". You have to show you are capable of working at the
| next level by working at the next level.
|
| I'm not saying you shouldn't make more money if you bring more
| value to a company than do done else at your level. But how is
| a company suppose to objectively manage that? You pulled more
| stories off the board? You had less QA defects?
|
| For what it's worth, I flew to close to the sun myself about a
| decade ago and realized I would suck as a manager of people.
| But I was getting better at leading projects. I chose the IC
| route.
| aristofun wrote:
| > I'm not smarter than anyone else, I learned how to network,
| talk the talk and play the game.
|
| Congratulations that you learned how to game the system. Fair
| enough. That doesn't mean you should brag about it or
| celebrate that terrible "school of thought".
|
| > How will someone know what you're doing if you don't tell
| them?
|
| That's a simple part: it's your manager's direct and one of
| the main job responsibilities. It's like 80% of what manager
| job is all about. To be perfectly aware of what his team is
| doing, what was done good, what was bad, performance, strong,
| weak sides etc. For every individual report.
|
| The hard part is to find the manager who at least understands
| that, even harder to find someone who are good at it. But in
| my limited experience it's not much harder than to find and
| spot a decent engineer.
| hampelm wrote:
| Game the system? That _is_ the system!
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Its a gravity problem. Gravity doesn't care whether you
| like it or not when you land after jumping out of a 70
| story building. You can either choose to accept gravity
| exists and not jump out of a 70 story building - or jump
| and die.
|
| My manager's job is not to manage my career. The last time
| I was a "pull tickets off the board maintained by someone
| else" developer was over a decade ago. Even then my project
| manager was different than my actual manager. My manager
| didn't look at the Jira board for all of his reports are
| across teams to know what they were doing.
|
| You still had to tell him yourself during 1 on 1s on high
| level. But even then, what were you going to tell him? "I
| pulled some well defined tickers off of a Jira board and I
| deserve a promotion?" There are so many people that are
| good enough to do that on either the enterprise CRUD side
| or the BigTech side, why should you be promoted for that?
|
| On the other hand, except for my stint at BigTech between
| 2020-2023, I was already at the top of the technical IC
| chain as far as responsibility. There was no place to be
| promoted to. I have broad initiatives that I'm responsible
| for and still the manager just knows that things are
| running smoothly and the stake holders are happy. They
| definitely aren't keeping up with my day to day work.
|
| To be honest, outside of BigTech, worrying about promotions
| aren't worth the effort, do your job, build your resume and
| hop to another job if you want more money. But even then,
| you can't hope to get ahead in your career if you are
| content with just being a ticket taker and not taking on
| responsibilities that require you to navigate corporate
| culture.
|
| I would much rather play the game than spend months
| grinding leetCode trying to pass coding interviews.
|
| Right this second, I have reason to believe that I would
| have a greater than even chance of getting into Google via
| GCP in their internal consulting division based on a
| combination of experience (not with GCP in particular),
| soft skills, network, and knowing how the game is played
| than a hands on developer would trying to get in by being
| able to "codez real gud".
|
| I don't because I would rather get a daily anal probe with
| a cactus than work in any large company again and I'm damn
| sure not going back into an office.
|
| Again, not because I'm smarter, I've accepted the game for
| what it is.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > My manager's job is not to manage my career.
|
| But it is to promote and demote. In many (most?)
| companies, to get a promotion he needs to actively
| advocate for you in front of others. That is part of his
| job. Many of them simply optimize to "I'm not going to do
| that part of the job well, so you, as my report, need to
| give me the material I can sell to others." And _not_
| "you need to do well so I can sell to others".
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Yes, that's true. But that only happens if you give them
| something to work with. I volunteered for the thorny
| complicated initiatives at the startup I worked for prior
| to AWS.
|
| While there was no place to be "promoted to" besides
| being a team lead as an IC, it did give me the chance to
| have the skillset to get my next job. I specifically told
| my CTO - we had a good working relationship - that a team
| lead would be a demotion. I was already influencing the
| direction of the entire company. He couldn't "promoted
| me". But he gave me a nice raise and kept letting me
| choose the hairy work that crossed team boundaries.
|
| At BigTech, your manager can help you go through the
| promotion process. But it is still mostly out of their
| hands whether you get promoted. You have to prove you are
| deserving to a wider audience.
| aristofun wrote:
| > Gravity doesn't care whether you like it or not when
| you land after jumping out of a 70 story building
|
| With one key difference - it's not a gravity. It's just
| currently popular and dominating style in IT corporate
| culture. Mainly because it worked once for few successful
| companies and others cargo-culted it without much
| thought.
|
| There will always be value and importance to networking,
| human relationships and communication. Because after all
| we're people, not robots.
|
| But there will also be shift and evolution in management
| styles, just like we notice a shift in Leetcode
| interviews right now (less and less of this bullshit).
|
| Change is the true "gravity" here.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Can you change the corporate culture of the companies
| that pay top of market any more than you can change
| gravity?
|
| Sure I could change the culture by accepting a bullshit
| CTO position that is a glorified developer at a YC like
| startup that pays less than the intern I mentored when
| they got their return offer at BigTech and I could get
| meaningless "equity".
|
| But if I were in a position where I wanted to maximize my
| comp, I would play the game and convince a company with a
| lot of money to give me some of that money.
|
| I just happen to care more about work life balance and
| making "enough" money now.
| aristofun wrote:
| > hop to another job if you want more money
|
| I wonder on what planet are you working?
|
| Virtually everyone I know in IT bumped their salary only
| after switching the companies, never I've seen anyone who
| raised their salary with comparable magnitude and/or pace
| by working hard at one place.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Isn't that what I just said?
| aristofun wrote:
| I apologize if I misunderstood it. It sounded to me like
| the opposite.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > How will someone know what you're doing if you don't tell
| them?
|
| They certainly seem to know when I'm _not_ doing well,
| without me having to tell them.
|
| Do you not see the asymmetry?
| aristofun wrote:
| yes, there are much more bad managers than good ones, also
| human brain is naturally wired to notice problems and
| warnings, rather than good news
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| So you can either bemoan "bad management" that you can't
| change or accept it and play the game.
|
| I love the autonomy I get now in the latter part of my
| career over the last 10 years where I don't have a
| manager hovering.
| aristofun wrote:
| I don't bemoan actually, I'm just calling out things for
| what they are. I too learned to play the game and adapt
| the way it works for me.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Indeed, and I think that's the point of many in the
| thread.
|
| Things are how they are, and some people may successfully
| navigate while playing some of the games. That's very
| different from saying "this is how it has to be" or "this
| is how it will always be".
| jbs789 wrote:
| These things are not mutually exclusive. You can do a great job
| and learn how to communicate a job well done.
|
| If the company truly promotes incompetent salespeople then I'd
| steer clear of that company with the confidence that others are
| out there.
| aristofun wrote:
| > These things are not mutually exclusive. You can do a great
| job and learn how to communicate a job well done.
|
| Absolutely! Nothing wrong with communicating your work and
| networking. It's better to do that than don't, it's a good
| thing to do, it's a great thing to help your manager to be
| aware of what's going on.
|
| As long as it is not a mandatory requirement and expectation
| of an engineer that puts pressure and becomes a toil.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| If you are okay with just being a ticket taker who us not
| aiming for a promotion to a job with more scope,
| responsibility and pay, there is nothing wrong with that
| trade off.
|
| I'm at a point in my life where I am okay with the level of
| autonomy I have and have no interest in being a director or
| above and getting cost of living raises for the foreseeable
| future. But I'm 51 and an empty nester with me and my wife.
|
| A line level manager position would be a vertical move. A
| director is a "manager of managers".
| aristofun wrote:
| > If you are okay with just being a ticket taker who us
| not aiming for a promotion
|
| I think your extreme example does not refute any of my
| points and I agree with you. "good manager" is not a
| guarantee for a good career, it's your responsibility
| ultimately.
| gnarlouse wrote:
| "Ok Greg"
|
| "I'm not defined by my career Greg"
|
| "Greg see a therapist"
| agumonkey wrote:
| Does this apply in chaotic context ? I can't foresee what jobs
| there will be in 2 years now.
| cloudyporpoise wrote:
| Great feedback. Many of us are on auto-pilot and taking a little
| bit of time to reflect, can shape a better version of that auto-
| pilot.
|
| Another useful input is what are other people telling you? This
| shaped my career early on by either taking on the work others
| didn't want to do, or hearing others mention what they felt was
| important and focusing on this.
| liampulles wrote:
| An underappreciated factor for building one's career is also
| building a safety net, because that allows for risk. Having that
| safety net means you can't be taken hostage in a salary
| negotiation, and it means that you can entertain riskier career
| moves. That safety net contains financial and (demonstrable)
| human capital.
| Sheeny96 wrote:
| I worked very hard for the first 5 or 6 years of my career - hit
| senior dev pretty quick, managed to double my pay moving into
| consultancy, and back on product dev in a smaller company
| nowadays.
|
| Honestly? I don't feel a massive need to grow beyond where I am.
| I earn in the top 5% in my country. I live a comfortable and
| flexible life. I continue to learn like any dev with a passion
| for technology does - but i'm not constructing my life around an
| endless climb. If my role naturally transitions upwardly, great.
| If I stay where I am, steadily taking on more
| responsibility,that's also totally fine. The diminishing returns
| of chasing a CTO title or another arbritrarily large sum of money
| just doesn't seem worth it.
| nospice wrote:
| If you design your career, you will almost certainly get the same
| outcome too.
|
| I've managed people for decades and this has been a common
| pattern. I'd have people come to me with their plans to be in the
| C-suite in five or ten years, based precisely on self-help advice
| like that. None of them ended up there. But several of the people
| who never had a plan did in fact end up as VPs, CTOs, etc.
|
| I don't want to say that thinking about your career doesn't
| matter. It's definitely easy to self-sabotage it by sticking to
| your comfort zone for life. But turn-by-turn plans are not useful
| because a lot of it is a product of chance. In a corporate
| setting, the best advice is just: get in the habit of solving
| tough problems for the people who matter, and find low-key ways
| to let them know about the good work you're doing. The rest, more
| or less, follows from that.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| I can't say I've ever had "5 year plans" and even I did, facts on
| the ground change so fast, my plans would change.
|
| I've been working since 1996. But without going into ancient
| history, in 2008, I had spent the last 9 years at my second job,
| became an expert beginner, been divorced for two years, and had 5
| mortgages between my home and two rental properties that were
| underwater by about a $250K.
|
| I was also teaching fitness classes part time to make up the gap
| - that was suppose just be a hobby.
|
| Then my plan was to get out from under all of that mess. I didn't
| know how or have a timeline. But it started with getting a job
| where I could get exposed to modern development practices (done
| after 3 months and a lot of prep work), stopped teaching so much
| (just kept my favorite classes where my friends were), and walked
| away from five mortgages and wrecked my credit (everyone was
| doing "strategic defaults" back then).
|
| One thing I didn't "plan" for was to meet and marry my future
| wife and become a father to pre-teens by 2013. I'm still married,
| boys are grown. That by itself changed my goals.
|
| By 2013, I was still about 25% under paid even for an enterprise
| "senior" [sic] dev in Atlanta and still digging myself out of my
| financial mess while supporting a family.
|
| My goal by then was to develop the soft skills and hard skills to
| be a team lead - again no timeline.
|
| Then in 2016, my goal was for us to move and work for a much
| better paying tech company after 2020 when my youngest graduated
| from high school. Even that changed to I would rather just not
| move and get into customer facing cloud consulting (not staff
| aug) after 2020 when I thought I would have to travel a lot (who
| could have predicted a worldwide pandemic??).
|
| Well both fell into my lap in mid 2020 - customer facing cloud
| consulting _and_ BigTech and I didn't have to move when I got a
| job at AWS working in Professional Services. I didn't even know
| the department existed. Again not planned.
|
| 2020 my plan was to work for Amazon for four years, pay off debt,
| save some money and work for a smaller consulting firm. I knew
| three months after I got there that I definitely didn't have the
| stomach for BigTech long term. This was the only 5 year plan that
| worked out more or less as I wanted (staff consultant for a
| reputable mid sized company).
|
| Even then, I never thought in 5 years, we would decide to sell
| our house in the burbs, downsize and move to state tax free, much
| better weather Florida
| _superposition_ wrote:
| Reminds me of https://fs.blog/hunter-s-thompson-to-hume-logan/
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Yeah totally. Someone should totally have designed their career
| in marketing pre AI and not change course. They are in control.
| There are no outside forces.
| yoan9224 wrote:
| This advice remains relevant but I think it misses an important
| nuance about how career design actually works in practice. The
| metaphor of "design" implies you're building something from
| scratch with full control, but career development is more like
| gardening - you can influence conditions but not force outcomes.
|
| The key insight is recognizing the misalignment between your
| goals and your manager's goals. Your manager optimizes for team
| output and organizational needs. Your career growth is a
| secondary concern - important, but not primary. This creates a
| fundamental principal-agent problem. The solution isn't to become
| adversarial, it's to be explicit about your goals and negotiate
| actively rather than hoping they'll be noticed.
|
| Practically, this means: (1) Having quarterly conversations where
| you explicitly state "I want to work on X technology" or "I'm
| aiming for senior by Q3" rather than assuming good work will be
| rewarded automatically. (2) Building skills outside your job
| scope through side projects, open source, or internal tools that
| solve real problems. (3) Being willing to change companies when
| growth stalls - the biggest salary/title jumps come from job
| changes, not promotions.
|
| The dangerous flip side is over-optimization. I've seen engineers
| obsess over "career design" to the point where they won't touch
| any task that doesn't directly ladder to their promotion case.
| That creates fragile specialists who can't adapt when their niche
| technology becomes obsolete. Better approach: have a direction,
| but maintain broad skills and genuine curiosity. The most
| interesting career paths come from unexpected opportunities you
| recognized because you had wide exposure, not rigid planning.
| cheapbussy wrote:
| +++ Non native english speaker, machine-edited text +++
|
| English Version (clean, correct, humorous) "Whoever ignores
| success because it doesn't count as a mistake will make very
| little progress."
|
| The "Little Brother" Misassessment Now, bro once said: "If
| there's no mistake, then I can't learn anything from it. Without
| a mistake, there's nothing to learn."
|
| But if his recipe for success - all the right, good, subtle, less
| noticeable things - isn't even registered by his mind...
|
| ...then isn't that a problem with the mental template he's using?
|
| "Fixed points of social polarization"...
|
| Hey bro, before I hug you as the "Hero of Labor" - sincerely,
| warmly - 2,800 hours of work this year...
|
| Tell me honestly: Did only you earn that praise, or do the
| employees of high-performers like you also deserve some
| recognition?
|
| I probably don't know them - but I do know you, which is why I'm
| asking.
|
| Self-reflection: Learning also comes from questioning routine
| Keyword: Extremes (Mistake vs. Non-Mistake)
|
| Thesis: "You only learn from mistakes." Antithesis: "Then I must
| be a genius, considering how often I mess things up..." Paradox:
| "If you never see success, you can't do anything wrong."
|
| The "Little Brother" misjudgment is ultimately a cognitive trap.
| It reduces learning to mistakes and filters out success,
| cooperation, and quiet contributions.
|
| The Mistake Olympics Gold for the colleague who filled the coffee
| machine with dish soap. Bronze for the intern - eventually you
| only learn how to apologize.
|
| Punchline: "I don't make mistakes - I produce learning material."
|
| "My success is invisible, boss, because - as I'd like to
| emphasize - I couldn't possibly have done anything wrong."
|
| "Hero of labor? I'm a hero of coffee breaks. Without me, there
| wouldn't be any work at all."
|
| "If mistakes were the only source of learning, my life would
| count as a Harvard degree."
|
| Whoever ignores success because it doesn't count as a mistake
| will make very little progress.
|
| +++ COMMERCIAL BREAK! +++
|
| LIFESTYLE: THE WIRELESS MOBILEBUTTON ?
|
| The wireless button lifestyle is a practical and simple solution
| for users who want reliable communication without unnecessary
| distractions.
|
| Because modern smartphones can do way too much.
|
| Forget apps, streaming, selfies, and endless notifications - and
| yes, even without emojis: finally real words again.
|
| Pure minimalism: One button, one life, your direction!
|
| "Since I started using the one-button phone, I actually know what
| my friends look like." - A convinced ex-smartphone addict
|
| "I just wanted to quickly check something online... Now I
| meditate." - A satisfied user
|
| Because sometimes less is simply... less.
|
| +++
|
| hoped that it adds something ...useful...nor... hahaha!
| alphazard wrote:
| It's worth mentioning that career conversations with your manager
| are always bullshit. How could they not be? Your manager's
| incentives are to keep you around, keep you productive, and keep
| you inexpensive. It's ridiculous to think that helping you build
| a successful career, which likely doesn't involve them or your
| current employer for very long, is something that they would do.
| Why would you reveal any information about your long term plans
| to such an adversary?
|
| If they realize that the company cannot provide what you are
| looking for then they may not want to invest more resources in
| keeping you around, or keeping you happy. If they realize that
| you find some sort of intrinsic reward in certain work, then they
| might put you last for raises, because the money could help them
| more when spent on other people.
|
| It's best to selectively reveal only your immediate short-term
| goals, only at the current company, and only as part of an ask.
| Always make them pay for information, if you are going to reveal
| what you want, then they need to reveal whether they intend to
| help you or hinder you in getting it. Slow answers, non-answers,
| pushing to next quarter, etc. All signal that they intend to
| hinder. It's rare to get an honest, fast "no".
| thenoblesunfish wrote:
| Comments like this make me feel very lucky to have the job and
| manager I have! If the situation is as adversarial as the one
| you're describing, are you perhaps missing out on the fact that
| when people trust and genuinely support each other it's not
| zero sum? That you and your manager are actually on a team
| (assuming you're in a big company), basically at the same level
| in terms of power and influence?
| alphazard wrote:
| > when people trust and genuinely support each other it's not
| zero sum
|
| This is a clear non-sequitur. Whether or not the situation is
| zero-sum is dictated by the situation not by the actions of
| people, or how they feel about each other.
|
| If the situation is zero-sum, and one party doesn't realize,
| or is too trusting of other parties, then they just lose. And
| they might not even realize that they lost, or that the
| situation was zero-sum to begin with.
|
| > basically at the same level in terms of power and
| influence?
|
| Obviously not true, unless you can truly ignore your manager
| and still be successful at the company, then they have power
| over you. If they control more resources than you, or have
| more face time with people who do control resources, then
| they probably have more influence than you as well.
|
| This whole comment reads like a sucker who doesn't know they
| are being scammed.
| linkage wrote:
| Trust me, your situation is more common than not. Having been
| an IC for most of my career and then a manager and back to
| being an IC again, I can say that OP is way off base.
| Managers are incentivized to make sure that their reports can
| grow and can be promoted. When I was a manager, all my
| colleagues were perpetually diligent about making sure that
| we were fostering a great working environment for everyone.
| hnthrowaway121 wrote:
| I'm careful like this to a point, but you can establish trust
| with managers. Most decent cultures don't favor hoarding good
| employees how you've described.
|
| > It's ridiculous to think that helping you build a successful
| career, which likely doesn't involve them or your current
| employer for very long, is something that they would do.
|
| This is a very short term perspective. If I am a good manager
| to you, you are much more likely to stay because that's an
| important relationship & you are benefiting. If it means you
| move on because I helped you gain the skills/confidence you
| needed, great, maybe sometime down the road you can help me
| when I'm looking for me next job or refer my next awesome
| employee. But who cares, at least neither one of us had to be
| miserable.
|
| You always have to be _cautious_ but don't let relentless
| cynicism keep you from good useful professional relationships
| that can actually help you.
| alphazard wrote:
| > but you can establish trust with managers.
|
| This is technically true, but metaphorically false. Most
| readers, especially the younger crowd, are likely to be too
| trusting and not correctly recognize fundamentally
| adversarial relationships, like with their boss, with HR,
| with lawyers whom they don't pay personally, etc. Especially
| when those people present the relationship with a faux
| version of the same naivety that they intend to prey upon.
|
| The only people you can trust at a company, are people who
| have demonstrated that they value your relationship more than
| the company's relationship. That's not impossible, but if
| they really need the salary, then the odds are stacked
| against you.
|
| It's certainly nice to pretend that everyone is nice and
| trustworthy. In fact, most people will hold it against you if
| you don't sufficiently pretend to be trusting. Universal
| insincerity is part of the human condition.
| englishspot wrote:
| I can't be the only one burnt out on trying to design my career.
| especially these days when things outside your control just keep
| making it harder and harder (bad job market).
| npodbielski wrote:
| I understand that and I agree. Though I think the real question
| is what you would do when you will achieve this goal. What then?
| Will you be happy? What you will do with the money? Will this
| amount be enough?
|
| Can this ever be enough?
|
| I am not sure. Is this even possible in current feudal corporate
| structures? I did spoke with some people from my work. One was
| afraid for his job because of another employee. Other was afraid
| of reorg and if there will be lay-offs. Another company and the
| merger there caused one guy to be afraid of loosing his job
| because system he build will be discontinued. Maybe their current
| position is not the career they really want and after the
| setback, they are afraid off, they will be able to advance it
| further in the direction they are actually aiming for... but what
| if not? What if they will never will be able to advance it
| further? What if they will never will be get back up?
|
| At some point the only direction you can go is down. Is this all?
|
| Even if you will be able to build your own company things may go
| wrong and you may loose it. Economy can change. Market can
| change. Your company may be bought or taken over. Nothing is
| truly sure.
|
| Should you not invest in the carrier then? No, this is wrong. If
| you will not set course for you someone else will. And you may
| not like the place when you will end up. Setting up your own
| goals is very good practice.
|
| But I am not sure if this should be your life goal because this
| is so dependent on so many variables. Variables you have
| absolutely no impact on. And with that uncertainty comes stress.
| I think that your life goals should be set to something that
| depends only, or almost only on you.
| thepryz wrote:
| Imagine Sisyphus happy seems like the appropriate response.
|
| I don't think it's a matter of setting goals based on what you
| can do alone, life is lonely enough as it it. I think it's more
| a matter of accepting that life is a sequence of unpredictable
| events, and you have to just embrace the absurdity of it all.
| zkmon wrote:
| Nope. It is not that black & white. It is always a mix of
| contextual changes and your decisions that are going define your
| path. Too much action on your own is also not going to help. In
| some cases, people who just didn't do a thing in decades, have
| achieved better that people who did all acrobatics.
| fnoef wrote:
| I just want to be left alone, without doing the corporate dances.
| I don't care about your company, your culture, and your unique
| DNA. The only family I have is back home, so just let me do my
| work for 8-9 hours a day, and leave me alone.
| DrPimienta wrote:
| I feel this so much. This expectation to care about work
| outside of work is obscene. The anger you will often receive
| for saying this is just as jarring.
| sciencesama wrote:
| if you dont live your life, some one will !! if you dont eat your
| food some one will !!
| rstlney wrote:
| I tried the exercise. It turned into a mess. I seem to only want
| to escape employment. Everything I "wanted" to do seemed to be a
| deflection from the fact that I have anxiety about my job,
| staying relevant, staying employed, hamstering enough money to
| clear out my debts when the competition or AI inevitably beat me.
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