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Ask HN: What is the smartest career path to take?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the smartest career path to take?

#11

Post by idoby »

Higher paying jobs don't pay higher for no reason. One of those reasons could be that you have unique skills worth paying for. Another reason is as compensation for squeezing every last hour of work out of you. Not saying you can't get a higher paying job and be happy with your work-life balance, but buyer beware when it comes to this. You might actually be in a good place in this regard.

If you start a business, you might get the opportunity to learn a bunch of things you never would have in a corporate environment, and if the business succeeds, you might have the time and money to do the other things on your list. If it doesn't succeed, you'll certainly have the time when you decide to shut it down.

Another option is to start a side business while working for your current employer, if your contract and legal environment will allow it.

Your mid-twenties are a great time to figure out what you want to be by the end of your thirties.

Re: Ask HN: What is the smartest career path to take?

#12

Post by bigJavaLava »

framebit wrote: post #2

How do you define success for you life? Put differently, what do you define as The Good Life? You have to define that metric for yourself. Nobody else can do that for you. That said, I can offer a personal illustration. I was in an art-oriented career previously. I defined The Good Life back then as achieving prestige in my field of art. Several years in, I came to realize that, for myself, my definition of The Good…

That is a really good question. Honestly, I never really thought about it. Nothing outside of get a degree, get an apartment, and get a job.

Re: Ask HN: What is the smartest career path to take?

#13

Post by davedx »

> But I'm also cautiously thinking how your earning potential lowers as you age.

It's not happened to me yet, my earning potential has only increased as I've gained more experience (41 now), especially since I went freelance.

I would say in your 20's is a great time to take risks. Usually doing this will give you great experience you can then apply throughout your life, too. For example:

- Work for a startup. Here you are on Hacker News! The pay won't be as good as a bigger company and equity probably won't ever pay out anything much, but you will learn a LOT if you choose to work for a half decent startup.

- Go freelance. This is how I've learned the majority of the technologies I've worked with. For the first 15 years of my career I mostly stuck to what I knew, after going freelance my skillset grew significantly due to working with various different clients with different requirements. Note that if you go freelance it will be hard to go back to working in permanent positions. The freedom and money is really nice.

Starting a business - (Assuming you mean "build a product") - I personally wouldn't recommend this unless you have a good idea; early paying customers; the ability to commit to it and execute continuously. It's the most difficult career path to take. IMHO it's worth waiting and gaining experience and seeing what else is out there first before diving in. It takes serious drive, tons of effort and some luck to be successful. I've released a few of my own products and nothing has been successful - becoming a successful freelancer was MUCH easier.

Take risks, meet people, learn plenty of new things. If you can combine your interests with your career it can be great but be careful you don't end up burning out on something you privately enjoy because of combining it with work.

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: What is the smartest career path to take?

#15

Post by T-hawk »

I'm an example of your #2. I have a pretty easy and cushy 40-hour software development job, in a fairly quiet company and industry. I could be making more or doing splashier work at a FAANG, but I'm happy to compartmentalize software into that box, and spend the rest of my time on non-technical hobbies and interests.

Not everyone has to be a world-smashing rock star startup. Hacker News certainly has an exposure bias towards that, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing a mundane software job to easily pay the bills, while channeling your passionate focus elsewhere.

It's perfectly fine to have a wall between work and other interests. I rarely get interested in software for its own sake outside of getting paid for it (maybe a small personal project once every couple years), and conversely my other interests need to stay passions rather than trying to be leveraged into monetizing.

Re: Ask HN: What is the smartest career path to take?

#17

Post by AnimalMuppet »

bigJavaLava wrote: post #5
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #3

People want different things. Worse, people want different things at different times. That makes it very hard to write "how to succeed at your life". You're bored. I think that means that you're ready for a job that demands more of you than the one you're in. (Plus, that usually means more money.) Looking for a job with more responsibility might be your first move. (That doesn't mean that you necessarily have to swit…

> You want work that demands more of you - but not so much that work becomes your life. That way lies burnout and depression, which are not what you're looking for. Yes, balance is key. I guess you can't have the best of both worlds?

You can't have all of both worlds. You can find a somewhat-close-to-optimal-for-you balance. It won't be everything you want, but it hopefully will be good enough.

Re: Ask HN: What is the smartest career path to take?

#18

Post by AYBABTME »

If you want to use salary-as-a-metric-of-success, your location is going to help put your situation in context. FWIW I've had super well paying jobs that had awesome work-life balance, and very bad paying jobs that had awful work-life balance. I think it's a false dichotomy, you can have both good pay and good life balance.

With that out of the way, "How" to achieve "more" depends a lot on your interests and life goals.

edit: I see that 7 and 10 months ago, you basically posted the same "Ask HN". I think you should change job, there's no reason to keep a job that bores you to death. There's no point in trying to learn to love your job, if you don't enjoy it, you don't enjoy it. Luckily as a software engineer, you're not stuck in there.

Now your problem seems to be that you don't know what to do with your life, and you feel that somehow you need to accept the routine of daily life to find happiness. You mentioned wishing you could be satisfied with the routine like others are. There's no point trying to fit someone else's enjoyment of life, you're not the same person. It's not true that this is the only way to enjoy life.

Again, I don't know your situation/location, so it's hard to put your situation into perspective. I'd just say, on the "how to live a happy life" side of things, that you need to figure out first why you're alive, what makes you wake up in the morning and decide that your life worthy of living. Somehow, by continuing to breathe everyday, you're making the active decision of being alive. Figure out what motivates this decision, and then optimize for it.

Personally, I've always thought that life is pointless, has no intrinsic meaning. It's like a video game, you can play it or not, and it won't change anything whether you do or not. However, there's reasons we play video games: they're enjoyable, something in them makes us feel satisfaction. In my personal life, I enjoy the idea of exploring and furthering humanity in the technological space, and that motivates how I govern my life, or at least which goals I pick for myself. It made me pick hobbies, such as sailing and fabrication/manufacturing, that help me live my goals. I've oriented my career choices in a similar manner too: in particular only working for remote companies. I've not always been happy, in the moment, with the job I was making, but it was usually the right tradeoff overall toward my longer term goals.

Re: Ask HN: What is the smartest career path to take?

#19

Post by fmpwizard »

bigJavaLava wrote: post #5
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #3

People want different things. Worse, people want different things at different times. That makes it very hard to write "how to succeed at your life". You're bored. I think that means that you're ready for a job that demands more of you than the one you're in. (Plus, that usually means more money.) Looking for a job with more responsibility might be your first move. (That doesn't mean that you necessarily have to swit…

> You want work that demands more of you - but not so much that work becomes your life. That way lies burnout and depression, which are not what you're looking for. Yes, balance is key. I guess you can't have the best of both worlds?

You can definitely have the best of both worlds. People will tell you (or me here) that it's rare, etc, and maybe it is, but all you need is one. Keeping balance is not something you do once and then you are done, it is similar to, you are not a recovered alcoholic, you are a recovering alcoholic, because any day you can fall back. You don't have to say, I can either have a happy personal life or make money, you can do both.
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