Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Career for someone good at making time-sensitive critical decisions?

news.ycombinator.com

11–15 of 15 posts

Re: Ask HN: Career for someone good at making time-sensitive critical decisions?

#13
post #9
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Time-sensitive critical decisions as a career sounds like guaranteed burnout. More than burnout, it was the boredom of "lulls" in between time-sensitive critical decisions that got me. In my pre-sales/post sales system engineering roles, I was routinely approached by leadership and teammates to "put out the fire" as they used to say. I enjoyed those kind of challenges but such instances were not that frequent, may…

I've worked at many companies as a SRE/DevOps where I was putting out fires every other day. It's fun to save the day and be the hero, especially if it wasn't you that created the problem in the first place But unless there's a plan to put a stop to constant fires, you start to resent your boss, your coworkers, other teams, etc. I've been burned out many times and I've learned to recognize when it's happening but I w…

A good boss and collaborative team members makes all the difference.

In my case, as these were external customers with revenue implications, I had the backing of sales and executive management most of the time to push through lot of internal BS.

Yeah, internal customers treat as cost center, and are much more difficult to manage. I generally turned down requests from external customers when invited me to come onboard into their orgs.

Re: Ask HN: Career for someone good at making time-sensitive critical decisions?

#14
If he's bright and does well with pressure, almost any high paying high pressure job would be a place he could succeed. He likes biology, he could be an ER doctor. If he likes tech, he could be a world class SRE. If he's a people person, sales or law would love someone like him. Trading or quant would probably be a fun game for him and make him gobs of money.

Just encourage him to study a wide variety of topics so he can pursue his passion.

Post reply on HN