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Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?

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Re: Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?

#111

Post by busterarm »

phakding wrote: post #25

There is no loyalty in business. Keep your loyalty for your family and may be friends, not for the company you work for. The company will never be loyal back. Have an opportunity to make more or work more interesting? Grab it with both hands. If you are 99.99% of the workforce, you are not indispensable no matter how much you think you are.

And I'll fly the opposing flag here. Loyalty to people is everything in business. Got a good working relationship with people? Stick to them like glue. Make your moves as a unit. Having a team of people consistently work well together is lightning in a bottle.

I've built relationships with people just by doing right by them in tough situations that have lasted decades and paid fantastic dividends.

Re: Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?

#113

Post by NamTaf »

jakecopp wrote: post #72
ryanackley wrote: post #33

Getting a job in a major metro area. I was very resistant to moving away from the smallish city/metro area I lived in until my late 20's. When I did, my career just took off. I'm not even talking about Silicon Valley. I worked in Boston, Seattle, and Sydney, Australia. Never set foot in the valley as an employee of a local company. Made insane salaries, one company I worked for got acquired, another one went public,…

How did Sydney compare to other medium sized cities in the US?

Define "medium-sized". Sydney has over 5m people in it and covers approximately 4750 sq mi. So maybe half the population of the LA metro area in about the same size?

Re: Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?

#115

Post by dijit »

chubot wrote: post #104

Learning Python! (in 2003) It led to a lot of learning and a lot of opportunities. I often wonder what language is the "new Python", or if that question even makes sense in 2018. Related: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

Go-Lang is almost certainly positioned to be the new python.

Re: Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?

#116

Post by makeupsomething »

Getting out of an industry I knew I wasn't right for before it was too late. I took a job at an animation company about 5 years ago. Initially making iPhone applications as they were trying to break into that market at the time. That work dried up and I found myself doing more work as a pipeline director and technical artist. Work in that field requires a lot of specific knowledge and I did not want to invest the time to understanding it if I did not see myself staying in that industry forever. I moved to another company as a web developer and never looked back.

Re: Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?

#118

Post by cschep »

busterarm wrote: post #111
phakding wrote: post #25

There is no loyalty in business. Keep your loyalty for your family and may be friends, not for the company you work for. The company will never be loyal back. Have an opportunity to make more or work more interesting? Grab it with both hands. If you are 99.99% of the workforce, you are not indispensable no matter how much you think you are.

And I'll fly the opposing flag here. Loyalty to people is everything in business. Got a good working relationship with people? Stick to them like glue. Make your moves as a unit. Having a team of people consistently work well together is lightning in a bottle. I've built relationships with people just by doing right by them in tough situations that have lasted decades and paid fantastic dividends.

I think you're agreeing. Loyalty to people is awesome. Loyalty to corporations is not.

Re: Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?

#119

Post by makapuf »

chubot wrote: post #104

Learning Python! (in 2003) It led to a lot of learning and a lot of opportunities. I often wonder what language is the "new Python", or if that question even makes sense in 2018. Related: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

I can relate to that. Learned python in that timeframe and this has opened opportunities but I'm not seeing the next python or web, being a programming language or technique. ML maybe but the hype is much higher than low key python was.

Re: Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?

#120

Post by dionidium »

NamTaf wrote: post #113
jakecopp wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did Sydney compare to other medium sized cities in the US?

Define "medium-sized". Sydney has over 5m people in it and covers approximately 4750 sq mi. So maybe half the population of the LA metro area in about the same size?

> Define "medium-sized". Sydney has over 5m people in it and covers approximately 4750 sq mi

This reveals something many readers might not have noticed. It's a quirk of politics and history that "Sydney" is defined to include the entire urban agglomeration that surrounds its city core (all 4750 sq miles of it), but this isn't the case in most U.S. cities. For an apples-to-apples comparison, you should be looking at U.S. CSA (Combined Statistical Area) populations (not the populations of core cities).

That puts Sydney outside the top 10 U.S. metros -- considerably smaller than #11 Atlanta (6,555,956), and about the size of #12 Detroit (5,336,286) or #13 Seattle (4,764,736).

The Los Angeles CSA (since you brought it up) has ~18 million people in it. †

† In the spirit of fairness, it should be noted that CSAs sometimes cover extremely large areas. If we were to restrict Los Angeles to its MSA (which at 4,850 sq miles covers an area almost identical in size to Sydney), its population drops to about 13 million. The difference between CSA and MSA populations isn't usually so large, but the Los Angeles metro area contains an almost ridiculous amount of urban-ish sprawl, compared to most other cities.

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