Ask HN: Is it me or ...?

Most notably, a relationship is different from years [2,4) than it is from year [0,2) and there's no way to make that not true. Maybe you really like the [0, 2) thing -- the excitement, the sense of possibility, the novelty -- and there's nothing wrong with that, but it's an important thing to know about yourself.

Of course, as with romantic relationships, you might find that as you get older it's harder to keep jumping from one [0, 2) gig to another, without facing consequences you might not like: reduced choice in jobs; reduced pay; getting a reputation as someone a company shouldn't invest in, etc.

You might try prioritizing the people you work with rather than the business.

Boyd was the best fighter pilot in the Air Force. At the Fighter Weapons School, the Air Force's advanced tactics course that the Navy's Top Gun school was later based on, he laid down a challenge to anyone who would take it, in forty seconds, Boyd would maneuver from from having you on his six, to being on your six and winning the battle. It only ever took him twenty seconds and he was never beaten.

Boyd took his immense swagger and put it to work at the Pentagon designing what would become the F-15 and the F-16.

If you think the companies you've worked at had awful management practices, you ain't seen nothing yet. Boyd developed a scientific approach to designing planes based on the laws of thermodynamics. His ideas were constantly ridiculed and attacked, until enough studies were done to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were right.

Using this work, he designs the best fighter plane ever flown by pilots. He almost got that design approved for the F-15 but the bureaucracy, riddled with utterly toxic players, managed to bloat the plane with unnecessary cruft, gold-plating, they called it.

Boyd lost the fight for the F-15, but thinking ahead, he started working clandestinely on his design and, through a combination of back-channel communications with senior leadership under the President, outright neglect of the crap duties the Air Force gave him to marginalize him, he managed to turn his vision of a light-weight fighter into the YF-16, which demolished the competing design that the Air Force insisted have two engines. The YF-17 later became the Navy's F-18.

But the bureaucrats won the day again. After having the F-16 shoved down their throats by Boyd, they again gold-plated the design and the resulting fighter was nothing like the prototype. Boyd gave up in disgust and turned to academics, eventually developing what many consider to be the most important contribution to warfare since Sun Tzu, his OODA loop.

My takeaway from this is that we often limit the scope of our actions unnecessarily. If we focus our energies and efforts on things that management can shut down, then you are bound to be disappointed. I have projects and responsibilities handed down from above that I take seriously and try to do a good job of, but they don't get my passion. That goes into my personal projects and life. You should not sign your passion away for a paycheck. You can't succeed by fighting your opponents, you can only succeed by completely marginalizing them. If management doesn't matter, then they can't hurt you.

You can remove the MBA, and it generalizes just fine.

It's better to compromise on technical details (Clojure vs. Python, Git vs. Hg) than on quality of people.

I would posit that the general tenor of a technical community, the quality of people attracted to it, and the efficiency with which it accrues value and gains the right kind of mindshare is really the crux of the matter. The technology is just a fortunate byproduct of technologist lives well lived. This applies equally to companies and programming language communities.

If you have the above and bad tech, you will still get by. If you have the above and good tech, you will prosper. If you have bad people/culture and excellent tech, you will fail anyways.