31–40 of 42 posts
A common career path in finance for instance is start out as a developer, pick up the business side and later move to a function closer to the market (risk analyst, quant, structuring etc). Must be similar avenues for other domains. You need to be on top of the domain subject@hand anyway to be a good dev in my opinion...
- Technical Marketing
- Product Design
- Product Management
- UX
Also you need to evaluate yourself by your own metrics. In the grand scheme of things over human history having a "career" and "advancement" is unusual, apparently temporary, and is going away, back to the way it was. Being born into a declining economic era is not a personal failure worth feeling stressfully responsible about. Work to live vs live to work and all that.
The most important thing you can do is relax. Sure, life is pretty grim in the sense that you can't do whatever you want unless you're rich. On the other hand, your life as a coder is far, far higher quality than e.g. a construction worker's or (regrettably) a teacher's. One thing you could do is try to grow a source of passive income. See patio11 for insights on achieving this. Also, three failures isn't anything to…
> I'm starting to panic that I'm running out of time to "get my shit together." There is no time limit on getting your shit together. Seriously. Please don't buy into the valley hype of everybody-is-a-success-in-their-twenties. It's bullshit. > So, I'm interested to see the discussion about what those of us who are life long hackers (with a ton of varied experiences) can do besides keep writing code or moving into pe…
VCs and in-crowd founders, not engineers, created that age discrimination culture. It's a way for the people who have made it already to put phony time pressure on the people coming up the ladder. The only way to get a highly talented person to throw 100 hours per week behind someone else's shitty idea is to convince him that he'll be yesterday's dogshit by age 40. When people are scared, they're less likely to challenge authority.
Back when the Valley was about technology (imagine that!) an age discrimination culture was untenable, just because ours is a field where it takes so long to get half-decent at it. Now that the marketing people and MBAs rule it and actual smart people are second-class citizens, age discrimination is much more prevalent.
About 3 years ago I said stuff it, took a pay cut and spent a long and happy time just coding all day. It seems however that no matter which way I turn people will not let me sit in a box and type, I have to help straighten out teams, talk to humans, navigate politics.
We use coding as if it was a real job - it is no more a job than writing or literacy. A few privileged, talented people will be paid for their writing skills. the rest will use coding in the same way as literacy, as part of their job
1. You won't ever escape "people management", but that's not a bad thing. People (especially highly skilled professionals) are like autonomous self-guided missiles, you just need to know how to guide them, and let them be guided by you.
Start with Google's 8 rules http://www.davidzinger.com/8-google-rules-improving-manageme...
Remember - you will not be making the tough decisions - your team / people will. You just get to guide which tough decisions get looked at.
2. Having a "constant flow of new challenges" is all about building and filling a sales pipeline. This is pretty brutal work. There is nothing other than knuckling down, calling people, building audiences, sales sales sales. To me this is the biggest cost of being in business for myself - and I am a long way from having got it right.
So the advice I have and am trying to live by is
* build an audience on a subject you are good at
* build a product related to what you are good at
* keep going
I and many developers I know have been through a phase like you describe. This is especially true in tech, where most projects fail, and for people with wide interests like yourself. Some people would be happy writing nice code and leave it at that. But you're going to be bummed if the design is ugly, the marketing plan doesn't work, or if any of a dozen other things outside your control goes wrong. You are upset, anxious, and fearful. You attribute your feelings to objective things around you like business failures, etc. and guess that a new line of work might solve those feelings.
Let me suggest that maybe they won't. Those feelings are telling you something, but you can't trust your guesses about what will solve them, and you especially should not make large, life-changing decisions because of half-understood feelings of anxiety and depression.
Instead, try to engage with and resolve those feelings in smaller ways. Pick something small you will decide to do really well and just thoroughly engage in it. Make some new friends. Maybe go talk to a therapist or religious figure.
What I found out of this process was that I had made several career moves, some bad choices in my personal life, and a lot of stress by setting myself impossible goals and ignoring some longstanding things I disliked about myself. In the process, I learned that I wasn't really paying attention to the world around me and especially to close friends and family. After some reading, low-pressure work, and therapy, I understand my own feelings much better, and I derive much more satisfaction from my life outside work.
Of course, by no longer putting on my job the stress to define me and my value as a person, I get to approach it much more freely and joyfully. It ain't perfect, and it doesn't always work, but on a good day I can deal with setbacks and annoyances without them damaging my emotional state.
A therapist would call this cognitive therapy focused on mindfulness. Various religions would call it spiritual direction aimed at contemplation or present focus. There does appear to be actual evidence of its value, though I'm only qualified to say it works anecdotally. Good stuff.
Anyone who is interested, feel free to ask questions here or email me at username at gmail.
You ask "what else besides writing code or managing people" and mention prototyping & creativity: have you considered moving into product design/UX or product management? After working as a developer for a few years, I got a bit disillusioned with "building and fixing things all day" as you say. I now work as a User Experience architect and am still involved with building and fixing things, but in a very different wa…
My advice to the OP is to set titles aside for a moment and focus on what it is they like doing and where they want their career to go, then work from there to find a position that suits. It might be called product management, product marketing, or it might even be called lead architect or CTO.
The one piece of advice I'd give, though, is that for such broad ranging interests, I think one will need to relax and give up a modicum of direct control, particularly for larger more complex projects. What is it they say about product management? All of the responsibility and none of the authority? Or, more prescriptively, lead by influence.