Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?

80000hours.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 218 posts

Re: What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?

#161

Post by croh »

throwaway6890 wrote: post #152

Consider your choice of field carefully. I loved programming and yet doing it for a living and climbing the ladder made me start hating it. IMHO the tech field is overrun with young, bright, energetic people, most of whom are dreamers with their own private techno-utopian fantasies who secretly harbor the belief they'll be multi-millionaires or billionaires in a few short years. Dreamers are mostly innocent but there…

So true. Actually early days of programming are good when you enjoy it. But once you decide to work for money, it becomes shit. This applies for everything. Real problem is money. Programmer makes lifestyle-changing-money in early days which keep them in constant fear to lose. As long as you're disconnected from money and doing your shit without bothering about others, everything works well.

This is the reason I keep telling myself life is long. Try as many things as possible. Don't fear to start again as there ain't such thing as security. But alas my stupid mind... still seeks security over bewilderment.

Re: What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?

#162

Post by croh »

_q1cj wrote: post #97
mnm1 wrote: post #39

Work is irrelevant beyond a paycheck. Don't stress out over anything if it doesn't involve you getting fired. Work as little as possible. Get as much done as you can working as little as possible as long as it doesn't stress you out. Never lose sleep over work. Never work unpaid overtime unless you'll lose your job over it. Never care if your bosses are angry or unhappy as long as it doesn't affect you having a job.…

This. I never understood why people at a startup I worked at (even after it was acquired by a FAANG) gave a shit what happened after hours. There was an ops guy actually trying to slack people at 3am. At one point they tried to contact me again on the weekend, my boss decided she'd ask why I didn't seek "ownership of the problem" (one of the god awful basically fascist "workplace principles" of said FAANG). My respon…

Agree. I tried to tell boss hire more people if you want 99.99 % uptime. But he complained about money. Then I quit.

Re: What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?

#163

Post by friendlybus »

breakerbox wrote: post #83

When I was an intern at an Aerospace org, I had a mentor that was the head of engineering of several smaller companies at once emphasize one point - Always align yourself positively with people 2-3 levels of leadership above you. That is, if necessary, skirt around your direct report(s) if you have something to bring to the table for higher up people. It is how you move up faster, but of course, strains your short te…

Yes it works. My direct report's boss was a nightmare to deal with. His areas of influence were always producing problems. All the staff routinely agreed the problems were to be coming from one place. He had tried to get me fired at one point.

My reports to three levels above me were an agreed, small but positive influence in removing the problematic leadership. I ended up leaving later on for different reasons.

Re: What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?

#164

Post by [deleted] »

flying_dutchman wrote: post #158
toomuchtodo wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are very few jobs worth believing in to be honest.

This is not accurate. There are large number of jobs that have a directly impact, as part of solid teams working on things for the right reasons.

[deleted]

Re: What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?

#165

Post by croh »

1. Get a disease something like migraine/sinus where quick medical treatment not possible and symptoms not visible. If you tell people that you need urgent leave to attend some function, they feel like cheated. Instead use this disease and take leaves you want. They feel compassionate.

2. Always show your in hurry to manager. You can do this by running with laptop when meeting colleague for chit-chat.

Re: What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?

#166

Post by toomuchtodo »

flying_dutchman wrote: post #158
toomuchtodo wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are very few jobs worth believing in to be honest.

This is not accurate. There are large number of jobs that have a directly impact, as part of solid teams working on things for the right reasons.

I suppose it heavily depends on what is considered impact and the right reasons.

Re: What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?

#167

Post by frobozz »

Teever wrote: post #141
ok_coo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be careful with throwing people under the bus because if it's noticed by people..going to be honest, they are not going to trust you and word will get around. You become that snake to avoid, you're dangerous to work with. So, hopefully you do it in a way where it can't come back to you. At the org I work at, if you're seen doing this, you're not a team player and you get an unofficial mark against you. Pe…

What if you gain a reputation as the person who throws snakes under the bus? That seems like it would be a very good reputation to have with non-snakes because it would signal to them that you'll defend them the need arises.

Then that's not playing politics and throwing people under a bus, that's standing up for values.

Re: What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?

#168

Post by ido »

impendia wrote: post #8

> When you’re in college... Your time is less valuable This really jumped out at me. As a college student, I've never had so many opportunities available to me at once -- nor so little maturity with which to take advantage of them. That said, I certainly agree with taking care of low-level health problems, the sooner the better.

From the perspective of a high-schooler, college/university is the most work/least time you ever had. But it wouldn't seem that way in 10+ years.

I'm a bit over a decade past college (36) & aside from short bouts between jobs (which never lasted very long) I've never had as much free time as I had as a student.

Re: What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?

#169

Post by scarejunba »

nostrademons wrote: post #69
robertwiblin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Nostrademos — I was involved in this project. We asked a lot of questions and the answers to some others were quite a bit more controversial (we're going to release a new question each week or thereabouts). But one thing we learned in the process was that seriously successful people doing their thing feel pretty gagged. It's not worth it for them to write even things that seem uncontroversial to you or me, because…

Yeah, I figured it was something like that. There are plenty of things that I believe are true but don't say because the blow-up potential just isn't worth it. (And I'm someone who actually likes arguing on the Internet.) Why not do something actually anonymous, though? Put up a form box on your website where people can write anything in response to the prompt, and let folks access it through Tor? Then post the resul…

Yeah, but then, like Blind, you just get a bunch of bullshitters. The problem with Blind is that you're getting long-term career advice from a 23-year-old who's obsessed with 'TC'. Even if that person's obsession is in line with yours, he rarely has the experience to tell you what's going to work. Most posts there come from a place of anger and insecure showing-off that they're unlikely to be useful.

Re: What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?

#170

Post by scarejunba »

Here, mid to big company ULPT. I'll never let my name be next to this:

- Get a reputation as a guy who wears everything on his sleeve. You fucked up? You're going to say "I fucked up. Give me a chance to fix it. Thanks for your help so far. If you can find the time, I'd appreciate if you could also help me with Y". Likewise "this is fucking retarded" if you see something fucking retarded. Use the word 'fuck'. People love "straight talkers" and people especially love the kind who swear because they see them as honest people. Don't use it in an angry manner, more in an obvious bemusement at the state of the world. It's fucking retarded that some machine has a locale different from the rest and we forgot to specify the character encoding for bytes to string so that machine misinterprets UTF-8. No individual is fucking retarded. You're not pointing fingers at anyone but the universe for this having happened. Then you fix it. Rarely, but at crucial moments, exploit this with lies.

- Always try to punch above your weight. Your organization is in shambles. The new product isn't taking off, your boss is leaving, your boss's boss is leaving. You're asked to take over your boss's responsibilities. No one else wants this. They can't guarantee success. Take it. Take your boss's boss's job if he's gone. If they're hesitant, use words like 'interim' and 'acting'. People suck at firing and you can always Marissa Mayer your way through ("the patient was dying; it's a wonder I kept them alive this long"). This is all opportunity.

- When you do the extra thing, make it visible. Someone fucked up and your site is dropping a fifth of traffic. You were planning on taking it easy that weekend: drop some acid, go with your friends to listen to Lane 8, maybe go home with a girl you met there. Don't do it. Instead fix the site but make it visible. Tell your boss, "I'm going to take a couple of days off. Last weekend really finished me off.". Make sure you make everyone look good, updates all the time on company Slack. "Oh shit, turns out our health check didn't detect this condition for one of our five servers. That's what it was!" See, no blame, "we" made the mistake. Then put in a protective layer around that. Improve the health check and take the server out. Now go have some fun. Do this early and you'll get a reputation as a hero. Live off of it.

- Always be bold. Make strong assertions. Then back them up. If you're convinced of the opposite of your original assertions, correct it as soon as possible. Go back to the guys you told the wrong thing to, uncorrect them clearly. "Guys, I fucked up. There's an edge case where JSON isn't valid YAML and we hit it". No one is making a decision on a particular engineering problem and the meeting is drawing to a close? Use the words "All right, looks like we don't have much time here but I think it'll be useful to leave with a default option just so we can scope future discussions. How about we consider X our default". No one's even going to fight you on that. If they do, they're forcing indecision.

- Make others look good. They made a mistake? No, we did. Sometimes maybe it was even you who failed to spot the mistake. Together, you all made something nice? No, they made something nice. They'll be obligated to say "Yeah, I only did X, you did all the Y". Accept that with grace.

- Be likable. Dress nicely. Be friendly. Be unassailable, for instance: Curmudgeonly coworker makes a disparaging remark about your code? If it's right, don't silently eat it with a "Addressed comments". Hit them with the "Thanks for the detailed review. Made the changes requested. By the way, also found article X that describes a general principle for this". Positively framed. You retain your dignity and portray security (irrespective of how insecure you are). In software, people adore "plucky guy who learns" because they imagine that he'll be good at the asymptote. Exploit it.

- Stick your neck out in low-risk situations. Some dude in Sales wants a quick feature and the cost is going to be felt by an engineer far in the future? Do it, even if you have to do extra hours. Then coast on your reputation as a doer. Someone else will pay the price. You can double down by "I don't think we should generally do it, but if it will really help I can do it but it'll take me some work. I need you to not go tell all the other sales guys that I did this, though". They'll tell the other sales guys that you do things but not what. Perfect. Now in their heads those guys think you made magic.

Post reply on HN