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Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

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Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#71

Post by toyg »

dijit wrote: post #3

I don't know your whole background; I think location plays a factor. Add to that: we tend to romanticise the past, and also the fact for every John Carmack there were thousands of behind the scenes people simply doing a job and maybe you'll see that the reality today is not much different. The hacker ethos you envision does exist to some extent, I've been part of small units of people pushing boundaries, and it's dee…

> for every John Carmack there were thousands of behind the scenes people simply doing a job

Coupland's Microserfs comes to mind.

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#73

Post by kube-system »

idoby wrote: post #57
godzillabrennus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, start your one thing. I’ve never worked a W2 job and I’ve been able to work on interesting problems my entire career.

What's W2?

There are two worker classifications in the US which refer to the tax forms they get:

"W2": An employee. A regular job.

"1099": Independent contractor, freelancer.

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#74

Post by navbaker »

Look at places like the various university-affiliated research centers around the US. The one I work at is a pretty great blend of hard research and applied engineering with a solid base of support for innovation. Pretty much anyone can get funding for their ideas at various levels if they present a solid case!

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#76

Post by zachlatta »

Email me? zach@zachlatta.com. I’ve spent the past 6 years building a nonprofit to revive the hacker ethos in teenagers worldwide. I’m hiring.

We are not “VC funded” and do creative, long-term work on a small team. We just started an endowment to help make sure we can exist for the next 50 years.

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#77

Post by slavoingilizov »

OK. I'll try to play devil's advocate here.

Disclaimer: I think of myself as an engineer.

I do believe your frustration comes from observing actual issues and you're right to express your disappointment. However, I can see a lot of cynicism in your tone, and I feel there's a huge amount of judgement on those "cons" without trying to peek behind the curtain on what makes them behave like that.

To provide a different viewpoint - I've often seen this desire to do tech in a tech-first way fail massively. Many of us consider ourselves techies, so we believe we work in the tech industry. But we don't. We work in Finance, Productivity, Mobility, Food and similar industries, even though we're engineers. Apart from developer tooling and some exceptions - those industries are not about the tech. Countless times, I've seen engineers spend valuable resources (their own time) delivering the perfect tech solutions for non-existing problems (or over-engineered and expensive solutions to real problems, which could have been solved without tech much easier) Without the "cons" of UX, business development and product management, people like those would always disconnect from customers.

I do believe we should all try to find what motivates us and for many people here, this would be tech innovation. But dismissing the other roles in the companies we work with is just an endless utopia chasing, never productive.

I've been lucky to work with some great non-tech people and learn a lot from them. And from 10+ years in the industries (plural), I've seen many more examples of over-engineered and useless tech than failure of "cons" to grasp why engineers should be put first.

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#78

Post by wayoutthere »

Here’s some advice from a hacker-turned-MBA: find your passion outside of work.

Tech is great money. You can live a very comfortable life by putting in your 40 hours a week at a good company. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this; and treating it as a clock-in/clock-out type of job will keep you from burning out.

Use that comfort to explore your true passion. A lot of times this isn’t remotely related to tech — maybe it’s music, maybe it’s triathlons, maybe it’s building shitty robots. I spent a lot of time and energy trying to find a “meaningful” job where I could build things that changed the world. Spoiler alert: it didn’t happen because that’s not how it works. Once I figured that out I went and got an MBA, because if I was going to be part of a soul-draining machine, I might as well make bank while doing it.

The myth of the “hero engineer” is honestly one that those of us in technology management try to eliminate. A “hero engineer“ culture is basically one that doesn’t bother properly designing things so they have to be held together with duct tape and string. The “hero” feels accomplished and like he/she saved the day, but if they had done their job right in the first place, the heroics wouldn’t have been needed.

Don’t look to be a hero. Be a software janitor who has a life outside of work. You’ll be way happier.

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#79

Post by op03 »

"go back to academia" doesn't mean you have to go back there and collect certificates, take classes and pass exams.

Find a prof working on something interesting to you and offer to help. Better still submit a patch to whatever source code they have put out in the public domain. Its a great way to get your leg in the door.

Lots of the labs in the country have techies on staff. It leaves the subject matter experts free from wasting endless amounts of time filling their heads with unnecessary garbage about software. DONT goto CS depts. Target multidisciplinary groups so when the Chemist is done with you, work with the Neuroscientist and then the Social Scientist and then the Astrophysicists etc. The longer you are loitering around one lab the more work will fall into your lap. After wasting my time at bluechips for few years, I moved to a univ lab, which morphed into working at the univ startup accelerator as various lab projects matured into startups.

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#80

Post by fsloth »

cynusx wrote: post #35

I think you want to seek out companies where the main business risk is technology risk still. That would be database companies, developer tools, artificial intelligence startups, operating systems, ... Probably drones and sensor-companies also qualify but don't really know much about that industry. SpaceX's reusable rocket is a great example of technology risk and so is Tesla's affordable electric car. Most startups…

"I think you want to seek out companies where the main business risk is technology risk still."

This is an excellent assessment. Any software product that depends on understanding deep first principles based complex systems has an ecological need to maintain a working engineering culture. At least in those parts of the organization that does product development.

I've worked my entire software engineer career in computer graphics and computer aided design (after getting my masters in physics) and while in these fields you've seen the usual MBA types poke their heads out, there have still been nooks where proper engineering was necessary.

So, find a company that seems to be needing internal development of non-trivial software.

But the original attention was correct as well - there are so many non-value adding bullshit jobs to keep things "professional" that they try to embrace all nooks an crannies, so even a healthy engineering culture is usually at risk, all the time.

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