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Ask HN: How do I move up my career/life?

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31–40 of 52 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do I move up my career/life?

#33

Here are a bunch of options you can explore: - You are young and skilled, apply for a Canadian PR under express entry and move to Canada. Better work/life balance, better pay and better opportunities. - Keep learning new stuff everyday. If you stop learning in the technology space you become obsolete pretty quickly. - Work in the blockchain space and by extension in open source software. You are good at Go, contribut…

I got a question about Canadian PR. Do I need to have a Canadian job offer before I apply for PR? Assuming that I don't have a job offer, and I end up getting a PR anyway, then do I just fly to Canada and hunt for jobs there? It scares me to just go to a country without a job offer in hand. From what I understand, getting a PR becomes easier if I already have a job offer. And conversely, getting a job offer is easier…

If you didn't like USA Canada wouldn't be different.

Re: Ask HN: How do I move up my career/life?

#34
I'm 26 years old, living in US so I don't know if I have the best experience as we're probably in similar boats career wise. I don't know if I have the best advice to give but maybe you can find some wisdom in some of my experiences.

I was really frustrated earlier this year, left my job, got a new one that I was really excited about. It's a remote software job in game dev. It's a good job and I'm excited, but what I realized is that it wasn't some magical bullet for all my frustrations. Life is complex and I think I'm starting to realize that it can't all be boiled down into one thing. I'm not just interested in doing one thing. I want to work on cool things, I want to become really good at my job and pick up skills and experience, I want to get married, I want to waste time playing games and doing other experiences I enjoy, I want to pick up random skills that won't really benefit me in any meaningful way but I would enjoy having. And the list goes on. I don't think I can distill what I want or who I am into one thing or one goal. That said I'm very aspirational, just like a lot of engineers/geeks/nerds. I think a common path for many engineers in life is to try and reach some technical peak. There's the idea that if I could just get good enough, if I could be really competent at my job or some skill then I would derive satisfaction from it. I think I would if I reached that peak. But I think reaching that peak would be a bit like this new job I got; it wouldn't be the answer for everything. That doesn't mean I'm not going to go for that peak, I am, it's just I no longer have the illusion that it will profoundly change who I am. So I think I maybe see some parallels with what you want. You're looking to get into FAANG, ML, or even looking into moving to a different city/country. I don't think any of these things are going to profoundly change who you are or how you feel. I'm not saying don't do them, pursuing those things could be some of the greatest things you do in your life.

Again not to try and be annoyingly profound, but try to find out who you are instead of defining yourself through your aspirations. Little things can end up having a large effect on you as well, not just huge life changing decisions, which I'm guessing you're hoping will get you out of this malaise. I don't think working at facebook or moving to London, will change your mindset. They might faciliate that change, but the change ultimately will be internal to you.

Re: Ask HN: How do I move up my career/life?

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before getting kids - might want to analyse what impact the climate crisis will have on your future kids.

this is a suboptimal strategy though as only inconsiderate people would reproduce.

That's a huge fallacy by simplification. It's just as accurate to say only the brave will reproduce (also not entirely true).

Re: Ask HN: How do I move up my career/life?

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a question about Canadian PR. Do I need to have a Canadian job offer before I apply for PR? Assuming that I don't have a job offer, and I end up getting a PR anyway, then do I just fly to Canada and hunt for jobs there? It scares me to just go to a country without a job offer in hand. From what I understand, getting a PR becomes easier if I already have a job offer. And conversely, getting a job offer is easier…

If you didn't like USA Canada wouldn't be different.

Why not?

Re: Ask HN: How do I move up my career/life?

#38

I was 27, living in the Southern USA with a MS from a State University, feeling very similar to you. I decided to push through my comfortable malaise and got offers at early Amazon AWS & Facebook back in 2009. It changed my life trajectory completely. I worked a little bit harder but got exponentially better payoff and interesting problems. Recommendations: 1. Getting into a more prestigious company is likely your ne…

Thank you for your advise. I value it highly. Me not being an American and not being physically present in the USA complicates things. My understanding is that, because the US visa situation is the way it is (due to historical reasons), unless I'm an extraordinary candidate (I'm not) I'm not going to get a callback from any of their US offices. So these days I don't even bother applying to their US offices. Anyway, a…

Visa-Wise, it may be easier for you to transfer from the Indian office to the US office.

Re: Ask HN: How do I move up my career/life?

#39

Or perhaps I should try to get away from my web developer job and get into something else? You already know what to do here. I just quit my job at MSFT sometime back, worked straight outta college for four years (in the MS-IDC office). I quit to actually pursue Research in "systems". As for you not getting a callback, add the right keywords/buzzwords in your resume and most importantly LC (considering where you are i…

Pardon my ignorance, but what's an LC? Leetcode?

yes, Leetcode

Re: Ask HN: How do I move up my career/life?

#40
>> I know little of Haskell and Racket, and I think I'd enjoy doing more of those in a professional capacity. But then again, the job market for those kinds of things is next to nil here. A career at Jane Street interests me more than a career at Google, but I don't think I'm great enough for them to move me to one of their offices abroad (they don't have offices in India).

Just wanted to comment on this - Hasura is one of those rare venture funded startups whose stack is in Haskell and iirc they hire a lot of Haskell devs in Bangalore, India

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