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A career ending mistake

bitfieldconsulting.com

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Re: A career ending mistake

#111

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

As it so happens, this resonates with me.

All through my professional life, I lived frugally, saved as much as I possibly could, made conservative, yet not "bunker mentality," investments, and avoided personal debt like the plague. Being exactly where I am today, has always been a goal.

I also made sure that every job I did, shipped. I sometimes had to "hode by dose", as it passed by, on its way out the door, but I became habituated to shipping. As a manager, I never stopped coding, but it had to be shunted to "nights and weekends." Again, I always shipped; even my open-source work. In fact, I designed, curated, and eventually turned over, a project that has become a world-standard infrastructure, used by thousands, around the world. It's really still in its infancy, even though I started it in 2008-2009.

I was fortunate to work for a company that is absolutely crazy about Quality, and I learned to have an ethos of personal Integrity, which has worked out quite well. My fiscal conservatism also worked out nicely in my management career.

Then, when my company finally wound up the department I led, and no one would hire me, I happened to have plenty set aside to retire. I'm not happy about being forced into it, but I am happy that it happened, despite my best efforts.

I have been able to pivot -fairly easily-, to a lone-wolf programmer (even though I spent my entire career in fairly diverse and large teams), and I found folks that like the kind of software I write, so my habit of ship is already paying dividends (not really. I don't make a dime, and that's just fine with me).

Re: A career ending mistake

#112

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

Adding comments while reading:

> Most of us, in fact, don't really know what we want to do with our working lives until we're more or less doing it.

I can relate. Approaching 40 and I still change the definition of what I "want to do" from time to time. This in part results from my childhood experience in which my parents make important judgements, in part results from my own weakness (not perseverant enough and always back down when boredom and/or difficulty strike).

Basically I find myself distracted by all sorts of things (game dev? cool! reverse engineering? cool! embedded system? cool! writing an interpreter? cool!) but only scratching the surface for all of them. Yes it might be OK because they are just hobbies, and I can do whatever I want with hobbies, but deep in my heart I still admire those who can drill deep even for hobbies.

> What we're really talking about is the aim or goal of your career.

Actually I believe there is one thing that is potentially more important: How do we plan the end of our philosophical life? That is, when do we be content enough and say to ourselves: "OK if I die now, I can at least say that I have done something this life and did not waste all of my time". Reflecting on that, I have to say that if I were to die now, I probably believe that all of my life is wasted. Against this is just personal and everyone has one's own version of "wasted".

******* Overall I think this is a well written piece, but the hard-core question is: Do you know yourself?

Re: A career ending mistake

#113

Post by giantg2 »

zabzonk wrote: post #99
giantg2 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't any good career changes that I've found so far. I'm looking though. I think it's easier to get into tech than most other decent paying jobs. So if we reversed the direction of your change, I assume it would be much more difficult to go from programming to medical microbiologist.

> I assume it would be much more difficult to go from programming to medical microbiologist. You are right - it takes you several years of training, whereas you can probably pick up the bits and bobs of programming in a few weeks, if you have any aptitude. But the basic idea remains - if you are doing something you hate, stop doing it, no matter what the price. It isn't going to get any better.

I pretty much agree. Except if I stop doing it, it could get worse. I need to support my family.

Re: A career ending mistake

#114

Post by chillycurve »

On a side note:

I am new to Go and programming in general and have found John's work to be instrumental to my educational journey. I highly recommend everything he has produced.

Perhaps the most underrated resource, his Youtube channel is full of educational gems like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSgIEDMekSg

Please keep up the good work John!

Re: A career ending mistake

#115

Post by ghaff »

giantg2 wrote: post #72
ghaff wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like they were very upfront with you about what the job would entail. How is that lying? And the reality at a large company is that many people spend a lot of time coordinating, sharing information, gathering requirements, etc. even if their nominal job is market research or whatever.

I would expect that there would be presentations and meetings to share the products of the research. It's an entirely different thing be primarily performing project and stakeholder management. The only way I found out about the true nature of the position is from an informal informational with a member of that team. The job posting itself mentioned nothing about project management and glossed over the stake holder m…

More jobs involve a lot more of that sort of thing than you're crediting I think. A lot of our research projects involve collaborating with regional teams around the world and other marketing groups on budgets, research content, etc. There's the outside firm that's actually doing the survey to be managed. And probably a bunch of other things that I'm not directly involved with. Sometimes you have dedicated program managers for certain tasks at a large company but a lot of people spend a lot of their time essentially collaborating with other people.

Re: A career ending mistake

#116

Post by sbarre »

giantg2 wrote: post #96
wussboy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like your perspective is very narrow. You’ve had a bad experience at one company that you admit has done well for almost all their employees, therefore all companies are evil and your chance of happiness is zero? That doesn’t seem reasonable or even likely. May I recommend “Feeling Good” by David Burns? It has helped many people in situations like yours.

"therefore all companies are evil" Not evil, but that they lie and screw over employees. Are there any companies on Glassdoor with 100% positive ratings (with n>100)?

Glassdoor is a terrible metric for measuring companies.

Like any rating system it is biased towards people with grievances, as they are motivated to look for an outlet to express that grievance.

Re: A career ending mistake

#117

Post by BadCookie »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #77
BadCookie wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like all the technical PM jobs require that you’ve already held that title for several years. Or maybe I take job descriptions too literally.

Apply, apply, apply. Let them make the decision if you’re qualified or not.

I appreciate the encouragement!

Re: A career ending mistake

#118

Post by Jaruzel »

I hate my job. I don't know how I got here.

Like many I started out in small scale IT just as desktop computers were becoming a thing. I transitioned from mainframe support to desktop support, from there I worked through several desktop support roles, wishing I was server support but never managing to get there... over time I became a desktop architect, and then infrastructure architect, and now well.... I just don't know.

I have meetings, I write documents. I offer sage advice on best practice. That's it. It's not IT anymore, it's just make-work.

If I knew my middle-career years would be like this, I would have never started in IT in the first place[1].

However... I work 100% remotely, and I LIKE that. I've been a remote worker for a decade now, and I just couldn't go back to commuting or being in an office.

So, I have no idea what to do[2].

I'm not really soliciting for advice (but feel free!), I'm just venting I guess.

---

[1] I had a chance at the very beginning to become a Forensic Scientist at New Scotland Yard for the Police. I turned it down. Often I wonder if I made the wrong choice.

[2] Computers are the only thing I'm good at.

Re: A career ending mistake

#119

Post by znq »

moonchrome wrote: post #54
znq wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope people don't see this as spam (especially since in the past I've talked a lot about this), but I've started Mobile Jazz (my first company) specifically because I wanted to created a place where I and others feel happy. A place where increasing revenue and profit to the extreme is not the focus, but employee happiness is. We call it "Optimizing for Happiness". We've written a lot about it in our company handboo…

I'm fine with being civil and approachable but I really don't want to make the effort of being friendly with people I work with just because higher ups think this will compensate for below market salary. If I click somewhere that's great but I don't really see a correlation with a good work environment.

Sure. If you live in the US and want to work for us and want a Silicon Valley market salary at the same time, then we're not the right company for you. Not because we don't want to pay you a Silicon Valley salary, but simply because we cannot afford it.

If you are in another country/market, then we are very able to pay market salary and in most cases even above market salary, while providing a great work environment at the same time. We have and had people from Ireland, England, Germany, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Croatia, Serbia, Mauritius, Thailand, Azerbaijan, Austria, Thailand, Argentina and probably a couple more that I forgot now.

So basically what I wanted to say: just because we cannot afford a Silicon Valley market salary, doesn't mean we are underpaying people elsewhere or treating them unfair (financially speaking).

I hope my answer helped to clarify things.

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