A career ending mistake

Among the happy people I see, most have the "randomness" I talk about. Among unhappy people, I see a mix of both.

I crave this. Move fast & break things mentality is a plague. Shipping the proof of concept is a plague.

If you want to break into a technical field from a non-technical background, the better indicator of success will be grit, perseverance, and self motivation. Learning becomes easier if you are motivated to learn and when its hard still stick with it. I used mentor at a nonprofit web-dev bootcamp that aimed to help students from under-estimated and non-traditional backgrounds (no college education) become software developers. Most of the students did not have traditional STEM backgrounds and were learning to program for the first time. The program was free and deliberately designed to be hard with multiple places where students would be kicked out if they didn't keep up with the work. There were no traditional tests and coding exams. All assignments were project based with a clear deliverables (website, backend database, full stack javascript applications, etc).

Most of the students (over 80% graduation rate and 99% employment rate) who finished the program got well paying dev jobs (avg salary of 90k). Of the students I mentored, the ones who were most successful were the one willing to put in the extra hours to learn and ask for help (often doing 80-100 hours weeks of learning) and genuinely curious to learn outside of the scope of the curriculum. At the end of the day the program was not filtering on general "intelligence" (whatever that means) but really the perseverance of students to put in the work and produce something each week. At the end of 8 weeks

https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_career_planning_part0.html

This is Marc Andreessen's guide to career planning, and I've found it exceptionally useful. In particular, he backs off from the narrow "decide what track you want to be on" approach to frame the problem as developing a set of skills that will make you more valuable to any enterprise you choose to be a part of. Then while you do that, watch for the most valuable opportunities to apply those skills.

The other great thing about Marc Andreessen's guide is that it acknowledges the role of risk and opportunity in how your career will shape out. So instead of tracking yourself into a path based on how the world looks today, you stay alert to how the world is changing, and then use the downtime to improve yourself. Despite being a guide for "high-potential people who are not interested in work/life balance", it feels like it puts less pressure on individuals than feeling like there's a set of steps you must hit to be on your chosen track.

My careers have followed a similar route. When I graduated from college, I took a particular job because I didn't want to sit in an office all day. But as I got better at that job, my work increasingly became telling other people how to do the work, and ten years later I ended up in the office most of the time.

I quit that job to start my own company, again, so I could have the freedom to do things outside of an office. And again, as more people joined the company, I spent more time managing the company and writing reports and doing things other than being hands-on with the thing I started the company for. After another ten years, I closed the company.

Now I'm happy writing code. And another ten years in, my job is increasingly not about writing code anymore, but about ideas and processes and meetings and telling other people how to do things. The heads of departments completely unrelated to mine invite me to their meetings just so I can listen and write reports about what I heard later. Now, no matter how hard I try, I spend more time in Microsoft Word than writing code.

There seems to be something about the business world that removes people from the jobs they're good at. Sure, lots of people strive to be the Senior Lead Corporate Upstairs Middle Manager Grade IV. But some people are just happy doing work, and at some companies it's hard to stay in those roles.

At this point in my life, I'd rather be Lazlo Hollyfeld than Professor Hathaway.