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A career ending mistake

bitfieldconsulting.com

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Re: A career ending mistake

#161

Post by hinkley »

asdfman123 wrote: post #148
hinkley wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conclusion I think is missing from the 10k hours theory of mastery is that there is more than enough time in a full lifespan to master 4-6 things, depending on how good you are at managing your time. People who are only good at one thing may find that they aren't good at anything because of it. Don't neglect your passions, even if you don't see how you could ever make money from it, experience in other verticals…

We're making a huge mistake when we see mastery as an end goal. I played band in grade school, pushed myself hard, burnt out, etc. Learning classical piano as an adult has been a MASSIVELY instructive experience. Here's why: I'm never going to be a professional classical pianist. Ever. It's far too competitive, I'm probably not talented enough, and it's not worth the effort. Therefore, the ONLY reason I'm doing it is…

> We're making a huge mistake when we see mastery as an end goal.

Agreed. If you look even more pessimistically at this, it's also how workers get exploited by owners. You've attached your identity to something, making it a giant lever. I can push on that pain point to motivate you or to neg you into accepting less money for the work.

Re: A career ending mistake

#162

Post by jdauriemma »

eulerian wrote: post #40

Curious if there's anyone who's made a plan for this sort of a thing. I'm never able to plan even the rest of my week and follow through with it. What does a plan for your career look like and how do you get the discipline to stick to it?

Try not to consider career planning as being in the same category as task management. Instead, have a broad vision and keep a look out for opportunities that might bring you closer to that vision. Opportunities present themselves all the time; it's up to us to have the attention to notice them and the judgement to know when (not) to take them.

Re: A career ending mistake

#163

Post by duxup »

asdfman123 wrote: post #148
hinkley wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conclusion I think is missing from the 10k hours theory of mastery is that there is more than enough time in a full lifespan to master 4-6 things, depending on how good you are at managing your time. People who are only good at one thing may find that they aren't good at anything because of it. Don't neglect your passions, even if you don't see how you could ever make money from it, experience in other verticals…

We're making a huge mistake when we see mastery as an end goal. I played band in grade school, pushed myself hard, burnt out, etc. Learning classical piano as an adult has been a MASSIVELY instructive experience. Here's why: I'm never going to be a professional classical pianist. Ever. It's far too competitive, I'm probably not talented enough, and it's not worth the effort. Therefore, the ONLY reason I'm doing it is…

I go to a lot of college football games. (i'm going to put cte concerns aside here for a bit)

Most of those players have zero chance at a professional career, many by their final season know it. And yet they push themselves to achieve / try achieve great things or at least things they never thought they could.

I rushed the field for a game last year, talked to players who were ecstatic mingling among the fans / celebrating.

I like to think that benefits them / even me.

Re: A career ending mistake

#164

Post by reaperducer »

vinceguidry wrote: post #155
reaperducer wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 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 offic…

> There seems to be something about the business world that removes people from the jobs they're good at. There's not much business value in just having one person be really good at something. It doesn't scale. The state of coding and information technology means you can't maintain exponential or even logarithmic scaling of your own abilities to produce business value. At some point, the only real thing left to do is…

10 people that are 15% as good as you will outproduce you.

That only seems to make sense if those 10 less-productive people make one-tenth the salary of the single productive person.

I've seen this in action. I know of a company that hired a whole room full of know-it-all high school drop-outs to write code, rather than one or two trained college graduates. That company went out of business in a matter of months.

Re: A career ending mistake

#165

Post by BobbyJo »

duxup wrote: post #42

I changed careers at 40+ years old. I'm very happy that I did it. People have all sorts of constructs / ideas about how careers work (based on experience) or how they think it works, or how they want it to work. I talk to some college graduates who tell me what they're planning for and have ZERO clue what industry they're talking about, their description is unrecognizable to me ... even tho I know it is the one I wor…

Where you end up is, largely, a by-product of the little choices you make with how you spend your time, and you should treat your time accordingly, but the article treats those decisions as descending a tree with limited depth, when, in reality, the tree keeps going well past where your career (and your life) end. I don't think any of us (in tech) end up in a place where we have no choices (as the author implies), I think we end up in a place where the ROI distribution of our choices becomes so unequal that making a different one stops being practical depending on your goals.

You can spend the last X years of your career doing performance art or spear-fishing if you don't care about returns.

Re: A career ending mistake

#166

Post by znq »

dotancohen wrote: post #43
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…

It seems there may be a typo on the linked page: How we manage a fully reemote company

Thanks! I'll get that fixed :-)

Re: A career ending mistake

#167

Post by lliamander »

kosievdmerwe wrote: post #85
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software is clearly an exception to this because you can leverage your work to an arbitrary degree. One person can write software that benefits hundreds/thousands/millions/billions of people. The junior engineer solves an immediate problem. The senior engineer realizes it’s generalisable to similar problems of their team and solves them all at once. The principal engineer realizes it’s generalisable to their entire c…

Not really, you can leverage your work very widely, but your rate of change to the program is limited.

The relevant metric here is not how much code you can write or quickly you can write it, but how difficult and impactful the code being written is.

Many widely-used and industry-shaping pieces of software were (at least initially) the product of just a single programmer, or at most a small handful of core developers. When other people joined it, it is often after the software had some initial success.

Re: A career ending mistake

#168

Post by pcmoney »

A lot of people are dunking on this post but none are showing a terminal career path that stays in tech and is something other than: - Manager of some kind - Senior IC of some kind - Independent of some kind

It seems a reasonable breakdown to me, finer grained distinctions do not have the same magnitude of skill and prerequisite knowledge differences.

Re: A career ending mistake

#169

Post by [deleted] »

duxup wrote: post #42

I changed careers at 40+ years old. I'm very happy that I did it. People have all sorts of constructs / ideas about how careers work (based on experience) or how they think it works, or how they want it to work. I talk to some college graduates who tell me what they're planning for and have ZERO clue what industry they're talking about, their description is unrecognizable to me ... even tho I know it is the one I wor…

[deleted]

Re: A career ending mistake

#170

Post by AlwaysRock »

onion2k wrote: post #124
AlwaysRock wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. To some extend yes but largely, no. If you loved COBOL all your life you can still find COBOL work. It's harder now but its out there. You're just not going to be working at a cool start up doing it. So if part of what you love is working at cool cutting edge companies then yeah you have to keep learning new cutting edge things. But if you just want to bang out code in your preferred language there will almost al…

The beauty of your argument is that it's unprovable. No matter what language someone might suggest they enjoy that they can't find a job writing any more, you'll always be able to counter saying "Ah, but you've not looked hard enough! They're out there!" It'll always be the candidates fault for not scouring the world searching for that AP/L role or Shockwave Flash advert. The assertion that no matter what tech you wa…

Sure... I guess nothing is provable. I know COBOL devs. They say its harder and harder to find gigs but they just tend to stay in their jobs longer now. I have a relative that will probably retire in his current COBOL gig.
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