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A career ending mistake

bitfieldconsulting.com

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Re: A career ending mistake

#261

Post by [deleted] »

asdfman123 wrote: post #154
slfnflctd wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't think I'll ever find the position where I feel I belong [...] now that I know how broken the system really is Some people are chalking this up to depression, which is possibly part of it, but honestly I think this is simply the reality of a former idealist coming to grips with the big picture. You can't help but recognize that passion will come & go and it's all castles made of sand in the end. Whatever is mo…

Well, the difference between someone who is mentally healthy and someone who is depressed is this (and friends, I've been both): Someone who is mentally healthy realizes the world is imperfect and what they're doing is isn't working, but then takes that knowledge and builds upon it. Maybe they change careers, or maybe they lower their expectations for their job and focus on other meaningful things. Someone who is dep…

[deleted]

Re: A career ending mistake

#262

Post by magicroot75 »

As someone who went from managing three people at a high profile ad agency account to going back to IC. I'd like to say: It's so much more complicated that what this article lays out.

I was asked to train three totally green hires after only 3 months on the job myself. It was terrible. And I quit. But I loved the agency I was at. And I might love managing people under more sane circumstances. Now I'm an IC making more money with no reports and I'm back to being someone else's junior.

These things move quickly and I feel like keeping your eyes open is more important than placing oneself into a broad category of "career end." It's not as if roles are static and these things are defined as you go. Roles morph and people and projects come and go. Flexibility is more important than having an end in minds. Having an 'end ' is a fools errand. And is what encourages people to sit in shitty jobs because their boss promised them they "get what theyre looking for" just in a year or so.

Re: A career ending mistake

#263

Post by bradlys »

nostrademons wrote: post #233
gnarcoregrizz wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great point. One issue with your last paragraph though, is when trying to select a company to work for from an equity/ownership standpoint, there isn't the option of diversifying a career. You can only work at once place, so you put all your eggs in one basket. In hindsight, sure, you would make better money at coinbase rather than facebook, but it's essentially going long on one stock with your time rather than capi…

There is over time, just not at once. You gain much more information working at a company than you have from the outside. If it sucks, quit and go to a better one. It's that willingness to cut your losers that many people don't have. Lots of folks are miserable in their jobs (you see a number in this thread) but then perform all sorts of rationalizations on why it has to be that way. It doesn't: if you're miserable,…

> If it sucks, quit and go to a better one.

Again - easier said than done. It’s easy to say, “just quit and go to the unicorn that will make you mega rich”. It’s much harder to actually do it.

I’ve worked at a variety of places. All the way from research, seed, various rounds of funding, to going public, public companies, and long term enterprise. No one was any good at predicting whether these companies were going to make me rich.

The people I know who got rich were just lucky - that’s about it. They weren’t good at selecting companies or figuring out ideas. They just got lucky.

Spend enough time talking to people in SV and you get one thing above all - survivor bias is real and alive.

Re: A career ending mistake

#264

Post by bradlys »

sixdimensional wrote: post #29
tdumitrescu wrote: post #27

Feels like the "senior IC" role described in this article corresponds mainly to today's "3-5 years of experience 'senior' engineer" roles. The reality that I've seen and experienced is that advancing beyond that on an IC track means a lot more people/political work, rather than constant "hands on keyboard" coding as described in the article. It's not the same as management, but it's inevitably more meetings and evang…

The fact that we work in an industry where 3-5 years is considered senior still boggles me sometimes.

You’d have to keep people around longer. Thing is - people don’t want to stay in the industry as software ICs. They want to be in product, management, or something else. Being a software engineer is often just a stepping stone to the next thing.

Re: A career ending mistake

#265

Post by xmprt »

WJW wrote: post #243
noisy_boy wrote: post #125

> I think there are three main kinds of career destination, at least in the tech industry: > Independent > Senior individual contributor (IC) > Management I guess I'll stick my neck out and just admit that I don't want to give any more fucks about any of the above and just wake up, sip my tea, read the news and take a bloody nap whenever I want to. Also volunteering/open source but mostly, not doing things I don't wa…

On the off chance you haven't read it yet and might be inspired: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si... It's not an exciting way where you get to be in the newspapers as the latest billionaire, but it does work and has very low variance.

I understand what they're saying but I don't trust their math when they claim "simply cutting cable TV and a few lattes would instantly boost their savings to 15%." That implies that cable TV and a few lattes accounts for $2.5k of spending in a year.

Re: A career ending mistake

#266

Post by bobthepanda »

anonymousDan wrote: post #248
trulyme wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it goes both ways. Young people are cocky and dismiss older peoples' experience as irrelevant, and more senior people think they've seen it all already and that there is nothing new that hasn't been around since 60s. Neural networks are a good example. If you skipped the last decade (/two) and you think you know about ANN because you mastered them in 60s... boy do I have news for you. :) Another paradigm shift f…

NNs sure, React and Rust ... uhm no.

React was a pretty big step for frontend-development; people have done good and bad things in React just as they've done in any other framework, but the important thing it (or other frameworks like it) did was establish a better way of tying state to a series of rendered elements that was better than doing CSS-selector-fu and trying to update things that way.

Re: A career ending mistake

#267

Post by ehnto »

> The best time to start a pension is always twenty years ago

Does the US not have a mandatory pension program? We have "super annuation" here which is a mandatory payment employers have to make into our pension accounts, minimum being 7% on top of our salary. Very rarely a company will add more to your super.

Re: A career ending mistake

#268

Post by chakkepolja »

ansible wrote: post #25
crrndngmstk wrote: post #21

To me, this reveals an uncomfortable truth: - I know I'm not technically skilled enough to make it to the higher levels of IC - I know I lack the people skills & charisma to make it to the higher levels of management I'm aware I can improve in both and I accept that, to some extent, it's a laziness and confidence issue. But to some people it seems to come naturally and it's hard not to assume I'm in the majority that…

If you find a good niche, and develop a lot of domain expertise in that area, you can likely make it to the senior levels of an IC, even if you don't have the most super-awesome technical skills. The trick (and of course there is a trick) is to find a narrow enough niche that you would enjoy working in, where you can get paid well, but isn't so narrow that you have very limited choices regarding who to work for.

Can you give some examples of such fields?

Re: A career ending mistake

#269

Post by chestnuttrees »

xmprt wrote: post #265
WJW wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the off chance you haven't read it yet and might be inspired: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si... It's not an exciting way where you get to be in the newspapers as the latest billionaire, but it does work and has very low variance.

I understand what they're saying but I don't trust their math when they claim "simply cutting cable TV and a few lattes would instantly boost their savings to 15%." That implies that cable TV and a few lattes accounts for $2.5k of spending in a year.

$100/mo cable, 5 lattes/week before work at $5/latte… it’s not so far off (unless you decide to litigate the definition of “few” or the average post-tax price of coffee in Nebraska or whatever). It’s illustrative.

Re: A career ending mistake

#270

Post by dopidopHN »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #205
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…

There are many, many former tech careerists who become entrepreneurs in non-tech businesses. Wineries, coffee shops, bakeries... Mechanical Engineer->Baker https://www.kqed.org/bayareabites/134975/at-the-midwife-and-... No shortage of wineries: Aerospace: https://www.princeofpinot.com/article/680/ https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/san-fernando-valley-ventura/new... Software: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-silicon-val…

My understanding is that a career in tech allow more liberty down the line, because of eventual saving
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