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A career ending mistake

bitfieldconsulting.com

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Re: A career ending mistake

#301

Post by giantg2 »

xvector wrote: post #238
asdfman123 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree. For me the solution was to stop thinking about my career as much more than a means to an end ($$$). The system is broken, sure, but fixing it isn't my job. I'll work on problems I find interesting, and for all I care, the system can crash and burn. All the while, I'll clock out when I want and go home with a smile on my face.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,"

Re: A career ending mistake

#302

Post by giantg2 »

nl wrote: post #244
giantg2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It felt great at first. Once you realize that the company - respected/known as a place that does the right thing - doesn't follow its own policies and screws people over, you realize that every company/job sucks. It won't be better anywhere else. And you wasted your youth on obscure and obsolete tech because the company needed it and you wrongly believed their promises that they would take care of you (retraining, ca…

"Companies" are made up of individuals. If a company has a culture where they make an attempt to care and put on a public face of caring then that is an awesome start, but actually making that work comes down to you and your managers. > you wrongly believed their promises that they would take care of you (retraining, career growth, not laying off, not outsourcing, etc). None of these things _ever_ just happen, even w…

I understand what you're saying, but that's not really what I'm talking about.

It is solely the company who decides to outsource or lay off after saying they don't do that kind of thing. You have no recourse when the company gives you a bad rating. They don't even allow you to be present for the secret trial they put you on (calibration). God help you if you're in one of the departments that requires a manager to pick someone for a bad rating to balance out a top rating. Without a union, there's no way to contest bad ratings and keep the people in power from screwing over workers.

I have gotten certs like for AWS and one specific to my area's business acumen. So I'm not sitting here doing nothing. But it doesn't help that much and there aren't many options in my area.

Re: A career ending mistake

#303

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

onion2k wrote: post #279
hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a bad thing. One becomes an expert in one niche domain (I wouldn't say COBOL is niche but you know) and comfortable sit on top of it. One can just work maybe 15, 20 years and retire early.

You also need to be aware that there will be massive pressure on businesses to remove your job though. Every single app written in a lanuage that has a diminishing number of people able to work on is a huge risk. The only reason COBOL devs are still able to fine work is because businesses like banks didn't have the foresight to remove that dependency early enough - they've been running their legacy code for far too l…

Yes I understand. But consider two points: 1) People who are familiar with mainframes and COBOL are probably well into their career maturity (at least 40+) and because of the luxury salary they probably do not mind an early retirement, and 2) Even when bank moves it moves slowly.

But I do think that the whole COBOL thing is coming to an end...maybe we need to find something still hot but hated by everyone, for example...Java?

Re: A career ending mistake

#304

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

Jaruzel wrote: post #296
hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you need to find some sort of "savior" in a hobby or something more than that. But maybe a hobby is going to be enough and you need something bigger in picture...maybe take some volunteering work. Anything that satisfies your search for meaning of life.

Thanks. I've been seriously considering Volunteering recently.

No problem. Find something that can give you some peace and that should be good. Good luck.

Re: A career ending mistake

#305

Post by giantg2 »

ghaff wrote: post #231
giantg2 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are also many adjacent jobs to development (or whatever) at a medium to large tech company. However, if it's that all the jobs or companies are bad (for you), you're probably going to need something really fundamentally different like some sort of trade. And that has its own set of downsides and is probably going to be a step down in compensation.

I've been looking at other jobs. I saw one for a business analyst. That seemed like a perfect fit until I was told it's really 75% project and stakeholder management. No thanks. Plus, it turns out most people in that group are Ivy League MBA holder (corporate strategy is apparently the path to the C suite).

Re: A career ending mistake

#306

Post by giantg2 »

pracer wrote: post #299
giantg2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies lie and don't even follow their own policies, screwing over the workers (you could also apply this to the "justice" system, and many others). A good start would be a union to enforce the policies consistently and right the imbalance of power. I have an LLC for largely non-tech work. Tech work is terrible in my market, so I don't think I'd do well enough to support myself. Not to mention, the tech I spent ti…

I think it may be about expectations. It is a game and, no matter what people or company say, they are NOT your family. Face your job with that in mind, avoiding the cynical views/attitudes. You go there to make money and if you learn and improve yourself, don't do it for the company to congratulate you, but in order to have more options and/or because you want to learn that new thing. Companies are there to make mon…

A union could ensure equal enforcement and that contract terms aren't broken.

"we are lucky enough to have plenty of opportunities to get new jobs"

That's highly individual. I don't have many options or opportunities.

Re: A career ending mistake

#307

Post by jpetso »

bobthepanda wrote: post #266
anonymousDan wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

React was doing the right thing for sure, and perhaps in a more principled way than Qt in terms of state propagating downwards and events bubbling up. (CSS still makes layouts unreasonably complex imho.)

But also, React is doing things that desktop GUIs had figured out years ago. It did a really good job at distilling the essence into something useful. Angular started the trend of finally moving towards state-driven views. Kudos to all of these developers for making web development less sucky.

To label it as a new thing that nobody else had done before though, that's going a bit far. New on the web, sure. By the time these got introduced, I had been waiting for years for a web framework that incorporates some of the non-web lessons learned. Let's give it lots of credit, but not more than it deserves.

Re: A career ending mistake

#308

Post by wlonkly »

lytefm wrote: post #285
chrisweekly wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My advice is keep pursuing whatever energizes you, and aim towards being "T-shaped", not "jack of all trades, master of none", rather "jack of many trades, master of 2 maybe 3".

I'd rather call it pi-shaped or N-shaped then ;)

I've heard people call it "comb-shaped" before.

Re: A career ending mistake

#309

Post by sbarre »

giantg2 wrote: post #188
sbarre wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And it's likely thar at least some of those grievances where born out of misconduct by the company. Bringing us back to my position that all companies lie and screw over workers, that the ones that look good just mean you aren't witnessing it.

Find me any situation anywhere in the world where there are no bad actors.

Companies are made up of people, this happens everywhere. You're just describing life. This is not a problem specific to "companies".

Re: A career ending mistake

#310

Post by Sebb767 »

anonymousDan wrote: post #289
bobthepanda wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm talking about the difficulty of acquiring these skills given experience. It took me about a week to learn Rust

And it takes me about 2 hours to spin up an overfitted NN in TensorFlow. Learning and mastering are quite different things.
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