Non-linear career paths are the future

high school genius -> A Level failure -> record store stock clerk -> biochemistry & biophysics -> computational molecular biology PhD (abandoned) -> bike messenger -> systems support engineer -> software engineer -> UWashington CS&E staff -> amzn -> stay at home parent -> FLOSS hacker -> guest professor TU Berlin -> seemingly world-level expert on DAWs

I always wonder how rare this sort of pathway is.

I was a manager, for a very long time.

I worked for a company that actually had values similar to mine. It had lots of problems, but, in the aggregate, I ended up staying for a long time.

Could I have made a lot more, somewhere else? Absolutely. But that’s never been what I wanted. As it has turned out, I was able to leave the workforce at 55 (like I had a choice). I live humbly, but I also write code I want to write, the way I want to write it, for whom I want to write it, and I learn new stuff, every single day, without having anyone insisting that I compromise my Integrity, so they can make money.

I won’t lie. I was really pissed off (and still find it infuriating), when I realized what was happening.

In many ways, what I find most offensive, is the willful self-destruction, implicit in ignoring experience. It’s really no fun, watching companies, with so much talent and potential, implode, when they could have been so much better.

One of the characteristics of that company I worked for, was their frugality. They were (and still are) absolute tightwads. I got used to making do with limited resources, and figuring out how to motivate and reward employees, when I didn’t have the traditional leverage at my disposal.

It taught me a lot, but was also never comfortable. I would have loved the bucketfuls of money that so many companies seem to have, these days.

But maybe that whole gravy train is suffering a derailment.

Yes they can. In fact they do.

They have a San Francisco office, and they employ people in the US.

They can also pay US level wages in Canada.

whew, I just spent the last hour of my life reading your post history.

I'm 28, I make 170k/yr, and I drive a 2008 Nissan. I'm a 5'6" straight male, 150lbs, not unattractive, and I haven't had sex in five years. Frankly, I've never had a relationship longer than a couple months in my life.

In almost every quantifiable aspect, you've got me beat - but I don't envy you at all.

You're very intelligent and driven. There is this common thread in all your posts - you want what you can't have. You make one-percenter money, but you envy those with generational wealth. You can't find your ideal woman and it's killing you. You have a fairly clear-eyed view of dating dynamics among straight yuppies in the US that animates you to post obsessively about it in relevant threads. There's an anger at Silicon Valley, at women, at capitalism and humanity - alongside a resignation that this is the way things are. You seem pretty depressed.

I don't have most of what you do, but I'm pretty happy about my lot. I have autonomy at work, I like spending time with my friends, and my family's alright too. You said in one of your comments that most men would rather kill themselves than die alone - that really struck me. I don't feel that way, and I hope that if you do, you can find a path toward not feeling that way one day.

Anyway, I'm sorry for the surprise armchair psych. I guess the reason I'm writing this is because I consider myself an unusually driven and self-critical person. I push myself pretty hard and I get upset when I don't meet my own unrealistic standards. I'm usually in the 90th percentile and not the 99th, and that is a constant source of frustration. I've been through years of therapy to learn to control this part of my personality, but I worry about losing my edge. I've also made certain career choices, like picking a smaller start-up with high autonomy and WLB over a more lucrative FAANG role, and I often worry I fucked that up and wasted two years. Reading your posts made me realize that I could be in that 99th percentile, earn 4x what I am making now, and still be chasing that next thing. I hope this doesn't come off as patronizing, and that the perspective is at least interesting.

This has been a lot of my life. I wanted to be a mechanical engineer when I was younger, so I picked up a lot of the skills for that. I also became interested in architecture as a specific subset of that, which got me into learning about city planning, which got me into learning about systems infrastructure, which got me into learning about both classical and modern urbanism. I also learned a lot about internal combustion engines, which got me into learning about materials sciences, which got me into learning about chemistry, which curved back and got me into learning about metallurgy, which got me into learning about manufacturing processes.

I never became a mechanical engineer because my understanding of math at the time was poor. Instead I've jumped around from job to job or gig to gig, learning everything from woodworking and joinery to programming and electrical engineering. Each bit of work I did after the first dozen or so has supplemented or reinforced knowledge from other work I've done.

As a result I can give advice about pretty much anything you see standing on the street in a city, from where the concrete shape comes from and why that mix was chosen to why the street is so narrow to why the post office box is shaped like it is. Although a lot of this knowledge is shallow, it gives other people a good starting point to explain the more complex and in-depth topics of a given subject to me. That makes it easier for us to work with eachother and makes it easier for flaws in methodology, practice, or understanding to be noticed by both of us and thus makes it easier for me to understand where I went wrong. And if someone points out that I am wrong, that doesn't make me upset. It gets me excited because that means there's more to learn and more skills to acquire.

I doubt any of this would've been possible if I had actually gotten a stable job as a mechanical engineer and stuck to a single career path.