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A career-ending mistake

bitfieldconsulting.com

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Re: A career-ending mistake

#151

Post by Gud »

rakejake wrote: post #73
tossandthrow wrote: post #2

This approach to careers fails to take into account that we inherently change as people. In periods of ones life other things matters - maybe it is taking an education, starting a family, etc. Other periods work matter. It should be entirely fine to switch it on and off and change tracks throughout life - and in my view it seems like it is! To reach a peak it takes roughly 10 years, but these 10 years can be started…

I don't think the OP is talking about whether to focus on running the race or not, but rather which race to run. As you grow older, the number of open tracks diminishes and that is the point the OP is trying to make. While one can change tracks at any time, success is far from guaranteed. Being a distinguished engineer at 40, one cannot suddenly decide to enter the track for CFO or CEO. The track for that accepted en…

Disagree here. Start your own company, boom, you are the CEO.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#152

Post by illiac786 »

equestria wrote: post #20

Here's the thing about the average career in big tech: five years after you leave, almost no one will remember you were there . Most of your old team mates will leave for other other jobs. Your code will get refactored or rewritten. Docs will be superseded, then lost in some CMS migration. Before long, it will be as if you have never worked there. I know it sounds preposterous, but ask anyone over the age of 55 or 60…

Maybe I am wrong about this, but being a VP is exactly the kind of things that sound like draining the life energy out of someone. VPs all sound completely formatted in a way that only happen if you are under an immense pressure and the only way out is through that very tight exit, which leaves you nearly formatted.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#153

Post by saltminer »

donatj wrote: post #77
equestria wrote: post #20

Here's the thing about the average career in big tech: five years after you leave, almost no one will remember you were there . Most of your old team mates will leave for other other jobs. Your code will get refactored or rewritten. Docs will be superseded, then lost in some CMS migration. Before long, it will be as if you have never worked there. I know it sounds preposterous, but ask anyone over the age of 55 or 60…

Even in small tech. I worked for an agency in the aughts and we would put up websites at roughly the pace of 1 a week. In my time there I'd guess I'd personally built a little over 100 websites and developed our internal framework for us to make doing so easier. Every couple years since, I've gotten a bug in my butt and investigated how many sites still had pieces I'd clearly worked on. On this most recent occasion,…

>It's a strange feeling, like 5 years of my life just evaporated.

To quote Roy Batty, "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."

If there's anything I've noticed in this industry, it's that abstractions tend to outlive their origins. For instance, back in the 80s the Unix systems my workplace used (and subsequently, many of the applications they ran) had an 8 character max username length, and although those old Unix boxes (and their vendors) are long gone, we're still given 8 character usernames since nobody wants to find out the hard way that there still are some applications that depend on an 8 character max or which truncate longer usernames to 8 characters.

If you want to make a lasting impact on an industry but you weren't able to get in on the ground floor, your best bet is to get into advanced R&D, whether at a major hardware company or in academia. Anywhere else and your knowledge will either be wasted because nobody cares or it will be siloed off because the company will never open-source the tech you pioneered (and someone else will likely take the credit for it later on when they create an open-source equivalent).

Re: A career-ending mistake

#154

Post by gniv »

hcrean wrote: post #6

This article assumes a lot more self-determinism than is available in practice to most people. Beyond that many of us have been running on fumes for years, I can't lose ten extra hours every week away from seeing my family, so I can up-skill for a new variation on the same career with ultimately the same bull.

This is the point I was going to make as well. I think the article is written for high-agency people, which are rare in my experience, even in tech.

Also related: The Peter Principle: people get promoted to their level of incompetence. We think we want something but then realize the job is actually harder than we thought, so we do a bad job (or burn out).

So to the excellent points in the article I would add an introspection about the level we want to achieve and how to continue working at that level, assuming we don't hate the job.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#155

Post by CoastalCoder »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #36
la64710 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also I want to acknowledge everything that ends our career is not in our control .. like the dual forces of global offshoring / outsourcing and relentless automation (including AI driven) will continue to put downward pressure in the career curves of tech workers for next few years/decades.

It's interesting that the common sentiment on HN a couple of years ago was the polar opposite of that. I lost count of the number of comments that affirmed the boom was going to go on forever. Software was eating the world, etc.

I should point out that a perceived shift in the general opinion of the overall group doesn't necessarily mean that a lot of individuals within that group had a shift in opinion.

I.e., it's probably affected by who bothers to voice their opinion, and how memorably, at different times.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#156

Post by itronitron »

negus wrote: post #104

> Lao Tzu teaches: the best fighter is never angry. More important than the blow is knowing when to strike Seems like a fake citation https://www.taoistic.com/fake-laotzu-quotes/fake-laotzu-quot...

Yeah, the Lao Tzu I know advises people to be simple, like uncarved blocks of wood.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#158

Post by Aperocky »

equestria wrote: post #20

Here's the thing about the average career in big tech: five years after you leave, almost no one will remember you were there . Most of your old team mates will leave for other other jobs. Your code will get refactored or rewritten. Docs will be superseded, then lost in some CMS migration. Before long, it will be as if you have never worked there. I know it sounds preposterous, but ask anyone over the age of 55 or 60…

> For example, a lifetime IC job may be ultimately worth less than a management job that gets you to VP level in a decade

How are you positive that you can get to VP level in a decade as a manager? That doesn't sound easy. Just by looking at the number of managers and number of VP in my company it would seemed that around ~2% would eventually become VP if the ratio hold, that's an incredible standard for "reasonably good". Doubly so if you are not even starting from the same track.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#159

Post by cudgy »

frmersdog wrote: post #75
Ancalagon wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is IC offensive? I’ve never considered it to be. “Resources”, on the other hand, feels very offensive.

Well, taken at face value, it is a bit of an oxymoron. To contribute is to be part of a group; by definition, a contributor can't be wholly independent, because they're adding to a corpus, not producing it by themselves.

True. Who is not an individual contributor? I find the term meaningless.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#160

Post by cudgy »

robocat wrote: post #143
CooCooCaCha wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way I know how to deal with this is FIRE. Investing as much as possible and working towards early retirement or semi-retirement so that you can at least live a good chunk of your life. The world we live in still sucks away the best years of your life but at least you don't have to wait until your 60s to live the life you want. You can also work on side projects in your spare time that will hopefully accelera…

> The only way I know how to deal with this is FIRE. Investing as much as possible and working towards early retirement I retired at 50 and "the dream" of FIRE is almost like someone else's idea of an ideal goal and I'm not that satisfied with it - perhaps because I'm out of sync with my peers (I have gained some retired 65+ friends). I had planned to enjoy investing however I find investing soulless and unsatisfying…

> however I find investing soulless and unsatisfying even though I'm doing well at it

Agreed, but how do you know you are doing well at it? Who hasn’t? Stock market only goes up and has been fueled by low interest rates for almost 2 decades.

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