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A career-ending mistake

bitfieldconsulting.com

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Re: A career-ending mistake

#161

Post by hintymad »

Great article and thought provoking.

> and unlike your colleagues in management, you won’t spend all day in meetings.

The author will be surprised. In a bureaucratic company like Google, even an E6 can spend all their time having meetings and writing docs, to the point that they even get rusty at drawing boxes.

> If you want to reach this level, you’ll need to become a master of your chosen craft

One thing that worries me is that mastery also means specialization, and specialization is the most risky when there's a paradigm shift. My cope is to be specialized in a category. For instance, be a specialist in distributed systems instead of being a master of building Spring-boot services. That said, even that type of specialization is not immune to paradigm shift. Case in point, scaling out a service is really not that hard these days compared to 10 years ago.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#162

Post by mxuribe »

snozolli wrote: post #27
Sytten wrote: post #15

Maybe I am a pessimist but I really don't believe you can plan for 20y in the future especially in the tech sector. People fail to realize that we live in a world that changes not in a linear fashion but rather exponential. For all we know in 10y we will only need 1/5 of the coders we have and IC won't be viable, who knows.

IMO, there's no such thing as a career in tech, outside of maybe FAANGs (or whatever they're called now). It's just a series of jobs until accumulated wealth, ageism, or disability ends it.

Ugh, your dagger of truth cuts me so deep...but truthfully so. :-)

I'm beginning to feel ageism big time nowadays. And, while i'm thankful that i don't have any impact from disability (yet?!) from employers, the wealth accumulation is not enough to where i'd be comfy just yet. I wonder if "unicorns" outside of FAANGs nowadays are simply trying to accumulate enough wealth from conventional corporate IT jobs to have a comfy retirement like folks from the 60s/70s/80s/90s eras have had? ;-)

Re: A career-ending mistake

#163

Post by mxuribe »

mettamage wrote: post #57

I feel the discussion needs to be opened up to other ends of careers. My favorite career end that I'm naturally working towards to is the ability to jop hob to different roles without having prior experience. One way to do that is to be able to show in an interview that you have transferable skills and learn crazy fast. Another facet of that is that you need to identify companies that are open to this sort of thing.…

> ...My favorite career end that I'm naturally working towards to is the ability to jop hob to different roles without having prior experience. One way to do that is to be able to show in an interview that you have transferable skills and learn crazy fast. Another facet of that is that you need to identify companies that are open to this sort of thing...

Maybe its been the job hunting climate of the most recent decade or so...but I no longer see opportunities for jobs where employers are willing to take on someone who might be awesomely enthusiastic, and well-rounded, but lack a very super-specific set of skills. This also goes back to those ridiculous job descriptions where an employer __"requires"__ a candidate to have, let's say, 10 years of a specific experience - even though said skill might have only existed for slightly over 10 years.

I wish i could do something like that: sort of jump to a different role without prior experience (or at least very little experience)....For me it would be more of an intellectual fulfillment, and wanting to learn more, etc...And, for any employer who would give me that chance, i'd legit give them 110%! But, i'm not holding my breath for that.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#164

Post by gtirloni »

paxys wrote: post #59
toast0 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but for most techies, the most useful goal is to make money fast in a way that doesn't drain your life energy. And most of the time, this means responding to opportunities, not sticking to your guns. For example, a lifetime IC job may be ultimately worth less than a management job that gets you to VP level in a decade. If you can switch to management without draining your life energy, go for it? I hope you're a goo…

Exactly. If making good money without taking on too much stress was the goal, my advice to everyone would be to become a senior/staff IC at a decent company and stay in that role till retirement.

I think the stress at senior/staff will be there no matter what but if you aren't especially suited for the management track, the stress of being a manager will be 10x. If you're suited, then I'd argue it will be 1x or maybe less.

I've attempted to follow the traditional/expected progression path of senior->management and had a horrible experience each time. Even though I was getting praised for the work,it was taking way more energy from me to the point of burning out much faster than anything at the IC level.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#165

Post by bdangubic »

teractiveodular wrote: post #146
dclowd9901 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep -- this is something I wish I understood earlier on: burn hard, make as much as you can, then do what you _really_ want once you have enough money.

But when do you have "enough" money? There are many traps here. With lifestyle creep, mortgages or kids' educations to pay for, the sum that would have been "enough" in your twenties isn't in your forties. Many people work hard for decades and drop dead of a heart attack the first day after their retire. Others retire too early and find out the hard way that they did not, in fact, have enough money. Some people get b…

you have enough money when you can comfortably live taking out 4% of your invested savings. math always checks out for this.

also I know one family who retired early, realized they will run out of money and instead of going back to work moved to costa rica :)

Re: A career-ending mistake

#166

Post by apocadam »

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...

The person (Denpok) who quotes it is a charlatan posing as a guru, which makes the fake citation fitting.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#167

Post by johnfn »

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 most techies, the most useful goal is to make money fast in a way that doesn't drain your life energy

Is it so insane to think that it is possible to enjoy your job? I feel that this treatment of your job as a toxic thing that must be handled with safety gloves from a distance may contribute more to the "drain[ing] of life energy" than the actual job itself.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#168

Post by ZephyrBlu »

paxys wrote: post #17

"What do you want to be?" is a question we have all constantly been asked since middle school by parents, teachers, career counsellors, professors, recruiters, mentors, managers, HR and lots of other well meaning souls. My answer is the same at 40 as it was at 14 – I don't know. And you know what? I've been fine. I have worked at some great companies, and some not so great ones. A couple FAANGs as well as a 20-person…

> Never once have I had any semblance of a "plan" or a "goal". And despite what all the authority figures in your life will tell you, that is a perfectly fine way to live and be happy

That's the ideal career for sure, but how common is it?

It would be great if I knew I could bumble along and become a staff eng/manager/director without any sort of plan or goal. I don't believe that's a common experience though, and it seems even more unlikely for people who are at the start of their careers today (Like me).

Re: A career-ending mistake

#169

Post by raphlinus »

rglullis wrote: post #141
Attummm wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree with your premise. The goal of many software engineers is to build software / systems they can be proud of. They love software and the machines it runs on. Many people here have Arduino projects, 3D printers, home servers, and similar hobbies. A few weeks ago, I was looking for compression algorithms for a particular use case and came across Brotli[0]. I was surprised to learn it was developed by G…

> Projects like Brotli aren't built to maximize personal profit; In the case of Google, they very much are driven by profit. For a small company, reducing your payload size or decompression time by 0.01% may be senseless, but at their scale the benefit will greatly outweigh the costs.

In this case, GP has it very much right. Brotli was developed by people, not just faceless Googlers. Jyrki, who led the project, is as passionate an engineer as you're likely to meet. In this case, being able to pursue that passion happened to align well with Google's business interests, as it is indeed the case that improvements to compression have obvious benefits at scale when bandwidth and storage cost real money. But someone still has to push the initiative, and it's not as easy as you might think.

Disclosure: have collaborated with Jyrki and the compression team, including WOFF2 font compression, an early application of Brotli.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#170

Post by ZephyrBlu »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #122
f1shy wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not true that in all companies you have to chose between tech and management. It's true in some companies. But at many companies lead and director roles are very hands on. I‘ve seen bad companies where it is true, but in good companies typically not true. Look for example Peter Norvig, 100% hands on technical type, but in a high management position.

These types of ultra-high IC positions tend to be gate-kept by companies, often requiring a lot of prestige and experience. It's a nice gesture that they exist, but we're not all Rob Pike or Peter Norvig.

Yeah, top-level IC positions are much harder to acquire than their equivalent management positions and tend to require some level of public claim to fame.
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