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A career-ending mistake

bitfieldconsulting.com

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Re: A career-ending mistake

#171

Post by kyleee »

suzzer99 wrote: post #133
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…

There's also a risk going to into management that you don't have as a much more indispensable developer. My friend is great developer who transitioned to management, then got laid off 2 years later when the company hired a bunch of Amazon layoff casualties who pushed out all the other management. All the developers under her were retained.

Is it more likely to happen as manager or dev? I suppose that is the important question, to which I don’t know the answer

Re: A career-ending mistake

#172

Post by jimmaswell »

> If you love what you’re doing now and don’t ever want to change jobs, great: you’ve reached the end of your career

Guess I'm there. I don't know how common my mindset is around here, but I have a relatively low stress, unexciting remote job in web dev. It's not glamorous or particularly interesting, but it pays well and offers the flexibility for me to travel a lot/spend time with loved ones and have extra mental energy for my hobbies. Well worth the tradeoff for me personally - I have no particular impetus to climb the corporate ladder when I already make six figures in a low cost of living area.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#173

Post by ghaff »

CooCooCaCha wrote: post #136
ghaff wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you don't have to wait until your 60s to live the life you want But, at least at some point in your life, doing work within a company may provide that life. At some point, you're done. And that point may vary. But many people wouldn't really love (or at least benefit from) a bunch of money dropped in their lap when they graduated from college.

I can 100% tell you it will not provide that life to a lot of people. I'm happy for you if it does but others like myself would rather kill themselves than work a 9-5 until they're 60.

And a lot of those people would not have been in a position to start their own companies--much less succeed at it.

Have a big trust fund? Sure. If it were from Day 1, depending on the circumstances, 9-5 would have been ehh. But not sure how directed I would have been absent strong parental direction.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#174

Post by yawnxyz »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #48
yawnxyz wrote: post #19

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. It's not entirely clear that much of this field will look the same in five years, but still, I think doing the thinking and the planning for the sake of mapping out the route is important. If only to inform you that no, you don't want any of those routes. (I did this planning and ended up in academia/microbiology, as a product designer, for better or worse but it's bee…

My wife asks me from time to time: "What do you need to learn now for the next five years of your career?" It's a great question. It is also, I think, the right time frame, though one could argue for three years instead of five. Given the terrain I see now, I can plan for the next five years, and have those plans be mostly reasonable most of the time. Past that is harder.

I honestly have no idea what to even plan for the next couple of years and it's stressful

Re: A career-ending mistake

#175

Post by valval »

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…

Source: made it up.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#176

Post by AnimalMuppet »

yawnxyz wrote: post #174
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife asks me from time to time: "What do you need to learn now for the next five years of your career?" It's a great question. It is also, I think, the right time frame, though one could argue for three years instead of five. Given the terrain I see now, I can plan for the next five years, and have those plans be mostly reasonable most of the time. Past that is harder.

I honestly have no idea what to even plan for the next couple of years and it's stressful

Plan for AI to be a tool that can help you, but not one that will replace you. Learn how to use it to help you; learn how far you can listen to it and how far you can't.

If you're in embedded systems, probably learn Rust.

If you're in Android apps, probably learn Kotlin.

If you're in web programming, I have no idea how to advise you, but there are others who can.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#177

Post by cheema33 »

fallinditch wrote: post #16

> Most managers are terrible. A sweeping statement indeed, but it does reflect my experience too. Perhaps it's my ingrained deference to authority - when I start a new position I tend to believe that my manager has my best interests at heart. This is a mistake and I now believe it's better to maintain a kind of defensive attitude and to always be assertive in establishing, and if necessary negotiating, the responsibi…

> it's better to maintain a kind of defensive attitude

As a manager/developer, I do sometimes see this attitude in some devs. I try very hard to help them find a different job where they are not working for me.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#178

Post by cheema33 »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #124

One thing I didn't anticipate when younger is the extent that other people will prevent your advancement. Whether by being in the way, *isms - a.k.a. refusing to hire you for positions you'd be great at, or very common today... the majority of companies that no longer train or encourage career development. Because you might leave? Advancement seems to be lot of outmaneuvering these folks.

> very common today... the majority of companies that no longer train or encourage career development.

I don't get this. What is stopping anyone from doing that themselves? Why does someone else have to do it?

Re: A career-ending mistake

#179

Post by suzzer99 »

kyleee wrote: post #171
suzzer99 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a risk going to into management that you don't have as a much more indispensable developer. My friend is great developer who transitioned to management, then got laid off 2 years later when the company hired a bunch of Amazon layoff casualties who pushed out all the other management. All the developers under her were retained.

Is it more likely to happen as manager or dev? I suppose that is the important question, to which I don’t know the answer

From my experience it's manager and not close. Good devs are hard to find, especially devs who have built some stuff and can make fixes in 5 minutes that might take another dev a week to get up to speed.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#180

Post by rglullis »

raphlinus wrote: post #169
rglullis wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Brotli was developed by people

And this type of work was only possible because someone provided resources because they were expecting some type of payoff.

Let's stop romanticizing the past. Brotli's first release is from 2015. More than 10 years after Google's IPO. To claim that this type of project used to indicate that companies were more geeky and nerdy is completely asinine.

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