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If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)

gregmckeown.com

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Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)

#3
In regards to the review part:

What helps me is keeping around my TODO.txt month by month, as well as a lot of screenshots and images of the things I find relevant for sharing in stand ups and meetings and such (as well as presentations).

So if I need to review the past month/year (e.g. when I want to update CV/site or catch up with management), it’s just a matter of going through a bunch of text and images without a lot of unnecessary fluff, like digging through Jira. Maybe if I want to get the approximate time/effort spent on particular stuff, based on the amount of activity there.

Alongside that, it’s also nice to document stuff that was particularly good, or all the ways software broke in (and what broke how often), as well as stuff that pissed me off and made me want to quit (sometimes people/mindsets, sometimes tangible code or practices).

When the default is just going with the flow and not documenting anything and doing no self reflection, every improvement upon that helps.

Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)

#5
post #4

I would take it one step up and say if you don't design your life intentionally your career will.

Juniors fall into this pitfall so quick. Our newest hire actually set boundaries early on and I was pleasantly surprised

So it's the kind of work place where you have to set boundaries? :)

Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)

#6
My favorite lens on this comes from Hamming:

> It is well known the drunken sailor whos taggers to the left or right n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about sqrt(n) steps from the origin. But if there is a pretty girl in one direction, then his steps will tend to go in that direction and he will go a distance proportional to n. In a lifetime of many, many independent choices, small and large, a career with a vision will get you a distance proportional to n, while no vision will get you only the distance sqrt(n). In a sense, the main difference between those who go far and those who do not is some people have a vision and others do not and therefore can only react to the current events as they happen.

Just a tiny bit of bias towards a direction will get you very far very fast.

I once modeled+visualised this with a bit of javascript[1] and it's quite surprising to see the huge difference from even a tiny multiplication factor on each random/probabilistic decision.

[1] https://swizec.com/blog/your-career-needs-a-vision/

Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)

#9
post #5
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Juniors fall into this pitfall so quick. Our newest hire actually set boundaries early on and I was pleasantly surprised

So it's the kind of work place where you have to set boundaries? :)

What workplace is not?

Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)

#10
post #5
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Juniors fall into this pitfall so quick. Our newest hire actually set boundaries early on and I was pleasantly surprised

So it's the kind of work place where you have to set boundaries? :)

You need to set your bounds in every single workplace, because no one workplace can set the right boundaries for everyone.
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