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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)

#11

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

Swizec wrote: post #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…

It is not something I share very often, because people assume a lot when I do, but von Braun[1] shared a similar idea. Ignoring for a moment his past, one cannot say that he had no achievements further supporting position noted by OP.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Aim_at_the_Stars

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

#14

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

KronisLV wrote: post #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…

GPT was actually pretty good for this use case until 5.2 kneecapped its long term memory and now its more aggressive about pruning ( very annoying as wide recall now has to be explicitly invoked ).

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

#15

Post by madduci »

ramon156 wrote: post #4
hwhehwhehegwggw wrote: post #2

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

I hope they were work-life balance boundaries

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

#16

Post by xianwen »

KronisLV wrote: post #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…

Very interesting! Do you organize screenshots and images by day and by topic?

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

#17

Post by raincole »

Swizec wrote: post #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…

Wait, are you saying that for a symmetrical random walk, the expected distance is of the order of sqrt(n), but even for a slightly biased random walk (like 0.5000001 chance to take right) it's of the order of n?

Edit: well of course it is. I was thinking expected position (which should be 0) not distance

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

#18

Post by paganel »

hwhehwhehegwggw wrote: post #2

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

Statements like this one come for a position of privilege, which is to be expected on a forum like this one targeting techies who are most probably solidly middle-class, but just wanted to point that out. More exactly, most of the (normal) people are NOT in the position of designing their lives, believing otherwise is, again, tainted by said position of privilege.

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

#19

Post by kbrkbr »

I enjoyed this article and think it's good advice, and I also think that the punchline (title + last sentence) is wrong. Not that it makes a big difference, I just treasure texts more that I feel the author thought through to the last detail.

If you don't design your career, in most cases I guess no one will. In the comments are good examples, like the random walk of the drunken sailor. The cases in which you could use the phrase "someone else designed it for me" in a meaningful way seem rather rare to me.

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

#20

Post by y-curious »

Swizec wrote: post #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…

This is a lovely mental model and also makes me feel a host of existential dread. I had a semblance of vision before gen AI and I think that vision needs serious revision
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