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If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
71–80 of 270 posts
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#72I’ve spent my career chasing jobs that had kept me employed for over 20 years so I can support a family. Unfortunately I have had to let the ‘system’ take me where I am needed so I can pay my bills. It is life.
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#73I do something similar for development of me as a human being. I ask myself how can I improve, what kind of person do I want to be, how can I help make the world a better place. My "career" is just a means to an end to put food on the table. Also being in my 30s I think I have mostly maxed it out anyway. Sure I might increase my wage a little bit but all in all as for being an IC it is a good as it gets. Sure there i…
> In the end my work just makes someone else richer, it doesn't have any meaning. This is something I struggle with a lot. I left companies before, because the job felt meaningless and making some rich guy richer doesn't sound meaningful to me. I am trying to come up with a business idea I can work on on the side, that actually is supposed to make the world a better place, but I am struggling to find anything I have…
> trying to make non tech people aware about how Amazon, Google and so on makes life worse for everyone. Or how anti privacy laws are probably a bad idea.
I think a majority of people already know this, that's why it feels fruitless. Also more negativity ("these companies are bad because of x, y, z") will also make you feel negative.
Why not make those sites, talk to those non-techy people, but provide _some_ form of thing they can do to make an impact in a tangible way, not just "don't use amazon", links to sites that put together local info for small areas, catagories of smaller online sites that you can use instead of amazon or something.
> My everyday life is consumed by the desire of having some kind of impact, making the world better.
Do you have something tangible you can look back on that you did last week that helped achieve this vision? If not, what small thing can you do this week?
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#74My 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…
That's really nice, but the point where the vision is should move too. You learn as you progress. What you enjoy changes. The entire industry moves. Being focused on the goal you defined 30 years ago is almost certainly wrong for most people.
I can’t emphasize this enough. Every 5 years or so I reassess what my goals are and refocus my vision on where I want to apply my skills.
Things change fast in our industry so being able to pivot to something nearby is paramount for maintaining a career in this field.
Not everyone has the fortune to spend 15 years at a FAANG or other large corporation. Sometimes you have to build it.
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#75My 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
Which is fine. Goals shift and can even completely disappear, forcing you to pick another one. But having and pursuing long term goals at most times is still the ticket for success. My 2c.
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#76I’ve spent my career chasing jobs that had kept me employed for over 20 years so I can support a family. Unfortunately I have had to let the ‘system’ take me where I am needed so I can pay my bills. It is life.
If you don’t design your career, someone else will.
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#77[deleted]
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#78I planned to get out of my current company and stop wasting my life two years ago. The job market and my visa status meant that it's either impossible or I need to make significant sacrifices. So that's life.
Why didn’t you make the significant sacrifices?
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You either misunderstood or we disagree fundamentally. Everyone can and should design their life. Of course richer people have a lot more choices, and poorer people a lot more constraints, but everyone can make informed choices. Believing "most of the normal people" have no agency is condescending.
I don't think it's condescending to believe a large number of people mostly cannot design their lives. At best they can try to make it better for their children, if at all.
Why is this condescending? It's not their fault, it's how the system works and their bad luck in not being born into a more privileged position. For people who cannot make ends meet, trying to make ends meet takes most of their available time and energy, there's not much left to ponder about life's choices.
What it is, in my opinion, is terribly unfair. I agree with the GP commenter that us here mostly ignore this reality. And that's OK, clearly TFA is aimed at privileged people like us, not most people.
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#80The main thing missing from this IMO is an element of chance or randomness, the ability to incorporate “unknown unknowns” into your life. The most interesting people I’ve come across have had a variety of jobs, many of which they knew absolutely nothing about when starting out. There is a genuine value add when you’ve worked beyond the same white collar profession your entire working career. In other words, the probl…
In a society where everything needs to be optimal, randomness is seen as a mistake.
And that’s the tragedy. It should be viewed as a feature, not the bug. Curiosity and willingness to mix it up is where the serious innovation resides. Cross cutting concepts more easily happen when you’ve done/experienced/seen/felt different stuff … period.
I tell my son all the time that I couldn’t predict what I’m doing now … 3 years prior. I didn’t have this insight or awareness but after running the SW/IT marathon for 25 years here we are. Trust your instincts, they weren’t developed in a vacuum. The more you explore, the more insights pop in your mind and every 3 years or so, a change presents itself for you to affirm or deny.