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

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

#91

Post by kamaal »

georgeburdell wrote: post #69
ramon156 wrote: 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

Disagree. This kind of comment is furtively pulling up the ladder behind you. Do as I say not as I do. Junior is the time to learn as much as possible and take risky bets (and suffer accordingly). When I was in a junior in a factory, the night shift knew me well. Nowadays, I've pared it back to 50 or so hours per week, because I now have a family, which is fine but it came at the cost of basically zero time to learn…

This is a correct view point to have.

As you get to the downswing of your career, you should have already worked and made enough mistakes to have most of your experience. You must cruise on that experience when you are older.

When you are old, that is not the time to work and make mistakes.

That is, most of the heavy work must be done as early as you can. Eat that frog.

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

#92

Post by integralid »

bboozzoo wrote: post #66
integralid wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh they have agency. They also have bills to pay, families to take care of and many other obligations that folks of privilege do not need to be bothered with. It is immediately obvious how privileged we are compared to many others who are not a liberty of designing their lives or careers.

>They also have bills to pay, families to take care of and many other obligations

I honestly don't get your point. I also have bills to pay and a family to take care of. Almost everyone does. I can't just quit my job and spend my life sunbathing on a sunny island, even though that sounds way better than my office job.

The number of people who have so much that they don't ever need to worry about bills or affording a family is tiny, even among HN users. This is also not what "designing your life" is about.

To be clear, I acknowledge my privilege - I have a relatively high salary (but not US-high, not even 6 USD figures) and don't need to worry about day-to-day survival. I just fundamentally disagree that there is some threshold below which people can't make decisions about their own life or career.

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

#93

Post by alexpotato »

So a bit of my thoughts + open to suggestions from other folks on HN.

I've been a DevOps/SRE essentially my entire career and almost always in Finance (banks, FinTech startups, multiple hedge funds etc) and most recently in crypto.

It's seemed that for SWEs the path was always something like:

- junior

- team lead

- manager

- manager of managers

- CTO (or VP of Engineering etc)

For SREs/DevOps it always felt a bit fuzzier after manager and most of the manager of managers I know ended up being that role in an "infra" department (e.g. k8s, networking etc).

I would love to know what folks with my background ended up doing later in their careers/age mid 40s and above?

(all of this is even more fuzzy due to LLMs/AI and part of me feels like it's time to start pivoting into some kind of IRL service or manufacturing role given the speed at which things are developing. e.g. maybe I should buy a bakery...)

Open to all kinds of stories and suggestions here as would most likely benefit me and also lots of other folks reading the comments.

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

#95

Post by xeromal »

elevatortrim wrote: post #33
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…

I think the beauty of this quote is working more than its content. Most people, even when they do not sit down and think about it, follow one of the two career paths: - Some people will actively pursue the next logical progression (senior, lead/manager, head/vp, exec). - Some will happily stay in their position unless the next one is offered to them. Being deliberate will always work better compared to being random,…

I never really had a plan for a career but I never settled. I borderline almost did at my last job as it paid enough and I loved the people like family but the move from that job landed me in the most interesting and well paying job I've had yet. Luck totally played a part in most of my jumps and the ones I thought were good were often bad and the ones I wasn't interested in ended up being the most interesting.

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

#96

Post by haritha-j »

xandrius wrote: post #83
haritha-j wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lovely metaphor, but I find myself at odds with the logic. What you sacrifice with vision I think is flexibility to respond to serendipity.

Vision is not a dictator, it's just having half an idea of where you'd love to be in X years. It can and probably will move as you age and gain experience. But if you're thinking you'd love to be your own boss and, as you have that vision, you find something much more interesting, you can still re-assess.

That's a good point. I find it very hard to find the optimum balance between flexbility / vision.

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

#97

Post by rubslopes »

xandrius wrote: post #83
haritha-j wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lovely metaphor, but I find myself at odds with the logic. What you sacrifice with vision I think is flexibility to respond to serendipity.

Vision is not a dictator, it's just having half an idea of where you'd love to be in X years. It can and probably will move as you age and gain experience. But if you're thinking you'd love to be your own boss and, as you have that vision, you find something much more interesting, you can still re-assess.

This resonates with me.

Three years ago, I left academia after finishing my PhD in Economics, frustrated by how little real-world impact my hard work seemed to have. I moved into IT, wanting to build things that would be more immediately useful and practical. Still, the dream of using science to create positive change never left me.

I was invited to work with AI at a company that develops software for the public sector. It wasn't the dream (I wouldn't be using my academic expertise) but it felt like a step closer. At least I'd be providing tools to support people who directly affect others' lives. From the start, I told my boss that I hoped someday to offer not just AI tools, but real socioeconomic statistical analysis as a service for the public sector. And while I've been happy working with AI, I've always sought out opportunities on projects that were more data-driven.

Three years later, some clients expressed interest in having our AI chatbot provide real-world socioeconomic data analysis. My boss just gave me a promotion to lead both the AI team and this new socioeconomic data initiative.

I was reflecting the other day on how fortunate I am, my dream "chased me." But it wasn't simply luck. I had always stayed attuned to the opportunities that arose.

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

#100

Post by elbear »

keiferski wrote: post #27

The 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…

Another way to put it: don't focus on distance but more on behaving in tune with yourself.
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