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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…
Earlier 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.
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…
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering is a great book but it needs context. The last edition was released in 1994. Programmers had a lot of labour power back then.
Today though? The median house costs more than a third of the median income. Inflation has raised costs of living to unsustainable levels. And for programmers there have been hundreds of thousands of layoffs since 2023 and a low number of job openings.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to take what job you can get or stay in a job you don’t care for until the trade winds return.
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 fuz…
I'm 41 now, started working in education but pivoted back to tech quickly (DevOps specifically) since tech is a better match for me.
After a few years, fell upwards into management then pivoted into Technical Program Management roles where I've remained since. Love this since I get to interact with teams of people working in my program(s) but don't have the responsibilities of a people manager.
Personally, my roles focus on infrastructure and things at least loosely related to my DevOps background. Worked at two blockchain companies (I've been into blockchain tech since 2012) but considering moving into green energy somehow.
I think in most cases including yours: choose roles based both on interest and total compensation. And it's a lot easier to get roles (especially TPM roles) if you're already technically competent in that particular field (in your case FinTech and crypto).
You're welcome.
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…
The vision doesn't have to be accurate, it just has to be directional
Probably butchered the quote, can't remember who said it, but the message stuck.
But this reminds me of what I hate about modern corporate “culture” the most. And what is broken about it the most.
Im speaking about the rat race. Tge fact, that you have to waste a noticeable part of your work time, effort and energy to sell your work instead of doing it. To the point where good salesmen make a “career” and become your bosses without any correlation to their work abilities or even management skills. Those are very good at designing their careers.
As a result the more corrupted the company with this style of internal management the more reliable it drowns in a swamp of ineffectiveness.
In a well functioning company or society “building a career” shouldn’t be a goal nor priority. It should be the natural outcome (more or less) of a “job very well done” that is a true priority.
Yes we’re not in a perfect world. But at least we should try to reach our ideals rather than promoting rat race mentality as a norm.
I have a really hard time designing my career in tech because I believe that people already have more options than they need or can afford. What people need aren't more options. What they need is MONEY; which is the ability to obtain the options which exist. And the only way to give people more money is through political means. This is why I was interested in crypto; it seemed to get straight to the point... I later…
I resonate so much with you. I'm in the middle of getting my product out for people to use and naively kept thinking that a good product means people are interested. I need to integrate with tools that prematurely deny me because I'm not a big company. I basically already lost, despite my tool being much more reasonable and maintainable (I've worked at the competitors and it was a mess). The world doesn't care about…
“I’m not defined by my career Greg”
“Greg see a therapist”