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Career advice for people with bad luck

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Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#111

Post by fenwick67 »

username90 wrote: post #90

Step 1: Get a well paying job at a big tech company. There is very little luck involved in this, just get really good at algorithms. No need for a famous school, specific degree etc. It requires intelligence, if you don't have that then you need luck. Step 2: Save more than two thirds of your take home salary, you can still live way better than the people sweeping the office floor. Step 3: You now have a ton of money…

So, 1 make money, 2 save it, 3 congrats you have lots of money. Thought-provoking.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#112

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

efficax wrote: post #100

The point made in here about how your company is not your family cannot be emphasized enough. Corporate culture, and especially tech startup culture, likes to make you believe that we're all family and best friends and love each other. That attitude stays up right until the day they lay you off without warning. It's great to work with great people that you enjoy being around, and we should treat each other all with h…

But I think there can also be too much negativity around "the company is not a family". At this point, with 3 major crashes in the past 20 years, I feel like only bad companies say the company is a family.

Good companies say, and act like, the company is a team. People can work hard together, they can be friends, but they are clear that the reason for the team is to accomplish a goal, and if the structure of the team needs to be changed to accomplish that goal, people will be cut. This team mentality can provide true clarity of purpose, and can eliminate any sense of bitterness if things don't work out. When people are cut from a high caliber sports team they may be immensely disappointed, but if treated fairly they understand it.

The family mentality almost always results in bitterness, because what kind of family kicks out their members when things get slightly tough?

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#113

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #94
username90 wrote: post #90

Step 1: Get a well paying job at a big tech company. There is very little luck involved in this, just get really good at algorithms. No need for a famous school, specific degree etc. It requires intelligence, if you don't have that then you need luck. Step 2: Save more than two thirds of your take home salary, you can still live way better than the people sweeping the office floor. Step 3: You now have a ton of money…

>Step 1: Get a well paying job at a big tech company. There is very little luck involved in this, just get really good at algorithms. Let me stop you right there. Maybe that works in SV but in most of Europe(the world?) you aint getting in to any well paying job at a big tech company without a degree from a prestigious university or previous experience at equally big and famous companies. Companies here don't have th…

I can second that sentiment in Canada as well - I'm not even aware of what the good paying jobs would even be - there's none with FAANG fame, and every job has a hard wall with a laundry list of 5+ years of experience with a dozen web technologies that you can only climb over with the appropriate connections.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#114

Post by 0xfaded »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #94
username90 wrote: post #90

Step 1: Get a well paying job at a big tech company. There is very little luck involved in this, just get really good at algorithms. No need for a famous school, specific degree etc. It requires intelligence, if you don't have that then you need luck. Step 2: Save more than two thirds of your take home salary, you can still live way better than the people sweeping the office floor. Step 3: You now have a ton of money…

>Step 1: Get a well paying job at a big tech company. There is very little luck involved in this, just get really good at algorithms. Let me stop you right there. Maybe that works in SV but in most of Europe(the world?) you aint getting in to any well paying job at a big tech company without a degree from a prestigious university or previous experience at equally big and famous companies. Companies here don't have th…

Step 1: Move to SV.

I'm sorry, I'm Australian and studied and worked in Australia. I spent 4 years in SV, and now founded a startup in Europe.

Even after the Covid issue has played out, I'm convinced SV will still be where a passionate technologist can optimize their impact and lifetime earnings. There's just nothing that can compare to being surrounded by so many smart people who share your interests.

I've heard stories about the dotcom crash, and how it was awesome because everyone who had no business being there left. You just had the geeks that wanted to build stuff for the sake of building stuff, and it turns out there was still plenty of money floating around after things got going again.

Europe has laws which makes hiring people risky and expensive. And even if you do become a top earner, expect to pay 50% in taxes (+ 25% VAT). It's hard to fathom individual engineers would be able to save enough to have the sort of financial freedom to bankroll a company while still in their 20's.

But don't worry, there are government grants for you! Just be prepared to spend 1/3rd of your time dealing with paperwork and hourly reporting of what you did on a day by day basis, all for 50k here, 40k there. I feel these grants are designed to be demoralizing and the startup equivalent of unemployment benefits. And then you realize that almost all R&D in Europe, from startups to multinationals, is subsidized by EU funding schemes and mountains of paperwork.

Don't underestimate how good SV has it with the "I like you and your idea, here's $1m and come back next year and tell me if it worked".

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#115

Post by chadash »

throw4failure wrote: post #50
chadash wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interview people regularly and if I see someone with technical talent, then I'll proceed. Chances are I'm not looking up your references until I'm pretty sure I want to hire you, so up until that point, it's on you to impress me with your technical knowledge. Brush up on the fundamentals. Maybe read cracking the coding interview. And if possible, spend some time working on an open source project, preferably an exis…

I appreciate the feedback, thank you. In particular, reminding me to contribute to a larger open source project which is something I haven't done since leaving my last job.

I think a lot of people take open-source to mean "oh, I'll make a project that does something cool in my own time and throw it up on github and everyone can see the code."

And sometimes this works. If you are (to take an extreme example) Linus Torvald and your open source project in Linux, then holy cow, I'm gonna hire you right away. But most people don't have the combination of talent, luck and perseverance that are required to get wide adoption of an open source project. So in 99% of cases, what you are left with is a library or small project that you threw up on a git-hub that maybe has a few stars and that almost no one uses.

Furthermore, as a hiring decision maker, I really don't have much time to actually read your code. Got a project with 3 stars on github? That's great, but I'm really pretty busy writing new features and maintaining my code and I don't have time to read through your code unless I'm pretty certain I'm going to hire you, so I look for proxies. Number of stars is one of them. If 1000 people use your product, it probably says something about the quality of your code or the difficulty of the problem you solved, or at least your ability to solve a problem in a way that people find useful (yes, yes... I know it doesn't guarantee any of these are true, it's just a proxy, but in the initial stage of interviews, proxies are useful).

The issue is that most people are never going to write a project from scratch that gets 1000 stars. However, if you have substantial work in a project that you didn't start, that's also a great proxy. This means that you collaborate with others and not only that, but the people you collaborate with think you are good enough that they are willing to merge in your code. That's a good proxy.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#116

Post by TeMPOraL »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #108
mdorazio wrote: post #67

I really want to see more articles like this on HN. However, this is really "career advice for people at struggling companies." The luck part doesn't get discussed in the way I expected. To me, bad luck is things like: - You're in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ex. you graduated in 2008-2010/now or your business sector got wiped out by COVID - Despite your best efforts at networking, you simply never meet that ma…

>- You're in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ex. you graduated in 2008-2010/now or your business sector got wiped out by COVID I feel bad for the higher class pizza restaurant that opened down the street from our house at the end of January after a long time of renovating the building. Even though their pizza isn't really as good as the fancy pizza place at the mall (it's a mall in a rich area) down by the nearby…

I have a similar story. There was a fancy pizza place about to open next to a park few minutes from my home. They were intensively renovating a pretty building. I was really waiting to see them open - I like pizzas, and this is a small town, so we don't have much of choice in them. COVID-19 lockdowns came just as they were readying to open. They had a market, they had a great location - but they also had really bad luck.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#117

Post by JoeAltmaier »

chadash wrote: post #115
throw4failure wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the feedback, thank you. In particular, reminding me to contribute to a larger open source project which is something I haven't done since leaving my last job.

I think a lot of people take open-source to mean "oh, I'll make a project that does something cool in my own time and throw it up on github and everyone can see the code." And sometimes this works. If you are (to take an extreme example) Linus Torvald and your open source project in Linux, then holy cow, I'm gonna hire you right away. But most people don't have the combination of talent, luck and perseverance that ar…

More than that: there are just a handful of open-source projects that went anywhere at all. Among an enormous slushpile of perhaps-worthy but ignored projects.

As a filter for useful, sharable code, open-source is an almost total failure?

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#118

Post by ptero »

Kye wrote: post #60
ptero wrote: post #17

Most of it is reasonable, if already often quoted advice. But I did not see what does it have to do with the title: "for people with bad luck"

People with good luck are probably not looking for career advice.

I am not so sure of this. IME folks who do well are, on average, much more willing to hear external advice. They do not take it as direction (and, on disagreement would rarely try to convince the speaker that (s)he is wrong), but they would actually listen and try to understand the point, then make their own decision on whether they should act on it.

Also, (not bad_luck) != good_luck. I think most people would consider themselves average_luck.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#119

Post by username90 »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #94
username90 wrote: post #90

Step 1: Get a well paying job at a big tech company. There is very little luck involved in this, just get really good at algorithms. No need for a famous school, specific degree etc. It requires intelligence, if you don't have that then you need luck. Step 2: Save more than two thirds of your take home salary, you can still live way better than the people sweeping the office floor. Step 3: You now have a ton of money…

>Step 1: Get a well paying job at a big tech company. There is very little luck involved in this, just get really good at algorithms. Let me stop you right there. Maybe that works in SV but in most of Europe(the world?) you aint getting in to any well paying job at a big tech company without a degree from a prestigious university or previous experience at equally big and famous companies. Companies here don't have th…

> Let me stop you right there. Maybe that works in SV but in most of Europe(the world?) you aint getting in to any well paying job at a big tech company without a degree from a prestigious university or previous experience at equally big and famous companies.

I did exactly that though, I joined Google in Europe a few years ago.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#120

Post by Hokusai »

efficax wrote: post #100

The point made in here about how your company is not your family cannot be emphasized enough. Corporate culture, and especially tech startup culture, likes to make you believe that we're all family and best friends and love each other. That attitude stays up right until the day they lay you off without warning. It's great to work with great people that you enjoy being around, and we should treat each other all with h…

> But your boss is not, and never will be, your friend.

I agree with the sentiment. I am still friends with people that were my direct reports many years ago. But, when I was their manager, I treat them fairly like any other employee. That they were my friends meant that we will hang after work hours. But, as I manager I could not be their friends in work hours. Favoritism will have been extremely unfair for the rest of employees, that still were very good people.

I also have friends that have been my managers. And, in the job I expected to be treated equally than the rest of employees. I guess that we are still friends because we think in a similar way about justice and work ethics.

With teammates has been different. I have been part of awesome teams that we have been friends while working together to later on drift apart as our interests outside the job does not match (quite usually people with children that have limited time to hang out).

The opposite of that are managers that "feel betrayed" when you leave a company that has been mistreating you, or tell you that they expect loyalty to the company that is not reciprocal. They are the "paterfamilias" of a dysfunctional and abusive family. There is nothing worse that a manager that expects to be treated as a friend, with loyalty and sacrifice but sees you as just a number.

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