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If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
141–150 of 270 posts
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#142My 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…
Hamming was also writing from a highly privileged position. He was able to work at Bell Labs for the majority of his career. That just doesn’t exist today. 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…
Is this still a valuable read today (specially taking it into account)? It's been in my reading list for a while now but I'm always postponing :|
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#143I can’t say I’ve ever had “5 year plans” and even I did, facts on the ground change so fast, my plans would change.
I’ve been working since 1996. But without going into ancient history, in 2008, I had spent the last 9 years at my second job, became an expert beginner, been divorced for two years, and had 5 mortgages between my home and two rental properties that were underwater by about a $250K.
I was also teaching fitness classes part time to make up the gap - that was suppose just be a hobby.
Then my plan was to get out from under all of that mess. I didn’t know how or have a timeline. But it started with getting a job where I could get exposed to modern development practices (done after 3 months and a lot of prep work), stopped teaching so much (just kept my favorite classes where my friends were), and walked away from five mortgages and wrecked my credit (everyone was doing “strategic defaults” back then).
One thing I didn’t “plan” for was to meet and marry my future wife and become a father to pre-teens by 2013. I’m still married, boys are grown. That by itself changed my goals.
By 2013, I was still about 25% under paid even for an enterprise “senior” [sic] dev in Atlanta and still digging myself out of my financial mess while supporting a family.
My goal by then was to develop the soft skills and hard skills to be a team lead - again no timeline.
Then in 2016, my goal was for us to move and work for a much better paying tech company after 2020 when my youngest graduated from high school. Even that changed to I would rather just not move and get into customer facing cloud consulting (not staff aug) after 2020 when I thought I would have to travel a lot (who could have predicted a worldwide pandemic??).
Well both fell into my lap in mid 2020 - customer facing cloud consulting and BigTech and I didn’t have to move when I got a job at AWS working in Professional Services. I didn’t even know the department existed. Again not planned.
2020 my plan was to work for Amazon for four years, pay off debt, save some money and work for a smaller consulting firm. I knew three months after I got there that I definitely didn’t have the stomach for BigTech long term. This was the only 5 year plan that worked out more or less as I wanted (staff consultant for a reputable mid sized company).
Even then, I never thought in 5 years, we would decide to sell our house in the burbs, downsize and move to state tax free, much better weather Florida
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#144The general sentiment of being aware about your career and decisions is true. 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 bo…
> To the point where good salesmen make a “career” and become your bosses without any correlation to their work abilities or even management skills.
The few times I've seen this actually happen at a company, it was not the kind of company I wanted to work for long-term anyway.
If the company is so broken that the wrong people are being promoted while the right people are being ignored constantly, there will be bigger problems than you simply missing a promotion.
The one startup I worked for that had this problem chronically (combined with some nepotism) did a bee-line run straight for insolvency and then collapsed. Everyone on the ground floor saw it coming. Some people still tried to race for promotions and upward career trajectory there, but the smart ones invested their effort in getting out.
That said, I've also worked at some companies where the right people were getting promoted but there were groups of people with sour grapes he were always upset it wasn't them. It's never something everyone agrees on.
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hamming was also writing from a highly privileged position. He was able to work at Bell Labs for the majority of his career. That just doesn’t exist today. 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…
Is this still a valuable read today (specially taking it into account)? It's been in my reading list for a while now but I'm always postponing :|
I read/skimmed it this year. I don't feel it was worth it. The first few and last few chapters have some nuggets but for the most part it's pretty highly technical stuff that feels not super relevant or interesting for a software engineer today (in my opinion).
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#146Reminds me of
https://fs.blog/hunter-s-thompson-to-hume-logan/
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#147[dead]
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#148Its that time of the year again huh. The times for unfilled news years aspirations.
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Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#149My 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…
Hamming was also writing from a highly privileged position. He was able to work at Bell Labs for the majority of his career. That just doesn’t exist today. 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…
>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.
Having a goal does not seem at all at odds with weathering a storm. Your choices can then be what you learn in your free time, or what horizontal moves you make at that job, or which people you get closer to, for example.
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#150I 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.
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