151–160 of 270 posts
An underappreciated factor for building one's career is also building a safety net, because that allows for risk. Having that safety net means you can't be taken hostage in a salary negotiation, and it means that you can entertain riskier career moves. That safety net contains financial and (demonstrable) human capital.
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I literally fell into anti-fraud and email security back in 2012 and spent a totally unexpected chunk of my career around those topics. The amount of people I've heard of say they want to go into email security is very small.
I think this demostrates a far more important perspective than "have a vision" - which is easy to explain and almost impossible to execute, which is be curious, intentional and open to lots of things. The curious & open part leads you to new oppportunities, and the intentional part helps you figure out how to evaluate & where to go next.
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> 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…
> But that does not feel fruitful either. My everyday life is consumed by the desire of having some kind of impact, making the world better. It nearly impossible to achieve substantial change alone. The key is to be organized with others, to find a community. Now, I don't mean joining a political party, especially not at first. That can be important work but also very soul crushing I am talking grassroots-level, loca…
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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…
This is a framing issue. You can't control the times, but good advice is applicable in good and bad times. If Hamming was operating from a "good time", it should be true that his policies are also applicable in the "bad times". His advice to "work on the worlds hardest problems" was spoken to people who had worked their way past the initial difficulties. General advice to "Move towards important problems", which is p…
"Direction" and "design" are probably the wrong metaphors for careers.
The key insight is recognizing the misalignment between your goals and your manager's goals. Your manager optimizes for team output and organizational needs. Your career growth is a secondary concern - important, but not primary. This creates a fundamental principal-agent problem. The solution isn't to become adversarial, it's to be explicit about your goals and negotiate actively rather than hoping they'll be noticed.
Practically, this means: (1) Having quarterly conversations where you explicitly state "I want to work on X technology" or "I'm aiming for senior by Q3" rather than assuming good work will be rewarded automatically. (2) Building skills outside your job scope through side projects, open source, or internal tools that solve real problems. (3) Being willing to change companies when growth stalls - the biggest salary/title jumps come from job changes, not promotions.
The dangerous flip side is over-optimization. I've seen engineers obsess over "career design" to the point where they won't touch any task that doesn't directly ladder to their promotion case. That creates fragile specialists who can't adapt when their niche technology becomes obsolete. Better approach: have a direction, but maintain broad skills and genuine curiosity. The most interesting career paths come from unexpected opportunities you recognized because you had wide exposure, not rigid planning.
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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.
This is a very "live to work" article. Is it wrong to have your career on autopilot if you are satisfied with your job? Clearly, the author wasn't, switching from law to becoming a teacher/writer. So I guess that the article makes sense in this context.
Only if you don't mind the career equivalent of CFIT¹ when a mountain turns out not to be where your maps said it was. I'll wager that a lot of former Flash developers weren't expecting Apple to cause Flash to die out.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_flight_into_terrain
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…
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…
Huh? Back then, there was very little glamor to software engineering. Computing just wasn't serious enough. There was relatively little competition, salaries were unremarkable, and sure, you could land a job for life, but that still exists today. If you are an IT guy for a lumber mill, a regional ISP, or a grocery store, it's not going to be as cutthroat as Big Tech. It's just that you're not gonna be making millions.
We're pretending that this type of cozy tech jobs don't exist anymore, but they do. They just don't come with IPOs and RSUs.