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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)

#171

Post by VirusNewbie »

agentultra wrote: post #169
VirusNewbie wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I got into the industry over 20 years ago, it was unheard of for an IC software engineer to retire early. Unless you got extremely lucky like working at Microsoft or Apple pre-IPO, you just weren't making the kind of money big law or doctors made. That is not the case now. Yes the competition is incredibly fierce but the pay has skyrocketed.

There were a lot of factors that went into making salaries sky-rocket. One of those was leverage: there was more demand for skilled programmers than there were available. You also had the ZIRP era from 2008-2021ish. If you could write fizz buzz and breathe you could get a good paying job. In the 90s inflation-adjusted salaries were still rather high. A 75k USD salary in 1995 is roughly 150k USD today. And the median…

>In the 90s inflation-adjusted salaries were still rather high. A 75k USD salary in 1995 is roughly 150k USD today. And the median house was less than a third of your income. And in the 90s there was even more demand for programmers.

Right but how many programmers were making even 150k back then, even if they were 10x geniuses? I don't think even high level ICs at IBM or Microsoft were making that much. Even inflation adjusted, that's lower than the medain at FAANG these days.

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

#172

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

aristofun wrote: post #166
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will someone know what you’re doing if you don’t tell them? There is an entire theory called the “luck surface area” that says you need to do the work and tell people you did the work. https://modelthinkers.com/mental-model/surface-area-of-luck There is another similar school of thought that the only thing that matters in your career are “results and relationships”. It took me way too long to figure all of this o…

> I’m not smarter than anyone else, I learned how to network, talk the talk and play the game. Congratulations that you learned how to game the system. Fair enough. That doesn't mean you should brag about it or celebrate that terrible "school of thought". > How will someone know what you’re doing if you don’t tell them? That's a simple part: it's your manager's direct and one of the main job responsibilities. It's li…

Its a gravity problem. Gravity doesn’t care whether you like it or not when you land after jumping out of a 70 story building. You can either choose to accept gravity exists and not jump out of a 70 story building - or jump and die.

My manager’s job is not to manage my career. The last time I was a “pull tickets off the board maintained by someone else” developer was over a decade ago. Even then my project manager was different than my actual manager. My manager didn’t look at the Jira board for all of his reports are across teams to know what they were doing.

You still had to tell him yourself during 1 on 1s on high level. But even then, what were you going to tell him? “I pulled some well defined tickers off of a Jira board and I deserve a promotion?” There are so many people that are good enough to do that on either the enterprise CRUD side or the BigTech side, why should you be promoted for that?

On the other hand, except for my stint at BigTech between 2020-2023, I was already at the top of the technical IC chain as far as responsibility. There was no place to be promoted to. I have broad initiatives that I’m responsible for and still the manager just knows that things are running smoothly and the stake holders are happy. They definitely aren’t keeping up with my day to day work.

To be honest, outside of BigTech, worrying about promotions aren’t worth the effort, do your job, build your resume and hop to another job if you want more money. But even then, you can’t hope to get ahead in your career if you are content with just being a ticket taker and not taking on responsibilities that require you to navigate corporate culture.

I would much rather play the game than spend months grinding leetCode trying to pass coding interviews.

Right this second, I have reason to believe that I would have a greater than even chance of getting into Google via GCP in their internal consulting division based on a combination of experience (not with GCP in particular), soft skills, network, and knowing how the game is played than a hands on developer would trying to get in by being able to “codez real gud”.

I don’t because I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than work in any large company again and I’m damn sure not going back into an office.

Again, not because I’m smarter, I’ve accepted the game for what it is.

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

#173

Post by alphazard »

It's worth mentioning that career conversations with your manager are always bullshit. How could they not be? Your manager's incentives are to keep you around, keep you productive, and keep you inexpensive. It's ridiculous to think that helping you build a successful career, which likely doesn't involve them or your current employer for very long, is something that they would do. Why would you reveal any information about your long term plans to such an adversary?

If they realize that the company cannot provide what you are looking for then they may not want to invest more resources in keeping you around, or keeping you happy. If they realize that you find some sort of intrinsic reward in certain work, then they might put you last for raises, because the money could help them more when spent on other people.

It's best to selectively reveal only your immediate short-term goals, only at the current company, and only as part of an ask. Always make them pay for information, if you are going to reveal what you want, then they need to reveal whether they intend to help you or hinder you in getting it. Slow answers, non-answers, pushing to next quarter, etc. All signal that they intend to hinder. It's rare to get an honest, fast "no".

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

#174

Post by thenoblesunfish »

alphazard wrote: post #173

It's worth mentioning that career conversations with your manager are always bullshit. How could they not be? Your manager's incentives are to keep you around, keep you productive, and keep you inexpensive. It's ridiculous to think that helping you build a successful career, which likely doesn't involve them or your current employer for very long, is something that they would do. Why would you reveal any information…

Comments like this make me feel very lucky to have the job and manager I have! If the situation is as adversarial as the one you're describing, are you perhaps missing out on the fact that when people trust and genuinely support each other it's not zero sum? That you and your manager are actually on a team (assuming you're in a big company), basically at the same level in terms of power and influence?

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

#175

Post by underlipton »

maciejzj wrote: post #86

From the perspective of someone in their late 20s, the timing of this article feels quite off when entering 2026. The reality has become far different from the gist of what is presented here. Career paths and opportunities have been getting broken and changing so much in recent years that I find it hard to plan anything. I don't even know what kind of "goal" is sustainable, let alone what the path towards it is. The…

I wouldn't even say medicine. Neither Baby Boomers nor the current American healthcare system have 30 years left in them; that means that, unless you're already in your 40s or 50s, you're going to see the bottom fall out of that sector mid-career.

This is a political failure. It has nothing to do with individual decision-making and everything to do with poorly-managed incentives for appropriate 21st-century investments.

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

#176

Post by cardanome »

zwnow wrote: post #154
cardanome wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm trying to avoid community unfortunately. I was never really accepted anywhere, whether is be online spaces or irl and I am not the person to socialize and do stuff with people. Also don't want to rely on people or having people rely on me.

> I was never really accepted anywhere

I felt the same way before I got my diagnosis for my neurodivergency. I mean I still do but it got better because I know now why I get rejected and are better at finding people I can fit in with.

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

#177

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

Aurornis wrote: post #144
aristofun wrote: post #118

The 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…

Every single major tech company that I am aware of (admittedly only two from 1st and 2nd hand knowledge) require you to submit a promo doc showing you “operating at the level you want to get promoted to”. You only can show that by getting those plum opportunities and that only happens through building the right relationships with the right people and knowing how to navigate corporate culture.

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

#178

Post by hnthrowaway121 »

alphazard wrote: post #173

It's worth mentioning that career conversations with your manager are always bullshit. How could they not be? Your manager's incentives are to keep you around, keep you productive, and keep you inexpensive. It's ridiculous to think that helping you build a successful career, which likely doesn't involve them or your current employer for very long, is something that they would do. Why would you reveal any information…

I’m careful like this to a point, but you can establish trust with managers. Most decent cultures don’t favor hoarding good employees how you’ve described.

> It's ridiculous to think that helping you build a successful career, which likely doesn't involve them or your current employer for very long, is something that they would do.

This is a very short term perspective. If I am a good manager to you, you are much more likely to stay because that’s an important relationship & you are benefiting. If it means you move on because I helped you gain the skills/confidence you needed, great, maybe sometime down the road you can help me when I’m looking for me next job or refer my next awesome employee. But who cares, at least neither one of us had to be miserable.

You always have to be _cautious_ but don’t let relentless cynicism keep you from good useful professional relationships that can actually help you.

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

#180

Post by georgeecollins »

yobbo wrote: post #155
jvanderbot wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not about good or bad times. All compasses are broken so any particular direction you believe you are walking deliberately might as well be uniformly random. "Direction" and "design" are probably the wrong metaphors for careers.

I think it is better for your mental health to see yourself as having some agency. You certainly have some, though how much we can debate. But saying something like "all compasses are broken" sounds so defeatist that I worry you are experiencing depression.
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