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

gregmckeown.com

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

#201

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

aristofun wrote: post #192
jbs789 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These things are not mutually exclusive. You can do a great job and learn how to communicate a job well done. If the company truly promotes incompetent salespeople then I’d steer clear of that company with the confidence that others are out there.

> These things are not mutually exclusive. You can do a great job and learn how to communicate a job well done. Absolutely! Nothing wrong with communicating your work and networking. It's better to do that than don't, it's a good thing to do, it's a great thing to help your manager to be aware of what's going on. As long as it is not a mandatory requirement and expectation of an engineer that puts pressure and become…

If you are okay with just being a ticket taker who us not aiming for a promotion to a job with more scope, responsibility and pay, there is nothing wrong with that trade off.

I’m at a point in my life where I am okay with the level of autonomy I have and have no interest in being a director or above and getting cost of living raises for the foreseeable future. But I’m 51 and an empty nester with me and my wife.

A line level manager position would be a vertical move. A director is a “manager of managers”.

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

#202

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

underlipton wrote: post #175
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 investmen…

I agree. I’m 51. I’m hoping to end up like Ben Kenobi. Say f%%% this and die after having a good life and letting the younger generation take over.

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

#203

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

georgeburdell wrote: post #69
ramon156 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Juniors fall into this pitfall so quick. Our newest hire actually set boundaries early on and I was pleasantly surprised

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…

You realize “pairing it back to 50 hours a week” is not a great outcome don’t you?

If I graduated post 2012 instead of 1996, I would have tied my horse to a safe BigTech company and made a lot of money in cash and liquid RSUs long before I joined a bullshit startup that statistically wouldn’t have gone anywhere.

Hell I made that choice at 46 when my youngest (step)son graduated. I chose to work at BigTech instead of getting a meaningless “CTO” founding engineer position at a startup.

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

#204

Post by dayvid »

agentultra wrote: post #113
Swizec wrote: post #6

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…

It ultimately doesn't change the advice. Strongly deciding I wanted a career change led me to putting in some extra time and tripling my income. It's easier if you can reduce obligations and noise and focus on what matters to optimize for whatever you want. It may not be easy, but you have some degree of power to alter your trajectory to some extent

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

#205

Post by aoeusnth1 »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #167
Swizec wrote: post #6

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…

> n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about sqrt(n) steps from the origin AKCSHUALLY The root of the mean of the squared distances is sqrt(n). The phrase as you quoted is the mean of the absolute distance. In general those are different. I don't know the latter from memory, and a quick look at the wikipedia page for Brownian motion doesn't have it.

You're right, sqrt(E[d^2]) > E[|d|] because of Jensen's inequality. The latter is about 0.8 sqrt(N).

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

#206

Post by aristofun »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #194
aristofun wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hop to another job if you want more money I wonder on what planet are you working? Virtually everyone I know in IT bumped their salary only after switching the companies, never I've seen anyone who raised their salary with comparable magnitude and/or pace by working hard at one place.

Isn’t that what I just said?

I apologize if I misunderstood it. It sounded to me like the opposite.

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

#207

Post by aristofun »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #197
aristofun wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, there are much more bad managers than good ones, also human brain is naturally wired to notice problems and warnings, rather than good news

So you can either bemoan “bad management” that you can’t change or accept it and play the game. I love the autonomy I get now in the latter part of my career over the last 10 years where I don’t have a manager hovering.

I don't bemoan actually, I'm just calling out things for what they are. I too learned to play the game and adapt the way it works for me.

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

#208

Post by aristofun »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #201
aristofun wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These things are not mutually exclusive. You can do a great job and learn how to communicate a job well done. Absolutely! Nothing wrong with communicating your work and networking. It's better to do that than don't, it's a good thing to do, it's a great thing to help your manager to be aware of what's going on. As long as it is not a mandatory requirement and expectation of an engineer that puts pressure and become…

If you are okay with just being a ticket taker who us not aiming for a promotion to a job with more scope, responsibility and pay, there is nothing wrong with that trade off. I’m at a point in my life where I am okay with the level of autonomy I have and have no interest in being a director or above and getting cost of living raises for the foreseeable future. But I’m 51 and an empty nester with me and my wife. A lin…

> If you are okay with just being a ticket taker who us not aiming for a promotion

I think your extreme example does not refute any of my points and I agree with you. "good manager" is not a guarantee for a good career, it's your responsibility ultimately.

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

#210

Post by DrPimienta »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #171
agentultra wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inflatio…

Look man, life was unironically just better for everyone back in the 90s. Minimum wage, median wage, highest earners, if you do the math everything was cheaper and wages were comparatively higher. Gas, food, electricity, housing, it was all cheaper. There were fewer regulations and less bureaucracy.

The buying power of a programmer in the 90s was much, much higher than an average programmer today.

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