211–220 of 270 posts
I just want to be left alone, without doing the corporate dances. I don’t care about your company, your culture, and your unique DNA. The only family I have is back home, so just let me do my work for 8-9 hours a day, and leave me alone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh they have agency. They also have bills to pay, families to take care of and many other obligations that folks of privilege do not need to be bothered with. It is immediately obvious how privileged we are compared to many others who are not a liberty of designing their lives or careers.
>They also have bills to pay, families to take care of and many other obligations I honestly don't get your point. I also have bills to pay and a family to take care of. Almost everyone does. I can't just quit my job and spend my life sunbathing on a sunny island, even though that sounds way better than my office job. The number of people who have so much that they don't ever need to worry about bills or affording a…
Stuff happens to you and to one's family that you just cannot "strategize" your life around just like that, unless you have (some, a good amount even) money, this is just how things are. If you haven't ever been in that place consider yourself very lucky.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh they have agency. They also have bills to pay, families to take care of and many other obligations that folks of privilege do not need to be bothered with. It is immediately obvious how privileged we are compared to many others who are not a liberty of designing their lives or careers.
>They also have bills to pay, families to take care of and many other obligations I honestly don't get your point. I also have bills to pay and a family to take care of. Almost everyone does. I can't just quit my job and spend my life sunbathing on a sunny island, even though that sounds way better than my office job. The number of people who have so much that they don't ever need to worry about bills or affording a…
The one thing I had going for me was that my grandmother prepaid my college tuition. So I scraped by working bullshit jobs, completed college, and now in my 30s I'm doing sort-of okay as a programmer for a start up (the pay here is bad, which is why I'm here).
It was awful getting here and I was always one small step away from being permanently homeless or dead. Maybe he didn't mean it like this, but a "normal" person means a person living in poverty in China or Indian or wherever else, and they all have it even worse than me.
I'm writing this here because, not you, but others on this website tend to just give some form of "bro, just stop sucking so bad if you want to improve your life" and it doesn't seem like they really understand what having no option is like.
So a bit of my thoughts + open to suggestions from other folks on HN. I've been a DevOps/SRE essentially my entire career and almost always in Finance (banks, FinTech startups, multiple hedge funds etc) and most recently in crypto. It's seemed that for SWEs the path was always something like: - junior - team lead - manager - manager of managers - CTO (or VP of Engineering etc) For SREs/DevOps it always felt a bit fuz…
> I would love to know what folks with my background ended up doing later in their careers/age mid 40s and above? I'm 41 now, started working in education but pivoted back to tech quickly (DevOps specifically) since tech is a better match for me. After a few years, fell upwards into management then pivoted into Technical Program Management roles where I've remained since. Love this since I get to interact with teams…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's condescending to believe a large number of people mostly cannot design their lives. At best they can try to make it better for their children, if at all. Why is this condescending? It's not their fault, it's how the system works and their bad luck in not being born into a more privileged position. For people who cannot make ends meet, trying to make ends meet takes most of their available time and…
> I don't think it's condescending to believe a large number of people mostly cannot design their lives. At best they can try to make it better for their children, if at all. If they have children, barring some violent circumstances, then they've already participated in designing their life. This is not a binary issue. All of us have choices and make decisions (feeding family, paying rent, not robbing a bank - all of…
This is not the kind of design we're discussing here; "not having children" is usually a privileged, informed decision which most people are not in a position to make. It's certainly very far from "designing your career". Regardless, a lot of people don't have much choice here either, through a system conspiring on denying them choices (see: anti-abortion and anti-sex education lobbies, a health care system that conspires against their free time and energy, etc).
There's an illusion of choice, especially to us pontificating from our privileged lives, but no real choice.
> But sure - no one is denying that some folks exist [...] their agency is significantly diminished.
Most folk, not some.
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…
> Some times you have to find something and work …
Rather than waiting for a perfect choice, I read Hamming as reminding us that are making choices all the time and cannot avoid doing so. Even not choosing, e.g., staying in a less-than-ideal role, is a choice. Given that we have no choice but to choose, Hamming suggests knowing up front where we want to go in the long term and biasing choices in that general direction.
Swizec mentioned Cal Newport elsewhere[0], and Newport’s recommendations around lifestyle-centric career planning provide an interesting bridge between your comments about occasionally needing to weather a storm and Hamming.
Some view titles, particular projects, or certain roles to be worthwhile goals in themselves. “I just graduated law school, so I want to make partner at a big NYC law firm” is a goal that a motivated new attorney might set. Does that career goal serve her if she despises traffic, subway travel, and apartment living? Newport advocates beginning with a vision of an ideal lifestyle and working backward from there by setting career goals to achieve the desired lifestyle.
Where he may be in a conflict with Hamming is warning people about what he calls the grand goal theory, of which the fresh law school grad aiming at partner shows the pitfalls. Hamming’s advice will help you go far. Newport warns that if you’re going to go far, be sure it’s in the direction you want to go.
In the case you mentioned of someone who is long-term unemployed, having a job that produces income is certainly nearer to any Hamming career goal and any Newport ideal lifestyle than that person’s present circumstance of draining savings or, worse, accumulating debt for basic living expenses.
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>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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't think it's condescending to believe a large number of people mostly cannot design their lives. At best they can try to make it better for their children, if at all. If they have children, barring some violent circumstances, then they've already participated in designing their life. This is not a binary issue. All of us have choices and make decisions (feeding family, paying rent, not robbing a bank - all of…
> If they have children, barring some violent circumstances, then they've already participated in designing their life. This is not the kind of design we're discussing here; "not having children" is usually a privileged, informed decision which most people are not in a position to make. It's certainly very far from "designing your career". Regardless, a lot of people don't have much choice here either, through a syst…
It certainly seems to be.
> "not having children" is usually a privileged, informed decision which most people are not in a position to make.
As I said - barring some violent circumstances, having a child, or at least the actions leading up to it, is a decision one makes.
> It's certainly very far from "designing your career".
This thread is not about designing one's career, but designing one's life. See the top level comment.
> Regardless, a lot of people don't have much choice here either, through a system conspiring on denying them choices (see: anti-abortion and anti-sex education lobbies, a health care system that conspires against their free time and energy, etc).
I've yet to meet someone who is not underage and doesn't understand that having kids is a consequence.
Sure, poor education and lack of abortion play a role, but none of that negates the fact that the person had a choice. It's exceptionally insulting to those who made different choices that led to positive outcomes to be told that people just like them in the same circumstances didn't have a choice.
Sorry, but your stance is very much coming across as privileged, who is trying to sympathize with people you don't understand. It's a very different perspective when you actually come from the background you're claiming didn't have a choice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Things are how they are, and some people may successfully navigate while playing some of the games. That's very different from saying "this is how it has to be" or "this is how it will always be".