I tried the exercise. It turned into a mess. I seem to only want to escape employment. Everything I "wanted" to do seemed to be a deflection from the fact that I have anxiety about my job, staying relevant, staying employed, hamstering enough money to clear out my debts when the competition or AI inevitably beat me.
If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
221–230 of 270 posts
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Comparatively cheaper, no. Americans could afford a lot of things, but the average American home looked like Malcolm in the Middle, and not so much more fancy for the higher class. Meanwhile in 2025, people have immense furbished kitchen (I’m European so I always notice that in abs-training-bro-youtube-slop, I’m not talking about influencers here) and living rooms, order food deliveries all the time, and perhaps some…
No, the average 30 year old American owns far less than the average 30 year old American did in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Owning a home in a safe community is what is most important, and most young men can't seem to get that. Things are getting worse.
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#223My 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…
What a terribly flawed model. Being opportunistic can be classified as "vision" too.
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#224It'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?
Trust me, your situation is more common than not. Having been an IC for most of my career and then a manager and back to being an IC again, I can say that OP is way off base. Managers are incentivized to make sure that their reports can grow and can be promoted. When I was a manager, all my colleagues were perpetually diligent about making sure that we were fostering a great working environment for everyone.
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
>Look man, life was unironically just better for everyone back in the 90s.
It was not. Programmers were not buying Porches and living in luxury neighborhoods or retiring early.
Watch Office Space. Being a programmer was a low status, averagely paying job.
Was life better back in the 90s for the average programmer? Maybe? Housing was certainly cheaper, I'll give you that. But for exceptional engineers was it better?
Did programmers show up to work to have a barista make them a gourmet coffee, have catered lunches, free massages, all the meanwhile getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars extra per year in RSUs? I don't think so.
There's no way an exceptional engineer had a better quality of life in the 90s than they would today. There was no FAANG, no deca-corns, no big tech giving near as many perks and comp. It just wasn't comparable.
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> This is not the kind of design we're discussing here 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 o…
> As I said - barring some violent circumstances, having a child, or at least the actions leading up to it, is a decision one makes.
This is simply a falsehood you believe.
Or rather, it's a very constrained, mostly unfree "choice", with a lot of pressure from society telling them it's the wrong choice to make, barring them from access to abortion, contraception, and in many cases decent access to health and education. In many cases they are not even aware the choice existed, because it was concealed from them. I'm not sure if you are even aware a lot of people are not sure how babies come to be.
It's easy to claim everyone has access to these choices when you are, well, privileged.
> Sure, poor education and lack of abortion play a role, but none of that negates the fact that the person had a choice.
It absolutely negates it.
> 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.
Statistically, very few do. The odds are stacked against them. So it's not insulting at all; what's insulting is claiming from a privileged position that they "had a choice".
> Sorry, but your stance is very much coming across as privileged
Nope.
> It's a very different perspective when you actually come from the background you're claiming didn't have a choice.
Let me guess: your family was starving and dirt poor, your siblings were all addicts, but you managed to overcome this, educate yourself, and raise yourself to entrepreneurship. Is this where this is going?
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don’t design your career, someone else will.
If you don’t support your family, no one else will
I find that when decisions are very minor, people love to have tons of options to select from. When decisions are much more impactful and high stakes, people seem to love finding ways to convince themselves there are no options and that they must proceed down a single path out of necessity for how the world is.
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why didn’t you make the significant sacrifices?
This is one of those areas where family starts to influence decisions. My wife and I had kids between 24 and 28. From that point forward, 'supporting the family' took priority over personal fulfillment. Now that our kids are grown and self-supporting, it's wild how much simpler the risk calculation is. But at 52 with engineering manager being the dominant role in my CV, not particularly appealing to the small compani…
Nobody with a family has ever found a way to make a sacrifice and leave a job they felt was wasting their life?
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is not the kind of design we're discussing here 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 o…
> As I said - barring some violent circumstances, having a child, or at least the actions leading up to it, is a decision one makes. This is simply a falsehood you believe. Or rather, it's a very constrained, mostly unfree "choice", with a lot of pressure from society telling them it's the wrong choice to make, barring them from access to abortion, contraception, and in many cases decent access to health and educatio…
> Or rather, it's a very constrained, mostly unfree "choice", with a lot of pressure from society telling them it's the wrong choice to make, barring them from access to abortion, contraception, and in many cases decent access to health and education. In many cases they are not even aware the choice existed, because it was concealed from them. I'm not sure if you are even aware a lot of people are not sure how babies come to be.
> Statistically, very few do. The odds are stacked against them.
I've already acknowledged much of these circumstances, right from my first comment. It doesn't change the very trivial fact that engaging in such behavior is a choice. Nor does it change the fact that virtually everyone has choices. I'll repeat what I said:
"Yes, people in privileged positions have a much larger "choice space". And yes, plenty of underprivileged folks simply refuse to pursue the choices they have. Both these things can be true."
As I said, even if you have kids, deciding whether you will feed them or let them starve (with all its consequences), is still a choice. Unless there are mental health issues involved, the person is making choices.
> Let me guess: your family was starving and dirt poor, your siblings were all addicts, but you managed to overcome this, educate yourself, and raise yourself to entrepreneurship. Is this where this is going?
No. But I didn't have easy access to contraception and abortion. And I was not a big outlier in the choices I made.
And let's be real: The majority of people who come to me and complain that they didn't really have a choice did not have siblings who were all addicts, coming from a dirt poor starving family.
Arguments from extremes are not helping you.
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As I said - barring some violent circumstances, having a child, or at least the actions leading up to it, is a decision one makes. This is simply a falsehood you believe. Or rather, it's a very constrained, mostly unfree "choice", with a lot of pressure from society telling them it's the wrong choice to make, barring them from access to abortion, contraception, and in many cases decent access to health and educatio…
> Or rather, it's a very constrained, mostly unfree "choice", with a lot of pressure from society telling them it's the wrong choice to make, barring them from access to abortion, contraception, and in many cases decent access to health and education. In many cases they are not even aware the choice existed, because it was concealed from them. I'm not sure if you are even aware a lot of people are not sure how babies…
> It doesn't change the very trivial fact that engaging in such behavior is a choice. Nor does it change the fact that virtually everyone has choices.
Quite the contrary, it does change it.
> As I said, even if you have kids, deciding whether you will feed them or let them starve (with all its consequences), is still a choice.
It's very hard to take you seriously after this.
> Arguments from extremes are not helping you.
This isn't about me or you; I don't need help. And you've just made an extreme argument which I quoted above.
By the way, it amazes me you consider the real world "an argument from extreme". I suppose from a very limited sample one might draw the same conclusion as you.