Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

gregmckeown.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 270 posts

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

#231

Post by BeetleB »

the_af wrote: post #230
BeetleB wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> It's very hard to take you seriously after this.

I take it you've not encountered such folks? It must be nice to be shielded. As I said, your comments definitely give off "privileged" vibes.

I don't know your background, but spend some time in various countries - both wealthy and not. Both repressive and not. When people debate the virtues and vices of freedom, much of what we discussed in this thread come into play. The US is very much a country centered on freedom, and the reason many are in a bad state is precisely because the US gives them more freedom by letting them have these choices. Statistically, they will choose poorly, but the fact that their behavior is predictable via statistics doesn't negate the fact that they made those choices.

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

#232

Post by conqrr »

aristofun wrote: post #187
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

> Gravity doesn’t care whether you like it or not when you land after jumping out of a 70 story building With one key difference - it's not a gravity. It's just currently popular and dominating style in IT corporate culture. Mainly because it worked once for few successful companies and others cargo-culted it without much thought. There will always be value and importance to networking, human relationships and commun…

> With one key difference - it's not a gravity. It's just currently popular and dominating style in IT corporate culture. Mainly because it worked once for few successful companies and others cargo-culted it without much thought.

Sadly this is majority of tech industry. Cargo-cult whatever the big players are doing. But all is not lost. Lots of interesting smaller companies with highly technical people advocate for a tech culture that rewards real Engineering over Salesman/Politician. For instance, a FAANG resume with business impact bullet points will be pretty useless for a small team building a database. Someone with PR commits to open source Databases would hardly need to prove themselves.

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

#233

Post by brailsafe »

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…

> The median house costs more than a third of the median income

That sounds like a steal, in my city the median home price across all types is 10-20x the median annual household income

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

#234

Post by the_af »

BeetleB wrote: post #231
the_af wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> It's very hard to take you seriously after this. I take it you've not encountered such folks? It must be nice to be shielded. As I said, your comments definitely give off "privileged" vibes. I don't know your background, but spend some time in various countries - both wealthy and not. Both repressive and not. When people debate the virtues and vices of freedom, much of what we discussed in this thread come into pla…

> I take it you've not encountered such folks? It must be nice to be shielded.

What are you even trying to argue here? "Not dying and not letting your kids die is a choice"? I mean, sure, in a bizarre alien logic kind of way, but as someone once told me: "you're not helping yourself by using extreme arguments".

If that's your main point, we can stop here. I won't argue with extraterrestrials or robots.

> I don't know your background, but spend some time in various countries

Exactly, you don't know my background, so don't lecture me. Your lecturing comes across as very condescending and, well, privileged.

> The US

I'm not from the US.

> Statistically, they will choose poorly, but the fact that their behavior is predictable via statistics doesn't negate the fact that they made those choices.

Non-sequitur.

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

#235

Post by BeetleB »

the_af wrote: post #234
BeetleB wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's very hard to take you seriously after this. I take it you've not encountered such folks? It must be nice to be shielded. As I said, your comments definitely give off "privileged" vibes. I don't know your background, but spend some time in various countries - both wealthy and not. Both repressive and not. When people debate the virtues and vices of freedom, much of what we discussed in this thread come into pla…

> I take it you've not encountered such folks? It must be nice to be shielded. What are you even trying to argue here? "Not dying and not letting your kids die is a choice"? I mean, sure, in a bizarre alien logic kind of way, but as someone once told me: "you're not helping yourself by using extreme arguments". If that's your main point, we can stop here. I won't argue with extraterrestrials or robots. > I don't know…

> Exactly, you don't know my background, so don't lecture me. Your lecturing comes across as very condescending and, well, privileged.

1. I definitely am privileged.

2. Have you looked in a mirror?

3. You don't need to, as you yourself said: "And that's OK, clearly TFA is aimed at privileged people like us, not most people."

The only thing I have left to say is: Try not to confuse obligations with choices.

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

#237

Post by the_af »

BeetleB wrote: post #235
the_af wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I take it you've not encountered such folks? It must be nice to be shielded. What are you even trying to argue here? "Not dying and not letting your kids die is a choice"? I mean, sure, in a bizarre alien logic kind of way, but as someone once told me: "you're not helping yourself by using extreme arguments". If that's your main point, we can stop here. I won't argue with extraterrestrials or robots. > I don't know…

> Exactly, you don't know my background, so don't lecture me. Your lecturing comes across as very condescending and, well, privileged. 1. I definitely am privileged. 2. Have you looked in a mirror? 3. You don't need to, as you yourself said: "And that's OK, clearly TFA is aimed at privileged people like us, not most people." The only thing I have left to say is: Try not to confuse obligations with choices.

> I definitely am privileged

It shows! And condescending too, I'd add.

> The only thing I have left to say is: Try not to confuse obligations with choices.

That is meaningless, though doubtless it seems very deep to you.

Look, you made the bizarre argument people always have choices because feeding your kids is a choice. In whatever alien world you live in that might be a clever argument. Meanwhile, in the real world...

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

#238

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

conqrr wrote: post #232
aristofun wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gravity doesn’t care whether you like it or not when you land after jumping out of a 70 story building With one key difference - it's not a gravity. It's just currently popular and dominating style in IT corporate culture. Mainly because it worked once for few successful companies and others cargo-culted it without much thought. There will always be value and importance to networking, human relationships and commun…

> With one key difference - it's not a gravity. It's just currently popular and dominating style in IT corporate culture. Mainly because it worked once for few successful companies and others cargo-culted it without much thought. Sadly this is majority of tech industry. Cargo-cult whatever the big players are doing. But all is not lost. Lots of interesting smaller companies with highly technical people advocate for a…

Out of 10 companies I’ve worked for over 30 years, I’ve only worked for two large companies - General Electric when it was still an F10 company and later Amazon (AWS) - I hated my time at each of them. In fact, I turned down an opportunity by a former coworker at AWS who was a director at another well known non tech company who was going to create a position for me to lead their migration to AWS and then their “modernization”. I turned it down even though I could have made about $50K more in cash than I was making in cash and RSUs at Amazon because I didn’t want to work at another large company after leaving Amazon.

It’s fine if you want to work at smaller “interesting” companies, I’m doing the same. But let’s not pretend there are no tradeoffs.

The intern I mentored their intern summer and the year after they got back, got a return offer at 22 in 2022 that was the same I was making at 46 in 2020 as a senior enterprise dev in Atlanta.

On the opposite side, now they are an L5 (mid level) Solution Architect at 25 working at AWS doing a similar line of work to what I do[1] and make the same total comp as I make as as a staff consultant working at mid size firm at 51.

If you want to make the eye popping big tech salaries - you have to play the game.

[1] I’m mostly post sales leading implementations and doing some management style consulting reports. My former mentor is pre-sales.

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

#239

Post by Archit3ch »

nospice wrote: post #138

If you design your career, you will almost certainly get the same outcome too. I've managed people for decades and this has been a common pattern. I'd have people come to me with their plans to be in the C-suite in five or ten years, based precisely on self-help advice like that. None of them ended up there. But several of the people who never had a plan did in fact end up as VPs, CTOs, etc. I don't want to say that…

> I've managed people for decades and this has been a common pattern. I'd have people come to me with their plans to be in the C-suite in five or ten years, based precisely on self-help advice like that. None of them ended up there.

According to the Gervais Principle, these people are Clueless. Of course they end up in middle management. The top spots are reserved for Sociopaths.

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

#240

Post by georgeburdell »

BeetleB wrote: post #190
georgeburdell wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. That would require a whole, separate article. Many (most?) juniors grinding like that in a major company will work hard to get nowhere. Speaking from experience. Yes, I learned some lessons: 1. Get a different job. Deadend jobs definitely exist, and are qui…

I was clear that the junior should be learning and experimenting. That's different from saying yes to everything and grinding it out. The juniors in my group, for example, are the ones leading the LLM charge and learning the new tooling ahead of management's awareness of them, so almost by definition they're not just filling their time taking orders from management. That's exactly how they should be spending their excess capacity.

> This is not the endorsement you think it is. I've done quite well by insisting on 40 hour weeks. I'm going to assume you're doing much better than I am, because otherwise it seems like a life wasted.

HN is not the kind of place I'm going to toot my own horn

Post reply on HN