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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)

#241

Post by pmg101 »

brailsafe wrote: post #233
agentultra wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Did they mean perhaps taking a 25 year mortgage on the median house would consume a third of the median income?

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

#242

Post by npodbielski »

thepryz wrote: post #183
npodbielski wrote: post #182

I understand that and I agree. Though I think the real question is what you would do when you will achieve this goal. What then? Will you be happy? What you will do with the money? Will this amount be enough? Can this ever be enough? I am not sure. Is this even possible in current feudal corporate structures? I did spoke with some people from my work. One was afraid for his job because of another employee. Other was…

Imagine Sisyphus happy seems like the appropriate response. I don't think it's a matter of setting goals based on what you can do alone, life is lonely enough as it it. I think it's more a matter of accepting that life is a sequence of unpredictable events, and you have to just embrace the absurdity of it all.

I did not said anything about loneliness. IF you are working because you are lonely you really need to change your life right now.

Also where I hinted that pointless grind is something that should be a way to happiness?

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

#244

Post by bravetraveler »

DrPimienta wrote: post #222
eastbound wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Heck, I'll lower the bar! I'm (mid-30s American) not so worried about 'safe'. A certain amount of danger is fine. Desirable, even, if it meant I could live in my home town, not in an unfamiliar city.

I could buy half of a house, right now, cash. I don't, because the moment I do, I'll be forced to sell/move/whatever. Again. Where I am [for work] and where I want to be are forever at odds. Leaders have found it fashionable to bundle us all together. Spin the wheel and see if we hit RTO, let's bid against each other [again].

All to say, I'd give half my salary to never negotiate it or my location, again. Clearly not an option, so what to do? Endure and save. You won't see me buying toys or status symbols, that's for sure. At Will employment, meet At Will spending.

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

#245

Post by kubanczyk »

alphazard wrote: post #200
thenoblesunfish wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> when people trust and genuinely support each other it's not zero sum This is a clear non-sequitur. Whether or not the situation is zero-sum is dictated by the situation not by the actions of people, or how they feel about each other. If the situation is zero-sum, and one party doesn't realize, or is too trusting of other parties, then they just lose. And they might not even realize that they lost, or that the situa…

> This is a clear non-sequitur. Whether or not the situation is zero-sum is dictated by the situation not by the actions of people

Yes.

But a first-line manager more often than not is just another human being caught in the system rather than a total drone. They have their own agency distinct from their org's, and you can consider trusting them, up to a point.

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

#246

Post by g947o »

paulcole wrote: post #228
jcims wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

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

#247

Post by dugidugout »

georgeecollins wrote: post #180
yobbo wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems more odd to me you are placing as much value on career agency to infer ones mental health broadly. I'm not saying this isnt a norm in many cultures, but I'd like to hear your argument for supporting it.

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

#248

Post by test123asdfasdf »

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…

Comment is interesting because its only confirmation bias material and doesn't hold up under minimal scrutiny. If you want to stay in pretentious CS analogy territory, then consider that if you can react to current events you can be a heuristical pathfinding algorithm that adjusts its goal based on locally optimal heuristics, making each individual step more efficient. This all a straight ass pull that will not translate to real world performance either, but it will serve to sound impressive to a fool.

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

#249

Post by DrPimienta »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #225
DrPimienta wrote: post #210

Earlier 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.

>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? D…

Okay sure, life was unironically just better for everyone back in the 90s except for the highest paid exceptional programmers.

Do you feel better now? Will you admit the economy is bad, and has been getting worse for 50 years straight for absolutely everyone (except the most exceptional engineers)?

What is the point you are arguing?

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

#250

Post by BeetleB »

georgeburdell wrote: post #240
BeetleB wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ex…

> 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.

Agreed that they should explore and experiment and learn. And they should do that at 40 hours a week on the job (I did!).

Not all jobs allow for it. Change jobs if that's the case. Chances are your pay will be the same and more, and you'll have more time for this. You simply don't need to stay and work evenings to do this.

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