Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Well-said
If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
251–260 of 270 posts
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#252If 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.
> The top spots are reserved for Sociopaths
How many people think the first step is to become a sociopath?
And then try to act like they think a sociopath acts? Few people are ruthlessly cunning in the right way.
Even worse, do people try and model their behaviour based on The Apprentice or the worst of the shows about chefs?
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Quebec we have a sort of college between high school and university where you are forced to take "bullshit classes" along with the stuff you chose to study. Mine included philosophy, Spanish, photography, canoeing, and a few others. At the time it felt like a diversion, but it was a welcome introduction to something other than computer science. In my first year of university, a senior grabbed me by the shoulders a…
I wish cegep, or an interstitial school where you have a year or 2 to just take tons of unrelated courses, was more common. So much focus is put on universities as job training that they lose a part of what historically has long made them special --- learning for the sake or learning.
Going all-in beats hedging your bets when the gravy train is running thick. But when times go sour, fortunes reverse. Unfortunately, that's when survivor bias shows up. Being diversified (almost) leads to being in the upper-middle, but if you only listen to those currently on top, you'll hear only the benefits of going all-in.
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#254I do something similar for development of me as a human being. I ask myself how can I improve, what kind of person do I want to be, how can I help make the world a better place. My "career" is just a means to an end to put food on the table. Also being in my 30s I think I have mostly maxed it out anyway. Sure I might increase my wage a little bit but all in all as for being an IC it is a good as it gets. Sure there i…
I am also in my (late) 30s. I would definitely question myself if I were “constantly the person with the most technical skills in the room”. I of course think I’m smart, but I am rarely surrounded by people that I think I’m smarter than…
I agree work is just a means to an end of not starving, but I like learning and growing enough that if that were the case (most technical among my peers), I would start looking for another opportunity.
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#255Earlier 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?
What use is extrapolating what I said to its extreme end? In 1999 I quit my full time secure job to start a company. My wife was a stay at home mom, we had a new baby and a new mortgage for a house that was still being built. Yes it's possible, but counterexamples don't mean it's not a factor.
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#256My 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…
I think the beauty of this quote is working more than its content. Most people, even when they do not sit down and think about it, follow one of the two career paths: - Some people will actively pursue the next logical progression (senior, lead/manager, head/vp, exec). - Some will happily stay in their position unless the next one is offered to them. Being deliberate will always work better compared to being random,…
I just can’t understand people whose life goal is like to be a CTO by some date; I have never tried for a promotion since I first shifted into a job where I was paid to make software. Due to the random walk of promotion rules (and most likely the good work of bosses that believed in me), I have been promoted enough that I had to put thought leader into my linked in, but I do believe just making sure whatever you are working on is useful and successful to other people is enough worry; if you are skilled in software and thinking, the other things will work them selves out.
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#257I 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.
Yikes! If I'm going to spend all week working with others, I hope they're not thinking this way about me. I don't know what "corporate" dance you're talking about, exactly, and I agree that "family" is too strong a word, but my colleagues are pretty cool, and I enjoy their company; I enjoy the work we do, and I want it to get done. I don't mind the time spent working on it; I think it's meaningful to contribute to the advancement of our civilization's agency and welfare.
I don't want my coworkers to "leave me alone", I want to participate in their society and mutually define what that means.
As adults, it's our opportunity—and obligation—to selectively reproduce civilization. I'm lucky to be able to do that with clever, earnest, and kind people.
I don't want to be treated like a cog in your paycheck mill.
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#258Earlier 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…
This is a framing issue. You can't control the times, but good advice is applicable in good and bad times. If Hamming was operating from a "good time", it should be true that his policies are also applicable in the "bad times". His advice to "work on the worlds hardest problems" was spoken to people who had worked their way past the initial difficulties. General advice to "Move towards important problems", which is p…
What are the important problems today? Do you mean AI? I'm not sure I'd agree or that it's obvious what the "important" problems are.
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
I suppose it could be interpreted either way, but your interpretation probably makes more sense in context. In reports about housing cost in Canada, they tend to use both the median income to median servicing cost like you have, but also home price-to-income ratio which often is a multiple of annual income for whatever reason.
Further down in the thread there's mention of median housing cost to income ratio for programmers in the 90's, and in that situation it seems like the absolute total cost of a house was a fraction of annual income, so it could go either way, but it would be much tougher now for your annual salary to surpass the cost of a house unless it's severely in the boonies.
Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
#260Earlier 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…
I think the parent sufficiently qualified their take to mean how much an average person could realistically expect to make in inflation-adjusted dollars. Whether "exceptional" engineers were pulling numerically similar salaries or not seems like a bit of a strawman. Thankfully, the day-to-day conditions of cube farms in grey-space aren't as common today, but it's not wildly different for a majority of people. Trade the cube for a standing desk, and it's often still the same grey office in a tower somewhere working on something boring. After inflation and accounting for cost of housing, the numerically higher salary doesn't mean a whole lot, especially so since it's often theoretical money and not vastly changed tax brackets. Our needs as people haven't changed; we don't suddenly need a Porsche that we can afford instead of a house that we can't. Some things have become much cheaper in inflation-adjusted dollars, which is great, but if they didn't, we simply wouldn't have the money for them.