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Career advice for people with bad luck

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Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#261

Post by DanielLihaciu »

askdfjng wrote: post #251
chosenbreed37 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Read some philosophy. Buy a reliable used car. Look inward for contentment. Try therapy if your shitty childhood and shitty parents made inward a hard place to look. I'd recommend the following: 1. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius 2. 12 Rules for Life - Jordan B Peterson 3. Letters from a self made merchant - John Graham

JBP's 12 Rules for Life is dangerous advice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtwP6AbbAUc

I would be the devil's advocate and disagree with you. There are more dangerous self help books like The Secret who took the Bible quote about praying and it will come true out of context, and many other THE 4-HOUR WORKWEEK, LAW OF ATTRACTION....

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#262

Post by adamsea »

chosenbreed37 wrote: post #203
LarryDarrell wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it's because there isn't much advice to give. My answer, having checked a few of your boxes... Your lifetime wages are going to be lower than many of your peers. This is unlikely to change. Adjust your worldview accordingly. Don't assume any debt that relies on increasing future earnings to be comfortable. By all means, keep trying, but stay level headed. Success for most is not always right around the corn…

> Read some philosophy. Buy a reliable used car. Look inward for contentment. Try therapy if your shitty childhood and shitty parents made inward a hard place to look. I'd recommend the following: 1. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius 2. 12 Rules for Life - Jordan B Peterson 3. Letters from a self made merchant - John Graham

Dunno about Jordan Peterson. Some of his advice may be OK but he's also profoundly weird / not very self-reflective .... only eats meat? Meat cures all?

IMHO the Socratic Dialogues, as basically the foundational text of all Western Philosophy, and being pretty friendly and approachable, are the right place to begin. Helps you figure out how to figure it out for yourself. You can make your own calls from there.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#263

Post by xivzgrev »

mdorazio wrote: post #67

I really want to see more articles like this on HN. However, this is really "career advice for people at struggling companies." The luck part doesn't get discussed in the way I expected. To me, bad luck is things like: - You're in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ex. you graduated in 2008-2010/now or your business sector got wiped out by COVID - Despite your best efforts at networking, you simply never meet that ma…

I've found that success in life is correlated with how closely you hit on actual "truths" in the world. For example, you join company X on a rocket ship. Your equity value skyrockets - those assets were actually undervalued relative to what someone would pay for them later.

One of the hardest things in life is that we don't actually know the "truth", no one does. But what we can do is learn to spot ways we tell ourselves convenient lies - this is why Buffet + Munger did SO much work on studying human biases. If we had a perfect ability to spot every falsehood, we would be left with the bare truth.

Given it's an imperfect system, "bad luck" can be simplified to "you keep missing the truth". And it's often not our fault - how the hell could anyone have known about COVID-19, and impact on their company, far enough in advance to actually move to safer waters prior? But it's worth examining why you made the decision to do X - were there any truths you missed, or lies you told yourself?

Through that process, you can get better at spotting falsehoods or clarifying your values, so that even if you don't ever land on a rocket ship, you find a workplace you are happy at.

For example, one of my early jobs was at a turd of a company. I knew BEFORE that it wasn't a great opportunity. But I was desperate to leave my current situation so I took it. Within a few weeks, I KNEW it was still a turd. But I didn't want to pay the relocation bonus back if I left so soon. So I stuck it out, ended up being there for a few years, and it mostly was wasted time. So now I turn down jobs where I feel like that going in. I need to feel great about the company's situation.

But even that's not foolproof. I had another company where the company was doing GREAT. Fucking rocketship. Then literally within a few months of me joining, it went down the tubes and barely survived. So I also learned to be more wary of quickly growing, younger companies as well.

Now I'm at a steadily growing larger company, that's managed well, and I love it.

One last piece of advance - google "It works". It's a little book about writing a list of what you want and constantly looking at it. I did it during my last job search and literally got an (almost) dream job. Give it a try.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#264

Post by Sodman »

caymanjim wrote: post #161
mywittyname wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but hardly anyone speaks to references. I'd be surprised if this were universal. I've been the reference for several people and had references checked for every job that I've had. I can totally understand why a company wouldn't check references (bias, mainly), but HR is full of a lot of cargo cult superstitions.

I'm probably biased here due to the length of my career; at this point, my resume is extensive and speaks for itself. References may be more important if you've got less experience.

I think that's kind of the point of references though, right? Your resume speaks for itself, but you wrote your resume. It's a good sanity check for a potential employer to quickly verify that it's actually accurate.

People exaggerate on their resumes all the time. Maybe the 2 interns they supervised materializes as them managing a team of 4. Maybe the project on which their boss did the brunt of the work on becomes a project they architected and lead. It's easy enough to make all of this sound true in an interview, so it's totally logical for an interviewer to want to fact check and keep the interviewees honest.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#265

Post by blululu »

LarryDarrell wrote: post #198
mdorazio wrote: post #67

I really want to see more articles like this on HN. However, this is really "career advice for people at struggling companies." The luck part doesn't get discussed in the way I expected. To me, bad luck is things like: - You're in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ex. you graduated in 2008-2010/now or your business sector got wiped out by COVID - Despite your best efforts at networking, you simply never meet that ma…

I suspect it's because there isn't much advice to give. My answer, having checked a few of your boxes... Your lifetime wages are going to be lower than many of your peers. This is unlikely to change. Adjust your worldview accordingly. Don't assume any debt that relies on increasing future earnings to be comfortable. By all means, keep trying, but stay level headed. Success for most is not always right around the corn…

>> Read some philosophy. Buy a reliable used car.

As the proud owner of a 2004 Toyota Corolla and a 2011 Philosophy Minor, this line made my day. Honestly it is just plain good advice.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#267

Post by TurkishPoptart »

blululu wrote: post #265
LarryDarrell wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it's because there isn't much advice to give. My answer, having checked a few of your boxes... Your lifetime wages are going to be lower than many of your peers. This is unlikely to change. Adjust your worldview accordingly. Don't assume any debt that relies on increasing future earnings to be comfortable. By all means, keep trying, but stay level headed. Success for most is not always right around the corn…

>> Read some philosophy. Buy a reliable used car. As the proud owner of a 2004 Toyota Corolla and a 2011 Philosophy Minor, this line made my day. Honestly it is just plain good advice.

I love my 2001 Corolla. It's got 164k miles on it (had about 140 when I bought it), and I hope to get another 100k out of it!

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#268

Post by [deleted] »

Arete314159 wrote: post #230
mdorazio wrote: post #67

I really want to see more articles like this on HN. However, this is really "career advice for people at struggling companies." The luck part doesn't get discussed in the way I expected. To me, bad luck is things like: - You're in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ex. you graduated in 2008-2010/now or your business sector got wiped out by COVID - Despite your best efforts at networking, you simply never meet that ma…

I can speak to one of your points! I got dealt a bad hand in terms of health issues. However, a few years before I developed my health issues, I happened to have a long talk with a guy who had advanced MS. He told me that after his diagnosis, he tried to sock away as much money as possible and go for higher-paying jobs, as he knew that one day he'd become fully disabled and have to live on disability. Also, disabilit…

[deleted]

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#269

Post by mettamage »

username90 wrote: post #90

Step 1: Get a well paying job at a big tech company. There is very little luck involved in this, just get really good at algorithms. No need for a famous school, specific degree etc. It requires intelligence, if you don't have that then you need luck. Step 2: Save more than two thirds of your take home salary, you can still live way better than the people sweeping the office floor. Step 3: You now have a ton of money…

Alright, can you get me a phone screen? Sorry to ask the question so directly, but I have applied since 2014, and I can't get to the phone screen.

I'd love to be a frontend engineer, UX engineer, creative engineer (I've seen this role at Google, it looks awesome) or a full-stack engineer.

I have:

A bachelor in information science (2012)

A bachelor degree in psychology (2015)

A master in game-design where I learned about Unity3D and C# (2016)

A master in computer science where I learned about cache eviction in GPUs to perform rowhammer via a JavaScript advertizement (2018).

I have done quite a few side projects (not willing to disclose here, email is in my profile). And I have some work experience as a coding bootcamp instructor (1 year, I trained 50 people to become junior web developers at companies like IBM, Capgemini and a top 5 Dutch bank) and a freelance web developer (6 months) and a freelance iOS developer (also 6 months).

I graduated in 2018 and after freelancing for a bit, I took a sabbatical in 2019 (setting up a bar in Thailand with family and friends). When I started looking for jobs in earnest in 2020, Covid started to hit.

I'm practicing algorithms as we speak, I'll be ready in 2 weeks to a month from now. So far I'm facing no difficulties, this stuff is hard work but it's a lot easier than my security courses. Also, algorithms are actually quite fun. There are a few things there that I really want to learn such as a hyper attention to detail. I'm currently training the skill to write a program flawless without bugs from the get go, complete with the fastest time complexity immediately. I know I can get to this level because I'm noticing that for a lot of algorithms just by playing around one can see the best time complexity for it (I find optimizing for the right space complexity a bit harder).

I hope you'll help me with this. If not, and I don't get to a phone screen, well that is my (and many people) their biggest issue. Passing algorithms is not the issue, getting a chance to be interviewed is. I'm a 100% sure I'd rock at the job, as I'm sure that many other people would who didn't get the chance for a phone screen.

I'm from The Netherlands and would love to work in Zurich. I see you work in Zurich as well, I've been to Switzerland quite a few times, it's amazing.

Google teams that I find interesting and want to know more about:

- Google Doodles

- Project zero (though I don't think I'd be able work there since people have a super big track record regarding the security work they do)

- Google Creative Lab

- Google Health

- Google Stadia

- Google Cloud Platform

- Google Brand Studio (though I don't think I'd be able to work there since it's more about people who can shoot beautiful movies)

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#270

Post by tathougies »

crystalmeph wrote: post #163
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>- You're in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ex. you graduated in 2008-2010/now or your business sector got wiped out by COVID I feel bad for the higher class pizza restaurant that opened down the street from our house at the end of January after a long time of renovating the building. Even though their pizza isn't really as good as the fancy pizza place at the mall (it's a mall in a rich area) down by the nearby…

Tangenting a bit. It saddens me to no end that this happens just after the unemployment rate for African Americans hit record lows. I'm not a SJW by any means, but it's so frustrating to see a whole class of historically mistreated people get punched in the gut the minute they start to get a good toehold.

Seriously! and the lowest poverty rates ever recorded. It is so sad. Just want everyone to get a break.
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