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

261–270 of 270 posts

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

#261

Post by VirusNewbie »

brailsafe wrote: post #260
VirusNewbie wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 t…

My point is that 20+ years ago, there was frustration here (and elsewhere) that even if we weren't 10x engineers, even being 3x engineers could not get us 3x the compensation.

That changed in the last 20 years for the better. People who had the work ethic and aptitude to become medical doctors or lawyers or management consultants no longer had to sacrifice compensation if they loved tech.

This is notable and worth calling out, and pointing out it wasn't always like this.

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

#262

Post by paulcole »

jcims wrote: post #255
paulcole wrote: post #228

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?

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.

Your example is as much a counter example as mine is…

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

#263

Post by hnthrowaway121 »

alphazard wrote: post #198
hnthrowaway121 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m careful like this to a point, but you can establish trust with managers. Most decent cultures don’t favor hoarding good employees how you’ve described. > 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. This is a very short term perspective. If I am a good manager to you, you are much mor…

> but you can establish trust with managers. This is technically true, but metaphorically false. Most readers, especially the younger crowd, are likely to be too trusting and not correctly recognize fundamentally adversarial relationships, like with their boss, with HR, with lawyers whom they don't pay personally, etc. Especially when those people present the relationship with a faux version of the same naivety that…

To me a direct HR person is much less trustworthy than a manager with whom you’ve established a good track record. The manager’s behavior is incentivized completely differently depending on the company - sometimes it’s legitimate to manage towards the employees success and sometimes lose them. As a manager I had a director say something similar, that we are often just stepping stone on somebody’s career.

Whereas HR is a risk mitigation function whose purpose is to minimize the company’s exposure to lawsuits, and I stay miles away from them unless it’s absolutely necessary to engage. They can do other things on top of that function that are very helpful, but they are not there to help.

There are a lot of fictions at work. Still we all have our own risk profiles, and if we are lucky we can afford the risk of an honest conversation with our boss. That’s not the same as pretending everybody is trustworthy, it’s making a bet based on the specific situation at hand.

If your advice is “young people be careful, managers, supervisors, and HR are not your friends”, I totally agree.

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

#264

Post by jselysianeagle »

underlipton wrote: post #175
maciejzj wrote: post #86

From the perspective of someone in their late 20s, the timing of this article feels quite off when entering 2026. The reality has become far different from the gist of what is presented here. Career paths and opportunities have been getting broken and changing so much in recent years that I find it hard to plan anything. I don't even know what kind of "goal" is sustainable, let alone what the path towards it is. The…

I wouldn't even say medicine. Neither Baby Boomers nor the current American healthcare system have 30 years left in them; that means that, unless you're already in your 40s or 50s, you're going to see the bottom fall out of that sector mid-career. This is a political failure. It has nothing to do with individual decision-making and everything to do with poorly-managed incentives for appropriate 21st-century investmen…

> unless you're already in your 40s or 50s, you're going to see the bottom fall out of that sector mid-career.

Can you elaborate? What's going to happen to the healthcare system?

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

#265

Post by rustyboy »

BeetleB wrote: post #186
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…

> My manager’s job is not to manage my career. But it is to promote and demote. In many (most?) companies, to get a promotion he needs to actively advocate for you in front of others. That is part of his job. Many of them simply optimize to "I'm not going to do that part of the job well, so you, as my report, need to give me the material I can sell to others." And not "you need to do well so I can sell to others".

At my very large enterprise, a managers job is not to "promote and demote" it's to "get you where you want to be". That requires you to know your direction (to the article) but importantly, when they say "based on our company policies, you need to demonstrate an outsized inpact" you're going to have to work with the manager to define that, execute, and get the data to equip them to do that.

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

#266

Post by underlipton »

jselysianeagle wrote: post #264
underlipton wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't even say medicine. Neither Baby Boomers nor the current American healthcare system have 30 years left in them; that means that, unless you're already in your 40s or 50s, you're going to see the bottom fall out of that sector mid-career. This is a political failure. It has nothing to do with individual decision-making and everything to do with poorly-managed incentives for appropriate 21st-century investmen…

> unless you're already in your 40s or 50s, you're going to see the bottom fall out of that sector mid-career. Can you elaborate? What's going to happen to the healthcare system?

It's going to become insolvent. People aren't going to be able to afford care.

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

#267

Post by VirusNewbie »

DrPimienta wrote: post #249
VirusNewbie wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

>What is the point you are arguing?

That it is way better to be working at Nvidia, Google, or Apple today than it would have been working for IBM, HP, or even Microsoft 30 years ago.

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

#268

Post by kmijyiyxfbklao »

the_af wrote: post #237
BeetleB wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Abandoning your children is not an extreme example. It's a situation that anyone that knows poverty is familiar with.

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

#269

Post by brailsafe »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #261
brailsafe wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

My point is that 20+ years ago, there was frustration here (and elsewhere) that even if we weren't 10x engineers, even being 3x engineers could not get us 3x the compensation. That changed in the last 20 years for the better. People who had the work ethic and aptitude to become medical doctors or lawyers or management consultants no longer had to sacrifice compensation if they loved tech. This is notable and worth ca…

Ya I suppose that is a fair point, albeit a tangential somewhat luck-based one. Additionally, that ceiling has been likely raised across technical professions for non-men as well who have the potential and drive to be at the top of whatever ladder. I say tangential because while the ceiling was raised significantly, the parent's argument was that it wasn't nearly as necessary to be the 1% fortunate genius landing a dream gig, which is still true.

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

#270

Post by moralestapia »

jvanderbot wrote: post #135
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…

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…

>If Hamming was operating from a "good time", it should be true that his policies are also applicable in the "bad times".

No. Why?

Post reply on HN