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Career advice for people with bad luck

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Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#321

Post by strken »

the_af wrote: post #285
michaelbrave wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like having priorities that go beyond making money or having career success. Nothing wrong with that, but it may be something to make peace with.

Yes, of course. To elaborate, most people (outside the HN bubble) have these priorities, they are good priorities to have, and these people work in tech. Therefore, advice starting with "move to SV" applies only to an extremely small subset of programmers worldwide, and as such, is not very helpful. If the career advice is "ditch everything in your life, become magically younger, live in a country you don't like, dit…

Someone who is reading this conversation will benefit from being told that moving to the Bay Area, New York, Berlin, Sydney, Amsterdam etc. for a couple of years is possible. Maybe it's not you, and that's fine. In general, though, helpful advice is about choosing the right side of a trade-off, not a panacea.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#322

Post by ShamelessC »

Kye wrote: post #51
MrPatan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I see the parent comment grey? I surely hope there is some rule I don't understand here about new accounts, because otherwise it means somebody had nothing better to do than to be mean to someone depressed and asking for help. Maybe that's the advice for you, if you're feeling down go have a look around for somebody who has it worse than you and push them further down! Nice work, everybody.

It wasn't gray when I got to it. This is part of why the guidelines discourage complaining about downvotes. It's often temporary. Someone was probably just having a bad day.

I could be wrong but I thought comments of a certain length were greyed a bit to discourage lengthy comments?

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#323

Post by the_af »

strken wrote: post #321
the_af wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, of course. To elaborate, most people (outside the HN bubble) have these priorities, they are good priorities to have, and these people work in tech. Therefore, advice starting with "move to SV" applies only to an extremely small subset of programmers worldwide, and as such, is not very helpful. If the career advice is "ditch everything in your life, become magically younger, live in a country you don't like, dit…

Someone who is reading this conversation will benefit from being told that moving to the Bay Area, New York, Berlin, Sydney, Amsterdam etc. for a couple of years is possible. Maybe it's not you, and that's fine. In general, though, helpful advice is about choosing the right side of a trade-off, not a panacea.

It's more than "maybe it's not you": it's not most people outside the HN bubble where SV is the mecca and everyone wants to join a US startup. Yes, there are trade-offs involved in every choice (except age, of course: that's not a trade-off, you cannot choose to become younger and be picked for low-wage trainee job positions that are only offered to young people), but I don't get why we're so fixated in such specific trade-off options.

In the spirit of the article, which warns about optimistic people arguing for unrealistic paths, I'm just warning that "move to SV" is not, for most people, reasonable advice.

Now, you may argue that for people reading HN, there is a larger subset which do aspire and would benefit from moving to SV. I won't argue against that. But I thought the spirit of the article was not about providing career advice for such a small subset of tech-minded people.

To sum up, this proposition is false for most people (and not just me): "everyone passionate about technology should, all else being equal, strive to move to Silicon Valley and work there, because that's the best place there is".

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#324

Post by hmart »

karimdxy wrote: post #300
hmart wrote: post #284

I live in a 3rd world country, worked the last 20 years as systems administrator. Recently lost my job and while looking for a new remote job I have been touched by the hard reality: The world changed and I was full of self leniency, years using the same bash scripts, the same tricks day to day. Did lot of things maintenance, networking, security,databases, mail servers, anti spam. I consider myself capable of put a…

Since you like coding and apparently you happen to enjoy building websites why not transition to web dev? The barrier to entry is relatively low. Give freecodecamp ( https://freecodecamp.org ) a shot and let me know if you ever need help!

Thank you!

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#325

Post by [deleted] »

karimdxy wrote: post #300
hmart wrote: post #284

I live in a 3rd world country, worked the last 20 years as systems administrator. Recently lost my job and while looking for a new remote job I have been touched by the hard reality: The world changed and I was full of self leniency, years using the same bash scripts, the same tricks day to day. Did lot of things maintenance, networking, security,databases, mail servers, anti spam. I consider myself capable of put a…

Since you like coding and apparently you happen to enjoy building websites why not transition to web dev? The barrier to entry is relatively low. Give freecodecamp ( https://freecodecamp.org ) a shot and let me know if you ever need help!

[deleted]

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#326

Post by hmart »

hattori wrote: post #305
hmart wrote: post #284

I live in a 3rd world country, worked the last 20 years as systems administrator. Recently lost my job and while looking for a new remote job I have been touched by the hard reality: The world changed and I was full of self leniency, years using the same bash scripts, the same tricks day to day. Did lot of things maintenance, networking, security,databases, mail servers, anti spam. I consider myself capable of put a…

It seems you nailed exactly what is the problem and what needs to be done or learned. You have more or less ideal background to jump into these tools, it's just matter of spending some time and considering your experience it will take less than for most of people. You'll be ok.

Thanks!

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#327

Post by wondringaloud »

RookyNumbas wrote: post #247
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…

When I think of the very successful people I know, all have gone through life events that would absolutely flatten most people. The loss of a child, a partner committing suicide, 6 businesses failing, 2 weeks in an induced comma. And yet a stranger looks at their accomplishments and thinks that they just didn't have bad luck.

This is absolutely true. I've noticed most "unsuccessful" people go around with a view of "successful" people that they got lucky, never had to endure hardship, had something handed to them, and so on. It's a defeatist, whiny attitude.

I've put "un/successful" in quotes because I'm referring to the common interpretation of success/failure being purely financial. There are many other ways to lead an "unsuccessful" but fulfilling life, and I'd argue the place to start is to accept the hand you've been dealt. And to work with it rather than rail against it.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#328

Post by burntoutfire »

adamsea wrote: post #262
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

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.

> Meat cures all?

When did he say that?

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#329

Post by bvandewalle »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #176
bitL wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> expect to pay 50% in taxes (+ 25% VAT) Don't forget the tax prepayments that might be 1.33x of your previous taxes, i.e. you pay 100k in taxes for one year and for the next year you need to prepay 133k.

In which country is that?

Belgium would be a good candidate.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#330

Post by muro »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #148
username90 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved to Zurich.

How do you find life there? From some acquaintances who moved there to work in tech I heard integration/dating/making friends is very difficult as a foreigner especially if you come from $UNCOOL_COUNTRY and the real estate market is terrible, with cramped and expensive apartments in a poor state and buying is even more difficult if you're not a swiss citizen which is a difficult citizenship to get.

Vast majority of people rent in Zurich. I lived in multiple countries (US, Australia, Europe - Germany, Austria and more) and apartments in Zurich are better maintained than anywhere else I've seen. You can find cramped, if that's what you want, but there is plenty large apartments - bigger than US or Australian apartments. E.g. looking at our corner of the city, there are 2 bedroom 85 - 120m2, 3 bedroom 120 - 160 m2 places. In Sydney, we had a 75m2 2BR with tiny bedrooms and it was a typical apartment there. If you want to live in a house, Zurich is the wrong place, you'll probably need to commute.
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