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Being OK with not being extraordinary

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Re: Being OK with not being extraordinary

#341

Post by collyw »

munk-a wrote: post #235
wjossey wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my career so far in a nutshell. I’m an average programmer. I’m an excellent problem solver. I have an above average work ethic. I’m an excellent communicator. Basically, I combined all of these traits and found roles that leveraged these traits to maximize my impact. Not for nothing, but this is why my liberal arts college was profoundly impactful for me, despite not getting a “top tier” CS education. My writ…

Being an excellent communicator is a great virtue to have and something I come to value more and more in co-workers. Once upon a time in my career it was standard for devs to wander off into the woods to painstakingly craft a wonder over 3-4 months, now collaborative working is the thing and it's far more productive. Those people who have the right balance of not being constantly dependent on others but knowing when…

I agree. And over time I have realised that a good team player is far more valuable than an algorithmic wizard who is a prima donna.

The problem is no one interviews for that.

Re: Being OK with not being extraordinary

#342

Post by collyw »

Delk wrote: post #227
_v7gu wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As if RationalWiki has any business calling people cranks

Has it always been that way? I seem to remember RationalWiki (or perhaps some other similar site?) as an occasionally snarky but generally high-quality wiki on rationality, fallacies, science vs. pseudoscience, the logical or other mistakes in arguments that have been given for quackery, etc. Nowadays it seems like a lot of the content is just about bashing people who have expressed less-than-greatly argued opinions,…

It's come across as pretty bad since I discovered it, maybe 5 years ago.

Re: Being OK with not being extraordinary

#344

Post by [deleted] »

ngngngng wrote: post #313
tomcam wrote: post #312

I’ve made well into eight figures by taking almost the opposite approach. As a kid, all I wanted to do was get the fuck out of my unsafe neighborhood and never go back. When I was young I read a lot of biographies of successful people. What I got out of it was that they just worked a lot harder than most, and failed more than most. Later I observed that there were people dumber than I was with better jobs than I had,…

I have a similar background, but right now I'm just taking a salary as a software engineer and looking to expand that. Have you written more about your path so someone like me could learn from it?

[deleted]

Re: Being OK with not being extraordinary

#345

Post by JohnBooty »

tonymet wrote: post #309
JohnBooty wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also true that even a "mediocre" engineer is elite in many ways - they are "mediocre" compared to all the other folks who managed to carve out a sustained engineering career. However, even somebody in the middle of that group has elite engineering skill relative to the population at large. This is true of many careers, of course! I always feel bad for the professional athletes who "suck." It's kind of hilarious…

When i first joined my cycling club, i was dead last every ride. Even then i used to say "i'm faster than all the blokes who were too lazy to get out of bed". Slowly i got a bit better. Reminding my self of that was a great motivator.

Hah! I do the same with tennis. I'm not very good, but you know... I can do some decent things out there sometimes, and I'm proud I took up the game in my 40s after so many of my peers have totally given up on such things.

I'm also blind in one eye. Probably not a lot of people out there playing tennis with just one good eye. Perhaps I actually am "elite" in terms of half-blind, middle-aged, overweight, novice tennis players.

Re: Being OK with not being extraordinary

#346

Post by collyw »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #330
umvi wrote: post #2

> Climbing to a higher vantage point can also unlock new forms of extraordinary that you might have never noticed before. I read an article once about how the amount of work to get into the top tier in a single area is astronomical, but the amount of work to become top tier in a combination of 2-3 fields is attainable by almost anyone. For example, becoming a top tier statistician is hard. But becoming a top tier sta…

I'm an OK developer, don't know anything but superficial about AI or parser combinators or compilers, and most of my work is building pages, forms, APIs and databases and has been for the past decade+. However, my experience doing that trick is very varied by now; I can do the trick in a handful of back-end languages, front-end frameworks, even native iOS. So yeah I'm nowhere near a rockstar developer, but I'm experi…

Sounds like me. Never gonna be rich, but doesn't look like I'll be out of a job any time soon.

Re: Being OK with not being extraordinary

#347

Post by SuoDuanDao »

wesleywt wrote: post #317
MaximumYComb wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IQ is one of the strongest predictors we have for many life outcomes, such as career success, wealth, lower risk of death. This doesn't mean "everyone with a very high IQ will blah blah blah" but it does mean that those with high IQs are more likely to achieve certain things.

IQ is one of those myths smart people love.

I'm having trouble parsing this - is it a mark of stupidity not to believe in IQ or is IQ a lie that mostly hoodwinks smart people?

Re: Being OK with not being extraordinary

#348

Post by O_H_E »

ZainRiz wrote: post #322
O_H_E wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any notes :) or resources on note-taking you can share? I am currently studying and have been struggling in that area.

I've written an article comparing a couple of the more popular note taking strategies. It was even on the HN front page 13 hours ago :) https://www.zainrizvi.io/blog/remembering-what-you-read-zett... HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24251068#24262190

Thanks for linking. The amount of content on here is astronomical, it is impossible to keep up with things you care about and have a healthy life.

Re: Being OK with not being extraordinary

#349

Post by ubermonkey »

wjossey wrote: post #66
umvi wrote: post #2

> Climbing to a higher vantage point can also unlock new forms of extraordinary that you might have never noticed before. I read an article once about how the amount of work to get into the top tier in a single area is astronomical, but the amount of work to become top tier in a combination of 2-3 fields is attainable by almost anyone. For example, becoming a top tier statistician is hard. But becoming a top tier sta…

This is my career so far in a nutshell. I’m an average programmer. I’m an excellent problem solver. I have an above average work ethic. I’m an excellent communicator. Basically, I combined all of these traits and found roles that leveraged these traits to maximize my impact. Not for nothing, but this is why my liberal arts college was profoundly impactful for me, despite not getting a “top tier” CS education. My writ…

I, too, have had a pretty successful and rewarding career in software with a liberal arts degree -- but I'm also 50, so when I entered the workforce in the early 1990s, lots of (at least American) university programs were still super behind what was actually in use in the commercial world.

Many of my coworkers over the years had only 2-year degrees, or in a couple of exceptional cases no degree at all. People my age mostly learned to program on our own, as teenagers, starting with BASIC and then going deeper, so by the time we were in a position to take CS 101 or whatever we balked, because spending time listening to a professor tell you about writing a bubble sort in FORTRAN just isn't interesting or applicable when your hobby project is writing your own text editor or whatever.

So yeah, lots of people my age have liberal arts degrees -- political science, English, foreign languages, history, whatever. The secret advantage of that background is that we can usually write and communicate WAY better than the CS grads, which turns out to be immensely useful.

The tl;dr is really "understanding how software gets built AND being able to describe it to both technical and nontechnical people opens up lucrative career paths."

Re: Being OK with not being extraordinary

#350

Post by burntoutfire »

lowiqengineer wrote: post #218
realbarack wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that "that person" is not actually a specific person, but merely your image of one.

I mean I can probably go on LinkedIn right now and find someone that fits these loose criteria. They’re fairly common!

How can you know what goes on in their lives though? Maybe they're bored or bitter or lonely or even suicidal? $500k a year alone does not do much for your well being.
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