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Career advice for people with bad luck

chiefofstuff.substack.com

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Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#361

Post by mywittyname »

yingw787 wrote: post #347

I've been reading the Incerto series by Nassim Taleb and he talks quite frequently about nonlinearities and their outsize impact. He mentions how a friend of his saw how during the Gulf War, everybody had planned for the war to increase the price of oil. So his friend bet against everybody else. Turns out, everybody was stockpiling oil due to the war, and given how short it was, there was an oil glut afterwards. His…

> It's difficult to work for a FAANG and become wealthy, as in move between socioeconomic classes

You're goal should not necessarily be to move up a social-economic class, but to at least provide your children with more opportunity than you had. Inter-generational wealth accumulation is very important.

Most people don't go rags to riches, it's typically families that do so over multiple generations. With poor people focusing on educating their children, who become professionals, who then have kids with the opportunity to make it big. If you look at Bill Gates, he's the son of a judge. Zuckerberg is the son of a dentist. One of the Google founders is the son of a college professor. Even our president came from a wealthy family.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#362

Post by rhizome »

burntoutfire wrote: post #328
adamsea wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Come on, all you have to do is google "jordan peterson meat" and you get pages and pages of when-he-said-thats.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#363

Post by pmiller2 »

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…

Depending on the interpretation, I've had between 3 and 5 out of these 5 things happen to me. I could have used the advice you're asking for about 10-15 years ago.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#364

Post by benibela »

mettamage wrote: post #245
tlear wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at Japan as well, really easy to get in to work but money is not as good as NA. I don’t really know EU market

I'm a Dutchie, and I can't speak about the EU market as a whole, but as any European that travels around a bit, I have the following ranking in terms of lifestyle/pay: 1. Switzerland (90k or higher + mountains if you're willing to drive a bit) 2. Luxembourg (I just remember you get paid quite a bit) 3. Berlin (alright pay, low living costs, amazing city) 4. England + Scandinavia + The Netherlands (didn't look into Sc…

The best thing would be to move to a country with low living costs and work remotely for a company from a high living costs country.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#365

Post by rhizome »

xupybd wrote: post #358
lovich wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of these seem fine to good, but number 5 is kind of just removing agency from children entirely. Its the same mindset of people who kick their kids out for being gay

Possibly but this is more to counter letting your kids go wild such that as they grow up you don't like to around them. By ining them how to behave well you equip them will the tools to interact in society. Of course if you are a horrible person you might dislike them for their good behaviours. But if you're a horrible person chances are you'll mess up your kids with or without that rule.

I don't think people "let" their kids go wild so much as run out of parenting skills. That's what makes the idea irrational: use your parenting skills to make up for your lack of parenting skills. All you have to do is decide to do so!

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#366

Post by pmiller2 »

Pamar wrote: post #353
mywittyname wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't philosophy kind of like CS minus the computers? I remember my sister talking about how much she hated her philosophy class and what she described was essentially discrete math-lite.

This is interesting. Can you expand it a bit, please?

Since they said "philosophy class," singular, I suspect they're referring to the unit on logic: modus ponens, modus tollens, valid vs sound arguments, etc.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#367

Post by dvt »

Pamar wrote: post #353
mywittyname wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't philosophy kind of like CS minus the computers? I remember my sister talking about how much she hated her philosophy class and what she described was essentially discrete math-lite.

This is interesting. Can you expand it a bit, please?

Philosophy major here (I jokingly tout myself as a trained philosopher). Philosophy is a big field with different schools of thought. In the US/UK, the primary school is known as "analytic (philosophy)" which is focused on tight arguments, precise language, and clarity of thought (see Russell, Wittgenstein, Lewis, Godel). This is contrasted by European -- in particular, French -- "continental (philosophy)" which waxes more poetic (see Nietzsche, Sartre, Lacan, Derrida).

The former deals quite a bit with logic (which was my area of focus in undergrad). Classes I took ranged from "baby logic" (predicate logic, first-order-logic), to second-order logic, to mathematical logic (mostly Peano arithmetic), to metalogic (learning how to prove things like Godel's incompleteness), to lambda calculus, to game theory. This was on top of ethics classes, history of philosophy, and other miscellaneous classes (took a very fun seminar by a Yale visiting professor -- I forget his name -- on the philosophy of food). Most of the graduate seminars I took were on philsophy of language and model theory.

Just about every philosophy class had a pretty strong "logic" undercurrent.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#368

Post by Leherenn »

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.

Language is a big issue with integration. It's not that people don't speak English or High German, it's just that to truly integrate you need to speak the local language.

And learning a dialect without an accepted written form, and thus no textbook to speak of is not easy.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#369

Post by pmiller2 »

protonimitate wrote: post #345
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…

Great advice. I see a lot of people in tech with inflated ideas of what success means, and they're almost all tied strictly to salary/net worth. Yeah, having money is nice, but if that's all you base happiness/idea of success on, its going to be a bumpy road. >There are a lot of self-conscious IT people in the midwest making $70k/year feeling like failures I understand how this can point of view can develop, but one…

> Yeah, having money is nice,

As someone who was broke for many years and now is less broke (cash is flowing, there's money in my accounts, but I'm deeply in negative net worth due to student debt), I think you're understating the issue, vastly.

Simply put, money is freedom. If you have it, you can do things people who don't have it can't. If you have enough of it, you can do just about anything. And, I'm not necessarily talking about luxuries, I'm talking about stuff like:

* If you have enough money in the bank, an unexpected car repair is a hassle, rather than a disaster.

* If you can afford to buy a home, then you don't have to worry about being evicted or not having a lease renewed.

* If you have enough money, you can send your kids to a good school and get them off to the best possible start in life.

* If you have an absurd amount of money, you don't need to worry about going bankrupt from getting sick.

As I said, none of these things are luxuries, but, to reach "don't have to worry about medical bankruptcy" levels, or even "I get to own a home and nobody can tell me I can't paint my front door pink" levels takes a huge amount of money relative to the median income today.

> I learned how to live poor, and discovered I could still have a meaningful life while being broke.

That doesn't mean being broke is great, good, or even not all that bad. It just means you've gotten used to it.

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