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The Most Dangerous Email (to my career) I've Sent

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Re: The Most Dangerous Email (to my career) I've Sent

#41

Post by sudopluto »

engineer_22 wrote: post #32
ComputerGuru wrote: post #7

There are many different types of "dangerous" things you can do for your career, and some are worse (and more permanent) than others. The most "dangerous" thing for my career was when I started posting about what's happening in Gaza and Palestine on my public social media accounts. I've heard similar horror stories from others, ranging from being let go from their jobs to missing out on new opportunities and position…

Yeah, freedom of speech used to be sacred... No longer.

"about what's happening in Gaza and Palestine" seems like a euphemism for some more emotional / inflammatory posts. It's not a violation of free speech for a private corporation to make an at-will employment decision to protect their PR image.

Re: The Most Dangerous Email (to my career) I've Sent

#42

Post by partypete »

hluska wrote: post #35

I enjoyed the article and it reminded me of many experiences in my career. However, this sentence bothers me: “I felt like by 40 I needed to move on from engineering because if I didn’t, I’d be like the few older workers I’d dealt with in my career. I felt like they moved too slow, were stuck in their ways, and unable to change - even when faced with evidence to the contrary.” I’m in my forties and none of those thin…

For what it’s worth, I am a relatively young engineer who has recently been working very closely with other engineers over the age of 55 on a daily basis. It has been one of the more enriching periods in my career so far. I often wonder if the ageism that I see so often referred to on Hackernews is more projection than reality because I consistently find it pleasant to work with individuals who have a very large body of experience to draw from. Ageism in general baffles me as one could very well ask the question: “would you rather have a carpenter with 2 years of experience working on your house, or one with 30 years of experience?” The answer seems obvious to me, and the question could easily be applied to software engineering.

Re: The Most Dangerous Email (to my career) I've Sent

#43

Post by oceanplexian »

mikepurvis wrote: post #37
engineer_22 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, freedom of speech used to be sacred... No longer.

Freedom of speech has never meant freedom from consequences, particularly in one's dealings with private individuals or corporations. At best it's supposed to mean no reprisals from public institutions, such as the TSA, IRS, DMV, and the like.

It should if you have some semblance of professionalism. At work I don’t want to know nor want to know about the politics of the people working with me.

If I’m engaged in a business transaction I don’t care about the personal views of the person I’m buying or selling from. Call me old fashioned but the world used to be that way before the rise of social media addictions and the current online echo chambers in our society.

Re: The Most Dangerous Email (to my career) I've Sent

#44

Post by sroussey »

umvi wrote: post #34
neilv wrote: post #17

> I felt like by 40 I needed to move on from engineering because if I didn’t, I’d be like the few older workers I’d dealt with in my career. I felt like they moved too slow, were stuck in their ways, and unable to change - even when faced with evidence to the contrary. If that was your fear, then I'm sorry you had that fear, and I hope it was unfounded. Unfortunately, there's externalities to voicing a negative stere…

I feel like it's not just ageism - software development itself is so big now that it's fractured to the point that there are now strongly opinionated camps that are "stuck in their ways and unable to change - even when faced with evidence to the contrary. " For example, certain web dev crowds that love (in my very biased opinion) really slow, bloated and/or over complicated tooling to do simple things. But only becau…

The nice thing about the JS ecosystem is there there is no “how everyone does it”.

It’s as if you had Ruby where Rails was only 10% of the market.

Some people say it’s the problem, but I like the egalitarian aspect of it.

Re: The Most Dangerous Email (to my career) I've Sent

#45

Post by anothername12 »

stavros wrote: post #28
_yb2s wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they moved too slow, were stuck in their ways, and unable to change This goes beyond just engineering- people generally get more like this in all aspects of life as they get older, and I believe you can prevent it by deciding not to be that way, and taking actions to not be that way. Personally, I feel that I was very rigid and closed minded when I was younger, and I've been learning and working on how to be less l…

I'm also very wary of being stuck in my ways, but even after all that bias-compensation, I still hold the belief that the fastest/most maintainable/easiest/best for the user way to make web apps is server-side rendered with minimal JS (mostly to enhance components). I don't know if this makes me a dinosaur, but I firmly believe that the best way to make 95% of modern websites is Django+HTMX (or similar), instead of a…

My belief too, as a grey beard 25 years in. I’ve seen all sorts of shit come and go.

There’s a lot of “slack” in the industry that we get away with. Ridiculous incidental complexity, far-out frameworks, architectural astronautics etc.

But if you care about “adding value” or your business succeeding, tools like Rails/Django are way to go. (And btw, use a RDBMS ffs)

Re: The Most Dangerous Email (to my career) I've Sent

#47

Post by dnoberon »

j-scott wrote: post #22

I've lurked on hacker news for a number of years, and this post is what inspired me to finally make an account. Thank you for sharing; this aligns with my current situation and reinforces my recent decision that I need to make a change.

I hope that the change goes well!

Re: The Most Dangerous Email (to my career) I've Sent

#48

Post by yodsanklai »

neilv wrote: post #17

> I felt like by 40 I needed to move on from engineering because if I didn’t, I’d be like the few older workers I’d dealt with in my career. I felt like they moved too slow, were stuck in their ways, and unable to change - even when faced with evidence to the contrary. If that was your fear, then I'm sorry you had that fear, and I hope it was unfounded. Unfortunately, there's externalities to voicing a negative stere…

Sounds like an extremely prejudiced individual...

Re: The Most Dangerous Email (to my career) I've Sent

#49

Post by jll29 »

slibhb wrote: post #31

The email could have been pared down significantly. The idea that a programmer might want to solve problems directly rather than manage others should be well known at this point. The company I work for has an "individual contributor" career track for this reason. You can simply say it straight out without all the fluff, which is most of the email. That aside, I'm happy it worked out and I understand it's hard to send…

> The company I work for has an "individual contributor" career track for this reason.

I once worked for a large information company that had a split between technical career paths (individual contributors to architects) and managerial career paths (individual contributor to manager to directors). So I stated in my HR profile that I aspire a technical career track to make sure, and told my management.

A few months on, I was sitting on a beach in Croatia during a vacation with my now-wife when my phone rang, and my boss told me I was promoted to Director. The reasoning was that the group I was leading would be taken more seriously if it was headed by someone who was himself at Director level, the same level as the peers that I would be doing projects for/with. Thankfully my team was small enough so I could stay reasonably technical, but I still envied the folks that "were allowed to write code every day" a bit.

Re: The Most Dangerous Email (to my career) I've Sent

#50

Post by jules-jules »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #7

There are many different types of "dangerous" things you can do for your career, and some are worse (and more permanent) than others. The most "dangerous" thing for my career was when I started posting about what's happening in Gaza and Palestine on my public social media accounts. I've heard similar horror stories from others, ranging from being let go from their jobs to missing out on new opportunities and position…

Thank you for speaking out. There are so many who are too afraid sadly.
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