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Skill Stacking: A Practical Strategy to Achieve Career Success

dariusforoux.com

81–90 of 104 posts

Re: Skill Stacking: A Practical Strategy to Achieve Career Success

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The template is simple: Write generic advice that sounds nice, and is never controversial. Make sure it's super vague so you don't have to take any accountability for it, you can move the goalposts of what you're saying In technical terms, what you are suggesting is that the article is making a claim which is unfalsifiable. But actually it is falsifiable. All you have to do is find a person who has diverse skills bu…

Finding a single counterexample works in mathematics to disprove a theorem, but not in this situation. It is silly to claim that having diverse skills guarantees success. The article doesn't even claim that; it explicitly mentions increasing the odds of success. To "disprove" this claim, you'd need to design and run a study that looks for a statistical relationship between success and skill diversity, both of which y…

It doesn’t guarantee it, it doubles the probability, and it is stackable. So there is a metric to measure (somehow).

Now, the author is probably just bullshittng things out of his fingers, an assumption I make based on the lack of any evidence being provided.

Nonetheless, since stackability and doubling at each turn mean you can trend toward 100% very quickly, then you can look at people you see as very successful, no matter what is your favorite measure of success, and observe for yourself.

Now I like “social impact” as a measure of success, but it’s a lot easier to go with “f’ing rich people” because data is being compiled every year by different business magazines. So when you take the list of Billionaires, you can realize that only one thing, sometimes two, where involved.

Now if someone would like to apply a statistical analysis to this, I think it would favor The null hypothesis, which is: there is no relation between the number of skills stacked and the amount of money in ones’ bank account

Re: Skill Stacking: A Practical Strategy to Achieve Career Success

#82
post #19

I don't find these sorts of articles valuable. The template is simple: Write generic advice that sounds nice, and is never controversial. Make sure it's super vague so you don't have to take any accountability for it, you can move the goalposts of what you're saying. If we remove all the filler in this article (more or less the entire article), it amounts to "be okay at multiple things rather than trying to be good a…

The SMBC comics this morning was about a Turing test for non-fiction literature, but it would apply to this also

Re: Skill Stacking: A Practical Strategy to Achieve Career Success

#84
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Write generic advice that sounds nice, and is never controversial. Make sure it's super vague so you don't have to take any accountability for it, you can move the goalposts of what you're saying. Worked for Agile ducks

Well in fairness some Agile is controversial.

I've only ever heard it sold as an ala-carte solution, where you can freely pick-and-choose the least controversial bits. Agile-lite by default.

Re: Skill Stacking: A Practical Strategy to Achieve Career Success

#85
post #2

It's rare to see arguments in favor of being a generalist over a specialist. In the end, they both have their pros and cons. > You simply have more chance of career success if you have more skills. I think that depends on how one intends to apply those skills. Being a generalist means that you don't depend on any one particular skill to always keep you in demand, and you can do more on your own to do tasks that speci…

Undergrad in physics. 7 years in the military. Medical school, self-taught computing (mainly Unix, web stuff, and python), surgical internship, more programming, residency, more programming. Now medical director of a clinical lab with 40 staff and major research in progress, published, overseeing clinical and research employees across 10 timezones, working across 13 time zones, have briefed to highest levels of gover…

Thanks for serving and glad to know someone with your passionate commitment to knowledge is helping advance medicine.

Re: Skill Stacking: A Practical Strategy to Achieve Career Success

#86
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Write generic advice that sounds nice, and is never controversial. Make sure it's super vague so you don't have to take any accountability for it, you can move the goalposts of what you're saying. Worked for Agile ducks

Well in fairness some Agile is controversial.

I think you meant Fragile (tm)

Re: Skill Stacking: A Practical Strategy to Achieve Career Success

#87
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How sustainable is that model going to be? It's mathematically impossible for everyone to be in the top 1%.

Not if we create 10 billion different specialties.

I think what makes it a 1% is the disparity of demand.

Re: Skill Stacking: A Practical Strategy to Achieve Career Success

#88
Agree that you need a balanced set of skills. However the advice in the article is pushing it too far.

Being a generalist is great in terms of broadening you career options, at an early stage anyway. But until you truly master something most of the higher tier opportunities remain closed to you.

These opportunities are much rarer and often not advertised. But the competition is also less intense and arbitrary. It is also in human nature to enjoy getting better at something. This path is actually not as hard as people think, and way more fun than keep picking up new mediocre skills.

Re: Skill Stacking: A Practical Strategy to Achieve Career Success

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s interesting, the career steps you took. May I ask how much is the general pay in those “high paying jobs”?

I hate to mention salaries ranges on HN because of the HN/Silicon Valley bubble where people seem amazed that not only does every developer not live on the West Coast they also don’t make half a million dollars and are not all bumming it in a trailer park. But, outside the west coast and New York City. In most major cities in the US, a semi hands on software architect can make between around $125K - $150K. A consulta…

>>a semi hands on software architect can make between around $125K - $150K. A consultant can make from $140K to $200K.

Do years of experience matter to make that kind of money?

Re: Skill Stacking: A Practical Strategy to Achieve Career Success

#90
post #12
post #8

When I rode my bicycle across the USA from LA to NYC I met a dude named Ryan through WarmShowers. Over pizza and beers at a local joint in Tempe, AZ, Ryan told me about this blog called _Semi-Rad_ - "you don't need to be a rockstar in something, you just need to be semi-rad. Semi-rad people have the most fun, they achieve the most, they experience the spice of life. They're not so caught up in perfection, but they st…

Seems like a justification for mediocrity. Yeah, you'll enjoy life more if you're not working 100 hours a week like Elon Musk. But I think you'll be in general better off and happier if you push yourself. I've always worked very hard at my career and it has paid off. I get to do lots of fun things as a result. It was hard in the moment to make the sacrifices, but that's water under the bridge now. Present and future…

Are you suggesting Elon Musk is happier than most? He certainly doesn’t seem happy to me.
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