> It is well known the drunken sailor whos taggers to the left or right n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about sqrt(n) steps from the origin. But if there is a pretty girl in one direction, then his steps will tend to go in that direction and he will go a distance proportional to n. In a lifetime of many, many independent choices, small and large, a career with a vision will get you a distance proportional to n, while no vision will get you only the distance sqrt(n). In a sense, the main difference between those who go far and those who do not is some people have a vision and others do not and therefore can only react to the current events as they happen.
Just a tiny bit of bias towards a direction will get you very far very fast.
I once modeled+visualised this with a bit of javascript[1] and it's quite surprising to see the huge difference from even a tiny multiplication factor on each random/probabilistic decision.
Hamming was also writing from a highly privileged position. He was able to work at Bell Labs for the majority of his career. That just doesn’t exist today.
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering is a great book but it needs context. The last edition was released in 1994. Programmers had a lot of labour power back then.
Today though? The median house costs more than a third of the median income. Inflation has raised costs of living to unsustainable levels. And for programmers there have been hundreds of thousands of layoffs since 2023 and a low number of job openings.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to take what job you can get or stay in a job you don’t care for until the trade winds return.
This is a framing issue. You can't control the times, but good advice is applicable in good and bad times. If Hamming was operating from a "good time", it should be true that his policies are also applicable in the "bad times".
His advice to "work on the worlds hardest problems" was spoken to people who had worked their way past the initial difficulties. General advice to "Move towards important problems", which is precisely the same thing, applies in good and bad times, and is very likely to produce in you a valuable expertise.
Personally, I find the advice useful. Most who provide a framing for causes of success either do not place it in relation to anything, or relate it primarily their own situation, and their argument becomes susceptible to interpretation as survivorship bias. Some try to extend their argument to cover more cases, but can be seen as overconfident based on limited experience. It's hard for one writer to "prove" what general success rules are.
It's not about good or bad times. All compasses are broken so any particular direction you believe you are walking deliberately might as well be uniformly random.
"Direction" and "design" are probably the wrong metaphors for careers.
I think it is better for your mental health to see yourself as having some agency. You certainly have some, though how much we can debate. But saying something like "all compasses are broken" sounds so defeatist that I worry you are experiencing depression.
It seems more odd to me you are placing as much value on career agency to infer ones mental health broadly. I'm not saying this isnt a norm in many cultures, but I'd like to hear your argument for supporting it.
> Hamming was also writing from a highly privileged position.
Hamming had a lot of career capital. He was the only person in the world with his track record. If you needed his kind of research/output/teaching/etc, he was the person you needed.
Cal Newport talks a lot about this. Great books.
Have something [unique/valuable] to offer and you'll be surprised how many doors it opens. Yes it takes time to stairstep your way there. A fresh grad has less career capital than a seasoned engineer with a track record of building billion dollar companies.
>I don’t think it’s unreasonable to take what job you can get or stay in a job you don’t care for until the trade winds return.
Having a goal does not seem at all at odds with weathering a storm. Your choices can then be what you learn in your free time, or what horizontal moves you make at that job, or which people you get closer to, for example.
When I got into the industry over 20 years ago, it was unheard of for an IC software engineer to retire early. Unless you got extremely lucky like working at Microsoft or Apple pre-IPO, you just weren't making the kind of money big law or doctors made.
That is not the case now. Yes the competition is incredibly fierce but the pay has skyrocketed.
There were a lot of factors that went into making salaries sky-rocket. One of those was leverage: there was more demand for skilled programmers than there were available. You also had the ZIRP era from 2008-2021ish. If you could write fizz buzz and breathe you could get a good paying job.
In the 90s inflation-adjusted salaries were still rather high. A 75k USD salary in 1995 is roughly 150k USD today. And the median house was less than a third of your income. And in the 90s there was even more demand for programmers.
The early 2000s were a bit rough unless you were insulated inside Google and big tech.
But 2025 is a very different landscape. I’ve talked to lots of highly talented developers who’ve been consistently employed since the early 2000s who have been on the job search for 9 months, a year.
It’s one thing to have a goal for one’s career but it’s not like you can wait around to find that perfect opportunity forever, right?
Some times you have to find something and work. It might not fit into your plans for your career but it might provide you with the income you need to keep your family afloat and maybe let you indulge in a hobby.
> … but it’s not like you can wait around to find that perfect opportunity forever, right?
> Some times you have to find something and work …
Rather than waiting for a perfect choice, I read Hamming as reminding us that are making choices all the time and cannot avoid doing so. Even not choosing, e.g., staying in a less-than-ideal role, is a choice. Given that we have no choice but to choose, Hamming suggests knowing up front where we want to go in the long term and biasing choices in that general direction.
Swizec mentioned Cal Newport elsewhere[0], and Newport’s recommendations around lifestyle-centric career planning provide an interesting bridge between your comments about occasionally needing to weather a storm and Hamming.
Some view titles, particular projects, or certain roles to be worthwhile goals in themselves. “I just graduated law school, so I want to make partner at a big NYC law firm” is a goal that a motivated new attorney might set. Does that career goal serve her if she despises traffic, subway travel, and apartment living? Newport advocates beginning with a vision of an ideal lifestyle and working backward from there by setting career goals to achieve the desired lifestyle.
Where he may be in a conflict with Hamming is warning people about what he calls the grand goal theory, of which the fresh law school grad aiming at partner shows the pitfalls. Hamming’s advice will help you go far. Newport warns that if you’re going to go far, be sure it’s in the direction you want to go.
In the case you mentioned of someone who is long-term unemployed, having a job that produces income is certainly nearer to any Hamming career goal and any Newport ideal lifestyle than that person’s present circumstance of draining savings or, worse, accumulating debt for basic living expenses.
>In the 90s inflation-adjusted salaries were still rather high. A 75k USD salary in 1995 is roughly 150k USD today. And the median house was less than a third of your income. And in the 90s there was even more demand for programmers.
Right but how many programmers were making even 150k back then, even if they were 10x geniuses? I don't think even high level ICs at IBM or Microsoft were making that much. Even inflation adjusted, that's lower than the medain at FAANG these days.
Look man, life was unironically just better for everyone back in the 90s. Minimum wage, median wage, highest earners, if you do the math everything was cheaper and wages were comparatively higher. Gas, food, electricity, housing, it was all cheaper. There were fewer regulations and less bureaucracy.
The buying power of a programmer in the 90s was much, much higher than an average programmer today.
>Look man, life was unironically just better for everyone back in the 90s.
It was not. Programmers were not buying Porches and living in luxury neighborhoods or retiring early.
Watch Office Space. Being a programmer was a low status, averagely paying job.
Was life better back in the 90s for the average programmer? Maybe? Housing was certainly cheaper, I'll give you that. But for exceptional engineers was it better?
Did programmers show up to work to have a barista make them a gourmet coffee, have catered lunches, free massages, all the meanwhile getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars extra per year in RSUs? I don't think so.
There's no way an exceptional engineer had a better quality of life in the 90s than they would today. There was no FAANG, no deca-corns, no big tech giving near as many perks and comp. It just wasn't comparable.
I think the parent sufficiently qualified their take to mean how much an average person could realistically expect to make in inflation-adjusted dollars. Whether "exceptional" engineers were pulling numerically similar salaries or not seems like a bit of a strawman. Thankfully, the day-to-day conditions of cube farms in grey-space aren't as common today, but it's not wildly different for a majority of people. Trade the cube for a standing desk, and it's often still the same grey office in a tower somewhere working on something boring. After inflation and accounting for cost of housing, the numerically higher salary doesn't mean a whole lot, especially so since it's often theoretical money and not vastly changed tax brackets. Our needs as people haven't changed; we don't suddenly need a Porsche that we can afford instead of a house that we can't. Some things have become much cheaper in inflation-adjusted dollars, which is great, but if they didn't, we simply wouldn't have the money for them.
My point is that 20+ years ago, there was frustration here (and elsewhere) that even if we weren't 10x engineers, even being 3x engineers could not get us 3x the compensation.
That changed in the last 20 years for the better. People who had the work ethic and aptitude to become medical doctors or lawyers or management consultants no longer had to sacrifice compensation if they loved tech.
This is notable and worth calling out, and pointing out it wasn't always like this.
Ya I suppose that is a fair point, albeit a tangential somewhat luck-based one. Additionally, that ceiling has been likely raised across technical professions for non-men as well who have the potential and drive to be at the top of whatever ladder. I say tangential because while the ceiling was raised significantly, the parent's argument was that it wasn't nearly as necessary to be the 1% fortunate genius landing a dream gig, which is still true.
Okay sure, life was unironically just better for everyone back in the 90s except for the highest paid exceptional programmers.
Do you feel better now? Will you admit the economy is bad, and has been getting worse for 50 years straight for absolutely everyone (except the most exceptional engineers)?
Comparatively cheaper, no. Americans could afford a lot of things, but the average American home looked like Malcolm in the Middle, and not so much more fancy for the higher class. Meanwhile in 2025, people have immense furbished kitchen (I’m European so I always notice that in abs-training-bro-youtube-slop, I’m not talking about influencers here) and living rooms, order food deliveries all the time, and perhaps some americans could access the number of flights that we saw in movies like Die Hard (going from NYC to SF to see a wife), but that was unimaginable for Europeans. We’re seeing wealth levels that are unimaginable, and global poverty has receded so much that the UN overhauled their definition to redirect their efforts towards human rights rather than hunger.
No, the average 30 year old American owns far less than the average 30 year old American did in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Owning a home in a safe community is what is most important, and most young men can't seem to get that. Things are getting worse.
Heck, I'll lower the bar! I'm (mid-30s American) not so worried about 'safe'. A certain amount of danger is fine. Desirable, even, if it meant I could live in my home town, not in an unfamiliar city.
I could buy half of a house, right now, cash. I don't, because the moment I do, I'll be forced to sell/move/whatever. Again. Where I am [for work] and where I want to be are forever at odds. Leaders have found it fashionable to bundle us all together. Spin the wheel and see if we hit RTO, let's bid against each other [again].
All to say, I'd give half my salary to never negotiate it or my location, again. Clearly not an option, so what to do? Endure and save. You won't see me buying toys or status symbols, that's for sure. At Will employment, meet At Will spending.
> Programmers had a lot of labour power back then.
Huh? Back then, there was very little glamor to software engineering. Computing just wasn't serious enough. There was relatively little competition, salaries were unremarkable, and sure, you could land a job for life, but that still exists today. If you are an IT guy for a lumber mill, a regional ISP, or a grocery store, it's not going to be as cutthroat as Big Tech. It's just that you're not gonna be making millions.
We're pretending that this type of cozy tech jobs don't exist anymore, but they do. They just don't come with IPOs and RSUs.
I suppose it could be interpreted either way, but your interpretation probably makes more sense in context. In reports about housing cost in Canada, they tend to use both the median income to median servicing cost like you have, but also home price-to-income ratio which often is a multiple of annual income for whatever reason.
Further down in the thread there's mention of median housing cost to income ratio for programmers in the 90's, and in that situation it seems like the absolute total cost of a house was a fraction of annual income, so it could go either way, but it would be much tougher now for your annual salary to surpass the cost of a house unless it's severely in the boonies.
It ultimately doesn't change the advice. Strongly deciding I wanted a career change led me to putting in some extra time and tripling my income. It's easier if you can reduce obligations and noise and focus on what matters to optimize for whatever you want. It may not be easy, but you have some degree of power to alter your trajectory to some extent
I read/skimmed it this year. I don't feel it was worth it. The first few and last few chapters have some nuggets but for the most part it's pretty highly technical stuff that feels not super relevant or interesting for a software engineer today (in my opinion).
That's really nice, but the point where the vision is should move too. You learn as you progress. What you enjoy changes. The entire industry moves. Being focused on the goal you defined 30 years ago is almost certainly wrong for most people.
After ~15 years, I've realized that no good things come to you without sustained focus / attentiveness, and gentle pressure in the direction of attention. What everyone here is saying is "be closed loop", vs the drunkards "open loop". Combined with a bit of progress every day, it's (so far, at least) magical what happens.
Another bit to consider:
It took a long time to realize that basically everyone wants basically everyone to succeed, as long as incentives align. It was very easy to imagine I was swimming upstream early in my career - especially my early mentors urging me to specialize to find success. My initial temptation was to "specialize" in hot/attractive topics in an effort to be the "indispensable X authority". But my PhD advisor urged me to "not swim in red water", where the incentives are inherently conflicting - everyone wants to be "the X person".
Much better to find a team working on a good problem somewhat like the ones you want to solve and just push along with them. You can save yourself a lot of energy by slotting yourself into a system that aligns with your preferred direction of travel, even if only a little bit. The current carries you.
I think this demostrates a far more important perspective than "have a vision" - which is easy to explain and almost impossible to execute, which is be curious, intentional and open to lots of things. The curious & open part leads you to new oppportunities, and the intentional part helps you figure out how to evaluate & where to go next.
This sounds like much better advice. Trying to plan out a tech career over decades seems like very premature optimizing. Being curious and making sure you keep learning is not only very pleasant, it’s useful. And when the tech changes, fine, no problem. Most of the big features of my life have not been plannable ahead of time.
Exactly. You can “have a vision” to accelerate full speed and hit the hard wall and just before going full throttle you are offered an opportunity to enter an open door around the corner which you have never even thought about. And that door helps you discover a new vision, that might stick for lifetime.
Also, while the original advice about “vision” sounds reasonable, it also sounds a bit dogmatic. The filpside of “career vision” is “tunnel vision”. And life is not deterministic, it has a much more probabalistic nature. Hence, curiosity and open mind.
>>Being focused on the goal you defined 30 years ago is almost certainly wrong for most people.
I think there are certain things that are not likely to change, and must be aimed for. For starters, being healthy, proactively working towards a retirement nest egg, so that you don't end up homeless and starving in case things go south too fast.
There are many such things I hold as things I would want several years from now. Good health, free time and enough money to not need a job to just put food on the table, and a roof above my head.
Do people actually perform a random walk though? All terrain - both metaphorically and physically - is not equal, so wouldn't a more accurate description be 1. float on the water and go where the current/tides take you, or 2. decide when you're going to paddle against it towards the lighthouse? or more simply, "most people walk downhill"?
It is not something I share very often, because people assume a lot when I do, but von Braun[1] shared a similar idea. Ignoring for a moment his past, one cannot say that he had no achievements further supporting position noted by OP.
> Despite his moral quandaries, von Braun participates in the Nazi's V-2 rocket program during World War II to further his ambitions in rocket engineering. The film carefully depicts his efforts to reconcile his love for scientific exploration with the knowledge that his work is being used for destructive purposes.
I have a similar short story idea where a person of the calibre of Elon Musk who works so hard is made to feel and see his successful moonshot projects being used for destroying and subjugating nations. This would be similar to Oppenheimer. Another twist I can take with the story is Hero "Elon" knows about this outcome but still in the hope of change in institutional ideology over decades hopes for better use for his technology. In the movie Watchmen, Ozymandias feels the pain of millions he is going to kill to save future billions.
This is a lovely mental model and also makes me feel a host of existential dread. I had a semblance of vision before gen AI and I think that vision needs serious revision
Which is fine. Goals shift and can even completely disappear, forcing you to pick another one. But having and pursuing long term goals at most times is still the ticket for success. My 2c.
Comment is interesting because its only confirmation bias material and doesn't hold up under minimal scrutiny. If you want to stay in pretentious CS analogy territory, then consider that if you can react to current events you can be a heuristical pathfinding algorithm that adjusts its goal based on locally optimal heuristics, making each individual step more efficient. This all a straight ass pull that will not translate to real world performance either, but it will serve to sound impressive to a fool.
Three years ago, I left academia after finishing my PhD in Economics, frustrated by how little real-world impact my hard work seemed to have. I moved into IT, wanting to build things that would be more immediately useful and practical. Still, the dream of using science to create positive change never left me.
I was invited to work with AI at a company that develops software for the public sector. It wasn't the dream (I wouldn't be using my academic expertise) but it felt like a step closer. At least I'd be providing tools to support people who directly affect others' lives. From the start, I told my boss that I hoped someday to offer not just AI tools, but real socioeconomic statistical analysis as a service for the public sector. And while I've been happy working with AI, I've always sought out opportunities on projects that were more data-driven.
Three years later, some clients expressed interest in having our AI chatbot provide real-world socioeconomic data analysis. My boss just gave me a promotion to lead both the AI team and this new socioeconomic data initiative.
I was reflecting the other day on how fortunate I am, my dream "chased me." But it wasn't simply luck. I had always stayed attuned to the opportunities that arose.
My entire professional life/career has been a tension between trying new things/opportunities and trying to be intentional in what/where/when/how I make changes. I'll probably be done in about 10 years so I'll let you know how it worked out then.
I also really treasure that quote. Your visualization really made it hit home again though.
It does make me reflect on this piece I wrote 9(!!) years ago though, which hasn't completely materialized. I think I'm due for a re-alignment of priorities.
> n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about sqrt(n) steps from the origin
AKCSHUALLY
The root of the mean of the squared distances is sqrt(n).
The phrase as you quoted is the mean of the absolute distance. In general those are different. I don't know the latter from memory, and a quick look at the wikipedia page for Brownian motion doesn't have it.
Wait, are you saying that for a symmetrical random walk, the expected distance is of the order of sqrt(n), but even for a slightly biased random walk (like 0.5000001 chance to take right) it's of the order of n?
Edit: well of course it is. I was thinking expected position (which should be 0) not distance
"expected distance" is average abs(coordinate), so for biased walk (and big enough time) it's simply abs(bias)*time, and for unbiased it's deviation==sqrt(variance)
I think the beauty of this quote is working more than its content.
Most people, even when they do not sit down and think about it, follow one of the two career paths:
- Some people will actively pursue the next logical progression (senior, lead/manager, head/vp, exec).
- Some will happily stay in their position unless the next one is offered to them.
Being deliberate will always work better compared to being random, but it is not like all people who succeed in their careers deliberately planned to get where they are.
I would even guess that for the vast majority of successful careers, competency and luck played a much bigger role than being deliberate about it.
> would even guess that for the vast majority of successful careers, competency and luck played a much bigger role than being deliberate about it.
I think this is true. I had a while where my career was doing really well constant steps up, I was learning, getting promoted, was working on great projects and problems that were engaging and led to easy promotions. Then I got a new manager and it was downhill. Then I got a new job and the problems are insignificant and there's no room for growth of any kind. If my latest job was earlier in my career my career would be very different.
I never really had a plan for a career but I never settled. I borderline almost did at my last job as it paid enough and I loved the people like family but the move from that job landed me in the most interesting and well paying job I've had yet. Luck totally played a part in most of my jumps and the ones I thought were good were often bad and the ones I wasn't interested in ended up being the most interesting.
I just can’t understand people whose life goal is like to be a CTO by some date; I have never tried for a promotion since I first shifted into a job where I was paid to make software. Due to the random walk of promotion rules (and most likely the good work of bosses that believed in me), I have been promoted enough that I had to put thought leader into my linked in, but I do believe just making sure whatever you are working on is useful and successful to other people is enough worry; if you are skilled in software and thinking, the other things will work them selves out.
I have generally had strong vision in my career but this year due to external forces at play at work I have been much more reactive to the chaos and generally felt off the whole year, this was a nice mental model to step through, liked the visualization.
I don't think jus the raw distance (from here) is the metric to necessarily optimize for. It may be more useful to throughly search the nearby area, for example - especially if you feel you're in a good neighborhood already.
A new study suggests that some sharks and other marine predators can follow strict mathematical strategies when foraging for dinner. The work, reported online June 9 in Nature, is the latest aiming to show whether animals sometimes move in a pattern called a Lévy walk.
Unlike random motion — in which animals take similar-sized steps in any direction, like a drunk stumbling around — Lévy walks are punctuated by rare, long forays in any direction. Draw a Lévy walk on a graph, and its squiggly pattern echoes a fractal, the mathematical phenomenon whose shape remains similar no matter the viewing scale.
But I think it is the wrong view, as generally people do move into the direction they want to go. Take a person doing plumbing but wanting to be in art. The problem is not the direction, the problem is taking the first step.
In general, many people dislike changing jobs, so they don't take steps. The steps are the problem, not the direction.
This reminds me of a take on art, that goes something like "you don't need talent, but you do need to have taste". Taste is the same kind of driver as direction in this case.
Probably butchered the quote, can't remember who said it, but the message stuck.
The general sentiment of being aware about your career and decisions is true.
But this reminds me of what I hate about modern corporate “culture” the most. And what is broken about it the most.
Im speaking about the rat race. Tge fact, that you have to waste a noticeable part of your work time, effort and energy to sell your work instead of doing it. To the point where good salesmen make a “career” and become your bosses without any correlation to their work abilities or even management skills. Those are very good at designing their careers.
As a result the more corrupted the company with this style of internal management the more reliable it drowns in a swamp of ineffectiveness.
In a well functioning company or society “building a career” shouldn’t be a goal nor priority. It should be the natural outcome (more or less) of a “job very well done” that is a true priority.
Yes we’re not in a perfect world. But at least we should try to reach our ideals rather than promoting rat race mentality as a norm.
> To the point where good salesmen make a “career” and become your bosses without any correlation to their work abilities or even management skills.
The few times I've seen this actually happen at a company, it was not the kind of company I wanted to work for long-term anyway.
If the company is so broken that the wrong people are being promoted while the right people are being ignored constantly, there will be bigger problems than you simply missing a promotion.
The one startup I worked for that had this problem chronically (combined with some nepotism) did a bee-line run straight for insolvency and then collapsed. Everyone on the ground floor saw it coming. Some people still tried to race for promotions and upward career trajectory there, but the smart ones invested their effort in getting out.
That said, I've also worked at some companies where the right people were getting promoted but there were groups of people with sour grapes he were always upset it wasn't them. It's never something everyone agrees on.
Every single major tech company that I am aware of (admittedly only two from 1st and 2nd hand knowledge) require you to submit a promo doc showing you “operating at the level you want to get promoted to”. You only can show that by getting those plum opportunities and that only happens through building the right relationships with the right people and knowing how to navigate corporate culture.
How will someone know what you’re doing if you don’t tell them? There is an entire theory called the “luck surface area” that says you need to do the work and tell people you did the work.
There is another similar school of thought that the only thing that matters in your career are “results and relationships”. It took me way too long to figure all of this out. But once I did, it made my life much easier and it made it much easier to navigate within my company and getting opportunities on the outside.
During the last ten or so years as a “developer” without doing a single coding interview because I do know how to sell myself (and deliver)…
1. I’ve gotten three jobs where the new manager/director/CTO hired me as one of their first technical hires to lead major initiatives
2. Got a job at BigTech without any coding interviews even though my job required hands on keyboard coding as part of the job - cloud consulting specializing in app dev (yes full time direct hire with bonuses and RSUs)
3. Left there and had a job within a week as a staff consultant (full time) with another consulting company.
I’m not smarter than anyone else, I learned how to network, talk the talk and play the game.
On another note, you don’t and shouldn’t get a promotion based on doing your current job well. Just because you are a good developer doesn’t mean that you have the skills to lead other developers. That’s the entire point behind the “Peter Principle”. You have to show you are capable of working at the next level by working at the next level.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t make more money if you bring more value to a company than do done else at your level. But how is a company suppose to objectively manage that? You pulled more stories off the board? You had less QA defects?
For what it’s worth, I flew to close to the sun myself about a decade ago and realized I would suck as a manager of people. But I was getting better at leading projects. I chose the IC route.
> I’m not smarter than anyone else, I learned how to network, talk the talk and play the game.
Congratulations that you learned how to game the system. Fair enough. That doesn't mean you should brag about it or celebrate that terrible "school of thought".
> How will someone know what you’re doing if you don’t tell them?
That's a simple part: it's your manager's direct and one of the main job responsibilities. It's like 80% of what manager job is all about.
To be perfectly aware of what his team is doing, what was done good, what was bad, performance, strong, weak sides etc. For every individual report.
The hard part is to find the manager who at least understands that, even harder to find someone who are good at it. But in my limited experience it's not much harder than to find and spot a decent engineer.
Its a gravity problem. Gravity doesn’t care whether you like it or not when you land after jumping out of a 70 story building. You can either choose to accept gravity exists and not jump out of a 70 story building - or jump and die.
My manager’s job is not to manage my career. The last time I was a “pull tickets off the board maintained by someone else” developer was over a decade ago. Even then my project manager was different than my actual manager. My manager didn’t look at the Jira board for all of his reports are across teams to know what they were doing.
You still had to tell him yourself during 1 on 1s on high level. But even then, what were you going to tell him? “I pulled some well defined tickers off of a Jira board and I deserve a promotion?” There are so many people that are good enough to do that on either the enterprise CRUD side or the BigTech side, why should you be promoted for that?
On the other hand, except for my stint at BigTech between 2020-2023, I was already at the top of the technical IC chain as far as responsibility. There was no place to be promoted to. I have broad initiatives that I’m responsible for and still the manager just knows that things are running smoothly and the stake holders are happy. They definitely aren’t keeping up with my day to day work.
To be honest, outside of BigTech, worrying about promotions aren’t worth the effort, do your job, build your resume and hop to another job if you want more money. But even then, you can’t hope to get ahead in your career if you are content with just being a ticket taker and not taking on responsibilities that require you to navigate corporate culture.
I would much rather play the game than spend months grinding leetCode trying to pass coding interviews.
Right this second, I have reason to believe that I would have a greater than even chance of getting into Google via GCP in their internal consulting division based on a combination of experience (not with GCP in particular), soft skills, network, and knowing how the game is played than a hands on developer would trying to get in by being able to “codez real gud”.
I don’t because I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than work in any large company again and I’m damn sure not going back into an office.
Again, not because I’m smarter, I’ve accepted the game for what it is.
But it is to promote and demote. In many (most?) companies, to get a promotion he needs to actively advocate for you in front of others. That is part of his job. Many of them simply optimize to "I'm not going to do that part of the job well, so you, as my report, need to give me the material I can sell to others." And not "you need to do well so I can sell to others".
Yes, that’s true. But that only happens if you give them something to work with. I volunteered for the thorny complicated initiatives at the startup I worked for prior to AWS.
While there was no place to be “promoted to” besides being a team lead as an IC, it did give me the chance to have the skillset to get my next job. I specifically told my CTO - we had a good working relationship - that a team lead would be a demotion. I was already influencing the direction of the entire company. He couldn’t “promoted me”. But he gave me a nice raise and kept letting me choose the hairy work that crossed team boundaries.
At BigTech, your manager can help you go through the promotion process. But it is still mostly out of their hands whether you get promoted. You have to prove you are deserving to a wider audience.
At my very large enterprise, a managers job is not to "promote and demote" it's to "get you where you want to be". That requires you to know your direction (to the article) but importantly, when they say "based on our company policies, you need to demonstrate an outsized inpact" you're going to have to work with the manager to define that, execute, and get the data to equip them to do that.
Virtually everyone I know in IT bumped their salary only after switching the companies, never I've seen anyone who raised their salary with comparable magnitude and/or pace by working hard at one place.
> Gravity doesn’t care whether you like it or not when you land after jumping out of a 70 story building
With one key difference - it's not a gravity. It's just currently popular and dominating style in IT corporate culture. Mainly because it worked once for few successful companies and others cargo-culted it without much thought.
There will always be value and importance to networking, human relationships and communication. Because after all we're people, not robots.
But there will also be shift and evolution in management styles, just like we notice a shift in Leetcode interviews right now (less and less of this bullshit).
Can you change the corporate culture of the companies that pay top of market any more than you can change gravity?
Sure I could change the culture by accepting a bullshit CTO position that is a glorified developer at a YC like startup that pays less than the intern I mentored when they got their return offer at BigTech and I could get meaningless “equity”.
But if I were in a position where I wanted to maximize my comp, I would play the game and convince a company with a lot of money to give me some of that money.
I just happen to care more about work life balance and making “enough” money now.
> With one key difference - it's not a gravity. It's just currently popular and dominating style in IT corporate culture. Mainly because it worked once for few successful companies and others cargo-culted it without much thought.
Sadly this is majority of tech industry. Cargo-cult whatever the big players are doing. But all is not lost. Lots of interesting smaller companies with highly technical people advocate for a tech culture that rewards real Engineering over Salesman/Politician.
For instance, a FAANG resume with business impact bullet points will be pretty useless for a small team building a database. Someone with PR commits to open source Databases would hardly need to prove themselves.
Out of 10 companies I’ve worked for over 30 years, I’ve only worked for two large companies - General Electric when it was still an F10 company and later Amazon (AWS) - I hated my time at each of them. In fact, I turned down an opportunity by a former coworker at AWS who was a director at another well known non tech company who was going to create a position for me to lead their migration to AWS and then their “modernization”. I turned it down even though I could have made about $50K more in cash than I was making in cash and RSUs at Amazon because I didn’t want to work at another large company after leaving Amazon.
It’s fine if you want to work at smaller “interesting” companies, I’m doing the same. But let’s not pretend there are no tradeoffs.
The intern I mentored their intern summer and the year after they got back, got a return offer at 22 in 2022 that was the same I was making at 46 in 2020 as a senior enterprise dev in Atlanta.
On the opposite side, now they are an L5 (mid level) Solution Architect at 25 working at AWS doing a similar line of work to what I do[1] and make the same total comp as I make as as a staff consultant working at mid size firm at 51.
If you want to make the eye popping big tech salaries - you have to play the game.
[1] I’m mostly post sales leading implementations and doing some management style consulting reports. My former mentor is pre-sales.
Indeed, and I think that's the point of many in the thread.
Things are how they are, and some people may successfully navigate while playing some of the games. That's very different from saying "this is how it has to be" or "this is how it will always be".
> These things are not mutually exclusive. You can do a great job and learn how to communicate a job well done.
Absolutely! Nothing wrong with communicating your work and networking. It's better to do that than don't, it's a good thing to do, it's a great thing to help your manager to be aware of what's going on.
As long as it is not a mandatory requirement and expectation of an engineer that puts pressure and becomes a toil.
If you are okay with just being a ticket taker who us not aiming for a promotion to a job with more scope, responsibility and pay, there is nothing wrong with that trade off.
I’m at a point in my life where I am okay with the level of autonomy I have and have no interest in being a director or above and getting cost of living raises for the foreseeable future. But I’m 51 and an empty nester with me and my wife.
A line level manager position would be a vertical move. A director is a “manager of managers”.
> If you are okay with just being a ticket taker who us not aiming for a promotion
I think your extreme example does not refute any of my points and I agree with you. "good manager" is not a guarantee for a good career, it's your responsibility ultimately.
The main thing missing from this IMO is an element of chance or randomness, the ability to incorporate “unknown unknowns” into your life. The most interesting people I’ve come across have had a variety of jobs, many of which they knew absolutely nothing about when starting out. There is a genuine value add when you’ve worked beyond the same white collar profession your entire working career.
In other words, the problem in designing your life is that you’re almost always going to pick things you already know. Maybe that gets you to the peak of your current profession over twenty years…but maybe some other job is actually a lot more fulfilling to you.
I’m not sure how to incorporate this into a young person’s real life experience, but I do think gap years, varied internships, volunteering, etc. are probably a good start.
I recently listened to a podcast with a guy that wrote a book advocating that young people spend 4 years getting a pilot’s license, working on a ranch, becoming an EMT, and various other useful skills/jobs. That seems like a great idea, although I didn’t like the hostility to traditional college he had in offering this plan.
In Quebec we have a sort of college between high school and university where you are forced to take "bullshit classes" along with the stuff you chose to study. Mine included philosophy, Spanish, photography, canoeing, and a few others. At the time it felt like a diversion, but it was a welcome introduction to something other than computer science.
In my first year of university, a senior grabbed me by the shoulders and told me that I _have_ to try an internship or semester abroad. One thing led to another and I have just celebrated 10 years in Germany. It led to my current career, which is not at all what I studied.
To answer your question, I think that it requires a certain curiosity, and an appetite for experimentation. I feel like the system is teaching kids the opposite of that.
I wish cegep, or an interstitial school where you have a year or 2 to just take tons of unrelated courses, was more common. So much focus is put on universities as job training that they lose a part of what historically has long made them special --- learning for the sake or learning.
Going all-in beats hedging your bets when the gravy train is running thick. But when times go sour, fortunes reverse. Unfortunately, that's when survivor bias shows up. Being diversified (almost) leads to being in the upper-middle, but if you only listen to those currently on top, you'll hear only the benefits of going all-in.
>The main thing missing from this IMO is an element of chance or randomness, the ability to incorporate “unknown unknowns” into your life.
100% this. When I started working in recruitment, it was literally intended to be a temporary means to an end. I stumbled across Hacker News back in 2010 and accidentally uncovered a niche (tech startups) that has resulted in a career where over the past 15 years has evolved into holding VP level roles at YC startups to now running my own successful recruitment and HR advisory business for startups. I can legitimately attribute that entire path and growth to accidentally stumbling across this website and couldn't possibly have guessed the impact it would ultimately have on my career.
And that’s the tragedy. It should be viewed as a feature, not the bug. Curiosity and willingness to mix it up is where the serious innovation resides. Cross cutting concepts more easily happen when you’ve done/experienced/seen/felt different stuff … period.
I tell my son all the time that I couldn’t predict what I’m doing now … 3 years prior. I didn’t have this insight or awareness but after running the SW/IT marathon for 25 years here we are. Trust your instincts, they weren’t developed in a vacuum. The more you explore, the more insights pop in your mind and every 3 years or so, a change presents itself for you to affirm or deny.
Yeah and even if you’re totally uninterested in “having an interesting life” and just want to maximize income/job prospects, I think you can make the argument that a little bit of randomness is actually the optimal path because it increases your luck surface area.
For example - working in a well-rated fine dining restaurant over a summer while you’re studying computer science seems totally unrelated and not optimal. But maybe that unique experience is what stands out on your resume, and maybe the knowledge about wine or food you acquired there builds a connection with an investor or manager, years down the line.
If you design your career, you will almost certainly get the same outcome too.
I've managed people for decades and this has been a common pattern. I'd have people come to me with their plans to be in the C-suite in five or ten years, based precisely on self-help advice like that. None of them ended up there. But several of the people who never had a plan did in fact end up as VPs, CTOs, etc.
I don't want to say that thinking about your career doesn't matter. It's definitely easy to self-sabotage it by sticking to your comfort zone for life. But turn-by-turn plans are not useful because a lot of it is a product of chance. In a corporate setting, the best advice is just: get in the habit of solving tough problems for the people who matter, and find low-key ways to let them know about the good work you're doing. The rest, more or less, follows from that.
> I've managed people for decades and this has been a common pattern. I'd have people come to me with their plans to be in the C-suite in five or ten years, based precisely on self-help advice like that. None of them ended up there.
According to the Gervais Principle, these people are Clueless. Of course they end up in middle management. The top spots are reserved for Sociopaths.
I do something similar for development of me as a human being. I ask myself how can I improve, what kind of person do I want to be, how can I help make the world a better place.
My "career" is just a means to an end to put food on the table. Also being in my 30s I think I have mostly maxed it out anyway. Sure I might increase my wage a little bit but all in all as for being an IC it is a good as it gets. Sure there is always room for improvement but I am already constantly the person with the most technical skills in the room so it would not grant me any benefit.
I don't think your "career" needs to be a major focus in your life once you are set up at least. Especially if you don't do any meaningful work that actually helps people like being a doctor or teacher or something.
In the end my work just makes someone else richer, it doesn't have any meaning. It does not make the world a better place. Probably a worse place sometimes. I just do it to not starve.
> In the end my work just makes someone else richer, it doesn't have any meaning.
This is something I struggle with a lot. I left companies before, because the job felt meaningless and making some rich guy richer doesn't sound meaningful to me. I am trying to come up with a business idea I can work on on the side, that actually is supposed to make the world a better place, but I am struggling to find anything I have enough experience in to pursue.
I am leaning towards activism now, because that is probably the most achievable thing to do for me. Just building info sites nobody reads, trying to make non tech people aware about how Amazon, Google and so on makes life worse for everyone. Or how anti privacy laws are probably a bad idea.
But that does not feel fruitful either. My everyday life is consumed by the desire of having some kind of impact, making the world better.
> But that does not feel fruitful either. My everyday life is consumed by the desire of having some kind of impact, making the world better.
It nearly impossible to achieve substantial change alone. The key is to be organized with others, to find a community.
Now, I don't mean joining a political party, especially not at first. That can be important work but also very soul crushing
I am talking grassroots-level, local groups that work on a concrete topic, preferable something that concerns you personally. It is important to get into doing things as quickly as possible, be it organizing a small protest or maybe just a get together.
With this you will gain practically experience and you will find other people that share your goals and with whom you will struggle together.
Now, for the long term, you will also need to actually read political theory, you will have to get organized with people that have a more concrete strategy on how to create change but I generally would urge you to avoid analysis paralysis and focus on gaining practical experience first.
I'm trying to avoid community unfortunately. I was never really accepted anywhere, whether is be online spaces or irl and I am not the person to socialize and do stuff with people. Also don't want to rely on people or having people rely on me.
I felt the same way before I got my diagnosis for my neurodivergency. I mean I still do but it got better because I know now why I get rejected and are better at finding people I can fit in with.
> trying to make non tech people aware about how Amazon, Google and so on makes life worse for everyone. Or how anti privacy laws are probably a bad idea.
I think a majority of people already know this, that's why it feels fruitless. Also more negativity ("these companies are bad because of x, y, z") will also make you feel negative.
Why not make those sites, talk to those non-techy people, but provide _some_ form of thing they can do to make an impact in a tangible way, not just "don't use amazon", links to sites that put together local info for small areas, catagories of smaller online sites that you can use instead of amazon or something.
> My everyday life is consumed by the desire of having some kind of impact, making the world better.
Do you have something tangible you can look back on that you did last week that helped achieve this vision? If not, what small thing can you do this week?
> Do you have something tangible you can look back on that you did last week that helped achieve this vision? If not, what small thing can you do this week?
Not too sure, I am pretty delusional about the impact part. I want to achieve something big but have zero ideas on what I could start with. I have a ton of time and want to use it for something I actually believe in, the difficulty is in finding something I actually believe in...
I am also in my (late) 30s. I would definitely question myself if I were “constantly the person with the most technical skills in the room”. I of course think I’m smart, but I am rarely surrounded by people that I think I’m smarter than…
I agree work is just a means to an end of not starving, but I like learning and growing enough that if that were the case (most technical among my peers), I would start looking for another opportunity.
If you make a lot of money doing something that makes the world a worse place sometimes, and your goal is to simply "not starve," you can probably find something else to do which fulfills that requirement while also making the world a better place instead.
From the perspective of someone in their late 20s, the timing of this article feels quite off when entering 2026. The reality has become far different from the gist of what is presented here.
Career paths and opportunities have been getting broken and changing so much in recent years that I find it hard to plan anything. I don't even know what kind of "goal" is sustainable, let alone what the path towards it is.
The only sensible career that seems to offer a steady trajectory is medicine. Apart from that, my most successful peers were the ones that followed immediate money and speed-ran into owning some kind of real estate, which is a game changer. Besides that, people try to do as many side hustles as possible and diversify their income to save as much as they can and brace for a possible recession. I find it hard to apply any of these 8 steps in such volatile reality.
I wouldn't even say medicine. Neither Baby Boomers nor the current American healthcare system have 30 years left in them; that means that, unless you're already in your 40s or 50s, you're going to see the bottom fall out of that sector mid-career.
This is a political failure. It has nothing to do with individual decision-making and everything to do with poorly-managed incentives for appropriate 21st-century investments.
Disagree. This kind of comment is furtively pulling up the ladder behind you. Do as I say not as I do. Junior is the time to learn as much as possible and take risky bets (and suffer accordingly). When I was in a junior in a factory, the night shift knew me well. Nowadays, I've pared it back to 50 or so hours per week, because I now have a family, which is fine but it came at the cost of basically zero time to learn or do things other than what my manager asks.
> Junior is the time to learn as much as possible and take risky bets (and suffer accordingly). When I was in a junior in a factory, the night shift knew me well.
That would require a whole, separate article.
Many (most?) juniors grinding like that in a major company will work hard to get nowhere. Speaking from experience. Yes, I learned some lessons:
1. Get a different job. Deadend jobs definitely exist, and are quite common.
2. Ignore senior folks who say "You're whining. It's crappy everywhere. Just learn to take it."
Number 2 has been wrong every single time someone said it.
> Nowadays, I've pared it back to 50 or so hours per week, because I now have a family,
This is not the endorsement you think it is. I've done quite well by insisting on 40 hour weeks. I'm going to assume you're doing much better than I am, because otherwise it seems like a life wasted.
Don't get me wrong. If you want to go much farther than I have, you likely will have to grind and work hard and smart and be lucky. But I assure you - most of the people I know who worked hard are not in a better position than I am (or if they are, the difference is incremental).
I was clear that the junior should be learning and experimenting. That's different from saying yes to everything and grinding it out. The juniors in my group, for example, are the ones leading the LLM charge and learning the new tooling ahead of management's awareness of them, so almost by definition they're not just filling their time taking orders from management. That's exactly how they should be spending their excess capacity.
> This is not the endorsement you think it is. I've done quite well by insisting on 40 hour weeks. I'm going to assume you're doing much better than I am, because otherwise it seems like a life wasted.
HN is not the kind of place I'm going to toot my own horn
> I was clear that the junior should be learning and experimenting. That's different from saying yes to everything and grinding it out. The juniors in my group, for example, are the ones leading the LLM charge and learning the new tooling ahead of management's awareness of them, so almost by definition they're not just filling their time taking orders from management. That's exactly how they should be spending their excess capacity.
Agreed that they should explore and experiment and learn. And they should do that at 40 hours a week on the job (I did!).
Not all jobs allow for it. Change jobs if that's the case. Chances are your pay will be the same and more, and you'll have more time for this. You simply don't need to stay and work evenings to do this.
As you get to the downswing of your career, you should have already worked and made enough mistakes to have most of your experience. You must cruise on that experience when you are older.
When you are old, that is not the time to work and make mistakes.
That is, most of the heavy work must be done as early as you can. Eat that frog.
I agree. When new programmers come from uni they sometimes barely did any programming. So at some time in their life they got to actually put in the time and learn how to be a competent developer. It is obviously great if you can do it on somebody else dime in a 9 to 5 but if you can’t get that you should just put in the time and learn. In the end you can at best get paid for the value you can create and if you are incompetent that is not going to be a lot
You realize “pairing it back to 50 hours a week” is not a great outcome don’t you?
If I graduated post 2012 instead of 1996, I would have tied my horse to a safe BigTech company and made a lot of money in cash and liquid RSUs long before I joined a bullshit startup that statistically wouldn’t have gone anywhere.
Hell I made that choice at 46 when my youngest (step)son graduated. I chose to work at BigTech instead of getting a meaningless “CTO” founding engineer position at a startup.
We work in different timezones so it's a mess. Either people give up their morning or they give up their evening time.
I'm at the bottom of the chain here and have no authority to change this. Given that I'm being let go soon there's not much reason for them to care about my mental state either.
But from the time I've been here, yes, you need to set boundaries or they'll do it for you. It seems like most PMs are used to talking to robots, because that's how they talk to us lately.
Statements like this one come for a position of privilege, which is to be expected on a forum like this one targeting techies who are most probably solidly middle-class, but just wanted to point that out. More exactly, most of the (normal) people are NOT in the position of designing their lives, believing otherwise is, again, tainted by said position of privilege.
You either misunderstood or we disagree fundamentally. Everyone can and should design their life. Of course richer people have a lot more choices, and poorer people a lot more constraints, but everyone can make informed choices.
Believing "most of the normal people" have no agency is condescending.
Oh they have agency. They also have bills to pay, families to take care of and many other obligations that folks of privilege do not need to be bothered with. It is immediately obvious how privileged we are compared to many others who are not a liberty of designing their lives or careers.
>They also have bills to pay, families to take care of and many other obligations
I honestly don't get your point. I also have bills to pay and a family to take care of. Almost everyone does. I can't just quit my job and spend my life sunbathing on a sunny island, even though that sounds way better than my office job.
The number of people who have so much that they don't ever need to worry about bills or affording a family is tiny, even among HN users. This is also not what "designing your life" is about.
To be clear, I acknowledge my privilege - I have a relatively high salary (but not US-high, not even 6 USD figures) and don't need to worry about day-to-day survival. I just fundamentally disagree that there is some threshold below which people can't make decisions about their own life or career.
> I just fundamentally disagree that there is some threshold below which people can't make decisions about their own life or career.
Stuff happens to you and to one's family that you just cannot "strategize" your life around just like that, unless you have (some, a good amount even) money, this is just how things are. If you haven't ever been in that place consider yourself very lucky.
I'm going to add my perspective here, I'm new to the website and have noticed people here might not fully understand not having any opportunity and what that is like. My mother, father, and grandparents all died before I was 19. I was homeless for a bit, and slept behind bushes while working at a local Kmart. I would have stayed homeless if not for some friends (that I barely knew then) inviting me to rent an apartment with them (they did not know about my situation).
The one thing I had going for me was that my grandmother prepaid my college tuition. So I scraped by working bullshit jobs, completed college, and now in my 30s I'm doing sort-of okay as a programmer for a start up (the pay here is bad, which is why I'm here).
It was awful getting here and I was always one small step away from being permanently homeless or dead. Maybe he didn't mean it like this, but a "normal" person means a person living in poverty in China or Indian or wherever else, and they all have it even worse than me.
I'm writing this here because, not you, but others on this website tend to just give some form of "bro, just stop sucking so bad if you want to improve your life" and it doesn't seem like they really understand what having no option is like.
I don't think it's condescending to believe a large number of people mostly cannot design their lives. At best they can try to make it better for their children, if at all.
Why is this condescending? It's not their fault, it's how the system works and their bad luck in not being born into a more privileged position. For people who cannot make ends meet, trying to make ends meet takes most of their available time and energy, there's not much left to ponder about life's choices.
What it is, in my opinion, is terribly unfair. I agree with the GP commenter that us here mostly ignore this reality. And that's OK, clearly TFA is aimed at privileged people like us, not most people.
> I don't think it's condescending to believe a large number of people mostly cannot design their lives. At best they can try to make it better for their children, if at all.
If they have children, barring some violent circumstances, then they've already participated in designing their life.
This is not a binary issue. All of us have choices and make decisions (feeding family, paying rent, not robbing a bank - all of these are choices). Yes, people in privileged positions have a much larger "choice space". And yes, plenty of underprivileged folks simply refuse to pursue the choices they have. Both these things can be true.
But sure - no one is denying that some folks exist who, either due to their own design or otherwise (e.g. health issues), may be stuck and their agency is significantly diminished.
> If they have children, barring some violent circumstances, then they've already participated in designing their life.
This is not the kind of design we're discussing here; "not having children" is usually a privileged, informed decision which most people are not in a position to make. It's certainly very far from "designing your career". Regardless, a lot of people don't have much choice here either, through a system conspiring on denying them choices (see: anti-abortion and anti-sex education lobbies, a health care system that conspires against their free time and energy, etc).
There's an illusion of choice, especially to us pontificating from our privileged lives, but no real choice.
> But sure - no one is denying that some folks exist [...] their agency is significantly diminished.
> This is not the kind of design we're discussing here
It certainly seems to be.
> "not having children" is usually a privileged, informed decision which most people are not in a position to make.
As I said - barring some violent circumstances, having a child, or at least the actions leading up to it, is a decision one makes.
> It's certainly very far from "designing your career".
This thread is not about designing one's career, but designing one's life. See the top level comment.
> Regardless, a lot of people don't have much choice here either, through a system conspiring on denying them choices (see: anti-abortion and anti-sex education lobbies, a health care system that conspires against their free time and energy, etc).
I've yet to meet someone who is not underage and doesn't understand that having kids is a consequence.
Sure, poor education and lack of abortion play a role, but none of that negates the fact that the person had a choice. It's exceptionally insulting to those who made different choices that led to positive outcomes to be told that people just like them in the same circumstances didn't have a choice.
Sorry, but your stance is very much coming across as privileged, who is trying to sympathize with people you don't understand. It's a very different perspective when you actually come from the background you're claiming didn't have a choice.
> As I said - barring some violent circumstances, having a child, or at least the actions leading up to it, is a decision one makes.
This is simply a falsehood you believe.
Or rather, it's a very constrained, mostly unfree "choice", with a lot of pressure from society telling them it's the wrong choice to make, barring them from access to abortion, contraception, and in many cases decent access to health and education. In many cases they are not even aware the choice existed, because it was concealed from them. I'm not sure if you are even aware a lot of people are not sure how babies come to be.
It's easy to claim everyone has access to these choices when you are, well, privileged.
> Sure, poor education and lack of abortion play a role, but none of that negates the fact that the person had a choice.
It absolutely negates it.
> It's exceptionally insulting to those who made different choices that led to positive outcomes to be told that people just like them in the same circumstances didn't have a choice.
Statistically, very few do. The odds are stacked against them. So it's not insulting at all; what's insulting is claiming from a privileged position that they "had a choice".
> Sorry, but your stance is very much coming across as privileged
Nope.
> It's a very different perspective when you actually come from the background you're claiming didn't have a choice.
Let me guess: your family was starving and dirt poor, your siblings were all addicts, but you managed to overcome this, educate yourself, and raise yourself to entrepreneurship. Is this where this is going?
> Or rather, it's a very constrained, mostly unfree "choice", with a lot of pressure from society telling them it's the wrong choice to make, barring them from access to abortion, contraception, and in many cases decent access to health and education. In many cases they are not even aware the choice existed, because it was concealed from them. I'm not sure if you are even aware a lot of people are not sure how babies come to be.
> Statistically, very few do. The odds are stacked against them.
I've already acknowledged much of these circumstances, right from my first comment. It doesn't change the very trivial fact that engaging in such behavior is a choice. Nor does it change the fact that virtually everyone has choices. I'll repeat what I said:
"Yes, people in privileged positions have a much larger "choice space". And yes, plenty of underprivileged folks simply refuse to pursue the choices they have. Both these things can be true."
As I said, even if you have kids, deciding whether you will feed them or let them starve (with all its consequences), is still a choice. Unless there are mental health issues involved, the person is making choices.
> Let me guess: your family was starving and dirt poor, your siblings were all addicts, but you managed to overcome this, educate yourself, and raise yourself to entrepreneurship. Is this where this is going?
No. But I didn't have easy access to contraception and abortion. And I was not a big outlier in the choices I made.
And let's be real: The majority of people who come to me and complain that they didn't really have a choice did not have siblings who were all addicts, coming from a dirt poor starving family.
> It doesn't change the very trivial fact that engaging in such behavior is a choice. Nor does it change the fact that virtually everyone has choices.
Quite the contrary, it does change it.
> As I said, even if you have kids, deciding whether you will feed them or let them starve (with all its consequences), is still a choice.
It's very hard to take you seriously after this.
> Arguments from extremes are not helping you.
This isn't about me or you; I don't need help. And you've just made an extreme argument which I quoted above.
By the way, it amazes me you consider the real world "an argument from extreme". I suppose from a very limited sample one might draw the same conclusion as you.
> It's very hard to take you seriously after this.
I take it you've not encountered such folks? It must be nice to be shielded. As I said, your comments definitely give off "privileged" vibes.
I don't know your background, but spend some time in various countries - both wealthy and not. Both repressive and not. When people debate the virtues and vices of freedom, much of what we discussed in this thread come into play. The US is very much a country centered on freedom, and the reason many are in a bad state is precisely because the US gives them more freedom by letting them have these choices. Statistically, they will choose poorly, but the fact that their behavior is predictable via statistics doesn't negate the fact that they made those choices.
> I take it you've not encountered such folks? It must be nice to be shielded.
What are you even trying to argue here? "Not dying and not letting your kids die is a choice"? I mean, sure, in a bizarre alien logic kind of way, but as someone once told me: "you're not helping yourself by using extreme arguments".
If that's your main point, we can stop here. I won't argue with extraterrestrials or robots.
> I don't know your background, but spend some time in various countries
Exactly, you don't know my background, so don't lecture me. Your lecturing comes across as very condescending and, well, privileged.
> The US
I'm not from the US.
> Statistically, they will choose poorly, but the fact that their behavior is predictable via statistics doesn't negate the fact that they made those choices.
> The only thing I have left to say is: Try not to confuse obligations with choices.
That is meaningless, though doubtless it seems very deep to you.
Look, you made the bizarre argument people always have choices because feeding your kids is a choice. In whatever alien world you live in that might be a clever argument. Meanwhile, in the real world...
I never considered that angle because no one ever explained it to me. It feels like this "privilege" concept explains a great deal about society. It is like a master key.
Someone recently told me about Jesus and the fact that he died to cleanse my sins. I never heard that one before either.
Deliberate planning is great but serendipity is important too. Some of the richest people I know made most of their wealth as a consequence of being in a position to act* when opportunities presented themselves.
My guess is that it's important not to be overly focused on the intermediate goals and the more debt you have the less able you feel to take risks.
*it may be more appropriate to say start than act as in the two cases that immediately come to
mind they were both 10+ year journeys.
Is it wrong to have your career on autopilot if you are satisfied with your job? Clearly, the author wasn't, switching from law to becoming a teacher/writer. So I guess that the article makes sense in this context.
> "Is it wrong to have your career on autopilot if you are satisfied with your job?"
Only if you don't mind the career equivalent of CFIT¹ when a mountain turns out not to be where your maps said it was. I'll wager that a lot of former Flash developers weren't expecting Apple to cause Flash to die out.
That's not the impression I got. It's about wanting a career that's meaningful to you. Whatever that means to you. Maybe your answer to "What would I do in my career if I could do anything?" is working 9-5 without a care in the world. That's totally valid.
I can want a decent work/life balance, but I also want to not be in a dead-end job. I can give some thought to my career (not being on total autopilot), and also have my job in balance with the rest of my life.
This reads a bit like classic self-help, but there's a solid point hiding underneath the platitudes. Most careers do get shaped by inertia: the projects you say yes to, the skills you accidentally accumulate, the expectations other people quietly set for you
I find that's a good reason, other than looking for an increase in salary, to seek out new employment opportunities every few years, while nudging your resume more towards the career you want rather than the career you've experienced.
> Many years ago I followed this process and, without exaggeration, it changed the course of my life. The insight I gained led me to quit law school, leave England and move to America and start down the path as a teacher and author. You’re reading this because of that choice. It remains the single most important career decision of my life
That "decision" required a safety net most will never have
Designing your career isn’t about self introspection, it’s about leverage
And leverage is stolen from the invisible hands that keep your world running while you journal
The problem isn't individual, but systemic: why is the freedom to choose rationed so narrowly?
For a lot of people, work isn't a career to design, it's survival math
This advice remains relevant but I think it misses an important nuance about how career design actually works in practice. The metaphor of "design" implies you're building something from scratch with full control, but career development is more like gardening - you can influence conditions but not force outcomes.
The key insight is recognizing the misalignment between your goals and your manager's goals. Your manager optimizes for team output and organizational needs. Your career growth is a secondary concern - important, but not primary. This creates a fundamental principal-agent problem. The solution isn't to become adversarial, it's to be explicit about your goals and negotiate actively rather than hoping they'll be noticed.
Practically, this means: (1) Having quarterly conversations where you explicitly state "I want to work on X technology" or "I'm aiming for senior by Q3" rather than assuming good work will be rewarded automatically. (2) Building skills outside your job scope through side projects, open source, or internal tools that solve real problems. (3) Being willing to change companies when growth stalls - the biggest salary/title jumps come from job changes, not promotions.
The dangerous flip side is over-optimization. I've seen engineers obsess over "career design" to the point where they won't touch any task that doesn't directly ladder to their promotion case. That creates fragile specialists who can't adapt when their niche technology becomes obsolete. Better approach: have a direction, but maintain broad skills and genuine curiosity. The most interesting career paths come from unexpected opportunities you recognized because you had wide exposure, not rigid planning.
What helps me is keeping around my TODO.txt month by month, as well as a lot of screenshots and images of the things I find relevant for sharing in stand ups and meetings and such (as well as presentations).
So if I need to review the past month/year (e.g. when I want to update CV/site or catch up with management), it’s just a matter of going through a bunch of text and images without a lot of unnecessary fluff, like digging through Jira. Maybe if I want to get the approximate time/effort spent on particular stuff, based on the amount of activity there.
Alongside that, it’s also nice to document stuff that was particularly good, or all the ways software broke in (and what broke how often), as well as stuff that pissed me off and made me want to quit (sometimes people/mindsets, sometimes tangible code or practices).
When the default is just going with the flow and not documenting anything and doing no self reflection, every improvement upon that helps.
GPT was actually pretty good for this use case until 5.2 kneecapped its long term memory and now its more aggressive about pruning ( very annoying as wide recall now has to be explicitly invoked ).
Currently not really, at least not for the weekly status meetings.
Typically I'll have a folder with a bunch of numbered files in the order that I want to talk about them, since it's easier to just quickly share my screen and run through then when I want to let others know what I've done, for example along the lines of:
If I need them for like a yearly performance review, then I'll probably do a pass where I group them into named folders and write a doc loosely following those topics, given that I might work on similar improvements and fixes across more than just 1 week. Pretty low friction daily and also when I need more structure.
So a bit of my thoughts + open to suggestions from other folks on HN.
I've been a DevOps/SRE essentially my entire career and almost always in Finance (banks, FinTech startups, multiple hedge funds etc) and most recently in crypto.
It's seemed that for SWEs the path was always something like:
- junior
- team lead
- manager
- manager of managers
- CTO (or VP of Engineering etc)
For SREs/DevOps it always felt a bit fuzzier after manager and most of the manager of managers I know ended up being that role in an "infra" department (e.g. k8s, networking etc).
I would love to know what folks with my background ended up doing later in their careers/age mid 40s and above?
(all of this is even more fuzzy due to LLMs/AI and part of me feels like it's time to start pivoting into some kind of IRL service or manufacturing role given the speed at which things are developing. e.g. maybe I should buy a bakery...)
Open to all kinds of stories and suggestions here as would most likely benefit me and also lots of other folks reading the comments.
> I would love to know what folks with my background ended up doing later in their careers/age mid 40s and above?
I'm 41 now, started working in education but pivoted back to tech quickly (DevOps specifically) since tech is a better match for me.
After a few years, fell upwards into management then pivoted into Technical Program Management roles where I've remained since. Love this since I get to interact with teams of people working in my program(s) but don't have the responsibilities of a people manager.
Personally, my roles focus on infrastructure and things at least loosely related to my DevOps background. Worked at two blockchain companies (I've been into blockchain tech since 2012) but considering moving into green energy somehow.
I think in most cases including yours: choose roles based both on interest and total compensation. And it's a lot easier to get roles (especially TPM roles) if you're already technically competent in that particular field (in your case FinTech and crypto).
Wondering if working as a contractor is any different. you won't stay longer than 6-12 months on a project and you can safely say goodbye without having to explain a gap in your resume
This is one of those areas where family starts to influence decisions. My wife and I had kids between 24 and 28. From that point forward, 'supporting the family' took priority over personal fulfillment.
Now that our kids are grown and self-supporting, it's wild how much simpler the risk calculation is. But at 52 with engineering manager being the dominant role in my CV, not particularly appealing to the small companies making big moves that I'm interested in.
What use is extrapolating what I said to its extreme end? In 1999 I quit my full time secure job to start a company. My wife was a stay at home mom, we had a new baby and a new mortgage for a house that was still being built. Yes it's possible, but counterexamples don't mean it's not a factor.
I’ve spent my career chasing jobs that had kept me employed for over 20 years so I can support a family. Unfortunately I have had to let the ‘system’ take me where I am needed so I can pay my bills. It is life.
I find that when decisions are very minor, people love to have tons of options to select from. When decisions are much more impactful and high stakes, people seem to love finding ways to convince themselves there are no options and that they must proceed down a single path out of necessity for how the world is.
> We have a sense of what we would most love to do but we immediately push it aside. Why? Typically because “it is not realistic” which is code for, “I can’t make money doing this.”
A lot of us live our lives according to the expectations of others (our parents, society, etc) because this is all we know how to do at first and what the "system" reinforces through school, career, etc. and this difference between what we want to do and what we actually end up doing can end up causing lots of suffering to ourselves (and to others).
I've seen fear as the primary obstacle to trying something different when the current route is not working. It's really hard to step outside the comfort zone in those situations.
My 2c as someone who has ended up in a non-traditional career track, mostly doing my own thing and getting paid for it.
While you definitely need a higher than average tolerance for uncertainty, the big thing is just not seeing all the options. Many choices are occluded by the options presented to you by employers, the educational system, etc. The spectrum of careers, which is a continuous higher-dimensional blob of "things you can do to make money", is systematized in such a way that while there are paths to unusual career outcomes, most of those paths can not be expressed.
You may on some level want to reach some career or lifestyle goal, but often the path to that destination isn't obvious, and it's definitely never presented to you as an option among the things you can choose, and more than likely you'll have few if any role models or people to ask for guidance if you find yourself on that track.
Not just fear of failure, but fear of disappointing people, losing status, or admitting (to yourself and others) that the plan you’ve been following isn't actually working
I just want to be left alone, without doing the corporate dances. I don’t care about your company, your culture, and your unique DNA. The only family I have is back home, so just let me do my work for 8-9 hours a day, and leave me alone.
Yikes! If I'm going to spend all week working with others, I hope they're not thinking this way about me. I don't know what "corporate" dance you're talking about, exactly, and I agree that "family" is too strong a word, but my colleagues are pretty cool, and I enjoy their company; I enjoy the work we do, and I want it to get done. I don't mind the time spent working on it; I think it's meaningful to contribute to the advancement of our civilization's agency and welfare.
I don't want my coworkers to "leave me alone", I want to participate in their society and mutually define what that means.
As adults, it's our opportunity—and obligation—to selectively reproduce civilization. I'm lucky to be able to do that with clever, earnest, and kind people.
I don't want to be treated like a cog in your paycheck mill.
I feel this so much. This expectation to care about work outside of work is obscene. The anger you will often receive for saying this is just as jarring.
I have a really hard time designing my career in tech because I believe that people already have more options than they need or can afford.
What people need aren't more options. What they need is MONEY; which is the ability to obtain the options which exist. And the only way to give people more money is through political means. This is why I was interested in crypto; it seemed to get straight to the point...
I later quit crypto due to too much corruption in the space and launched a mainstream startup with a co-founder centered around helping people find 'the perfect job' but I quit as co-founder because the idea of it almost makes me want to vomit now.
The system is firing people en masse. The system itself doesn't want people to have jobs... So me, trying to work against the system by offering a solution that operates within the system feels futile and like gaslighting users and myself. It's selling a dream. There is no perfect job. Reality is our socio-economic system doesn't even have a shitty job for you... Let alone a perfect job... And most jobs seem like bullshit jobs anyway.
It's extremely hard to find an idea that's both truly useful and profitable these days. That's a shame because that's exactly what I want to do with my life but I feel like this does not align with what is possible within the current system. I cannot find any such opportunities in the tech sector.
Someone told me I should get into politics but again if I think about what the typical politician does, I feel nauseous. The only kind of politician I could possibly be is the honest kind that gets assassinated... And of course I don't want that. Besides, nobody would fund me... My hitman would probably have an easier time raising funding to 'take me out' of politics than I would raising funding to get into it.
I resonate so much with you. I'm in the middle of getting my product out for people to use and naively kept thinking that a good product means people are interested.
I need to integrate with tools that prematurely deny me because I'm not a big company. I basically already lost, despite my tool being much more reasonable and maintainable (I've worked at the competitors and it was a mess).
The world doesn't care about good products, they just care about how it looks. Big companies look good, you don't. It got me demotivated early on. You really need thick skin to start selling a product.
Your last paragraph is an interesting way to frame it.
I also think it's true; what appeals to people is something superficial. The product has to be highly optimized to generate an initial 'wow' factor. But it's almost impossible to create such 'wow' factor without sacrificing something fundamental about the product.
The goal is to make such a good first impression that people will pay for your product and then will keep convincing themselves and their friends that your product is great... When it's not because actually there are many better alternatives out there which are higher quality and provide more flexibility.
Among financially successful products, I see a lot of rigid, inflexible, low-quality products. They create a 'wow' factor by removing complexity; also removing flexibility... Targeting a specific psychological bias... These products seem 'easy' and magical at first but what makes them easy also makes them inflexible and fundamentally useless. Because flexibility is what gives a competitive edge... But flexibility also scares people away.
I have also fallen in this trap by thinking that a good product that addresses the needs of users would make it wanted. But coming so far with no traction to show I seriously doubt my prospects of bridging the gap between from the needs to the wants.
But your opportunities depend partially on what you can actually do. In other words, optmize for your strengths, refine what works, remove what doesn't. Opportunities will come, but if you are not prepared based on your own predispositions, they are wasted on you anyway. Direction of the sailor of the sailor is but one factor in this.
I tried the exercise. It turned into a mess. I seem to only want to escape employment. Everything I "wanted" to do seemed to be a deflection from the fact that I have anxiety about my job, staying relevant, staying employed, hamstering enough money to clear out my debts when the competition or AI inevitably beat me.
I worked very hard for the first 5 or 6 years of my career - hit senior dev pretty quick, managed to double my pay moving into consultancy, and back on product dev in a smaller company nowadays.
Honestly? I don't feel a massive need to grow beyond where I am. I earn in the top 5% in my country. I live a comfortable and flexible life. I continue to learn like any dev with a passion for technology does - but i'm not constructing my life around an endless climb. If my role naturally transitions upwardly, great. If I stay where I am, steadily taking on more responsibility,that's also totally fine. The diminishing returns of chasing a CTO title or another arbritrarily large sum of money just doesn't seem worth it.
I can't be the only one burnt out on trying to design my career. especially these days when things outside your control just keep making it harder and harder (bad job market).
I enjoyed this article and think it's good advice, and I also think that the punchline (title + last sentence) is wrong. Not that it makes a big difference, I just treasure texts more that I feel the author thought through to the last detail.
If you don't design your career, in most cases I guess no one will. In the comments are good examples, like the random walk of the drunken sailor. The cases in which you could use the phrase "someone else designed it for me" in a meaningful way seem rather rare to me.
Great feedback. Many of us are on auto-pilot and taking a little bit of time to reflect, can shape a better version of that auto-pilot.
Another useful input is what are other people telling you? This shaped my career early on by either taking on the work others didn't want to do, or hearing others mention what they felt was important and focusing on this.
An underappreciated factor for building one's career is also building a safety net, because that allows for risk. Having that safety net means you can't be taken hostage in a salary negotiation, and it means that you can entertain riskier career moves. That safety net contains financial and (demonstrable) human capital.
I can’t say I’ve ever had “5 year plans” and even I did, facts on the ground change so fast, my plans would change.
I’ve been working since 1996. But without going into ancient history, in 2008, I had spent the last 9 years at my second job, became an expert beginner, been divorced for two years, and had 5 mortgages between my home and two rental properties that were underwater by about a $250K.
I was also teaching fitness classes part time to make up the gap - that was suppose just be a hobby.
Then my plan was to get out from under all of that mess. I didn’t know how or have a timeline. But it started with getting a job where I could get exposed to modern development practices (done after 3 months and a lot of prep work), stopped teaching so much (just kept my favorite classes where my friends were), and walked away from five mortgages and wrecked my credit (everyone was doing “strategic defaults” back then).
One thing I didn’t “plan” for was to meet and marry my future wife and become a father to pre-teens by 2013. I’m still married, boys are grown. That by itself changed my goals.
By 2013, I was still about 25% under paid even for an enterprise “senior” [sic] dev in Atlanta and still digging myself out of my financial mess while supporting a family.
My goal by then was to develop the soft skills and hard skills to be a team lead - again no timeline.
Then in 2016, my goal was for us to move and work for a much better paying tech company after 2020 when my youngest graduated from high school. Even that changed to I would rather just not move and get into customer facing cloud consulting (not staff aug) after 2020 when I thought I would have to travel a lot (who could have predicted a worldwide pandemic??).
Well both fell into my lap in mid 2020 - customer facing cloud consulting and BigTech and I didn’t have to move when I got a job at AWS working in Professional Services. I didn’t even know the department existed. Again not planned.
2020 my plan was to work for Amazon for four years, pay off debt, save some money and work for a smaller consulting firm. I knew three months after I got there that I definitely didn’t have the stomach for BigTech long term. This was the only 5 year plan that worked out more or less as I wanted (staff consultant for a reputable mid sized company).
Even then, I never thought in 5 years, we would decide to sell our house in the burbs, downsize and move to state tax free, much better weather Florida
“The crime which bankrupts men and nations is that of turning aside from one’s main purpose to serve a job here and there.”
As a former career contractor who took probably 7 commercial jobs I didn’t care about for every 1 creative job I wanted to do but for which I was underpaid, this feels deeply true.
There is a lot of luck involved too, the conditions we are born, family ,people we are friends with early on and so on, just because there are few outliers does not everyone can follow same.
It's worth mentioning that career conversations with your manager are always bullshit.
How could they not be? Your manager's incentives are to keep you around, keep you productive, and keep you inexpensive.
It's ridiculous to think that helping you build a successful career, which likely doesn't involve them or your current employer for very long, is something that they would do.
Why would you reveal any information about your long term plans to such an adversary?
If they realize that the company cannot provide what you are looking for then they may not want to invest more resources in keeping you around, or keeping you happy.
If they realize that you find some sort of intrinsic reward in certain work, then they might put you last for raises, because the money could help them more when spent on other people.
It's best to selectively reveal only your immediate short-term goals, only at the current company, and only as part of an ask.
Always make them pay for information, if you are going to reveal what you want, then they need to reveal whether they intend to help you or hinder you in getting it. Slow answers, non-answers, pushing to next quarter, etc. All signal that they intend to hinder.
It's rare to get an honest, fast "no".
Comments like this make me feel very lucky to have the job and manager I have! If the situation is as adversarial as the one you're describing, are you perhaps missing out on the fact that when people trust and genuinely support each other it's not zero sum? That you and your manager are actually on a team (assuming you're in a big company), basically at the same level in terms of power and influence?
> when people trust and genuinely support each other it's not zero sum
This is a clear non-sequitur.
Whether or not the situation is zero-sum is dictated by the situation not by the actions of people, or how they feel about each other.
If the situation is zero-sum, and one party doesn't realize, or is too trusting of other parties, then they just lose.
And they might not even realize that they lost, or that the situation was zero-sum to begin with.
> basically at the same level in terms of power and influence?
Obviously not true, unless you can truly ignore your manager and still be successful at the company, then they have power over you.
If they control more resources than you, or have more face time with people who do control resources, then they probably have more influence than you as well.
This whole comment reads like a sucker who doesn't know they are being scammed.
> This is a clear non-sequitur. Whether or not the situation is zero-sum is dictated by the situation not by the actions of people
Yes.
But a first-line manager more often than not is just another human being caught in the system rather than a total drone. They have their own agency distinct from their org's, and you can consider trusting them, up to a point.
Trust me, your situation is more common than not. Having been an IC for most of my career and then a manager and back to being an IC again, I can say that OP is way off base. Managers are incentivized to make sure that their reports can grow and can be promoted. When I was a manager, all my colleagues were perpetually diligent about making sure that we were fostering a great working environment for everyone.
I’m careful like this to a point, but you can establish trust with managers. Most decent cultures don’t favor hoarding good employees how you’ve described.
> It's ridiculous to think that helping you build a successful career, which likely doesn't involve them or your current employer for very long, is something that they would do.
This is a very short term perspective. If I am a good manager to you, you are much more likely to stay because that’s an important relationship & you are benefiting. If it means you move on because I helped you gain the skills/confidence you needed, great, maybe sometime down the road you can help me when I’m looking for me next job or refer my next awesome employee. But who cares, at least neither one of us had to be miserable.
You always have to be _cautious_ but don’t let relentless cynicism keep you from good useful professional relationships that can actually help you.
This is technically true, but metaphorically false.
Most readers, especially the younger crowd, are likely to be too trusting and not correctly recognize fundamentally adversarial relationships, like with their boss, with HR, with lawyers whom they don't pay personally, etc.
Especially when those people present the relationship with a faux version of the same naivety that they intend to prey upon.
The only people you can trust at a company, are people who have demonstrated that they value your relationship more than the company's relationship.
That's not impossible, but if they really need the salary, then the odds are stacked against you.
It's certainly nice to pretend that everyone is nice and trustworthy.
In fact, most people will hold it against you if you don't sufficiently pretend to be trusting.
Universal insincerity is part of the human condition.
To me a direct HR person is much less trustworthy than a manager with whom you’ve established a good track record. The manager’s behavior is incentivized completely differently depending on the company - sometimes it’s legitimate to manage towards the employees success and sometimes lose them. As a manager I had a director say something similar, that we are often just stepping stone on somebody’s career.
Whereas HR is a risk mitigation function whose purpose is to minimize the company’s exposure to lawsuits, and I stay miles away from them unless it’s absolutely necessary to engage. They can do other things on top of that function that are very helpful, but they are not there to help.
There are a lot of fictions at work. Still we all have our own risk profiles, and if we are lucky we can afford the risk of an honest conversation with our boss. That’s not the same as pretending everybody is trustworthy, it’s making a bet based on the specific situation at hand.
If your advice is “young people be careful, managers, supervisors, and HR are not your friends”, I totally agree.
I understand that and I agree. Though I think the real question is what you would do when you will achieve this goal. What then? Will you be happy? What you will do with the money? Will this amount be enough?
Can this ever be enough?
I am not sure. Is this even possible in current feudal corporate structures? I did spoke with some people from my work. One was afraid for his job because of another employee. Other was afraid of reorg and if there will be lay-offs. Another company and the merger there caused one guy to be afraid of loosing his job because system he build will be discontinued. Maybe their current position is not the career they really want and after the setback, they are afraid off, they will be able to advance it further in the direction they are actually aiming for... but what if not? What if they will never will be able to advance it further? What if they will never will be get back up?
At some point the only direction you can go is down. Is this all?
Even if you will be able to build your own company things may go wrong and you may loose it. Economy can change. Market can change. Your company may be bought or taken over. Nothing is truly sure.
Should you not invest in the carrier then? No, this is wrong. If you will not set course for you someone else will. And you may not like the place when you will end up. Setting up your own goals is very good practice.
But I am not sure if this should be your life goal because this is so dependent on so many variables. Variables you have absolutely no impact on. And with that uncertainty comes stress. I think that your life goals should be set to something that depends only, or almost only on you.
Imagine Sisyphus happy seems like the appropriate response.
I don't think it's a matter of setting goals based on what you can do alone, life is lonely enough as it it. I think it's more a matter of accepting that life is a sequence of unpredictable events, and you have to just embrace the absurdity of it all.
Yeah totally. Someone should totally have designed their career in marketing pre AI and not change course. They are in control. There are no outside forces.
Nope. It is not that black & white. It is always a mix of contextual changes and your decisions that are going define your path. Too much action on your own is also not going to help. In some cases, people who just didn't do a thing in decades, have achieved better that people who did all acrobatics.
+++ Non native english speaker, machine-edited text +++
English Version (clean, correct, humorous)
“Whoever ignores success because it doesn’t count as a mistake will make very little progress.”
The “Little Brother” Misassessment
Now, bro once said:
“If there’s no mistake, then I can’t learn anything from it. Without a mistake, there’s nothing to learn.”
But if his recipe for success - all the right, good, subtle, less noticeable things - isn’t even registered by his mind...
…then isn’t that a problem with the mental template he’s using?
“Fixed points of social polarization”...
Hey bro, before I hug you as the “Hero of Labor” - sincerely, warmly -
2,800 hours of work this year...
Tell me honestly:
Did only you earn that praise,
or do the employees of high‑performers like you also deserve some recognition?
I probably don’t know them -
but I do know you, which is why I’m asking.
Self‑reflection: Learning also comes from questioning routine
Keyword: Extremes (Mistake vs. Non‑Mistake)
Thesis: “You only learn from mistakes.”
Antithesis: “Then I must be a genius, considering how often I mess things up…”
Paradox: “If you never see success, you can’t do anything wrong.”
The “Little Brother” misjudgment is ultimately a cognitive trap.
It reduces learning to mistakes and filters out success, cooperation,
and quiet contributions.
The Mistake Olympics
Gold for the colleague who filled the coffee machine with dish soap.
Bronze for the intern - eventually you only learn how to apologize.
Punchline:
“I don’t make mistakes - I produce learning material.”
“My success is invisible, boss, because - as I’d like to emphasize -
I couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong.”
“Hero of labor? I’m a hero of coffee breaks.
Without me, there wouldn’t be any work at all.”
“If mistakes were the only source of learning, my life would count as a Harvard degree.”
Whoever ignores success because it doesn’t count as a mistake will make very little progress.
+++ COMMERCIAL BREAK! +++
LIFESTYLE: THE WIRELESS MOBILEBUTTON ?
The wireless button lifestyle
is a practical and simple solution
for users who want reliable communication
without unnecessary distractions.
Because modern smartphones can do way too much.
Forget apps, streaming, selfies,
and endless notifications -
and yes, even without emojis: finally real words again.
Pure minimalism:
One button, one life, your direction!
“Since I started using the one‑button phone,
I actually know what my friends look like.”
- A convinced ex‑smartphone addict
“I just wanted to quickly check something online…
Now I meditate.”
- A satisfied user
Because sometimes less is simply… less.
+++
hoped that it adds something ...useful...nor... hahaha!
My favorite lens on this comes from Hamming:
> It is well known the drunken sailor whos taggers to the left or right n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about sqrt(n) steps from the origin. But if there is a pretty girl in one direction, then his steps will tend to go in that direction and he will go a distance proportional to n. In a lifetime of many, many independent choices, small and large, a career with a vision will get you a distance proportional to n, while no vision will get you only the distance sqrt(n). In a sense, the main difference between those who go far and those who do not is some people have a vision and others do not and therefore can only react to the current events as they happen.
Just a tiny bit of bias towards a direction will get you very far very fast.
I once modeled+visualised this with a bit of javascript[1] and it's quite surprising to see the huge difference from even a tiny multiplication factor on each random/probabilistic decision.
[1] https://swizec.com/blog/your-career-needs-a-vision/
Hamming was also writing from a highly privileged position. He was able to work at Bell Labs for the majority of his career. That just doesn’t exist today.
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering is a great book but it needs context. The last edition was released in 1994. Programmers had a lot of labour power back then.
Today though? The median house costs more than a third of the median income. Inflation has raised costs of living to unsustainable levels. And for programmers there have been hundreds of thousands of layoffs since 2023 and a low number of job openings.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to take what job you can get or stay in a job you don’t care for until the trade winds return.
This is a framing issue. You can't control the times, but good advice is applicable in good and bad times. If Hamming was operating from a "good time", it should be true that his policies are also applicable in the "bad times".
His advice to "work on the worlds hardest problems" was spoken to people who had worked their way past the initial difficulties. General advice to "Move towards important problems", which is precisely the same thing, applies in good and bad times, and is very likely to produce in you a valuable expertise.
Personally, I find the advice useful. Most who provide a framing for causes of success either do not place it in relation to anything, or relate it primarily their own situation, and their argument becomes susceptible to interpretation as survivorship bias. Some try to extend their argument to cover more cases, but can be seen as overconfident based on limited experience. It's hard for one writer to "prove" what general success rules are.
What are the important problems today? Do you mean AI? I'm not sure I'd agree or that it's obvious what the "important" problems are.
It's not about good or bad times. All compasses are broken so any particular direction you believe you are walking deliberately might as well be uniformly random.
"Direction" and "design" are probably the wrong metaphors for careers.
I think it is better for your mental health to see yourself as having some agency. You certainly have some, though how much we can debate. But saying something like "all compasses are broken" sounds so defeatist that I worry you are experiencing depression.
It seems more odd to me you are placing as much value on career agency to infer ones mental health broadly. I'm not saying this isnt a norm in many cultures, but I'd like to hear your argument for supporting it.
>If Hamming was operating from a "good time", it should be true that his policies are also applicable in the "bad times".
No. Why?
> Hamming was also writing from a highly privileged position.
Hamming had a lot of career capital. He was the only person in the world with his track record. If you needed his kind of research/output/teaching/etc, he was the person you needed.
Cal Newport talks a lot about this. Great books.
Have something [unique/valuable] to offer and you'll be surprised how many doors it opens. Yes it takes time to stairstep your way there. A fresh grad has less career capital than a seasoned engineer with a track record of building billion dollar companies.
>I don’t think it’s unreasonable to take what job you can get or stay in a job you don’t care for until the trade winds return.
Having a goal does not seem at all at odds with weathering a storm. Your choices can then be what you learn in your free time, or what horizontal moves you make at that job, or which people you get closer to, for example.
When I got into the industry over 20 years ago, it was unheard of for an IC software engineer to retire early. Unless you got extremely lucky like working at Microsoft or Apple pre-IPO, you just weren't making the kind of money big law or doctors made.
That is not the case now. Yes the competition is incredibly fierce but the pay has skyrocketed.
There were a lot of factors that went into making salaries sky-rocket. One of those was leverage: there was more demand for skilled programmers than there were available. You also had the ZIRP era from 2008-2021ish. If you could write fizz buzz and breathe you could get a good paying job.
In the 90s inflation-adjusted salaries were still rather high. A 75k USD salary in 1995 is roughly 150k USD today. And the median house was less than a third of your income. And in the 90s there was even more demand for programmers.
The early 2000s were a bit rough unless you were insulated inside Google and big tech.
But 2025 is a very different landscape. I’ve talked to lots of highly talented developers who’ve been consistently employed since the early 2000s who have been on the job search for 9 months, a year.
It’s one thing to have a goal for one’s career but it’s not like you can wait around to find that perfect opportunity forever, right?
Some times you have to find something and work. It might not fit into your plans for your career but it might provide you with the income you need to keep your family afloat and maybe let you indulge in a hobby.
> … but it’s not like you can wait around to find that perfect opportunity forever, right?
> Some times you have to find something and work …
Rather than waiting for a perfect choice, I read Hamming as reminding us that are making choices all the time and cannot avoid doing so. Even not choosing, e.g., staying in a less-than-ideal role, is a choice. Given that we have no choice but to choose, Hamming suggests knowing up front where we want to go in the long term and biasing choices in that general direction.
Swizec mentioned Cal Newport elsewhere[0], and Newport’s recommendations around lifestyle-centric career planning provide an interesting bridge between your comments about occasionally needing to weather a storm and Hamming.
Some view titles, particular projects, or certain roles to be worthwhile goals in themselves. “I just graduated law school, so I want to make partner at a big NYC law firm” is a goal that a motivated new attorney might set. Does that career goal serve her if she despises traffic, subway travel, and apartment living? Newport advocates beginning with a vision of an ideal lifestyle and working backward from there by setting career goals to achieve the desired lifestyle.
Where he may be in a conflict with Hamming is warning people about what he calls the grand goal theory, of which the fresh law school grad aiming at partner shows the pitfalls. Hamming’s advice will help you go far. Newport warns that if you’re going to go far, be sure it’s in the direction you want to go.
In the case you mentioned of someone who is long-term unemployed, having a job that produces income is certainly nearer to any Hamming career goal and any Newport ideal lifestyle than that person’s present circumstance of draining savings or, worse, accumulating debt for basic living expenses.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46354790
>In the 90s inflation-adjusted salaries were still rather high. A 75k USD salary in 1995 is roughly 150k USD today. And the median house was less than a third of your income. And in the 90s there was even more demand for programmers.
Right but how many programmers were making even 150k back then, even if they were 10x geniuses? I don't think even high level ICs at IBM or Microsoft were making that much. Even inflation adjusted, that's lower than the medain at FAANG these days.
Look man, life was unironically just better for everyone back in the 90s. Minimum wage, median wage, highest earners, if you do the math everything was cheaper and wages were comparatively higher. Gas, food, electricity, housing, it was all cheaper. There were fewer regulations and less bureaucracy.
The buying power of a programmer in the 90s was much, much higher than an average programmer today.
>Look man, life was unironically just better for everyone back in the 90s.
It was not. Programmers were not buying Porches and living in luxury neighborhoods or retiring early.
Watch Office Space. Being a programmer was a low status, averagely paying job.
Was life better back in the 90s for the average programmer? Maybe? Housing was certainly cheaper, I'll give you that. But for exceptional engineers was it better?
Did programmers show up to work to have a barista make them a gourmet coffee, have catered lunches, free massages, all the meanwhile getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars extra per year in RSUs? I don't think so.
There's no way an exceptional engineer had a better quality of life in the 90s than they would today. There was no FAANG, no deca-corns, no big tech giving near as many perks and comp. It just wasn't comparable.
I think the parent sufficiently qualified their take to mean how much an average person could realistically expect to make in inflation-adjusted dollars. Whether "exceptional" engineers were pulling numerically similar salaries or not seems like a bit of a strawman. Thankfully, the day-to-day conditions of cube farms in grey-space aren't as common today, but it's not wildly different for a majority of people. Trade the cube for a standing desk, and it's often still the same grey office in a tower somewhere working on something boring. After inflation and accounting for cost of housing, the numerically higher salary doesn't mean a whole lot, especially so since it's often theoretical money and not vastly changed tax brackets. Our needs as people haven't changed; we don't suddenly need a Porsche that we can afford instead of a house that we can't. Some things have become much cheaper in inflation-adjusted dollars, which is great, but if they didn't, we simply wouldn't have the money for them.
My point is that 20+ years ago, there was frustration here (and elsewhere) that even if we weren't 10x engineers, even being 3x engineers could not get us 3x the compensation.
That changed in the last 20 years for the better. People who had the work ethic and aptitude to become medical doctors or lawyers or management consultants no longer had to sacrifice compensation if they loved tech.
This is notable and worth calling out, and pointing out it wasn't always like this.
Ya I suppose that is a fair point, albeit a tangential somewhat luck-based one. Additionally, that ceiling has been likely raised across technical professions for non-men as well who have the potential and drive to be at the top of whatever ladder. I say tangential because while the ceiling was raised significantly, the parent's argument was that it wasn't nearly as necessary to be the 1% fortunate genius landing a dream gig, which is still true.
Okay sure, life was unironically just better for everyone back in the 90s except for the highest paid exceptional programmers.
Do you feel better now? Will you admit the economy is bad, and has been getting worse for 50 years straight for absolutely everyone (except the most exceptional engineers)?
What is the point you are arguing?
>What is the point you are arguing?
That it is way better to be working at Nvidia, Google, or Apple today than it would have been working for IBM, HP, or even Microsoft 30 years ago.
Comparatively cheaper, no. Americans could afford a lot of things, but the average American home looked like Malcolm in the Middle, and not so much more fancy for the higher class. Meanwhile in 2025, people have immense furbished kitchen (I’m European so I always notice that in abs-training-bro-youtube-slop, I’m not talking about influencers here) and living rooms, order food deliveries all the time, and perhaps some americans could access the number of flights that we saw in movies like Die Hard (going from NYC to SF to see a wife), but that was unimaginable for Europeans. We’re seeing wealth levels that are unimaginable, and global poverty has receded so much that the UN overhauled their definition to redirect their efforts towards human rights rather than hunger.
No, the average 30 year old American owns far less than the average 30 year old American did in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Owning a home in a safe community is what is most important, and most young men can't seem to get that. Things are getting worse.
Heck, I'll lower the bar! I'm (mid-30s American) not so worried about 'safe'. A certain amount of danger is fine. Desirable, even, if it meant I could live in my home town, not in an unfamiliar city.
I could buy half of a house, right now, cash. I don't, because the moment I do, I'll be forced to sell/move/whatever. Again. Where I am [for work] and where I want to be are forever at odds. Leaders have found it fashionable to bundle us all together. Spin the wheel and see if we hit RTO, let's bid against each other [again].
All to say, I'd give half my salary to never negotiate it or my location, again. Clearly not an option, so what to do? Endure and save. You won't see me buying toys or status symbols, that's for sure. At Will employment, meet At Will spending.
> Programmers had a lot of labour power back then.
Huh? Back then, there was very little glamor to software engineering. Computing just wasn't serious enough. There was relatively little competition, salaries were unremarkable, and sure, you could land a job for life, but that still exists today. If you are an IT guy for a lumber mill, a regional ISP, or a grocery store, it's not going to be as cutthroat as Big Tech. It's just that you're not gonna be making millions.
We're pretending that this type of cozy tech jobs don't exist anymore, but they do. They just don't come with IPOs and RSUs.
> The median house costs more than a third of the median income
That sounds like a steal, in my city the median home price across all types is 10-20x the median annual household income
Did they mean perhaps taking a 25 year mortgage on the median house would consume a third of the median income?
I suppose it could be interpreted either way, but your interpretation probably makes more sense in context. In reports about housing cost in Canada, they tend to use both the median income to median servicing cost like you have, but also home price-to-income ratio which often is a multiple of annual income for whatever reason.
Further down in the thread there's mention of median housing cost to income ratio for programmers in the 90's, and in that situation it seems like the absolute total cost of a house was a fraction of annual income, so it could go either way, but it would be much tougher now for your annual salary to surpass the cost of a house unless it's severely in the boonies.
It ultimately doesn't change the advice. Strongly deciding I wanted a career change led me to putting in some extra time and tripling my income. It's easier if you can reduce obligations and noise and focus on what matters to optimize for whatever you want. It may not be easy, but you have some degree of power to alter your trajectory to some extent
Is this still a valuable read today (specially taking it into account)? It's been in my reading list for a while now but I'm always postponing :|
I read/skimmed it this year. I don't feel it was worth it. The first few and last few chapters have some nuggets but for the most part it's pretty highly technical stuff that feels not super relevant or interesting for a software engineer today (in my opinion).
That's really nice, but the point where the vision is should move too. You learn as you progress. What you enjoy changes. The entire industry moves. Being focused on the goal you defined 30 years ago is almost certainly wrong for most people.
After ~15 years, I've realized that no good things come to you without sustained focus / attentiveness, and gentle pressure in the direction of attention. What everyone here is saying is "be closed loop", vs the drunkards "open loop". Combined with a bit of progress every day, it's (so far, at least) magical what happens.
Another bit to consider: It took a long time to realize that basically everyone wants basically everyone to succeed, as long as incentives align. It was very easy to imagine I was swimming upstream early in my career - especially my early mentors urging me to specialize to find success. My initial temptation was to "specialize" in hot/attractive topics in an effort to be the "indispensable X authority". But my PhD advisor urged me to "not swim in red water", where the incentives are inherently conflicting - everyone wants to be "the X person".
Much better to find a team working on a good problem somewhat like the ones you want to solve and just push along with them. You can save yourself a lot of energy by slotting yourself into a system that aligns with your preferred direction of travel, even if only a little bit. The current carries you.
I literally fell into anti-fraud and email security back in 2012 and spent a totally unexpected chunk of my career around those topics.
The amount of people I've heard of say they want to go into email security is very small.
I think this demostrates a far more important perspective than "have a vision" - which is easy to explain and almost impossible to execute, which is be curious, intentional and open to lots of things. The curious & open part leads you to new oppportunities, and the intentional part helps you figure out how to evaluate & where to go next.
This sounds like much better advice. Trying to plan out a tech career over decades seems like very premature optimizing. Being curious and making sure you keep learning is not only very pleasant, it’s useful. And when the tech changes, fine, no problem. Most of the big features of my life have not been plannable ahead of time.
Exactly. You can “have a vision” to accelerate full speed and hit the hard wall and just before going full throttle you are offered an opportunity to enter an open door around the corner which you have never even thought about. And that door helps you discover a new vision, that might stick for lifetime.
Also, while the original advice about “vision” sounds reasonable, it also sounds a bit dogmatic. The filpside of “career vision” is “tunnel vision”. And life is not deterministic, it has a much more probabalistic nature. Hence, curiosity and open mind.
I always wondered about that.
Seemed like everyone was doing topics in the “red water” and felt useless to not.
I found my areas of interest were the “red water” of 20 years prior and there was little left and it didn’t solve problems relevant to industry.
Quit PhD and got a job where I was grossly underpaid until the next one.
I can’t emphasize this enough. Every 5 years or so I reassess what my goals are and refocus my vision on where I want to apply my skills.
Things change fast in our industry so being able to pivot to something nearby is paramount for maintaining a career in this field.
Not everyone has the fortune to spend 15 years at a FAANG or other large corporation. Sometimes you have to build it.
Every five years or so, my wife asks me, "What do you need to learn now for the next five years of your career?"
It's the same as what you do, except I need the reminder...
>>Being focused on the goal you defined 30 years ago is almost certainly wrong for most people.
I think there are certain things that are not likely to change, and must be aimed for. For starters, being healthy, proactively working towards a retirement nest egg, so that you don't end up homeless and starving in case things go south too fast.
There are many such things I hold as things I would want several years from now. Good health, free time and enough money to not need a job to just put food on the table, and a roof above my head.
>> Good health, free time and enough money to not need a job to just put food on the table, and a roof above my head.
Sound like the utility function for a lot of people I would say.
Do people actually perform a random walk though? All terrain - both metaphorically and physically - is not equal, so wouldn't a more accurate description be 1. float on the water and go where the current/tides take you, or 2. decide when you're going to paddle against it towards the lighthouse? or more simply, "most people walk downhill"?
It is not something I share very often, because people assume a lot when I do, but von Braun[1] shared a similar idea. Ignoring for a moment his past, one cannot say that he had no achievements further supporting position noted by OP.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Aim_at_the_Stars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Aim_at_the_Stars
> Despite his moral quandaries, von Braun participates in the Nazi's V-2 rocket program during World War II to further his ambitions in rocket engineering. The film carefully depicts his efforts to reconcile his love for scientific exploration with the knowledge that his work is being used for destructive purposes.
I have a similar short story idea where a person of the calibre of Elon Musk who works so hard is made to feel and see his successful moonshot projects being used for destroying and subjugating nations. This would be similar to Oppenheimer. Another twist I can take with the story is Hero "Elon" knows about this outcome but still in the hope of change in institutional ideology over decades hopes for better use for his technology. In the movie Watchmen, Ozymandias feels the pain of millions he is going to kill to save future billions.
Watchmen: Killing millions to save billions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu2DdkOxLNs
This is a lovely mental model and also makes me feel a host of existential dread. I had a semblance of vision before gen AI and I think that vision needs serious revision
Which is fine. Goals shift and can even completely disappear, forcing you to pick another one. But having and pursuing long term goals at most times is still the ticket for success. My 2c.
Comment is interesting because its only confirmation bias material and doesn't hold up under minimal scrutiny. If you want to stay in pretentious CS analogy territory, then consider that if you can react to current events you can be a heuristical pathfinding algorithm that adjusts its goal based on locally optimal heuristics, making each individual step more efficient. This all a straight ass pull that will not translate to real world performance either, but it will serve to sound impressive to a fool.
It's a lovely metaphor, but I find myself at odds with the logic. What you sacrifice with vision I think is flexibility to respond to serendipity.
Vision is not a dictator, it's just having half an idea of where you'd love to be in X years.
It can and probably will move as you age and gain experience.
But if you're thinking you'd love to be your own boss and, as you have that vision, you find something much more interesting, you can still re-assess.
This resonates with me.
Three years ago, I left academia after finishing my PhD in Economics, frustrated by how little real-world impact my hard work seemed to have. I moved into IT, wanting to build things that would be more immediately useful and practical. Still, the dream of using science to create positive change never left me.
I was invited to work with AI at a company that develops software for the public sector. It wasn't the dream (I wouldn't be using my academic expertise) but it felt like a step closer. At least I'd be providing tools to support people who directly affect others' lives. From the start, I told my boss that I hoped someday to offer not just AI tools, but real socioeconomic statistical analysis as a service for the public sector. And while I've been happy working with AI, I've always sought out opportunities on projects that were more data-driven.
Three years later, some clients expressed interest in having our AI chatbot provide real-world socioeconomic data analysis. My boss just gave me a promotion to lead both the AI team and this new socioeconomic data initiative.
I was reflecting the other day on how fortunate I am, my dream "chased me." But it wasn't simply luck. I had always stayed attuned to the opportunities that arose.
That's a good point. I find it very hard to find the optimum balance between flexbility / vision.
Don't let optimum be the enemy of good and enjoy the ride.
My entire professional life/career has been a tension between trying new things/opportunities and trying to be intentional in what/where/when/how I make changes. I'll probably be done in about 10 years so I'll let you know how it worked out then.
I also really treasure that quote. Your visualization really made it hit home again though.
It does make me reflect on this piece I wrote 9(!!) years ago though, which hasn't completely materialized. I think I'm due for a re-alignment of priorities.
https://www.jrishaug.com/Who-do-you-want-to-be/
> n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about sqrt(n) steps from the origin
AKCSHUALLY
The root of the mean of the squared distances is sqrt(n).
The phrase as you quoted is the mean of the absolute distance. In general those are different. I don't know the latter from memory, and a quick look at the wikipedia page for Brownian motion doesn't have it.
You're right, sqrt(E[d^2]) > E[|d|] because of Jensen's inequality. The latter is about 0.8 sqrt(N).
Wait, are you saying that for a symmetrical random walk, the expected distance is of the order of sqrt(n), but even for a slightly biased random walk (like 0.5000001 chance to take right) it's of the order of n?
Edit: well of course it is. I was thinking expected position (which should be 0) not distance
yep
"expected distance" is average abs(coordinate), so for biased walk (and big enough time) it's simply abs(bias)*time, and for unbiased it's deviation==sqrt(variance)
Oh right, makes sense.
The “expected distance” is not what you think here.
For a binomial distribution of probability p and (1-p), after N steps the expectation value of right steps is Np.
The Variance is Np(1-p), so the standard deviation (or Root-Mean-Square) scales as Sqrt(N).
I think the beauty of this quote is working more than its content.
Most people, even when they do not sit down and think about it, follow one of the two career paths:
- Some people will actively pursue the next logical progression (senior, lead/manager, head/vp, exec).
- Some will happily stay in their position unless the next one is offered to them.
Being deliberate will always work better compared to being random, but it is not like all people who succeed in their careers deliberately planned to get where they are.
I would even guess that for the vast majority of successful careers, competency and luck played a much bigger role than being deliberate about it.
> would even guess that for the vast majority of successful careers, competency and luck played a much bigger role than being deliberate about it.
I think this is true. I had a while where my career was doing really well constant steps up, I was learning, getting promoted, was working on great projects and problems that were engaging and led to easy promotions. Then I got a new manager and it was downhill. Then I got a new job and the problems are insignificant and there's no room for growth of any kind. If my latest job was earlier in my career my career would be very different.
I never really had a plan for a career but I never settled. I borderline almost did at my last job as it paid enough and I loved the people like family but the move from that job landed me in the most interesting and well paying job I've had yet. Luck totally played a part in most of my jumps and the ones I thought were good were often bad and the ones I wasn't interested in ended up being the most interesting.
I just can’t understand people whose life goal is like to be a CTO by some date; I have never tried for a promotion since I first shifted into a job where I was paid to make software. Due to the random walk of promotion rules (and most likely the good work of bosses that believed in me), I have been promoted enough that I had to put thought leader into my linked in, but I do believe just making sure whatever you are working on is useful and successful to other people is enough worry; if you are skilled in software and thinking, the other things will work them selves out.
I have generally had strong vision in my career but this year due to external forces at play at work I have been much more reactive to the chaos and generally felt off the whole year, this was a nice mental model to step through, liked the visualization.
I don't think jus the raw distance (from here) is the metric to necessarily optimize for. It may be more useful to throughly search the nearby area, for example - especially if you feel you're in a good neighborhood already.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/sharks-use-math-hunt
A new study suggests that some sharks and other marine predators can follow strict mathematical strategies when foraging for dinner. The work, reported online June 9 in Nature, is the latest aiming to show whether animals sometimes move in a pattern called a Lévy walk.
Unlike random motion — in which animals take similar-sized steps in any direction, like a drunk stumbling around — Lévy walks are punctuated by rare, long forays in any direction. Draw a Lévy walk on a graph, and its squiggly pattern echoes a fractal, the mathematical phenomenon whose shape remains similar no matter the viewing scale.
Great point, and great blog post (as usual).
PS Tangent - FYI there's a typo "Minset" should be "Mindset" in the reference to your book. HTH
What a terribly flawed model. Being opportunistic can be classified as "vision" too.
That's basically diffusion versus drift.
But I think it is the wrong view, as generally people do move into the direction they want to go. Take a person doing plumbing but wanting to be in art. The problem is not the direction, the problem is taking the first step.
In general, many people dislike changing jobs, so they don't take steps. The steps are the problem, not the direction.
You don’t know anyone in your life that “talks big game?
Or someone else that “can’t get their stuff together?”
A lot of people never even “move”.
Drift made me think of electron drift under applied voltage or electric field.
The vision doesn't have to be accurate, it just has to be directional
This reminds me of a take on art, that goes something like "you don't need talent, but you do need to have taste". Taste is the same kind of driver as direction in this case.
Probably butchered the quote, can't remember who said it, but the message stuck.
Taken out of context, this line seems like a valid description of our ethos these days lol.
Premature optimization would like a word.
Tonight on Top Bit: I formally verify a theorem, James designs a dbms, and Richard writes a blog.
Ok but how do you know that the pretty girl isn't a succubus?
That's just a bonus.
The general sentiment of being aware about your career and decisions is true.
But this reminds me of what I hate about modern corporate “culture” the most. And what is broken about it the most.
Im speaking about the rat race. Tge fact, that you have to waste a noticeable part of your work time, effort and energy to sell your work instead of doing it. To the point where good salesmen make a “career” and become your bosses without any correlation to their work abilities or even management skills. Those are very good at designing their careers.
As a result the more corrupted the company with this style of internal management the more reliable it drowns in a swamp of ineffectiveness.
In a well functioning company or society “building a career” shouldn’t be a goal nor priority. It should be the natural outcome (more or less) of a “job very well done” that is a true priority.
Yes we’re not in a perfect world. But at least we should try to reach our ideals rather than promoting rat race mentality as a norm.
> To the point where good salesmen make a “career” and become your bosses without any correlation to their work abilities or even management skills.
The few times I've seen this actually happen at a company, it was not the kind of company I wanted to work for long-term anyway.
If the company is so broken that the wrong people are being promoted while the right people are being ignored constantly, there will be bigger problems than you simply missing a promotion.
The one startup I worked for that had this problem chronically (combined with some nepotism) did a bee-line run straight for insolvency and then collapsed. Everyone on the ground floor saw it coming. Some people still tried to race for promotions and upward career trajectory there, but the smart ones invested their effort in getting out.
That said, I've also worked at some companies where the right people were getting promoted but there were groups of people with sour grapes he were always upset it wasn't them. It's never something everyone agrees on.
Every single major tech company that I am aware of (admittedly only two from 1st and 2nd hand knowledge) require you to submit a promo doc showing you “operating at the level you want to get promoted to”. You only can show that by getting those plum opportunities and that only happens through building the right relationships with the right people and knowing how to navigate corporate culture.
How will someone know what you’re doing if you don’t tell them? There is an entire theory called the “luck surface area” that says you need to do the work and tell people you did the work.
https://modelthinkers.com/mental-model/surface-area-of-luck
There is another similar school of thought that the only thing that matters in your career are “results and relationships”. It took me way too long to figure all of this out. But once I did, it made my life much easier and it made it much easier to navigate within my company and getting opportunities on the outside.
During the last ten or so years as a “developer” without doing a single coding interview because I do know how to sell myself (and deliver)…
1. I’ve gotten three jobs where the new manager/director/CTO hired me as one of their first technical hires to lead major initiatives
2. Got a job at BigTech without any coding interviews even though my job required hands on keyboard coding as part of the job - cloud consulting specializing in app dev (yes full time direct hire with bonuses and RSUs)
3. Left there and had a job within a week as a staff consultant (full time) with another consulting company.
I’m not smarter than anyone else, I learned how to network, talk the talk and play the game.
On another note, you don’t and shouldn’t get a promotion based on doing your current job well. Just because you are a good developer doesn’t mean that you have the skills to lead other developers. That’s the entire point behind the “Peter Principle”. You have to show you are capable of working at the next level by working at the next level.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t make more money if you bring more value to a company than do done else at your level. But how is a company suppose to objectively manage that? You pulled more stories off the board? You had less QA defects?
For what it’s worth, I flew to close to the sun myself about a decade ago and realized I would suck as a manager of people. But I was getting better at leading projects. I chose the IC route.
> I’m not smarter than anyone else, I learned how to network, talk the talk and play the game.
Congratulations that you learned how to game the system. Fair enough. That doesn't mean you should brag about it or celebrate that terrible "school of thought".
> How will someone know what you’re doing if you don’t tell them?
That's a simple part: it's your manager's direct and one of the main job responsibilities. It's like 80% of what manager job is all about. To be perfectly aware of what his team is doing, what was done good, what was bad, performance, strong, weak sides etc. For every individual report.
The hard part is to find the manager who at least understands that, even harder to find someone who are good at it. But in my limited experience it's not much harder than to find and spot a decent engineer.
Its a gravity problem. Gravity doesn’t care whether you like it or not when you land after jumping out of a 70 story building. You can either choose to accept gravity exists and not jump out of a 70 story building - or jump and die.
My manager’s job is not to manage my career. The last time I was a “pull tickets off the board maintained by someone else” developer was over a decade ago. Even then my project manager was different than my actual manager. My manager didn’t look at the Jira board for all of his reports are across teams to know what they were doing.
You still had to tell him yourself during 1 on 1s on high level. But even then, what were you going to tell him? “I pulled some well defined tickers off of a Jira board and I deserve a promotion?” There are so many people that are good enough to do that on either the enterprise CRUD side or the BigTech side, why should you be promoted for that?
On the other hand, except for my stint at BigTech between 2020-2023, I was already at the top of the technical IC chain as far as responsibility. There was no place to be promoted to. I have broad initiatives that I’m responsible for and still the manager just knows that things are running smoothly and the stake holders are happy. They definitely aren’t keeping up with my day to day work.
To be honest, outside of BigTech, worrying about promotions aren’t worth the effort, do your job, build your resume and hop to another job if you want more money. But even then, you can’t hope to get ahead in your career if you are content with just being a ticket taker and not taking on responsibilities that require you to navigate corporate culture.
I would much rather play the game than spend months grinding leetCode trying to pass coding interviews.
Right this second, I have reason to believe that I would have a greater than even chance of getting into Google via GCP in their internal consulting division based on a combination of experience (not with GCP in particular), soft skills, network, and knowing how the game is played than a hands on developer would trying to get in by being able to “codez real gud”.
I don’t because I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than work in any large company again and I’m damn sure not going back into an office.
Again, not because I’m smarter, I’ve accepted the game for what it is.
> My manager’s job is not to manage my career.
But it is to promote and demote. In many (most?) companies, to get a promotion he needs to actively advocate for you in front of others. That is part of his job. Many of them simply optimize to "I'm not going to do that part of the job well, so you, as my report, need to give me the material I can sell to others." And not "you need to do well so I can sell to others".
Yes, that’s true. But that only happens if you give them something to work with. I volunteered for the thorny complicated initiatives at the startup I worked for prior to AWS.
While there was no place to be “promoted to” besides being a team lead as an IC, it did give me the chance to have the skillset to get my next job. I specifically told my CTO - we had a good working relationship - that a team lead would be a demotion. I was already influencing the direction of the entire company. He couldn’t “promoted me”. But he gave me a nice raise and kept letting me choose the hairy work that crossed team boundaries.
At BigTech, your manager can help you go through the promotion process. But it is still mostly out of their hands whether you get promoted. You have to prove you are deserving to a wider audience.
At my very large enterprise, a managers job is not to "promote and demote" it's to "get you where you want to be". That requires you to know your direction (to the article) but importantly, when they say "based on our company policies, you need to demonstrate an outsized inpact" you're going to have to work with the manager to define that, execute, and get the data to equip them to do that.
> hop to another job if you want more money
I wonder on what planet are you working?
Virtually everyone I know in IT bumped their salary only after switching the companies, never I've seen anyone who raised their salary with comparable magnitude and/or pace by working hard at one place.
Isn’t that what I just said?
I apologize if I misunderstood it. It sounded to me like the opposite.
> Gravity doesn’t care whether you like it or not when you land after jumping out of a 70 story building
With one key difference - it's not a gravity. It's just currently popular and dominating style in IT corporate culture. Mainly because it worked once for few successful companies and others cargo-culted it without much thought.
There will always be value and importance to networking, human relationships and communication. Because after all we're people, not robots.
But there will also be shift and evolution in management styles, just like we notice a shift in Leetcode interviews right now (less and less of this bullshit).
Change is the true "gravity" here.
Can you change the corporate culture of the companies that pay top of market any more than you can change gravity?
Sure I could change the culture by accepting a bullshit CTO position that is a glorified developer at a YC like startup that pays less than the intern I mentored when they got their return offer at BigTech and I could get meaningless “equity”.
But if I were in a position where I wanted to maximize my comp, I would play the game and convince a company with a lot of money to give me some of that money.
I just happen to care more about work life balance and making “enough” money now.
> With one key difference - it's not a gravity. It's just currently popular and dominating style in IT corporate culture. Mainly because it worked once for few successful companies and others cargo-culted it without much thought.
Sadly this is majority of tech industry. Cargo-cult whatever the big players are doing. But all is not lost. Lots of interesting smaller companies with highly technical people advocate for a tech culture that rewards real Engineering over Salesman/Politician. For instance, a FAANG resume with business impact bullet points will be pretty useless for a small team building a database. Someone with PR commits to open source Databases would hardly need to prove themselves.
Out of 10 companies I’ve worked for over 30 years, I’ve only worked for two large companies - General Electric when it was still an F10 company and later Amazon (AWS) - I hated my time at each of them. In fact, I turned down an opportunity by a former coworker at AWS who was a director at another well known non tech company who was going to create a position for me to lead their migration to AWS and then their “modernization”. I turned it down even though I could have made about $50K more in cash than I was making in cash and RSUs at Amazon because I didn’t want to work at another large company after leaving Amazon.
It’s fine if you want to work at smaller “interesting” companies, I’m doing the same. But let’s not pretend there are no tradeoffs.
The intern I mentored their intern summer and the year after they got back, got a return offer at 22 in 2022 that was the same I was making at 46 in 2020 as a senior enterprise dev in Atlanta.
On the opposite side, now they are an L5 (mid level) Solution Architect at 25 working at AWS doing a similar line of work to what I do[1] and make the same total comp as I make as as a staff consultant working at mid size firm at 51.
If you want to make the eye popping big tech salaries - you have to play the game.
[1] I’m mostly post sales leading implementations and doing some management style consulting reports. My former mentor is pre-sales.
Game the system? That _is_ the system!
> How will someone know what you’re doing if you don’t tell them?
They certainly seem to know when I'm not doing well, without me having to tell them.
Do you not see the asymmetry?
yes, there are much more bad managers than good ones, also human brain is naturally wired to notice problems and warnings, rather than good news
So you can either bemoan “bad management” that you can’t change or accept it and play the game.
I love the autonomy I get now in the latter part of my career over the last 10 years where I don’t have a manager hovering.
I don't bemoan actually, I'm just calling out things for what they are. I too learned to play the game and adapt the way it works for me.
Indeed, and I think that's the point of many in the thread.
Things are how they are, and some people may successfully navigate while playing some of the games. That's very different from saying "this is how it has to be" or "this is how it will always be".
These things are not mutually exclusive. You can do a great job and learn how to communicate a job well done.
If the company truly promotes incompetent salespeople then I’d steer clear of that company with the confidence that others are out there.
> These things are not mutually exclusive. You can do a great job and learn how to communicate a job well done.
Absolutely! Nothing wrong with communicating your work and networking. It's better to do that than don't, it's a good thing to do, it's a great thing to help your manager to be aware of what's going on.
As long as it is not a mandatory requirement and expectation of an engineer that puts pressure and becomes a toil.
If you are okay with just being a ticket taker who us not aiming for a promotion to a job with more scope, responsibility and pay, there is nothing wrong with that trade off.
I’m at a point in my life where I am okay with the level of autonomy I have and have no interest in being a director or above and getting cost of living raises for the foreseeable future. But I’m 51 and an empty nester with me and my wife.
A line level manager position would be a vertical move. A director is a “manager of managers”.
> If you are okay with just being a ticket taker who us not aiming for a promotion
I think your extreme example does not refute any of my points and I agree with you. "good manager" is not a guarantee for a good career, it's your responsibility ultimately.
The main thing missing from this IMO is an element of chance or randomness, the ability to incorporate “unknown unknowns” into your life. The most interesting people I’ve come across have had a variety of jobs, many of which they knew absolutely nothing about when starting out. There is a genuine value add when you’ve worked beyond the same white collar profession your entire working career.
In other words, the problem in designing your life is that you’re almost always going to pick things you already know. Maybe that gets you to the peak of your current profession over twenty years…but maybe some other job is actually a lot more fulfilling to you.
I’m not sure how to incorporate this into a young person’s real life experience, but I do think gap years, varied internships, volunteering, etc. are probably a good start.
I recently listened to a podcast with a guy that wrote a book advocating that young people spend 4 years getting a pilot’s license, working on a ranch, becoming an EMT, and various other useful skills/jobs. That seems like a great idea, although I didn’t like the hostility to traditional college he had in offering this plan.
In Quebec we have a sort of college between high school and university where you are forced to take "bullshit classes" along with the stuff you chose to study. Mine included philosophy, Spanish, photography, canoeing, and a few others. At the time it felt like a diversion, but it was a welcome introduction to something other than computer science.
In my first year of university, a senior grabbed me by the shoulders and told me that I _have_ to try an internship or semester abroad. One thing led to another and I have just celebrated 10 years in Germany. It led to my current career, which is not at all what I studied.
To answer your question, I think that it requires a certain curiosity, and an appetite for experimentation. I feel like the system is teaching kids the opposite of that.
I wish cegep, or an interstitial school where you have a year or 2 to just take tons of unrelated courses, was more common. So much focus is put on universities as job training that they lose a part of what historically has long made them special --- learning for the sake or learning.
Going all-in beats hedging your bets when the gravy train is running thick. But when times go sour, fortunes reverse. Unfortunately, that's when survivor bias shows up. Being diversified (almost) leads to being in the upper-middle, but if you only listen to those currently on top, you'll hear only the benefits of going all-in.
>The main thing missing from this IMO is an element of chance or randomness, the ability to incorporate “unknown unknowns” into your life.
100% this. When I started working in recruitment, it was literally intended to be a temporary means to an end. I stumbled across Hacker News back in 2010 and accidentally uncovered a niche (tech startups) that has resulted in a career where over the past 15 years has evolved into holding VP level roles at YC startups to now running my own successful recruitment and HR advisory business for startups. I can legitimately attribute that entire path and growth to accidentally stumbling across this website and couldn't possibly have guessed the impact it would ultimately have on my career.
In a society where everything needs to be optimal, randomness is seen as a mistake.
Societies that promote experimentation will - in the long run - become superior.
Because: The interesting things that give you leverage are at the frontier of knowledge. In business, as well as, in science.
And that’s the tragedy. It should be viewed as a feature, not the bug. Curiosity and willingness to mix it up is where the serious innovation resides. Cross cutting concepts more easily happen when you’ve done/experienced/seen/felt different stuff … period.
I tell my son all the time that I couldn’t predict what I’m doing now … 3 years prior. I didn’t have this insight or awareness but after running the SW/IT marathon for 25 years here we are. Trust your instincts, they weren’t developed in a vacuum. The more you explore, the more insights pop in your mind and every 3 years or so, a change presents itself for you to affirm or deny.
Yeah and even if you’re totally uninterested in “having an interesting life” and just want to maximize income/job prospects, I think you can make the argument that a little bit of randomness is actually the optimal path because it increases your luck surface area.
For example - working in a well-rated fine dining restaurant over a summer while you’re studying computer science seems totally unrelated and not optimal. But maybe that unique experience is what stands out on your resume, and maybe the knowledge about wine or food you acquired there builds a connection with an investor or manager, years down the line.
Optimal by whose criterion?
Financial capitalism, monetary value, the maximization of profit.
Another way to put it: don't focus on distance but more on behaving in tune with yourself.
Do you have a link to that podcast? Sounds interesting!
I forget the exact podcast, as I think he did a few different interviews. Might have been this one?
https://www.artofmanliness.com/people/fatherhood/podcast-108...
The book itself is called The Preparation.
If you design your career, you will almost certainly get the same outcome too.
I've managed people for decades and this has been a common pattern. I'd have people come to me with their plans to be in the C-suite in five or ten years, based precisely on self-help advice like that. None of them ended up there. But several of the people who never had a plan did in fact end up as VPs, CTOs, etc.
I don't want to say that thinking about your career doesn't matter. It's definitely easy to self-sabotage it by sticking to your comfort zone for life. But turn-by-turn plans are not useful because a lot of it is a product of chance. In a corporate setting, the best advice is just: get in the habit of solving tough problems for the people who matter, and find low-key ways to let them know about the good work you're doing. The rest, more or less, follows from that.
> I've managed people for decades and this has been a common pattern. I'd have people come to me with their plans to be in the C-suite in five or ten years, based precisely on self-help advice like that. None of them ended up there.
According to the Gervais Principle, these people are Clueless. Of course they end up in middle management. The top spots are reserved for Sociopaths.
> The top spots are reserved for Sociopaths
How many people think the first step is to become a sociopath?
And then try to act like they think a sociopath acts? Few people are ruthlessly cunning in the right way.
Even worse, do people try and model their behaviour based on The Apprentice or the worst of the shows about chefs?
I do something similar for development of me as a human being. I ask myself how can I improve, what kind of person do I want to be, how can I help make the world a better place.
My "career" is just a means to an end to put food on the table. Also being in my 30s I think I have mostly maxed it out anyway. Sure I might increase my wage a little bit but all in all as for being an IC it is a good as it gets. Sure there is always room for improvement but I am already constantly the person with the most technical skills in the room so it would not grant me any benefit.
I don't think your "career" needs to be a major focus in your life once you are set up at least. Especially if you don't do any meaningful work that actually helps people like being a doctor or teacher or something.
In the end my work just makes someone else richer, it doesn't have any meaning. It does not make the world a better place. Probably a worse place sometimes. I just do it to not starve.
> In the end my work just makes someone else richer, it doesn't have any meaning.
This is something I struggle with a lot. I left companies before, because the job felt meaningless and making some rich guy richer doesn't sound meaningful to me. I am trying to come up with a business idea I can work on on the side, that actually is supposed to make the world a better place, but I am struggling to find anything I have enough experience in to pursue.
I am leaning towards activism now, because that is probably the most achievable thing to do for me. Just building info sites nobody reads, trying to make non tech people aware about how Amazon, Google and so on makes life worse for everyone. Or how anti privacy laws are probably a bad idea.
But that does not feel fruitful either. My everyday life is consumed by the desire of having some kind of impact, making the world better.
> But that does not feel fruitful either. My everyday life is consumed by the desire of having some kind of impact, making the world better.
It nearly impossible to achieve substantial change alone. The key is to be organized with others, to find a community.
Now, I don't mean joining a political party, especially not at first. That can be important work but also very soul crushing
I am talking grassroots-level, local groups that work on a concrete topic, preferable something that concerns you personally. It is important to get into doing things as quickly as possible, be it organizing a small protest or maybe just a get together.
With this you will gain practically experience and you will find other people that share your goals and with whom you will struggle together.
Now, for the long term, you will also need to actually read political theory, you will have to get organized with people that have a more concrete strategy on how to create change but I generally would urge you to avoid analysis paralysis and focus on gaining practical experience first.
Building community is really the key.
I'm trying to avoid community unfortunately. I was never really accepted anywhere, whether is be online spaces or irl and I am not the person to socialize and do stuff with people. Also don't want to rely on people or having people rely on me.
> I was never really accepted anywhere
I felt the same way before I got my diagnosis for my neurodivergency. I mean I still do but it got better because I know now why I get rejected and are better at finding people I can fit in with.
> trying to make non tech people aware about how Amazon, Google and so on makes life worse for everyone. Or how anti privacy laws are probably a bad idea.
I think a majority of people already know this, that's why it feels fruitless. Also more negativity ("these companies are bad because of x, y, z") will also make you feel negative.
Why not make those sites, talk to those non-techy people, but provide _some_ form of thing they can do to make an impact in a tangible way, not just "don't use amazon", links to sites that put together local info for small areas, catagories of smaller online sites that you can use instead of amazon or something.
> My everyday life is consumed by the desire of having some kind of impact, making the world better.
Do you have something tangible you can look back on that you did last week that helped achieve this vision? If not, what small thing can you do this week?
> Do you have something tangible you can look back on that you did last week that helped achieve this vision? If not, what small thing can you do this week?
Not too sure, I am pretty delusional about the impact part. I want to achieve something big but have zero ideas on what I could start with. I have a ton of time and want to use it for something I actually believe in, the difficulty is in finding something I actually believe in...
I am also in my (late) 30s. I would definitely question myself if I were “constantly the person with the most technical skills in the room”. I of course think I’m smart, but I am rarely surrounded by people that I think I’m smarter than…
I agree work is just a means to an end of not starving, but I like learning and growing enough that if that were the case (most technical among my peers), I would start looking for another opportunity.
If you make a lot of money doing something that makes the world a worse place sometimes, and your goal is to simply "not starve," you can probably find something else to do which fulfills that requirement while also making the world a better place instead.
From the perspective of someone in their late 20s, the timing of this article feels quite off when entering 2026. The reality has become far different from the gist of what is presented here.
Career paths and opportunities have been getting broken and changing so much in recent years that I find it hard to plan anything. I don't even know what kind of "goal" is sustainable, let alone what the path towards it is.
The only sensible career that seems to offer a steady trajectory is medicine. Apart from that, my most successful peers were the ones that followed immediate money and speed-ran into owning some kind of real estate, which is a game changer. Besides that, people try to do as many side hustles as possible and diversify their income to save as much as they can and brace for a possible recession. I find it hard to apply any of these 8 steps in such volatile reality.
I wouldn't even say medicine. Neither Baby Boomers nor the current American healthcare system have 30 years left in them; that means that, unless you're already in your 40s or 50s, you're going to see the bottom fall out of that sector mid-career.
This is a political failure. It has nothing to do with individual decision-making and everything to do with poorly-managed incentives for appropriate 21st-century investments.
> unless you're already in your 40s or 50s, you're going to see the bottom fall out of that sector mid-career.
Can you elaborate? What's going to happen to the healthcare system?
It's going to become insolvent. People aren't going to be able to afford care.
I agree. I’m 51. I’m hoping to end up like Ben Kenobi. Say f%%% this and die after having a good life and letting the younger generation take over.
I would take it one step up and say if you don't design your life intentionally your career will.
Juniors fall into this pitfall so quick. Our newest hire actually set boundaries early on and I was pleasantly surprised
Disagree. This kind of comment is furtively pulling up the ladder behind you. Do as I say not as I do. Junior is the time to learn as much as possible and take risky bets (and suffer accordingly). When I was in a junior in a factory, the night shift knew me well. Nowadays, I've pared it back to 50 or so hours per week, because I now have a family, which is fine but it came at the cost of basically zero time to learn or do things other than what my manager asks.
> Junior is the time to learn as much as possible and take risky bets (and suffer accordingly). When I was in a junior in a factory, the night shift knew me well.
That would require a whole, separate article.
Many (most?) juniors grinding like that in a major company will work hard to get nowhere. Speaking from experience. Yes, I learned some lessons:
1. Get a different job. Deadend jobs definitely exist, and are quite common.
2. Ignore senior folks who say "You're whining. It's crappy everywhere. Just learn to take it."
Number 2 has been wrong every single time someone said it.
> Nowadays, I've pared it back to 50 or so hours per week, because I now have a family,
This is not the endorsement you think it is. I've done quite well by insisting on 40 hour weeks. I'm going to assume you're doing much better than I am, because otherwise it seems like a life wasted.
Don't get me wrong. If you want to go much farther than I have, you likely will have to grind and work hard and smart and be lucky. But I assure you - most of the people I know who worked hard are not in a better position than I am (or if they are, the difference is incremental).
I was clear that the junior should be learning and experimenting. That's different from saying yes to everything and grinding it out. The juniors in my group, for example, are the ones leading the LLM charge and learning the new tooling ahead of management's awareness of them, so almost by definition they're not just filling their time taking orders from management. That's exactly how they should be spending their excess capacity.
> This is not the endorsement you think it is. I've done quite well by insisting on 40 hour weeks. I'm going to assume you're doing much better than I am, because otherwise it seems like a life wasted.
HN is not the kind of place I'm going to toot my own horn
> I was clear that the junior should be learning and experimenting. That's different from saying yes to everything and grinding it out. The juniors in my group, for example, are the ones leading the LLM charge and learning the new tooling ahead of management's awareness of them, so almost by definition they're not just filling their time taking orders from management. That's exactly how they should be spending their excess capacity.
Agreed that they should explore and experiment and learn. And they should do that at 40 hours a week on the job (I did!).
Not all jobs allow for it. Change jobs if that's the case. Chances are your pay will be the same and more, and you'll have more time for this. You simply don't need to stay and work evenings to do this.
This is a correct view point to have.
As you get to the downswing of your career, you should have already worked and made enough mistakes to have most of your experience. You must cruise on that experience when you are older.
When you are old, that is not the time to work and make mistakes.
That is, most of the heavy work must be done as early as you can. Eat that frog.
I agree. When new programmers come from uni they sometimes barely did any programming. So at some time in their life they got to actually put in the time and learn how to be a competent developer. It is obviously great if you can do it on somebody else dime in a 9 to 5 but if you can’t get that you should just put in the time and learn. In the end you can at best get paid for the value you can create and if you are incompetent that is not going to be a lot
You realize “pairing it back to 50 hours a week” is not a great outcome don’t you?
If I graduated post 2012 instead of 1996, I would have tied my horse to a safe BigTech company and made a lot of money in cash and liquid RSUs long before I joined a bullshit startup that statistically wouldn’t have gone anywhere.
Hell I made that choice at 46 when my youngest (step)son graduated. I chose to work at BigTech instead of getting a meaningless “CTO” founding engineer position at a startup.
I hope they were work-life balance boundaries
So it's the kind of work place where you have to set boundaries? :)
You need to set your bounds in every single workplace, because no one workplace can set the right boundaries for everyone.
We work in different timezones so it's a mess. Either people give up their morning or they give up their evening time.
I'm at the bottom of the chain here and have no authority to change this. Given that I'm being let go soon there's not much reason for them to care about my mental state either.
But from the time I've been here, yes, you need to set boundaries or they'll do it for you. It seems like most PMs are used to talking to robots, because that's how they talk to us lately.
“Set your own boundaries, or someone else will do it for you”
Turtles all the way down
I think this mostly speaks about setting boundaries with your higher-up, which is revolved around you.
So, I guess it would be "Turtles all the way up"
What workplace is not?
Statements like this one come for a position of privilege, which is to be expected on a forum like this one targeting techies who are most probably solidly middle-class, but just wanted to point that out. More exactly, most of the (normal) people are NOT in the position of designing their lives, believing otherwise is, again, tainted by said position of privilege.
You either misunderstood or we disagree fundamentally. Everyone can and should design their life. Of course richer people have a lot more choices, and poorer people a lot more constraints, but everyone can make informed choices.
Believing "most of the normal people" have no agency is condescending.
Oh they have agency. They also have bills to pay, families to take care of and many other obligations that folks of privilege do not need to be bothered with. It is immediately obvious how privileged we are compared to many others who are not a liberty of designing their lives or careers.
>They also have bills to pay, families to take care of and many other obligations
I honestly don't get your point. I also have bills to pay and a family to take care of. Almost everyone does. I can't just quit my job and spend my life sunbathing on a sunny island, even though that sounds way better than my office job.
The number of people who have so much that they don't ever need to worry about bills or affording a family is tiny, even among HN users. This is also not what "designing your life" is about.
To be clear, I acknowledge my privilege - I have a relatively high salary (but not US-high, not even 6 USD figures) and don't need to worry about day-to-day survival. I just fundamentally disagree that there is some threshold below which people can't make decisions about their own life or career.
> I just fundamentally disagree that there is some threshold below which people can't make decisions about their own life or career.
Stuff happens to you and to one's family that you just cannot "strategize" your life around just like that, unless you have (some, a good amount even) money, this is just how things are. If you haven't ever been in that place consider yourself very lucky.
I'm going to add my perspective here, I'm new to the website and have noticed people here might not fully understand not having any opportunity and what that is like. My mother, father, and grandparents all died before I was 19. I was homeless for a bit, and slept behind bushes while working at a local Kmart. I would have stayed homeless if not for some friends (that I barely knew then) inviting me to rent an apartment with them (they did not know about my situation).
The one thing I had going for me was that my grandmother prepaid my college tuition. So I scraped by working bullshit jobs, completed college, and now in my 30s I'm doing sort-of okay as a programmer for a start up (the pay here is bad, which is why I'm here).
It was awful getting here and I was always one small step away from being permanently homeless or dead. Maybe he didn't mean it like this, but a "normal" person means a person living in poverty in China or Indian or wherever else, and they all have it even worse than me.
I'm writing this here because, not you, but others on this website tend to just give some form of "bro, just stop sucking so bad if you want to improve your life" and it doesn't seem like they really understand what having no option is like.
I don't think it's condescending to believe a large number of people mostly cannot design their lives. At best they can try to make it better for their children, if at all.
Why is this condescending? It's not their fault, it's how the system works and their bad luck in not being born into a more privileged position. For people who cannot make ends meet, trying to make ends meet takes most of their available time and energy, there's not much left to ponder about life's choices.
What it is, in my opinion, is terribly unfair. I agree with the GP commenter that us here mostly ignore this reality. And that's OK, clearly TFA is aimed at privileged people like us, not most people.
> I don't think it's condescending to believe a large number of people mostly cannot design their lives. At best they can try to make it better for their children, if at all.
If they have children, barring some violent circumstances, then they've already participated in designing their life.
This is not a binary issue. All of us have choices and make decisions (feeding family, paying rent, not robbing a bank - all of these are choices). Yes, people in privileged positions have a much larger "choice space". And yes, plenty of underprivileged folks simply refuse to pursue the choices they have. Both these things can be true.
But sure - no one is denying that some folks exist who, either due to their own design or otherwise (e.g. health issues), may be stuck and their agency is significantly diminished.
> If they have children, barring some violent circumstances, then they've already participated in designing their life.
This is not the kind of design we're discussing here; "not having children" is usually a privileged, informed decision which most people are not in a position to make. It's certainly very far from "designing your career". Regardless, a lot of people don't have much choice here either, through a system conspiring on denying them choices (see: anti-abortion and anti-sex education lobbies, a health care system that conspires against their free time and energy, etc).
There's an illusion of choice, especially to us pontificating from our privileged lives, but no real choice.
> But sure - no one is denying that some folks exist [...] their agency is significantly diminished.
Most folk, not some.
> This is not the kind of design we're discussing here
It certainly seems to be.
> "not having children" is usually a privileged, informed decision which most people are not in a position to make.
As I said - barring some violent circumstances, having a child, or at least the actions leading up to it, is a decision one makes.
> It's certainly very far from "designing your career".
This thread is not about designing one's career, but designing one's life. See the top level comment.
> Regardless, a lot of people don't have much choice here either, through a system conspiring on denying them choices (see: anti-abortion and anti-sex education lobbies, a health care system that conspires against their free time and energy, etc).
I've yet to meet someone who is not underage and doesn't understand that having kids is a consequence.
Sure, poor education and lack of abortion play a role, but none of that negates the fact that the person had a choice. It's exceptionally insulting to those who made different choices that led to positive outcomes to be told that people just like them in the same circumstances didn't have a choice.
Sorry, but your stance is very much coming across as privileged, who is trying to sympathize with people you don't understand. It's a very different perspective when you actually come from the background you're claiming didn't have a choice.
> As I said - barring some violent circumstances, having a child, or at least the actions leading up to it, is a decision one makes.
This is simply a falsehood you believe.
Or rather, it's a very constrained, mostly unfree "choice", with a lot of pressure from society telling them it's the wrong choice to make, barring them from access to abortion, contraception, and in many cases decent access to health and education. In many cases they are not even aware the choice existed, because it was concealed from them. I'm not sure if you are even aware a lot of people are not sure how babies come to be.
It's easy to claim everyone has access to these choices when you are, well, privileged.
> Sure, poor education and lack of abortion play a role, but none of that negates the fact that the person had a choice.
It absolutely negates it.
> It's exceptionally insulting to those who made different choices that led to positive outcomes to be told that people just like them in the same circumstances didn't have a choice.
Statistically, very few do. The odds are stacked against them. So it's not insulting at all; what's insulting is claiming from a privileged position that they "had a choice".
> Sorry, but your stance is very much coming across as privileged
Nope.
> It's a very different perspective when you actually come from the background you're claiming didn't have a choice.
Let me guess: your family was starving and dirt poor, your siblings were all addicts, but you managed to overcome this, educate yourself, and raise yourself to entrepreneurship. Is this where this is going?
> Or rather, it's a very constrained, mostly unfree "choice", with a lot of pressure from society telling them it's the wrong choice to make, barring them from access to abortion, contraception, and in many cases decent access to health and education. In many cases they are not even aware the choice existed, because it was concealed from them. I'm not sure if you are even aware a lot of people are not sure how babies come to be.
> Statistically, very few do. The odds are stacked against them.
I've already acknowledged much of these circumstances, right from my first comment. It doesn't change the very trivial fact that engaging in such behavior is a choice. Nor does it change the fact that virtually everyone has choices. I'll repeat what I said:
"Yes, people in privileged positions have a much larger "choice space". And yes, plenty of underprivileged folks simply refuse to pursue the choices they have. Both these things can be true."
As I said, even if you have kids, deciding whether you will feed them or let them starve (with all its consequences), is still a choice. Unless there are mental health issues involved, the person is making choices.
> Let me guess: your family was starving and dirt poor, your siblings were all addicts, but you managed to overcome this, educate yourself, and raise yourself to entrepreneurship. Is this where this is going?
No. But I didn't have easy access to contraception and abortion. And I was not a big outlier in the choices I made.
And let's be real: The majority of people who come to me and complain that they didn't really have a choice did not have siblings who were all addicts, coming from a dirt poor starving family.
Arguments from extremes are not helping you.
> It doesn't change the very trivial fact that engaging in such behavior is a choice. Nor does it change the fact that virtually everyone has choices.
Quite the contrary, it does change it.
> As I said, even if you have kids, deciding whether you will feed them or let them starve (with all its consequences), is still a choice.
It's very hard to take you seriously after this.
> Arguments from extremes are not helping you.
This isn't about me or you; I don't need help. And you've just made an extreme argument which I quoted above.
By the way, it amazes me you consider the real world "an argument from extreme". I suppose from a very limited sample one might draw the same conclusion as you.
> It's very hard to take you seriously after this.
I take it you've not encountered such folks? It must be nice to be shielded. As I said, your comments definitely give off "privileged" vibes.
I don't know your background, but spend some time in various countries - both wealthy and not. Both repressive and not. When people debate the virtues and vices of freedom, much of what we discussed in this thread come into play. The US is very much a country centered on freedom, and the reason many are in a bad state is precisely because the US gives them more freedom by letting them have these choices. Statistically, they will choose poorly, but the fact that their behavior is predictable via statistics doesn't negate the fact that they made those choices.
> I take it you've not encountered such folks? It must be nice to be shielded.
What are you even trying to argue here? "Not dying and not letting your kids die is a choice"? I mean, sure, in a bizarre alien logic kind of way, but as someone once told me: "you're not helping yourself by using extreme arguments".
If that's your main point, we can stop here. I won't argue with extraterrestrials or robots.
> I don't know your background, but spend some time in various countries
Exactly, you don't know my background, so don't lecture me. Your lecturing comes across as very condescending and, well, privileged.
> The US
I'm not from the US.
> Statistically, they will choose poorly, but the fact that their behavior is predictable via statistics doesn't negate the fact that they made those choices.
Non-sequitur.
> Exactly, you don't know my background, so don't lecture me. Your lecturing comes across as very condescending and, well, privileged.
1. I definitely am privileged.
2. Have you looked in a mirror?
3. You don't need to, as you yourself said: "And that's OK, clearly TFA is aimed at privileged people like us, not most people."
The only thing I have left to say is: Try not to confuse obligations with choices.
> I definitely am privileged
It shows! And condescending too, I'd add.
> The only thing I have left to say is: Try not to confuse obligations with choices.
That is meaningless, though doubtless it seems very deep to you.
Look, you made the bizarre argument people always have choices because feeding your kids is a choice. In whatever alien world you live in that might be a clever argument. Meanwhile, in the real world...
Abandoning your children is not an extreme example. It's a situation that anyone that knows poverty is familiar with.
They're just speaking from their own place of privilege.
I never considered that angle because no one ever explained it to me. It feels like this "privilege" concept explains a great deal about society. It is like a master key.
Someone recently told me about Jesus and the fact that he died to cleanse my sins. I never heard that one before either.
Deliberate planning is great but serendipity is important too. Some of the richest people I know made most of their wealth as a consequence of being in a position to act* when opportunities presented themselves.
My guess is that it's important not to be overly focused on the intermediate goals and the more debt you have the less able you feel to take risks.
*it may be more appropriate to say start than act as in the two cases that immediately come to mind they were both 10+ year journeys.
This is a very "live to work" article.
Is it wrong to have your career on autopilot if you are satisfied with your job? Clearly, the author wasn't, switching from law to becoming a teacher/writer. So I guess that the article makes sense in this context.
> "Is it wrong to have your career on autopilot if you are satisfied with your job?"
Only if you don't mind the career equivalent of CFIT¹ when a mountain turns out not to be where your maps said it was. I'll wager that a lot of former Flash developers weren't expecting Apple to cause Flash to die out.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_flight_into_terrain
> This is a very "live to work" article.
That's not the impression I got. It's about wanting a career that's meaningful to you. Whatever that means to you. Maybe your answer to "What would I do in my career if I could do anything?" is working 9-5 without a care in the world. That's totally valid.
I can want a decent work/life balance, but I also want to not be in a dead-end job. I can give some thought to my career (not being on total autopilot), and also have my job in balance with the rest of my life.
This reads a bit like classic self-help, but there's a solid point hiding underneath the platitudes. Most careers do get shaped by inertia: the projects you say yes to, the skills you accidentally accumulate, the expectations other people quietly set for you
I find that's a good reason, other than looking for an increase in salary, to seek out new employment opportunities every few years, while nudging your resume more towards the career you want rather than the career you've experienced.
> Many years ago I followed this process and, without exaggeration, it changed the course of my life. The insight I gained led me to quit law school, leave England and move to America and start down the path as a teacher and author. You’re reading this because of that choice. It remains the single most important career decision of my life
That "decision" required a safety net most will never have
Designing your career isn’t about self introspection, it’s about leverage
And leverage is stolen from the invisible hands that keep your world running while you journal
The problem isn't individual, but systemic: why is the freedom to choose rationed so narrowly?
For a lot of people, work isn't a career to design, it's survival math
This advice remains relevant but I think it misses an important nuance about how career design actually works in practice. The metaphor of "design" implies you're building something from scratch with full control, but career development is more like gardening - you can influence conditions but not force outcomes.
The key insight is recognizing the misalignment between your goals and your manager's goals. Your manager optimizes for team output and organizational needs. Your career growth is a secondary concern - important, but not primary. This creates a fundamental principal-agent problem. The solution isn't to become adversarial, it's to be explicit about your goals and negotiate actively rather than hoping they'll be noticed.
Practically, this means: (1) Having quarterly conversations where you explicitly state "I want to work on X technology" or "I'm aiming for senior by Q3" rather than assuming good work will be rewarded automatically. (2) Building skills outside your job scope through side projects, open source, or internal tools that solve real problems. (3) Being willing to change companies when growth stalls - the biggest salary/title jumps come from job changes, not promotions.
The dangerous flip side is over-optimization. I've seen engineers obsess over "career design" to the point where they won't touch any task that doesn't directly ladder to their promotion case. That creates fragile specialists who can't adapt when their niche technology becomes obsolete. Better approach: have a direction, but maintain broad skills and genuine curiosity. The most interesting career paths come from unexpected opportunities you recognized because you had wide exposure, not rigid planning.
In regards to the review part:
What helps me is keeping around my TODO.txt month by month, as well as a lot of screenshots and images of the things I find relevant for sharing in stand ups and meetings and such (as well as presentations).
So if I need to review the past month/year (e.g. when I want to update CV/site or catch up with management), it’s just a matter of going through a bunch of text and images without a lot of unnecessary fluff, like digging through Jira. Maybe if I want to get the approximate time/effort spent on particular stuff, based on the amount of activity there.
Alongside that, it’s also nice to document stuff that was particularly good, or all the ways software broke in (and what broke how often), as well as stuff that pissed me off and made me want to quit (sometimes people/mindsets, sometimes tangible code or practices).
When the default is just going with the flow and not documenting anything and doing no self reflection, every improvement upon that helps.
GPT was actually pretty good for this use case until 5.2 kneecapped its long term memory and now its more aggressive about pruning ( very annoying as wide recall now has to be explicitly invoked ).
Very interesting! Do you organize screenshots and images by day and by topic?
Currently not really, at least not for the weekly status meetings.
Typically I'll have a folder with a bunch of numbered files in the order that I want to talk about them, since it's easier to just quickly share my screen and run through then when I want to let others know what I've done, for example along the lines of:
If I need them for like a yearly performance review, then I'll probably do a pass where I group them into named folders and write a doc loosely following those topics, given that I might work on similar improvements and fixes across more than just 1 week. Pretty low friction daily and also when I need more structure.So a bit of my thoughts + open to suggestions from other folks on HN.
I've been a DevOps/SRE essentially my entire career and almost always in Finance (banks, FinTech startups, multiple hedge funds etc) and most recently in crypto.
It's seemed that for SWEs the path was always something like:
- junior
- team lead
- manager
- manager of managers
- CTO (or VP of Engineering etc)
For SREs/DevOps it always felt a bit fuzzier after manager and most of the manager of managers I know ended up being that role in an "infra" department (e.g. k8s, networking etc).
I would love to know what folks with my background ended up doing later in their careers/age mid 40s and above?
(all of this is even more fuzzy due to LLMs/AI and part of me feels like it's time to start pivoting into some kind of IRL service or manufacturing role given the speed at which things are developing. e.g. maybe I should buy a bakery...)
Open to all kinds of stories and suggestions here as would most likely benefit me and also lots of other folks reading the comments.
> I would love to know what folks with my background ended up doing later in their careers/age mid 40s and above?
I'm 41 now, started working in education but pivoted back to tech quickly (DevOps specifically) since tech is a better match for me.
After a few years, fell upwards into management then pivoted into Technical Program Management roles where I've remained since. Love this since I get to interact with teams of people working in my program(s) but don't have the responsibilities of a people manager.
Personally, my roles focus on infrastructure and things at least loosely related to my DevOps background. Worked at two blockchain companies (I've been into blockchain tech since 2012) but considering moving into green energy somehow.
I think in most cases including yours: choose roles based both on interest and total compensation. And it's a lot easier to get roles (especially TPM roles) if you're already technically competent in that particular field (in your case FinTech and crypto).
Thanks for the suggestion!
I planned to get out of my current company and stop wasting my life two years ago.
The job market and my visa status meant that it's either impossible or I need to make significant sacrifices.
So that's life.
Wondering if working as a contractor is any different. you won't stay longer than 6-12 months on a project and you can safely say goodbye without having to explain a gap in your resume
Visa.
Why didn’t you make the significant sacrifices?
This is one of those areas where family starts to influence decisions. My wife and I had kids between 24 and 28. From that point forward, 'supporting the family' took priority over personal fulfillment.
Now that our kids are grown and self-supporting, it's wild how much simpler the risk calculation is. But at 52 with engineering manager being the dominant role in my CV, not particularly appealing to the small companies making big moves that I'm interested in.
Nobody with a family has ever found a way to make a sacrifice and leave a job they felt was wasting their life?
What use is extrapolating what I said to its extreme end? In 1999 I quit my full time secure job to start a company. My wife was a stay at home mom, we had a new baby and a new mortgage for a house that was still being built. Yes it's possible, but counterexamples don't mean it's not a factor.
Your example is as much a counter example as mine is…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
Well-said
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I’ve spent my career chasing jobs that had kept me employed for over 20 years so I can support a family. Unfortunately I have had to let the ‘system’ take me where I am needed so I can pay my bills. It is life.
If you don’t design your career, someone else will.
If you don’t support your family, no one else will
I find that when decisions are very minor, people love to have tons of options to select from. When decisions are much more impactful and high stakes, people seem to love finding ways to convince themselves there are no options and that they must proceed down a single path out of necessity for how the world is.
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> We have a sense of what we would most love to do but we immediately push it aside. Why? Typically because “it is not realistic” which is code for, “I can’t make money doing this.”
Reminds me of PG's "How To Do What You Love"[1]
[1] https://paulgraham.com/love.html
A lot of us live our lives according to the expectations of others (our parents, society, etc) because this is all we know how to do at first and what the "system" reinforces through school, career, etc. and this difference between what we want to do and what we actually end up doing can end up causing lots of suffering to ourselves (and to others).
I've seen fear as the primary obstacle to trying something different when the current route is not working. It's really hard to step outside the comfort zone in those situations.
My 2c as someone who has ended up in a non-traditional career track, mostly doing my own thing and getting paid for it.
While you definitely need a higher than average tolerance for uncertainty, the big thing is just not seeing all the options. Many choices are occluded by the options presented to you by employers, the educational system, etc. The spectrum of careers, which is a continuous higher-dimensional blob of "things you can do to make money", is systematized in such a way that while there are paths to unusual career outcomes, most of those paths can not be expressed.
You may on some level want to reach some career or lifestyle goal, but often the path to that destination isn't obvious, and it's definitely never presented to you as an option among the things you can choose, and more than likely you'll have few if any role models or people to ask for guidance if you find yourself on that track.
Not just fear of failure, but fear of disappointing people, losing status, or admitting (to yourself and others) that the plan you’ve been following isn't actually working
I just want to be left alone, without doing the corporate dances. I don’t care about your company, your culture, and your unique DNA. The only family I have is back home, so just let me do my work for 8-9 hours a day, and leave me alone.
Yikes! If I'm going to spend all week working with others, I hope they're not thinking this way about me. I don't know what "corporate" dance you're talking about, exactly, and I agree that "family" is too strong a word, but my colleagues are pretty cool, and I enjoy their company; I enjoy the work we do, and I want it to get done. I don't mind the time spent working on it; I think it's meaningful to contribute to the advancement of our civilization's agency and welfare.
I don't want my coworkers to "leave me alone", I want to participate in their society and mutually define what that means.
As adults, it's our opportunity—and obligation—to selectively reproduce civilization. I'm lucky to be able to do that with clever, earnest, and kind people.
I don't want to be treated like a cog in your paycheck mill.
I feel this so much. This expectation to care about work outside of work is obscene. The anger you will often receive for saying this is just as jarring.
I have a really hard time designing my career in tech because I believe that people already have more options than they need or can afford.
What people need aren't more options. What they need is MONEY; which is the ability to obtain the options which exist. And the only way to give people more money is through political means. This is why I was interested in crypto; it seemed to get straight to the point...
I later quit crypto due to too much corruption in the space and launched a mainstream startup with a co-founder centered around helping people find 'the perfect job' but I quit as co-founder because the idea of it almost makes me want to vomit now.
The system is firing people en masse. The system itself doesn't want people to have jobs... So me, trying to work against the system by offering a solution that operates within the system feels futile and like gaslighting users and myself. It's selling a dream. There is no perfect job. Reality is our socio-economic system doesn't even have a shitty job for you... Let alone a perfect job... And most jobs seem like bullshit jobs anyway.
It's extremely hard to find an idea that's both truly useful and profitable these days. That's a shame because that's exactly what I want to do with my life but I feel like this does not align with what is possible within the current system. I cannot find any such opportunities in the tech sector.
Someone told me I should get into politics but again if I think about what the typical politician does, I feel nauseous. The only kind of politician I could possibly be is the honest kind that gets assassinated... And of course I don't want that. Besides, nobody would fund me... My hitman would probably have an easier time raising funding to 'take me out' of politics than I would raising funding to get into it.
I resonate so much with you. I'm in the middle of getting my product out for people to use and naively kept thinking that a good product means people are interested.
I need to integrate with tools that prematurely deny me because I'm not a big company. I basically already lost, despite my tool being much more reasonable and maintainable (I've worked at the competitors and it was a mess).
The world doesn't care about good products, they just care about how it looks. Big companies look good, you don't. It got me demotivated early on. You really need thick skin to start selling a product.
Your last paragraph is an interesting way to frame it.
I also think it's true; what appeals to people is something superficial. The product has to be highly optimized to generate an initial 'wow' factor. But it's almost impossible to create such 'wow' factor without sacrificing something fundamental about the product.
The goal is to make such a good first impression that people will pay for your product and then will keep convincing themselves and their friends that your product is great... When it's not because actually there are many better alternatives out there which are higher quality and provide more flexibility.
Among financially successful products, I see a lot of rigid, inflexible, low-quality products. They create a 'wow' factor by removing complexity; also removing flexibility... Targeting a specific psychological bias... These products seem 'easy' and magical at first but what makes them easy also makes them inflexible and fundamentally useless. Because flexibility is what gives a competitive edge... But flexibility also scares people away.
I have also fallen in this trap by thinking that a good product that addresses the needs of users would make it wanted. But coming so far with no traction to show I seriously doubt my prospects of bridging the gap between from the needs to the wants.
Also see Feedback Analysis, by Peter Drucker from Managing Oneself - https://hbr.org/2005/01/managing-oneself
https://www.thecompleteleader.org/sites/default/files/imce/M...
I don't think the random sailor analogy is a perfect fit.
If you guide your own direction too strictly you will both risk moving yourself into a dead end, but also miss out on unexpected opportunities.
But your opportunities depend partially on what you can actually do. In other words, optmize for your strengths, refine what works, remove what doesn't. Opportunities will come, but if you are not prepared based on your own predispositions, they are wasted on you anyway. Direction of the sailor of the sailor is but one factor in this.
Its that time of the year again huh. The times for unfilled news years aspirations.
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I tried the exercise. It turned into a mess. I seem to only want to escape employment. Everything I "wanted" to do seemed to be a deflection from the fact that I have anxiety about my job, staying relevant, staying employed, hamstering enough money to clear out my debts when the competition or AI inevitably beat me.
I'd more say: if you don't care about your career yourself - someone else with interest conflicts will
Kinda reminds me of an interesting scene from the Netflix series "Castlevania"
"If you don't have your own story, you become part of someone else's."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MofDRVtRec
I worked very hard for the first 5 or 6 years of my career - hit senior dev pretty quick, managed to double my pay moving into consultancy, and back on product dev in a smaller company nowadays.
Honestly? I don't feel a massive need to grow beyond where I am. I earn in the top 5% in my country. I live a comfortable and flexible life. I continue to learn like any dev with a passion for technology does - but i'm not constructing my life around an endless climb. If my role naturally transitions upwardly, great. If I stay where I am, steadily taking on more responsibility,that's also totally fine. The diminishing returns of chasing a CTO title or another arbritrarily large sum of money just doesn't seem worth it.
I can't be the only one burnt out on trying to design my career. especially these days when things outside your control just keep making it harder and harder (bad job market).
Reminds me of https://fs.blog/hunter-s-thompson-to-hume-logan/
I enjoyed this article and think it's good advice, and I also think that the punchline (title + last sentence) is wrong. Not that it makes a big difference, I just treasure texts more that I feel the author thought through to the last detail.
If you don't design your career, in most cases I guess no one will. In the comments are good examples, like the random walk of the drunken sailor. The cases in which you could use the phrase "someone else designed it for me" in a meaningful way seem rather rare to me.
Great feedback. Many of us are on auto-pilot and taking a little bit of time to reflect, can shape a better version of that auto-pilot.
Another useful input is what are other people telling you? This shaped my career early on by either taking on the work others didn't want to do, or hearing others mention what they felt was important and focusing on this.
An underappreciated factor for building one's career is also building a safety net, because that allows for risk. Having that safety net means you can't be taken hostage in a salary negotiation, and it means that you can entertain riskier career moves. That safety net contains financial and (demonstrable) human capital.
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I can’t say I’ve ever had “5 year plans” and even I did, facts on the ground change so fast, my plans would change.
I’ve been working since 1996. But without going into ancient history, in 2008, I had spent the last 9 years at my second job, became an expert beginner, been divorced for two years, and had 5 mortgages between my home and two rental properties that were underwater by about a $250K.
I was also teaching fitness classes part time to make up the gap - that was suppose just be a hobby.
Then my plan was to get out from under all of that mess. I didn’t know how or have a timeline. But it started with getting a job where I could get exposed to modern development practices (done after 3 months and a lot of prep work), stopped teaching so much (just kept my favorite classes where my friends were), and walked away from five mortgages and wrecked my credit (everyone was doing “strategic defaults” back then).
One thing I didn’t “plan” for was to meet and marry my future wife and become a father to pre-teens by 2013. I’m still married, boys are grown. That by itself changed my goals.
By 2013, I was still about 25% under paid even for an enterprise “senior” [sic] dev in Atlanta and still digging myself out of my financial mess while supporting a family.
My goal by then was to develop the soft skills and hard skills to be a team lead - again no timeline.
Then in 2016, my goal was for us to move and work for a much better paying tech company after 2020 when my youngest graduated from high school. Even that changed to I would rather just not move and get into customer facing cloud consulting (not staff aug) after 2020 when I thought I would have to travel a lot (who could have predicted a worldwide pandemic??).
Well both fell into my lap in mid 2020 - customer facing cloud consulting and BigTech and I didn’t have to move when I got a job at AWS working in Professional Services. I didn’t even know the department existed. Again not planned.
2020 my plan was to work for Amazon for four years, pay off debt, save some money and work for a smaller consulting firm. I knew three months after I got there that I definitely didn’t have the stomach for BigTech long term. This was the only 5 year plan that worked out more or less as I wanted (staff consultant for a reputable mid sized company).
Even then, I never thought in 5 years, we would decide to sell our house in the burbs, downsize and move to state tax free, much better weather Florida
“The crime which bankrupts men and nations is that of turning aside from one’s main purpose to serve a job here and there.”
As a former career contractor who took probably 7 commercial jobs I didn’t care about for every 1 creative job I wanted to do but for which I was underpaid, this feels deeply true.
There is a lot of luck involved too, the conditions we are born, family ,people we are friends with early on and so on, just because there are few outliers does not everyone can follow same.
It's worth mentioning that career conversations with your manager are always bullshit. How could they not be? Your manager's incentives are to keep you around, keep you productive, and keep you inexpensive. It's ridiculous to think that helping you build a successful career, which likely doesn't involve them or your current employer for very long, is something that they would do. Why would you reveal any information about your long term plans to such an adversary?
If they realize that the company cannot provide what you are looking for then they may not want to invest more resources in keeping you around, or keeping you happy. If they realize that you find some sort of intrinsic reward in certain work, then they might put you last for raises, because the money could help them more when spent on other people.
It's best to selectively reveal only your immediate short-term goals, only at the current company, and only as part of an ask. Always make them pay for information, if you are going to reveal what you want, then they need to reveal whether they intend to help you or hinder you in getting it. Slow answers, non-answers, pushing to next quarter, etc. All signal that they intend to hinder. It's rare to get an honest, fast "no".
Comments like this make me feel very lucky to have the job and manager I have! If the situation is as adversarial as the one you're describing, are you perhaps missing out on the fact that when people trust and genuinely support each other it's not zero sum? That you and your manager are actually on a team (assuming you're in a big company), basically at the same level in terms of power and influence?
> when people trust and genuinely support each other it's not zero sum
This is a clear non-sequitur. Whether or not the situation is zero-sum is dictated by the situation not by the actions of people, or how they feel about each other.
If the situation is zero-sum, and one party doesn't realize, or is too trusting of other parties, then they just lose. And they might not even realize that they lost, or that the situation was zero-sum to begin with.
> basically at the same level in terms of power and influence?
Obviously not true, unless you can truly ignore your manager and still be successful at the company, then they have power over you. If they control more resources than you, or have more face time with people who do control resources, then they probably have more influence than you as well.
This whole comment reads like a sucker who doesn't know they are being scammed.
> This is a clear non-sequitur. Whether or not the situation is zero-sum is dictated by the situation not by the actions of people
Yes.
But a first-line manager more often than not is just another human being caught in the system rather than a total drone. They have their own agency distinct from their org's, and you can consider trusting them, up to a point.
Trust me, your situation is more common than not. Having been an IC for most of my career and then a manager and back to being an IC again, I can say that OP is way off base. Managers are incentivized to make sure that their reports can grow and can be promoted. When I was a manager, all my colleagues were perpetually diligent about making sure that we were fostering a great working environment for everyone.
I’m careful like this to a point, but you can establish trust with managers. Most decent cultures don’t favor hoarding good employees how you’ve described.
> It's ridiculous to think that helping you build a successful career, which likely doesn't involve them or your current employer for very long, is something that they would do.
This is a very short term perspective. If I am a good manager to you, you are much more likely to stay because that’s an important relationship & you are benefiting. If it means you move on because I helped you gain the skills/confidence you needed, great, maybe sometime down the road you can help me when I’m looking for me next job or refer my next awesome employee. But who cares, at least neither one of us had to be miserable.
You always have to be _cautious_ but don’t let relentless cynicism keep you from good useful professional relationships that can actually help you.
> but you can establish trust with managers.
This is technically true, but metaphorically false. Most readers, especially the younger crowd, are likely to be too trusting and not correctly recognize fundamentally adversarial relationships, like with their boss, with HR, with lawyers whom they don't pay personally, etc. Especially when those people present the relationship with a faux version of the same naivety that they intend to prey upon.
The only people you can trust at a company, are people who have demonstrated that they value your relationship more than the company's relationship. That's not impossible, but if they really need the salary, then the odds are stacked against you.
It's certainly nice to pretend that everyone is nice and trustworthy. In fact, most people will hold it against you if you don't sufficiently pretend to be trusting. Universal insincerity is part of the human condition.
To me a direct HR person is much less trustworthy than a manager with whom you’ve established a good track record. The manager’s behavior is incentivized completely differently depending on the company - sometimes it’s legitimate to manage towards the employees success and sometimes lose them. As a manager I had a director say something similar, that we are often just stepping stone on somebody’s career.
Whereas HR is a risk mitigation function whose purpose is to minimize the company’s exposure to lawsuits, and I stay miles away from them unless it’s absolutely necessary to engage. They can do other things on top of that function that are very helpful, but they are not there to help.
There are a lot of fictions at work. Still we all have our own risk profiles, and if we are lucky we can afford the risk of an honest conversation with our boss. That’s not the same as pretending everybody is trustworthy, it’s making a bet based on the specific situation at hand.
If your advice is “young people be careful, managers, supervisors, and HR are not your friends”, I totally agree.
I understand that and I agree. Though I think the real question is what you would do when you will achieve this goal. What then? Will you be happy? What you will do with the money? Will this amount be enough?
Can this ever be enough?
I am not sure. Is this even possible in current feudal corporate structures? I did spoke with some people from my work. One was afraid for his job because of another employee. Other was afraid of reorg and if there will be lay-offs. Another company and the merger there caused one guy to be afraid of loosing his job because system he build will be discontinued. Maybe their current position is not the career they really want and after the setback, they are afraid off, they will be able to advance it further in the direction they are actually aiming for... but what if not? What if they will never will be able to advance it further? What if they will never will be get back up?
At some point the only direction you can go is down. Is this all?
Even if you will be able to build your own company things may go wrong and you may loose it. Economy can change. Market can change. Your company may be bought or taken over. Nothing is truly sure.
Should you not invest in the carrier then? No, this is wrong. If you will not set course for you someone else will. And you may not like the place when you will end up. Setting up your own goals is very good practice.
But I am not sure if this should be your life goal because this is so dependent on so many variables. Variables you have absolutely no impact on. And with that uncertainty comes stress. I think that your life goals should be set to something that depends only, or almost only on you.
Imagine Sisyphus happy seems like the appropriate response.
I don't think it's a matter of setting goals based on what you can do alone, life is lonely enough as it it. I think it's more a matter of accepting that life is a sequence of unpredictable events, and you have to just embrace the absurdity of it all.
I did not said anything about loneliness. IF you are working because you are lonely you really need to change your life right now.
Also where I hinted that pointless grind is something that should be a way to happiness?
This reminds on the sentence of a former boss, who said: "if you do not take care of your money, someone else will do"
No one else will.
Does this apply in chaotic context ? I can't foresee what jobs there will be in 2 years now.
if you dont live your life, some one will !! if you dont eat your food some one will !!
“Ok Greg”
“I’m not defined by my career Greg”
“Greg see a therapist”
When I buy clothes, I always “choose” the outfit the mannequin is already wearing.
I measure success by the number of rabbit holes I step over.
Yeah totally. Someone should totally have designed their career in marketing pre AI and not change course. They are in control. There are no outside forces.
Nope. It is not that black & white. It is always a mix of contextual changes and your decisions that are going define your path. Too much action on your own is also not going to help. In some cases, people who just didn't do a thing in decades, have achieved better that people who did all acrobatics.
Here's my two cents: career-driven people are assholes.
You're welcome.
+++ Non native english speaker, machine-edited text +++
English Version (clean, correct, humorous) “Whoever ignores success because it doesn’t count as a mistake will make very little progress.”
The “Little Brother” Misassessment Now, bro once said: “If there’s no mistake, then I can’t learn anything from it. Without a mistake, there’s nothing to learn.”
But if his recipe for success - all the right, good, subtle, less noticeable things - isn’t even registered by his mind...
…then isn’t that a problem with the mental template he’s using?
“Fixed points of social polarization”...
Hey bro, before I hug you as the “Hero of Labor” - sincerely, warmly - 2,800 hours of work this year...
Tell me honestly: Did only you earn that praise, or do the employees of high‑performers like you also deserve some recognition?
I probably don’t know them - but I do know you, which is why I’m asking.
Self‑reflection: Learning also comes from questioning routine Keyword: Extremes (Mistake vs. Non‑Mistake)
Thesis: “You only learn from mistakes.” Antithesis: “Then I must be a genius, considering how often I mess things up…” Paradox: “If you never see success, you can’t do anything wrong.”
The “Little Brother” misjudgment is ultimately a cognitive trap. It reduces learning to mistakes and filters out success, cooperation, and quiet contributions.
The Mistake Olympics Gold for the colleague who filled the coffee machine with dish soap. Bronze for the intern - eventually you only learn how to apologize.
Punchline: “I don’t make mistakes - I produce learning material.”
“My success is invisible, boss, because - as I’d like to emphasize - I couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong.”
“Hero of labor? I’m a hero of coffee breaks. Without me, there wouldn’t be any work at all.”
“If mistakes were the only source of learning, my life would count as a Harvard degree.”
Whoever ignores success because it doesn’t count as a mistake will make very little progress.
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+++
hoped that it adds something ...useful...nor... hahaha!
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