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Ha! Strong opinions! I think my failure here is that I did not fully explain, that this applies mostly to the corporate environment of technology companies, wh
by artpi 7y ago
Ha! Strong opinions!
I think my failure here is that I did not fully explain, that this applies mostly to the corporate environment of technology companies, where the risk of failure is much, much smaller and you distinguish yourself from the rest by having appetite for risk.
I of course totally forgot, that there is a whole startup world and convincing people to chase moonshots without any risk analysis should be indeed illegal.
Young entrepreneur: YOU SHOULD WEIGH YOUR RISKS BEFORE YOU GO INTO THE WILD!!
- yowlingcat 7y agoI think that this caveat basically completely transforms the post. Take my admittedly strong opinion with a grain of salt, but I think rewriting this post with that context at the beginning (and from that angle) would really, really elevate it. If you get into a comparison of how risk-adverse versus risk-centric approaches can compare and contrast with career payoffs, I think you get much closer to a more detailed, useful comparison that helps folks think about their careers. With that said, I do think that courting risk as its own reward is flawed. It's risk weighted return that's the powerful part -- if you could make gigantic impacts risk free, you should do that. In fact, to a large extent, I think this is a huge part of what senior engineering is all about. If there are table stakes things to be done that will make a big impact, you want to learn how to communicate that, negotiate implementation against roadmap, and then qualify and quantify the impact after executing. I believe and have observed what makes much of corporate software engineering so lucrative is the value you can add with relatively low risk. So, to court risk is give up a systematic advantage. It seems to be quite backwards to me.