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I worked 5 years at a company I dreamed about. Then 2 at another one. It was an amazing experience, I learned a lot in the process and met many great people. Pr

I worked 5 years at a company I dreamed about. Then 2 at another one. It was an amazing experience, I learned a lot in the process and met many great people. Problem is, there are no companies or projects left for me to dream about any more. :'(

names_are_hard 6y ago
I know the feeling. I've come to believe that it's a terrible thing to actually meet your goals. Kinda like heroes, I guess.
- steve_adams_86 6y ago
  I've heard people say that rather than focus on goals, focus on systems. Like, one time I set a goal to dead lift 400lbs. I actually did it a couple years later. The stupid thing is I stopped lifting maybe 3 months after that. Lifting 400lbs really meant nothing. Focusing on that goal was pointless. Focusing on the system of getting stronger and healthier would have been far more sensible, because there is no end to it, and there's endless progress to be made. Well, within one's own means - you could lift, swim, climb, whatever. Just enjoy it and push yourself, and you'll probably find more ways to get better at it than you could manage in your lifetime. I've been realizing recently, maybe late in life - I don't know if this is obvious to other people much earlier - that discreet goals don't make much sense in such changeable, open-ended lives. Why aim to save $10,000 when you could aim to maintain the practice of saving 10% of your income - forever? Every month or quarter or year you can look and say hell yes, I hit that goal! Maybe you want to increase it one year. $10k will run out in no time, but a good habit doesn't. Also, maybe saving sums of money isn't really what we need to focus on... Kind of like lifting some arbitrary weight. Maybe what we really want is health and strength, or financial security and independence to allow us to buy the things we want or need. Maybe rather than travelling to a specific location, we want to live in such a way that we can have the opportunity and means to explore and see interesting places. The discreet goals could be a sub-goal of the system perhaps, but probably shouldn't be the focus. I've always had these silly discreet goals and terrible habits to support them. I think, moving forward into my later 30s and beyond, I'll try more to focus on systems over discreet, limited results.
  - edjrage 6y ago
    > rather than focus on goals, focus on systems Maybe it's from James Clear? > You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. > This is a quote from my new book Atomic Habits and was adapted from one of my favorite sayings by the Greek poet Archilochus: “We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” https://twitter.com/jamesclear/status/1047643455722283009 https://twitter.com/jamesclear/status/1047643455722283009
    - steve_adams_86 6y ago
      "You fall to the level of your systems" I really like that! Thanks, I'm going to check this out.
steve_adams_86 6y ago
I hear you, I've felt like that at times. Lately I've been thinking I need to make my own dream, so to speak. I want to build something for myself maybe - just enjoy the product of what I've learned and the skills I've developed. I enjoy working with my team and having a job, but I think my next step might be taking a break to just enjoy creating something. I definitely feel that "what's next" question creeping up more often these days. I think that was the original dream in a way too - to learn enough to be able to create the things I imagined. Maybe I'll work part time at regular work and part time on the 'dream', who knows. Like others have mentioned though, there's often a lot to be grateful for in the moment, dreams aside.
- grishka 6y ago
  The thing with building something for myself is that it's hard. Sure, I do have a hobby project that will, hopefully, make the world better at some point. But that's a hobby project. It doesn't help with this crippling loneliness the slightest. And then starting your own company is a lot of responsibility. Much more than I'm willing to ever take. Not only do you have to have an idea good enough and that there's market for, you also have to devise a way to make money, preferably without ruining your product both in the long and short term. And delegation. I don't like delegation, but running your own startup demands a lot of it. I'm such a kind of person that it's almost always easier for me to do something myself when I know exactly how it's done rather than to explain someone else what I want. The software industry is trending towards dumbing everything down and making increasingly user-hostile design decisions. This is the exact opposite of my values. Then there's the purely technical side of things. It's becoming scarily common for software developers to not understand the abstractions they're using and the compromises they're making while choosing those abstractions. This leads to poor-quality, underperforming products. It's become so ingrained into the culture that people legit look at you weird when you tell them that they don't need react and 50 JS libraries to build a website and that using the Android APIs in an app directly is a perfectly okay thing to do. So, there are diminishing opportunities for creating a startup, and most existing companies' values go against mine. I feel lost at this point. I truly have no clue where to go next and what to look for. Nonprofits maybe?
  - 6y ago
thomasfromcdnjs 6y ago
"You haven't exhausted all ideas, all ideas have exhausted you."
- theonemind 6y ago
  The latter sounds worse. :o
jjav 6y ago
I identify so much with this comment. I achieved my dream in my 20s by working for Sun Microsystems. The company behind SunOS (then Solaris), and all the hardware I drooled over while in the university. Where I met luminaries like Diffie and Gosling. Where pure magic like dtrace and zfs were born. Java too. A place where brilliant quirky engineers ruled the world. A company that built the best operating system and awesome hardware, how awesome is that? (Spoiler: extremely awesome). The ride of my life. Today.. what? Most silicon valley jobs by volume (GOOG+FB) are in advertising. Not interested. Most of the rest are in building yet another phone app or social site. Yawn. Where are the pure tech companies innovating cutting edge hardcore technology products? I want to dream again.
- grishka 6y ago
  This, so much this. Except I'm Russian so for me it was VKontakte, the social network used by literally everyone, before it was bought by Mail.ru Group and started being turned into a profit machine, by which time I quit. It used to be a small team, maybe 10 developers, 4 sysadmins, 1 designer, and 1 Pavel Durov. Now it's several hundred people and I can't help but wonder where is so much work coming from to keep all of them busy. It's also engulfed by advertising and most decisions are driven by KPIs, not user needs. Everything interesting we've had was bought by Mail.ru, Yandex, or Sberbank. Everything runs on ads, which I consider the cancerous tumor of the internet. Silicon Valley is even more depressing than that. I've been there, and I've seen these offices with rows and rows of desks that go as far as you could see. This didn't feel like a welcoming environment. This also raised that question about what the hell do all these people do. I want companies that are primarily concerned with making the world better, not making shareholders richer at the cost of everyone's sanity.
zigzaggy 6y ago
Go build something to dream about! My job is part of my dream, but not all of it. I am currently building the other part, where I have equity in something that is growing everyday. I hear people talk about how great high school was, or how much they loved college or their 20's. For me, each decade is better than the last as long as I'm still learning, growing, and building.

names_are_hard 6y ago

I know the feeling. I've come to believe that it's a terrible thing to actually meet your goals. Kinda like heroes, I guess.

steve_adams_86 6y ago
I've heard people say that rather than focus on goals, focus on systems. Like, one time I set a goal to dead lift 400lbs. I actually did it a couple years later. The stupid thing is I stopped lifting maybe 3 months after that. Lifting 400lbs really meant nothing. Focusing on that goal was pointless. Focusing on the system of getting stronger and healthier would have been far more sensible, because there is no end to it, and there's endless progress to be made. Well, within one's own means - you could lift, swim, climb, whatever. Just enjoy it and push yourself, and you'll probably find more ways to get better at it than you could manage in your lifetime. I've been realizing recently, maybe late in life - I don't know if this is obvious to other people much earlier - that discreet goals don't make much sense in such changeable, open-ended lives. Why aim to save $10,000 when you could aim to maintain the practice of saving 10% of your income - forever? Every month or quarter or year you can look and say hell yes, I hit that goal! Maybe you want to increase it one year. $10k will run out in no time, but a good habit doesn't. Also, maybe saving sums of money isn't really what we need to focus on... Kind of like lifting some arbitrary weight. Maybe what we really want is health and strength, or financial security and independence to allow us to buy the things we want or need. Maybe rather than travelling to a specific location, we want to live in such a way that we can have the opportunity and means to explore and see interesting places. The discreet goals could be a sub-goal of the system perhaps, but probably shouldn't be the focus. I've always had these silly discreet goals and terrible habits to support them. I think, moving forward into my later 30s and beyond, I'll try more to focus on systems over discreet, limited results.
- edjrage 6y ago
  > rather than focus on goals, focus on systems Maybe it's from James Clear? > You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. > This is a quote from my new book Atomic Habits and was adapted from one of my favorite sayings by the Greek poet Archilochus: “We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” https://twitter.com/jamesclear/status/1047643455722283009 https://twitter.com/jamesclear/status/1047643455722283009
  - steve_adams_86 6y ago
    "You fall to the level of your systems" I really like that! Thanks, I'm going to check this out.

steve_adams_86 6y ago

I hear you, I've felt like that at times. Lately I've been thinking I need to make my own dream, so to speak. I want to build something for myself maybe - just enjoy the product of what I've learned and the skills I've developed. I enjoy working with my team and having a job, but I think my next step might be taking a break to just enjoy creating something. I definitely feel that "what's next" question creeping up more often these days. I think that was the original dream in a way too - to learn enough to be able to create the things I imagined. Maybe I'll work part time at regular work and part time on the 'dream', who knows. Like others have mentioned though, there's often a lot to be grateful for in the moment, dreams aside.

grishka 6y ago
The thing with building something for myself is that it's hard. Sure, I do have a hobby project that will, hopefully, make the world better at some point. But that's a hobby project. It doesn't help with this crippling loneliness the slightest. And then starting your own company is a lot of responsibility. Much more than I'm willing to ever take. Not only do you have to have an idea good enough and that there's market for, you also have to devise a way to make money, preferably without ruining your product both in the long and short term. And delegation. I don't like delegation, but running your own startup demands a lot of it. I'm such a kind of person that it's almost always easier for me to do something myself when I know exactly how it's done rather than to explain someone else what I want. The software industry is trending towards dumbing everything down and making increasingly user-hostile design decisions. This is the exact opposite of my values. Then there's the purely technical side of things. It's becoming scarily common for software developers to not understand the abstractions they're using and the compromises they're making while choosing those abstractions. This leads to poor-quality, underperforming products. It's become so ingrained into the culture that people legit look at you weird when you tell them that they don't need react and 50 JS libraries to build a website and that using the Android APIs in an app directly is a perfectly okay thing to do. So, there are diminishing opportunities for creating a startup, and most existing companies' values go against mine. I feel lost at this point. I truly have no clue where to go next and what to look for. Nonprofits maybe?
- 6y ago

thomasfromcdnjs 6y ago

"You haven't exhausted all ideas, all ideas have exhausted you."

theonemind 6y ago
The latter sounds worse. :o

jjav 6y ago

I identify so much with this comment. I achieved my dream in my 20s by working for Sun Microsystems. The company behind SunOS (then Solaris), and all the hardware I drooled over while in the university. Where I met luminaries like Diffie and Gosling. Where pure magic like dtrace and zfs were born. Java too. A place where brilliant quirky engineers ruled the world. A company that built the best operating system and awesome hardware, how awesome is that? (Spoiler: extremely awesome). The ride of my life. Today.. what? Most silicon valley jobs by volume (GOOG+FB) are in advertising. Not interested. Most of the rest are in building yet another phone app or social site. Yawn. Where are the pure tech companies innovating cutting edge hardcore technology products? I want to dream again.

grishka 6y ago
This, so much this. Except I'm Russian so for me it was VKontakte, the social network used by literally everyone, before it was bought by Mail.ru Group and started being turned into a profit machine, by which time I quit. It used to be a small team, maybe 10 developers, 4 sysadmins, 1 designer, and 1 Pavel Durov. Now it's several hundred people and I can't help but wonder where is so much work coming from to keep all of them busy. It's also engulfed by advertising and most decisions are driven by KPIs, not user needs. Everything interesting we've had was bought by Mail.ru, Yandex, or Sberbank. Everything runs on ads, which I consider the cancerous tumor of the internet. Silicon Valley is even more depressing than that. I've been there, and I've seen these offices with rows and rows of desks that go as far as you could see. This didn't feel like a welcoming environment. This also raised that question about what the hell do all these people do. I want companies that are primarily concerned with making the world better, not making shareholders richer at the cost of everyone's sanity.

zigzaggy 6y ago

Go build something to dream about! My job is part of my dream, but not all of it. I am currently building the other part, where I have equity in something that is growing everyday. I hear people talk about how great high school was, or how much they loved college or their 20's. For me, each decade is better than the last as long as I'm still learning, growing, and building.