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A career ending mistake

• apples_oranges 5y ago
  It's a choice, just pick something that suits you and go for it.
• t43562 5y ago
  I would like to try some of the destinations - perhaps they are not for me but I'd like to feel I hadn't been frightened off even trying something that I might have eventually liked. In the past I've often felt that success depends on people and how they work together and that it's most important to get that right. You could see it as part of the architecture of the product. In early jobs I saw how having QA as a completely separate entity lead to all sorts of blame games when something went wrong - so they should be in the team but with a different manager. My favorite anecdote about why it matters how you arrange things socially was about Friday pizzas at one company where you got your choice if you showed up in the kitchen early and if you were late you took whatever was left. When the kitchen was getting remodelled we had to split the deliveries per floor and get people to collect their floor's pizzas. Inevitably one person would pick up something they shouldn't have - either the wrong kind or one more than their floor was allocated and that messed up the orders for every other floor - great anger was generated with people accusing each other of skulduggery. The anger was not minor and created an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. People suggested we needed more pizzas so everyone could get enough. A few weeks later the kitchen was finished and we were back to the old scheme. We didn't order more - the old rule that if you were hungry then be early was back in place and the nastiness evaporated. That's just a long winded way of trying to explain that some ways of arranging people work and others create a disaster. I'm interested in how to make things succeed and I realised that being good at <some programming language/technology> wasn't going to ever be enough to create successes. Often it doesn't matter what heroic programming effort you make - your management has set you up to fail. So I wanted to, for once, be in a position where one can influence those things so I could create some "success" with the appropriate tools even if that is not just a compiler/IDE. I wanted to fix the things that were killing our success (e.g. at Nokia) that I couldn't as a pure developer. Has that happened? Well, a little bit. I doubt it will ever be more than a little bit - but it's less frustrating to feel that I'm not stuck in the same groundhog day. :-) Being an independent contractor/business owner is what frightens me next - will I ever have the courage to do that? Possibly when the mortgage is paid :-)
• gregfjohnson 5y ago
  I'm 67, and am in the final stages of my career. This article resonated, and made a lot of sense based on my own personal experiences. Early in my career, my head was full of fantasies and ambitions about entrepreneurship, being a founder, being a leader, etc. It took a long while for me to realize that I am not a leader, and am much more of an individual contributor. It was liberating to accept my true nature, and to go with it. If you are lucky enough to have a job that you find interesting on most days, that turns out to be a tactical advantage: you will spend more time learning, thinking about things, and improving your ability to contribute effectively. If you are lucky enough to have a job where you feel like you are making the world a better place in some meaningful way, that can be surprisingly fulfilling. At the age of 50 I did a career direction change and took a new job doing embedded software for medical devices. Been doing it ever since, and find my life to be rich and meaningful. Anecdote: our twin granddaughters (now 4) were born about 6 weeks premature, and spent over a month in the UCLA NICU. We all spent a lot time there. Next to every incubator was an Avea neonatal ventilator, a product that I had written a lot of software for. Nowadays I'm working at a medical device startup that's working on next-gen radiation treatment for cancer patients. Software people are blessed at this point in history, in that we have a lot of options. You can make good money, support your family and provide for retirement etc., while at the same time doing something that you enjoy and find meaningful. It was kinda terrifying for me to take a leap into the unknown mid-career and start doing something that I believed in, but it worked out well. (I have a small sample size, i.e., one, so I don't know what the odds are here. Your mileage may vary; no guarantees implied or otherwise, just one data point for your consideration.)
  • suhlig 5y ago
    > Next to every incubator was […] a product that I had written a lot of software for. That must feel like ultimate satisfaction - software that is making the world a better place. Congratulations!
• nedt 5y ago
  If you aren’t close to your career end don’t even plan for a target. Do what you are currently doing, but always end something out of your comfort zone. Maybe something much more technical, or teaching other people, or planning a bigger project, … Even if you really suck at it or hate it - at least that’s something you’ve learned then. And maybe you’ll pick it up 10 years later. When you are 30 you don’t have 20+ years of training for your specific job. You were trying a lot of things. You’ll need the same curiosity to have an enjoyable job when you are 55.
• fiznool 5y ago
  > A consultant is independent, for example; a contractor is not. The difference is that the client tells a contractor what to do, while a consultant tells the client what they should do. As someone who has worked as an ‘Independent’ for the past 8 years, this really resonated with me. I aspire to be a consultant, but realise now that most of the time, I’ve been a contractor. I think the lines are a little more blurred (e.g. a consultant can still advise based on a set of requirements, which usually come from the client) but it’s one of the most concise explanations of the differences between these two roles that I’ve heard.
  • WastingMyTime89 5y ago
    > > A consultant is independent, for example; a contractor is not. The difference is that the client tells a contractor what to do, while a consultant tells the client what they should do. It's not that rosy. At the end of the day, you still work for the client even as a consultant. You still have to produce things you would rather not. You still have to properly identify and solve the problem your client wants solved. Also most people who work as consultants still occasionaly do some work which would be classified as a contractor job by this definition.
• fifilura 5y ago
  That quote The truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do. —Ursula K. Le Guin Seems applicable to one or more of the world's dictators today.
• karlkloss 5y ago
  • Raed667 5y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Be kind. Don't be snarky.
• zwieback 5y ago
  I'm going the senior IC route, I would add to the description in the article that the job usually comes with an expectation of technical leadership and mentoring and/or helping to steer management. I spend hardly any time in general meetings but do spend some time building consensus around technical decisions.
  • giantg2 5y ago
    Sounds like your HR is doing a decent job then, unlike mine. I recently applied to a business analyst role. I was told in the informational that I would spend only about 25% of my time researching/reporting, and that the other 75% would be project/stakeholder management. Ridiculous. No wonder we have trouble finding people when position titles are basically lies.
    • ghaff 5y ago
      It sounds like they were very upfront with you about what the job would entail. How is that lying? And the reality at a large company is that many people spend a lot of time coordinating, sharing information, gathering requirements, etc. even if their nominal job is market research or whatever.
      • giantg2 5y ago
        I would expect that there would be presentations and meetings to share the products of the research. It's an entirely different thing be primarily performing project and stakeholder management. The only way I found out about the true nature of the position is from an informal informational with a member of that team. The job posting itself mentioned nothing about project management and glossed over the stake holder management part. This is very misleading. Plus, if the majority of the position is project management, then they should probably title it as such.
        • ghaff 5y ago
          More jobs involve a lot more of that sort of thing than you're crediting I think. A lot of our research projects involve collaborating with regional teams around the world and other marketing groups on budgets, research content, etc. There's the outside firm that's actually doing the survey to be managed. And probably a bunch of other things that I'm not directly involved with. Sometimes you have dedicated program managers for certain tasks at a large company but a lot of people spend a lot of their time essentially collaborating with other people.
• giantg2 5y ago
  "It's not surprising, then, that many of us find ourselves in less than fully satisfying jobs, with doubtful or non-existent prospects for advancement." Very true. I can't wait for my career to be over. I don't think I'll ever find the position where I feel I belong, so I'll just be miserable anywhere now that I know how broken the system really is.
  • BurningFrog 5y ago
    This sounds more like a classic case of depression, and might be solvable from that angle.
    • giantg2 5y ago
      I don't think it is. I enjoy a lot of things in life. Work just sucks. I believe there was post here about a questionnaire used in medicine (longer than the typical one during a physical) for screening for depression. I scored low, so I shouldn't have it. Same as when the doctor asks during a physical.
      • BurningFrog 5y ago
        OK. That seems like all the due diligence I'd recommend.
  • _abox 5y ago
    I'm sorry to hear that. I've had many positions where I felt like I belonged including my current. The ones where I didn't were very depressing and stressful. I hope you will find more fulfillment in the future! By the way I never planned anything. I don't think more than a week ahead. Somehow I have fallen into the right places anyhow. I tend to get really bored once I've totally mastered a job so I change a lot. I need a challenge. Because I do this within the same company (lucky to get the opportunity!) it didn't really make me look like a jobhopper, that helped alleviate worries about having a CV that's all over the place.. Also, some things I've done (like desktop office telephony) are totally extinct now so it is pretty easy to explain. I'm definitely in the "Senior IC" category in the article. But I can recommend to look around if you're not happy. You never know...
• newaccount2021 5y ago
• KineticLensman 5y ago
  > I think there are three main kinds of career destination, at least in the tech industry: > Independent > Senior individual contributor (IC) > Management Sales is an obvious omission.
  • namdnay 5y ago
    wouldn't sales be a form of IC ?
    • ansible 5y ago
      I would categorize a senior field applications engineer to be more IC than sales. But some people move directory into sales. I don't know if this counts as steering an existing technical career or switching careers entirely.
      • salisburysteak 5y ago
        From my experience, I would say it's a horizontal move. I had been out of the industry for 5 years, an eternity in IT. Attempting to move into a sales-related role was my strategy to use my experience in both tech and communications and hopefully find a company willing to take a chance on me. It worked. Being able to have a friendly conversation seems to be a challenge for most IT folks. I currently enjoy not being "in the trenches" everyday putting out fires. Plus, I'm not frontline sales so I'm not on the phone all day or head-down in a contract negotiation. It's also provided a great opportunity to get up to speed with automation (looking at you, Ansible ;) and containerization on the company's dime.
    • KineticLensman 5y ago
      > wouldn't sales be a form of IC ? Not in the sense the article uses: "A senior IC role appeals to those who want to stay technical and keep their hands on the keyboard, or at least the mouse."
• vmception 5y ago
  The summary here is that people don't know what they want. They have overly simplistic ideas of what they want. There are ways to take greater control, or to more quickly concede that there is no control if the sacrifices are not tolerable, to you.
• crrndngmstk 5y ago
  To me, this reveals an uncomfortable truth: - I know I'm not technically skilled enough to make it to the higher levels of IC - I know I lack the people skills & charisma to make it to the higher levels of management I'm aware I can improve in both and I accept that, to some extent, it's a laziness and confidence issue. But to some people it seems to come naturally and it's hard not to assume I'm in the majority that aren't exceptional.
  • ansible 5y ago
    If you find a good niche, and develop a lot of domain expertise in that area, you can likely make it to the senior levels of an IC, even if you don't have the most super-awesome technical skills. The trick (and of course there is a trick) is to find a narrow enough niche that you would enjoy working in, where you can get paid well, but isn't so narrow that you have very limited choices regarding who to work for.
    • hef19898 5y ago
      I came to realize recently that, despite having been quite ambitious, I never really wanted to rise through the ranks. It took it nice, quite job without management responsibility to show me hoe good it can be to be good in your job and not worry about career advancement. There are other things to spend energy on on life. That's the reason why I am less then thrilled to be pulled into high profile projects lately... Especially those projects will have zero real world impact despite being high profile...
    • ryandrake 5y ago
      I think it's kind of rare to find a company that will promote you to "the senior levels of an IC" on just your technical domain expertise. I mean REALLY rare. At most places I've seen, you can get promoted on purely technical knowledge up to a certain level, but beyond that level, you're expected to show "leadership" and "influence" and "cross-team impact" and all that jazz. Same expectation of social skills as if you wanted to take the management track. So no matter which way you go, you ultimately plateau early in your career if you just focus on technical mastery. Businesses are inherently social organizations, and at the higher levels, all require the typical bullshit that you though you left behind in high school: Schmoozing, smooth talking, brown nosing, political savvy, charm, confidence, cutthroat opportunism, those telltale "Ivy League mannerisms" that you see in every VP at your company. I learned this too late in my career, and it's really hard to pivot from "grumpy old man" once you become one!
• onion2k 5y ago
  If you love what you're doing now and don't ever want to change jobs, great: you've reached the end of your career, even if it plays out over many decades. Even if you love what you do and you don't want to change anything, the world around you is going to have other ideas. Especially in tech.
  • AlwaysRock 5y ago
    Eh. To some extend yes but largely, no. If you loved COBOL all your life you can still find COBOL work. It's harder now but its out there. You're just not going to be working at a cool start up doing it. So if part of what you love is working at cool cutting edge companies then yeah you have to keep learning new cutting edge things. But if you just want to bang out code in your preferred language there will almost always be a company somewhere hiring for that.
    • onion2k 5y ago
      The beauty of your argument is that it's unprovable. No matter what language someone might suggest they enjoy that they can't find a job writing any more, you'll always be able to counter saying "Ah, but you've not looked hard enough! They're out there!" It'll always be the candidates fault for not scouring the world searching for that AP/L role or Shockwave Flash advert. The assertion that no matter what tech you want to work with there'll certainly be a job writing it somewhere doesn't seem right to me. Not because there won't be some uniquely rare role out there, but because very few people want literally any job, anywhere, on any salary, under any conditions just because they get to a specific language. Unless there's good jobs writing it that you would actually accept then the language might as well be dead.
      • AlwaysRock 5y ago
        Sure... I guess nothing is provable. I know COBOL devs. They say its harder and harder to find gigs but they just tend to stay in their jobs longer now. I have a relative that will probably retire in his current COBOL gig.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• tdumitrescu 5y ago
  Feels like the "senior IC" role described in this article corresponds mainly to today's "3-5 years of experience 'senior' engineer" roles. The reality that I've seen and experienced is that advancing beyond that on an IC track means a lot more people/political work, rather than constant "hands on keyboard" coding as described in the article. It's not the same as management, but it's inevitably more meetings and evangelizing your ideas.
  • sixdimensional 5y ago
    The fact that we work in an industry where 3-5 years is considered senior still boggles me sometimes.
    • julianozen 5y ago
      My two cents here is that senior doesn’t mean the same thing at every company. But title inflation is a good way to snag great hires away from other places and retain employees
    • isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
      It's just a title. Means about as much as VP in banks.
      • treis 5y ago
        Also, only the 2nd or 3rd step on the ladder. Most places with 3-5 YOE seniors have Staffs & Principles above them.
        • qzw 5y ago
          Which have also been watered down in order to give the seniors somewhere to move up to. So the rungs get relabeled, but the ladder doesn’t actually reach any higher.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
• mrits 5y ago
  I think it is important to mention that managers also don't pick what they want to work on. Often times they are "managing" teams of just a few people. A better term for some of these people would be performance reviewers.
• eulerian 5y ago
  Curious if there's anyone who's made a plan for this sort of a thing. I'm never able to plan even the rest of my week and follow through with it. What does a plan for your career look like and how do you get the discipline to stick to it?
  • svnt 5y ago
    For me it was more about identifying the archetype I was after so I knew who to emulate. It only lasted a year or two in most cases until I moved on to someone else. You can’t, and I don’t think it is smart to try to, line up a progression like this because in the process both you and the environment will change.
    • eulerian 5y ago
      So you'd suggest something to the contrary of the article -- plan not for the end of your career but for the next few years?
  • jdauriemma 5y ago
    Try not to consider career planning as being in the same category as task management. Instead, have a broad vision and keep a look out for opportunities that might bring you closer to that vision. Opportunities present themselves all the time; it's up to us to have the attention to notice them and the judgement to know when (not) to take them.
  • mattgreenrocks 5y ago
    It's not about discipline, it's about cultivating the ability to find your own north star of sorts, follow that, and ignore the noise. In my example: I consulted in 2010-2012 doing Rails and hated it (despite having a great client). Decided I was not compatible with the webdev culture of shipping fast and breaking things, so I started self-studying compilers. Landed a job at an R&D firm in 2012 working on LLVM stuff, then have hung out in the research-y space ever since. I'd always set that as my career endpoint, but lately I'm not as sure. I think my next step is working towards being able to work for myself creating products on the side, and working for others part time eventually. I realized I like working on other people's problems, but I have a lot of skill and vision in programming that I can use in other ways, such as product design. The idea of learning how to be more independent is very exciting to me, including learning about marketing, UI design, talking to users, etc. After that? Who knows! Maybe I will teach part time, or write ebooks, or give trainings, or write games with friends. Computing is a big world and I feel very grateful to be able to move around in it as I get older.
• duxup 5y ago
  I changed careers at 40+ years old. I'm very happy that I did it. People have all sorts of constructs / ideas about how careers work (based on experience) or how they think it works, or how they want it to work. I talk to some college graduates who tell me what they're planning for and have ZERO clue what industry they're talking about, their description is unrecognizable to me ... even tho I know it is the one I work in. I find your experience and paths can vary greatly company to company, even job to job. We all find truths we want to hold on to about work. I recall trips to the valley where my coworkers where astonished to hear tales of people doing the same work they did, but doing it slightly differently elsewhere in the country. Their view of how that job was done was entirely shaped by the couple places they worked (and everyone seemed to cycle through those couple companies). You'd think these folks though that if you didn't fill out the TPS report right to left that the world would end... I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people fill them out left to right but I didn't feel like telling them that, it might have been too much for them to handle. " I think there are three main kinds of career destination, at least in the tech industry: Independent Senior individual contributor (IC) Management " I have no idea why those are the only destinations ... for an article worried about being happy that seems kind of limited. The whole article feels very pie in the sky to me.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • svnt 5y ago
    Totally. Look at the quotes he’s pulling and then he somehow vectors into three predefined end points. Dude is waiting to crack open, telling himself he can fit the ideas from all the reading he’s recently been doing into the concrete pipeline of a career he’s built.
  • ebiester 5y ago
    And it seems to lump tech lead, staff-level individual contributor not leading a team, and architect-level positions that have no direct reports. When I speak about career options to people I lead, I say there is a senior level plateau. At that point, you have to be more intentional about growth. If you want to stay in the field, and you want to progress past senior developer (staying a core contributor is an option!), you need to think about where you are going. You can be a generalist, specialist, or outside of development. Going into management is changing careers, much like going into product development or farming. If you want to be a generalist, you are looking to expand your influence as you tackle harder and harder problems. Tech leads are generalists. Architects are generalists. All of them have some form of technical leadership to help steer larger and larger efforts. You can also become a generalist that specializes in early startups: you are there to tackle any problem that is in front of the organization until it outgrows the need - at that point you can look for new pastures or help guide the organization while solving smaller and smaller problems. You can also become a specialist. You learn, in depth, a smaller set of responsibilities, but you can build what others cannot. You can debug and solve problems others cannot. You can be a consultant, or a specialized shared service within an organization. You have options, but mastery is what motivates you, and that mastery can be very valuable in certain situations. But that is career growth, not planning for the end of your career. Sometimes, that is a parallel track, like management or product. Sometimes, that's retirement. Sometimes, that's moving into another industry. I think that's what the article is talking about instead.
• IceMichael 5y ago
  What such articles lack is that they assume anyone could do anything, but that's just not true. To become a really well-paid, influential developer (IC called here, I think), you need to be smart, so that others that are also smart acknowledge you as a very skilled developer. Plus, it's probably not enough to be very smart (which in itself most people are not), but you need some level of politics that is always necessary. For managers, it's also not a default that promotion will just come with years being somewhere, just untrue. I would say, although depressing, some people in the industry just don't have it to be successful enough in anything to feel great at their job and there is not always a way to change this. I would never fingerpoint to anyone and say "he cannot make it", I would probably not even recognise that person (apart from myself) but I would say they take up a great portion, unfortunately. Today's environment enforces performance. Those who cannot perform, will have a hard time...
  • dhairya 5y ago
    I disagree. We are conflating being smart really with being self-motivated. Also being in the right environment is very important. I do believe that anyone can do almost anything (I'm not going to be an NBA player in my 40s). Certain things though become harder as time goes on given education or industry requirements but are still not impossible - you have people become medical doctors in their 50s. It fair to state that the privilege of time and money also make career transitions far more easier for some folks. But if you are willing to put in the time and effort and stick with it, you can learn anything and make the jump career wise. If you want to break into a technical field from a non-technical background, the better indicator of success will be grit, perseverance, and self motivation. Learning becomes easier if you are motivated to learn and when its hard still stick with it. I used mentor at a nonprofit web-dev bootcamp that aimed to help students from under-estimated and non-traditional backgrounds (no college education) become software developers. Most of the students did not have traditional STEM backgrounds and were learning to program for the first time. The program was free and deliberately designed to be hard with multiple places where students would be kicked out if they didn't keep up with the work. There were no traditional tests and coding exams. All assignments were project based with a clear deliverables (website, backend database, full stack javascript applications, etc). Most of the students (over 80% graduation rate and 99% employment rate) who finished the program got well paying dev jobs (avg salary of 90k). Of the students I mentored, the ones who were most successful were the one willing to put in the extra hours to learn and ask for help (often doing 80-100 hours weeks of learning) and genuinely curious to learn outside of the scope of the curriculum. At the end of the day the program was not filtering on general "intelligence" (whatever that means) but really the perseverance of students to put in the work and produce something each week. At the end of 8 weeks
• jdlyga 5y ago
  The way I see it, managing people is not your main objective even as a team lead. Your primary responsibility is to drive the project forward and get the work done, and managing people is the how. So in essence, you'll be doing a lot of people management but you should be laser focused on the project your team is working on. It's like the difference between writing code for code's sake and writing code to solve a problem.
• dhairya 5y ago
  A couple things that come to mind with this article. My own journey has been quite nonlinear both in terms of roles (business systems analyst -> data analyst -> technical project manager -> data scientist -> AI research scientist) and environments (F100 -> academia -> startups). My undergrad (creative writing and social sciences) would not have predicted my current role (Senior AI researcher focusing on deep learning and NLP) and I still have no idea where I want to end up. It can be hard to imagine and project your potential. Often our journeys are not linear and we have hard time factoring who we will be in future as sum of our experiences. Often that growth in knowledge and life experiences will be exponential even though to us it may feel linear in the present. I also find it useful to think about problems instead roles. I've had roles that didn't exist 10 years ago and likewise new problem spaces are always emerging. Problems don't necessarily have to be domain specific or role specific but generally describe the types of challenges you find interesting. Once I identify a problem space I start to think about how I would like to make an impact and how I can currently make an impact. Sometimes the two are the same and other times they are different and require a journey to get there. But I find the metaphor of problems interesting because it helps align the type of work I do with the things I find interesting at any given point. It also helps narrow the search space for opportunities and ensure what type of career growth is meaningful for you.
  • bckr 5y ago
    It sounds like you have had an amazing adventure so far, and it's really inspiring to see that you've been able to have such a fluid career. Could I contact you to learn more about your adventures? My email is Anthony at yesrobo dot net
    • dhairya 5y ago
      Happy to chat.my contact info is on my profile.
• danity 5y ago
  A long time ago, after interviewing for months, I finally landed my first job as a developer. It was VERY hard to get your foot in the door back then. On my first day, I was given someone's old computer that had a bunch of junk on it. While cleaning it up, I accidentally deleted all files on the company's file share. Shortly after, I started hearing murmurs of missing files and then, panicking inside, realized what I had done. The IT guy came by and asked me if I had done it, but I played dumb. He knew it was me but he couldn't prove it, so I survived that one. He gave me dirty looks from that point forward though. I surely would have been fired on the spot if the truth were uncovered.
  • vsareto 5y ago
    Hopefully lots of folks swing by to say that if they didn't have backups, they should have seen it coming. It's a great example of how you can be made to look bad because of other peoples' decisions.
  • AlwaysRock 5y ago
    Do you really think you would have been fired? It sounds like it was easy for you to fix. Sounds like it would have been easy for them to fix. Rather than fire you they could say, "Oh yeah we should make sure that something like this doesnt happen again. It could happen to anyone." Firing seems like a big leap here.
    • hogrider 5y ago
      Yeah... People are not rational like this lol I've definitely seen people fired for fucking up in ways that were actually sysstemic issues.
  • afterburner 5y ago
    If you lied, and they found out, you would have been fired for that reason alone. On the other hand if you told the truth right away, it's hard to say if you would have been fired; where I've worked you wouldn't have been fired for telling the truth and doing that (having seen people fess up to much worse failures). Lying on the other hand is a serious problem since it betrays trust (if caught, of course). That said, I've also been at a company where people in charge had admitted to not having a backup copy of something rather important. I was flabbergasted.
• AlbertCory 5y ago
  I came to realize the wisdom of a quote from a truly bad movie: “Everything ends badly, otherwise, it wouldn’t end.” ---Bryan Flanagan from “Cocktail”. [1] I had to look that up as part of my due diligence for this post. The more you know. Occasionally a sports career ends with hitting a homer in Game Seven of the World Series (David Ross of the 2016 Cubs). Most of the time, not. You want to have the sweet we'll-still-be-friends breakup with your spouse, but it really ends in divorce court with you hating each other. So don't feel remorse that it ends badly. That's life. [1] https://www.capegazette.com/blog-entry/everything-ends-badly-derrick-mason-turns/18116 https://www.capegazette.com/blog-entry/everything-ends-badly...
  • hinkley 5y ago
    The fact that things end is why you should enjoy the good times when you have them. If you're going to live forever, you can always see that sunset tomorrow, or next year, or a century from now. No particular value in doing it today.
    • AlbertCory 5y ago
      Yep. Walking or playing with my wonderful doggie, I think often "someday I won't be able to do this."
• tevon 5y ago
  Reminds me of this poem which has always stuck with me: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51296/ithaka-56d22eef917ec https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51296/ithaka-56d22eef... --- Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you wouldn't have set out. She has nothing left to give you now. And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  As it so happens, this resonates with me. All through my professional life, I lived frugally, saved as much as I possibly could, made conservative, yet not "bunker mentality," investments, and avoided personal debt like the plague. Being exactly where I am today, has always been a goal. I also made sure that every job I did, shipped. I sometimes had to "hode by dose", as it passed by, on its way out the door, but I became habituated to shipping. As a manager, I never stopped coding, but it had to be shunted to "nights and weekends." Again, I always shipped; even my open-source work. In fact, I designed, curated, and eventually turned over, a project that has become a world-standard infrastructure, used by thousands, around the world. It's really still in its infancy, even though I started it in 2008-2009. I was fortunate to work for a company that is absolutely crazy about Quality, and I learned to have an ethos of personal Integrity, which has worked out quite well. My fiscal conservatism also worked out nicely in my management career. Then, when my company finally wound up the department I led, and no one would hire me, I happened to have plenty set aside to retire. I'm not happy about being forced into it, but I am happy that it happened, despite my best efforts. I have been able to pivot -fairly easily-, to a lone-wolf programmer (even though I spent my entire career in fairly diverse and large teams), and I found folks that like the kind of software I write, so my habit of ship is already paying dividends (not really. I don't make a dime, and that's just fine with me).
  • bckr 5y ago
    > I was fortunate to work for a company that is absolutely crazy about Quality I crave this. Move fast & break things mentality is a plague. Shipping the proof of concept is a plague.
  • Nerada 5y ago
    This was a fun read and feels like it deserves a longform blog post.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      Here's some of my "longform" stuff: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/ https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/
• hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
  Adding comments while reading: > Most of us, in fact, don't really know what we want to do with our working lives until we're more or less doing it. I can relate. Approaching 40 and I still change the definition of what I "want to do" from time to time. This in part results from my childhood experience in which my parents make important judgements, in part results from my own weakness (not perseverant enough and always back down when boredom and/or difficulty strike). Basically I find myself distracted by all sorts of things (game dev? cool! reverse engineering? cool! embedded system? cool! writing an interpreter? cool!) but only scratching the surface for all of them. Yes it might be OK because they are just hobbies, and I can do whatever I want with hobbies, but deep in my heart I still admire those who can drill deep even for hobbies. > What we're really talking about is the aim or goal of your career. Actually I believe there is one thing that is potentially more important: How do we plan the end of our philosophical life? That is, when do we be content enough and say to ourselves: "OK if I die now, I can at least say that I have done something this life and did not waste all of my time". Reflecting on that, I have to say that if I were to die now, I probably believe that all of my life is wasted. Against this is just personal and everyone has one's own version of "wasted". ******* Overall I think this is a well written piece, but the hard-core question is: Do you know yourself?
• Jaruzel 5y ago
  I hate my job. I don't know how I got here. Like many I started out in small scale IT just as desktop computers were becoming a thing. I transitioned from mainframe support to desktop support, from there I worked through several desktop support roles, wishing I was server support but never managing to get there... over time I became a desktop architect, and then infrastructure architect, and now well.... I just don't know. I have meetings, I write documents. I offer sage advice on best practice. That's it. It's not IT anymore, it's just make-work. If I knew my middle-career years would be like this, I would have never started in IT in the first place[1]. However... I work 100% remotely, and I LIKE that. I've been a remote worker for a decade now, and I just couldn't go back to commuting or being in an office. So, I have no idea what to do[2]. I'm not really soliciting for advice (but feel free!), I'm just venting I guess. --- [1] I had a chance at the very beginning to become a Forensic Scientist at New Scotland Yard for the Police. I turned it down. Often I wonder if I made the wrong choice. [2] Computers are the only thing I'm good at.
  • nigerian1981 5y ago
    I know exactly how you feel. Wish I’d chosen a different field such as Mechanical or Electrical Engineering to IT.
    • burntoutfire 5y ago
      Don't they have even more meeting to go to and documents to write? Things in the physical world require a lot of approvals and consideration before are given a sign-off to proceed to implementation.
      • dbish 5y ago
        Yeah, there are a ton of meeting for those roles as well (possibly more since they have firm hardware prep needs, usually official standards to get approval for, etc.). Reading through the requirements docs and planning years out for a product release being done by the electrical engineers on a new device, made me thankful software was so agile.
  • 5y ago
• chillycurve 5y ago
  On a side note: I am new to Go and programming in general and have found John's work to be instrumental to my educational journey. I highly recommend everything he has produced. Perhaps the most underrated resource, his Youtube channel is full of educational gems like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSgIEDMekSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSgIEDMekSg Please keep up the good work John!
• sombremesa 5y ago
  It's completely unsurprising to me that HN likes to take career advice from someone who doesn't know the difference between 'careen' and 'career'.
  • larrik 5y ago
    I thought this too, but google backs him up as being correct.
    • bckr 5y ago
      Yeah, c'mon. GP, it took 5 seconds to confirm the definition of the word. If you're going to be cynical at least be correct.
    • sombremesa 5y ago
      It's completely unsurprising to me that HN likes to get information from a search engine that doesn't know the difference between 'careen' and 'career'. This may indeed explain how the author came about their incorrect definition, though.
    • TehShrike 5y ago
      I don't know where Google got that definition, but I don't see it in a dictionary so far... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/career https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/career https://www.dictionary.com/browse/career https://www.dictionary.com/browse/career https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/career https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/career
• noisy_boy 5y ago
  > I think there are three main kinds of career destination, at least in the tech industry: > Independent > Senior individual contributor (IC) > Management I guess I'll stick my neck out and just admit that I don't want to give any more fucks about any of the above and just wake up, sip my tea, read the news and take a bloody nap whenever I want to. Also volunteering/open source but mostly, not doing things I don't want to do any more. Yep, I don't want to be "incredibly excited" about the "next growth chapter of my life" - I just want to live my life in a non-agile way without sprinting towards the end of it. That is about it.
  • allisdust 5y ago
    Sadly unless there is some kind of universal ABI or born to rich parents, doing what we want especially in the way we want is not an option. Its wage slavery all across the world and no end in sight for any number of future generations.
    • pracer 5y ago
      Oh man, if you see it like that, is probably becoming true. In other industries or jobs it could b, but in tech? Companies are the ones looking for more developers, and if you made it to senior, you have a lot of power. ABI or rich parents are the only options for you, it seems. Such a sad view. We don't need to be the next Bezos to avoid the wage slavery. We just need to be financially independent: some investments, maybe some flats for rent... in general, the principles of FIRE are possible for those who work in tech or engineering. It is a matter of making the effort to get there (and a bit of luck, of course). But if you start defeating yourself since the start, of course you will lose. Also, working for a salary is not wage slavery in every case. In fact, working for money is the modern equivalent of spending the day wandering around for food or going to a 3 days' hunting trip with the fellow cavemen. What I mean is that no matter what, you have to get food and shelter to live, so either you work for it or someone else does. Which is essentially what ABI is. Until automation reaches full capabilities (if it does and Skynet doesn't kill us), you have to work to get food (and other services we want and need today) so try to find the best way for you to get that. Don't rely on others, they have no obligation with you and your desires.
• larrik 5y ago
  > The first phase of your career is probably too early to make serious plans, and any decisions you make at this stage are rarely critical: there's plenty of room to experiment and make mistakes. I think the decisions you make in the early stages are indeed very critical, but there's basically no way to truly predict their effects, so you shouldn't worry about it.
• nostrademons 5y ago
  Another oldie but goodie in the career planning vein: https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_career_planning_part0.html https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_career_planning_part0.html This is Marc Andreessen's guide to career planning, and I've found it exceptionally useful. In particular, he backs off from the narrow "decide what track you want to be on" approach to frame the problem as developing a set of skills that will make you more valuable to any enterprise you choose to be a part of. Then while you do that, watch for the most valuable opportunities to apply those skills. The other great thing about Marc Andreessen's guide is that it acknowledges the role of risk and opportunity in how your career will shape out. So instead of tracking yourself into a path based on how the world looks today, you stay alert to how the world is changing, and then use the downtime to improve yourself. Despite being a guide for "high-potential people who are not interested in work/life balance", it feels like it puts less pressure on individuals than feeling like there's a set of steps you must hit to be on your chosen track.
  • WJW 5y ago
    Marc Andreessen who according to wikipedia has had a single employee job in his entire adult life, after which he went on to found a string of companies and then became a VC? Why would I want to take their advice on skills that make me more valuable to an enterprise? I'd 100% take advice from him on founding companies and on investing btw, but advice on how to build your career as an employee seems wildly irrelevant coming from him.
    • nostrademons 5y ago
      Why would you ever want to be an employee? Pretty much everything about the American system is setup to shaft them. The advantage of Andreessen's perspective in that blog series is that he thinks of a career as a portfolio of investments, each of which has their own risks and their own upsides, and each of which may unlock future investments. In my experience this has been a far more effective way to manage your career, simply because everything about present-day America is setup to screw people who take one job and work within its strictures.
• akselmo 5y ago
  I'm still in very beginning of my career but I hope to eventually work on something open source. Something that is being used by many. Be it software library, business software or games industry. Would be very cool to help the Linux gaming push that is happening and help to push it even more. But I don't think I have skills for that yet..
• dasil003 5y ago
  As unobjectionable as this advice is, it also doesn't feel terribly useful. Consider this quote: > As software engineers, we already know that a too-rigid plan rarely survives contact with reality. For me this is understating things quite a bit. As someone pretty much exactly mid-career who has done well, I can't really point to long-term planning as providing any value whatsoever. It certainly doesn't hurt to think about the long-term value of what you are doing now as an impetus for change, but thinking too much about specific destinations starts to veer into day dreaming territory. Instead, what I've found useful is first and foremost to take risks and keep my options open. For instance, IC vs EM is not something about which I hold a strong opinion. When it comes time to change my role the best opportunity may not fit into a rigid taxonomy of "career goals" and there are more important factors. All too often I see ambitious young people asking for a roadmap to success. This is especially true at higher tier companies and people that have come up through Stanford/MIT where they have been spent their whole life jumping through rigidly defined hoops. They come into the workforce with the idea if they just do what they're told hard enough they can get promoted on a regular cadence. However doing as you're told has a natural glass ceiling, and personal success has more to do with playing to your strengths and seizing opportunity than playing by the book.
  • stkdump 5y ago
    I would say, no need to plan out a career. But don't be surprised if you end up where you are currently heading. There might be unconscious things affecting your day-to-day choices affecting your career.
• irrational 5y ago
  > If you love what you're doing now and don't ever want to change jobs, great: you've reached the end of your career, even if it plays out over many decades. This is me. I have zero inclination to be anything other than an individual contributor developer. I abhor meetings and don’t want to manage people. It actually took me a long time to convince the higher ups at my company that I have no interest in moving into management. I figure I have 15-20 years left in my career. If I can just keep learning new skills/technologies and getting better at what I do for the remainder of that time, I would be very happy.
• ttiurani 5y ago
  Tip to the privileged[1]: find out how low you can drop your monthly spend – what are all the things you could still relatively comfortably live without? I'm now very happy living on my savings, spending super little per month, and it has opened up so many wildly different career paths. A bonus is that my ecological footprint is also very small (relative to my country at least), which has had a very positive effect mentally. [1] Obviously if you already are at the limit, or living in a society without safety nets, this is not an option.
• pcmoney 5y ago
  A lot of people are dunking on this post but none are showing a terminal career path that stays in tech and is something other than: - Manager of some kind - Senior IC of some kind - Independent of some kind It seems a reasonable breakdown to me, finer grained distinctions do not have the same magnitude of skill and prerequisite knowledge differences.
  • ghaff 5y ago
    It's a reasonable if very generalized taxonomy--and it captures someone who really wants to be their own boss, someone who wants to manage people, and someone who doesn't really want any of those things. But within those categories, the differences are vast. I've effectively had three rather different 10-ish year careers as an IC (plus one other shorter one that, as planned, I left to go to grad school).
• erwincoumans 5y ago
  My 5 cents: optimize for working with great colleagues on things you are passionate about, with leadership caring about those things and giving you freedom to do that. Keeping up with general tech trends helps too, and stay curious. In my experience, if you follow this, the appreciation with follow, either inside or outside your company (or both).
• rurban 5y ago
  "You can't stop the waves, as the saying goes, but you can learn to surf. Chance favours the prepared mind." Never underestimate such innocent looking sentences. I've learned surfing with 40. Surfing is by far the hardest craft to learn. You only have a few seconds on a wave, and hardly get anyone, esp. in crowded surfs. You need at least 5 years to get decent at it. But it's really worth it. I'm missing it a lot.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• rektide 5y ago
  Noteable to me is that the only people with any power are consultants (sometimes) or managers. There are very few paths where the very good, wise, experienced techies get much self-determininacy, much power. You have to become a manager & fight your stake via politics to gain control. Probably one of the key reasons SRE & devops roles are semi-popular. Your target is techies, and you have much more leeway about where you want to go. There used to be architect roles, but they feel- to me- fairly outmoded?
• goodpoint 5y ago
  > A consultant is independent, for example; a contractor is not. The difference is that the client tells a contractor what to do, while a consultant tells the client what they should do. Huh? The two terms are very often used to mean the same thing.
• jimmaswell 5y ago
  I just want to work from home 9-5 without too much stress and have enough money and time to do what I want outside of it. Thankfully looks like I've already reached the end of my career as the article calls it pretty early.
  • math_denial 5y ago
    I have yet to start a career and I'm already at that point. The things I'm passionate about are just not monetizable or you need to be the 0.00000001% (without counting luck and connections) to make some profit.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• granshaw 5y ago
  I think he's missing one big endgame – becoming a [Co-]Founder. The most risky of the bunch, and with the most variables outside of your control, but it IS there as an option, esp if you have relevant or prestigious experience as a senior IC or PM. Come to think of it, it's something of a mix of all 3, Independent, Senior IC, Management.
• fleddr 5y ago
  The article is Schwarzenegger-style motivational nonsense. That sounds a lot more harsh than I want to, as the advise in itself is solid. Yes, you should very much plan for happiness if you can. The problem is the silent majority that actually doesn't want a career. At all. They work out of necessity, not to find meaning. They just want to live. American optimism has slowly and carefully made this attitude unacceptable to express, hence the silent majority. But the underlying reality is still there. People don't want to work. That's why you pay them. If you believe the people at your work are there for meaning and joy, give them fuck-you-money and see how you find yourself alone the next day. If I may turn a bit morbid for a minute, I've attended too many death beds already. I've never heard any of them spend a single breath on work or career. Isn't that telling, if work is supposedly purpose and meaning, and you spent most of your life on it, it's not even worth mentioning? Anyways, it's still solid advise to switch to a field or role that fits you, in case it currently doesn't. The problem is, work sucks everywhere. It's not the field or the actual tasks, it's other things. You have no control over your time, your colleagues, the quality of management, and most of your time is spent on reporting and communicating rather than actually working or doing things that bring actual joy. Everything is factory-like, financialized, metric porn. Even the academic world is like this now, and so are non-profits.
• lvl100 5y ago
  I once took a job that I regretted taking on the very first day. I contemplated quitting that same day but stuck it out for many years thereafter. Turns out staying in that job WAS the career ending mistake. It killed my career, family life and even health. It takes a lot of effort to recover from these career mistakes even if you have spectacular resume and background. Number one rule in avoiding this is to never take such a job in the first place.
  • artemonster 5y ago
    Oh wow, what was that you saw directly at day 1 that was a dead giveaway „well this is going to suck“?
• Barrin92 5y ago
  I think a very straight forward cure is just stopping this hamster wheel career attitude altogether. I started to program because I enjoy programming. I enjoyed it at awful companies, I enjoyed it at good companies. The article's suggestion of steering towards 'career goals' is I think mistaken. If you want to be happy in your job you can be happy right now provided you enjoy your craft. This goal oriented mindset drilled into people is terrible because there's just going to always be the next thing.
• OOPMan 5y ago
  Careen != Career
• robwwilliams 5y ago
  I stopped reading at this point: “If you love what you're doing now and don't ever want to change jobs, great: you've reached the end of your career, even if it plays out over many decades.” That is so wrong if your job is dynamic and creative, and if you have ambitious goals.
• m0d0nne11 5y ago
• AlexCoventry 5y ago
  Does anyone really believe they're going to be able to plan the end of their careers, with the world moving as fast as it is these days? Even a five-year plan seems ambitious and full of unjustified assumptions, to me.
• mbrodersen 5y ago
  I never considered my “career” as part of my life goals. I always navigate based on happiness. When I wasn’t happy doing what I was doing I tried something else. We all have an inner compass that will guide us in the right direction, if we allow ourselves to listen to it instead of following the expectations of others. It works remarkably well if you let it.
• magicroot75 5y ago
  As someone who went from managing three people at a high profile ad agency account to going back to IC. I'd like to say: It's so much more complicated that what this article lays out. I was asked to train three totally green hires after only 3 months on the job myself. It was terrible. And I quit. But I loved the agency I was at. And I might love managing people under more sane circumstances. Now I'm an IC making more money with no reports and I'm back to being someone else's junior. These things move quickly and I feel like keeping your eyes open is more important than placing oneself into a broad category of "career end." It's not as if roles are static and these things are defined as you go. Roles morph and people and projects come and go. Flexibility is more important than having an end in minds. Having an 'end ' is a fools errand. And is what encourages people to sit in shitty jobs because their boss promised them they "get what theyre looking for" just in a year or so.
• ehnto 5y ago
  > The best time to start a pension is always twenty years ago Does the US not have a mandatory pension program? We have "super annuation" here which is a mandatory payment employers have to make into our pension accounts, minimum being 7% on top of our salary. Very rarely a company will add more to your super.
  • mike22 5y ago
    The US has the social security program, to which both employer and employee make mandatory payroll contributions, but it pays very modestly in retirement. Many employees now contribute to their own self-managed retirement savings/investments. Employer sponsored pensions are disappearing.
• ascii_pasta 5y ago
• manmal 5y ago
  The author makes it sound as if career paths were under our control, while they often are not. Any of these events can change your choice of possible roles completely: - Being at the wrong place at the wrong time - Industry changes or gets disrupted - Falling out with a boss - Having burnout - Having children - Spouse gets sick - Accidents - Stock bubble bursts - War Trying to plan your (job) life up front can be a nice thought experiment, but, in my opinion, not much else. Like a car driving in the dark, we can’t really plan way ahead. There’s no knowing what’s further down the road. Accepting this is, I believe, crucial for leading a good (job) life.
  • seer 5y ago
    Thats a bleak (if maybe correct) outlook on life! I think the old maxim “success if where preparation meats opportunity” is very true. You cannot usually control for the “opportunity” side but without preparation you’ll definitely miss a lot of opportunities. Sure you can’t predict war, but its hardly ever something that happens overnight - like the brewing conflict in Ukraine has been brewing for decades and you can always try to move somewhere more stable. We can’t predict us or our spouse having accidents but we can strive to be healthy. Most of the “things outside our control” we can attempt to mitigate or plan to avoid. And sure sometimes shit happens and you have to deal with it, but thats not a healthy outlook I think, you should plan for the future, what if nothing earth shattering happens? And you can do things to mitigate the risk and the amounts of bad outcomes - thats also planing, we’re not just animals after all - running away from pain and towards pleasure, we can think about the future, and I in my estimate this article just encourages us to do so.