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You have no way of knowing that you would have done well in the manager role and gotten promoted to director like your peer. You claim to be more hard working a

You have no way of knowing that you would have done well in the manager role and gotten promoted to director like your peer. You claim to be more hard working and intelligent than him but who's to say what you view as hard working and intelligent are objectively true? Who's to say success in those roles is even a function of hard work or intelligence? Who's to say your peer didn't have some third skill relevant to managering and directoring that you lack in comparison? Maybe the thing that led to your peer's promotion was his boss's partner meeting his partner at a holiday party which put him on the radar. Who the heck knows. If a man in line behind you at the convenience store buys a lottery ticket and wins a million dollars, do you kick yourself for not buying that ticket when it was your turn in line? Life is chaos; pretending things like this are in your control is useless. Punishing yourself for not knowing what you didn't know in the past is cruel. Your misery comes from your own self-imprisonement. Happiness will not come from a time machine. Rather you should work on keeping your ego out of the driver's seat. A therapist might help, to teach you frameworks around catastrophization. Eastern philosophy has a lot of answers for dealing with ego as well. Alan Watts' The Book is a good way to experiment on that path. Forget the past and focus on the present. If you don't like the present, focus on the future.

adam12 4y ago
> Life is chaos; pretending things like this are in your control is useless. Yes, I've been thinking a lot about this and if free will is just an illusion. I sorta like to think it is just an illusion. It does make it easier to deal with "wrong" decisions.
- baremetal 4y ago
  that kind of thinking could result in repeating your mistakes.
  - adam12 4y ago
    If free will isn't an illusion.
    - baremetal 4y ago
      what benefit is gleaned from thinking free will is an illusion?
      - dkersten 4y ago
        Not beating yourself up over past mistakes.
        MrTortoise 4y ago
        but you are saying you dont have a choice about that i dont really see how you can say free will is an illusion so you shouldnt do something. Thats a direct contradiction
        adam12 4y ago
        > Thats a direct contradiction No, if free will is an illision, then even "choosing" to believe in it and "choosing" to let things go is an illusion. It would apply to every "choice" we make.
        baremetal 4y ago
        if only it were so simple to side step personal responsibility. just call it illusory. to what effect?
  - tuyiown 4y ago
    I often see this reaction when people suggests that you should care too much about your past decisions since you can't ever imagine control everything. It's about _past_ decisions, nobody says you shouldn't care about doing the best for you in the present. You can't be sure if your decisions are the best, but you surely have to avoid the bad one if you can !
    - sjg007 4y ago
      Don't repeat the same mistakes, it is boring. Make new mistakes, much more learning happens that way. There's probably a Yodaism in there. The meta level is to recognize classes of mistakes and create a process around preventing them to help avoid future mistakes.
- me_me_me 4y ago
  (Not OP but) This quote most likely is not about free will. But how life is random/chaotic. Two people in same situation doing exactly same thing might end up with different end results. In professional poker there is a rule/saying, "you can do everything right and still loose" (due to chaos). The trick is to not over-think your mistakes, if you made a stupid decision reflect why, if you didnt make stupid decision it might not have been a bad decision, just unlucky. You cannot control the chaos only adapt and look ahead, instead of if only i did this or that i would be better off. You cannot know for sure if something would happened or not. You absolutely have free will to do something about your situation, but you cannot guaranteed outcome.
  - adam12 4y ago
    Think of a situation where you think you could have done something better than someone else. It is likely that you could have using your mind, body and life experience. Do you think that you could have done the situation better if you were using their mind, body and you had their life experience? I believe that we would all have the same outcome. If that is the case, then free will is an illusion.
    - me_me_me 4y ago
      Free will is an illusion, but it doesn't change anything. Lives go on as we cannot predict/simulate our world to 100% predict human reactions and decisions. > I believe that we would all have the same outcome. We are not talking about impossible hypothetical situations. We are talking about Bob and Alice, where Bob thinks to himself that only if he followed same career choices as Alice he would be in the same place as her. Since he is smarter and harder working than her. And that is simply not true due to life being chaotic, unfair and luck plays its part. He would have a chance but not guarantee to have same outcome as Alice.
- mgh2 4y ago
  Proof: https://trendguardian.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale-4fecf8095812 https://trendguardian.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale...
- jpcapdevila 4y ago
  I was having this conversation two days ago. I believe free will is an illusion, everything is ruled by causality beyond our comprehension. But even as I say write it, in a couple of minutes my brain will jump back into thinking I'm in control. It's very strange.
sph 4y ago
Agreed 100%. I had an opportunity for a managerial role, I took it, I thought it would make my career better. It didn't. I crashed, burned, couldn't write as much code as I wanted and managing people is an entirely other and opposite skill than writing code. I quit, I took a break and I'm now planning on writing code as an engineer for the rest of my career. I'll leave herding cats^H^Hdealing with people to more suited candidates. You can't know that your current choice is a mistake. That's an unproductive attitude to have in life.
- zerr 4y ago
  Unfortunately, at many places, going into management is considered as career advancement instead of parallel path, and this is reflect in terms of compensation as well (a huge mistake).
  - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
    At tech companies, this is starting to change. They'll have an IC path and a management path. But at a non-tech company that happens to have engineering roles (Bank, healthcare, etc.), yeah that's not happening. If you want to write code, you might end up being promoted to "Senior Software Engineer", but you'll stall there and your compensation will fall even farther behind the curve than it already is. You might cap at 150K/year if you're lucky.
moonchrome 4y ago
>If a man in line behind you at the convenience store buys a lottery ticket and wins a million dollars, do you kick yourself for not buying that ticket when it was your turn in line? That's a very nice analogy - is it something you came up with ? (I am going to steal it so I would like to know who I'm stealing from :) )
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  I think it's an example of the post hoc fallacy and is often presented in terms of a casino slot machine, where a player leaves the machine and the next player wins the jackpot. X is assumed to cause Y, simply because X occurred before Y. With the above example, X is 'not buying the lottery ticket when you had the chance' and Y is 'the next person to buy a lottery ticket wins the prize'.
  - quietbritishjim 4y ago
    Slot machines are a much worse example because they have programmed minimum prize percentages, so if one has gone without a win for a while then it's more likely to win than average. With the lottery ticket, there was really no reason to have made that decision.
    - daveguy 4y ago
      Isnt this the fallacy? Aren't those minimum prize percentages set in advance? As in, if a machine has a 0.0002% chance jackpot it will have that with each pull and no less (ie minimum prize percentage). Minimum prize percentage just means it never goes below a certain percentage (eg it can't go to zero). Also, the smaller payouts can be higher minimum percent. But over the long term the payout is always less than the cost to play.
      - jrockway 4y ago
        My understanding is that the algorithm is something like: func doTheyWin(): if timeSinceLastWin < 10: winPercentage = 1 else if timeSinceLastWin < 100: winPercentage = 25 else: winPercentage = 99 return random(100) < winPercentage That is an algorithm designed to meet people's expectations of the gambler's fallacy, basically. Other comments say that slot machines in Las Vegas are prohibited from using this algorithm, but nothing is stopping, say, video games from doing this. (Hearthstone has a "pity timer" for giving you legendary cards in card packs, for example. It's random until it feels bad for you, or more likely the data shows that you won't buy any more card packs and they'll go out of business if they don't give you a legendary every 40 card packs or whatever.)
codegeek 4y ago
Well said. OP is making the classic mistake of comparing them with others and assuming that Grass is greener on the other side. Never compare yourself with others, never. Always compare yourself with YOURSELF. I keep saying this and hoping it helps others.
tigershark 4y ago
I completely agree. I’m a pretty good software developer but I’m pretty sure that I would be only an average manager at best, that kind of job is not for me. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
designium 4y ago
Well said though I be a bit more soft in the words.
- somehnacct3757 4y ago
  My apologies. It takes me way more effort to write that way, so I don't bother for anonymous comments. But I know you're right and I agree with you.
anoy8888 4y ago
I agree with everything you say. However,I think this argument is overused. Sure , luck is important and there is always incomplete information but it doesn’t mean you can’t differentiate between good decisions and bad decisions. It also doesn’t mean you can’t improve yourself by improving your decision making skills. For example , there is a lot of luck involved in poker games , but experienced player who can make consistently good decisions are going outperform those who are not making good decisions.
sifar 4y ago
>> Happiness will not come from a time machine This needs to be framed.

adam12 4y ago

> Life is chaos; pretending things like this are in your control is useless. Yes, I've been thinking a lot about this and if free will is just an illusion. I sorta like to think it is just an illusion. It does make it easier to deal with "wrong" decisions.

baremetal 4y ago
that kind of thinking could result in repeating your mistakes.
- adam12 4y ago
  If free will isn't an illusion.
  - baremetal 4y ago
    what benefit is gleaned from thinking free will is an illusion?
    - dkersten 4y ago
      Not beating yourself up over past mistakes.
      - MrTortoise 4y ago
        but you are saying you dont have a choice about that i dont really see how you can say free will is an illusion so you shouldnt do something. Thats a direct contradiction
        adam12 4y ago
        > Thats a direct contradiction No, if free will is an illision, then even "choosing" to believe in it and "choosing" to let things go is an illusion. It would apply to every "choice" we make.
        baremetal 4y ago
        if only it were so simple to side step personal responsibility. just call it illusory. to what effect?
- tuyiown 4y ago
  I often see this reaction when people suggests that you should care too much about your past decisions since you can't ever imagine control everything. It's about _past_ decisions, nobody says you shouldn't care about doing the best for you in the present. You can't be sure if your decisions are the best, but you surely have to avoid the bad one if you can !
  - sjg007 4y ago
    Don't repeat the same mistakes, it is boring. Make new mistakes, much more learning happens that way. There's probably a Yodaism in there. The meta level is to recognize classes of mistakes and create a process around preventing them to help avoid future mistakes.
me_me_me 4y ago
(Not OP but) This quote most likely is not about free will. But how life is random/chaotic. Two people in same situation doing exactly same thing might end up with different end results. In professional poker there is a rule/saying, "you can do everything right and still loose" (due to chaos). The trick is to not over-think your mistakes, if you made a stupid decision reflect why, if you didnt make stupid decision it might not have been a bad decision, just unlucky. You cannot control the chaos only adapt and look ahead, instead of if only i did this or that i would be better off. You cannot know for sure if something would happened or not. You absolutely have free will to do something about your situation, but you cannot guaranteed outcome.
- adam12 4y ago
  Think of a situation where you think you could have done something better than someone else. It is likely that you could have using your mind, body and life experience. Do you think that you could have done the situation better if you were using their mind, body and you had their life experience? I believe that we would all have the same outcome. If that is the case, then free will is an illusion.
  - me_me_me 4y ago
    Free will is an illusion, but it doesn't change anything. Lives go on as we cannot predict/simulate our world to 100% predict human reactions and decisions. > I believe that we would all have the same outcome. We are not talking about impossible hypothetical situations. We are talking about Bob and Alice, where Bob thinks to himself that only if he followed same career choices as Alice he would be in the same place as her. Since he is smarter and harder working than her. And that is simply not true due to life being chaotic, unfair and luck plays its part. He would have a chance but not guarantee to have same outcome as Alice.
mgh2 4y ago
Proof: https://trendguardian.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale-4fecf8095812 https://trendguardian.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale...
jpcapdevila 4y ago
I was having this conversation two days ago. I believe free will is an illusion, everything is ruled by causality beyond our comprehension. But even as I say write it, in a couple of minutes my brain will jump back into thinking I'm in control. It's very strange.

sph 4y ago

Agreed 100%. I had an opportunity for a managerial role, I took it, I thought it would make my career better. It didn't. I crashed, burned, couldn't write as much code as I wanted and managing people is an entirely other and opposite skill than writing code. I quit, I took a break and I'm now planning on writing code as an engineer for the rest of my career. I'll leave herding cats^H^Hdealing with people to more suited candidates. You can't know that your current choice is a mistake. That's an unproductive attitude to have in life.

zerr 4y ago
Unfortunately, at many places, going into management is considered as career advancement instead of parallel path, and this is reflect in terms of compensation as well (a huge mistake).
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  At tech companies, this is starting to change. They'll have an IC path and a management path. But at a non-tech company that happens to have engineering roles (Bank, healthcare, etc.), yeah that's not happening. If you want to write code, you might end up being promoted to "Senior Software Engineer", but you'll stall there and your compensation will fall even farther behind the curve than it already is. You might cap at 150K/year if you're lucky.

moonchrome 4y ago

>If a man in line behind you at the convenience store buys a lottery ticket and wins a million dollars, do you kick yourself for not buying that ticket when it was your turn in line? That's a very nice analogy - is it something you came up with ? (I am going to steal it so I would like to know who I'm stealing from :) )

photochemsyn 4y ago
I think it's an example of the post hoc fallacy and is often presented in terms of a casino slot machine, where a player leaves the machine and the next player wins the jackpot. X is assumed to cause Y, simply because X occurred before Y. With the above example, X is 'not buying the lottery ticket when you had the chance' and Y is 'the next person to buy a lottery ticket wins the prize'.
- quietbritishjim 4y ago
  Slot machines are a much worse example because they have programmed minimum prize percentages, so if one has gone without a win for a while then it's more likely to win than average. With the lottery ticket, there was really no reason to have made that decision.
  - daveguy 4y ago
    Isnt this the fallacy? Aren't those minimum prize percentages set in advance? As in, if a machine has a 0.0002% chance jackpot it will have that with each pull and no less (ie minimum prize percentage). Minimum prize percentage just means it never goes below a certain percentage (eg it can't go to zero). Also, the smaller payouts can be higher minimum percent. But over the long term the payout is always less than the cost to play.
    - jrockway 4y ago
      My understanding is that the algorithm is something like: func doTheyWin(): if timeSinceLastWin < 10: winPercentage = 1 else if timeSinceLastWin < 100: winPercentage = 25 else: winPercentage = 99 return random(100) < winPercentage That is an algorithm designed to meet people's expectations of the gambler's fallacy, basically. Other comments say that slot machines in Las Vegas are prohibited from using this algorithm, but nothing is stopping, say, video games from doing this. (Hearthstone has a "pity timer" for giving you legendary cards in card packs, for example. It's random until it feels bad for you, or more likely the data shows that you won't buy any more card packs and they'll go out of business if they don't give you a legendary every 40 card packs or whatever.)

codegeek 4y ago

Well said. OP is making the classic mistake of comparing them with others and assuming that Grass is greener on the other side. Never compare yourself with others, never. Always compare yourself with YOURSELF. I keep saying this and hoping it helps others.

tigershark 4y ago

I completely agree. I’m a pretty good software developer but I’m pretty sure that I would be only an average manager at best, that kind of job is not for me. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

designium 4y ago

Well said though I be a bit more soft in the words.

somehnacct3757 4y ago
My apologies. It takes me way more effort to write that way, so I don't bother for anonymous comments. But I know you're right and I agree with you.

anoy8888 4y ago

I agree with everything you say. However,I think this argument is overused. Sure , luck is important and there is always incomplete information but it doesn’t mean you can’t differentiate between good decisions and bad decisions. It also doesn’t mean you can’t improve yourself by improving your decision making skills. For example , there is a lot of luck involved in poker games , but experienced player who can make consistently good decisions are going outperform those who are not making good decisions.

sifar 4y ago

>> Happiness will not come from a time machine This needs to be framed.