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Totally agree with everything you've said, brain train for the actual job by doing the actual job and immersing in it as thoroughly and consistently as you can,

Totally agree with everything you've said, brain train for the actual job by doing the actual job and immersing in it as thoroughly and consistently as you can, do things others find boring or difficult. In case the author IS young, I would also add this: Stay away from startups with capricious, absentee or already wealthy founders, find the most productive, stable environment you can. If you work in an environment where personal production and job security are orthogonal you might find yourself getting rug pulled where effort/contribution are fully decoupled from reward. Unless you achieve financial escape velocity or end up in an increasingly rare engineering "jobs program" at a large entity, you will get rug pulled at some point due to founder/manager proclivities or due to other macro economic issues. You are probably screwed if this happens to you young enough as it fucks up motivation, it's why among the older programmer crowd you see some former HS dropouts that started professional work way too young (in the early days of the digital revolution) for a toxic company just completely burn out and fuck up their reward circuitry (it's also part of why 2 round leukemia kids have worse longterm outcomes than 1 round or non-leukemia kids). You want to already have experienced patterns of good faith behavior and delay your first rug pull as long as possible.

Aurornis 2y ago
> If you work in an environment where personal production and job security are orthogonal you might find yourself getting rug pulled where effort/contribution are fully decoupled from reward. This is a great point. When you find yourself in a workplace where job security is based more on vibes than production it creates a false sense of security. You think your personal productivity doesn't matter and that you can vibe your way into the good graces of people making decisions. When jobs security is decoupled from productivity, the winds of the company can and do change frequently. Other people are going to be better at playing the vibes game than you are. Vibes-based companies are overly vulnerable to politics. It's good to work at companies where productivity is tied to personal performance, even if measuring productivty is far from perfect.
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago
  > When jobs security is decoupled from productivity, the winds of the company can and do change frequently. But that is always the case, and the "productivity=security" environment is artificial and unnatural. The large forces beyond your control dominate the world, and the whole companies get hit by redundancies because the market changed, AI ate some section of the market, or the banks were too busy playing with mortgages and collapsed the whole global economy. My experience indicates that it's more important to be working on the right thing, than to be super productive working on the wrong thing.
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    This seems like a tautology, by definition forces on a global scale are far beyond the average person. If they weren’t, then they would cease to significantly affect things on such a scale.
    - fc417fc802 2y ago
      [dead]
    - ClumsyPilot 2y ago
      Exactly, and even beyond control of company management. In which case why is everyone so obsessed with productivity?
- tkiolp4 2y ago
  > It's good to work at companies where productivity is tied to personal performance, even if measuring productivty is far from perfect. Not in my opinion. These kind of companies ask you to give 100% of yourself every single day. This may sound normal and natural to everyone, but I don’t like it. I cannot work in an environment in which they ask me to be a high performer, and anything else is “below expectations”. It’s just not worth it. Much better to have job (in)security detached from productivity: in any case, companies are not to be trusted, and one should be ready to switch at any moment.
Aeolun 2y ago
> Stay away from startups with capricious, absentee or already wealthy founders, find the most productive, stable environment you can. I don’t think this is necessarily true. The job I learned most was one where I was the only tech person working on a product that had a more or less absent founder. I had to teach myself of course, but if you are self motivated you can learn a lot there. Just don’t expect to get rewarded for it. See it as being paid in knowledge instead of money.

Aurornis 2y ago

> If you work in an environment where personal production and job security are orthogonal you might find yourself getting rug pulled where effort/contribution are fully decoupled from reward. This is a great point. When you find yourself in a workplace where job security is based more on vibes than production it creates a false sense of security. You think your personal productivity doesn't matter and that you can vibe your way into the good graces of people making decisions. When jobs security is decoupled from productivity, the winds of the company can and do change frequently. Other people are going to be better at playing the vibes game than you are. Vibes-based companies are overly vulnerable to politics. It's good to work at companies where productivity is tied to personal performance, even if measuring productivty is far from perfect.

ClumsyPilot 2y ago
> When jobs security is decoupled from productivity, the winds of the company can and do change frequently. But that is always the case, and the "productivity=security" environment is artificial and unnatural. The large forces beyond your control dominate the world, and the whole companies get hit by redundancies because the market changed, AI ate some section of the market, or the banks were too busy playing with mortgages and collapsed the whole global economy. My experience indicates that it's more important to be working on the right thing, than to be super productive working on the wrong thing.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  This seems like a tautology, by definition forces on a global scale are far beyond the average person. If they weren’t, then they would cease to significantly affect things on such a scale.
  - fc417fc802 2y ago
    [dead]
  - ClumsyPilot 2y ago
    Exactly, and even beyond control of company management. In which case why is everyone so obsessed with productivity?
tkiolp4 2y ago
> It's good to work at companies where productivity is tied to personal performance, even if measuring productivty is far from perfect. Not in my opinion. These kind of companies ask you to give 100% of yourself every single day. This may sound normal and natural to everyone, but I don’t like it. I cannot work in an environment in which they ask me to be a high performer, and anything else is “below expectations”. It’s just not worth it. Much better to have job (in)security detached from productivity: in any case, companies are not to be trusted, and one should be ready to switch at any moment.

Aeolun 2y ago

> Stay away from startups with capricious, absentee or already wealthy founders, find the most productive, stable environment you can. I don’t think this is necessarily true. The job I learned most was one where I was the only tech person working on a product that had a more or less absent founder. I had to teach myself of course, but if you are self motivated you can learn a lot there. Just don’t expect to get rewarded for it. See it as being paid in knowledge instead of money.