8 ms·

If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)

• hwhehwhehegwggw 10mo ago
  I would take it one step up and say if you don't design your life intentionally your career will.
  • ramon156 10mo ago
    Juniors fall into this pitfall so quick. Our newest hire actually set boundaries early on and I was pleasantly surprised
    • nottorp 10mo ago
      So it's the kind of work place where you have to set boundaries? :)
      • fifilura 10mo ago
        What workplace is not?
      • ManuelKiessling 10mo ago
        You need to set your bounds in every single workplace, because no one workplace can set the right boundaries for everyone.
      • y-curious 10mo ago
        “Set your own boundaries, or someone else will do it for you” Turtles all the way down
        • ramon156 10mo ago
          I think this mostly speaks about setting boundaries with your higher-up, which is revolved around you. So, I guess it would be "Turtles all the way up"
      • ramon156 10mo ago
        We work in different timezones so it's a mess. Either people give up their morning or they give up their evening time. I'm at the bottom of the chain here and have no authority to change this. Given that I'm being let go soon there's not much reason for them to care about my mental state either. But from the time I've been here, yes, you need to set boundaries or they'll do it for you. It seems like most PMs are used to talking to robots, because that's how they talk to us lately.
    • madduci 10mo ago
      I hope they were work-life balance boundaries
    • georgeburdell 10mo ago
      Disagree. This kind of comment is furtively pulling up the ladder behind you. Do as I say not as I do. Junior is the time to learn as much as possible and take risky bets (and suffer accordingly). When I was in a junior in a factory, the night shift knew me well. Nowadays, I've pared it back to 50 or so hours per week, because I now have a family, which is fine but it came at the cost of basically zero time to learn or do things other than what my manager asks.
      • kamaal 10mo ago
        This is a correct view point to have. As you get to the downswing of your career, you should have already worked and made enough mistakes to have most of your experience. You must cruise on that experience when you are older. When you are old, that is not the time to work and make mistakes. That is, most of the heavy work must be done as early as you can. Eat that frog.
        • nasmorn 10mo ago
          I agree. When new programmers come from uni they sometimes barely did any programming. So at some time in their life they got to actually put in the time and learn how to be a competent developer. It is obviously great if you can do it on somebody else dime in a 9 to 5 but if you can’t get that you should just put in the time and learn. In the end you can at best get paid for the value you can create and if you are incompetent that is not going to be a lot
      • BeetleB 10mo ago
        > Junior is the time to learn as much as possible and take risky bets (and suffer accordingly). When I was in a junior in a factory, the night shift knew me well. That would require a whole, separate article. Many (most?) juniors grinding like that in a major company will work hard to get nowhere. Speaking from experience. Yes, I learned some lessons: 1. Get a different job. Deadend jobs definitely exist, and are quite common. 2. Ignore senior folks who say "You're whining. It's crappy everywhere. Just learn to take it." Number 2 has been wrong every single time someone said it. > Nowadays, I've pared it back to 50 or so hours per week, because I now have a family, This is not the endorsement you think it is. I've done quite well by insisting on 40 hour weeks. I'm going to assume you're doing much better than I am, because otherwise it seems like a life wasted. Don't get me wrong. If you want to go much farther than I have, you likely will have to grind and work hard and smart and be lucky. But I assure you - most of the people I know who worked hard are not in a better position than I am (or if they are, the difference is incremental).
  • paganel 10mo ago
    Statements like this one come for a position of privilege, which is to be expected on a forum like this one targeting techies who are most probably solidly middle-class, but just wanted to point that out. More exactly, most of the (normal) people are NOT in the position of designing their lives, believing otherwise is, again, tainted by said position of privilege.
    • integralid 10mo ago
      You either misunderstood or we disagree fundamentally. Everyone can and should design their life. Of course richer people have a lot more choices, and poorer people a lot more constraints, but everyone can make informed choices. Believing "most of the normal people" have no agency is condescending.
      • aduty 10mo ago
        They're just speaking from their own place of privilege.
        • deleted 10mo ago
          [deleted]
      • bboozzoo 10mo ago
        Oh they have agency. They also have bills to pay, families to take care of and many other obligations that folks of privilege do not need to be bothered with. It is immediately obvious how privileged we are compared to many others who are not a liberty of designing their lives or careers.
        • integralid 10mo ago
          >They also have bills to pay, families to take care of and many other obligations I honestly don't get your point. I also have bills to pay and a family to take care of. Almost everyone does. I can't just quit my job and spend my life sunbathing on a sunny island, even though that sounds way better than my office job. The number of people who have so much that they don't ever need to worry about bills or affording a family is tiny, even among HN users. This is also not what "designing your life" is about. To be clear, I acknowledge my privilege - I have a relatively high salary (but not US-high, not even 6 USD figures) and don't need to worry about day-to-day survival. I just fundamentally disagree that there is some threshold below which people can't make decisions about their own life or career.
• KronisLV 10mo ago
  In regards to the review part: What helps me is keeping around my TODO.txt month by month, as well as a lot of screenshots and images of the things I find relevant for sharing in stand ups and meetings and such (as well as presentations). So if I need to review the past month/year (e.g. when I want to update CV/site or catch up with management), it’s just a matter of going through a bunch of text and images without a lot of unnecessary fluff, like digging through Jira. Maybe if I want to get the approximate time/effort spent on particular stuff, based on the amount of activity there. Alongside that, it’s also nice to document stuff that was particularly good, or all the ways software broke in (and what broke how often), as well as stuff that pissed me off and made me want to quit (sometimes people/mindsets, sometimes tangible code or practices). When the default is just going with the flow and not documenting anything and doing no self reflection, every improvement upon that helps.
  • A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo ago
    GPT was actually pretty good for this use case until 5.2 kneecapped its long term memory and now its more aggressive about pruning ( very annoying as wide recall now has to be explicitly invoked ).
  • xianwen 10mo ago
    Very interesting! Do you organize screenshots and images by day and by topic?
    • KronisLV 10mo ago
      Currently not really, at least not for the weekly status meetings. Typically I'll have a folder with a bunch of numbered files in the order that I want to talk about them, since it's easier to just quickly share my screen and run through then when I want to let others know what I've done, for example along the lines of: 01-migrate-gulp-grunt-to-vite.png 02-vue-prebuild-script-check-unused-translations.png 03-java-add-compile-memory-limit-ide.png 04-server-update-python-for-ansible.png ... If I need them for like a yearly performance review, then I'll probably do a pass where I group them into named folders and write a doc loosely following those topics, given that I might work on similar improvements and fixes across more than just 1 week. Pretty low friction daily and also when I need more structure.
• Swizec 10mo ago
  My favorite lens on this comes from Hamming: > It is well known the drunken sailor whos taggers to the left or right n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about sqrt(n) steps from the origin. But if there is a pretty girl in one direction, then his steps will tend to go in that direction and he will go a distance proportional to n. In a lifetime of many, many independent choices, small and large, a career with a vision will get you a distance proportional to n, while no vision will get you only the distance sqrt(n). In a sense, the main difference between those who go far and those who do not is some people have a vision and others do not and therefore can only react to the current events as they happen. Just a tiny bit of bias towards a direction will get you very far very fast. I once modeled+visualised this with a bit of javascript[1] and it's quite surprising to see the huge difference from even a tiny multiplication factor on each random/probabilistic decision. [1] https://swizec.com/blog/your-career-needs-a-vision/ https://swizec.com/blog/your-career-needs-a-vision/
  • y-curious 10mo ago
    This is a lovely mental model and also makes me feel a host of existential dread. I had a semblance of vision before gen AI and I think that vision needs serious revision
    • ptero 10mo ago
      Which is fine. Goals shift and can even completely disappear, forcing you to pick another one. But having and pursuing long term goals at most times is still the ticket for success. My 2c.
  • A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo ago
    It is not something I share very often, because people assume a lot when I do, but von Braun[1] shared a similar idea. Ignoring for a moment his past, one cannot say that he had no achievements further supporting position noted by OP. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Aim_at_the_Stars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Aim_at_the_Stars
    • 10mo ago
• andrewstuart 10mo ago
  No one else will.
• kstenerud 10mo ago
  Kinda reminds me of an interesting scene from the Netflix series "Castlevania" "If you don't have your own story, you become part of someone else's." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MofDRVtRec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MofDRVtRec
  • deleted 10mo ago
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• fifilura 10mo ago
  I don't think the random sailor analogy is a perfect fit. If you guide your own direction too strictly you will both risk moving yourself into a dead end, but also miss out on unexpected opportunities.
  • A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo ago
    But your opportunities depend partially on what you can actually do. In other words, optmize for your strengths, refine what works, remove what doesn't. Opportunities will come, but if you are not prepared based on your own predispositions, they are wasted on you anyway. Direction of the sailor of the sailor is but one factor in this.
• kbrkbr 10mo ago
  I enjoyed this article and think it's good advice, and I also think that the punchline (title + last sentence) is wrong. Not that it makes a big difference, I just treasure texts more that I feel the author thought through to the last detail. If you don't design your career, in most cases I guess no one will. In the comments are good examples, like the random walk of the drunken sailor. The cases in which you could use the phrase "someone else designed it for me" in a meaningful way seem rather rare to me.
• keiferski 10mo ago
  The main thing missing from this IMO is an element of chance or randomness, the ability to incorporate “unknown unknowns” into your life. The most interesting people I’ve come across have had a variety of jobs, many of which they knew absolutely nothing about when starting out. There is a genuine value add when you’ve worked beyond the same white collar profession your entire working career. In other words, the problem in designing your life is that you’re almost always going to pick things you already know. Maybe that gets you to the peak of your current profession over twenty years…but maybe some other job is actually a lot more fulfilling to you. I’m not sure how to incorporate this into a young person’s real life experience, but I do think gap years, varied internships, volunteering, etc. are probably a good start. I recently listened to a podcast with a guy that wrote a book advocating that young people spend 4 years getting a pilot’s license, working on a ranch, becoming an EMT, and various other useful skills/jobs. That seems like a great idea, although I didn’t like the hostility to traditional college he had in offering this plan.
  • tock 10mo ago
    Do you have a link to that podcast? Sounds interesting!
    • keiferski 10mo ago
      I forget the exact podcast, as I think he did a few different interviews. Might have been this one? https://www.artofmanliness.com/people/fatherhood/podcast-1085-the-preparation-an-adventure-driven-skill-building-alternative-to-college-for-young-men/ https://www.artofmanliness.com/people/fatherhood/podcast-108... The book itself is called The Preparation.
  • Xunjin 10mo ago
    In a society where everything needs to be optimal, randomness is seen as a mistake.
    • keiferski 10mo ago
      Yeah and even if you’re totally uninterested in “having an interesting life” and just want to maximize income/job prospects, I think you can make the argument that a little bit of randomness is actually the optimal path because it increases your luck surface area. For example - working in a well-rated fine dining restaurant over a summer while you’re studying computer science seems totally unrelated and not optimal. But maybe that unique experience is what stands out on your resume, and maybe the knowledge about wine or food you acquired there builds a connection with an investor or manager, years down the line.
• neuralkoi 10mo ago
  A lot of us live our lives according to the expectations of others (our parents, society, etc) because this is all we know how to do at first and what the "system" reinforces through school, career, etc. and this difference between what we want to do and what we actually end up doing can end up causing lots of suffering to ourselves (and to others). I've seen fear as the primary obstacle to trying something different when the current route is not working. It's really hard to step outside the comfort zone in those situations.
  • ErigmolCt 10mo ago
    Not just fear of failure, but fear of disappointing people, losing status, or admitting (to yourself and others) that the plan you’ve been following isn't actually working
  • marginalia_nu 10mo ago
    My 2c as someone who has ended up in a non-traditional career track, mostly doing my own thing and getting paid for it. While you definitely need a higher than average tolerance for uncertainty, the big thing is just not seeing all the options. Many choices are occluded by the options presented to you by employers, the educational system, etc. The spectrum of careers, which is a continuous higher-dimensional blob of "things you can do to make money", is systematized in such a way that while there are paths to unusual career outcomes, most of those paths can not be expressed. You may on some level want to reach some career or lifestyle goal, but often the path to that destination isn't obvious, and it's definitely never presented to you as an option among the things you can choose, and more than likely you'll have few if any role models or people to ask for guidance if you find yourself on that track.
• ErigmolCt 10mo ago
  This reads a bit like classic self-help, but there's a solid point hiding underneath the platitudes. Most careers do get shaped by inertia: the projects you say yes to, the skills you accidentally accumulate, the expectations other people quietly set for you
  • bebb 10mo ago
    I find that's a good reason, other than looking for an increase in salary, to seek out new employment opportunities every few years, while nudging your resume more towards the career you want rather than the career you've experienced.
• NoiseBert69 10mo ago
  I'd more say: if you don't care about your career yourself - someone else with interest conflicts will
• cardanome 10mo ago
  I do something similar for development of me as a human being. I ask myself how can I improve, what kind of person do I want to be, how can I help make the world a better place. My "career" is just a means to an end to put food on the table. Also being in my 30s I think I have mostly maxed it out anyway. Sure I might increase my wage a little bit but all in all as for being an IC it is a good as it gets. Sure there is always room for improvement but I am already constantly the person with the most technical skills in the room so it would not grant me any benefit. I don't think your "career" needs to be a major focus in your life once you are set up at least. Especially if you don't do any meaningful work that actually helps people like being a doctor or teacher or something. In the end my work just makes someone else richer, it doesn't have any meaning. It does not make the world a better place. Probably a worse place sometimes. I just do it to not starve.
  • zwnow 10mo ago
    > In the end my work just makes someone else richer, it doesn't have any meaning. This is something I struggle with a lot. I left companies before, because the job felt meaningless and making some rich guy richer doesn't sound meaningful to me. I am trying to come up with a business idea I can work on on the side, that actually is supposed to make the world a better place, but I am struggling to find anything I have enough experience in to pursue. I am leaning towards activism now, because that is probably the most achievable thing to do for me. Just building info sites nobody reads, trying to make non tech people aware about how Amazon, Google and so on makes life worse for everyone. Or how anti privacy laws are probably a bad idea. But that does not feel fruitful either. My everyday life is consumed by the desire of having some kind of impact, making the world better.
    • ta1024768 10mo ago
      > trying to make non tech people aware about how Amazon, Google and so on makes life worse for everyone. Or how anti privacy laws are probably a bad idea. I think a majority of people already know this, that's why it feels fruitless. Also more negativity ("these companies are bad because of x, y, z") will also make you feel negative. Why not make those sites, talk to those non-techy people, but provide _some_ form of thing they can do to make an impact in a tangible way, not just "don't use amazon", links to sites that put together local info for small areas, catagories of smaller online sites that you can use instead of amazon or something. > My everyday life is consumed by the desire of having some kind of impact, making the world better. Do you have something tangible you can look back on that you did last week that helped achieve this vision? If not, what small thing can you do this week?
• g947o 10mo ago
  I planned to get out of my current company and stop wasting my life two years ago. The job market and my visa status meant that it's either impossible or I need to make significant sacrifices. So that's life.
  • ramon156 10mo ago
    Wondering if working as a contractor is any different. you won't stay longer than 6-12 months on a project and you can safely say goodbye without having to explain a gap in your resume
    • g947o 10mo ago
      Visa.
  • paulcole 10mo ago
    Why didn’t you make the significant sacrifices?
    • jcims 10mo ago
      This is one of those areas where family starts to influence decisions. My wife and I had kids between 24 and 28. From that point forward, 'supporting the family' took priority over personal fulfillment. Now that our kids are grown and self-supporting, it's wild how much simpler the risk calculation is. But at 52 with engineering manager being the dominant role in my CV, not particularly appealing to the small companies making big moves that I'm interested in.
      • paulcole 10mo ago
        Nobody with a family has ever found a way to make a sacrifice and leave a job they felt was wasting their life?
        • g947o 10mo ago
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
• socketcluster 10mo ago
  I have a really hard time designing my career in tech because I believe that people already have more options than they need or can afford. What people need aren't more options. What they need is MONEY; which is the ability to obtain the options which exist. And the only way to give people more money is through political means. This is why I was interested in crypto; it seemed to get straight to the point... I later quit crypto due to too much corruption in the space and launched a mainstream startup with a co-founder centered around helping people find 'the perfect job' but I quit as co-founder because the idea of it almost makes me want to vomit now. The system is firing people en masse. The system itself doesn't want people to have jobs... So me, trying to work against the system by offering a solution that operates within the system feels futile and like gaslighting users and myself. It's selling a dream. There is no perfect job. Reality is our socio-economic system doesn't even have a shitty job for you... Let alone a perfect job... And most jobs seem like bullshit jobs anyway. It's extremely hard to find an idea that's both truly useful and profitable these days. That's a shame because that's exactly what I want to do with my life but I feel like this does not align with what is possible within the current system. I cannot find any such opportunities in the tech sector. Someone told me I should get into politics but again if I think about what the typical politician does, I feel nauseous. The only kind of politician I could possibly be is the honest kind that gets assassinated... And of course I don't want that. Besides, nobody would fund me... My hitman would probably have an easier time raising funding to 'take me out' of politics than I would raising funding to get into it.
  • ramon156 10mo ago
    I resonate so much with you. I'm in the middle of getting my product out for people to use and naively kept thinking that a good product means people are interested. I need to integrate with tools that prematurely deny me because I'm not a big company. I basically already lost, despite my tool being much more reasonable and maintainable (I've worked at the competitors and it was a mess). The world doesn't care about good products, they just care about how it looks. Big companies look good, you don't. It got me demotivated early on. You really need thick skin to start selling a product.
    • 10mo ago
• ursAxZA 10mo ago
  When I buy clothes, I always “choose” the outfit the mannequin is already wearing.
• WhereIsTheTruth 10mo ago
  > Many years ago I followed this process and, without exaggeration, it changed the course of my life. The insight I gained led me to quit law school, leave England and move to America and start down the path as a teacher and author. You’re reading this because of that choice. It remains the single most important career decision of my life That "decision" required a safety net most will never have Designing your career isn’t about self introspection, it’s about leverage And leverage is stolen from the invisible hands that keep your world running while you journal The problem isn't individual, but systemic: why is the freedom to choose rationed so narrowly? For a lot of people, work isn't a career to design, it's survival math
• qwertytyyuu 10mo ago
  Its that time of the year again huh. The times for unfilled news years aspirations.
  • 72649293 10mo ago
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• te_chris 10mo ago
  Also see Feedback Analysis, by Peter Drucker from Managing Oneself - https://hbr.org/2005/01/managing-oneself https://hbr.org/2005/01/managing-oneself
  • esafak 10mo ago
    https://www.thecompleteleader.org/sites/default/files/imce/Managing%20Oneself_Drucker_HBR.pdf https://www.thecompleteleader.org/sites/default/files/imce/M...
• doctorhandshake 10mo ago
  “The crime which bankrupts men and nations is that of turning aside from one’s main purpose to serve a job here and there.” As a former career contractor who took probably 7 commercial jobs I didn’t care about for every 1 creative job I wanted to do but for which I was underpaid, this feels deeply true.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• MikeMoh 10mo ago
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• etothepii 10mo ago
  Deliberate planning is great but serendipity is important too. Some of the richest people I know made most of their wealth as a consequence of being in a position to act* when opportunities presented themselves. My guess is that it's important not to be overly focused on the intermediate goals and the more debt you have the less able you feel to take risks. *it may be more appropriate to say start than act as in the two cases that immediately come to mind they were both 10+ year journeys.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• firesteelrain 10mo ago
  I’ve spent my career chasing jobs that had kept me employed for over 20 years so I can support a family. Unfortunately I have had to let the ‘system’ take me where I am needed so I can pay my bills. It is life.
  • paulcole 10mo ago
    If you don’t design your career, someone else will.
    • FromTheFirstIn 10mo ago
      If you don’t support your family, no one else will
      • paulcole 10mo ago
        I find that when decisions are very minor, people love to have tons of options to select from. When decisions are much more impactful and high stakes, people seem to love finding ways to convince themselves there are no options and that they must proceed down a single path out of necessity for how the world is.
    • 72649293 10mo ago
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• deleted 10mo ago
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• maciejzj 10mo ago
  From the perspective of someone in their late 20s, the timing of this article feels quite off when entering 2026. The reality has become far different from the gist of what is presented here. Career paths and opportunities have been getting broken and changing so much in recent years that I find it hard to plan anything. I don't even know what kind of "goal" is sustainable, let alone what the path towards it is. The only sensible career that seems to offer a steady trajectory is medicine. Apart from that, my most successful peers were the ones that followed immediate money and speed-ran into owning some kind of real estate, which is a game changer. Besides that, people try to do as many side hustles as possible and diversify their income to save as much as they can and brace for a possible recession. I find it hard to apply any of these 8 steps in such volatile reality.
  • underlipton 10mo ago
    I wouldn't even say medicine. Neither Baby Boomers nor the current American healthcare system have 30 years left in them; that means that, unless you're already in your 40s or 50s, you're going to see the bottom fall out of that sector mid-career. This is a political failure. It has nothing to do with individual decision-making and everything to do with poorly-managed incentives for appropriate 21st-century investments.
    • raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
      I agree. I’m 51. I’m hoping to end up like Ben Kenobi. Say f%%% this and die after having a good life and letting the younger generation take over.
    • jselysianeagle 10mo ago
      > unless you're already in your 40s or 50s, you're going to see the bottom fall out of that sector mid-career. Can you elaborate? What's going to happen to the healthcare system?
      • underlipton 10mo ago
        It's going to become insolvent. People aren't going to be able to afford care.
• danielfalbo 10mo ago
  > We have a sense of what we would most love to do but we immediately push it aside. Why? Typically because “it is not realistic” which is code for, “I can’t make money doing this.” Reminds me of PG's "How To Do What You Love"[1] [1] https://paulgraham.com/love.html https://paulgraham.com/love.html
• alexpotato 10mo ago
  So a bit of my thoughts + open to suggestions from other folks on HN. I've been a DevOps/SRE essentially my entire career and almost always in Finance (banks, FinTech startups, multiple hedge funds etc) and most recently in crypto. It's seemed that for SWEs the path was always something like: - junior - team lead - manager - manager of managers - CTO (or VP of Engineering etc) For SREs/DevOps it always felt a bit fuzzier after manager and most of the manager of managers I know ended up being that role in an "infra" department (e.g. k8s, networking etc). I would love to know what folks with my background ended up doing later in their careers/age mid 40s and above? (all of this is even more fuzzy due to LLMs/AI and part of me feels like it's time to start pivoting into some kind of IRL service or manufacturing role given the speed at which things are developing. e.g. maybe I should buy a bakery...) Open to all kinds of stories and suggestions here as would most likely benefit me and also lots of other folks reading the comments.
  • jonpurdy 10mo ago
    > I would love to know what folks with my background ended up doing later in their careers/age mid 40s and above? I'm 41 now, started working in education but pivoted back to tech quickly (DevOps specifically) since tech is a better match for me. After a few years, fell upwards into management then pivoted into Technical Program Management roles where I've remained since. Love this since I get to interact with teams of people working in my program(s) but don't have the responsibilities of a people manager. Personally, my roles focus on infrastructure and things at least loosely related to my DevOps background. Worked at two blockchain companies (I've been into blockchain tech since 2012) but considering moving into green energy somehow. I think in most cases including yours: choose roles based both on interest and total compensation. And it's a lot easier to get roles (especially TPM roles) if you're already technically competent in that particular field (in your case FinTech and crypto).
    • alexpotato 10mo ago
      Thanks for the suggestion!
• GuB-42 10mo ago
  This is a very "live to work" article. Is it wrong to have your career on autopilot if you are satisfied with your job? Clearly, the author wasn't, switching from law to becoming a teacher/writer. So I guess that the article makes sense in this context.
  • AnimalMuppet 10mo ago
    I can want a decent work/life balance, but I also want to not be in a dead-end job. I can give some thought to my career (not being on total autopilot), and also have my job in balance with the rest of my life.
  • elric 10mo ago
    > This is a very "live to work" article. That's not the impression I got. It's about wanting a career that's meaningful to you. Whatever that means to you. Maybe your answer to "What would I do in my career if I could do anything?" is working 9-5 without a care in the world. That's totally valid.
  • ThrowawayR2 10mo ago
    > "Is it wrong to have your career on autopilot if you are satisfied with your job?" Only if you don't mind the career equivalent of CFIT¹ when a mountain turns out not to be where your maps said it was. I'll wager that a lot of former Flash developers weren't expecting Apple to cause Flash to die out. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_flight_into_terrain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_flight_into_terrain
• deleted 10mo ago
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• KellyCriterion 10mo ago
  This reminds on the sentence of a former boss, who said: "if you do not take care of your money, someone else will do"
• deleted 10mo ago
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• d--b 10mo ago
  Here's my two cents: career-driven people are assholes. You're welcome.
• aristofun 10mo ago
  The general sentiment of being aware about your career and decisions is true. But this reminds me of what I hate about modern corporate “culture” the most. And what is broken about it the most. Im speaking about the rat race. Tge fact, that you have to waste a noticeable part of your work time, effort and energy to sell your work instead of doing it. To the point where good salesmen make a “career” and become your bosses without any correlation to their work abilities or even management skills. Those are very good at designing their careers. As a result the more corrupted the company with this style of internal management the more reliable it drowns in a swamp of ineffectiveness. In a well functioning company or society “building a career” shouldn’t be a goal nor priority. It should be the natural outcome (more or less) of a “job very well done” that is a true priority. Yes we’re not in a perfect world. But at least we should try to reach our ideals rather than promoting rat race mentality as a norm.
  • Aurornis 10mo ago
    > To the point where good salesmen make a “career” and become your bosses without any correlation to their work abilities or even management skills. The few times I've seen this actually happen at a company, it was not the kind of company I wanted to work for long-term anyway. If the company is so broken that the wrong people are being promoted while the right people are being ignored constantly, there will be bigger problems than you simply missing a promotion. The one startup I worked for that had this problem chronically (combined with some nepotism) did a bee-line run straight for insolvency and then collapsed. Everyone on the ground floor saw it coming. Some people still tried to race for promotions and upward career trajectory there, but the smart ones invested their effort in getting out. That said, I've also worked at some companies where the right people were getting promoted but there were groups of people with sour grapes he were always upset it wasn't them. It's never something everyone agrees on.
    • raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
      Every single major tech company that I am aware of (admittedly only two from 1st and 2nd hand knowledge) require you to submit a promo doc showing you “operating at the level you want to get promoted to”. You only can show that by getting those plum opportunities and that only happens through building the right relationships with the right people and knowing how to navigate corporate culture.
• gnarlouse 10mo ago
  “Ok Greg” “I’m not defined by my career Greg” “Greg see a therapist”
• agumonkey 10mo ago
  Does this apply in chaotic context ? I can't foresee what jobs there will be in 2 years now.
• cloudyporpoise 10mo ago
  Great feedback. Many of us are on auto-pilot and taking a little bit of time to reflect, can shape a better version of that auto-pilot. Another useful input is what are other people telling you? This shaped my career early on by either taking on the work others didn't want to do, or hearing others mention what they felt was important and focusing on this.
• liampulles 10mo ago
  An underappreciated factor for building one's career is also building a safety net, because that allows for risk. Having that safety net means you can't be taken hostage in a salary negotiation, and it means that you can entertain riskier career moves. That safety net contains financial and (demonstrable) human capital.
  • 72649293 10mo ago
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• Sheeny96 10mo ago
  I worked very hard for the first 5 or 6 years of my career - hit senior dev pretty quick, managed to double my pay moving into consultancy, and back on product dev in a smaller company nowadays. Honestly? I don't feel a massive need to grow beyond where I am. I earn in the top 5% in my country. I live a comfortable and flexible life. I continue to learn like any dev with a passion for technology does - but i'm not constructing my life around an endless climb. If my role naturally transitions upwardly, great. If I stay where I am, steadily taking on more responsibility,that's also totally fine. The diminishing returns of chasing a CTO title or another arbritrarily large sum of money just doesn't seem worth it.
• nospice 10mo ago
  If you design your career, you will almost certainly get the same outcome too. I've managed people for decades and this has been a common pattern. I'd have people come to me with their plans to be in the C-suite in five or ten years, based precisely on self-help advice like that. None of them ended up there. But several of the people who never had a plan did in fact end up as VPs, CTOs, etc. I don't want to say that thinking about your career doesn't matter. It's definitely easy to self-sabotage it by sticking to your comfort zone for life. But turn-by-turn plans are not useful because a lot of it is a product of chance. In a corporate setting, the best advice is just: get in the habit of solving tough problems for the people who matter, and find low-key ways to let them know about the good work you're doing. The rest, more or less, follows from that.
  • Archit3ch 10mo ago
    > I've managed people for decades and this has been a common pattern. I'd have people come to me with their plans to be in the C-suite in five or ten years, based precisely on self-help advice like that. None of them ended up there. According to the Gervais Principle, these people are Clueless. Of course they end up in middle management. The top spots are reserved for Sociopaths.
    • robocat 10mo ago
      > The top spots are reserved for Sociopaths How many people think the first step is to become a sociopath? And then try to act like they think a sociopath acts? Few people are ruthlessly cunning in the right way. Even worse, do people try and model their behaviour based on The Apprentice or the worst of the shows about chefs?
• Rakshath_1 10mo ago
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• raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
  I can’t say I’ve ever had “5 year plans” and even I did, facts on the ground change so fast, my plans would change. I’ve been working since 1996. But without going into ancient history, in 2008, I had spent the last 9 years at my second job, became an expert beginner, been divorced for two years, and had 5 mortgages between my home and two rental properties that were underwater by about a $250K. I was also teaching fitness classes part time to make up the gap - that was suppose just be a hobby. Then my plan was to get out from under all of that mess. I didn’t know how or have a timeline. But it started with getting a job where I could get exposed to modern development practices (done after 3 months and a lot of prep work), stopped teaching so much (just kept my favorite classes where my friends were), and walked away from five mortgages and wrecked my credit (everyone was doing “strategic defaults” back then). One thing I didn’t “plan” for was to meet and marry my future wife and become a father to pre-teens by 2013. I’m still married, boys are grown. That by itself changed my goals. By 2013, I was still about 25% under paid even for an enterprise “senior” [sic] dev in Atlanta and still digging myself out of my financial mess while supporting a family. My goal by then was to develop the soft skills and hard skills to be a team lead - again no timeline. Then in 2016, my goal was for us to move and work for a much better paying tech company after 2020 when my youngest graduated from high school. Even that changed to I would rather just not move and get into customer facing cloud consulting (not staff aug) after 2020 when I thought I would have to travel a lot (who could have predicted a worldwide pandemic??). Well both fell into my lap in mid 2020 - customer facing cloud consulting and BigTech and I didn’t have to move when I got a job at AWS working in Professional Services. I didn’t even know the department existed. Again not planned. 2020 my plan was to work for Amazon for four years, pay off debt, save some money and work for a smaller consulting firm. I knew three months after I got there that I definitely didn’t have the stomach for BigTech long term. This was the only 5 year plan that worked out more or less as I wanted (staff consultant for a reputable mid sized company). Even then, I never thought in 5 years, we would decide to sell our house in the burbs, downsize and move to state tax free, much better weather Florida
• _superposition_ 10mo ago
  Reminds me of https://fs.blog/hunter-s-thompson-to-hume-logan/ https://fs.blog/hunter-s-thompson-to-hume-logan/
• 72649293 10mo ago
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• danielmarkbruce 10mo ago
  Yeah totally. Someone should totally have designed their career in marketing pre AI and not change course. They are in control. There are no outside forces.
• yoan9224 10mo ago
  This advice remains relevant but I think it misses an important nuance about how career design actually works in practice. The metaphor of "design" implies you're building something from scratch with full control, but career development is more like gardening - you can influence conditions but not force outcomes. The key insight is recognizing the misalignment between your goals and your manager's goals. Your manager optimizes for team output and organizational needs. Your career growth is a secondary concern - important, but not primary. This creates a fundamental principal-agent problem. The solution isn't to become adversarial, it's to be explicit about your goals and negotiate actively rather than hoping they'll be noticed. Practically, this means: (1) Having quarterly conversations where you explicitly state "I want to work on X technology" or "I'm aiming for senior by Q3" rather than assuming good work will be rewarded automatically. (2) Building skills outside your job scope through side projects, open source, or internal tools that solve real problems. (3) Being willing to change companies when growth stalls - the biggest salary/title jumps come from job changes, not promotions. The dangerous flip side is over-optimization. I've seen engineers obsess over "career design" to the point where they won't touch any task that doesn't directly ladder to their promotion case. That creates fragile specialists who can't adapt when their niche technology becomes obsolete. Better approach: have a direction, but maintain broad skills and genuine curiosity. The most interesting career paths come from unexpected opportunities you recognized because you had wide exposure, not rigid planning.
• cheapbussy 10mo ago
  +++ Non native english speaker, machine-edited text +++ English Version (clean, correct, humorous) “Whoever ignores success because it doesn’t count as a mistake will make very little progress.” The “Little Brother” Misassessment Now, bro once said: “If there’s no mistake, then I can’t learn anything from it. Without a mistake, there’s nothing to learn.” But if his recipe for success - all the right, good, subtle, less noticeable things - isn’t even registered by his mind... …then isn’t that a problem with the mental template he’s using? “Fixed points of social polarization”... Hey bro, before I hug you as the “Hero of Labor” - sincerely, warmly - 2,800 hours of work this year... Tell me honestly: Did only you earn that praise, or do the employees of high‑performers like you also deserve some recognition? I probably don’t know them - but I do know you, which is why I’m asking. Self‑reflection: Learning also comes from questioning routine Keyword: Extremes (Mistake vs. Non‑Mistake) Thesis: “You only learn from mistakes.” Antithesis: “Then I must be a genius, considering how often I mess things up…” Paradox: “If you never see success, you can’t do anything wrong.” The “Little Brother” misjudgment is ultimately a cognitive trap. It reduces learning to mistakes and filters out success, cooperation, and quiet contributions. The Mistake Olympics Gold for the colleague who filled the coffee machine with dish soap. Bronze for the intern - eventually you only learn how to apologize. Punchline: “I don’t make mistakes - I produce learning material.” “My success is invisible, boss, because - as I’d like to emphasize - I couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong.” “Hero of labor? I’m a hero of coffee breaks. Without me, there wouldn’t be any work at all.” “If mistakes were the only source of learning, my life would count as a Harvard degree.” Whoever ignores success because it doesn’t count as a mistake will make very little progress. +++ COMMERCIAL BREAK! +++ LIFESTYLE: THE WIRELESS MOBILEBUTTON ? The wireless button lifestyle is a practical and simple solution for users who want reliable communication without unnecessary distractions. Because modern smartphones can do way too much. Forget apps, streaming, selfies, and endless notifications - and yes, even without emojis: finally real words again. Pure minimalism: One button, one life, your direction! “Since I started using the one‑button phone, I actually know what my friends look like.” - A convinced ex‑smartphone addict “I just wanted to quickly check something online… Now I meditate.” - A satisfied user Because sometimes less is simply… less. +++ hoped that it adds something ...useful...nor... hahaha!
• alphazard 10mo ago
  It's worth mentioning that career conversations with your manager are always bullshit. How could they not be? Your manager's incentives are to keep you around, keep you productive, and keep you inexpensive. It's ridiculous to think that helping you build a successful career, which likely doesn't involve them or your current employer for very long, is something that they would do. Why would you reveal any information about your long term plans to such an adversary? If they realize that the company cannot provide what you are looking for then they may not want to invest more resources in keeping you around, or keeping you happy. If they realize that you find some sort of intrinsic reward in certain work, then they might put you last for raises, because the money could help them more when spent on other people. It's best to selectively reveal only your immediate short-term goals, only at the current company, and only as part of an ask. Always make them pay for information, if you are going to reveal what you want, then they need to reveal whether they intend to help you or hinder you in getting it. Slow answers, non-answers, pushing to next quarter, etc. All signal that they intend to hinder. It's rare to get an honest, fast "no".
  • thenoblesunfish 10mo ago
    Comments like this make me feel very lucky to have the job and manager I have! If the situation is as adversarial as the one you're describing, are you perhaps missing out on the fact that when people trust and genuinely support each other it's not zero sum? That you and your manager are actually on a team (assuming you're in a big company), basically at the same level in terms of power and influence?
    • alphazard 10mo ago
      > when people trust and genuinely support each other it's not zero sum This is a clear non-sequitur. Whether or not the situation is zero-sum is dictated by the situation not by the actions of people, or how they feel about each other. If the situation is zero-sum, and one party doesn't realize, or is too trusting of other parties, then they just lose. And they might not even realize that they lost, or that the situation was zero-sum to begin with. > basically at the same level in terms of power and influence? Obviously not true, unless you can truly ignore your manager and still be successful at the company, then they have power over you. If they control more resources than you, or have more face time with people who do control resources, then they probably have more influence than you as well. This whole comment reads like a sucker who doesn't know they are being scammed.
• englishspot 10mo ago
  I can't be the only one burnt out on trying to design my career. especially these days when things outside your control just keep making it harder and harder (bad job market).
• npodbielski 10mo ago
  I understand that and I agree. Though I think the real question is what you would do when you will achieve this goal. What then? Will you be happy? What you will do with the money? Will this amount be enough? Can this ever be enough? I am not sure. Is this even possible in current feudal corporate structures? I did spoke with some people from my work. One was afraid for his job because of another employee. Other was afraid of reorg and if there will be lay-offs. Another company and the merger there caused one guy to be afraid of loosing his job because system he build will be discontinued. Maybe their current position is not the career they really want and after the setback, they are afraid off, they will be able to advance it further in the direction they are actually aiming for... but what if not? What if they will never will be able to advance it further? What if they will never will be get back up? At some point the only direction you can go is down. Is this all? Even if you will be able to build your own company things may go wrong and you may loose it. Economy can change. Market can change. Your company may be bought or taken over. Nothing is truly sure. Should you not invest in the carrier then? No, this is wrong. If you will not set course for you someone else will. And you may not like the place when you will end up. Setting up your own goals is very good practice. But I am not sure if this should be your life goal because this is so dependent on so many variables. Variables you have absolutely no impact on. And with that uncertainty comes stress. I think that your life goals should be set to something that depends only, or almost only on you.
  • thepryz 10mo ago
    Imagine Sisyphus happy seems like the appropriate response. I don't think it's a matter of setting goals based on what you can do alone, life is lonely enough as it it. I think it's more a matter of accepting that life is a sequence of unpredictable events, and you have to just embrace the absurdity of it all.
    • npodbielski 10mo ago
      I did not said anything about loneliness. IF you are working because you are lonely you really need to change your life right now. Also where I hinted that pointless grind is something that should be a way to happiness?
• zkmon 10mo ago
  Nope. It is not that black & white. It is always a mix of contextual changes and your decisions that are going define your path. Too much action on your own is also not going to help. In some cases, people who just didn't do a thing in decades, have achieved better that people who did all acrobatics.
• fnoef 10mo ago
  I just want to be left alone, without doing the corporate dances. I don’t care about your company, your culture, and your unique DNA. The only family I have is back home, so just let me do my work for 8-9 hours a day, and leave me alone.
  • DrPimienta 10mo ago
    I feel this so much. This expectation to care about work outside of work is obscene. The anger you will often receive for saying this is just as jarring.
  • gavmor 10mo ago
    Yikes! If I'm going to spend all week working with others, I hope they're not thinking this way about me. I don't know what "corporate" dance you're talking about, exactly, and I agree that "family" is too strong a word, but my colleagues are pretty cool, and I enjoy their company; I enjoy the work we do, and I want it to get done. I don't mind the time spent working on it; I think it's meaningful to contribute to the advancement of our civilization's agency and welfare. I don't want my coworkers to "leave me alone", I want to participate in their society and mutually define what that means. As adults, it's our opportunity—and obligation—to selectively reproduce civilization. I'm lucky to be able to do that with clever, earnest, and kind people. I don't want to be treated like a cog in your paycheck mill.
• sciencesama 10mo ago
  if you dont live your life, some one will !! if you dont eat your food some one will !!
• rstlney 10mo ago
  I tried the exercise. It turned into a mess. I seem to only want to escape employment. Everything I "wanted" to do seemed to be a deflection from the fact that I have anxiety about my job, staying relevant, staying employed, hamstering enough money to clear out my debts when the competition or AI inevitably beat me.
• maieuticagent 10mo ago
  I measure success by the number of rabbit holes I step over.
• Pbhaskal 10mo ago
  There is a lot of luck involved too, the conditions we are born, family ,people we are friends with early on and so on, just because there are few outliers does not everyone can follow same.