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I think "career advice" is generally too narrow a category. Most people are unhappy with their careers because they don't know what their life priorities are. T

by beat 11y ago

I think "career advice" is generally too narrow a category. Most people are unhappy with their careers because they don't know what their life priorities are. They have the career they have because of a bunch of "Well, that's what I'm supposed to do, I guess" decisions. So before career advice, get life advice. My favorite question in the world is "What do you want?" It's an incredibly difficult question, and very few people can answer it with any honesty. Sit and chew on that question. What do you want? If it proves hard, try applying the Five Whys approach. When you think about something you want, ask yourself why you want it. Five layers deep. Then maybe you can start getting close to what you really want.

MadManE 11y ago
This is advice that is widely ignored, but incredibly important. Doing what you want in life is vastly more rewarding than doing something just because you're expected to.
sravfeyn 11y ago
I agree and I start here each time I realize that I need to make a life plan. What makes that question hard for me is that - it results into a chain of questions that appear (but not) less practical, like 'What is this World', 'What is happiness' and what not? Don't you get into (what people call) the Philosophical Questions when you ask that question?
- beat 11y ago
  There's definitely a danger of Philosophical Questions. But what you want isn't necessarily philosophical. I shamelessly stole the "What do you want?" question from the tv show Babylon 5. Here's the original, meaningful answer from that show, by Ambassador Londo Mollari: "All right. Fine! You really want to know what I want? You really want to know the truth? I want my people to reclaim their rightful place in the galaxy. I want to see the Centauri stretch forth their hand again, and command the stars! I-I want a rebirth of glory, a renaissance of power. I want to stop running through my life like a man late for an appointment, afraid to– to look back, or to look forward. I want us to be what we used to BE! I want…I want it all back, the way that it was! Does that answer your question?" Of course, this leads to a gigantic galactic war and the deaths of billions, but that's another story. Another one that comes to mind is Inigo Montoya, from Princess Bride. He knows exactly what he wants - he wants revenge for his father's murder. He may take odd jobs as a hired sword, but it's all in service of finding the six-fingered man and killing him. So at a certain point, you don't have to keep asking philosophical questions. You just need to understand what motivates you, deep down. Inigo Montoya didn't have to ask why revenge mattered. He loved his father, and that was enough.
- msutherl 11y ago
  Philosophical Questions are good, you must engage with them! However, look at Wittgenstein, Lao Tzu, Nietzsche, and others who proposed compact solutions (or approaches) vs. the Kantian or analytical treatise style. You don't need to iteratively find Total Solutions, following every decision tree to its root. You just need working answers that you can revise as you go. Think agile vs. waterfall.
  - beat 11y ago
    That's great advice. At some point, you need to ask the philosophical questions (or maybe we just can't help ourselves), but it doesn't require a philosophy degree to come up with a useful answer.
allsystemsgo 11y ago
Best advice in this thread, hands down. I have some co-workers who are heading off to Google, Apple, etc. And while that's great, and I'm happy for them, I would never want anything like that. Why? I love work life balance too much. I love my side projects too much. I'll probably get a remote gig somewhere that pays the bills, gives me some spending money, and enjoy more time with my wife and dog. I could never do that at some big tech company.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  Personally, I won't consider moving to the Valley because I value my work-life balance and standard of living more than the prestige of my job. It is also too far from both my and my wife's families. It's a struggle, though, because what I can't seem to get what I want to do professionally either here in Texas or on the East Coast.
  - afarrell 11y ago
    OOC, what do you want to do professionally?
    - vonmoltke 11y ago
      I want to do firmware development, device driver development, and real-time embedded development. I'm particularly interested in doing this in the signal processing domain because I really like dealing with sensor systems and data. My degree is electrical engineering, and I spent almost 10 years working a combination of hardware production support, test software development, signal processing algorithm development, and "big" real-time embedded code development. I left that world because of internal political issues (long-ish story). Now I have spent 3 years in NLP R&D and that is what I get typecast as. Every "Who is hiring?" thread I see a bunch of companies with very interesting positions who might actually be willing to take a flier on me, but they are all in SF. In the past year I have only been able to get three companies to even talk to me about roles I actually want. One decided to pass because I was in Texas (they were in DC and very early stage) and I apparently wasn't strong enough to warrant relocation, and two I had to pass on because they hit me up at the exact wrong time (demo leadup crunch time).
afarrell 11y ago
So suppose I know what I want in an easily definable and describable sense. Where does one go to get advise about how the world works with respect to that goal and to bounce ideas for a plan of action off of? Self knowledge is super important, but the Sun Tzu quote about knowing yourself has another half: you also have to know what you're dealing with. (In my specific case: getting myself into a good position to eventually apply to work in the UK 1-2 years from now, given a current background of 3 years in DevOps and Python web dev)
- beat 11y ago
  Start with people who have already done what you want to do. If you can meet them personally and ask, do so (and getting to meet them can itself be quite a task). If they're historical or inaccessible, learn about them. Heroes and role models really matter. Find "a man to be emulated and admired". What you'll sometimes find is that they'll teach you to not do what they did. For example, I'm a guitarist, and a very good one. I work hard at it. I had the opportunity to have a few conversations with the greatest guitarist I've ever met, and extraordinary musician. What I found out is that he's a very small person in a lot of ways. He practices or gigs about 12 hours a day, every day. He can't talk about much other than playing music. At that, he's tremendously deep. At everything else in life, he's a wreck.
- ownagefool 11y ago
  Why do you need to wait?
- beat 11y ago
  So "What do you want?" is "I want to live in the UK". I could be wrong, but I'm guessing that where you live trumps what you do here. It's probably worth asking yourself why you want to live there, but I presume there's a good answer (family, love the culture, etc). So the next question is, "What kind of work skills will get me a job and a clean work visa in the UK?" This means the people you should be talking to are recruiters who bring people from your country to the UK to work in your field, to find out what they're looking for. You should also be talking to other programmers with a similar background to yours who made the transition you want to make, to find out what worked for them and what mistakes they made. Unless you have a specific place you want to be (say, London), you should figure out where in the UK you want to be. It's a big place with a wide variety of culture and living conditions. From there, you can start looking at employers in the area, figure out what they're looking for.
graycat 11y ago
> "What do you want?" From E. Fromm, The Art of Loving, I will shorten and paraphrase: "For humans the fundamental problem in life is doing something effective about feeling alone. The first recommended solution is a good romantic relationship."
- beat 11y ago
  That's a great book. It's also the kind of question that this career-planning stuff smashes into. Do you want to get married? Have children? Believe me, those are tremendous commitments that will drastically interfere with your career (and vice versa). I've been married 22 years and raised two children to semi-adulthood. It has dominated a quarter to a third of my life.
msutherl 11y ago
The only issue with the "what do I want" framing is that if you end up with an answer something along the lines of "to fulfill my potential", then it can quickly be discarded in favor of "who am I" ("know thyself") + "do stuff". According to the Cal Newport / Viktor Frankl philosophy of life, there's no a priori 'what you want', and what you want right now probably isn't 'what you want.' Finding mastery and meaning in life – which, for them, is the goal – is best achieved through throwing yourself into things, deliberate practice, ruthless introspection, and taking advantage of chance opportunities. Things like "work/life balance" can conflict with the process, and I often wonder if asking what you want at an early stage is premature optimization. I used to be critical of people who jumped immediately into big commitments (i.e. PhDs, working at Google), thinking they were "drones" who hadn't properly reflected on life, but now I realize that at least some of them are consciously or unconsciously doing the job of finding out.
- msutherl 11y ago
  Speaking of which, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning: http://amzn.to/1UwCEy6 http://amzn.to/1UwCEy6 and Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You: http://amzn.to/1fkHSNF http://amzn.to/1fkHSNF (blog: http://calnewport.com/blog/about/ http://calnewport.com/blog/about/) have really helped me navigate these issues.

by beat 11y ago

MadManE 11y ago

This is advice that is widely ignored, but incredibly important. Doing what you want in life is vastly more rewarding than doing something just because you're expected to.

sravfeyn 11y ago

I agree and I start here each time I realize that I need to make a life plan. What makes that question hard for me is that - it results into a chain of questions that appear (but not) less practical, like 'What is this World', 'What is happiness' and what not? Don't you get into (what people call) the Philosophical Questions when you ask that question?

beat 11y ago
There's definitely a danger of Philosophical Questions. But what you want isn't necessarily philosophical. I shamelessly stole the "What do you want?" question from the tv show Babylon 5. Here's the original, meaningful answer from that show, by Ambassador Londo Mollari: "All right. Fine! You really want to know what I want? You really want to know the truth? I want my people to reclaim their rightful place in the galaxy. I want to see the Centauri stretch forth their hand again, and command the stars! I-I want a rebirth of glory, a renaissance of power. I want to stop running through my life like a man late for an appointment, afraid to– to look back, or to look forward. I want us to be what we used to BE! I want…I want it all back, the way that it was! Does that answer your question?" Of course, this leads to a gigantic galactic war and the deaths of billions, but that's another story. Another one that comes to mind is Inigo Montoya, from Princess Bride. He knows exactly what he wants - he wants revenge for his father's murder. He may take odd jobs as a hired sword, but it's all in service of finding the six-fingered man and killing him. So at a certain point, you don't have to keep asking philosophical questions. You just need to understand what motivates you, deep down. Inigo Montoya didn't have to ask why revenge mattered. He loved his father, and that was enough.
msutherl 11y ago
Philosophical Questions are good, you must engage with them! However, look at Wittgenstein, Lao Tzu, Nietzsche, and others who proposed compact solutions (or approaches) vs. the Kantian or analytical treatise style. You don't need to iteratively find Total Solutions, following every decision tree to its root. You just need working answers that you can revise as you go. Think agile vs. waterfall.
- beat 11y ago
  That's great advice. At some point, you need to ask the philosophical questions (or maybe we just can't help ourselves), but it doesn't require a philosophy degree to come up with a useful answer.

allsystemsgo 11y ago

Best advice in this thread, hands down. I have some co-workers who are heading off to Google, Apple, etc. And while that's great, and I'm happy for them, I would never want anything like that. Why? I love work life balance too much. I love my side projects too much. I'll probably get a remote gig somewhere that pays the bills, gives me some spending money, and enjoy more time with my wife and dog. I could never do that at some big tech company.

vonmoltke 11y ago
Personally, I won't consider moving to the Valley because I value my work-life balance and standard of living more than the prestige of my job. It is also too far from both my and my wife's families. It's a struggle, though, because what I can't seem to get what I want to do professionally either here in Texas or on the East Coast.
- afarrell 11y ago
  OOC, what do you want to do professionally?
  - vonmoltke 11y ago
    I want to do firmware development, device driver development, and real-time embedded development. I'm particularly interested in doing this in the signal processing domain because I really like dealing with sensor systems and data. My degree is electrical engineering, and I spent almost 10 years working a combination of hardware production support, test software development, signal processing algorithm development, and "big" real-time embedded code development. I left that world because of internal political issues (long-ish story). Now I have spent 3 years in NLP R&D and that is what I get typecast as. Every "Who is hiring?" thread I see a bunch of companies with very interesting positions who might actually be willing to take a flier on me, but they are all in SF. In the past year I have only been able to get three companies to even talk to me about roles I actually want. One decided to pass because I was in Texas (they were in DC and very early stage) and I apparently wasn't strong enough to warrant relocation, and two I had to pass on because they hit me up at the exact wrong time (demo leadup crunch time).

afarrell 11y ago

So suppose I know what I want in an easily definable and describable sense. Where does one go to get advise about how the world works with respect to that goal and to bounce ideas for a plan of action off of? Self knowledge is super important, but the Sun Tzu quote about knowing yourself has another half: you also have to know what you're dealing with. (In my specific case: getting myself into a good position to eventually apply to work in the UK 1-2 years from now, given a current background of 3 years in DevOps and Python web dev)

beat 11y ago
Start with people who have already done what you want to do. If you can meet them personally and ask, do so (and getting to meet them can itself be quite a task). If they're historical or inaccessible, learn about them. Heroes and role models really matter. Find "a man to be emulated and admired". What you'll sometimes find is that they'll teach you to not do what they did. For example, I'm a guitarist, and a very good one. I work hard at it. I had the opportunity to have a few conversations with the greatest guitarist I've ever met, and extraordinary musician. What I found out is that he's a very small person in a lot of ways. He practices or gigs about 12 hours a day, every day. He can't talk about much other than playing music. At that, he's tremendously deep. At everything else in life, he's a wreck.
ownagefool 11y ago
Why do you need to wait?
beat 11y ago
So "What do you want?" is "I want to live in the UK". I could be wrong, but I'm guessing that where you live trumps what you do here. It's probably worth asking yourself why you want to live there, but I presume there's a good answer (family, love the culture, etc). So the next question is, "What kind of work skills will get me a job and a clean work visa in the UK?" This means the people you should be talking to are recruiters who bring people from your country to the UK to work in your field, to find out what they're looking for. You should also be talking to other programmers with a similar background to yours who made the transition you want to make, to find out what worked for them and what mistakes they made. Unless you have a specific place you want to be (say, London), you should figure out where in the UK you want to be. It's a big place with a wide variety of culture and living conditions. From there, you can start looking at employers in the area, figure out what they're looking for.

graycat 11y ago

> "What do you want?" From E. Fromm, The Art of Loving, I will shorten and paraphrase: "For humans the fundamental problem in life is doing something effective about feeling alone. The first recommended solution is a good romantic relationship."

beat 11y ago
That's a great book. It's also the kind of question that this career-planning stuff smashes into. Do you want to get married? Have children? Believe me, those are tremendous commitments that will drastically interfere with your career (and vice versa). I've been married 22 years and raised two children to semi-adulthood. It has dominated a quarter to a third of my life.

msutherl 11y ago

The only issue with the "what do I want" framing is that if you end up with an answer something along the lines of "to fulfill my potential", then it can quickly be discarded in favor of "who am I" ("know thyself") + "do stuff". According to the Cal Newport / Viktor Frankl philosophy of life, there's no a priori 'what you want', and what you want right now probably isn't 'what you want.' Finding mastery and meaning in life – which, for them, is the goal – is best achieved through throwing yourself into things, deliberate practice, ruthless introspection, and taking advantage of chance opportunities. Things like "work/life balance" can conflict with the process, and I often wonder if asking what you want at an early stage is premature optimization. I used to be critical of people who jumped immediately into big commitments (i.e. PhDs, working at Google), thinking they were "drones" who hadn't properly reflected on life, but now I realize that at least some of them are consciously or unconsciously doing the job of finding out.

msutherl 11y ago
Speaking of which, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning: http://amzn.to/1UwCEy6 http://amzn.to/1UwCEy6 and Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You: http://amzn.to/1fkHSNF http://amzn.to/1fkHSNF (blog: http://calnewport.com/blog/about/ http://calnewport.com/blog/about/) have really helped me navigate these issues.