Posted by TheAlchemist 1 day ago
> 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.
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering is a great book but it needs context. The last edition was released in 1994. Programmers had a lot of labour power back then.
Today though? The median house costs more than a third of the median income. Inflation has raised costs of living to unsustainable levels. And for programmers there have been hundreds of thousands of layoffs since 2023 and a low number of job openings.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to take what job you can get or stay in a job you don’t care for until the trade winds return.
His advice to "work on the worlds hardest problems" was spoken to people who had worked their way past the initial difficulties. General advice to "Move towards important problems", which is precisely the same thing, applies in good and bad times, and is very likely to produce in you a valuable expertise.
"Direction" and "design" are probably the wrong metaphors for careers.
Having a goal does not seem at all at odds with weathering a storm. Your choices can then be what you learn in your free time, or what horizontal moves you make at that job, or which people you get closer to, for example.
Hamming had a lot of career capital. He was the only person in the world with his track record. If you needed his kind of research/output/teaching/etc, he was the person you needed.
Cal Newport talks a lot about this. Great books.
Have something [unique/valuable] to offer and you'll be surprised how many doors it opens. Yes it takes time to stairstep your way there. A fresh grad has less career capital than a seasoned engineer with a track record of building billion dollar companies.
That sounds like a steal, in my city the median home price across all types is 10-20x the median annual household income
Huh? Back then, there was very little glamor to software engineering. Computing just wasn't serious enough. There was relatively little competition, salaries were unremarkable, and sure, you could land a job for life, but that still exists today. If you are an IT guy for a lumber mill, a regional ISP, or a grocery store, it's not going to be as cutthroat as Big Tech. It's just that you're not gonna be making millions.
We're pretending that this type of cozy tech jobs don't exist anymore, but they do. They just don't come with IPOs and RSUs.
That is not the case now. Yes the competition is incredibly fierce but the pay has skyrocketed.
In the 90s inflation-adjusted salaries were still rather high. A 75k USD salary in 1995 is roughly 150k USD today. And the median house was less than a third of your income. And in the 90s there was even more demand for programmers.
The early 2000s were a bit rough unless you were insulated inside Google and big tech.
But 2025 is a very different landscape. I’ve talked to lots of highly talented developers who’ve been consistently employed since the early 2000s who have been on the job search for 9 months, a year.
It’s one thing to have a goal for one’s career but it’s not like you can wait around to find that perfect opportunity forever, right?
Some times you have to find something and work. It might not fit into your plans for your career but it might provide you with the income you need to keep your family afloat and maybe let you indulge in a hobby.
> Some times you have to find something and work …
Rather than waiting for a perfect choice, I read Hamming as reminding us that are making choices all the time and cannot avoid doing so. Even not choosing, e.g., staying in a less-than-ideal role, is a choice. Given that we have no choice but to choose, Hamming suggests knowing up front where we want to go in the long term and biasing choices in that general direction.
Swizec mentioned Cal Newport elsewhere[0], and Newport’s recommendations around lifestyle-centric career planning provide an interesting bridge between your comments about occasionally needing to weather a storm and Hamming.
Some view titles, particular projects, or certain roles to be worthwhile goals in themselves. “I just graduated law school, so I want to make partner at a big NYC law firm” is a goal that a motivated new attorney might set. Does that career goal serve her if she despises traffic, subway travel, and apartment living? Newport advocates beginning with a vision of an ideal lifestyle and working backward from there by setting career goals to achieve the desired lifestyle.
Where he may be in a conflict with Hamming is warning people about what he calls the grand goal theory, of which the fresh law school grad aiming at partner shows the pitfalls. Hamming’s advice will help you go far. Newport warns that if you’re going to go far, be sure it’s in the direction you want to go.
In the case you mentioned of someone who is long-term unemployed, having a job that produces income is certainly nearer to any Hamming career goal and any Newport ideal lifestyle than that person’s present circumstance of draining savings or, worse, accumulating debt for basic living expenses.
Right but how many programmers were making even 150k back then, even if they were 10x geniuses? I don't think even high level ICs at IBM or Microsoft were making that much. Even inflation adjusted, that's lower than the medain at FAANG these days.
The buying power of a programmer in the 90s was much, much higher than an average programmer today.
It was not. Programmers were not buying Porches and living in luxury neighborhoods or retiring early.
Watch Office Space. Being a programmer was a low status, averagely paying job.
Was life better back in the 90s for the average programmer? Maybe? Housing was certainly cheaper, I'll give you that. But for exceptional engineers was it better?
Did programmers show up to work to have a barista make them a gourmet coffee, have catered lunches, free massages, all the meanwhile getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars extra per year in RSUs? I don't think so.
There's no way an exceptional engineer had a better quality of life in the 90s than they would today. There was no FAANG, no deca-corns, no big tech giving near as many perks and comp. It just wasn't comparable.
I'd (mid-30s) trade a 'safe' community for one I actually care to live in. A certain amount of danger is fine. Desirable, even, if it meant I could live in my home town, not in an unfamiliar city bound to temporary employment.
I could buy half of a house, right now, cash. I don't, because the moment I do, I'll be forced to sell/move/whatever. Again. Where I am [for work] and where I want to be are forever at odds. Spin the wheel and see if we hit RTO this time.
The whims of tech leaders are mildly better than tycoons of past, I guess. Pops had to give his lungs, I only have to prove dedication. Constantly.
Yes, we all must be living so well because of... checks notes, credit and superficial status symbols. Give me a break. I'd give half my salary to never have to discuss it [or my location] again.
Another bit to consider: It took a long time to realize that basically everyone wants basically everyone to succeed, as long as incentives align. It was very easy to imagine I was swimming upstream early in my career - especially my early mentors urging me to specialize to find success. My initial temptation was to "specialize" in hot/attractive topics in an effort to be the "indispensable X authority". But my PhD advisor urged me to "not swim in red water", where the incentives are inherently conflicting - everyone wants to be "the X person".
Much better to find a team working on a good problem somewhat like the ones you want to solve and just push along with them. You can save yourself a lot of energy by slotting yourself into a system that aligns with your preferred direction of travel, even if only a little bit. The current carries you.
The amount of people I've heard of say they want to go into email security is very small.
Also, while the original advice about “vision” sounds reasonable, it also sounds a bit dogmatic. The filpside of “career vision” is “tunnel vision”. And life is not deterministic, it has a much more probabalistic nature. Hence, curiosity and open mind.
Seemed like everyone was doing topics in the “red water” and felt useless to not.
I found my areas of interest were the “red water” of 20 years prior and there was little left and it didn’t solve problems relevant to industry.
Quit PhD and got a job where I was grossly underpaid until the next one.
Things change fast in our industry so being able to pivot to something nearby is paramount for maintaining a career in this field.
Not everyone has the fortune to spend 15 years at a FAANG or other large corporation. Sometimes you have to build it.
It's the same as what you do, except I need the reminder...
I think there are certain things that are not likely to change, and must be aimed for. For starters, being healthy, proactively working towards a retirement nest egg, so that you don't end up homeless and starving in case things go south too fast.
There are many such things I hold as things I would want several years from now. Good health, free time and enough money to not need a job to just put food on the table, and a roof above my head.
Sound like the utility function for a lot of people I would say.
> Despite his moral quandaries, von Braun participates in the Nazi's V-2 rocket program during World War II to further his ambitions in rocket engineering. The film carefully depicts his efforts to reconcile his love for scientific exploration with the knowledge that his work is being used for destructive purposes.
I have a similar short story idea where a person of the calibre of Elon Musk who works so hard is made to feel and see his successful moonshot projects being used for destroying and subjugating nations. This would be similar to Oppenheimer. Another twist I can take with the story is Hero "Elon" knows about this outcome but still in the hope of change in institutional ideology over decades hopes for better use for his technology. In the movie Watchmen, Ozymandias feels the pain of millions he is going to kill to save future billions.
Watchmen: Killing millions to save billions
AKCSHUALLY
The root of the mean of the squared distances is sqrt(n).
The phrase as you quoted is the mean of the absolute distance. In general those are different. I don't know the latter from memory, and a quick look at the wikipedia page for Brownian motion doesn't have it.
It can and probably will move as you age and gain experience.
But if you're thinking you'd love to be your own boss and, as you have that vision, you find something much more interesting, you can still re-assess.
Three years ago, I left academia after finishing my PhD in Economics, frustrated by how little real-world impact my hard work seemed to have. I moved into IT, wanting to build things that would be more immediately useful and practical. Still, the dream of using science to create positive change never left me.
I was invited to work with AI at a company that develops software for the public sector. It wasn't the dream (I wouldn't be using my academic expertise) but it felt like a step closer. At least I'd be providing tools to support people who directly affect others' lives. From the start, I told my boss that I hoped someday to offer not just AI tools, but real socioeconomic statistical analysis as a service for the public sector. And while I've been happy working with AI, I've always sought out opportunities on projects that were more data-driven.
Three years later, some clients expressed interest in having our AI chatbot provide real-world socioeconomic data analysis. My boss just gave me a promotion to lead both the AI team and this new socioeconomic data initiative.
I was reflecting the other day on how fortunate I am, my dream "chased me." But it wasn't simply luck. I had always stayed attuned to the opportunities that arose.
It does make me reflect on this piece I wrote 9(!!) years ago though, which hasn't completely materialized. I think I'm due for a re-alignment of priorities.
Edit: well of course it is. I was thinking expected position (which should be 0) not distance
"expected distance" is average abs(coordinate), so for biased walk (and big enough time) it's simply abs(bias)*time, and for unbiased it's deviation==sqrt(variance)
For a binomial distribution of probability p and (1-p), after N steps the expectation value of right steps is Np.
The Variance is Np(1-p), so the standard deviation (or Root-Mean-Square) scales as Sqrt(N).
A new study suggests that some sharks and other marine predators can follow strict mathematical strategies when foraging for dinner. The work, reported online June 9 in Nature, is the latest aiming to show whether animals sometimes move in a pattern called a Lévy walk.
Unlike random motion — in which animals take similar-sized steps in any direction, like a drunk stumbling around — Lévy walks are punctuated by rare, long forays in any direction. Draw a Lévy walk on a graph, and its squiggly pattern echoes a fractal, the mathematical phenomenon whose shape remains similar no matter the viewing scale.
Most people, even when they do not sit down and think about it, follow one of the two career paths:
- Some people will actively pursue the next logical progression (senior, lead/manager, head/vp, exec).
- Some will happily stay in their position unless the next one is offered to them.
Being deliberate will always work better compared to being random, but it is not like all people who succeed in their careers deliberately planned to get where they are.
I would even guess that for the vast majority of successful careers, competency and luck played a much bigger role than being deliberate about it.
I think this is true. I had a while where my career was doing really well constant steps up, I was learning, getting promoted, was working on great projects and problems that were engaging and led to easy promotions. Then I got a new manager and it was downhill. Then I got a new job and the problems are insignificant and there's no room for growth of any kind. If my latest job was earlier in my career my career would be very different.
PS Tangent - FYI there's a typo "Minset" should be "Mindset" in the reference to your book. HTH
But I think it is the wrong view, as generally people do move into the direction they want to go. Take a person doing plumbing but wanting to be in art. The problem is not the direction, the problem is taking the first step.
In general, many people dislike changing jobs, so they don't take steps. The steps are the problem, not the direction.
Or someone else that “can’t get their stuff together?”
A lot of people never even “move”.
Probably butchered the quote, can't remember who said it, but the message stuck.
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.
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.
https://modelthinkers.com/mental-model/surface-area-of-luck
There is another similar school of thought that the only thing that matters in your career are “results and relationships”. It took me way too long to figure all of this out. But once I did, it made my life much easier and it made it much easier to navigate within my company and getting opportunities on the outside.
During the last ten or so years as a “developer” without doing a single coding interview because I do know how to sell myself (and deliver)…
1. I’ve gotten three jobs where the new manager/director/CTO hired me as one of their first technical hires to lead major initiatives
2. Got a job at BigTech without any coding interviews even though my job required hands on keyboard coding as part of the job - cloud consulting specializing in app dev (yes full time direct hire with bonuses and RSUs)
3. Left there and had a job within a week as a staff consultant (full time) with another consulting company.
I’m not smarter than anyone else, I learned how to network, talk the talk and play the game.
On another note, you don’t and shouldn’t get a promotion based on doing your current job well. Just because you are a good developer doesn’t mean that you have the skills to lead other developers. That’s the entire point behind the “Peter Principle”. You have to show you are capable of working at the next level by working at the next level.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t make more money if you bring more value to a company than do done else at your level. But how is a company suppose to objectively manage that? You pulled more stories off the board? You had less QA defects?
For what it’s worth, I flew to close to the sun myself about a decade ago and realized I would suck as a manager of people. But I was getting better at leading projects. I chose the IC route.
Congratulations that you learned how to game the system. Fair enough. That doesn't mean you should brag about it or celebrate that terrible "school of thought".
> How will someone know what you’re doing if you don’t tell them?
That's a simple part: it's your manager's direct and one of the main job responsibilities. It's like 80% of what manager job is all about. To be perfectly aware of what his team is doing, what was done good, what was bad, performance, strong, weak sides etc. For every individual report.
The hard part is to find the manager who at least understands that, even harder to find someone who are good at it. But in my limited experience it's not much harder than to find and spot a decent engineer.
My manager’s job is not to manage my career. The last time I was a “pull tickets off the board maintained by someone else” developer was over a decade ago. Even then my project manager was different than my actual manager. My manager didn’t look at the Jira board for all of his reports are across teams to know what they were doing.
You still had to tell him yourself during 1 on 1s on high level. But even then, what were you going to tell him? “I pulled some well defined tickers off of a Jira board and I deserve a promotion?” There are so many people that are good enough to do that on either the enterprise CRUD side or the BigTech side, why should you be promoted for that?
On the other hand, except for my stint at BigTech between 2020-2023, I was already at the top of the technical IC chain as far as responsibility. There was no place to be promoted to. I have broad initiatives that I’m responsible for and still the manager just knows that things are running smoothly and the stake holders are happy. They definitely aren’t keeping up with my day to day work.
To be honest, outside of BigTech, worrying about promotions aren’t worth the effort, do your job, build your resume and hop to another job if you want more money. But even then, you can’t hope to get ahead in your career if you are content with just being a ticket taker and not taking on responsibilities that require you to navigate corporate culture.
I would much rather play the game than spend months grinding leetCode trying to pass coding interviews.
Right this second, I have reason to believe that I would have a greater than even chance of getting into Google via GCP in their internal consulting division based on a combination of experience (not with GCP in particular), soft skills, network, and knowing how the game is played than a hands on developer would trying to get in by being able to “codez real gud”.
I don’t because I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than work in any large company again and I’m damn sure not going back into an office.
Again, not because I’m smarter, I’ve accepted the game for what it is.
But it is to promote and demote. In many (most?) companies, to get a promotion he needs to actively advocate for you in front of others. That is part of his job. Many of them simply optimize to "I'm not going to do that part of the job well, so you, as my report, need to give me the material I can sell to others." And not "you need to do well so I can sell to others".
While there was no place to be “promoted to” besides being a team lead as an IC, it did give me the chance to have the skillset to get my next job. I specifically told my CTO - we had a good working relationship - that a team lead would be a demotion. I was already influencing the direction of the entire company. He couldn’t “promoted me”. But he gave me a nice raise and kept letting me choose the hairy work that crossed team boundaries.
At BigTech, your manager can help you go through the promotion process. But it is still mostly out of their hands whether you get promoted. You have to prove you are deserving to a wider audience.
I wonder on what planet are you working?
Virtually everyone I know in IT bumped their salary only after switching the companies, never I've seen anyone who raised their salary with comparable magnitude and/or pace by working hard at one place.
With one key difference - it's not a gravity. It's just currently popular and dominating style in IT corporate culture. Mainly because it worked once for few successful companies and others cargo-culted it without much thought.
There will always be value and importance to networking, human relationships and communication. Because after all we're people, not robots.
But there will also be shift and evolution in management styles, just like we notice a shift in Leetcode interviews right now (less and less of this bullshit).
Change is the true "gravity" here.
Sure I could change the culture by accepting a bullshit CTO position that is a glorified developer at a YC like startup that pays less than the intern I mentored when they got their return offer at BigTech and I could get meaningless “equity”.
But if I were in a position where I wanted to maximize my comp, I would play the game and convince a company with a lot of money to give me some of that money.
I just happen to care more about work life balance and making “enough” money now.
Sadly this is majority of tech industry. Cargo-cult whatever the big players are doing. But all is not lost. Lots of interesting smaller companies with highly technical people advocate for a tech culture that rewards real Engineering over Salesman/Politician. For instance, a FAANG resume with business impact bullet points will be pretty useless for a small team building a database. Someone with PR commits to open source Databases would hardly need to prove themselves.
It’s fine if you want to work at smaller “interesting” companies, I’m doing the same. But let’s not pretend there are no tradeoffs.
The intern I mentored their intern summer and the year after they got back, got a return offer at 22 in 2022 that was the same I was making at 46 in 2020 as a senior enterprise dev in Atlanta.
On the opposite side, now they are an L5 (mid level) Solution Architect at 25 working at AWS doing a similar line of work to what I do[1] and make the same total comp as I make as as a staff consultant working at mid size firm at 51.
If you want to make the eye popping big tech salaries - you have to play the game.
[1] I’m mostly post sales leading implementations and doing some management style consulting reports. My former mentor is pre-sales.
They certainly seem to know when I'm not doing well, without me having to tell them.
Do you not see the asymmetry?
I love the autonomy I get now in the latter part of my career over the last 10 years where I don’t have a manager hovering.
Things are how they are, and some people may successfully navigate while playing some of the games. That's very different from saying "this is how it has to be" or "this is how it will always be".
If the company truly promotes incompetent salespeople then I’d steer clear of that company with the confidence that others are out there.
Absolutely! Nothing wrong with communicating your work and networking. It's better to do that than don't, it's a good thing to do, it's a great thing to help your manager to be aware of what's going on.
As long as it is not a mandatory requirement and expectation of an engineer that puts pressure and becomes a toil.
I’m at a point in my life where I am okay with the level of autonomy I have and have no interest in being a director or above and getting cost of living raises for the foreseeable future. But I’m 51 and an empty nester with me and my wife.
A line level manager position would be a vertical move. A director is a “manager of managers”.
I think your extreme example does not refute any of my points and I agree with you. "good manager" is not a guarantee for a good career, it's your responsibility ultimately.
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.
In my first year of university, a senior grabbed me by the shoulders and told me that I _have_ to try an internship or semester abroad. One thing led to another and I have just celebrated 10 years in Germany. It led to my current career, which is not at all what I studied.
To answer your question, I think that it requires a certain curiosity, and an appetite for experimentation. I feel like the system is teaching kids the opposite of that.
100% this. When I started working in recruitment, it was literally intended to be a temporary means to an end. I stumbled across Hacker News back in 2010 and accidentally uncovered a niche (tech startups) that has resulted in a career where over the past 15 years has evolved into holding VP level roles at YC startups to now running my own successful recruitment and HR advisory business for startups. I can legitimately attribute that entire path and growth to accidentally stumbling across this website and couldn't possibly have guessed the impact it would ultimately have on my career.
Because: The interesting things that give you leverage are at the frontier of knowledge. In business, as well as, in science.
I tell my son all the time that I couldn’t predict what I’m doing now … 3 years prior. I didn’t have this insight or awareness but after running the SW/IT marathon for 25 years here we are. Trust your instincts, they weren’t developed in a vacuum. The more you explore, the more insights pop in your mind and every 3 years or so, a change presents itself for you to affirm or deny.
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.
https://www.artofmanliness.com/people/fatherhood/podcast-108...
The book itself is called The Preparation.
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.
According to the Gervais Principle, these people are Clueless. Of course they end up in middle management. The top spots are reserved for Sociopaths.
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.
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.
It nearly impossible to achieve substantial change alone. The key is to be organized with others, to find a community.
Now, I don't mean joining a political party, especially not at first. That can be important work but also very soul crushing
I am talking grassroots-level, local groups that work on a concrete topic, preferable something that concerns you personally. It is important to get into doing things as quickly as possible, be it organizing a small protest or maybe just a get together.
With this you will gain practically experience and you will find other people that share your goals and with whom you will struggle together.
Now, for the long term, you will also need to actually read political theory, you will have to get organized with people that have a more concrete strategy on how to create change but I generally would urge you to avoid analysis paralysis and focus on gaining practical experience first.
Building community is really the key.
I felt the same way before I got my diagnosis for my neurodivergency. I mean I still do but it got better because I know now why I get rejected and are better at finding people I can fit in with.
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?
Not too sure, I am pretty delusional about the impact part. I want to achieve something big but have zero ideas on what I could start with. I have a ton of time and want to use it for something I actually believe in, the difficulty is in finding something I actually believe in...
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
HN is not the kind of place I'm going to toot my own horn
If I graduated post 2012 instead of 1996, I would have tied my horse to a safe BigTech company and made a lot of money in cash and liquid RSUs long before I joined a bullshit startup that statistically wouldn’t have gone anywhere.
Hell I made that choice at 46 when my youngest (step)son graduated. I chose to work at BigTech instead of getting a meaningless “CTO” founding engineer position at a startup.
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.
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.
Turtles all the way down
So, I guess it would be "Turtles all the way up"
Believing "most of the normal people" have no agency is condescending.
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.
The one thing I had going for me was that my grandmother prepaid my college tuition. So I scraped by working bullshit jobs, completed college, and now in my 30s I'm doing sort-of okay as a programmer for a start up (the pay here is bad, which is why I'm here).
It was awful getting here and I was always one small step away from being permanently homeless or dead. Maybe he didn't mean it like this, but a "normal" person means a person living in poverty in China or Indian or wherever else, and they all have it even worse than me.
I'm writing this here because, not you, but others on this website tend to just give some form of "bro, just stop sucking so bad if you want to improve your life" and it doesn't seem like they really understand what having no option is like.
Stuff happens to you and to one's family that you just cannot "strategize" your life around just like that, unless you have (some, a good amount even) money, this is just how things are. If you haven't ever been in that place consider yourself very lucky.
Why is this condescending? It's not their fault, it's how the system works and their bad luck in not being born into a more privileged position. For people who cannot make ends meet, trying to make ends meet takes most of their available time and energy, there's not much left to ponder about life's choices.
What it is, in my opinion, is terribly unfair. I agree with the GP commenter that us here mostly ignore this reality. And that's OK, clearly TFA is aimed at privileged people like us, not most people.
If they have children, barring some violent circumstances, then they've already participated in designing their life.
This is not a binary issue. All of us have choices and make decisions (feeding family, paying rent, not robbing a bank - all of these are choices). Yes, people in privileged positions have a much larger "choice space". And yes, plenty of underprivileged folks simply refuse to pursue the choices they have. Both these things can be true.
But sure - no one is denying that some folks exist who, either due to their own design or otherwise (e.g. health issues), may be stuck and their agency is significantly diminished.
This is not the kind of design we're discussing here; "not having children" is usually a privileged, informed decision which most people are not in a position to make. It's certainly very far from "designing your career". Regardless, a lot of people don't have much choice here either, through a system conspiring on denying them choices (see: anti-abortion and anti-sex education lobbies, a health care system that conspires against their free time and energy, etc).
There's an illusion of choice, especially to us pontificating from our privileged lives, but no real choice.
> But sure - no one is denying that some folks exist [...] their agency is significantly diminished.
Most folk, not some.
It certainly seems to be.
> "not having children" is usually a privileged, informed decision which most people are not in a position to make.
As I said - barring some violent circumstances, having a child, or at least the actions leading up to it, is a decision one makes.
> It's certainly very far from "designing your career".
This thread is not about designing one's career, but designing one's life. See the top level comment.
> Regardless, a lot of people don't have much choice here either, through a system conspiring on denying them choices (see: anti-abortion and anti-sex education lobbies, a health care system that conspires against their free time and energy, etc).
I've yet to meet someone who is not underage and doesn't understand that having kids is a consequence.
Sure, poor education and lack of abortion play a role, but none of that negates the fact that the person had a choice. It's exceptionally insulting to those who made different choices that led to positive outcomes to be told that people just like them in the same circumstances didn't have a choice.
Sorry, but your stance is very much coming across as privileged, who is trying to sympathize with people you don't understand. It's a very different perspective when you actually come from the background you're claiming didn't have a choice.
This is simply a falsehood you believe.
Or rather, it's a very constrained, mostly unfree "choice", with a lot of pressure from society telling them it's the wrong choice to make, barring them from access to abortion, contraception, and in many cases decent access to health and education. In many cases they are not even aware the choice existed, because it was concealed from them. I'm not sure if you are even aware a lot of people are not sure how babies come to be.
It's easy to claim everyone has access to these choices when you are, well, privileged.
> Sure, poor education and lack of abortion play a role, but none of that negates the fact that the person had a choice.
It absolutely negates it.
> It's exceptionally insulting to those who made different choices that led to positive outcomes to be told that people just like them in the same circumstances didn't have a choice.
Statistically, very few do. The odds are stacked against them. So it's not insulting at all; what's insulting is claiming from a privileged position that they "had a choice".
> Sorry, but your stance is very much coming across as privileged
Nope.
> It's a very different perspective when you actually come from the background you're claiming didn't have a choice.
Let me guess: your family was starving and dirt poor, your siblings were all addicts, but you managed to overcome this, educate yourself, and raise yourself to entrepreneurship. Is this where this is going?
> Statistically, very few do. The odds are stacked against them.
I've already acknowledged much of these circumstances, right from my first comment. It doesn't change the very trivial fact that engaging in such behavior is a choice. Nor does it change the fact that virtually everyone has choices. I'll repeat what I said:
"Yes, people in privileged positions have a much larger "choice space". And yes, plenty of underprivileged folks simply refuse to pursue the choices they have. Both these things can be true."
As I said, even if you have kids, deciding whether you will feed them or let them starve (with all its consequences), is still a choice. Unless there are mental health issues involved, the person is making choices.
> Let me guess: your family was starving and dirt poor, your siblings were all addicts, but you managed to overcome this, educate yourself, and raise yourself to entrepreneurship. Is this where this is going?
No. But I didn't have easy access to contraception and abortion. And I was not a big outlier in the choices I made.
And let's be real: The majority of people who come to me and complain that they didn't really have a choice did not have siblings who were all addicts, coming from a dirt poor starving family.
Arguments from extremes are not helping you.
Quite the contrary, it does change it.
> As I said, even if you have kids, deciding whether you will feed them or let them starve (with all its consequences), is still a choice.
It's very hard to take you seriously after this.
> Arguments from extremes are not helping you.
This isn't about me or you; I don't need help. And you've just made an extreme argument which I quoted above.
By the way, it amazes me you consider the real world "an argument from extreme". I suppose from a very limited sample one might draw the same conclusion as you.
I take it you've not encountered such folks? It must be nice to be shielded. As I said, your comments definitely give off "privileged" vibes.
I don't know your background, but spend some time in various countries - both wealthy and not. Both repressive and not. When people debate the virtues and vices of freedom, much of what we discussed in this thread come into play. The US is very much a country centered on freedom, and the reason many are in a bad state is precisely because the US gives them more freedom by letting them have these choices. Statistically, they will choose poorly, but the fact that their behavior is predictable via statistics doesn't negate the fact that they made those choices.
What are you even trying to argue here? "Not dying and not letting your kids die is a choice"? I mean, sure, in a bizarre alien logic kind of way, but as someone once told me: "you're not helping yourself by using extreme arguments".
If that's your main point, we can stop here. I won't argue with extraterrestrials or robots.
> I don't know your background, but spend some time in various countries
Exactly, you don't know my background, so don't lecture me. Your lecturing comes across as very condescending and, well, privileged.
> The US
I'm not from the US.
> Statistically, they will choose poorly, but the fact that their behavior is predictable via statistics doesn't negate the fact that they made those choices.
Non-sequitur.
1. I definitely am privileged.
2. Have you looked in a mirror?
3. You don't need to, as you yourself said: "And that's OK, clearly TFA is aimed at privileged people like us, not most people."
The only thing I have left to say is: Try not to confuse obligations with choices.
It shows! And condescending too, I'd add.
> The only thing I have left to say is: Try not to confuse obligations with choices.
That is meaningless, though doubtless it seems very deep to you.
Look, you made the bizarre argument people always have choices because feeding your kids is a choice. In whatever alien world you live in that might be a clever argument. Meanwhile, in the real world...
Someone recently told me about Jesus and the fact that he died to cleanse my sins. I never heard that one before either.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.