I installed oh-my-zsh back in early college some 15 years ago, before zsh was even the default on macs, and it is so good I’ve never felt compelled to experiment or try any other shells terminals or configs. It’s the first thing I install on every new computer.
> For me, the writing speed has never been the issue. The issue has been my thinking speed. I do not see how an AI coding assistant helps me think better
Similar to moving from individual work to coordinating a large codebase: coding agents, human or otherwise, let you think at a higher abstraction level and tackle larger problems by taking care of the small details.
If I’m coordinating a large codebase, I expect the people I’m coordinating to be capable of learning and improving over time. Coding agents cannot (currently) do this.
I wonder if a very lightweight RL loop built around the user could work well enough to help the situation. As I understand it, current LLMs generally do not learn at a rate such that one single bad RL example and one (prompted?) better example could result in improvement at anywhere near human speed.
California represents 12% of USA population, 14% of US GDP. Effectively that means CA can throw its weight around and companies are forced to at least pretend to comply. Whether they actually comply depends on enforcement.
Now if Delaware were to adopt such a law for every company “headquartered” there …
Agreed, working in the kitchen is all about figuring out how to do things in parallel without messing them up. You can chop and dice while the pot or pan is heating up, you can do the dishes while the sauce reduces, you can make a salad while meat rests, etc.
I tend to go hyper mis en place when I cook. So by the time "active" cooking is taking place, it's a pretty chill affair and I often end up reading my book in the bits of down time.
Boiling the kettle means I can make pasta and a sauce in about 12 minutes, boiling on the stove just adds tons of time. Given that the kettle is next to the stove it's simply self sabotaging not to use it, one button press.
Yeah huge difference if you have 240V mains. A 120V electric kettle is not much of a timesaver (though perhaps still worth something if it frees up a place on the cooktop that you need for something else).
> I've tried the ultra-cynical view at workplaces, and would have had better results with some "idealism", which he rightly notes in his form is just a more effectively action atop a base of clear-eyed cynicism.
Cynics feel smart but optimists win.
You have to be at least a little optimistic, sometimes even naive, to achieve unlikely outcomes. Otherwise you’ll never put in enough oomph to get lucky.
That's not been my experience. Optimists also tend to assume the best motivations behind the actions of others, and that will nearly always bite you in the ass in any sizeable organization.
I've been the ultra-cynic before, and agree that doesn't work either. People don't like working with you, and don't trust you.
I think we need to be realistic on order to be successful, and neither ultra-cynicism nor optimism fits the bill.
I would suggest that a healthy, reasonable amount of cynicism is a part of being realistic about how the world works.
>I've been the ultra-cynic before, and agree that doesn't work either. People don't like working with you, and don't trust you.
Is the issue being that one isn't being cynical enough? If you are very cynical about how things will turn out, and share that with others who don't appreciate it (even if you are right), then you are being optimistic in thinking it will change things. Controlling one's displays to others to appear as whatever gets one their best outcome is being even more cynical, to the point of abandoning any attempts at open honest relationships, but it likely works the best if one can pull it off.
Though that might be a very big if, and getting caught faking this likely is worse. Then again, is forcing oneself to adopt optimism just an attempt to do this indirectly, a sort of 'fool yourself so you can better fool others' approach when more direct manipulation doesn't work, given that drive for the optimism is to get better outcomes?
Blind optimism is silly. But time and again we’ve shown that tit-for-tat is the best strategy in repeated games.
Start optimistic. Stop if it doesn’t work. In the long-term you don’t need to win every iteration, just enough for a positive expected value. And make sure you don’t get wiped out in any single iteration.
The weeks are short but the decades are long and the industry is smaller than you’d think :)
Is that really how most people would define optimism these days? I know that's what it meant in Voltaire's time, but something tells me that if you asked modern optimist whether they thought we lived in the best of all possible worlds, a majority of them would either say no or that they don't know.
It would seem if we think Voltaire was wrong, then the difference between pessimists and “modern” optimists is not fundamental but merely a matter of degree.
100% agree. Cynics can be always be right about the past, but optimists are often right about the future, because they are the ones actually building it.
Are you certain about which way the arrow of causality points there? Your friend might have more reason to be optimistic because he is financially secure.
It's pretty obvious how an insufficiently cynical person could end up badly off - they could send all that money to that deposed prince in Nigeria, or whatever.
But the right optimism in the right situation can really pay off. Imagine you're pitching your non-technical carmaker CEO on a proposal to make a new pickup truck, and the CEO asks if you can make the entire thing with 0.1mm accuracy.
If you say "Yes sir, in fact many parts will be even more accurate than that" your project gets funded.
If you say "No, thermal expansion alone makes that impossible, it's also unnecessary" you're gambling on him respecting your straight-talking and technical chops.
Cynical take - if you know you're lying, that's not optimism, that's cynical manipulation.
A lot of people missing that cynicism isn't the same as sneering grumpiness.
You can be perfectly pleasant and charming while being utterly cynical about how you approach professional relationships.
This is a problem with at least two axes. The cynicism part relies on accurately calibrating the distance between official narratives and reality.
If you're a pessimist, you overshoot. An optimist undershoots. A realist gets it more or less right.
But if the distance is huge, that automatically makes the realist a cynic, because the reality is a lie, and in most orgs failing to take false narratives at face value is considered dissidence.
The strategic part depends on how you handle that. You can be sneering and negative, you can play the game with a fake smile and an eye for opportunity, or you can aim for neutrality and a certain amount of distance.
Sneering negativity is usually the least effective option, even when it's the most honest.
A realist in a functional organisation won't be cynical at all.
> Cynical take - if you know you're lying, that's not optimism, that's cynical manipulation.
Cynicaler take: That's how some companies fill their management with people who don't know when they're lying.
A person who knows how much 5m of steel expands with a 30°C temperature swing has to say "No" to the boss. A person who doesn't know that, but does know the production line uses a $250,000 Leica laser tracker thingummy that's real accurate can say "Yes Sir" and find themselves in charge of a funded project.
That's all fake. LinkedIn is for sales and recruiting. If you see something there - a post, anything - it's meant to sell something. It's all as fake as the contents of an ad break.
It's important to note that many of those people aren't winning. What you're witnessing is the marketing equivalent of what random government software engineers produce. A good number of the people on HN would be trivially outearning those nerds
You won’t have happy kids and a good family life, if you don’t think it’s possible. Same as you won’t make a cool open-source library, if you aren’t optimistic (or naive) enough to go work on that.
And if you keep saying everything is impossible a huge drag extremely worthless and why even bother trying, you won’t get the fun projects at work.
I'd have to know what your work is worth; however, the past half a decade has brought enormous inflation that people still haven't factored into their expectations. Wait until commodities prices rise soon and then we'll see a shift in workplace attitudes towards salaries. The 401k ponzi scheme has to end sometime.
While not exactly a blog, I've collected ~16 years of [startup] engineering lessons into a book and I think it came out fantastic. People are saying super nice things.
> 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.
Hamming was also writing from a highly privileged position. He was able to work at Bell Labs for the majority of his career. That just doesn’t exist today.
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.
This is a framing issue. You can't control the times, but good advice is applicable in good and bad times. If Hamming was operating from a "good time", it should be true that his policies are also applicable in the "bad times".
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.
Personally, I find the advice useful. Most who provide a framing for causes of success either do not place it in relation to anything, or relate it primarily their own situation, and their argument becomes susceptible to interpretation as survivorship bias. Some try to extend their argument to cover more cases, but can be seen as overconfident based on limited experience. It's hard for one writer to "prove" what general success rules are.
It's not about good or bad times. All compasses are broken so any particular direction you believe you are walking deliberately might as well be uniformly random.
"Direction" and "design" are probably the wrong metaphors for careers.
I think it is better for your mental health to see yourself as having some agency. You certainly have some, though how much we can debate. But saying something like "all compasses are broken" sounds so defeatist that I worry you are experiencing depression.
It seems more odd to me you are placing as much value on career agency to infer ones mental health broadly. I'm not saying this isnt a norm in many cultures, but I'd like to hear your argument for supporting it.
> Hamming was also writing from a highly privileged position.
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.
When I got into the industry over 20 years ago, it was unheard of for an IC software engineer to retire early. Unless you got extremely lucky like working at Microsoft or Apple pre-IPO, you just weren't making the kind of money big law or doctors made.
That is not the case now. Yes the competition is incredibly fierce but the pay has skyrocketed.
There were a lot of factors that went into making salaries sky-rocket. One of those was leverage: there was more demand for skilled programmers than there were available. You also had the ZIRP era from 2008-2021ish. If you could write fizz buzz and breathe you could get a good paying job.
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.
> … 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 …
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.
>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.
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.
Look man, life was unironically just better for everyone back in the 90s. Minimum wage, median wage, highest earners, if you do the math everything was cheaper and wages were comparatively higher. Gas, food, electricity, housing, it was all cheaper. There were fewer regulations and less bureaucracy.
The buying power of a programmer in the 90s was much, much higher than an average programmer today.
>Look man, life was unironically just better for everyone back in the 90s.
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 think the parent sufficiently qualified their take to mean how much an average person could realistically expect to make in inflation-adjusted dollars. Whether "exceptional" engineers were pulling numerically similar salaries or not seems like a bit of a strawman. Thankfully, the day-to-day conditions of cube farms in grey-space aren't as common today, but it's not wildly different for a majority of people. Trade the cube for a standing desk, and it's often still the same grey office in a tower somewhere working on something boring. After inflation and accounting for cost of housing, the numerically higher salary doesn't mean a whole lot, especially so since it's often theoretical money and not vastly changed tax brackets. Our needs as people haven't changed; we don't suddenly need a Porsche that we can afford instead of a house that we can't. Some things have become much cheaper in inflation-adjusted dollars, which is great, but if they didn't, we simply wouldn't have the money for them.
My point is that 20+ years ago, there was frustration here (and elsewhere) that even if we weren't 10x engineers, even being 3x engineers could not get us 3x the compensation.
That changed in the last 20 years for the better. People who had the work ethic and aptitude to become medical doctors or lawyers or management consultants no longer had to sacrifice compensation if they loved tech.
This is notable and worth calling out, and pointing out it wasn't always like this.
Ya I suppose that is a fair point, albeit a tangential somewhat luck-based one. Additionally, that ceiling has been likely raised across technical professions for non-men as well who have the potential and drive to be at the top of whatever ladder. I say tangential because while the ceiling was raised significantly, the parent's argument was that it wasn't nearly as necessary to be the 1% fortunate genius landing a dream gig, which is still true.
Okay sure, life was unironically just better for everyone back in the 90s except for the highest paid exceptional programmers.
Do you feel better now? Will you admit the economy is bad, and has been getting worse for 50 years straight for absolutely everyone (except the most exceptional engineers)?
Comparatively cheaper, no. Americans could afford a lot of things, but the average American home looked like Malcolm in the Middle, and not so much more fancy for the higher class. Meanwhile in 2025, people have immense furbished kitchen (I’m European so I always notice that in abs-training-bro-youtube-slop, I’m not talking about influencers here) and living rooms, order food deliveries all the time, and perhaps some americans could access the number of flights that we saw in movies like Die Hard (going from NYC to SF to see a wife), but that was unimaginable for Europeans. We’re seeing wealth levels that are unimaginable, and global poverty has receded so much that the UN overhauled their definition to redirect their efforts towards human rights rather than hunger.
No, the average 30 year old American owns far less than the average 30 year old American did in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Owning a home in a safe community is what is most important, and most young men can't seem to get that. Things are getting worse.
Heck, I'll lower the bar! I'm (mid-30s American) not so worried about 'safe'. A certain amount of danger is fine. Desirable, even, if it meant I could live in my home town, not in an unfamiliar city.
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. Leaders have found it fashionable to bundle us all together. Spin the wheel and see if we hit RTO, let's bid against each other [again].
All to say, I'd give half my salary to never negotiate it or my location, again. Clearly not an option, so what to do? Endure and save. You won't see me buying toys or status symbols, that's for sure. At Will employment, meet At Will spending.
>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.
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.
I suppose it could be interpreted either way, but your interpretation probably makes more sense in context. In reports about housing cost in Canada, they tend to use both the median income to median servicing cost like you have, but also home price-to-income ratio which often is a multiple of annual income for whatever reason.
Further down in the thread there's mention of median housing cost to income ratio for programmers in the 90's, and in that situation it seems like the absolute total cost of a house was a fraction of annual income, so it could go either way, but it would be much tougher now for your annual salary to surpass the cost of a house unless it's severely in the boonies.
> Programmers had a lot of labour power back then.
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.
It ultimately doesn't change the advice. Strongly deciding I wanted a career change led me to putting in some extra time and tripling my income. It's easier if you can reduce obligations and noise and focus on what matters to optimize for whatever you want. It may not be easy, but you have some degree of power to alter your trajectory to some extent
I read/skimmed it this year. I don't feel it was worth it. The first few and last few chapters have some nuggets but for the most part it's pretty highly technical stuff that feels not super relevant or interesting for a software engineer today (in my opinion).
That's really nice, but the point where the vision is should move too. You learn as you progress. What you enjoy changes. The entire industry moves. Being focused on the goal you defined 30 years ago is almost certainly wrong for most people.
After ~15 years, I've realized that no good things come to you without sustained focus / attentiveness, and gentle pressure in the direction of attention. What everyone here is saying is "be closed loop", vs the drunkards "open loop". Combined with a bit of progress every day, it's (so far, at least) magical what happens.
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.
I think this demostrates a far more important perspective than "have a vision" - which is easy to explain and almost impossible to execute, which is be curious, intentional and open to lots of things. The curious & open part leads you to new oppportunities, and the intentional part helps you figure out how to evaluate & where to go next.
This sounds like much better advice. Trying to plan out a tech career over decades seems like very premature optimizing. Being curious and making sure you keep learning is not only very pleasant, it’s useful. And when the tech changes, fine, no problem. Most of the big features of my life have not been plannable ahead of time.
Exactly. You can “have a vision” to accelerate full speed and hit the hard wall and just before going full throttle you are offered an opportunity to enter an open door around the corner which you have never even thought about. And that door helps you discover a new vision, that might stick for lifetime.
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.
>>Being focused on the goal you defined 30 years ago is almost certainly wrong for most people.
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.
Do people actually perform a random walk though? All terrain - both metaphorically and physically - is not equal, so wouldn't a more accurate description be 1. float on the water and go where the current/tides take you, or 2. decide when you're going to paddle against it towards the lighthouse? or more simply, "most people walk downhill"?
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.
> 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.
Comment is interesting because its only confirmation bias material and doesn't hold up under minimal scrutiny. If you want to stay in pretentious CS analogy territory, then consider that if you can react to current events you can be a heuristical pathfinding algorithm that adjusts its goal based on locally optimal heuristics, making each individual step more efficient. This all a straight ass pull that will not translate to real world performance either, but it will serve to sound impressive to a fool.
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
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.
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.
My entire professional life/career has been a tension between trying new things/opportunities and trying to be intentional in what/where/when/how I make changes. I'll probably be done in about 10 years so I'll let you know how it worked out then.
I also really treasure that quote. Your visualization really made it hit home again though.
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.
> n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about sqrt(n) steps from the origin
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.
Wait, are you saying that for a symmetrical random walk, the expected distance is of the order of sqrt(n), but even for a slightly biased random walk (like 0.5000001 chance to take right) it's of the order of n?
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)
I think the beauty of this quote is working more than its content.
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.
> 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.
I never really had a plan for a career but I never settled. I borderline almost did at my last job as it paid enough and I loved the people like family but the move from that job landed me in the most interesting and well paying job I've had yet. Luck totally played a part in most of my jumps and the ones I thought were good were often bad and the ones I wasn't interested in ended up being the most interesting.
I just can’t understand people whose life goal is like to be a CTO by some date; I have never tried for a promotion since I first shifted into a job where I was paid to make software. Due to the random walk of promotion rules (and most likely the good work of bosses that believed in me), I have been promoted enough that I had to put thought leader into my linked in, but I do believe just making sure whatever you are working on is useful and successful to other people is enough worry; if you are skilled in software and thinking, the other things will work them selves out.
I have generally had strong vision in my career but this year due to external forces at play at work I have been much more reactive to the chaos and generally felt off the whole year, this was a nice mental model to step through, liked the visualization.
I don't think jus the raw distance (from here) is the metric to necessarily optimize for. It may be more useful to throughly search the nearby area, for example - especially if you feel you're in a good neighborhood already.
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.
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.
This reminds me of a take on art, that goes something like "you don't need talent, but you do need to have taste". Taste is the same kind of driver as direction in this case.
Probably butchered the quote, can't remember who said it, but the message stuck.
> If your grading is based mostly on correctly reproducing facts and applying algorithms you memorized then that’s the outcome your education system optimizes for
My favorite college class was compilers.
The whole semester you worked on a compiler for a simplified Pascal. Each homework added a feature.
The final exam was 4 hours. Open textbook, open internet. No chat with classmates. You got a description of 3 features to add to your compiler. Grade is number of tests passed.
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