I changed careers at 40+ years old. I'm very happy that I did it.
People have all sorts of constructs / ideas about how careers work (based on experience) or how they think it works, or how they want it to work. I talk to some college graduates who tell me what they're planning for and have ZERO clue what industry they're talking about, their description is unrecognizable to me ... even tho I know it is the one I work in.
I find your experience and paths can vary greatly company to company, even job to job.
We all find truths we want to hold on to about work. I recall trips to the valley where my coworkers where astonished to hear tales of people doing the same work they did, but doing it slightly differently elsewhere in the country. Their view of how that job was done was entirely shaped by the couple places they worked (and everyone seemed to cycle through those couple companies). You'd think these folks though that if you didn't fill out the TPS report right to left that the world would end... I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people fill them out left to right but I didn't feel like telling them that, it might have been too much for them to handle.
"
I think there are three main kinds of career destination, at least in the tech industry:
And it seems to lump tech lead, staff-level individual contributor not leading a team, and architect-level positions that have no direct reports.
When I speak about career options to people I lead, I say there is a senior level plateau. At that point, you have to be more intentional about growth. If you want to stay in the field, and you want to progress past senior developer (staying a core contributor is an option!), you need to think about where you are going. You can be a generalist, specialist, or outside of development. Going into management is changing careers, much like going into product development or farming.
If you want to be a generalist, you are looking to expand your influence as you tackle harder and harder problems. Tech leads are generalists. Architects are generalists. All of them have some form of technical leadership to help steer larger and larger efforts. You can also become a generalist that specializes in early startups: you are there to tackle any problem that is in front of the organization until it outgrows the need - at that point you can look for new pastures or help guide the organization while solving smaller and smaller problems.
You can also become a specialist. You learn, in depth, a smaller set of responsibilities, but you can build what others cannot. You can debug and solve problems others cannot. You can be a consultant, or a specialized shared service within an organization. You have options, but mastery is what motivates you, and that mastery can be very valuable in certain situations.
But that is career growth, not planning for the end of your career. Sometimes, that is a parallel track, like management or product. Sometimes, that's retirement. Sometimes, that's moving into another industry. I think that's what the article is talking about instead.
Right? I teach college students going into IT, and this feels like something they would write.
Offhand, I can't think of too many people (myself included) who are a) very happy in their jobs and b) planned very diligently to get to that exact space.
Mostly the opposite, "A lot of random stuff happened, I followed through on some stuff that felt right at the time, and just kind of did that over and over."
The conclusion I think is missing from the 10k hours theory of mastery is that there is more than enough time in a full lifespan to master 4-6 things, depending on how good you are at managing your time. People who are only good at one thing may find that they aren't good at anything because of it. Don't neglect your passions, even if you don't see how you could ever make money from it, experience in other verticals may give you cross-domain knowledge that makes the leap easier.
And even if you don't change, the skills from the other domain may translate to your day job. The history of big innovations is littered with people who put the proverbial domain A peanut butter together with the chocolate from domain B. Lots of people have solved problems that you are dealing with, but you don't work with them and you may never have any reason to even be in the same building with them.
Totally. Look at the quotes he’s pulling and then he somehow vectors into three predefined end points.
Dude is waiting to crack open, telling himself he can fit the ideas from all the reading he’s recently been doing into the concrete pipeline of a career he’s built.
> I changed careers at 40+ years old. I'm very happy that I did it.
Would you mind sharing a bit more about that? I.e. what did you do before, what are you doing now?
I ask because I'm looking for inspiration; my current job is comfortable and okayish but not leading anywhere. And I really dislike the company that I work for.
Where you end up is, largely, a by-product of the little choices you make with how you spend your time, and you should treat your time accordingly, but the article treats those decisions as descending a tree with limited depth, when, in reality, the tree keeps going well past where your career (and your life) end. I don't think any of us (in tech) end up in a place where we have no choices (as the author implies), I think we end up in a place where the ROI distribution of our choices becomes so unequal that making a different one stops being practical depending on your goals.
You can spend the last X years of your career doing performance art or spear-fishing if you don't care about returns.
"It's not surprising, then, that many of us find ourselves in less than fully satisfying jobs, with doubtful or non-existent prospects for advancement."
Very true. I can't wait for my career to be over. I don't think I'll ever find the position where I feel I belong, so I'll just be miserable anywhere now that I know how broken the system really is.
> I think there are three main kinds of career destination, at least in the tech industry:
> Independent
> Senior individual contributor (IC)
> Management
I guess I'll stick my neck out and just admit that I don't want to give any more fucks about any of the above and just wake up, sip my tea, read the news and take a bloody nap whenever I want to. Also volunteering/open source but mostly, not doing things I don't want to do any more. Yep, I don't want to be "incredibly excited" about the "next growth chapter of my life" - I just want to live my life in a non-agile way without sprinting towards the end of it. That is about it.
Feels like the "senior IC" role described in this article corresponds mainly to today's "3-5 years of experience 'senior' engineer" roles. The reality that I've seen and experienced is that advancing beyond that on an IC track means a lot more people/political work, rather than constant "hands on keyboard" coding as described in the article. It's not the same as management, but it's inevitably more meetings and evangelizing your ideas.
This is something people seem hesitant to realize: that after a certain point you can only grow your career by "managing" other people. This is true in a lot of (most?) fields.
At some point you cannot become more productive as an individual and you need to start coordinating the work of many people if you want to increase your productivity.
This can of course take many forms, but the essence is inescapable.
The answer to this for me has been to transition to something more specialized: from full stack developer to working in robotics. The previous skills are still relevant and all the new domain knowledge keeps me interested. The combo of domain knowledge and software skills is more rare, so it feels a bit more satisfying than working as a senior IC the way I did 10+ years ago 5 years into my software career out of college. And I still spend my days not in meetings, thinking about how to solve hard problems and implementing solutions. I haven't (yet) felt compelled to rise up the senior staff / fellow or whatever levels where you end up in meetings anyways. And not to knock the super senior folks who do this well, I just still really like coding for the time being.
The reality that I've seen and experienced is that advancing beyond that on an IC track means a lot more people/political work, rather than constant "hands on keyboard" coding as described in the article.
This is my struggle. After about five years of head down all day programming I started to get more of a tech lead role, and the hours spent on explaining the work instead of doing the work crept up. I managed to avoid the management track by actively pushing back when pushed that way, but I eventually got the architect title instead, and now I can go months writing nothing but emails and spec documents before I manage to find a good enough excuse to write code. The upside is that I decide a lot of things, which as a pure coder I did a lot less. The downside is that I really wish I spent more time writing code.
Sometimes I think about going indie and building and selling my own product, but anything I can think of seems to involve a lot of time spent doing other business activities than coding, and that just does not appeal.
Like many I started out in small scale IT just as desktop computers were becoming a thing. I transitioned from mainframe support to desktop support, from there I worked through several desktop support roles, wishing I was server support but never managing to get there... over time I became a desktop architect, and then infrastructure architect, and now well.... I just don't know.
I have meetings, I write documents. I offer sage advice on best practice. That's it. It's not IT anymore, it's just make-work.
If I knew my middle-career years would be like this, I would have never started in IT in the first place[1].
However... I work 100% remotely, and I LIKE that. I've been a remote worker for a decade now, and I just couldn't go back to commuting or being in an office.
So, I have no idea what to do[2].
I'm not really soliciting for advice (but feel free!), I'm just venting I guess.
---
[1] I had a chance at the very beginning to become a Forensic Scientist at New Scotland Yard for the Police. I turned it down. Often I wonder if I made the wrong choice.
- I know I'm not technically skilled enough to make it to the higher levels of IC
- I know I lack the people skills & charisma to make it to the higher levels of management
I'm aware I can improve in both and I accept that, to some extent, it's a laziness and confidence issue. But to some people it seems to come naturally and it's hard not to assume I'm in the majority that aren't exceptional.
All through my professional life, I lived frugally, saved as much as I possibly could, made conservative, yet not "bunker mentality," investments, and avoided personal debt like the plague. Being exactly where I am today, has always been a goal.
I also made sure that every job I did, shipped. I sometimes had to "hode by dose", as it passed by, on its way out the door, but I became habituated to shipping. As a manager, I never stopped coding, but it had to be shunted to "nights and weekends." Again, I always shipped; even my open-source work. In fact, I designed, curated, and eventually turned over, a project that has become a world-standard infrastructure, used by thousands, around the world. It's really still in its infancy, even though I started it in 2008-2009.
I was fortunate to work for a company that is absolutely crazy about Quality, and I learned to have an ethos of personal Integrity, which has worked out quite well. My fiscal conservatism also worked out nicely in my management career.
Then, when my company finally wound up the department I led, and no one would hire me, I happened to have plenty set aside to retire. I'm not happy about being forced into it, but I am happy that it happened, despite my best efforts.
I have been able to pivot -fairly easily-, to a lone-wolf programmer (even though I spent my entire career in fairly diverse and large teams), and I found folks that like the kind of software I write, so my habit of ship is already paying dividends (not really. I don't make a dime, and that's just fine with me).
> Most of us, in fact, don't really know what we want to do with our working lives until we're more or less doing it.
I can relate. Approaching 40 and I still change the definition of what I "want to do" from time to time. This in part results from my childhood experience in which my parents make important judgements, in part results from my own weakness (not perseverant enough and always back down when boredom and/or difficulty strike).
Basically I find myself distracted by all sorts of things (game dev? cool! reverse engineering? cool! embedded system? cool! writing an interpreter? cool!) but only scratching the surface for all of them. Yes it might be OK because they are just hobbies, and I can do whatever I want with hobbies, but deep in my heart I still admire those who can drill deep even for hobbies.
> What we're really talking about is the aim or goal of your career.
Actually I believe there is one thing that is potentially more important: How do we plan the end of our philosophical life? That is, when do we be content enough and say to ourselves: "OK if I die now, I can at least say that I have done something this life and did not waste all of my time". Reflecting on that, I have to say that if I were to die now, I probably believe that all of my life is wasted. Against this is just personal and everyone has one's own version of "wasted".
*******
Overall I think this is a well written piece, but the hard-core question is: Do you know yourself?
If you love what you're doing now and don't ever want to change jobs, great: you've reached the end of your career, even if it plays out over many decades.
Even if you love what you do and you don't want to change anything, the world around you is going to have other ideas. Especially in tech.
Eh. To some extend yes but largely, no. If you loved COBOL all your life you can still find COBOL work. It's harder now but its out there. You're just not going to be working at a cool start up doing it.
So if part of what you love is working at cool cutting edge companies then yeah you have to keep learning new cutting edge things. But if you just want to bang out code in your preferred language there will almost always be a company somewhere hiring for that.
It depends how dynamically you can define "what you're doing now." I don't really care what I do so long as it's remote with a good work-life balance and pays well, and I'll do what it takes to keep up with tech stacks. I expect this to carry me just fine to retirement.
I'm 67, and am in the final stages of my career. This article resonated, and made a lot of sense based on my own personal experiences. Early in my career, my head was full of fantasies and ambitions about entrepreneurship, being a founder, being a leader, etc. It took a long while for me to realize that I am not a leader, and am much more of an individual contributor. It was liberating to accept my true nature, and to go with it. If you are lucky enough to have a job that you find interesting on most days, that turns out to be a tactical advantage: you will spend more time learning, thinking about things, and improving your ability to contribute effectively. If you are lucky enough to have a job where you feel like you are making the world a better place in some meaningful way, that can be surprisingly fulfilling. At the age of 50 I did a career direction change and took a new job doing embedded software for medical devices. Been doing it ever since, and find my life to be rich and meaningful. Anecdote: our twin granddaughters (now 4) were born about 6 weeks premature, and spent over a month in the UCLA NICU. We all spent a lot time there. Next to every incubator was an Avea neonatal ventilator, a product that I had written a lot of software for. Nowadays I'm working at a medical device startup that's working on next-gen radiation treatment for cancer patients. Software people are blessed at this point in history, in that we have a lot of options. You can make good money, support your family and provide for retirement etc., while at the same time doing something that you enjoy and find meaningful. It was kinda terrifying for me to take a leap into the unknown mid-career and start doing something that I believed in, but it worked out well. (I have a small sample size, i.e., one, so I don't know what the odds are here. Your mileage may vary; no guarantees implied or otherwise, just one data point for your consideration.)
What such articles lack is that they assume anyone could do anything, but that's just not true.
To become a really well-paid, influential developer (IC called here, I think), you need to be smart, so that others that are also smart acknowledge you as a very skilled developer. Plus, it's probably not enough to be very smart (which in itself most people are not), but you need some level of politics that is always necessary.
For managers, it's also not a default that promotion will just come with years being somewhere, just untrue.
I would say, although depressing, some people in the industry just don't have it to be successful enough in anything to feel great at their job and there is not always a way to change this. I would never fingerpoint to anyone and say "he cannot make it", I would probably not even recognise that person (apart from myself) but I would say they take up a great portion, unfortunately.
Today's environment enforces performance. Those who cannot perform, will have a hard time...
I disagree. We are conflating being smart really with being self-motivated. Also being in the right environment is very important. I do believe that anyone can do almost anything (I'm not going to be an NBA player in my 40s). Certain things though become harder as time goes on given education or industry requirements but are still not impossible - you have people become medical doctors in their 50s. It fair to state that the privilege of time and money also make career transitions far more easier for some folks. But if you are willing to put in the time and effort and stick with it, you can learn anything and make the jump career wise.
If you want to break into a technical field from a non-technical background, the better indicator of success will be grit, perseverance, and self motivation. Learning becomes easier if you are motivated to learn and when its hard still stick with it. I used mentor at a nonprofit web-dev bootcamp that aimed to help students from under-estimated and non-traditional backgrounds (no college education) become software developers. Most of the students did not have traditional STEM backgrounds and were learning to program for the first time. The program was free and deliberately designed to be hard with multiple places where students would be kicked out if they didn't keep up with the work. There were no traditional tests and coding exams. All assignments were project based with a clear deliverables (website, backend database, full stack javascript applications, etc).
Most of the students (over 80% graduation rate and 99% employment rate) who finished the program got well paying dev jobs (avg salary of 90k). Of the students I mentored, the ones who were most successful were the one willing to put in the extra hours to learn and ask for help (often doing 80-100 hours weeks of learning) and genuinely curious to learn outside of the scope of the curriculum. At the end of the day the program was not filtering on general "intelligence" (whatever that means) but really the perseverance of students to put in the work and produce something each week. At the end of 8 weeks
A long time ago, after interviewing for months, I finally landed my first job as a developer. It was VERY hard to get your foot in the door back then. On my first day, I was given someone's old computer that had a bunch of junk on it. While cleaning it up, I accidentally deleted all files on the company's file share. Shortly after, I started hearing murmurs of missing files and then, panicking inside, realized what I had done.
The IT guy came by and asked me if I had done it, but I played dumb. He knew it was me but he couldn't prove it, so I survived that one. He gave me dirty looks from that point forward though. I surely would have been fired on the spot if the truth were uncovered.
Damn, dude. If I nuked stuff on the file server I would have immediately gotten up and talked to my team/manager/whatever. I'd be anxious as hell but I'd still do it. If I actually got fired I'd think they are just a trash employer because there's no possible way someone should get fired for an innocent mistake (that never should have been possible anyways -- systemic failure on the employer's part). I know someone who accidentally published private docs to the open web, because they followed the known process for sharing docs with their team, and the process did not correctly identify how to verify/ensure the docs are internal-access-only. They nearly got in trouble, but I told them to adamantly communicate how they followed the official process using the official tools and there was no information about the security/privacy that indicated it wasn't private. There was no way for this person to have known any better, with what the employer had provided. It was even just weeks after some security/privacy training had taken place at the job, proving just how badly the employer failed to educate their staff.
If you lied, and they found out, you would have been fired for that reason alone. On the other hand if you told the truth right away, it's hard to say if you would have been fired; where I've worked you wouldn't have been fired for telling the truth and doing that (having seen people fess up to much worse failures). Lying on the other hand is a serious problem since it betrays trust (if caught, of course).
That said, I've also been at a company where people in charge had admitted to not having a backup copy of something rather important. I was flabbergasted.
Do you really think you would have been fired? It sounds like it was easy for you to fix. Sounds like it would have been easy for them to fix. Rather than fire you they could say, "Oh yeah we should make sure that something like this doesnt happen again. It could happen to anyone."
The article is Schwarzenegger-style motivational nonsense.
That sounds a lot more harsh than I want to, as the advise in itself is solid. Yes, you should very much plan for happiness if you can.
The problem is the silent majority that actually doesn't want a career. At all. They work out of necessity, not to find meaning. They just want to live. American optimism has slowly and carefully made this attitude unacceptable to express, hence the silent majority.
But the underlying reality is still there. People don't want to work. That's why you pay them. If you believe the people at your work are there for meaning and joy, give them fuck-you-money and see how you find yourself alone the next day.
If I may turn a bit morbid for a minute, I've attended too many death beds already. I've never heard any of them spend a single breath on work or career. Isn't that telling, if work is supposedly purpose and meaning, and you spent most of your life on it, it's not even worth mentioning?
Anyways, it's still solid advise to switch to a field or role that fits you, in case it currently doesn't. The problem is, work sucks everywhere. It's not the field or the actual tasks, it's other things. You have no control over your time, your colleagues, the quality of management, and most of your time is spent on reporting and communicating rather than actually working or doing things that bring actual joy.
Everything is factory-like, financialized, metric porn. Even the academic world is like this now, and so are non-profits.
A couple things that come to mind with this article. My own journey has been quite nonlinear both in terms of roles (business systems analyst -> data analyst -> technical project manager -> data scientist -> AI research scientist) and environments (F100 -> academia -> startups). My undergrad (creative writing and social sciences) would not have predicted my current role (Senior AI researcher focusing on deep learning and NLP) and I still have no idea where I want to end up.
It can be hard to imagine and project your potential. Often our journeys are not linear and we have hard time factoring who we will be in future as sum of our experiences. Often that growth in knowledge and life experiences will be exponential even though to us it may feel linear in the present.
I also find it useful to think about problems instead roles. I've had roles that didn't exist 10 years ago and likewise new problem spaces are always emerging. Problems don't necessarily have to be domain specific or role specific but generally describe the types of challenges you find interesting. Once I identify a problem space I start to think about how I would like to make an impact and how I can currently make an impact. Sometimes the two are the same and other times they are different and require a journey to get there.
But I find the metaphor of problems interesting because it helps align the type of work I do with the things I find interesting at any given point. It also helps narrow the search space for opportunities and ensure what type of career growth is meaningful for you.
It sounds like you have had an amazing adventure so far, and it's really inspiring to see that you've been able to have such a fluid career. Could I contact you to learn more about your adventures? My email is Anthony at yesrobo dot net
I'm going the senior IC route, I would add to the description in the article that the job usually comes with an expectation of technical leadership and mentoring and/or helping to steer management. I spend hardly any time in general meetings but do spend some time building consensus around technical decisions.
Sounds like your HR is doing a decent job then, unlike mine. I recently applied to a business analyst role. I was told in the informational that I would spend only about 25% of my time researching/reporting, and that the other 75% would be project/stakeholder management. Ridiculous. No wonder we have trouble finding people when position titles are basically lies.
I once took a job that I regretted taking on the very first day. I contemplated quitting that same day but stuck it out for many years thereafter. Turns out staying in that job WAS the career ending mistake. It killed my career, family life and even health. It takes a lot of effort to recover from these career mistakes even if you have spectacular resume and background. Number one rule in avoiding this is to never take such a job in the first place.
"You can't stop the waves, as the saying goes, but you can learn to surf. Chance favours the prepared mind."
Never underestimate such innocent looking sentences. I've learned surfing with 40. Surfing is by far the hardest craft to learn. You only have a few seconds on a wave, and hardly get anyone, esp. in crowded surfs. You need at least 5 years to get decent at it. But it's really worth it. I'm missing it a lot.
[+] [-] duxup|4 years ago|reply
People have all sorts of constructs / ideas about how careers work (based on experience) or how they think it works, or how they want it to work. I talk to some college graduates who tell me what they're planning for and have ZERO clue what industry they're talking about, their description is unrecognizable to me ... even tho I know it is the one I work in.
I find your experience and paths can vary greatly company to company, even job to job.
We all find truths we want to hold on to about work. I recall trips to the valley where my coworkers where astonished to hear tales of people doing the same work they did, but doing it slightly differently elsewhere in the country. Their view of how that job was done was entirely shaped by the couple places they worked (and everyone seemed to cycle through those couple companies). You'd think these folks though that if you didn't fill out the TPS report right to left that the world would end... I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people fill them out left to right but I didn't feel like telling them that, it might have been too much for them to handle.
" I think there are three main kinds of career destination, at least in the tech industry:
"I have no idea why those are the only destinations ... for an article worried about being happy that seems kind of limited.
The whole article feels very pie in the sky to me.
[+] [-] ebiester|4 years ago|reply
When I speak about career options to people I lead, I say there is a senior level plateau. At that point, you have to be more intentional about growth. If you want to stay in the field, and you want to progress past senior developer (staying a core contributor is an option!), you need to think about where you are going. You can be a generalist, specialist, or outside of development. Going into management is changing careers, much like going into product development or farming.
If you want to be a generalist, you are looking to expand your influence as you tackle harder and harder problems. Tech leads are generalists. Architects are generalists. All of them have some form of technical leadership to help steer larger and larger efforts. You can also become a generalist that specializes in early startups: you are there to tackle any problem that is in front of the organization until it outgrows the need - at that point you can look for new pastures or help guide the organization while solving smaller and smaller problems.
You can also become a specialist. You learn, in depth, a smaller set of responsibilities, but you can build what others cannot. You can debug and solve problems others cannot. You can be a consultant, or a specialized shared service within an organization. You have options, but mastery is what motivates you, and that mastery can be very valuable in certain situations.
But that is career growth, not planning for the end of your career. Sometimes, that is a parallel track, like management or product. Sometimes, that's retirement. Sometimes, that's moving into another industry. I think that's what the article is talking about instead.
[+] [-] jrm4|4 years ago|reply
Offhand, I can't think of too many people (myself included) who are a) very happy in their jobs and b) planned very diligently to get to that exact space.
Mostly the opposite, "A lot of random stuff happened, I followed through on some stuff that felt right at the time, and just kind of did that over and over."
[+] [-] hinkley|4 years ago|reply
And even if you don't change, the skills from the other domain may translate to your day job. The history of big innovations is littered with people who put the proverbial domain A peanut butter together with the chocolate from domain B. Lots of people have solved problems that you are dealing with, but you don't work with them and you may never have any reason to even be in the same building with them.
[+] [-] svnt|4 years ago|reply
Dude is waiting to crack open, telling himself he can fit the ideas from all the reading he’s recently been doing into the concrete pipeline of a career he’s built.
[+] [-] 11thEarlOfMar|4 years ago|reply
Mechanical Engineer->Baker
https://www.kqed.org/bayareabites/134975/at-the-midwife-and-...
No shortage of wineries:
Aerospace:
https://www.princeofpinot.com/article/680/
https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/san-fernando-valley-ventura/new...
Software: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-silicon-valley-prepared-...
Seems like starting a non-tech business for career techies should be a valid career destination.
[+] [-] doctor_lollipop|4 years ago|reply
Would you mind sharing a bit more about that? I.e. what did you do before, what are you doing now?
I ask because I'm looking for inspiration; my current job is comfortable and okayish but not leading anywhere. And I really dislike the company that I work for.
[+] [-] BobbyJo|4 years ago|reply
You can spend the last X years of your career doing performance art or spear-fishing if you don't care about returns.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] neal_jones|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] JAlexoid|4 years ago|reply
Do you know if your new career is a career to your retirement, post retirement or only for a few years?
[+] [-] dookahku|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giantg2|4 years ago|reply
Very true. I can't wait for my career to be over. I don't think I'll ever find the position where I feel I belong, so I'll just be miserable anywhere now that I know how broken the system really is.
[+] [-] noisy_boy|4 years ago|reply
> Independent
> Senior individual contributor (IC)
> Management
I guess I'll stick my neck out and just admit that I don't want to give any more fucks about any of the above and just wake up, sip my tea, read the news and take a bloody nap whenever I want to. Also volunteering/open source but mostly, not doing things I don't want to do any more. Yep, I don't want to be "incredibly excited" about the "next growth chapter of my life" - I just want to live my life in a non-agile way without sprinting towards the end of it. That is about it.
[+] [-] tdumitrescu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kosievdmerwe|4 years ago|reply
At some point you cannot become more productive as an individual and you need to start coordinating the work of many people if you want to increase your productivity.
This can of course take many forms, but the essence is inescapable.
[+] [-] sixdimensional|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krosaen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Joeri|4 years ago|reply
This is my struggle. After about five years of head down all day programming I started to get more of a tech lead role, and the hours spent on explaining the work instead of doing the work crept up. I managed to avoid the management track by actively pushing back when pushed that way, but I eventually got the architect title instead, and now I can go months writing nothing but emails and spec documents before I manage to find a good enough excuse to write code. The upside is that I decide a lot of things, which as a pure coder I did a lot less. The downside is that I really wish I spent more time writing code.
Sometimes I think about going indie and building and selling my own product, but anything I can think of seems to involve a lot of time spent doing other business activities than coding, and that just does not appeal.
[+] [-] Jaruzel|4 years ago|reply
Like many I started out in small scale IT just as desktop computers were becoming a thing. I transitioned from mainframe support to desktop support, from there I worked through several desktop support roles, wishing I was server support but never managing to get there... over time I became a desktop architect, and then infrastructure architect, and now well.... I just don't know.
I have meetings, I write documents. I offer sage advice on best practice. That's it. It's not IT anymore, it's just make-work.
If I knew my middle-career years would be like this, I would have never started in IT in the first place[1].
However... I work 100% remotely, and I LIKE that. I've been a remote worker for a decade now, and I just couldn't go back to commuting or being in an office.
So, I have no idea what to do[2].
I'm not really soliciting for advice (but feel free!), I'm just venting I guess.
---
[1] I had a chance at the very beginning to become a Forensic Scientist at New Scotland Yard for the Police. I turned it down. Often I wonder if I made the wrong choice.
[2] Computers are the only thing I'm good at.
[+] [-] crrndngmstk|4 years ago|reply
- I know I'm not technically skilled enough to make it to the higher levels of IC
- I know I lack the people skills & charisma to make it to the higher levels of management
I'm aware I can improve in both and I accept that, to some extent, it's a laziness and confidence issue. But to some people it seems to come naturally and it's hard not to assume I'm in the majority that aren't exceptional.
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|4 years ago|reply
All through my professional life, I lived frugally, saved as much as I possibly could, made conservative, yet not "bunker mentality," investments, and avoided personal debt like the plague. Being exactly where I am today, has always been a goal.
I also made sure that every job I did, shipped. I sometimes had to "hode by dose", as it passed by, on its way out the door, but I became habituated to shipping. As a manager, I never stopped coding, but it had to be shunted to "nights and weekends." Again, I always shipped; even my open-source work. In fact, I designed, curated, and eventually turned over, a project that has become a world-standard infrastructure, used by thousands, around the world. It's really still in its infancy, even though I started it in 2008-2009.
I was fortunate to work for a company that is absolutely crazy about Quality, and I learned to have an ethos of personal Integrity, which has worked out quite well. My fiscal conservatism also worked out nicely in my management career.
Then, when my company finally wound up the department I led, and no one would hire me, I happened to have plenty set aside to retire. I'm not happy about being forced into it, but I am happy that it happened, despite my best efforts.
I have been able to pivot -fairly easily-, to a lone-wolf programmer (even though I spent my entire career in fairly diverse and large teams), and I found folks that like the kind of software I write, so my habit of ship is already paying dividends (not really. I don't make a dime, and that's just fine with me).
[+] [-] bckr|4 years ago|reply
I crave this. Move fast & break things mentality is a plague. Shipping the proof of concept is a plague.
[+] [-] Nerada|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnthrowaway0315|4 years ago|reply
> Most of us, in fact, don't really know what we want to do with our working lives until we're more or less doing it.
I can relate. Approaching 40 and I still change the definition of what I "want to do" from time to time. This in part results from my childhood experience in which my parents make important judgements, in part results from my own weakness (not perseverant enough and always back down when boredom and/or difficulty strike).
Basically I find myself distracted by all sorts of things (game dev? cool! reverse engineering? cool! embedded system? cool! writing an interpreter? cool!) but only scratching the surface for all of them. Yes it might be OK because they are just hobbies, and I can do whatever I want with hobbies, but deep in my heart I still admire those who can drill deep even for hobbies.
> What we're really talking about is the aim or goal of your career.
Actually I believe there is one thing that is potentially more important: How do we plan the end of our philosophical life? That is, when do we be content enough and say to ourselves: "OK if I die now, I can at least say that I have done something this life and did not waste all of my time". Reflecting on that, I have to say that if I were to die now, I probably believe that all of my life is wasted. Against this is just personal and everyone has one's own version of "wasted".
******* Overall I think this is a well written piece, but the hard-core question is: Do you know yourself?
[+] [-] onion2k|4 years ago|reply
Even if you love what you do and you don't want to change anything, the world around you is going to have other ideas. Especially in tech.
[+] [-] AlwaysRock|4 years ago|reply
So if part of what you love is working at cool cutting edge companies then yeah you have to keep learning new cutting edge things. But if you just want to bang out code in your preferred language there will almost always be a company somewhere hiring for that.
[+] [-] jimmaswell|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gregfjohnson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suhlig|4 years ago|reply
That must feel like ultimate satisfaction - software that is making the world a better place. Congratulations!
[+] [-] IceMichael|4 years ago|reply
To become a really well-paid, influential developer (IC called here, I think), you need to be smart, so that others that are also smart acknowledge you as a very skilled developer. Plus, it's probably not enough to be very smart (which in itself most people are not), but you need some level of politics that is always necessary.
For managers, it's also not a default that promotion will just come with years being somewhere, just untrue.
I would say, although depressing, some people in the industry just don't have it to be successful enough in anything to feel great at their job and there is not always a way to change this. I would never fingerpoint to anyone and say "he cannot make it", I would probably not even recognise that person (apart from myself) but I would say they take up a great portion, unfortunately.
Today's environment enforces performance. Those who cannot perform, will have a hard time...
[+] [-] dhairya|4 years ago|reply
If you want to break into a technical field from a non-technical background, the better indicator of success will be grit, perseverance, and self motivation. Learning becomes easier if you are motivated to learn and when its hard still stick with it. I used mentor at a nonprofit web-dev bootcamp that aimed to help students from under-estimated and non-traditional backgrounds (no college education) become software developers. Most of the students did not have traditional STEM backgrounds and were learning to program for the first time. The program was free and deliberately designed to be hard with multiple places where students would be kicked out if they didn't keep up with the work. There were no traditional tests and coding exams. All assignments were project based with a clear deliverables (website, backend database, full stack javascript applications, etc).
Most of the students (over 80% graduation rate and 99% employment rate) who finished the program got well paying dev jobs (avg salary of 90k). Of the students I mentored, the ones who were most successful were the one willing to put in the extra hours to learn and ask for help (often doing 80-100 hours weeks of learning) and genuinely curious to learn outside of the scope of the curriculum. At the end of the day the program was not filtering on general "intelligence" (whatever that means) but really the perseverance of students to put in the work and produce something each week. At the end of 8 weeks
[+] [-] danity|4 years ago|reply
The IT guy came by and asked me if I had done it, but I played dumb. He knew it was me but he couldn't prove it, so I survived that one. He gave me dirty looks from that point forward though. I surely would have been fired on the spot if the truth were uncovered.
[+] [-] vsareto|4 years ago|reply
It's a great example of how you can be made to look bad because of other peoples' decisions.
[+] [-] amatecha|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afterburner|4 years ago|reply
That said, I've also been at a company where people in charge had admitted to not having a backup copy of something rather important. I was flabbergasted.
[+] [-] AlwaysRock|4 years ago|reply
Firing seems like a big leap here.
[+] [-] fleddr|4 years ago|reply
That sounds a lot more harsh than I want to, as the advise in itself is solid. Yes, you should very much plan for happiness if you can.
The problem is the silent majority that actually doesn't want a career. At all. They work out of necessity, not to find meaning. They just want to live. American optimism has slowly and carefully made this attitude unacceptable to express, hence the silent majority.
But the underlying reality is still there. People don't want to work. That's why you pay them. If you believe the people at your work are there for meaning and joy, give them fuck-you-money and see how you find yourself alone the next day.
If I may turn a bit morbid for a minute, I've attended too many death beds already. I've never heard any of them spend a single breath on work or career. Isn't that telling, if work is supposedly purpose and meaning, and you spent most of your life on it, it's not even worth mentioning?
Anyways, it's still solid advise to switch to a field or role that fits you, in case it currently doesn't. The problem is, work sucks everywhere. It's not the field or the actual tasks, it's other things. You have no control over your time, your colleagues, the quality of management, and most of your time is spent on reporting and communicating rather than actually working or doing things that bring actual joy.
Everything is factory-like, financialized, metric porn. Even the academic world is like this now, and so are non-profits.
[+] [-] KineticLensman|4 years ago|reply
> Independent
> Senior individual contributor (IC)
> Management
Sales is an obvious omission.
[+] [-] namdnay|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dhairya|4 years ago|reply
It can be hard to imagine and project your potential. Often our journeys are not linear and we have hard time factoring who we will be in future as sum of our experiences. Often that growth in knowledge and life experiences will be exponential even though to us it may feel linear in the present.
I also find it useful to think about problems instead roles. I've had roles that didn't exist 10 years ago and likewise new problem spaces are always emerging. Problems don't necessarily have to be domain specific or role specific but generally describe the types of challenges you find interesting. Once I identify a problem space I start to think about how I would like to make an impact and how I can currently make an impact. Sometimes the two are the same and other times they are different and require a journey to get there.
But I find the metaphor of problems interesting because it helps align the type of work I do with the things I find interesting at any given point. It also helps narrow the search space for opportunities and ensure what type of career growth is meaningful for you.
[+] [-] bckr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlbertCory|4 years ago|reply
“Everything ends badly, otherwise, it wouldn’t end.” ---Bryan Flanagan from “Cocktail”. [1]
I had to look that up as part of my due diligence for this post. The more you know.
Occasionally a sports career ends with hitting a homer in Game Seven of the World Series (David Ross of the 2016 Cubs). Most of the time, not.
You want to have the sweet we'll-still-be-friends breakup with your spouse, but it really ends in divorce court with you hating each other.
So don't feel remorse that it ends badly. That's life.
[1] https://www.capegazette.com/blog-entry/everything-ends-badly...
[+] [-] zwieback|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giantg2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lvl100|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] artemonster|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmception|4 years ago|reply
They have overly simplistic ideas of what they want.
There are ways to take greater control, or to more quickly concede that there is no control if the sacrifices are not tolerable, to you.
[+] [-] rurban|4 years ago|reply
Never underestimate such innocent looking sentences. I've learned surfing with 40. Surfing is by far the hardest craft to learn. You only have a few seconds on a wave, and hardly get anyone, esp. in crowded surfs. You need at least 5 years to get decent at it. But it's really worth it. I'm missing it a lot.