If You Don't Design Your Career, Someone Else Will (2014)

Believing "most of the normal people" have no agency is condescending.

Someone recently told me about Jesus and the fact that he died to cleanse my sin. I never heard that one before either.

Typically I'll have a folder with a bunch of numbered files in the order that I want to talk about them, since it's easier to just quickly share my screen and run through then when I want to let others know what I've done, for example along the lines of:

  01-migrate-gulp-grunt-to-vite.png
  02-vue-prebuild-script-check-unused-translations.png
  03-java-add-compile-memory-limit-ide.png
  04-server-update-python-for-ansible.png
  ...

> 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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu2DdkOxLNs

"expected distance" is average abs(coordinate), so for biased walk 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).

Probably butchered the quote, can't remember who said it, but the message stuck.

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.

Or someone else that “can’t get their stuff together?”

A lot of people never even “move”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That is not the case now. Yes the competition is incredibly fierce but the pay has skyrocketed.

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 or a local hospital, 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.

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.

https://www.artofmanliness.com/people/fatherhood/podcast-108...

The book itself is called The Preparation.

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.

Because: The interesting things that give you leverage are the frontier of knowledge. In business as well as in science.

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.

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?

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.

Now that our kids are grown and self-supporting, it's wild how much simpler the risk calculation is. But at 52 with engineering manager being the dominant role in my CV, not particularly appealing to the small companies making big moves that I'm interested in.