I really want to see more articles like this on HN. However, this is really "career advice for people at struggling companies." The luck part doesn't get discussed in the way I expected. To me, bad luck is things like:
- You're in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ex. you graduated in 2008-2010/now or your business sector got wiped out by COVID
- Despite your best efforts at networking, you simply never meet that magical person who can strap a booster rocket to your career/company
- You don't have a resilient financial and mental safety net in the form of good friends/family early in your career that enables you to take risks, or you got dealt a bad hand in the form of things like dependents or health issues and simply can't afford to take risks
- Despite all your work, you get blindsided by things completely out of your control. Ex. a big company straight up rips off your product/service/side gig or an executive at your company guts your project/department
- You don't have the magic paper credentials to get you through the doors at places you want to go because you didn't know you needed them earlier in life when they were practical to get
These are the kinds of things I want to see tackled with real-world career advice since I think they apply to a lot of people. For every lucky executive or entrepreneur there are many who were unlucky.
I suspect it's because there isn't much advice to give.
My answer, having checked a few of your boxes... Your lifetime wages are going to be lower than many of your peers. This is unlikely to change. Adjust your worldview accordingly. Don't assume any debt that relies on increasing future earnings to be comfortable.
By all means, keep trying, but stay level headed. Success for most is not always right around the corner. Prior to SV eating the world, the only people that said that we all should be entrepreneurs really just wanted you in their Amway downline.
Society doesn't like to show the magnitude failures out there, or worse, the getting-by'ers. There are a lot of self-conscious IT people in the midwest making $70k/year feeling like failures, when they are the winners of Kokomo, IN.
Read some philosophy. Buy a reliable used car. Look inward for contentment. Try therapy if your shitty childhood and shitty parents made inward a hard place to look.
I don't think luck is as "random" of a factor as much as most people think it is. Checkout "Luck Factor" by Dr. Richard Wiseman.
I do think there are a lot of things you can due to get probability more on your side:
- Keep your eyes open for opportunities and look for the upside ("be optimistic" is the woo-woo version), but it's been proven in experiments that you'll catch things others won't
- Only keep friends around you that actually support you. It's really hard to try to make life changes when people are constantly telling you you can't or shitting on your parade.
- Start making analytical choices. Certain fields pay more than others. Certain businesses treat their employees better than others. A lower position at a better company will increase your probability of "bumping" into those people who might be life changing.
- Learn about probability (Fooled by Randomness is a good start). If you constantly expose yourself to more chances of success, _odds are_, you'll start to find more of it.
Counterpoint:
Luck (broadly seen, including your genetic disposition and where you’ve been born - you might not call it luck, but it’s certainly not something you’ve chosen or earned) plays a much bigger role than most people think it does.
Source and book recommendation:
Robert H. Frank: Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy
> In recent years, social scientists have discovered that chance plays a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people imagine. In Success and Luck, bestselling author and New York Times economics columnist Robert Frank explores the surprising implications of those findings to show why the rich underestimate the importance of luck in success—and why that hurts everyone, even the wealthy.
I totally agree with your sentiment, but I wouldn't consider it a counter point.
I said luck isn't as _random_ as some people think it is. You're saying it plays a much bigger role than most people think it does.
These are not mutually exclusive.
It might even emphasize the point -- because it plays a bigger role than most suppose, it is important to understand how to best take advantage of poor (or superior) circumstances.
I doubt the person you’re replying to made a counter point and what’s being written about is really just semantics (when someone references luck instead of just acknowledging determinism).
The knowledge that’s statistically likely to benefit someone that’s poor, may not work from unfortunate circumstances and that happen precisely when it will hurt the situation. That happens as everyone has a fairly unique life.
We also have to rely on if someone misfortune at birth (in some way), happens to be “lucky enough” to encounter the knowledge to hopefully benefit them or as I should say fate decided to allow it.
Some people do everything right contrary to a person doing the opposite and life can reward whoever the unique conditions happened to favor for each person.
Everything is decided at birth if we were to break everything down into cause & effect.
I agree with your points but they don't really support "luck isn't random". I would say the argument is more "if you increase luck surface area the expected outcome will be higher". Not as catchy.
> - Learn about probability (Fooled by Randomness is a good start). If you constantly expose yourself to more chances of success, _odds are_, you'll start to find more of it.
A) You really want to identify gambles with positive expectation. If you constantly expose yourself to “more chances of success” with negative expectation (such as going to the casino for the chance of winning big), you’ll end up ruined.
B) Even if you can identify gambles with positive expectation, the more resources you have initially, the more you can afford to gamble. Thus, people initially deprived of luck might have less chance of catching up, let alone making it big.
Very much agreed on both points -- which is why I think studying that is important. The tide is definitely against you, but you have a greater chance of fighting it if you know how it works.
Speaking from experience, and also having known a lot of people with a deep understanding of probability, the kind of unluckiness described by OP isn't immediately resolved by a familiarity with probability. For example, it can work against a person where becoming aware of the number of small chance events, that you come to believe you're just wasting your time. But I do think understanding probability is useful in life and underrated.
So that is where good advice would step in to offer some guidance about how to actually apply this knowledge.
IMHO we are not only discussing luck but also our imperfect and fallible nature as people. All you say is excellent advice, but -- sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you.
I've said this before, so apologies for repeating myself:
Luck is making the better decision in a timely manner based on incomplete knowledge where each option appears equally valid. However, people generally are poor at calculating probability combined with risk/reward and simply make bad decisions. And sometimes, all choices lead to bad outcomes.
To expand on this; if you are a healthy, intelligent adult I don't accept the idea that sometimes you don't have a choice, that somehow it is all out of your hands. That thinking leads to victimhood which is really an avoidance of taking responsibility for your decisions.
Yes, sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you - but you chose to take on the bear, whether directly or due to some previous decision (that didn't involve a bear at all).
Enjoyed watching "The Gentleman" the other night and a fan of films like Lock Stock, Two Smoking Barrels and the idea of events snowballing from the choices people make (and then the interaction of each individual's ongoing choices). But the situations that they find themselves in were a result of something they did.
It varies by brand. Plato pretty much runs forever. Kant, even property maintained, will leave you scratching your head. People keep Aristotle running, but it’s not pretty. For what you spend Hume is a bargain—you can even take it off road in the forest...assuming there are unfallen trees. For the DIYer, Wittgenstein will keep you busy but Russell is known to have a computational design flaw. I recommend a late model Singer if you can afford it because they’re still making parts.
In fairness it does break down constantly, but I can usually repair it on my own. I should mention that it handles well in difficult terrain, and it appreciates in value over time.
Isn't philosophy kind of like CS minus the computers? I remember my sister talking about how much she hated her philosophy class and what she described was essentially discrete math-lite.
Philosophy major here (I jokingly tout myself as a trained philosopher). Philosophy is a big field with different schools of thought. In the US/UK, the primary school is known as "analytic (philosophy)" which is focused on tight arguments, precise language, and clarity of thought (see Russell, Wittgenstein, Lewis, Godel). This is contrasted by European -- in particular, French -- "continental (philosophy)" which waxes more poetic (see Nietzsche, Sartre, Lacan, Derrida).
The former deals quite a bit with logic (which was my area of focus in undergrad). Classes I took ranged from "baby logic" (predicate logic, first-order-logic), to second-order logic, to mathematical logic (mostly Peano arithmetic), to metalogic (learning how to prove things like Godel's incompleteness), to lambda calculus, to game theory. This was on top of ethics classes, history of philosophy, and other miscellaneous classes (took a very fun seminar by a Yale visiting professor -- I forget his name -- on the philosophy of food). Most of the graduate seminars I took were on philsophy of language and model theory.
Just about every philosophy class had a pretty strong "logic" undercurrent.
Also, the less logical bit of analytic philosophy is all about breaking down and understanding other people's arguments. It's a very similar process to teasing out business requirements from stakeholders!
Just to clarify, and defend the old continent a bit: while it certainly originated German Idealism and its descendants all the way to post-structuralism and (gasp) “critical theory”, today of course you can find proponents of both schools (the continental/hermeneutic/postmodern and the analytic) on all continents.
And regarding the gp: most philosophy programs will have classes in informal and some even in formal logic, to Goedel’s incompleteness theorems and way beyond.
Since they said "philosophy class," singular, I suspect they're referring to the unit on logic: modus ponens, modus tollens, valid vs sound arguments, etc.
From what I remember, her class involved a lot of logical proofs using propositional logic, but in the form of word problems, not logical statements. I.e., if Bob is larger than Alice, then... instead of P -> Q. They also discussed probabilities, but I'm not sure to what degree.
Those two topics are discussed in entry level CS courses as well. So I assumed that the fields might be semi-related if they require the same mathematical foundations.
Possibly it is because philosophy is a lot like being bothered by a bug in your code, and you stress and strain to resolve it which provides growth in wisdom after the objective is completed.
You can always buy a new stereo and install it. If you buy it from Crutchfield, for like $19 extra, you can get it prewired/harnessed so you don't have to splice the wires. Pretty sweet deal.
Also, some stereos come with a backup cam. This has to be spliced in though.
HUGE NOTE: I bought a 4.5-star receiver on Crutchfield, but the receiver didn't have Sirius XM on it, so I basically don't have radio (unless I use an app on my phone to stream the radio). I don't listen to the radio often so it's not a huge deal for me, just something to be aware of.
I have two cars. 03 VW Jetta TDI with 270k miles and an 09 Nissan Altima with 260k miles. Though I do get plenty of chances to try my hand at being a mechanic.
I see a lot of people in tech with inflated ideas of what success means, and they're almost all tied strictly to salary/net worth.
Yeah, having money is nice, but if that's all you base happiness/idea of success on, its going to be a bumpy road.
>There are a lot of self-conscious IT people in the midwest making $70k/year feeling like failures
I understand how this can point of view can develop, but one of the things I'm most grateful for in life is struggling through a slew of minimum-wage jobs out of college before transitioning into tech. That first bump to "tech salary" literally doubled my income over night and it was only 70k in a high COL east coast city. I learned how to live poor, and discovered I could still have a meaningful life while being broke.
Although I still pursue career advancement, it's not just for money. And if it were to all disappear over night (which is the case for a lot of people right now), I'm comforted by the fact that I've already had it "that bad".
As someone who was broke for many years and now is less broke (cash is flowing, there's money in my accounts, but I'm deeply in negative net worth due to student debt), I think you're understating the issue, vastly.
Simply put, money is freedom. If you have it, you can do things people who don't have it can't. If you have enough of it, you can do just about anything. And, I'm not necessarily talking about luxuries, I'm talking about stuff like:
* If you have enough money in the bank, an unexpected car repair is a hassle, rather than a disaster.
* If you can afford to buy a home, then you don't have to worry about being evicted or not having a lease renewed.
* If you have enough money, you can send your kids to a good school and get them off to the best possible start in life.
* If you have an absurd amount of money, you don't need to worry about going bankrupt from getting sick.
As I said, none of these things are luxuries, but, to reach "don't have to worry about medical bankruptcy" levels, or even "I get to own a home and nobody can tell me I can't paint my front door pink" levels takes a huge amount of money relative to the median income today.
> I learned how to live poor, and discovered I could still have a meaningful life while being broke.
That doesn't mean being broke is great, good, or even not all that bad. It just means you've gotten used to it.
> If you have enough money, you can send your kids to a good school and get them off to the best possible start in life.
> If you have an absurd amount of money, you don't need to worry about going bankrupt from getting sick.
I don't know where you're from, but most rich countries, and even some poorer ones, have free, quality education for all, and health care tends to be nearly free... if you get sick, the government will support you for as long as needed. If you're from a very poor country, sorry about that... maybe you should consider migrating to a better country, if you have skills that are in demand, that's pretty easy nowadays!
I was being sarcastic :) of course I know in which country people usually have the concerns you mentioned... being #1 in GDP means nothing to the majority of Americans who don't get to have the peace of mind to not worry about even the most basic human necessities.
I see you caught my implicit punch line. None of those things above the level of "unexpected car breakdown" really ought to be things people in the country with the largest economy in the world ought to be worrying about. We need to do something about that, whether it's a move toward social democracy, or even full on socialism. But, there's such a "fuck you, got mine" attitude among our political class that we're never going to see it in my lifetime, I'm sure. If it hasn't happened in the face of a global pandemic shutting everything down, I doubt the elite are going to get the message that workers are the ones that create everything of value in the economy, so we should try to elevate the lot of the average worker, rather than keeping him so stressed, sick, and insecure.
I agree these things should not be what "people in the country with the largest economy in the world ought to be worrying about".
But Socialism is not the answer.
As Churchill said "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
Socialism is great in concept. In class, which deals with the theoretical, it sounds great. For teachers, who can teach concepts and don't need to deal with the pesky nastiness of the real world, it is the thing to teach.
But in real life, Socialism, and partial socialism, and partial social by other names, are all TERRIBLE for the average dude.
Study history, for real. Look at the countries which have had all the "ism's". Democracy (and in many cases, even autocracy - which is also REALLY bad) are better.
I am not at all wealthy, live simply (no car, no smartphone, no whatever). I moved from the States to a socialy democratic country with an excellent public Medicaire system.
Even so, if I could make it more democratic and less socialistic, I would, and so would anyone else I know. A massive amount of my neighbors have moved to the States or are waiting for papers to do so. Everyone who can afford it has supplemental insurance.
It would be a shame if the States lost what they have right.
Also, if you have an absurd amount of money, your days become 8-10 hours longer because you don't need a job to pay your bills, which effectively doubles your remaining (awake) lifespan.
Yeah, everyone knows that rich people live longer on average, but most people don't realize how much longer.
Lots of good points about living below your means. Also define what you want. I'd hate for someone to live a safe and secure life and minimize risk only to get shafted by the system in the end. Some risk is worth taking. Taking on debt in certain situations is worth it. You just need to get aware of life in the event of failure and take that into consideration.
"Adjust worldview" sounds deeply pessimistic to me. Anyone can do make life better, specially at time when degrees mean less, they just need to persevere. Stay level headed. If I have to suggest I wouldn't say "Adjust Worldview" at all.
> Read some philosophy. Buy a reliable used car. Look inward for contentment. Try therapy if your shitty childhood and shitty parents made inward a hard place to look.
I'd recommend the following:
1. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
2. 12 Rules for Life - Jordan B Peterson
3. Letters from a self made merchant - John Graham
A note on this, since mentioning Peterson tends to spark controversy: I think I think the people who get the best out of Peterson don't treat him as a guru issuing rules written in stone tablets (in spite of the implication of the book title) but as a provoker of attention/reflection. This is probably generally true of anyone, but especially worth considering here.
I also tend to recommend his university course lectures over his public-directed material; I'm not sure why it seems more moderated, but I'd guess that professional accountability and contextual habits developed before fame have something to do with it.
> I also tend to recommend his university course lectures over his public-directed material; I'm not sure why it seems more moderated, but I'd guess that professional accountability and contextual habits developed before fame have something to do with it.
I've noticed the same thing. I think he's gotten into bad habits commenting on subjects outside of his area of expertise, but I did enjoy his YouTube lectures for the reasons you mentioned
Whilst we're speaking philosophy... I think Pliny's "sutor, ne ultra crepidam" ("shoemaker, not beyond the shoe") might be the quip to match your comment.
Heh. It’s true and I think Peterson is guilty of not only taking advantage of the attention provocation brings but cultivating it to some extent.
But I did have something more specific in mind that I didn’t articulate well: I think he’s successful at provoking attention to some genuinely helpful philosophical questions... and at least calling attention to a segment of knowledge from psych/neuroscience and then to some extent literature and mythology that are relevant to the questions. I can see why the provoke part sometimes overwhelms the rest and limits his audience, he is not without sin, but I think he’s doing more than trading in ambiguous deepities. YMMV, it’s possible someone better educated in those fields can point to something better.
He was always like that. His work with the UN and legal work had rough edges. The fame has made him bigger not different.
His lectures go more in depth and are not trying to hit a peak of condensed information. As much as Peterson likes nietschze, he can’t write like nietschze, with highly condensed sentences. Peterson has always been better in the long form.
Without opinion on the particular value of this list, I'll advise that if you are exploring philosophy (even of the pop kind), especially if this is new for you, you'll probably get the best results out of reading contradicting and contrasting results.
Be it foundational or just currently popular, following up a work by reading it's most talented detractors can multiply it's value to you. Learning about an entirely different philosophical approach will often be more useful to you than reading another book on similar ideas.
Oh, and really good popularizors are rare. Usually the original sources are far better - but by nature much less accessible. So you have a trade off to make.
After my working life had induced anxiety, panic attacks, and a host of other issues which really started to rear their ugly head I’ve become a much more religious person. On top of the professional help I’ve sought out for these issues, it has also helped a lot in my case when you internalize deep that work/money/material success really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme and there’s a greater goal to work towards.
In my experience, religions are happy to hand out pre-baked sets of objectives. Live a life like X. Stay away from Y. Put your money in Z. If you have trouble deciding what direction you want to go, religion can point you somewhere and surround you with a community that will encourage you to keep moving that way.
For some people, that’s really valuable. You see this especially with people who’s prior independent experience didn’t work out very well. Maybe they grew up in an abusive home and want instructions on breaking the cycle and raising their family better. Maybe there was criminal behavior, substance abuse, relationship or career stagnation. For many people, a pre-packaged world view from Religion X can be a big step up from their prior experience, ESPECIALLY when it comes with a supportive community.
The problem, of course, is two fold.
First, life isn’t one-size-fits-all. Eventually the pre-packaged beliefs will be sub-optimal for your personal situation. The better religious communities are flexible enough to accommodate this. The uglier ones lock you down or cut you out.
Second, the pre-packaged beliefs usually assert their own universal and exclusive validity. Even if the one you pick happens to be correct about this, it encourages toxic behaviors that will isolate you from non-community members. And of course the claim is preposterous on its face; The interchangeability of religions undercuts their claims to universal truth.
So, to summarize: Religion is a reasonable place to get a default world view and community, especially if you’re existing beliefs/community aren’t serving you well. Long term they are suboptimal because they don’t adapt to your personal circumstances very well.
I've actually taken an essentially opposite view, interestingly enough. As a younger person I read widely, rebelled in a very thoughtful way against my religion (in my opinion! haha!), took things very seriously, tried to really understand both atheism and other religions, etc. I think all of that was important. Through life experiences I've come to appreciate, strangely, the rituals of religion and the not-making-sense-ness of it. So I find it useful to consider the pre-baked objectives as a sort of rough draft I can push against, but more importantly, I've discarded the world view and taken the concrete. For Christianity, that's bread, wine, the holidays, the rhythm, the community, the directive to support charities generously. The concrete actions do something on a primordial level, as they're what my ancestors have done for oh about eight generations.
The actual pre-packaged beliefs? Meh. I'm less interested than I ever was in arguing the particulars of Paul with anyone. So, to summarize, for me religion is a reasonable place to get a default set of rituals and perhaps community, and long term that's the useful part because the rituals can continue even as my beliefs and circumstances change.
This may also be worth thinking about with respect to healthy eating, exercise, etc. Don't get sucked into a cult, but if signing up for (now-virtual) CrossFit or Pilates classes, or following Starting Strength, gets you doing something, it's a concrete physical ritual that can stay with you even as you change :)
Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I’m glad you’ve found a fulfilling spiritual practice and community. I hope they are supporting you in this difficult time.
> I find it useful to consider the pre-baked objectives as a sort of rough draft I can push against, but more importantly, I've discarded the world view and taken the concrete. For Christianity, that's bread, wine, the holidays, the rhythm, the community, the directive to support charities generously.
That’s pretty interesting to me. I certainly agree that the rituals and community are the best part of organized religion. I’ve enjoyed them in the past and I miss them now. I actually considered returning to the church when I had a young family for exactly these reasons.
I just can’t untangle the practical from the philosophical. The community is great in and of itself, but it exists explicitly to advance a particular set of beliefs. It’s hard to take the community without the beliefs. At least, I haven’t been able to do it successfully. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say I could have, but I would have felt like a fraud. I think that would limit my ability to integrate.
> This may also be worth thinking about with respect to healthy eating, exercise, etc. Don't get sucked into a cult, but if signing up for (now-virtual) CrossFit or Pilates classes, or following Starting Strength, gets you doing something, it's a concrete physical ritual that can stay with you even as you change :)
Absolutely. The principal applies to many places. Employers, even. Many start ups want you to drink the kool-ade, own the vision, play ping pong... you can opt out of that and just do the engineering and paycheck!
> The community is great in and of itself, but it exists explicitly to advance a particular set of beliefs.
No. The community is above the beliefs.
Humans benefit greatly from acting within a group. Yes, it always grows a "here are The Best Practices" division. (It's just a sad side effect.) But one can identify with a smaller and humbler subgroup with the wink-wink approach to rules: switch to the higher levels, seek new goals, etc.
As an atheist, I took me years to notice this minority. Talking with deeply religious people often reveals that stuff they are actively pursuing is not only very interesting, but it's far above what you can achieve just by pondering about some Nietzsche text in your armchair taking mental notes "oh this definitely goes on the top of my todo list now". The group is the magic ingredient to the real-life results.
Disturbingly big part of modern atheism is actually sheer laziness. If I've written my final conclusion "Therefore all religion is useless." it's easy to come up with hundred semi-honest-but-true arguments to reach that conclusion. There is a lot that goes under the radar, like supporting the self-improvement of your children/family and coping with bad problems in your own life, chiefly including suffering and death. Atheism mostly says: better be rich and be able to afford some good professionals.
Dunno about Jordan Peterson. Some of his advice may be OK but he's also profoundly weird / not very self-reflective .... only eats meat? Meat cures all?
IMHO the Socratic Dialogues, as basically the foundational text of all Western Philosophy, and being pretty friendly and approachable, are the right place to begin. Helps you figure out how to figure it out for yourself. You can make your own calls from there.
It's controversial because it sounds pseudo-scientific. Why would removing all vegetables from his diet help with an autoimmune disorder? His daughter's blog called "Don’t Eat That" had the tagline "The food pyramid is a lie, fat is good for you, and many (if not most) health problems are treatable with diet alone." (though, it does now say "Do not take this as medical advice. I am not a doctor. This is my story and this is what worked for me.")
His other health choices don't really help his case. He went to Russia to get weened off of an addiction because "North American hospitals had misdiagnosed him". The Russian doctors are "not influenced by pharmaceutical companies to treat the side-effects of one drug with more drugs," and they “have the guts to medically detox someone from benzodiazepines.”"
People used to believe that eating fat makes you fat, and eating sugar makes you sweet (okay, the latter is maybe an exaggeration), because it seemed so obvious. Later they realized that actually eating lots of sugar makes you fat. That's progress. The sugar producers want you to believe the old version; they love to emphasise how "low-fat" their heaps of sugar are. (Every time you read "low-fat", translate it mentally to "contains lots of sugar". Every time you read "low-sugar", translate it mentally to "contains lots of artificial sweeteners". Hint: the actually healthy stuff, such as fruit and vegetables, doesn't need to protest too much.) Education about this part is a good thing.
On the other hand, removing vegetables from diet goes completely against the currect best knowledge. You should eat a lot of vegetables, preferably raw. Like, okay, you can cook your broccoli; but then eat some other raw vegetable, and some fruit (uncooked, without extra sugar). -- However, I have never heard Peterson recommend removing vegetables as a general advice for others; it was always in context of finding out what works for his autoimmune disorder, because the standard medicine didn't help him much, so he experimented with crazy things.
So, these are two different things. One is highly controversial, the other not at all.
I have my own problems with his daughter’s profiting off his back. I don’t see what you posted there as more click bait than anything else.
Many research bodies and authorities on health have flipped the food pyramid around. The CSRIO supports a low carb diet over the traditional carb heavy food pyramid. She’s just repeating what the experts have said. That part is the opposite of pseudoscience, and it’s lazy parroting.
Jordan has reactions to foods we don’t normally have a problem with, as does his daughter. They share methods that work for them and hold up the idea of eliminating everything and then working foods back in as they prove to be okay for them.
There’s been countless documentaries about the effect of big pharmaceutical money on the likelihood of certain drugs being prescribed by doctors and the money the docs make. It’s standard fare in America, no judgement about that from me.
Apart from a few eccentric behaviours and saying dumb things occasionally like his comments on godel, Jordan states the obvious in an inflammatory way and people are surprised when he’s actually rational under the flames. Zzz.
“”I can also, strangely enough, tolerate vodka and bourbon.”
The idea that alcohol, one of the most well-documented toxic substances, is among the few things that Peterson’s body will tolerate may be illuminating. It implies that when it comes to dieting, the inherent properties of the substances ingested can be less important than the eater’s conceptualizations of them—as either tolerable or intolerable, good or bad. What’s actually therapeutic may be the act of elimination itself.“
I've listened to probably hundreds of hours of JP and he never said that. He only said that, in his particular case, a lot of the terrible ailments he had went away after he switched to a meat-only diet. He doesn't say that meat is a cure for anything - his main theory is that he just has a ton of strong food alergies and, by eating only one thing he's not allergic to, he avoids them.
I've read 12 Rules for Life and disliked that Peterson uses a lot of Disney movie and bible references to support his claims. He makes some good points every once in a while but the book is unnecessarily verbose. I recommend reading the cliff notes to understand 90% of the book.
He uses Disney quotes to support his contention that there are profound, yet universal archetypes and myths that pop up everywhere - even in Disney movies.
Its interesting how wildly different in scope they are, as if its designed more to keep your attention than have meaningful advice.
1-4 are "respect yourself".
5 is.... I think legitimate bad advice as worded, but I'm sure as expounded it makes more sense. Maybe its designed as a hook (the "wtf" that drives views).
6-8 are general advice you'd find anywhere
9-11 are how to effectively deal with other people without saying the word "empathy"
> Rule 2: Treat yourself like you would someone you are responsible for helping
I've never seen someone turn the Golden Rule inward like this. I like it.
> Rule 5: Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
Other people will do what they do. The only thing you have control over is your own reaction. Most adults understand this.
> Rule 6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world
Nobody's house is in perfect order. Internalizing the tu quoque fallacy of relevance is not good philosophy.
> Rule 8: Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie
I'd mention the "Jew in the attic" thought experiment, but there's probably some way to successfully hide the Jew without telling a "lie" if you're clever enough about defining what a "lie" is and what precise statements you make.
> Rule 11: Do not bother children when they are skate-boarding
Unless this conflicts with Rule 5, I suppose.
(I don't have any issue with the statements I didn't respond to.)
I've only made it to Rule #2 in the book so far. But it is thought provoking. (Not strongly, in a Plato sense. But reflective.)
It mentions studies (or parables? Who cares?) of people taking better care of their dogs post-surgery than they take of themselves. It rings true, and speaks to anyone who thinks or knows they aren't taking good enough care of themselves.
Most of these seem fine to good, but number 5 is kind of just removing agency from children entirely. Its the same mindset of people who kick their kids out for being gay
Possibly but this is more to counter letting your kids go wild such that as they grow up you don't like to around them. By ining them how to behave well you equip them will the tools to interact in society.
Of course if you are a horrible person you might dislike them for their good behaviours. But if you're a horrible person chances are you'll mess up your kids with or without that rule.
I don't think people "let" their kids go wild so much as run out of parenting skills. That's what makes the idea irrational: use your parenting skills to make up for your lack of parenting skills. All you have to do is decide to do so!
> I don't think people "let" their kids go wild so much as run out of parenting skills.
There is a difference between not being able to control your child fully, and not even trying. In my experience, most parents are trying, but I have met one or two who did not care, seemingly believing that whatever their kid does is perfectly okay, because hey, it's just a small child... completely ignoring that fact that other kids around, of the same age, are well behaved.
Now, this strategy of making excuses may work well while the child is small. Like, adults will look at a misbehaving 4 years old and only think "what a horrible child... and what a horrible parent" and walk away. But as your child grows up, the environment becomes less forgiving, and it becomes more difficult for you to instill good habits. If the child's behavior irritates you, as a parent, you can bet that it irritates unrelated people at least twice as much. This creates a spiral, when the environment and your child become hostile to each other.
On the other hand, if you succeed to instill pleasant behavior in your child, it can create a positive spiral, when other people enjoy the presence of your child and by their attention reward the nice behavior, and your child has more pleasant life and more opportunities to further improve social skills.
That’s the same process we use at work everyday. When people run out of programming skill they get better by study and practice. All you have to do is to decide to.
It really isn’t the same mindset as intolerance. Why would it remove agency? Do you dislike children?
It’s about setting a boundary where it is most productive, children who are not socialised by the age of four hit problems in later life. Parents and kids who go to war help no one.
I think it comes from that the rule is titled "Do not let your children do anything that...". The language states to restrict the child's agency if you disagree with it.
I was fortunate enough to grow up with good parents, but there were times where they were misguided and myself disobeying them helped us both in the long run.
Language policing one line without the backing context is missing the point.
Those times you disobeyed were also met with decades of limiting your agency. Not letting you cover yourself in peanut butter or fight with other kids, or mistreat pets, or spend infinite money.
Jp sees resentment and pride as the ultimate source for being a rapscallion or monster, putting responsibility on the parent to keep their child in the ‘liked’ category is a very elegant way to keep a kid from destroying your house but also make a parent confront/channel any resentment or excessive pride into productive directions.
Rule 6 taken together with the maxim "Nobody's perfect" means a world where nobody can criticize anything, ever. Doesn't sound ideal to me.
Rule 10 is self-contradictory, since it doesn't specify what "precise in your speech" means.
Rule 11 is oddly-specific (why just skateboarding and not any other risky activity?), and reads like it's thrown in there to look "cool" ("how do you do fellow kids?" meme).
Rule 12 is vapid fluff. It's also potentially dangerous, since a unknown stray cat may carry rabies, or be fearful of humans and claw you up bad.
I would be the devil's advocate and disagree with you. There are more dangerous self help books like The Secret who took the Bible quote about praying and it will come true out of context, and many other THE 4-HOUR WORKWEEK, LAW OF ATTRACTION....
This is not bad luck. This is the normal state of life. It may be depressing (non-clinical), it might be disappointing, it might be discouraging, but it is 100% bog-standard ordinary.
The feeling that you are suffering more than other people is the true harm caused.
Your points:
* Graduated at the wrong time: How many thousands of people graduated between 2008 and 2010? That is by definition ordinary.
* Never met that magical person to makes your life magical: You said it yourself. Do you think most people meet magical people?
* Resilient financial safety net: You've read the statistics, right? Most people don't have a month's income saved for difficult times.
* Mental safety net/health issues: OK, there's some randomness here. But many people struggle with some form of this.
* Having dependents: Well, blended choice and randomness, to some extent. But controllable usually, if you mean offspring. Adult dependents (parents) are harder, but far less common.
* Large company rips off/Some exec derails your project: Normal and ordinary. This is how things work. Disappointing, but don't let it be discouraging. That part is your choice.
I think you're conflating "lack of unusual good luck" with "bad luck". They are not the same. Don't imagine that the lucky individuals for whom the stars aligned are in any way normal. They just get all the press.
Yeah, I think it's definitely worth remembering that the people and organisations making millions/billions of dollars and 'changing the world' are in the news because it's rare. Most musicians don't reach number 1, most film stars and YouTubers don't become millionaires, most startups don't become the next Facebook and most games on Steam or app stores just get buried.
A combination of press coverage and social media has basically convinced an increasingly large percentage of the population than the outliers are the norm.
I can speak to one of your points! I got dealt a bad hand in terms of health issues. However, a few years before I developed my health issues, I happened to have a long talk with a guy who had advanced MS. He told me that after his diagnosis, he tried to sock away as much money as possible and go for higher-paying jobs, as he knew that one day he'd become fully disabled and have to live on disability. Also, disability is pegged to your latest or average salary, so that's important to consider!
(SS is an average, LTD is your most recent)
During my 10 years of illness leading up to my eventual disability, I tried (with varying success) to do the following things:
- Looked for jobs with slightly under full-time work loads to allow me time to rest (found only one for 2 years, but the extra rest helped me slow down disease progression a lot)
- Looked for jobs with full benefit packages, including Short Term / Long Term Disability. If the job didn't offer it I signed up on my own
- Maxed out HSA every year
- Reduced my fixed costs as much as possible to prepare for living on a fixed income; moved to a LCOL area
- Moved to a climate that was better for my health
- Didn't have kids because I knew I wouldn't be healthy enough to bear them / raise them :-(
Very cool! Congratulations on your exceptionally clear-eyed approach to a major life challenge!
I’m sure this sounds sarcastic, but I’m genuinely impressed. It takes a lot of mental discipline to examine long term trends, make a correct projection, identify an appropriate course of action and then implement it even when its disruptive to your personal life.
I hope it worked well for you, and that you are living your best life despite your health challenges.
Thanks! Yes, it is especially challenging because my health problems are in the unfortunate category: extremely disabling + poorly understood. So until I found specialists I got a lot of "Well everyone gets 'tired' sometimes" gaslighting from medical professionals.
In other words I had to prepare for total disability being in my future, while also being told that nothing was wrong with me in my present by some doctors (not all, fortunately).
So psychologically the greatest part of the challenge was to prepare for an extreme event (disability) while being told that nothing was wrong. I just had to listen to my body and hear when it told me I wasn't going to be able to work full time until retirement age, and then plan accordingly.
So far, mostly due to the grace of God, I have turned out all right, thank you for your kind words. Getting approved for disability was brutal but I did eventually get approved.
Side note: Unfortunately / fortunately, dealing with medical gaslighting for all these years helped my BS detector spot the issues in the "just the flu" narrative this year way ahead of the curve, and prepare appropriately. Sadly.
> - Looked for jobs with slightly under full-time work loads to allow me time to rest (found only one for 2 years, but the extra rest helped me slow down disease progression a lot)
I think it's awful that such jobs are hard to find, considering the effect on disease progression of all things.
My own only very distantly related anecdote. I'd had an interview with a hiring manager, who would be my boss, who liked me and was keen to employ. But he didn't get to make the decision; he passed me to Head of HR who made the final decision on all hires.
The conversation with Head of HR seemed to go well, and I would have taken almost any terms (including a pay cut) because I really liked that job. But he (HR) wouldn't say how much they'd pay or give any clues about what level they operated at. He insisted on negotiating by insisting that I make the first move with no information, and say what would would make me happy. So I asked if they would consider a 4 day week. No pressure, I'd happily do 5 but 4 would be something I'd like.
That, it turns out, was a "red flag" for them, the idea that I might not be loyal enough to the company that I'd want to spend a day doing something else. This despite my evident eagerness for that particular job. There was no concern about not getting enough work done; they had enough people. It was all about concern that I might do something else with my time off.
I didn't get the job. Despite getting a message from the hiring manager that he was going to send me an offer the next morning, it was blocked by HR the following day with concerns about loyalty being given internally as the reason. Of course HR told me something else entirely.
This is exactly the reason why part-time jobs are so difficult to find. By saying "I don't want to sacrifice as much time as possible to this job" you send a bad signal. You working 4 days instead of 5 is frankly not a problem. But you wanting to work 4 days instead of 5 is. Why hire a guy who wants to sacrifice less, when you could hire a guy who wants to sacrifice more? Having a life outside of job is a red flag. Do you have hobbies? Dreams? Want to spend more time with your kids before they grow up and leave home? Go somewhere else; I want someone more loyal than you.
There are exceptions. Typically, women returning from maternity leave; with the assumption that the part-time is only for a year or two, followed by usual full-time. Also, students who work besides their school; again, with the assumption that after finishing school, the work becomes full-time. In both cases, there is a good excuse. "I'd love to devote my all time to you, but my selfish baby insists on my presence, and I need a few months before I can store it in kindergarten for the whole day." "I'd love to devote all my time to you, but this stupid school insists on me going to lessons and exams, but it will soon be over, I promise."
Maybe a health problem could serve as a sufficient excuse. "I'd love to devote all my time to you, but my doctor says 4 days a week max, otherwise I'll drop dead." It misses the "soon, it will be full-time" part, but at least it doesn't signal insufficient loyalty. I don't know; I never tried this. I'd like to hear a report from people who did.
I see where you're going with this, but a health problem which you are open about is often the kiss of death. Going by your theory, it means you'll never be able to make that sacrifice and you'll always have a different set of priorities...
But really what happens in corporate America is more brutal: "health problems" = weakness, and showing weakness is very bad.
A lot of employers prefer a mediocre employee who is there all the time to a stellar employee who has any sort of "defect." So actually it took me some effort to find employers who were "nice enough" to rate me only on my work output and quality rather than on some sort of law-of-the-jungle, survival-of-the-fittest thing.
The thing is, for technical jobs like the ones folks at Hacker News tend to have, I find almost no difference in my output between 30 and 40 hour weeks. 30 hours / week I'm more mentally / physically refreshed and better able to problem-solve, so I get my work done faster.
The only advantage to a full-time schedule is that it's easier to coordinate / follow-up with other people.
Most opinions and suggestions are based on the "standard path of success". If we use beauty contest as an analogy of success, only one will be the winner and all losers. In case of North American perspective, success looks like this:
- Have good academic credentials
- Have good big corporation names on your resume
- Have good connections
- Have nice car
- Have nice house
- Have kids, partner, etc.
- Travel a lot when retired
If we based our life against that standard, then it is going to be easier to be depressed once a person's life deviates from it.
The other extreme, suggested by some others here, is to accept and be content about "c'est la vie" concept - life will suck and get over it, and its variations. I think that is wrong because it reinforces the idea there is only one way to succeed and have a good life.
My suggestion is simpler:
- Cover your base: do you have a place to live? do you feel safe where you live? do you have good quality food that you like to eat? do you have a group of friends to hangout and rely on? do you have an income source that is relatively stable?
- Then you can focus on whatever you want to do; free yourself from rigid standards and paths. You can even pursue the stereotypical success lifestyle knowing that even if you fail, you can recover fast and try again.
Well said. I was reading the responses, and seeing the implicit group consensus on what "success" looks like.
The thing though is, your entire life outcome is based on luck. There is nothing you can really do to compensate for that, besides getting back up, brushing the dust of your knees, counting your blessings and keep going.
List of things that are luck:
1) Where you were born in the wrong place at the wrong time. (think Afghanistan, North Korea, Venezuela, etc.)
2) Being born the wrong gender in the majority of the world by population (ie female).
3) Being born with the wrong sexual orientation in a huge chunk of the world.
4) Being born with a health condition (physical or mental), or with a learning disability. Even a mild one like ADHD or dyslexia.
5) Being born to the wrong set of parents. ie. belonging to the wrong community/religion/race... in the majority of the world.
Honestly, even your mental capacity and grit are to a large extent (if not completely) luck. If developed via nurture, you didn't pick how you were nurtured. If nature, you didn't pick the genetic combination you were born with.
So really, what is left? What percentage of your 'success' can you actually take credit for?
> If developed via nurture, you didn't pick how you were nurtured
You pick how you nurture yourself every day though. Nurture didn't magically stop on the second you became 18 (or 21 or whatever arbitrary number your country recognizes as becoming an adult).
>- You're in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ex. you graduated in 2008-2010/now or your business sector got wiped out by COVID
I feel bad for the higher class pizza restaurant that opened down the street from our house at the end of January after a long time of renovating the building.
Even though their pizza isn't really as good as the fancy pizza place at the mall (it's a mall in a rich area) down by the nearby harbor, which will upset me if it goes out of business because I could take my kids there or visitors and they were made happy by the quality of the pizza.
But this place down the street from me, that is textbook bad luck.
Something similar happened to me during this outbreak.
Got my CS degree from a no-name university in a third world country a few years back, got a job in one of those software sweatshops getting paid peanuts, moved to a new one an year later where I worked my ass off to learn things and generally be a good developer, but here too I was paid a pittance, mostly due to my education and previous job. I hated working here by the end and wanted to leave.
Somehow I got an interview from a company in [COUNTRY] who were willing to sponsor my visa along with good pay. I studied hard for it (coming home from work at 10pm, preparing for interview until the late wee hours of the night) and cleared the interviews. Finally something good had happened to me, but just before I was scheduled to move for the new job, this outbreak just fucked everything over.
The company still hasn't rescinded the offer, but I don't really have any high hopes, everyday I wake up in the morning expecting a rejection mail from them in my mailbox. Whats worse is that I had left my previous job since the joining of the new one was so close before all this happened, so here I am sitting jobless leeching on my family till god know when.
Sorry for the rant, I just wanted to get this out.
You probably already know that, but sometimes it helps to hear it again:
The world is a competitive place, and a lot of success factors are outside of your control. (timing, pre-existing resources, sheer luck)
What you can control is exactly what you are already doing: Work really hard and make the best of what you have. Come up with a good long term plan and execute it. Do life decisions that help with that plan.
This will make you more successful than your relative peer group and over time wash you into an upper percentile compared to others dealing with the same factors.
Many people think that if they work really hard it will pay off. But its the other other way, first you discover that something pays off, then you can start to work hard to get even better. So it should really say work smart.
While it’s true that working hard is not sufficient to have things pay off, I think waiting to find something that pays off to work hard would result in most people missing the opportunity they were given. To sustainably work hard is a skill, and unless you’ve practiced it in advance of an opportunity showing itself you’ll find yourself unable to work hard when you need to.
Disclaimer: I don't know much about 3rd world countries other than my recent trip to Africa and talking to some locals there. In short I've learned: access to healthcare is completely and utterly fucked (this is why maximum age seems to be 40 in the villages that I went to), getting food is a struggle but doable if you know what you're doing (you just plant stuff somewhere and hope it doesn't get robbed), you'll have a mud house somewhere, you'll be living close with your family, you'll be relying a lot on your community and your community relies on you.
My point of this entire comment is to say: be a bit careful with your words when you're from a 1st world country and the person you comment to lives in an entirely different context.
--- My actual comment ---
You seem to be based in the USA. This person is from a 3rd world country. Your advice looks like its written for an American, not someone who lives in a 3rd world country.
For example, I can imagine that a lot of people don't think that the world is a competitive place but a criminal one. Why? Because there are a lot of mercantile practices going on. Your passport matters. There is no meritocracy in this world, only passports.
Make the best of what you have in some cases can be translated to: try to fucking survive and I'm sorry that your relative passed away from malaria and that we had no money for medicine, and even if we did have money the infrastructure would be too broken to bring it fast enough. Sadly enough, that happens quite often. Technically, that's still the same as "make the best of what you have". But I can imagine that it can be perceived quite negatively, as some might see that there's some implied sarcasm there.
> This will make you more successful than your relative peer group
So instead of having an average age of 50, you'll get to be 60? More successful for sure. Yet, I can feel the unfairness to 1st worlders who get to be 80.
> It's a long game.
I don't think everyone perceives life to be a game. I know I do at times. But I also happen to know family members that almost die from hunger (rare thing to happen in The Netherlands but it does). I am sure that to them in those moments life is not a game. Because of that, I also believe that enough people who suffer from poverty or are threatened by it don't perceive life to be a game.
---------
In closing: I think your comment was actually well meant. But since I see that you were downvoted I decided to take the time to explain how your comment seems to be missing the mark to me personally. I assume that other people have a similar enough interpretation of it.
FYI I didn't downvote, as I think your comment was well meant.
> your advice looks like its written for an American, not someone who lives in a 3rd world country.
My advice was written for someone with a university CS degree, years of experience in his profession, and an actual job offer that might still be honored. That goes a long way, especially in impoverished countries, where your odds of success are even more tied to the wealth of the family you were born in.
> that the world is a competitive place but a criminal one
Whether that's true or not, it's out of his control.
> There is no meritocracy in this world, only passports.
I agree. But a passport is a pre-existing resource, something you don't have a lot of control over. You can try to immigrate to another country, but that takes a long term plan again.
> Make the best of what you have in some cases can be translated to: try to fucking survive
That's true again. Families in Africa, who don't have a son with a CS degree,
often pressure their strongest, smartest son, the future of the family, to embark on a very dangerous journey to Europe. The risk of dying along the way is fairly high, but the upside is huge for the whole family.
The person I responded to was worried about a job offer. He might need to work for less money in a job he hates again. It's all relative.
> I don't think everyone perceives life to be a game
My bad, I should have used an actual subject: career. And a career has many characteristics of a strategy game. Accepting the job offer was probably a good career move and it might still happen. It's not withdrawn yet. Even if it is, I can't think of a situation where it would help to stop doing the best you can.
> But since I see that you were downvoted I decided to take the time to explain how your comment seems to be missing the mark to me personally.
Appreciate that. It's interesting how people fill in context based on their own experiences and come up with assumptions. While it's true I'm currently based in the US, I wasn't born with this privilege.
Like many others in this thread, I posted some universal best practices you can apply in pretty much every part of the world to deal with inevitable setbacks. It worked for me in the past 2 recessions and I expect it to work again for this one. The person I responded to seemed to be in distress and I think building some resilience skills helps with that.
I got to say I have given up worrying about why people are downvoting what I say, I do have a suspicion that I have a couple people who when they see my name automatically downvote - oh it's that guy again - although I don't think they search me out to downvote either.
on edit: at any rate I upvoted it as you're right, seems an encouraging nice message.
FWIW across ~10 years of HNing my sense is it's pretty hard to land on > 1 person's shitlist, and while it's unlikely you've garnered a coterie of haters, it is the iron law of HN that complaining about--or speculating about potential--downvotes attracts many downvotes.
Hiring is still going on in most of North America. Hedge your bets look at other companies and interview. Preparation for one interview is preparation for lots of them
I'm a Dutchie, and I can't speak about the EU market as a whole, but as any European that travels around a bit, I have the following ranking in terms of lifestyle/pay:
1. Switzerland (90k or higher + mountains if you're willing to drive a bit)
2. Luxembourg (I just remember you get paid quite a bit)
3. Berlin (alright pay, low living costs, amazing city)
4. England + Scandinavia + The Netherlands (didn't look into Scandinavia enough but in most cases they're on par or a bit better than The Netherlands)
Englang is on #4, because while the pay is better, society seems to be more screwed. University is more expensive, the welfare system sucks more (compared to most of the other countries in this list, Scandinavia being Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland).
Take this with a grain of salt, do your own research of course.
Countries that I wouldn't want to go to:
1. Eastern Europe
2. Southern Europe
The pay is too low.
The thing is: higher pay is always better, even when living costs are always, let's say 50% in any country. The more money you safe, the more you can utilize it for geo-arbitraging strategies later on in life.
I can't speak for the rest of the countries in the region, but in Romania if you work in IT for a decent company you pay 0 income tax if you graduated from a local CS department and only a 10% flat rate otherwise.
A senior position at a good company in Bucharest will mean at least 3000 Euros net per month which means that you'll live like a king, since rent for a great apartment will be something like 500-600 Euros.
The downside is lower development you notice regarding infrastructure, education levels, pollution, etc.
3-4k EUR net (after taxes) is pretty normal salary for senior enterprise dev in big cities in Poland. That's perhaps a bit less than in say Berlin (although I'm not too sure of that, given high taxes in Germany), but the costs of living are so much lower.
The issue with geo-arbitraging is that when you work somewhere for an extended period of time, you put resources into your life there. Retiring by leaving your home and friends etc. doesn't seem nearly as sweet.
You create a new home and make new friends (and eventually family if you moved somewhere single & got married along the way). I think you really underestimate how much easier life is in some places compared to others, even outside the extremes.
Please consult with someone worked in Japan before you actually go. Japanese company culture is very different to us/euro style, and if you can’t speak japanese, you will not be able to blend into their company culture.
Also, Japan IT sector is notoriously messy, think again before you join them
Its not a competition, but I can do you one better. I have excellent jobs get away from me 3 times, days before I join. First was due to 2008 recession, company shutdown and I came to know when I went to join on day ONE, fresh after graduation. The last was now due to covid, the company abandon plans and even fired some their own staff. So, no scope of getting there. Scores of shitty jobs in shitty companies. Couple of failed startups and pending payments I doubt to recover.
But unlike the last 2 times, now it didn't hurt much. May be i developed a tolerance. But its more of the fact that I accepted that many things are beyond my control. The fact it happens, shouldn't be taken personally by looking around and wondering why it "happened to me"? Shit happens, move on.
Focus on self-development like reading more, watching & listening to informative things like documentaries or well-written programs instead of time-killers. Stick to a personal routine and keep a clear head.
What is the fun if everyone has the same story? I story is unique to me, no claims of plagiarism. Your priority is to keep moving forward, whatever happens just think how to move forward.
I just talking this time and studying. What else can I do? I do spend about an hour applying for jobs. Learn new skills, in job & in life. I have a small garden now that was setup during this covid times. I contribute fresh leafs to the meals at home.
> so here I am sitting jobless leeching on my family till god know when.
sitting jobless - that is you. Why sit simply, do something productive for you or the ones around you. Just washed some old unused vessels in the kitchen that my mom wanted to use now.
leeching? as long was you not drinking or snorting drugs and actually trying to move forward its fine. Your time will come. You need to believe that to keep moving forward.
Dont resent or feel jealous of the ones who seem to have things better than you. You can never compare yourself to any one around.
The only person to compete with is yourself from yesterday.
It was dead for about 10 minutes after I posted it, I think it tripped up some spam/troll filter for new accounts. It's fine now though, but I can't edit the original comment and remove the last line.
Tangenting a bit. It saddens me to no end that this happens just after the unemployment rate for African Americans hit record lows. I'm not a SJW by any means, but it's so frustrating to see a whole class of historically mistreated people get punched in the gut the minute they start to get a good toehold.
I have a similar story. There was a fancy pizza place about to open next to a park few minutes from my home. They were intensively renovating a pretty building. I was really waiting to see them open - I like pizzas, and this is a small town, so we don't have much of choice in them. COVID-19 lockdowns came just as they were readying to open. They had a market, they had a great location - but they also had really bad luck.
Ouch. Bad luck combined with an already risky venture...
> Even though their pizza isn't really as good as the fancy pizza place at the mall
They opened the "not best pizza option" and "nTH restaurant option".
Opening a restaurant is a good example of what to avoid if you want to be resilient in the face of bad luck. It's a fragile and brutal business even in the best of times.
Opening a restaurant is difficult even for professionals. I had a neighbor who was managing one of the more successful restaurants at the Mall of America, who decided he wanted to do his own thing. He bought a restaurant in the downtown of our small suburb and spent months renovating it. I don't think it was open more than 3 months before he threw in the towel and declared personal bankruptcy.
Another huge aspect of "bad luck" is just meeting unusual numbers of bad people. By that I mean people who have an intention to harm you in some way or another instead just being the typical look out for oneself or even the more empathetic caring kind of person. You dont really choose the people you run into but there are absolutely skills you can learn in order to deal with them in healthy ways.
A significant portion part of someone's career is based on politics and surprisingly little on skill.
>> You don't have a resilient financial and mental safety net in the form of good friends/family early in your career that enables you to take risks, or you got dealt a bad hand in the form of things like dependents or health issues and simply can't afford to take risks
I've found that success in life is correlated with how closely you hit on actual "truths" in the world. For example, you join company X on a rocket ship. Your equity value skyrockets - those assets were actually undervalued relative to what someone would pay for them later.
One of the hardest things in life is that we don't actually know the "truth", no one does. But what we can do is learn to spot ways we tell ourselves convenient lies - this is why Buffet + Munger did SO much work on studying human biases. If we had a perfect ability to spot every falsehood, we would be left with the bare truth.
Given it's an imperfect system, "bad luck" can be simplified to "you keep missing the truth". And it's often not our fault - how the hell could anyone have known about COVID-19, and impact on their company, far enough in advance to actually move to safer waters prior? But it's worth examining why you made the decision to do X - were there any truths you missed, or lies you told yourself?
Through that process, you can get better at spotting falsehoods or clarifying your values, so that even if you don't ever land on a rocket ship, you find a workplace you are happy at.
For example, one of my early jobs was at a turd of a company. I knew BEFORE that it wasn't a great opportunity. But I was desperate to leave my current situation so I took it. Within a few weeks, I KNEW it was still a turd. But I didn't want to pay the relocation bonus back if I left so soon. So I stuck it out, ended up being there for a few years, and it mostly was wasted time. So now I turn down jobs where I feel like that going in. I need to feel great about the company's situation.
But even that's not foolproof. I had another company where the company was doing GREAT. Fucking rocketship. Then literally within a few months of me joining, it went down the tubes and barely survived. So I also learned to be more wary of quickly growing, younger companies as well.
Now I'm at a steadily growing larger company, that's managed well, and I love it.
One last piece of advance - google "It works". It's a little book about writing a list of what you want and constantly looking at it. I did it during my last job search and literally got an (almost) dream job. Give it a try.
Reflecting on my career of failure, unfulfilled potential, compared to the biographies of "successful" people, what they all seem to have which I lacked was a mentor.
That person who said "You can do this. I believe in you. Let's talk it thru."
To counterbalance all the people who actively or passively tear you down.
Finding the right people is a very important part of luck. At different stages of my life, I often had a person who made more difference than all other people combined.
(And, as far as I know, I was this person for someone else once. So, globally, I am still in debt. Should do something about it.)
Some things are outside your control, luck by definition is outside your control.
- Your business sector will come back post COVID.
- You can’t control other people
- Control who is dependent on you, and fix your health best you can.
- You can mitigate macro level risks. These techniques come at a cost.
- You can get magic paper at the wrong age, but it costs. Or find other ways in.
Frankly this discussion about luck is incredibly weak. You didn’t get everything you wanted, some things you can control and others you can’t. Appealing to luck might encourage some people to plaster over your mistakes and inability to eat loss with money and submission.
There is no advice to give because you have framed the conversation around what your heart wants and thrown any rational decision making possible into submission to luck.
You aren’t a victim of luck, it is by definition something nobody ever escapes and is a subset of randomness. An easy out for the unhappy. You are still ultimately responsible for your life, even the bits you can’t control. You make your own luck.
There are some things that are in your control, while others that are not. Concentrate on the former. How can you improve your skills, learn new ones.
Lower your expenses, stay healthy, avoid debt.
It might take longer, because of all the dead ends you have encountered, but eventually you'll get there. But more importantly, don't let those things make you bitter.
When I think of the very successful people I know, all have gone through life events that would absolutely flatten most people. The loss of a child, a partner committing suicide, 6 businesses failing, 2 weeks in an induced comma.
And yet a stranger looks at their accomplishments and thinks that they just didn't have bad luck.
This is absolutely true. I've noticed most "unsuccessful" people go around with a view of "successful" people that they got lucky, never had to endure hardship, had something handed to them, and so on. It's a defeatist, whiny attitude.
I've put "un/successful" in quotes because I'm referring to the common interpretation of success/failure being purely financial. There are many other ways to lead an "unsuccessful" but fulfilling life, and I'd argue the place to start is to accept the hand you've been dealt. And to work with it rather than rail against it.
The one big thing I see missing here is the ability to increase your luck by networking and personal branding. You absolutely have to build your personal network. More exposure, more potential opportunity. Plain and simple - no matter what field you are in.
For people who are already networking as much as they can, working hard on their personal brand, etc. and still finding it doesn't seem to be working out for them (probably most people), you're telling them to do what they are already doing and that it will make them more successful.
That's isn't useful. It's non-actionable advice, and empirically wrong in their experience.
For people in that situation, your advice is pointing them in the wrong direction, and that's what I read into "misinformation" in the GP comment.
For people with bad luck or from people with bad luck? It is often inspiring to hear from folks who haven't been on the success rocket doing just fine and having a great life.
The subtext here though is always "scoring" your success. There is the zen koan about one mans bad luck is another mans opportunity. But it really seems that the message is more "don't measure your own success unrealistically or you will always see yourself as having 'bad luck' when, in fact, you have a great life."
Depending on the interpretation, I've had between 3 and 5 out of these 5 things happen to me. I could have used the advice you're asking for about 10-15 years ago.
To paraphrase you are asking what should people who are not achieving their goals do?
I have read that the meaning of life is love and freedom and doing what you enjoy. What that means is different for everyone, but you have to ask yourself what that means to you. If that means have millions of dollars in just a few years, great. Read "think and grow rich" to see who you need to become. Otherwise don't waste you time following what others think success looks like.
> - You don't have a resilient financial and mental safety net in the form of good friends/family early in your career that enables you to take risks, or you got dealt a bad hand in the form of things like dependents or health issues and simply can't afford to take risks
The 'friends' part is something that I think can be potentially fixed. 'Friends' who can truly support you AND who are worthy of being supported in times of need are rare. But I think if one searches hard enough and find reasonable people to from an alliance with (without necessarily being friends) this problem can reduced. But it is needle in a hay stack endeavor. Most people in my observation are not worthy of receiving help ( for example they do not save enough money when they earn, so cannot be trusted to have the financial disciple to pay back) or conversely they are not in a position to help ( to cite the same example because they have not been saving enough money, they don't have enough money to lend to you).
As someone who got hit with several of those: the best advice is "Find good ways to deal with your frustration and start adjusting your expectations downward. Start by getting a therapist."
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a reliable way to recover your losses besides "get lucky in the future". Your career advice is the same as everyone else's, just with worse expected outcomes.
There was an article about "luck" a few years ago and how researchers really found "luck" was somewhat in our control. Graduating in a recession isn't, but being "blindsided" is - luck had a strong component of being attentive and aware to the world around them. This derived from a calm wellbeing. I used to know someone who always lamented her "bad luck." Stuff like car accidents, or getting physically injured. She was also the most profoundly depressed and anxious person I had ever met, like within minutes you could tell she was disturbed. You could tell her bad "luck" was her mode of being constant distracted, but there wasn't really any advice you could give other than "work on your mental state," which she already knew.
Her original bad luck over which she had no control was an unhappy upbringing, which is truly unfortunate, but that's not the last word on life.
I graduated in 08 and that was a GREAT time to enter the work force and start earning equity at a very low strike price right before a decade of amazing economic growth.
The bad luck is thinking a company is having a good luck and then realize it isn't. Running into people able to manipulate you is also bad luck.
Companies are selling you during the interview. Sometimes good businesses hire bad people who are good at interviews (maliciously or not), sometimes bad businesses who are good at interviews hire good people (maliciously or not).
Recommit to doing everything right, with a focus on the little things. Not just work or life. Daily routine and small chores. If you loose focus, acknowledge it and move on.
Focus on what's most important. Don't do anything else until what's most important is done. This helps stop overworking, scrubbing every bit of the kitchen when you should be getting clients or spending time with family.
Once your confidence builds up, take a real look at the top businesses.
Rich and famous?
Or just the public face of a lot of other people's hard work.
That's good! You have to be happy for other people's success. It's a luxury.
A really good credit card makes up a lot of business today. One good client pays the bills. Everything else likely gets a no. Getting a look even if it ends in a no is quite an accomplishment.
It's a fight at the top. A bad one. Some people want to do horrible things. Our side convinces people to pursue peace and knowledge. Sometimes you're just not ready.
There's someone here talking about a 6 month gap in their resume. The job interview is not a court of law. Just say:
"I had my own clients."
> "oh yeah? How that go?"
"Good! I made more money with them."
> "Huh. So why you quit?"
"I sold it. I sold the business."
Don't sell yourself short. Don't cheerlead either. Hindsight always makes you feel bad. Decide, and stick to the script no matter what. Admitting to mistakes and relating to people are for the ones at the top of the food chain. They might as well be in a different universe.
Also, there's the killer cold outbreak. If you're willing to work, I think they'll take you. A lot of people well off are not going to risk it. They'll go back home and take care of their family.
>>> You don't have a resilient financial and mental safety net in the form of good friends/family early in your career that enables you to take risks
I did not takes risks per say, but I was lucky to have this in a limited sense during a period of bad luck (aka the recession of 2007) that really helped me pivot to a better place where today during the COVID Crisis I am providing that support to some of my family....
There are rules of luck: it is not all chance with the wise: it can be assisted by care. Some content themselves with placing them-selves confidently at the gate of Fortune, waiting till she opens it. Others do better, and press forward and profit by their clever boldness, reaching the goddess and winning her favour on the wings of their virtue and valour. But on a true philosophy there is no other umpire than virtue and insight; for there is no luck or ill-luck except wisdom and the reverse.
xxxi Select the Lucky and avoid the Unlucky.
Ill-luck is generally the penalty of folly, and there is no disease so contagious to those who share in it. Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it. The greatest skill at cards is to know when to discard; the smallest of current trumps is worth more than the ace of trumps of the last game. When in doubt, follow the suit of the wise and prudent; sooner or later they will win the odd trick.
xxxvi In Acting or Refraining, weigh your Luck.
More depends on that than on noticing your temperament. If he is a fool who at forty applies to Hippocrates for health, still more is he one who then first applies to Seneca for wisdom. It is a great piece of skill to know how to guide your luck even while waiting for it. For something is to be done with it by waiting so as to use it at the proper moment, since it has periods and offers opportunities, though one cannot calculate its path, its steps are so irregular. When you find Fortune favourable, stride boldly forward, for she favours the bold and, being a woman, the young. But if you have bad luck, keep retired so as not to redouble the influence of your unlucky star.
> The company is not your family. Some of the people in the company are your friends in the current context. It’s like your dorm in college. Hopefully some of them will still be your friends after. But don’t stay because you’re comfortable.
This one hit hard. It’s amazing how many of the close work friends I had over the years were only close because of the shitty circumstances we endured together. Once that was gone, we actually had very few things in common.
Not that I don’t have any former colleagues I’m close with, but the ratio of kept/lost has to be in the 1/10 range or lower.
You may like the Japanese phrase 一期一会 (ichi-go-ichi-e). To me it means that you should cherish each relationship and encounter, regardless of whether you know it will last a long time or not. You may never get the chance to experience that particular relationship again. I actually learnt this word firsthand from a man that it applies to, an middle-aged Japanese guy who was volunteering with kids near where I live. We got along well, laughed and ate, but he went back home and I will never see him again. But that doesn't diminish the worthiness of experiencing of getting to know him and enjoying time together, because all things have their place. I'm writing this as much for me as for you or anyone else here. Good night
My mom has a similar saying: "People enter your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime." The idea is the same: you should cherish the relationships you have - while you have them - and let them go when they're over.
I really needed to read this right now. A few weeks ago, I received news that a friend from college had passed on. It hit me hard. I kept reading, and re-reading our last messages to one another, and kicked myself for not putting more energy into keeping up the correspondence, because now I'll never get another chance again.
While this was on a different level from other relationships that have faded away, it made me think about those ones as well, especially pertaining to work. A few companies ago, I was at a rocket ship of a startup and had some friendships that were as intimate and fun as any that I had since college. I sorely missed losing out on that camaraderie. I knew that professionally, it was the time to move on. But, it didn't make it any easier to leave the friends I had there behind. And it hurt to see folks that I thought I'd retain as close friends not end up that way after I left.
Luckily, after there (as with previous companies), I really lucked out and still managed to retain a couple friendships that I remain grateful for, now more than ever. I now realize this is just the way it is. I felt the same way at the end of college, and at the end of every job I've had. Sometimes, I need a reminder that it's okay for the friendships I've had to be in the past. It doesn't mean there was anything wrong with them. If they were going to hold place in the present rather than the past, then it would be that way. But that they are not does not mean they need to be critiqued, or analyzed, or critiqued. Perhaps, as you remind me, they just need to be thought of, reminisced of, and cherished and appreciated for what they were.
I do like that! I have been telling people that I'm content with relationships existing in chapters. Not everyone needs to be a follow on social media. Lets praise the utility and companionship of the time it was applicable. And maybe there is a cameo appearance in another chapter.
That’s an amazing saying. I, too, once had a middle aged Japanese colleague for just a few weeks - he was a smart engineer and hard worker, and kind to all. But he went back to the “mothership office” soon after - I was sad, but it was nice to work shoulder to shoulder with him. Something to cherish.
> It’s amazing how many of the close work friends I had over the years were only close because of the shitty circumstances we endured together.
Isn't that how most people form friends normally though? Through a shared experience? Especially a tough or formative one? Friends you meet at school, in your first year at uni, in bootcamp, on a sports team, these are how most people meet their life-long friends.
Yes, but I think there's a lot of variation in what people want out of work-friends.
My parents are super social to the point of inviting over colleagues for dinner regularly, but I think they're also so social (and worked for nonprofits that are more like family) that they simply have so many options that the ones they pick are much closer work-friends that often last decades.
Other people really do just want to go home and do their own thing. As long as no one is rude, there's room for both.
I find that after spending that many hours with work friends I rarely want to spend extra time with them when I could spend that time connecting with existing friends I haven't seen in a while who I'm already very close to. Balance.
I've rarely had a work friend turn into a real friend though, but I'm also totally happy with that. I need breaks from people and don't want to get sucked into the work as life mindset. I'd rather meet new people at... pick a hobby. Dancing, singing, karate, whatever. That's how I make new friends, through hobbies rather than work because work friends dominating my social life feels incredibly unbalanced.
as an introvert I am one to just " want to go home and do their own thing.", I have rarely kept in touch with former co-workers, sometimes I regret that but I was not born with a drive to be social.
One draw back of that is my professional network is limited as well, in times of economic decline a robust professional network is often the key between employment and not
I agree. If you want a possible compromise solution, consider sending cards to ex-coworkers on birthdays or holidays. It's pretty easy if you use an online service to print and mail them and boy would that make an impression that you value their long term acquaintance. My aunt runs an engineering firm and does this with so many people, I remember driving with her to deliver birthday flowers and stuff.
That's all professional relationship building though, I truly don't think those people are ones she'd invite to a movie or over for dinner. Maintaining professional relationships does take constant low key attention though, if they only hear from you when you need something it's not a good look.
My view is: "You can be 'friendly' with coworkers without being 'friends'." My test for friendship is: "Would I call this person to bail me out of jail?" The answer to that question from me has always excluded all my coworkers and managers, despite them being nice and helpful people.
I've also worked at a family company. They may claim you're "family" too, but that's just marketing hype. The truth is the family members will always be better compensated than you for doing far less. And when tough times come, you will take a hit before any family member.
That's the great thing about co-worker friends. I don't have tech friends from my "real" life, but I have a ton of random friends from old jobs I talk to and (in what seems like a different life, before COVID-19) get together with regularly. What started as joking about agile processes is now planning weird trips and brunches.
I have people with shared interests added as "friends" on facebook, but my actual friends are those with whom I have some common ground - even if it's something as abstract as the shared belief that nothing is ever "100% done" or that politics is just a game of appearances and one shouldn't get too invested emotionally in them.
This was a mistake I made in my 20s. No, values are not interests. Values are things like "would this person stab me in the back, given opportunity?". That can happen in sport, job, anywhere.
From long-term perspective, just like you lose most work-friends when you change your work, you lose most of your hobby-friends when you change a hobby or simply not have enough time for the hobby anymore. Values seem to stay for much longer time.
In the US at least, "values" has come to mean ethical positions, like those brands and politicians claim. For example, "treating all life as sacred" or "helping the neediest" or "maintaining our traditions." A person might say that politicians and brands "share my values."
Different from interests, hobbies, or shared experiences that provide the basis for most friendships.
The vast majority of all friends you meet tend to fade away. It isn't that you aren't friends anymore, it is that life has pulled you in different directions. It may help to realize that if you were put back in a work/school/whatever situation, you'd almost certainly enjoy each other again.
No, it’s not in vain. But in order to build a relationship that’s permanent, it needs a strong anchoring in non-work things. If everything is just about work, then once that shared experience is gone the relationship will be too.
Flip side, you don’t have to be besties with your colleagues. Enjoying time with them while you’re colleagues is an end upon itself. You’ll statistically have about a dozen jobs in your life, which’ll bring in close to 100 colleagues into your life. Chances are you can’t and won’t remain friends with all of them, and that’s ok too.
Do things outside work! You can make friends on the job, it makes the days so much better. If you believe the workplace is a big contest for who's best, it probably will be. But, in my experience, if you treat every new job like you would have starting a new school year, you can make real friendships.
It's not in vain. The opinions of your coworkers can greatly influence your ratings. Even if your output is stellar, the only way to get promoted is to have people like you.
No, but you have to put in a lot of extra effort to be friends with them outside the context of work or else the context disappearing will give you no established excuse to hang out.
It's not impossible to do, I know plenty of people who make real friends at work. But it takes intent to make it work like any human relationship, invite them to dinner, go to movies, play video games, etc. Go overboard to get over the activation barrier but be selective because you can't do that with two dozen people at once.
No, not in vain. If you enjoy it, it's for enjoyment. Just don't think they are your close friends. They are working with you and are nice to you because it's more enjoyable for everyone involved. Be nice to them too, but just don't expect big favors.
If you want to be pragmatic with these relationships - these are now connections. If you're in your early career and so are they, the odds of you all staying at this job are very low. Even if the friendships don't last, this is the start of a network that can possibly help get you in the next door when you're looking for a change.
Nah. Two jobs ago had wonderful people and we still regularly meet up for drinks (despite the company being a load for shite to work for).
Next job was a lot more family people and we rarely went for drinks together. I am not really in touch with them any more (perfectly nice people but the bonding never happened).
Everyone at family company was friendly at lunch, it's just the we didn't socialize after work at all (well a couple of times). The younger company regularly went drinking together.
Are you sure the ones with kids weren't doing playdates and things? I feel like there's often a gulf between people with and without kids.
Of course they didn't go drinking, they had to get home to take care of kids. Or, like me, they don't drink. They might still invite over other families to go hiking or camping or maybe even know other parents from school.
Not saying that was necessarily happening, but now that many more of my friends have kids (I don't) I see them do this all the time. They can't really hang out without a way to distract their kids. Board game nights are much more likely to connect than drinking.
Actually, let me put it this way. If you are relying on your employer to provide opportunities to make friends, you're shifting responsibility for maintaining relationships from yourself to your employer.
I don't think that's a good idea. When people elsewhere on this thread have commented that back in the day people's main opportunity to make friends was at work, they didn't mean that work gives them opportunities actively but rather that it gave them personally the opportunity to personally create a relationship with a coworker.
Agreed? There's a huge difference between the relationship you create by inviting a work friend over to your home for dinner and video games (or going to a bar even) and the relationship created by the "team" going to a "team building activity" together. Don't rely on work to provide the context to make a friend, but it's fine to rely on work to provide an opportunity to make a friend.
Within reason and assuming good actors, etc. I probably wouldn't share every detail of my personal life with work-friends and certainly older generations did not. I suspect the two are related; you have to be more guarded with work friends because social vulnerability can be very risky in a work environment. My mother didn't talk about her disability with work-friends much, only the work-friends she'd invite over for dinner. I share about my condition much more because I want and expect even "just" work-friends to understand and accept my limitations. The story I hear is that it didn't use to be at all safe to be vulnerable like that with colleagues.
First job friends are my closest work friends, especially since most of us relocated for work. It's kind of closer to friends you made in college, because it's a transition period to bond over.
You need to learn, from experience, that "friends" and "colleagues" are two different categories. Both of them useful, but each in a different way. And some people can belong to both categories, but that's an exception, not a rule.
Good colleagues are very important. They are the people you are going to spend with half of the time when you are not sleeping. You will spend more time with them than with anyone else, including the people who live with you. So how you interact with them can make your days pleasant or miserable for the following few years.
Even after you leave the job, if you stay in contact (like, having a lunch together once in a year), you can give each other good professional advice, recommend good jobs, and provide a reference. That can make a big difference, too.
So it is definitely NOT "all in vain". However...
The fact that you spend so much time together and face the same problems, this will all instantly disappear the very moment you leave the job. (It may also evaporate gradually if they leave the job sooner. This part is completely outside your control.) So leaving the job means losing it all, but staying in the job is not a guarantee of keeping it. Better not to get attached. (Being attached also weakens your negotiating position against your employer.) This is the opposite of friendship, when you expect your friends to be there for you especially when you face important changes in your life.
Friends, you choose freely. Colleagues, you get randomly assigned. It is important to be able to have good relationships with people you get randomly assigned. But this is completely different from friendship, where you choose people depending on how much you click with each other, and on the potential for the relationship to grow. If you find out that someone is only capable of a shallow level of friendship, you recognize they are a waste of time, and you replace them with a better friend. When the person happens to be your colleague, you continue to be polite to each other, understanding that this is the level you can't get beyond, but it is still valuable to keep this level. You have different expectations for friends and colleagues. With friends, the relationships start organically, and they grow over time. With colleagues, the relationships start artificially, and they mostly remain at the same level. With friends, you have an emotional connection; you take risks and make yourself vulnerable, in hope of making your connection deeper. With colleagues, you behave professionally, in hope of staying at the same level indefinitely.
(Now, there are situations like having a beer with your colleagues after the work, or a teambuilding organized by your company. They blur the lines; in case of teambuilding it is intentional brainwashing. Don't get confused. Relax and enjoy the situation, but don't forget that you have actual friends outside your work who are not with you now; remember to get in contact with them later.)
Sometimes, you accidentally get randomly assigned a colleague who is actually a friend material. Someone, who you would become friends with, if instead you would have met somewhere else; someone whom you would remember and try to meet again. If the feeling is mutual, great. But it is easy and perhaps tempting to overestimate this. You will probably find the true answer only after you (or the other person) leave this job.
It is amazing what circumstance can do for bonding, though. I still keep in occasional touch with a handful of people I’ve worked with, but the exception is the group from a company that spectacularly imploded: A couple of years after most of us left or were let go, we still talk all the time.
This one is hard. Once you leave the company that's it; you'll probably never hear from them again. Can they still be considered friends if you're on their contacts list, but you haven't spoken/messaged them in years?
It's a bit like that with every friend that you make. Most people lose contact with firends they made in school. Even family ties seems to be not that strong after all. It's all a matter of context.
That being said, what do you actully expect when spending time with work peers? It's supposed to be just relax after work. If it does not "spark joy" then just don't do it. If it does, then do not expect any other value. Friendship is not about how much you can get from others.
This seems like a good thread in which to try to solicit some advice, since it's at least tangentially related.
I was terminated from my last job. In my opinion it was due to my chronic and major depression that I have since been seeking extensive treatment (medication, several months rent in therapy) for. I say "in my opinion" because I really can't rule out that I'm just a lazy, crappy developer who is trying to use mental health as an excuse.
Either way, I've been unemployed for over half a year and am now trying to re-enter the job market. Obviously the gap is a bit of a red flag that I've been candid about to potential employers, in the sense that I speak about a medical issue, not the specifics.
If I could go back in time, I would have quit from my last job before being fired, but honestly I was beyond caring about anything, period, so the consequences of taking the career L barely phased me. There was no upside to being fired, I just didn't care.
Now, I wish I had cared, because it's an elephant in the room I don't really know how to address. Do I tackle it proactively by outright telling everyone I was canned? Do I wait until they call up my former employer to verify my work history?
If anyone else has been in a remotely similar situation I would greatly appreciate any tips or feedback. Please just refrain from telling me I messed up - I definitely know I did.
You're right to be concerned - it is a red flag. It's something I'd ask about if I were interviewing you. However, it's _not_ a dealbreaker: I've hired people who've been fired, with longer gaps than yours. You can recover from this.
When you get asked about this, your interviewer is going to be looking for a few things:
- are you honest about what happened self-reflective about the causes, and take ownership of the parts that were under your control?
- what have you learned from the experience that might help prevent something similar from happening again?
Definitely don't shy away from it, or claim that you quit. Getting fired isn't a dealbreaker, but dishonesty is.
So, if someone asks you "why you'd leave Company X?" (which, if they're a good interviewer, they will), you'll want to be able to say something like:
"Actually, I was fired. I had some medical issues that I let get out of control, and my work suffered. I've got the medical stuff sorted now, and I've learned how to take better care so that my work should stay consistent in the future."
I obviously don't know the specifics of your situation, so that's fairly vague; it's better if you can share specific work strategies that you've since learned, i.e. around managing your priorities/task lists or whatever. You don't need to -- and shouldn't -- go into specifics about the medical side, but you certainly can talk about things you've learned to keep yourself engaged and focused at work.
> You don't need to -- and shouldn't -- go into specifics about the medical side, but you certainly can talk about things you've learned to keep yourself engaged and focused at work.
This is very helpful. You touched on something I've been conflicted about, namely how to navigate being open about my situation without being open about the specifics of my medical condition (I'm not averse to it, but from my research online it's my understanding that sharing the nitty gritty details doesn't help either party partly due to potential legal issues).
> I've hired people who've been fired, with longer gaps than yours. You can recover from this.
This is very reassuring to hear :)
I'm expecting more than a few negative responses from employers, just like I would in good times, but my mind has also been drifting to worst case scenarios where literally nobody is willing to hire me for development again, so it's good to hear that there's still hope :)
Good luck with your search! I am not a hiring manager but in my experience being involved I would agree that a gap isn't a deal breaker at all. In fact as long as you are upfront and show that you've improved from it that could be a positive too!
One important thing for me is to be aware of what you don't have to share to interviewers! Try to answer questions fully and honestly but don't be afraid to keep your medical specifics private
Never admit that you were fired. Your prior employer isn't going to tell anyone, if they know what's good for them. Small, inexperienced companies with no lawyers might, but no real business is going to risk a lawsuit by saying anything bad about you whatsoever. They'll confirm that you worked there and that's about it.
Six months is not a big deal. You've been told all your life that gaps in your resume are a problem, and some people here will tell you that they ask about it, but they're all just following a rote pattern. You don't want to work anywhere that actually cares about this. Most people couldn't care less. You can always leave the months off your resume if you're really worried about it.
Do not under any circumstances tell people that you were unemployed or lost your job due to depression or mental health. I'm not going to sugar coat this for you. Never admit this during an interview. It's a bad idea to mention anything health related. It's also none of their business, unless you require an accommodation that needs to be addressed before you're hired.
Companies rarely check references. They might check your employment history, and they might ask for references to check your professional qualifications, but hardly anyone speaks to references. Don't put any on your resume. If someplace cares, they'll ask. Hopefully you have some ex-coworker willing to say a few nice things about you. If not, you might want to say you haven't stayed in touch with anyone from that particular job. If you can't summon any professional references at all, that may slow down your job search, but really, people don't usually check. Don't lie; just don't stress about it that much.
Lying is never a good idea, but you shouldn't be offering up negative information about yourself. Forget about what's fair, legal, politically or morally correct: there's a stigma around mental health issues and you don't want to bring them up with a potential employer.
You'll be fine going forward, although now isn't a great time to be looking for a job, so it might take longer.
I'm probably biased here due to the length of my career; at this point, my resume is extensive and speaks for itself. References may be more important if you've got less experience.
I think that's kind of the point of references though, right? Your resume speaks for itself, but you wrote your resume. It's a good sanity check for a potential employer to quickly verify that it's actually accurate.
People exaggerate on their resumes all the time. Maybe the 2 interns they supervised materializes as them managing a team of 4. Maybe the project on which their boss did the brunt of the work on becomes a project they architected and lead. It's easy enough to make all of this sound true in an interview, so it's totally logical for an interviewer to want to fact check and keep the interviewees honest.
> I think that's kind of the point of references though, right? Your resume speaks for itself, but you wrote your resume. It's a good sanity check for a potential employer to quickly verify that it's actually accurate.
This is 100% true. However, people are lazy and skimp on due diligence. Just because something is a good practice doesn't mean it's always done :P
The times where I’ve learned someone was lying on their resume, it was always someone claiming extensive experience. Several were managers, where it’s easier to bluff, but there were applicants for senior technical positions who were apparently hoping nobody would expect them to deliver.
Thanks for the reply and for offering a unique perspective :)
> Your prior employer isn't going to tell anyone, if they know what's good for them. Small, inexperienced companies with no lawyers might, but no real business is going to risk a lawsuit by saying anything bad about you whatsoever. They'll confirm that you worked there and that's about it.
This is an interesting point. I had been under the impression that even companies with fairly restrictive HR policies could safely disclose whether or not a former employee was terminated. After some fresh googling it seems I might have been incorrect and that now employers increasingly might just admit you existed :)
> Do not under any circumstances tell people that you were unemployed or lost your job due to depression or mental health. I'm not going to sugar coat this for you. Never admit this during an interview. It's a bad idea to mention anything health related. It's also none of their business, unless you require an accommodation that needs to be addressed before you're hired.
Sadly, I think you're very much correct re: mental health. I almost wish I could be more candid, but everyone (here and elsewhere) seems to agree that's just a terrible idea.
> It's a bad idea to mention anything health related.
I have, however, mentioned health / medical issues in some of my early conversations. I definitely understand how that could make potential employers nervous, so in some future interviews I may try to omit mentioning health at all.
> You'll be fine going forward, although now isn't a great time to be looking for a job, so it might take longer.
I am in a similar position as you. I have a medical issue and I was fired in August 2018. Differences being:
- I intentionally got myself fired so I could get an extra $25k in salary/severance/unemployment.
- It was my first job out of college.
- I have positive references I can give. (my manager sucked, other people were cool)
- Medical issue is physical and not mental. (herniated disc / sciatica).
Here is my advice:
- Practice interviewing at a bunch of no-name companies you don't care about. I practiced at a dozen or so startups, got rejected by half of them and learned the red flags. Now I'm at the onsite stage at Google / Facebook, both asked about previous employment history, which I talked about, and everything worked out ok because I practiced.
- DO NOT MENTION, OR INSINUATE, YOU WERE FIRED. And don't lie. If you imply that you were fired, nobody will give you a chance. This sounds like a death sentence, but thankfully interviewers don't probe into it too much if you tell the right story in the right way. Find a good narrative and build on it like you would an essay. Practice this. Over and over and over and over again. It's hard to get right, but once you do, it becomes a non-issue.
- I try to avoid saying negative stuff about my last job. It's about 50/50, some hiring managers see it as a red flag and others sympathize. It's best to come up with and practice a few neutral stories to tell them
- Nobody cares about a 6-month employment gap. I know plenty of people that take more than a year off. If anyone asks just say you were focusing on your health, family, hobbies, whatever.
- See as many practitioners as you possibly can about your medical issue. Good ones are hard to find. It took me 20 tries (and $5k down the toilet) before I found someone who could treat me.
- I should have put this behind me way sooner. Moving to a different city helped me a ton. I'd recommend getting an Airbnb in Lake Tahoe or Hawaii if you can afford it.
> DO NOT MENTION, OR INSINUATE, YOU WERE FIRED. And don't lie.
It's unfortunate that openness is punished so harshly, but I get it. You're not the first person to caution strongly against letting anyone learn about the termination, so I'll try to move forward accordingly :)
> I try to avoid saying negative stuff about my last job
Definitely agree. It's one of those things that's more likely to harm than to help.
> herniated disc / sciatica
my sincere sympathies. I herniated some (cervical) discs a few years back, it's an extremely frustrating condition. In my case it's gotten better with time to the point I can do almost everything I could before, but I don't see myself getting back into MMA or other full contact sports.
No problem, hopefully we can get out of this rut! :D
Yeah I only have a sample size of two, but I insinuated I was fired at both, and neither wanted to move forward. Perhaps I should have been blunt about it instead of hinting at it. Or maybe it was unrelated. Hard to tell. There might be a way to talk about it tactfully. For me, it's just easier to not mention it, since it can open a can of worms to talk about negative stuff, cuz I kind of hated my manager and that was what ultimately pushed me to get myself fired.
Regarding hernated disc, yeah it's pretty manageable for me now. I actually found a really good massage therapist that is helping me recover. Unfortunately there's a bit of a hiccup with this Coronavirus thing but it's not the borderline life-ruining thing it used to be
That's a tough one. I've never been an interviewer but have lost a couple short-term jobs because of depression. I also think it's the right way to avoid talking about the details. It's a medical condition.
You might be able to say "I put off seeking medical attention for too long, and it got in the way of doing my job. That was a wake-up call, so I've focused on getting better since then."
Was that the first resume-relevant job you lost because of depression? If so, you can also mention that now you're aware of your medical condition, you're proactively managing it.
If you have been fired from multiple resume-relevant jobs, then don't use the "I learned and won't repeat it" part. In a perfect world, the interviewer should know. Not because you're an immoral worker, but because it's a risk you and your employer would share.
Finally, you "messed up" in the way that a dropped glass hits the floor: no point shaming the glass. Be proud of seeking treatment, but remember there was also luck in that decision. Our ideas of choice and responsibility are more complicated than usual when psychological disorders get mixed in.
> If you have been fired from multiple resume-relevant jobs, then don't use the "I learned and won't repeat it" part. In a perfect world, the interviewer should know. Not because you're an immoral worker, but because it's a risk you and your employer would share.
Thankfully, although I think I've had depression for several years, I've left all other employers on good terms. For some reason things just spiraled heavily this last year, but long story short I don't have a pattern of termination.
> Finally, you "messed up" in the way that a dropped glass hits the floor: no point shaming the glass. Be proud of seeking treatment, but remember there was also luck in that decision. Our ideas of choice and responsibility are more complicated than usual when psychological disorders get mixed in.
There definitely was. If it hadn't been for my family and friends I would have avoided treatment much longer than I did, in addition to probably getting deep into substances. We're all products of circumstance and luck to varying degrees, and I've - all things considered - been very, very lucky.
Everyone looks at resumes differently. A resume that's perfect for one person screening resumes won't pass someone else.
In my case, if I see a gap on a resume I just assume that someone took time off to raise a young child, had some savings and traveled, ect. I wouldn't even ask about the gap, but if it did come up, even a vague "I just needed a break" would be fine. The whole point, if I were to ask, is just to make sure you can partition your personal life from your professional life. (I don't expect you to be perfect. I'm not perfect either.)
Now, hindsight is 20/20, but you could dedicate some free time to an open-source project, a "business," ect. Just enough to put something on your resume to fill the gap. When I worked with someone else at starting a business, my partner spent a lot of time (and money) going to a therapist. I had no problem with it.
I interview people regularly and if I see someone with technical talent, then I'll proceed. Chances are I'm not looking up your references until I'm pretty sure I want to hire you, so up until that point, it's on you to impress me with your technical knowledge.
Brush up on the fundamentals. Maybe read cracking the coding interview. And if possible, spend some time working on an open source project, preferably an existing one, not your own (it shows you can collaborate, which is a useful skill if I'm gonna hire you).
Good to know you leave references until the end. I will not be able to get a reference if I leave. My company's policy does not allow employees to be a reference for anyone who is leaving.
This isn't uncommon, and as I understand it follows directly from the typical HR policy of only confirming the essentials, such as title, dates of employment and reason for leaving. Companies care more about possible litigation than they do about helping you with your next job.
However, in my experience it's haphazardly enforced. If you're on good terms with a colleague or manager, it's my understanding (IANAL) that they can still provide an informal or personal reference. In practice, for most prospective employers this is just as good as a formal reference (since most companies these days have the aforementioned policy anyways).
My company requires 3 references. Hiring manager does calls those just before offer is made and there is intent. I don't like calling references unnecessarily. There is a form which mostly is about how candidate interacted with co-workers and management and general effectiveness at job. Medical stuff does not come up generally. Personal references do not work well here in general for technical hires unless it's an intern and they worked together on school project or something.
My guess would be that many of the references you call do in fact work for companies with a no-reference policy. This has at least been the case at all of my employers (large and small places alike, some household names), save a 5 person startup.
In my experience, although near-ubiquitous a no-reference policy mostly seems to mean "if anyone calls the company line or shows up on prem, we redirect them to HR who then tells them nothing". It doesn't mean they go out of their way to stop individual employees from giving positive references on their own time (to wit I've never seen any employer actually make any effort whatsoever to disseminate their no-reference policy to employees, it's just a CYA measure they adopt if communication happens through channels they're directly accountable for)
I appreciate the feedback, thank you. In particular, reminding me to contribute to a larger open source project which is something I haven't done since leaving my last job.
I think a lot of people take open-source to mean "oh, I'll make a project that does something cool in my own time and throw it up on github and everyone can see the code."
And sometimes this works. If you are (to take an extreme example) Linus Torvald and your open source project in Linux, then holy cow, I'm gonna hire you right away. But most people don't have the combination of talent, luck and perseverance that are required to get wide adoption of an open source project. So in 99% of cases, what you are left with is a library or small project that you threw up on a git-hub that maybe has a few stars and that almost no one uses.
Furthermore, as a hiring decision maker, I really don't have much time to actually read your code. Got a project with 3 stars on github? That's great, but I'm really pretty busy writing new features and maintaining my code and I don't have time to read through your code unless I'm pretty certain I'm going to hire you, so I look for proxies. Number of stars is one of them. If 1000 people use your product, it probably says something about the quality of your code or the difficulty of the problem you solved, or at least your ability to solve a problem in a way that people find useful (yes, yes... I know it doesn't guarantee any of these are true, it's just a proxy, but in the initial stage of interviews, proxies are useful).
The issue is that most people are never going to write a project from scratch that gets 1000 stars. However, if you have substantial work in a project that you didn't start, that's also a great proxy. This means that you collaborate with others and not only that, but the people you collaborate with think you are good enough that they are willing to merge in your code. That's a good proxy.
More than that: there are just a handful of open-source projects that went anywhere at all. Among an enormous slushpile of perhaps-worthy but ignored projects.
As a filter for useful, sharable code, open-source is an almost total failure?
Interviews are (with varying degrees of efficacy) meant to gauge fundamentals - so I think you're presenting a bit of a false dichotomy.
That said I haven't really solicited advice on either. My concern is more specifically related to how to frame my past employment and medical issues for a future employer - not so much making it through a technical screening.
I was, and am, curious about what others deem important to their career and craft (e.g. fundamentals), but like I said it's mainly curiosity. If you have something to share I'm all ears, and if not I wish you well.
The context of the original poster's question makes it obvious that they are looking for help interviewing. I'm not disputing the importance of learning "actual fundamentals" and for those, I agree that CTCI isn't the right choice, but it's a very popular book for interviewees for a reason.
I was in a really similar situation a couple years ago. I was having mental health problems two years into my first job out of college. Around the same time my manager quit and a new manager started, and the new manager only knew me while I was struggling so we didn't have a great relationship. He told me to take a leave of absence, and before the three months were up he sent me an email saying that my job had been terminated due to my company's abandonment policy.
I had a looong gap on my resume when I finally felt well enough to start interviewing again. I tried the honest approach and mentioned that I left for medical reasons, and I never made it past the initial phone call with a recruiter. I finally lied and came up with a believable cover story (that I left to work on some startup ideas and did some freelance work) and then I was able to get a job. Keep your lies small, and obviously don't claim you were an employee somewhere that you weren't.
I was paranoid, so when the company I was interviewing with told me they were going to do the background check, I went ahead and called my old companies HR to see what they would say to the new company. All they had listed was my start and end date, not the reason I was terminated or anything. My new company outsourced the background check to a different company, where I had to fill out a form listing everywhere I was employed. I only lied on my resume and I didn't lie on the portion where I had to fill out forms for the job application and the background check. I was never caught in this lie and my new team is happy with my work.
It sucks that we have to do this, but when interviewing companies will take literally anything as a reason to reject you, even if you can do well on the technical portion of the interview.
> He told me to take a leave of absence, and before the three months were up he sent me an email saying that my job had been terminated due to my company's abandonment policy.
I don't understand here. Unless the new manager was just being shitty, being on a leave of absence would generally not be considered job abandonment.
In any case, good job on gaming a shitty system. When will people realize that some of the things employers take as "deal brakers" have literally zero correlation to actual job performance?
Yeah I'm not totally sure what he did was legal. Before I took the LOA, I had been missing work and asking to WFH a lot. I probably could have fought it or sued but again, I wasn't in a great place mentally and the whole situation gave me horrible paranoia about going back into tech (on top of the other mental health problems I was having). This was at Amazon, which dooesn't exactly have a reputation for being nice to their employees.
Ironically, even with the gap I think I'm a waaaay better developer than I was at my first job, simply due to having more life experience and being more responsible overall. It probably took me about a month or two to get caught up and not be rusty, and I think my "getting up to speed and familiar with a new codebase and platform" time was more or less the same as it would be at any new job.
Why would I see the parent comment grey? I surely hope there is some rule I don't understand here about new accounts, because otherwise it means somebody had nothing better to do than to be mean to someone depressed and asking for help.
Maybe that's the advice for you, if you're feeling down go have a look around for somebody who has it worse than you and push them further down! Nice work, everybody.
It wasn't gray when I got to it. This is part of why the guidelines discourage complaining about downvotes. It's often temporary. Someone was probably just having a bad day.
Just wanted to chime in and say, 6 months is actually not a big deal at all. Listening to people who say it is will only serve to add stress to your job search. I took a year and a half off to travel when I was 26 and nobody cared. You can explain it in any way you want to but I certainly wouldn't mention getting fired or specifics about your personal medical history. Good luck.
I would think nothing of someone taking 6 months off. The only reason I've never done it myself on my own volition is that a good opportunity has never presented itself. Aside from one time I was laid off, I've had a job offer in hand before leaving an employer. And that one time I didn't, I got a quick job offer in the middle of the dot-com blowup so it certainly wasn't a good time to travel the world.
I'm sorry we have switched on resumes from reporting years to reporting years and months. It used to be that even 20 months off could just disappear.
When you're ready, drop this Hacker News name. Switch to something like makingChances.
Sounds like restarting may be helpful -- not expecting to continue from where you were -- getting a contracting agency to pitch you and going from there. Once you're in a job, most people don't care about earlier gaps, except that managers who don't know how to collect people who can do the work get fixated on superstitions.
To restate what you're probably already hearing from your therapist: everyone can become depressed. It's something you learn. Some people are more clever at picking it up than others, but everyone can learn it. Depression is episodic. It goes away and comes back. A common recovery is for the gaps between episodes to get larger and the episodes get smaller. Depression grants three super powers. 1) You can see probabilities and how much control you and others have. People without depression cannot. 2) You are ready to serve, even at the risk of your life. This is something that doesn't apply to most of modern life, but does come up now and then. Think of Oscar Schindler. 3) While in an episode, you can be confident that you will not enjoy things. So if you're trying to resist a bowl of ice cream, you have help: you won't enjoy it.
Your negative thoughts and feelings are a natural part of mammalian neural systems, like kicking when you're tapped under the knee and being able to see dim lights easier if you look a little away. Those thoughts and the feeling of dread are not necessary or helpful (in almost every situation). You do not have to respect them. In fact, when they appear, you can disrespect them. They are just an evolutionary glitch that served primitive communities, but were never in the best interests of the people getting them.
Its fairly likely that your previous employer has a policy that your previous employer will just confirm that you worked there. In that case, it shouldn't be too much of an issue.
There are services which you can pay to call up a previous employer pretending to be a new employer doing a background/reference check on you. They will then report back on what they say.
In the case that they do say something negative, one option would be to hire a lawyer to send them a cease and desist letter. My understanding is it's fairly affordable to do and it's usually enough to get them to stop.
You don't really need to hire a service to do a fake reference check and report back. Just find a trusted friend, or, if the company is large enough, you can probably do it yourself.
This is not meant to be hateful, but what an awfully long and needlessly complicated process just to prove that you didn't learn anything from being fired.
Having hired hundreds of people over my career, being fired is not an automatic exclusion, but we would be 100% looking for growth in the person sitting across the table from us. Your process shows no growth.
I'm not sure that I follow. If a previous employer is telling callers things that are keeping you from getting a new job, then I'm not sure what that has to do with personal growth. Especially if you were fired unjustly.
My mood disorder has made my whole career a rocky journey. I'm 43 now, and doing well in my current role.
Managing your depression will always be part of the trip. Don't listen to the voice(s) that say you are a failure/loser/underperformer, just do your best. Say it to yourself whenever you need to: "I'm doing my best, and that's how it will always be."
Strangely, when I know that I'm doing my best despite everything, I feel calm.
> Obviously the gap is a bit of a red flag that I've been candid about to potential employers
Well, I would address this by actually improving your situation: start reading the code from open source projects in your sort of headspace, and set some goal that requires you to do work visible to the public. If you're unemployed, you should have plenty of time to do that.
I get that clinical issues will get in the way of that, but I'm also sure that if you're getting help, you should have some strategies to set aside some time every day. It is absolutely worth it.
> Do I tackle it proactively by outright telling everyone I was canned?
Maybe not that way, but if you have some good evidence you did soul searching and made a daily effort to sharpen your skills and understand how you got yourself into this mess, then that'll go a long way with a decent employer.
Retention offers: yeah. I've been given retention offers twice, and the second time round I explicitly said "I don't want money, I want you to change the way this team and product is managed, like the previous times we discussed this, but that's not going to happen, is it?"
I ended up getting much more money, less responsibility, a nicer less open plan office, and a less dysfunctional process.
Risk: yes, sometimes you just have to go full Light Brigade and charge the guns. Generally the worst possible consequence is you lose your job and everyone forgets it, but be aware that sometimes the consequences are worse and your chances of landing on your feet depend on your privilege level. You have no right to judge people who don't do this.
To be clear, this wasn't the retention offer, this was the new job! And it's still technically open, but nicely spaced with sound-absorbing partitions. The dysfunctional place had a pingpong table within earshot.
Edit window now closed, but yes. My point was that a counteroffer can only ever change a very small set of things, so they're very rarely worth bothering with.
A lot of talk here that colleagues aren't friends.
What is wrong with you people? If you like your colleagues you can invite them to do stuff after you or they leave. They probably haven't invited you because they never got around to it either.
Most of the older generation people met through work is the only way to make friends.
There's a kind of snobby attitude at play here sometimes I think, as in: 'of course I wouldn't socialise with my colleagues outside work! They are nowhere near as interesting as me and my super-awesome, quirky and unique bunch of mates, I'm just slumming it for the money'.
I think it's more nuanced than that. If you hang out with them outside of work on a regular basis, then maybe they are genuine friends and that's great. The problem discussed is a different situation: You get along great with your colleagues, however you never spend time with them outside of work. Then let's say that getting along well with them nudges you to stay at the company longer even though your company/position is not a good fit for you and you should be looking for better career opportunities. You finally decide to leave the company 2 years later, then you realize that these colleagues weren't really friends after all and you should have started looking for better opportunities way earlier.
That is a great point, I've always found the true test for friendship is after I left the environment made us close.
This applies not just work friends, but college friends, activity friends and church friends.
Not everyone wanted to stay in touch, and I don't want to stay in touch with everyone. The few occasions where the desire to stay in touch is mutual, I cherish those connections for as long as they last, hopefully for a lifetime.
Depends a lot on your workplace. If its a younger workforce it usually easy to make friends and people do things together. Once people start having children it seems to change quite a lot.
Yeah, I really feel sad when I see those articles and comments telling you not to share anything that you don't want your boss to know with your colleagues, or even better ignore them completely and automatically treat as deadly competition. If you cannot trust anybody and have difficulties with assessing if someone won't turn his back on you, it may be a problem with your social skills, not with other people.
This kind of thinking encourages situations where the employer may have total control over his employees, like with Amazon.
There are definitely personal details that are dangerous for you to talk about with your co workers. It is still legal to fire someone for being gay or trans in a significant minority of states. There are two Supreme Court cases right now purely because of workplace bigotry.
I also don’t know how safe it would be to disclose having a disability or chronic condition in the workplace.
It may make you sad, but do you think "don't share anything with your colleagues you wouldn't want your boss to know" is bad advice? Treating people like "deadly competition," is probably not optimal, but being wary of what you say certainly is. I can tell you the Slack Police at my work think so, too.
There is a difference between being friendly and being friends.
A friend can be someone you have not spoken to in decades but they will help you in a time of need and pick up with you as if it was yesterday.
In a workplace you may adore your colleagues and spend more than forty hours a week in their company but are you being friendly or are you friends? There is a difference. It is not often that a workplace friendship arrangement becomes a true friendship.
In previous times people were not hypermobile. People did not travel on vast commutes just for a highly specialised job. They could get work on their side of town. They could also sell up and move that bit easier for that job out of town.
In a workplace you are not going to become best of friends with someone who lives a 3-4 hour journey away from you as you know from the off that it is a long distance relationship. The drink after work will be as far as it goes.
Of course there will be exceptions.
I am not sure that the older generation have that many close friends anyway, plus there was the stay at home mum phenomenon back then and whilst 'daddy went to work' the true friendships were made by the kids, bringing their respective parents together. Kids don't get chopped and changed like how jobs do so there is more scope for friendships being made through them.
Unacknowledged fact. Due to Stack Ranking and modern day Machivellian work culture, colleagues are competitors.
Most relationships end up the same way. If there is some kind of comparative ranking/selection, even if it is just fame or some recognition. Even sibling rivalry roots in this.
I had that happen too but the difference was trivial like a couple hundred but still bothered one of the people. I think the only way to share now is just post on glassdoors.
I don't know, I tend to cross over into whatever part of the business if someone seems cool and just ask them to grab lunch or a drink. One of my closest friends is a management person I worked for and asked to grab drinks with when she quit. She's 20 years my senior and now we take girls trips and know each others family and friends. I think it's all about putting yourself out there and occasionally sitting through a painfully awkward lunch.
In my case it's not snobbery like someone else insinuated. I don't consider myself "better" than my coworkers -- just not close to them.
I tend to make few friends. Of those, I made most of my closest friends at school and the Uni, I'm still in touch with them, and we keep our friendships going through good and bad times. It's an age thing, I suppose. If I were still in my 20s I'd probably make friends at work, too.
I tend to occasionally keep in touch with former coworkers, but I'm an introvert, I tend not to enjoy "afterhours" activities, and eventually all these new bonds tend to fade.
It's a luxury concept: the idea that people can rely on having a social group outside of their employer and maybe their employer's vendors and customers.
Also, don't talk to people about how their parents met; they'll be in shock that they overcame the fear that they'd become awkward or unprofessional if things broke off.
Having worked for a dying tech startup at one point in the early 2000s - I spent time agonizing over the fact that if I quit, the company would become unviable - I was one of the key technical people and was the only person with a good understanding of our entire product. After much dithering, I did ultimately leave and the company did fold shortly thereafter. I did feel bad at the time but in retrospect, I have come to realize that it was inevitable and I should have left even sooner.
I sympathize with feeling like the company can't do the job without you. It is a tough place to be. But ultimately, unless you are an exec or owner, that is not your problem. Your job is not a marriage, it is an ongoing business transaction. If the leadership built a company so dependent on one person, yet failed to either make sure that person was stupendously happy and satisfied there, or at least have a backup plan for that person's bus factor, that is their own management mistake.
I feel like this situation calls for making you a partner. If you are SO valuable the company can't even survive without you, then you ARE the company and should be treated as such.
I’m in this position now as the only developer in a successful company that has been operating in lean startup mode for years and every employee has become “irreplaceable” with no contingency plans. I brought partnership up with the owner and he wouldn’t consider it. It’s going to be rough For them when I leave and any “friendships” will definitely be erased.
As the company was clearly dying, a toxic environment was beginning to develop. Eventually, I just wanted out, regardless of the impact of my departure.
Finally, a post that isn't all hunky dory. I'm at the bottom quartile at the moment, so I'm happy to take any reasonable advice that doesn't sound like: study algorithms and get into Google.
Ok, I studied algorithms, got rejected at the paper round. Now what? The tough part isn't passing the interview, it's getting a chance in the first place.
This advice is better. Some points that really stood out to me and that I'll take to heart:
> But if you have an amazing manager at a shit company you’ll still have a shit time.
> “Take any role, at any pay, on a rocketship and everything will work out” is only sort of true.
With that said, a lot of the advice is quite US-centric. Not many Dutch startups would offer stock options as far as I know, for example.
my 2 cents:
there is rarely a shortcut available and is hardly a 6 months course work designed to get into google or the alike unless you have a friend or family member who guides you through the whole process and points you to the right direction, not least giving hope and motivation.
you have to develop a sustainable long term learning habit to hone your skills without being getting burned out and without hoping a dramatic success in the short term.
To get noticed or get an interview you have to identify people there and somehow get them forward your CV and/or build some proof of your skills in form of personal projects which many others like you dont have. Chances you are, you will get atleast an interview somewhere at big tech, if not at google.
> Ok, I studied algorithms, got rejected at the paper round. Now what? The tough part isn't passing the interview, it's getting a chance in the first place.
This resonates. I'm a senior engineer with CS master from top university, 10yoe with leadership skills that prepared the past 4 months and solved over 200 coding challenges. I contacted 18 companies (starting 3 months ago), some of them referrals, some of them from company recruiters reaching out to me (Facebook, Google).
I passed the Google onsite and made it to the FB onsite. I passed all the stages for another company with a "did fantastic" rating but then got denied onsite for unknown reasons.
That means I got through one single paper round from 18 outreachs and it's very frustrating since the ratio is much worse than when I applied 4 years ago with much less experience and requiring a H1B sponsorship.
I have so much fire in me to work on consumer products (which my current job doesn't allow) it makes me explode.
> Ok, I studied algorithms, got rejected at the paper round. Now what?
If you actually studied then play the odds? I.e apply to the dozens of other large tech companies that pay handsomely. Unless there's only Google in the Netherlands (assuming that's where you are based on the Dutch reference) or you already applied to dozens and got rejected at the paper round by all of them
Other than HFT firms, tech companies here don't pay handsomely, so you need to look for other European countries. I've tried Google and Facebook for years (not in NL they aren't that big here and want specialized people, not graduates).
You're right, I only tried Optiver 18 months ago. I should try all the others. I'm not too interested in HFT but the technical challenge sounds fun.
IMO, forget the big companies and startups. There's plenty of opportunities at smaller, established companies, which are, in my opinion, often better places to work anyway.
How would I be able to reach a similar conclusion if I don't have any experience of working at a big company? I'm open to learning more about this idea.
The point made in here about how your company is not your family cannot be emphasized enough. Corporate culture, and especially tech startup culture, likes to make you believe that we're all family and best friends and love each other.
That attitude stays up right until the day they lay you off without warning.
It's great to work with great people that you enjoy being around, and we should treat each other all with human dignity and respect, and with a bit of fun. But your boss is not, and never will be, your friend.
But I think there can also be too much negativity around "the company is not a family". At this point, with 3 major crashes in the past 20 years, I feel like only bad companies say the company is a family.
Good companies say, and act like, the company is a team. People can work hard together, they can be friends, but they are clear that the reason for the team is to accomplish a goal, and if the structure of the team needs to be changed to accomplish that goal, people will be cut. This team mentality can provide true clarity of purpose, and can eliminate any sense of bitterness if things don't work out. When people are cut from a high caliber sports team they may be immensely disappointed, but if treated fairly they understand it.
The family mentality almost always results in bitterness, because what kind of family kicks out their members when things get slightly tough?
Exactly. If a company says "we're a family," then, either they are (a family business), or they're lying. I always say "you don't fire your brother," when people say something like this.
> But your boss is not, and never will be, your friend.
I agree with the sentiment. I am still friends with people that were my direct reports many years ago. But, when I was their manager, I treat them fairly like any other employee. That they were my friends meant that we will hang after work hours. But, as I manager I could not be their friends in work hours. Favoritism will have been extremely unfair for the rest of employees, that still were very good people.
I also have friends that have been my managers. And, in the job I expected to be treated equally than the rest of employees. I guess that we are still friends because we think in a similar way about justice and work ethics.
With teammates has been different. I have been part of awesome teams that we have been friends while working together to later on drift apart as our interests outside the job does not match (quite usually people with children that have limited time to hang out).
The opposite of that are managers that "feel betrayed" when you leave a company that has been mistreating you, or tell you that they expect loyalty to the company that is not reciprocal. They are the "paterfamilias" of a dysfunctional and abusive family. There is nothing worse that a manager that expects to be treated as a friend, with loyalty and sacrifice but sees you as just a number.
Your boss can absolutely be your friend. You should be a good friend back and recognize you have two relationships, and if they are a good person with integrity they won't make professional actions on the basis of personal relationships.
That's just basic professionalism. I've been friendly with many of my bosses during and after the term of employment I've worked for them. I would never, ever have expected any favoritism on then basis of that friendship from them, including laying me off if necessary and distributing raises and promotions purely based on merit with no regards to our friendship. Any expectations otherwise, to me, would mean I was being the bad friend.
I'd have the exact same expectations of family if I worked for them.
I completely agree. I still have zero expectations in the professional context. If I couldn't handle that I would quit rather than risk the friendship.
A beloved co-worker and the best engineer on my team suddenly had to leave 2 months ago because his H1B renewal was denied. He asked the company HR for help and they sent him home immediately. Tears in his eyes he left us on a Thursday, and we didn't know what to say or how to feel.
This is just how it goes. No matter how much we wanted him to stay, there was nothing to be done about it at our level.
I live in a 3rd world country, worked the last 20 years as systems administrator. Recently lost my job and while looking for a new remote job I have been touched by the hard reality: The world changed and I was full of self leniency, years using the same bash scripts, the same tricks day to day. Did lot of things maintenance, networking, security,databases, mail servers, anti spam. I consider myself capable of put a SMB connected and working. My job didn’t demanded me new skills an I was self indulgent, happy to have enough money for the day.
Some recent job interviews showed me a depressing reality : I did the least, I know the minimum, never upgrade my knowledge, just relied on Google search. I didn’t know about CI, CD, containerization, DevOps in general. I have a B.S in Systems Engineering (Some sort of CS , without the ‘science’ part) enjoyed math and code in college, done tens of websites in WordPress, Joomla and some Drupal, I’m capable of code in Php, some bash, some ruby, some python.
I’m in my mid forties a kid 4 years old and cannot afford to stay worried, I have to do something to land a remote job, I want to thrive and motivated enough to learn, but time is ticking would like to hear some advice.
It seems you nailed exactly what is the problem and what needs to be done or learned. You have more or less ideal background to jump into these tools, it's just matter of spending some time and considering your experience it will take less than for most of people. You'll be ok.
Since you like coding and apparently you happen to enjoy building websites why not transition to web dev? The barrier to entry is relatively low. Give freecodecamp (https://freecodecamp.org) a shot and let me know if you ever need help!
The concept of "bad luck" is reinforced by endless self-comparison with those who had extremely good luck.
It's MUCH more valuable to compare yourself to those who are unlucky: the mentally disabled, those who died from COVID at age 29, those born/raised in North Korea. Compared to these people, we've all hit the fucking jackpot.
Adjust your mindset and you'll notice you're luckier than you thought you were.
Comparing yourself to people born in North Korea, etc. isn't actionable though. In other words, so what, other people are more unlucky than me? I know that already.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
“But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” -- George Orwell, 1984
Considering the expected value of your publicly traded stocks at 0 is not good advice. If you actually believe that, then it would make sense to trade all of your holdings for a dollar.
I didn’t ignore it. It’s just in conflict with your first sentence. I’m not sure if you’re talking about EV in technical terms, or a more lose “count on it way”, but neither makes sense to discount to 0. Like if you’re 50 and have a million dollars in stocks for retirement, you should put an expected value of 0 on that? Seems silly to me.
Fair point. My unstated perspective was from investing in a single stock without stop-loss orders using an informal 'don't count on it' definition. Yes, depending on the stock and many other factors - it probably shouldn't be zero. Same should be said of the equity package in the parent comment depending upon the circumstances and terms.
> It’s also okay to take risks. Staying at a company that’s slowly dying has its costs too. Stick around too long and you’ll lose your belief that you can build, that change is possible. Try not to learn the wrong habits.
I love this. I recently decided to move towards quitting at a job that is slowly dying and find something else to do. My mood immediately lightened, even though nothing except my mental direction has changed. I don't want to let cynicism seep into me; I want to find something I'm excited about.
+1 on this. I bailed out of a startup I was an early engineer at and worked at for close to four years awhile back and immediately my depression and frustration cleared up.
> Your equity package is a lottery ticket with expected value of zero.
While this is true, it's vastly more true for startups and privately owned companies vs publicly owned. Amazon's stock price might fluctuate but the chances of it being worthless are slim.
For publicly traded companies, many equity packages now include RSUs, or give you the option to choose between options and RSUs. Which are worth something so long as the stock has any value. Perhaps I am twisting the value of what equity package means.
Not for any big US tech company I've heard of! I think that is only for startups. FAANG (well, Netflix doesn't do equity comp normally), Microsoft, etc. it's all direct equity that vests over time.
Lots of great insight here into the weltanschauung of scrambling startups. This one especially: "It’s the nature of boards that they ignore (externally) problems until their hand is forced."
Translation: if the execs are doing a bad job, the board WILL NOT INTERVENE. Nobody on the board wants to take over for an inept manager. If you're waiting for them to do that ... don't wait any more.
To the people questioning why it is about luck: I think it is because it is written from the perspective that you are at a bad/dying company or have a bad boss. A lot of this article seems to be about leaving that situation. If you had good luck, then you might have been hired onto a good company in the first place.
I do think the article should point out that sometimes bad luck just happens and there's nothing that could have mitigated it. I work for a good company (top 20 IT best places to work) and I have had good managers (some bad too) and I have still been unlucky. I saw a coworker get promoted rapidly for filling the tech lead role for one year. When he left, I stepped up to fill that role for 1.5 years. I didn't get promoted or even the highest performance rating. My manager even told me they believed I deserved it but didn't have to power to make it happen.
> Don’t think that there won’t be politics because there wasn’t politics before. Politics emerge when the players believe the game is zero sum. In a recession, the players are more likely to believe the game is zero sum.
Another related quote from someone I read on another post "People call it politics when they are losing" [0]. A major draw to work for a early/medium startups is that there is "no" politics/bureaucracy, to get out of the "cog of the machine". As the company grows, processes are naturally developed and when the term "politics" is more frequently used. This projected recession is accelerating the development of processes, i.e. politics, for all companies.
Graduated with my BA in 2009 and definitely dealt with bad luck. Now, I work at a good company and have a good job (for now), but they are clearly making moves to shift the jobs to Texas. I’m just finishing my MBA and finding it really hard to find a job. Everyone wants you to have 5-8 years of experience doing exactly what they’re hiring for and don’t seem willing to train if you have 60-80% of the qualifications. Really sucks because trying to shift from one finance discipline (treasury/tax/FP&A/Corp Finance) doesn’t seem like companies are willing to consider.
> Everyone wants you to have 5-8 years of experience doing exactly what they’re hiring for and don’t seem willing to train if you have 60-80% of the qualifications.
This is a big worry for me. I'm leaning towards switching to a loosely related disciple in a few years, but with programming domains. However, when I research jobs in domains in looking at, a vast majority explicitly want at least a couple years in that exact domain, but most want upwards of 5 years.
The bit about the equity package rings true to me. I've never had options that have been worth anything. And I had an employee stock purchase program that was a can't lose deal where the shares would be priced at the lower of the price at the beginning and end of the purchase period. Problem was, between the end of the purchase period and the delivery of the shares, the stock price dropped by 30%.
I think you're not cynical enough. You should definitely keep an eye out for a bigger paycheck elsewhere. Your company wouldn't hesitate to cut you loose if they thought it would make or save them a dollar in the long run.
Its been impossible for me to get a tech job in the last 6 months, I stopped with the global COVID outbreak.
In the past I used to have 1 month of unemployement max, from the time I reached out to the first recruiter (internal or third party), to actually starting a job.
Now recruiters all tap me for Level 5's and Level 6's and reach out within 24 hours of my cold submission through their websites - after the disclaimers all say "expect 4-6 weeks for reply".
At first I realized I needed to brush up on Leetcode, what people are actually looking for in System Design interviews, and even behavioral/leadership stuff. A few educational SaaS subscriptions later, I find it all really fascinating. Although when I see the answers to a lot of "hard" problems, I really question my abstract problem solving capabilities. But I know this is not what happens on the job, thats the kicker, but I have accepted that my full time job was getting good at the interview job.
Later on, after I was solving the brain teasers in 5 minutes in the coderpad/in browser compiler, and asking "is there another part to the problem" and getting no, STILL to be rejected, I realized this was not the best use of my time.
I have no idea what people are looking for, maybe I need to delete all my online profiles and pretend my resume has half of the experience (Founder, small acquisition, probably too public and nobody can say so. Maybe they expected a savant and my moderately above average interview performance wasn't good enough.. for me. Seems like a trap for founders.)
I didn't want lower comp ranges and was at least getting interviewed by everyone imaginable... ? I was just about ready to lower my ask, until COVID hit and realized I can't get evicted, my health insurance won't get cancelled, my phone bill and my internet won't either. I don't even want to see what offers look like right now, and there are a ton of other priorities. Low key, I only needed time, but after how gamified leetcoding has become it started becoming a point of pride for me to get accepted. But I don't really need golden handcuffs, I would stay for the 1 year cliff, maybe. I don't think this was oozing through my fascade in interviews, of course I'm passionate about your flying scooter fintech platform :D (eye roll), but feel free to think thats why I was getting rejected.
In my notes it wasn't all rejections. Some (VC backed, and also mid-size) companies said they cancelled the position after talking with me and realizing they needed a completely different role, or the hiring manager didn't really have as much autonomy over the role they thought and the company focused their efforts on another team. In others (Big Tech) they didn't even know I wasn't already in the company, and therefore I was at an inherent disadvantage and pulled harder from internal pool. (Other big tech does matchmaking after an offer).
All I have are anecdotes. I had friend and founder referrals to their current startups, every "in" you could imagine, and still rejections. The silver lining? I did get exposed to Tech Lead, and his soap opera of a life is very engaging! The people you meet along the way, right?
Overall really good post, but I'm curious about the "Politics emerge when the players believe the game is zero sum".
What are the arguments that it's not a zero sum game? In theory, sure it's not. Everybody works to increase revenue and profits, ergo everybody benefits, but in reality?
I'm considering myself as a back luck person. Graduated with CS major but has been stuck in a QA engineer position. So, after many failures to become dev, I decided to take a M.S degree to sharp my skills and my resume. But when i'm gonna graduate soon, the Covid-19 happens.
My advice is to do a startup as early in your career as possible. Then you'll feel failure and the emptiness as it hits the skids. It's a life lesson in a few months because startups that fail usually tip over the cliff real fast.
In my experience the worst start ups don't hit the skids fast. They kind of keep bumping along, often for years. Neither growing much, nor dying, nor making much money, nor losing enough to go out of business. I even co-founded one of these a few years ago. If you're in one of these my advice is to recognise it and quit.
Even worse: they succeed wildly, to the extent they never need funding again after a series C, buy out the VC's, and stay private. This is roughly what I'm expecting from one of the startups I worked at. I already know they'll never need to take another dime in funding, so I'm just waiting for them to tell me how my shares are going to become worthless.
I am not so sure of this. IME folks who do well are, on average, much more willing to hear external advice. They do not take it as direction (and, on disagreement would rarely try to convince the speaker that (s)he is wrong), but they would actually listen and try to understand the point, then make their own decision on whether they should act on it.
Also, (not bad_luck) != good_luck. I think most people would consider themselves average_luck.
diversify income, I'm learning tattoo and working food service jobs because I'm too high variance in programming. I can be really good but I also go bust a lot :)
I've been reading the Incerto series by Nassim Taleb and he talks quite frequently about nonlinearities and their outsize impact.
He mentions how a friend of his saw how during the Gulf War, everybody had planned for the war to increase the price of oil. So his friend bet against everybody else. Turns out, everybody was stockpiling oil due to the war, and given how short it was, there was an oil glut afterwards. His friend turned $300,000 into $18M.
It's difficult to work for a FAANG and become wealthy, as in move between socioeconomic classes. You have to play politics and become fragile in your building of human relationships, which can fall apart much more quickly than your competence as a software engineer (barring a brain aneurysm or a TBI, where you have much more pressing problems).
If you bet that the stock market would absolutely tank by end of March, and acted on that impulse financially, you would be wealthy today. Renaissance Technologies rose 39% and is having one of their best years ever. It's not secret, exclusive knowledge. I started taking health precautions two weeks before the crash. I didn't act financially, because I honestly didn't think of it, and because I don't like the principle of shorting the market and betting against my country and my people.
My takeaway isn't go on wallstreetbets and attempt to yolo my way through life. My takeaway is people who bet on linearities are much more similar than you think. $300K, $70K, does it really matter? In the grand scheme of things, you're still a peon either way. You're a middle class guy, with little influence on Capitol Hill and less access to PPE and ventilators, high taxes, one primary income stream, and still trade time for money instead of building capital and having money work for you.
So if you feel down, keep a good head on your shoulders, don't despair, and consume as much information as you can on a regular basis. If you want to, look for ways to benefit from nonlinearities. And if you do make it, be a humanist and don't forget to give back to the people who raised you and taught you and care for you.
> It's difficult to work for a FAANG and become wealthy, as in move between socioeconomic classes
You're goal should not necessarily be to move up a social-economic class, but to at least provide your children with more opportunity than you had. Inter-generational wealth accumulation is very important.
Most people don't go rags to riches, it's typically families that do so over multiple generations. With poor people focusing on educating their children, who become professionals, who then have kids with the opportunity to make it big. If you look at Bill Gates, he's the son of a judge. Zuckerberg is the son of a dentist. One of the Google founders is the son of a college professor. Even our president came from a wealthy family.
Step 1: Get a well paying job at a big tech company. There is very little luck involved in this, just get really good at algorithms. No need for a famous school, specific degree etc. It requires intelligence, if you don't have that then you need luck.
Step 2: Save more than two thirds of your take home salary, you can still live way better than the people sweeping the office floor.
Step 3: You now have a ton of money saved up, take whatever risks you like or just retire early.
>Step 1: Get a well paying job at a big tech company. There is very little luck involved in this, just get really good at algorithms.
Let me stop you right there. Maybe that works in SV but in most of Europe(the world?) you aint getting in to any well paying job at a big tech company without a degree from a prestigious university or previous experience at equally big and famous companies.
Companies here don't have the FAANG resources to whiteboard everyone who bothers to apply and check their algorithm skills when all the future employee needs to do is work on some CRUD app so they initially select based on how impressive your resume is and run you through some coding test later to weed out the bullshitters.
Although I live and work in a city with one of the top 300 technical universities in the world where graduating means you have to study algorithms, advanced math, etc. almost no jobs here outside or research and academia require knowledge about algorithms. Companies just want an experienced node/python plumber ASAP.
I'm sorry, I'm Australian and studied and worked in Australia. I spent 4 years in SV, and now founded a startup in Europe.
Even after the Covid issue has played out, I'm convinced SV will still be where a passionate technologist can optimize their impact and lifetime earnings. There's just nothing that can compare to being surrounded by so many smart people who share your interests.
I've heard stories about the dotcom crash, and how it was awesome because everyone who had no business being there left. You just had the geeks that wanted to build stuff for the sake of building stuff, and it turns out there was still plenty of money floating around after things got going again.
Europe has laws which makes hiring people risky and expensive. And even if you do become a top earner, expect to pay 50% in taxes (+ 25% VAT). It's hard to fathom individual engineers would be able to save enough to have the sort of financial freedom to bankroll a company while still in their 20's.
But don't worry, there are government grants for you! Just be prepared to spend 1/3rd of your time dealing with paperwork and hourly reporting of what you did on a day by day basis, all for 50k here, 40k there. I feel these grants are designed to be demoralizing and the startup equivalent of unemployment benefits. And then you realize that almost all R&D in Europe, from startups to multinationals, is subsidized by EU funding schemes and mountains of paperwork.
Don't underestimate how good SV has it with the "I like you and your idea, here's $1m and come back next year and tell me if it worked".
No pain no gain. If the US and SV opportunities aren't a type of gain that's compelling to you then of course you dont need to worry about it. But if they are, then you need to make your own luck by making those sacrifices. Things about family ties and wants and stress are all part of the work you put in to make your own luck.
Being American is a pretty great gig, for all the stuff you keep hearing on the news. There's a reason silicon valley is silicon valley, New York is New York, and so on. Theres a lot of luck that comes from being here. My parents left behind their entire support network in india to set out on their own, navigated the complex immigration process (granted, easier 20-30 years ago than now), and made those sacrifices, and it more than paid off. And I got lucky by just getting to be born here. Things like "you dont want to move outside your country " are completely valid, and part of why american immigration works is because immigration is such a hard thing for people to do (leaving everything behind) that it self selects for the people willing to make those sacrifices.
The one valid one you mention is the difficulty of immigrating. That can be a straight up barrier in the way of a motivated person that would be a useful addition to this country and should be removed. This is the country of immigrants. We should keep that part of our culture alive.
> No pain no gain. If the US and SV opportunities aren't a type of gain that's compelling to you then of course you dont need to worry about it
There are many reasons why this might be out if your control, beyond visa requirements. Maybe you have dependents your can’t bring with you (sick or elderly family for example), or maybe your SO has a job that’s hard to move. Or you have a family and can’t afford the crazy SV rent for a place large enough.
I was replying to the bulk of the comments in the post above, which were along the lines of not wanting to go because of age/liking hometown etc, and specifically mentioned at the end that there are valid barriers to consider, including one in the original post about the complexity of immigration. There are true barriers in the way, my disagreement was with the ones listed above.
I disagree with your disagreement about the barriers, namely:
It is false that the US is the ideal place to live in (or to temporarily migrate to if you're in tech). It is false that, all other things being equal, one should prefer to live in the US. The US is not the default place people should aspire to live in, not even people in tech. Even within the US, SV is not the best place to live in. Living in some place means much more than just working in trendy tech companies.
For a lot of us -- I'd say the vast majority, outside the HN bubble -- the US is not a particularly interesting place to live in, even if there were no immigration barriers. Which there are, anyway.
The U.S. is absolutely not the ideal place to live in. However, it is the ideal place to aspire to if you want to make a lot of money without being born to an already wealthy family. (Wealth of course being relative, because you need some wealth to immigrate nowadays)
Money, and opportunity for their children to earn money, is the reason so many people have immigrated to the U.S in the past century.
Money isn't everything, but you can sure buy a lot of freedom with it. Of course, nothing in life is risk-free, and making money is no exception, and the U.S. is unforgiving when it comes to those who come here and fail.
I do agree with that. If its out of your control, its out of your control. I see that as the difference between "want" (I dont want to leave) and "can't" (I cant leave). Living in a community of immigrant families and a city of immigrants here by NYC has colored that perspective for me since I'm surrounded by people that went through hell for a better life, including my own family. I personally am of course incredibly privileged that I get to just be born here and have the opportunities that come with being an American. But my own family has been uprooted 3 times within my own lifetime so far moving around the country to pursue better opportunities before winding up here, and that pales in comparison to what others have gone through. If you can't you can't, but if you don't want to, well, selection bias, but I'm surrounded by the people that did anyway.
Understood, but if the first step of advice is "move to SV", that right there is unhelpful to the majority of programmers. It cannot work as a piece of general advice, and for most people it's also unattainable and/or undesirable.
Yeah definitely, its not good as a general bit of advice, but it could be helpful as a specific bit of advice to a motivated person down on their luck. If your luck is tied to geography, see if theres a way to move to somewhere with better luck. Whether it's a different city or a different country.
Sounds like having priorities that go beyond making money or having career success. Nothing wrong with that, but it may be something to make peace with.
Yes, of course. To elaborate, most people (outside the HN bubble) have these priorities, they are good priorities to have, and these people work in tech. Therefore, advice starting with "move to SV" applies only to an extremely small subset of programmers worldwide, and as such, is not very helpful.
If the career advice is "ditch everything in your life, become magically younger, live in a country you don't like, ditch friends and family, and generally live for work, and then you'll maybe succeed at having a tech job", that's... less than useful. Maybe if you're young and starting.
Someone who is reading this conversation will benefit from being told that moving to the Bay Area, New York, Berlin, Sydney, Amsterdam etc. for a couple of years is possible. Maybe it's not you, and that's fine. In general, though, helpful advice is about choosing the right side of a trade-off, not a panacea.
It's more than "maybe it's not you": it's not most people outside the HN bubble where SV is the mecca and everyone wants to join a US startup. Yes, there are trade-offs involved in every choice (except age, of course: that's not a trade-off, you cannot choose to become younger and be picked for low-wage trainee job positions that are only offered to young people), but I don't get why we're so fixated in such specific trade-off options.
In the spirit of the article, which warns about optimistic people arguing for unrealistic paths, I'm just warning that "move to SV" is not, for most people, reasonable advice.
Now, you may argue that for people reading HN, there is a larger subset which do aspire and would benefit from moving to SV. I won't argue against that. But I thought the spirit of the article was not about providing career advice for such a small subset of tech-minded people.
To sum up, this proposition is false for most people (and not just me): "everyone passionate about technology should, all else being equal, strive to move to Silicon Valley and work there, because that's the best place there is".
In a discussion about career advice, saying "move to where the most and best paying jobs are" is absolutely good advice. It may not work for everyone, but that advice applies to far more people than 'an extremely small subset'. It applies outside of tech too.
And then you realize that almost all R&D in Europe, from startups to multinationals, is subsidized by EU funding schemes and mountains of paperwork.
Couldn't agree more with this point. Also atleast in my experience they are there so just few people can be employed without much real pressure to produce real results... As long as paperwork is completed the results don't matter much.
Don't forget the tax prepayments that might be 1.33x of your previous taxes, i.e. you pay 100k in taxes for one year and for the next year you need to prepay 133k.
I can second that sentiment in Canada as well - I'm not even aware of what the good paying jobs would even be - there's none with FAANG fame, and every job has a hard wall with a laundry list of 5+ years of experience with a dozen web technologies that you can only climb over with the appropriate connections.
As a canadian, I disagree with how strict you’re describing the issue to be. There are a fair amount of big and well established companies that are not going to penalize you for lacking the five years and connections. With that said, they’re almost all in Toronto, but that’s a different issue ..
Yeah, I didn't want to get too regional, especially when it seems to be a single exception (possibly Vancouver as well?). As I understand it Toronto is almost like a different world, especially when compared to Western Canada, like using New York or Silicon Valley to describe all of America.
> Let me stop you right there. Maybe that works in SV but in most of Europe(the world?) you aint getting in to any well paying job at a big tech company without a degree from a prestigious university or previous experience at equally big and famous companies.
I did exactly that though, I joined Google in Europe a few years ago.
From some acquaintances who moved there to work in tech I heard integration/dating/making friends is very difficult as a foreigner especially if you come from $UNCOOL_COUNTRY and the real estate market is terrible, with cramped and expensive apartments in a poor state and buying is even more difficult if you're not a swiss citizen which is a difficult citizenship to get.
Vast majority of people rent in Zurich. I lived in multiple countries (US, Australia, Europe - Germany, Austria and more) and apartments in Zurich are better maintained than anywhere else I've seen. You can find cramped, if that's what you want, but there is plenty large apartments - bigger than US or Australian apartments. E.g. looking at our corner of the city, there are 2 bedroom 85 - 120m2, 3 bedroom 120 - 160 m2 places. In Sydney, we had a 75m2 2BR with tiny bedrooms and it was a typical apartment there.
If you want to live in a house, Zurich is the wrong place, you'll probably need to commute.
Language is a big issue with integration.
It's not that people don't speak English or High German, it's just that to truly integrate you need to speak the local language.
And learning a dialect without an accepted written form, and thus no textbook to speak of is not easy.
If this is the case Zurich sounds exactly like New York (other than the difficulty of buying property for non-citizens). Might just be the feeling of alienation that arises from living in a big city as an outsider.
> Step 1: Get a well paying job at a big tech company. There is very little luck involved in this, just get really good at algorithms. No need for a famous school, specific degree etc. It requires intelligence, if you don't have that then you need luck.
Sorry but no. Like everyone else has pointed out, this is so far from the truth that I’m actually in awe that someone would write this.
There is a ton of luck involved with getting a job at a good tech company. First being something straight up mentioned in the article - knowing the right people. The chances of a regular hard working person getting past even the initial resume filter takes luck. It takes luck for a referral to find the right hiring manager’s desk.
Get past that and then depending on the company, there’s always the chance that someone interviewing you is having a bad day or maybe the team “fit” isn’t there.
There are a ton of obstacles that come down to luck because it is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose.
Edit: Since many people are using anecdotal data and survivorship bias as proof that this is true, how about a counter point. I interviewed at a FAANG before and didn’t get the job. Later on, I met someone who works at that company who was able to look me up. I had passed their bar. Not with flying colors but well enough that you would generally get an offer. Why didn’t I? Because that specific team that interviewed me had a skillset need that I didn’t have. But there’s no way of knowing that prior because the job description doesn’t point that out. It’s just how their (and most companies’) process works. So like I said, luck.
Perseverance can help, but what you say doesn’t discredit what I’m pointing out - that you just might not have Lady Luck on your side.
Again, anecdotal data. I did keep trying at other big tech companies. I did get a good job where I was hoping to save money, build a career, etc. Exactly as OP planned. You know what happened? COVID-19 led to mass layoffs less than a year after I got hired. Now I’m back to square one. I’ve barely recovered the savings I spent moving, which as others have already pointed out, is a prerequisite to OP’s advice. Sometimes luck simply isn’t on your side. To say that all it takes is intelligence and hard work is simply not true.
> It takes luck for a referral to find the right hiring manager’s desk.
I only know about Google, but there is no such thing as a "hiring manager's desk". The hiring manager only gets info about a person once they passed interviews.
Ok, perhaps the titles are different per company, but the point still stands that the referral has to land on the desk of the right person in the right position. Doesn’t change a thing about what I wrote.
Do you seriously believe that anyone who is reasonably intelligent can just waltz into a high paying job at Apple or Google by sending them a resume? If so, I'd respectfully suggest that is... probably not the case. (Not that I have firsthand experience. I've never applied to nor been interested in those big tech firms.)
ADDED: I'm sorry, but the people on this thread who are arguing that if you can't get a $200K+ job at Google, you're obviously not even trying have some serious blinders on.
> Do you seriously believe that anyone who is reasonably intelligent can just waltz into a high paying job at Apple or Google by sending them a resume
People who have waltzed into a high paying job at Apple or Google by sending them a resume believe exactly this.
It’s one of the many problems with any sort of unsolicited financial/job seeking advice. Actually the problem with advice of any sort. It’s almost 100% wrong.
I'm just very aware of how lucky I've been on a couple of different occasions (ADDED: Specifically from an employment perspective).
During the dot-com bubble bursting, my company was having big layoffs and I landed a new job based on an informal lunch meeting with someone I knew that I had literally a couple of days after being laid off. (Some other leads I was investigating in parallel prior to getting an offer produced not so much as a nibble.)
Then, probably only a month of so before that employer shut down (somewhat after but somewhat related to the 2008 downturn), I contacted someone I knew at another company--which resulted in an offer and I'm still there.
But none of that provides much in the way of insights for someone else beyond a generic "have a network that knows you do good work and is in a position to hire you."
But it's not especially actionable. Except perhaps insofar as a reminder to not let yourself be locked in a company building and never interact with anyone outside those 4 walls.
In my case, it basically boiled down to working a long time in the industry and having relationships with former co-workers, consultants who did work for us, and clients.
ADDED: Having said that, a lot of people think their resumes are all they need to land whatever job they want. And maybe that's true in some cases. But other than my first job in the tech industry--which I got out of grad school--every other position has been basically through people I knew and my resume was essentially irrelevant.
Yes. Any reasonably good programmer can get a job at a FANG company with three months of serious study; any reasonably intelligent person can become a good entry-level programmer with 1-2 years of serious study.
The demand for engineers far outstrips supply.
I've been studying for the past two years and have failed at multiple FAANGs, some twice. Failed at FB, NFLX, AMZN, in addition to MSFT and UBER.
Then again, I'm not entry level (10 yoe), so I might be competing at a higher bar. However, I'd gladly join any of these companies as a junior engineer without hesitation.
I've seen stories of, amongst others, someone who studied while in prison get into GOOG, someone who was a aesthetician get into NFLX, a cab driver who got into UBER, all as SWEs.
I actually wish I wasn't a SWE so I could compete at the entry/junior level. I feel my 10yoe (SWE at investment bank), which gives me a TC only slightly higher than a FAANG junior SWE, is wasted.
How much time are you spending specifically on interview question practice (HackerRank/Leetcode)?
I've got close to 20 years of programming experience, including working at Google for several years and launching some very high-profile projects. I still fail interviews if I haven't studied for them. You could argue that it's a stupid system where they test 20-minute coding exercises with a trick answer, and you'd be right [1]. But it's a system that can be gamed, and can be gamed with relatively little time. Putting in a week full-time, or working a problem a day for 3 months, will put you way ahead of most of the rest of the competition.
[1] But the interview bullshit serves another less-obvious purpose: it tests how much you actually want to work at the organization. It's relatively easy to bullshit enthusiasm in a calm chat with a hiring manager. It's pretty hard to do it when your brain is occupied by solving a hard problem and you're frustrated because you have 5 minutes left to solve a problem and there's still a sticky bug.
At the start of the process, I began with comp sci/DS&A fundamentals - including books like Algorithm Design Manual, Intro to Algorithms, etc. Took a few months break to get married, then resumed, eventually starting to 100% grind leetcode problems. As my wife can amusingly attest - I no longer have any hobbies or other personal entertainment since we got married. Studying for interviews consumes all the free time I have that I don't spend with her.
Add to that, since last year, my day job got a lot less demanding, so I am actually studying/leetcoding during the afternoon at work too.
One wrench thrown into the loop is that I am a mainly a frontend engineer by trade, and it seems frontend interviews at FAANG and many other top tech companies are focusing less on leetcode/DS&A and more on JavaScript trivia problems. So that has been a context shift, and I am focusing more on getting as many JavaScript tricks and patterns into my repertoire now, and less on leetcode.
Pretty much my #1 personal goal in life at the moment is to get into a FAANG, or at least similar caliber, company. No, it's not a life or death matter, but whereas someone else might be content to watch TV/Netflix, or play games, or go golfing, I'm spending that time leetcoding...
What I feel torpedoes me during the interview is that I can get often get 90%+ of a solution, even if it's a problem I haven't seen before. But some edge case or bug in my code kills me, or I miss some trick or pattern that is the key to getting it right. In a less competitive company, this might mean passing the interview, but for a FAANG or similarly highly competitive company, I feel not getting 100% technical perfection means dead on arrival.
Sounds like you're doing a lot of the right stuff.
I started as a frontend engineer at Google, 11+ years ago, and you're right that there's a lot of Javascript/DOM/HTML trivia to understand. Google was also one of the few companies that insisted you know vanilla JS cold and don't use frameworks in the interview. It's worth studying up on MDN to make sure you really know JS corner cases. You need to know the leetcode-style problems too - when I applied (and I think this is still true), it was 2 interviews for algorithms & data structures, 2 for frontend, and 1 system design.
It also may not be the right time to apply, since many FAANGs are dramatically slowing down hiring. Your odds get much better in boom times than bust times.
I actually just got my rejection from FB today. Purely JavaScript questions, no leetcode at all. If I were to rewind, I'd have focused more on purely JavaScript tricks and less on other parts of the frontend repertoire. i.e. the time I spent on CSS seems to have been a waste.
Also got rejected from AMZN back in December. Made the mistake grinding leetcode during the weeks leading up to the interview, when it turned out to be purely JS trivia.
The hardest part of interviewing as FEE seems to be the lack of sample JS interview problems available, versus say, leetcode. I feel I am pretty well versed in using JS and have pretty in-depth knowledge of the arcane workings of the language far beyond a typical developer (certainly more so than my coworkers), but just like how leetcode interviews cover cases you'll never encounter in day to day work, frontend JS interview problems seem to do the same.
That said, I don't know how much JS knowledge a typical FEE at a FAANG or similar company has. But that's one big reason I want to get into one of these companies - I'm assuming, and hoping, the level of knowledge and enthusiasm (I hate to use the word passion) is much higher at SV tech companies than outside. Most of the places I've worked (banks, finance), the JS engineers can barely explain how async stuff works in JS.
I'm kind of in the same boat. I failed all my interviews as well and I have about the same amount of experience as you. I agree that getting into these companies is easier as a junior engineer.
You may want to look at an interview prep course like Outco.io or Interview Kickstart. I haven't attended one yet but will most likely do so once I'm ready to start interviewing again. I think the feedback they offer will be worth it rather than me constantly headscratching after failing another interview.
(The fact that these courses exist just exemplifies the whole problem with software interviewing but I don't fault them for that)
I've been in touch with the people at Interview Kickstart. They seem like nice people, but I'm pretty sure I know what my problem is - not doing the coding rounds with 100% perfect optimal solutions, when another competing candidate is doing so.
For example, in my failed FB interview above, I quickly and successfully solved two problems in the phone screen - thus I passed. The first onsite (virtual) coding round I struggled on the first problem but got it with about 10 minutes to spare. Main issue was that the optimal solution involved doing something in JavaScript that AFAIK typically considered bad practice. The second problem I waltzed through in 5 minutes. The second coding round I got the first problem, but there was an edge case bug I didn't catch, and fixing that took up the entire 45 minutes so I didn't get to a second problem. I'm guessing that was a big negative signal.
I know communication goes a long way, but considering how competitive these positions are at FAANG level companies, I'm sure there is someone else out there that communicates and vibes just as well as I do in addition to getting the 100% optimal solution quickly.
The one thing I can see a service like IK offering me is networks and referrals, but not sure how much that would be worth, especially since they aren't exactly cheap. That said, I'd pay the tuition without hesitation if they could guarantee me a job (of any level) at a FAANG level company, but that's not the case :). Or at least a 100% refund if I fail to get into such a company after a period following the curriculum - but I feel that's easier promised than done even if they were to offer such.
I have friends at some of these companies who have given me referrals, but ultimately all that does is give me higher odds of getting an interview, and in some cases, a chance to directly chat with the hiring manager prior to the interview. For whatever it's worth I've had managers express great enthusiasm about having someone like me on their team after a conversation, but then I get torpedoed for not being able to find the perfectly optimal solutions to some leetcode medium/hard.
Yeah I hear you. I've struggled with the exact same problem. The stress doesn't help and often times I've figured out the answer just 5 or 10 minutes after the interview was done. I know I got rejected from Amazon and then a week later I was doing practice interviews on interviewing.io and the guy who was mock interviewing me said that he works at Amazon and that I should apply. I had to tell him that I did apply and just got rejected from an onsite interview the week before.
Yeah, referrals at these sized companies only help to get a recruiter to pay attention. It doesn't really help. I've even gotten interviews just by searching LinkedIn for ___ recruiter and messaging them directly.
FWIW, I recently attended the Outco sales pitch and they do have a almost guaranteed payment option. Instead of paying up front you can pay nothing and then pay 10% of your first year's base salary. Obviously that would cost you more than if you had paid up front but that could be an option.
Thanks, I'll check out Outco. Scheduled an info session with them next week.
One other thing that did make me hesitate Interview Kickstart though were that they seemed to be for generalist SWE only, not frontend. The person I spoke with said FEE would have the same interview problems/track as any other SWE, but my personal experience over the past two years has shown me this is usually not the case.
Also would be concerned about what IK/Outco considers a "success". I'm only targeting a relatively small subset of companies (FAANG, obviously, plus others at similar level). So my definition of success (aforementioned companies) vs. theirs (any company?) might be different. A question to ask during the info session I suppose.
Same here. I’ve considered wiping my resume and leaving off my background intentionally just to get the chance to interview at the entry/junior level. Of course, those positions are now mostly exclusively reserved for those coming out of college. So unless you have the income and time to go get another CS degree, you still can’t apply.
This is all assuming you can get past the resume filter which is all luck unless you know someone with enough pull within the company already.
Why use stock ticker names instead of typing the company names out properly? It literally only takes a second or two longer and is much clearer to read.
It’s usually signalling. Specifically, it signals “I can afford to invest so much into stocks that I live and breathe stocks, and if you don’t, then I don’t care about you.” It’s a very conceited attitude.
Of course, in this case specifically, it might be because they worked for 10 years in an investment bank, and might be used to always speaking about companies in terms of stocks.
This is a particular kind of challenge that definitely occurs for more experienced engineers, however I also suspect you have a stronger foundation than you realize and could shine with some specific guidance.
A buddy and I provide all kinds of practice interviews to help engineers get into FAANGs. We work on a success based payment model, and help substantially with negotiations, too.
If you're interested send me a note with availability for a chat (email and website in profile). I would love to at least offer some advice for next time even you decide our coaching is not for you.
> Any reasonably good programmer can get a job at a FANG company with three months of serious study
Do we seriously believe there are so many FAANG jobs available that "any reasonably good programmer" who wants one can have one, just for the price of a bit of "serious study"? I don't think so. Google et al may be big, but they're not that big or growing that fast.
A great deal of the demand for engineers does not come with anything like FAANG-level prospects.
For every junior FAANG engineer, there are legions of senior or staff level equivalent engineers at companies outside of the Silicon Valley style tech/software sector who will retire with their TC topping out at maybe around what a lower-mid level engineer at a mid-top tech company would make.
Disclaimer: I don't work at a FAANG. However this is my observations from interviewing at FAANGs.
Seems random to be honest. Some of my interviewers have been older people. Some of the people waiting with me at lobbies prior to interview have been older people. I'm 38 FYI.
Seems your ability to pass the leetcode problems is the most important factor, so long as you don't torpedo yourself with odd behavior during the non-technical portions.
For more experienced candidates like yourself and I, I hear the system design round is also important. But your success in that is more difficult to gauge, whereas you kind of know whether you bombed an leetcode round or not.
Depressing is that your multiple decades of experience might be absolutely worthless as far as passing leetcode rounds go. Your experience may or may not be useful for the system design round. It's useful if your experience with systems matches that with what the company is looking for. It's useless if not. I've noticed the systems at many non-tech enterprise companies don't exactly align with the systems at newer tech companies.
This is kind of depressing for me. I've failed interviews at Amazon, MS, Google and Netflix. I studied a bunch and managed to get 5/5 on all but one section of the TripleByte test.
Don't be depressed. It's false that any reasonably good programmer can get a job at those companies. There are plenty of reasons why you may not get a job at any of them (bad luck, peer competition, interview antipatterns (google Yegge on this), maybe algorithms aren't your strong suit, ageism, etc). Even worse, from initial rejections you can spiral down into anxiety that will hinder you in future interviews, and listen to this: you cannot tell a person not to get anxious at the prospect of rejection, either.
People who say it's easy are arguing from an optimistic point of view specifically addressed as unhelpful at the start of the article.
Yes I do believe that, other less prestigious companies didn't even respond since I had holes in my resume but Google did. Getting an interview there is not harder than any other place, often times it is easier.
Yeah, step 2 sounds easy, but is actually the hardest. I know plenty of folks who had well paying jobs, but quickly blew it all on boats, multiple luxury cars, investing in their cousin's hot startup, etc.
Lifestyle creep is incredibly hard to resist when everyone around you is caught up in it. My compromise has been to allow myself reasonable splurging on a few hobbies that prioritize experiences over consumerism while keeping the rest of my life as minimalist as possible.
I've heard of people who did this and went on to retire. OTOH I don't know of any engineer who left Big Tech to take advantage of their financial security to do something _highly impactful_. In other words, the "Google mafia" was a lot weaker than the "Paypal mafia".
The problem is this : most creative engineers don't have the mindset to mindlessly study for algorithms interviews, only to then have to spend years in constrained engineering roles.
> most creative engineers don't have the mindset to mindlessly study for algorithms interviews, only to then have to spend years in constrained engineering roles.
I agree with this, but then they can't really complain about luck when they had the option to fix it. It was a choice they made and now they have to live with it. It is fine to gamble, but then you shouldn't complain about the outcome if you lose.
> Step 1: Get a well paying job at a big tech company.
You mean, a remote job in a place with low costs of living. Otherwise, this algorithm doesn't work for people with families. I've been on the job market just before COVID-19 hit. The costs of living in tech hubs are absolutely ridiculous. If it's not housing, then it's something else. For instance, you could afford staying in London with a spouse on a tech salary (the other salary would go straight into savings). But not with daycare, which quite literally costs more than housing.
I think London is particularly bad regarding the cost of living:SWE pay in general. But even in SV, if you started as L5/E5 at Google or Facebook and had enough for 20% down you should be able to afford to buy a 3bed house with <1hr commute based on the cash flow from that single job.
Should children wreck your finances? A lot of countries are spending a lot of money to reverse that sentiment right now. Yes, they are currently expensive, but blaming people for having children isn't going to fix anything.
What about health aspects? One should never overestimate their fertility. Rates of birth defects rise as humans age (not just women, men too). Complications at birth also rise. Older grandparents have less time to enjoy their progeny. Older parents have health issues that prevent them from spending as much time with new grandchildren.
Each family chooses when it is right for them to add a new member. Finances play into that, of course, but they should not dominate the decision like they do today. Top Tier economies are seeing the results of this myopia.
Many European countries are schilling out big bucks to bump their birthrates and help with these financial concerns. Places like Switerland have had their fertility rates under replacement since the 1970's. Data is a bit wonky, but it seems these policies have helped the problem from a continued backslide, though not ended it.
> A lot of countries are spending a lot of money to reverse that sentiment right now. Yes, they are currently expensive, but blaming people for having children isn't going to fix anything.
I think it's more about why people blame the government or society for the economic ramifications of this choice.
Which people? Environmentalist maybe. But those worrying about failing retirement pension system or the amount of migrant labor probably do realize both are caused by low population growth in their country.
> But those worrying about failing retirement pension system or the amount of migrant labor probably do realize both are caused by low population growth in their country.
The more years that pass, the less I am certain that many people realize anything beyond their front bumper.
Potentially very unpopular opinion, but to add to this, I think it’s irresponsible and unfair to the children if you choose to have have kids before your finances are in order. And selfish to put your desires above the wellbeing of the potential child’s.
We're talking in the thread about bad luck. It's entirely possible - and common - to have finances in order, decide to have children, and then experience sudden events causing financial hardships.
Also, we're in a subthread of "saving lots o'moneys by working for big tech", so this applies also to people wanting to improve your situation. I personally didn't realize how bad the calculus of chasing after companies in tech hubs looks until I started doing costs-of-living calculations while evaluating job offers with relocation. I ended up doubling down on remote, because even a moderately shit tech job (even a in-office one where I live) would leave us with more savings on a single income than us relocating to a big tech hub and living on two incomes (one non-tech).
I didn’t say I had anything against anybody who has kids and falls on hard times. I understand that makes my comment rather off topic in this thread. I do know a lot of people who definitely did not have their finances in order and decided to have children anyway. The children are the ones who suffer most in these cases! This is super irresponsible and selfish. Hell, I once knew a couple who literally said they might have a third child because it would be easier with the extra child support money...
Here I agree with you in principle - deciding to have a child while not being able to financially support it, and just hoping for the best, is extremely irresponsible and likely to permanently scar a new human being.
That said, before judging a struggling family, there are also some other things to consider:
- Pregnancies happen by accident. It's both easier and harder to conceive a child than people think. It can and does happen by accident even with multiple methods of birth control applied, and at the same time a couple can try to have a kid and not succeed for years (or at all).
- Your job can disappear suddenly and through no fault of your own. I had this situation in the past, where my coworkers and I didn't know that there was a hostile takeover of the company happening for almost a year before it run out of money and stopped paying us.
- Random events (family problems, illness, or a pandemic shutting down the global economy) can suddenly break your finances while a child is underway.
- People miscalculate.
- The drive to procreate is, in general, one of the strongest forces in all living organisms, and thus very hard to control - especially with abstract considerations like numbers on the screen symbolizing your chances of survival.
> Hell, I once knew a couple who literally said they might have a third child because it would be easier with the extra child support money...
Can't speak about that particular couple, but in general, that's economic reality. I've seen such things too (hell, my wife and I sometimes joke that we should try for two or for four, because there's little difference between three and four kids, and having a fourth gives guaranteed retirement from the government). Sometimes benefits are set up this way on purpose, by countries that want to improve their population growth.
I mean, I'm not going to campaign to put any actual restrictions or laws in place and I don't go around judging people or complaining or whatever. But I do think that people shouldn't have children unless they are able to take good care of them, and financial stability is part of that.
I guess my complaint is that many time people don't think of consequences or plan for the future and then other people (their children in this case) are the ones to suffer.
> I personally didn't realize how bad the calculus of chasing after companies in tech hubs looks until I started doing costs-of-living calculations while evaluating job offers with relocation.
Your mistake was waiting until mid-career to try to pivot to a higher paying job in a HCOL area, because then you'll be 10+ years behind your peers. If you start your career in a HCOL area it's not unfeasible to reach 400k+ by your 30s, at which point you can afford a family even in San Francisco if you wanted one. It's also much easier to find a higher income spouse in a HCOL area, which helps the math too.
I've made plenty of mistakes in my career, though arguably, I've never been in this for the money. What you describe is probably near-optimal from financial point of view, but I can't imagine my younger self being capable of seriously considering such thought process.
Step 1 reminds me of one of my favorites from the Onion:
According to a Gallup report published Tuesday, over 95 percent of the nation’s grandfathers began their careers by walking straight into a place of business, saying “I’m the man for the job,” and receiving a position right there on the spot.
Alright, can you get me a phone screen? Sorry to ask the question so directly, but I have applied since 2014, and I can't get to the phone screen.
I'd love to be a frontend engineer, UX engineer, creative engineer (I've seen this role at Google, it looks awesome) or a full-stack engineer.
I have:
A bachelor in information science (2012)
A bachelor degree in psychology (2015)
A master in game-design where I learned about Unity3D and C# (2016)
A master in computer science where I learned about cache eviction in GPUs to perform rowhammer via a JavaScript advertizement (2018).
I have done quite a few side projects (not willing to disclose here, email is in my profile). And I have some work experience as a coding bootcamp instructor (1 year, I trained 50 people to become junior web developers at companies like IBM, Capgemini and a top 5 Dutch bank) and a freelance web developer (6 months) and a freelance iOS developer (also 6 months).
I graduated in 2018 and after freelancing for a bit, I took a sabbatical in 2019 (setting up a bar in Thailand with family and friends). When I started looking for jobs in earnest in 2020, Covid started to hit.
I'm practicing algorithms as we speak, I'll be ready in 2 weeks to a month from now. So far I'm facing no difficulties, this stuff is hard work but it's a lot easier than my security courses. Also, algorithms are actually quite fun. There are a few things there that I really want to learn such as a hyper attention to detail. I'm currently training the skill to write a program flawless without bugs from the get go, complete with the fastest time complexity immediately. I know I can get to this level because I'm noticing that for a lot of algorithms just by playing around one can see the best time complexity for it (I find optimizing for the right space complexity a bit harder).
I hope you'll help me with this. If not, and I don't get to a phone screen, well that is my (and many people) their biggest issue. Passing algorithms is not the issue, getting a chance to be interviewed is. I'm a 100% sure I'd rock at the job, as I'm sure that many other people would who didn't get the chance for a phone screen.
I'm from The Netherlands and would love to work in Zurich. I see you work in Zurich as well, I've been to Switzerland quite a few times, it's amazing.
Google teams that I find interesting and want to know more about:
- Google Doodles
- Project zero (though I don't think I'd be able work there since people have a super big track record regarding the security work they do)
- Google Creative Lab
- Google Health
- Google Stadia
- Google Cloud Platform
- Google Brand Studio (though I don't think I'd be able to work there since it's more about people who can shoot beautiful movies)
The most reliable way to get an interview at Google is to pass round 1 in Google code jam. So you need to first do the preliminary round, then get top 1000 in any of the round 1 competitions. That sounds harder than it is, I managed to do it without having taken algorithms courses after a few months of practicing.
If you don't have time to wait for the one next year then when you talk with Google recruiters they care a lot more about your chances to pass the interview than anything else, since they get evaluated by how well you do there. So selling your ability to pass these kinds of questions is a good idea, put everything related to algorithms etc on there. Did you do well in some competition? Have you solved some particularly hard problems? Did you build something impressive? Things like that.
Also be clear that you are open for relocation, specifically to the large hubs like London and Zurich since there are more jobs there. Otherwise the recruiter might look for jobs at your location and see no openings. This almost happened to one of my friends, but he managed to say that he would be fine working in Zurich instead and he got the job and now works there.
> If you don't have time to wait for the one next year then when you talk with Google recruiters
I never got to speak to a Google recruiter. I simply get automated emails that they don't want to go through with me. But if I ever catch a hold of one, I'll apply these tips.
- You're in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ex. you graduated in 2008-2010/now or your business sector got wiped out by COVID
- Despite your best efforts at networking, you simply never meet that magical person who can strap a booster rocket to your career/company
- You don't have a resilient financial and mental safety net in the form of good friends/family early in your career that enables you to take risks, or you got dealt a bad hand in the form of things like dependents or health issues and simply can't afford to take risks
- Despite all your work, you get blindsided by things completely out of your control. Ex. a big company straight up rips off your product/service/side gig or an executive at your company guts your project/department
- You don't have the magic paper credentials to get you through the doors at places you want to go because you didn't know you needed them earlier in life when they were practical to get
These are the kinds of things I want to see tackled with real-world career advice since I think they apply to a lot of people. For every lucky executive or entrepreneur there are many who were unlucky.