
Career Advice (2013) - jor-el
http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/career-advice/
======
AYBABTME
This might look like a very traditional advice, but I think spending some time
in the military is a pretty good thing to do. In particular, because it's
really hard, and to someone who's more intellectually oriented, it's really
alien and uncomfortable. You learn a lot about yourself when pushed to your
limits, and then going back to normal life, everything looks very easy and
achievable.

The author suggests doing something that makes you uncomfortable and makes you
learn about yourself. He proposes a bunch of interesting things that have
something lacking in common. They're all intrinsically good or semi-
anarchistic things. I prefer my "go in the military" advice because it's
completely opposite to one's anarchist penchant. And I think that's something
important: to have a well formed perception, you need to experience things you
don't necessarily agree with.

Note: here I assume that the reader is more prone to a free, somehow
anarchist, anti-authoritarian point of view, and I suggest spending a decent
effort in something contrarian to that.

~~~
kelseydh
My main hesitation is wasting my precious years of my youth on something that
won't advance my skills.

E.g. as somebody who picked up programming at 25, I already fear that my brain
is now struggling to pick up concepts that my younger brain would have.

~~~
nine_k
Don't be afraid of that. The programmer's profession is one of _constant_
study and learning. It would be impossible if people actually had trouble
learning things by 25, and the field won't move at the pace it does. if
people, or at least _some_ people, lost the ability to constantly learn by 45
or 55 or whatever age looks ridiculously old to you.

~~~
kelseydh
There's no denying the fact that many engineers quit programming by the age of
35.

~~~
judk
Mostly because they found rewarding opportunity as leaders of teams.

~~~
nine_k
Which, again, takes quite some learning to do well.

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henrik_w
By no means as radical or daring advice, but I've been very happy with my own
career as a SW developer (working professionally for close to 25 years now,
still loving it). I wrote about why I still think it's a good choice in "5
Reasons Why Software Developer is a Great Career Choice":
[http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/08/5-reasons-why-software-
dev...](http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/08/5-reasons-why-software-developer-is-
a-great-career-choice/)

~~~
sarciszewski
Hmm, from Stockholm, eh? Been programming for 25 years?

    
    
        <insert Stockholm syndrome joke here>
    

But seriously, just because you're happy with your own career doesn't mean
that it's a good choice for most people.

------
afarrell
> In 1971, Dr. Philip Zimbardo conducted a psychological experiment that is
> now popularly known as the “Stanford Prison Experiment.”

Why does a non-reproducible study without a control group in which the
experimenter was an active participant get cited so much? It wasn't an
experiment; It was a historical incident.

~~~
mercer
The same applies to Mazlow's hierarchy of needs and the addiction study
involving mice that is referred to every time an article on addiction appears
on HN (which seems to be a weekly thing almost).

I see these things as little more than memes at this point. I suppose the
purpose they serve is to question commonly-held beliefs, which is not all bad.
I just wish we'd question these things based on valid information.

(to be clear, it's not so much that the two examples I'm using are considered
100% bunk. It's rather that they're generally accepted to not be too well-
supported, and definitely not well enough to cite them so much)

~~~
afarrell
I thought Mazlow's hierarchy was a theory, one that should hopefully be tested
by experiment somehow.

Why is the addiction study not reproducible? I agree that you should perhaps
take an additional step of having 4 groups: heroin+rat park, placebo
heroin+rat park, heroin+rat jail, placebo heroin+rat jail. And blind the
researcher making the observations as to the nature of the substance.

------
pm90
This is very good advice. However, its often not that easy to really stake it
out on your own in other countries with no skills, especially in a labor rich
country like China or India. In that context, developing skills that allow you
to earn something is the no.1 priority.

It was only after I started a career in Software Engineering that I had the
means to explore other directions as well.

------
thelettere
Love this. One caveat that I wonder about: asking about the meaning of one's
life outsides the strictures of culture yields nothing - structures in that
case are more helpful (providing guidance) than harmful (foreclosing other
options).

Does the same apply for career?

