
Now What? - raganwald
http://lispy.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/now-what/
======
andreyf
_I mean… will any employer possibly care if I told them that I've worked
through half of SICP, internalized maybe thirty Emacs commands, can do some
moderately interesting stuff with sed and pipes on Unix, and can write crappy
Perl code? Will all of this stuff remain merely a secret weapon of mine while
I continue on in work environments where such tools are unknown, actively
feared, or completely off the radar?_

 _Now what?_

Start your own company (duh, right?), or become a manager at one. If you know
these things, you can probably spot talent a lot better than the average
manager... and companies want managers who can spot talent well.

------
whacked_new
Man, I'm normally not a spelling Nazi, and I follow his point and all, but
"per say" really ruined this piece for me.

------
Hexstream
... What was this post about? (or: "Now what?")

~~~
learninglisp
An average programmer learns a variety of tools that lead him to a series of
epiphanies.

With his eyes open, he no longer can cope with the lame blubiness of his
career, but he finds him self pigeonholed by his old job description. He
doesn't have the credentials to strike off into a job that would allow for
more professional growth. But he had no idea that the many small development
choices he'd been making over time would lead to this crisis. Now what?

~~~
mechanical_fish
Grad school.

I'm not normally found arguing in _favor_ of the grad school option, but every
tool has its use. If you're in a place where you can't imagine getting a job
outside of the narrow boundaries of your resume, you need a different
environment with different friends and colleagues. It's time to escape the
resume-ruled world for a while and get a master's degree.

When you emerge from school it will be like being born again: Society will
understand it when you declare that you no longer want to be known as a Blub
guy -- you'll have moved to a higher plane, or at least a different one. Plus
you'll have a lot of smart friends who might want to help start a company.

Other options include: start a company [1], downshift your career (find the
job that you think you want, find the entry-level job that leads toward that,
and get that job -- swallow your pride), build some independent projects
(websites or open-source projects) and launch them... or all of the above.

[1] Here on news.yc I'm contractually obligated to include this advice
somewhere in every post.

~~~
whacked_new
> Grad school. This is not the first time I've seen you write something like
> this; so as a general question, how would one who hasn't had much
> involvement in academia (perhaps ever) get back into (perhaps into)
> academia?

~~~
mechanical_fish
Let's define our terms carefully. When I use the word "academia", I usually
mean "getting a job that's on the career path to becoming a tenured professor,
at least in theory".

If that's what you're asking about, I can talk about that, although my first
advice will be to forget all about it. ;) But that's not what I'm recommending
in the post above. I'm not even recommending going to grad school for the
credential, exactly. I'm recommending going to grad school because it's a
great, society-approved excuse to quit your job, get the hell out of your
cubicle, take some interesting classes, do some small and interesting projects
(either for school or on the side) with a bunch of other smart people who have
similar interests, and change the direction of your resume.

(There are obviously other ways to accomplish the goal of changing your
career's direction, and one of those might be better. But this particular
scenario -- a person who feels trapped by their own job history -- just
smelled to me like someone who might prefer the grad school route. It's a
fairly safe, classic, and well-respected way to mix your life up a bit for a
year or two.)

~~~
sofal
I'm quitting my BigCo job in one week to do exactly this for exactly those
reasons. It's almost creepy how well you described it.

