

Taking Career Risks in Your Twenties - kevinchau
http://kevinchau.org/post/51327700976/taking-career-risks-in-your-twenties

======
trustfundbaby
"Make peace with the worst case scenario"

\-- anon

Just remember ... it is called a 'risk' for a reason. You will most certainly
suffer some ill effects if you're doing this right, the key is to be okay with
it.

Coming out of college with a degree I didn't like I spent the next 3-4 years
heads down, learning and applying myself as a fullstack web developer and
software programmer. It paid off handsomely for me right as I turned 30 but
for most of my 20's I was behind all my peers whom I graduated with and my
family didn't really understand what I was doing.

All-in-all, I'm happy with the decision I made but the thing that gets me all
the time is ... what if it didn't work out?

~~~
kevinchau
Sometimes, failure is not an option. I hope that's what drove you to succeed.

~~~
trustfundbaby
Thats a very nice and it certainly informed my drive to succeed in a very
large way. But you must understand that sometimes, it just doesn't work out.

Making peace with that reality is actually more helpful that pursuing a
failing life path, just because you refuse to call it.

------
michaelochurch
Ouch. Having taken some terrible risks-- understand that none of them appeared
like such from the outset-- let me just come out and say:

... No.

You want to learn skills that will increase your job security, make you
happier, and advance your career. All that is true.

You might end up taking _financial_ risks that seem heavy. $100 for an out-of-
print book on a topic that you're really interested in. $750 (including
airfare and hotel) to go to a conference. A couple hundred dollars of
computing resources to try something out. Go for it. Those small financial
risks are minuscule if they're making your life and prospects better.

That's different from risking your whole career.

"Career" is just a make-nice word for "reputation" (plus the time series of
money infusions) and you don't want to take risks with that. Play a
conservative game, because people are assholes and will take advantage of you
as soon as there's a weakness in your story.

The tough part of all this is that it's hard to know where the worst career
risks are. For example, academia is presented as a low-risk track for smart
people, but the truth is that the long-term career risks are severe, even if
unexpected job loss is extremely uncommon. (Finance, on the other hand, has
more job volatility but much less existential career risk.)

~~~
kevinchau
Appreciate the additional details, Michael.

I agree, you're right. My thoughts stemmed from a lot of my peers who are
still in college wanting to focus on money straight off the bat, and put
themselves in to terrible places inside various companies.

~~~
michaelochurch
I feel like paying attention to salary signals is actually close to the
optimal strategy, most of the time. Here's why. Your salary is how much it
costs your employer to waste your time. (You'll find out that a lot of
managers like wasting their reports' time. It's a status thing.)

Should you take a $105,000 offer at a company you hate over $100,000 at a
great company? Of course not. However, if an offer comes in below market, you
have to question whether that's for legitimate economic reasons (lower cost of
living, cash-poor startup) or because it's a lower-level position than you
deserve and, if it's the second, run.

Unfortunately, it's still really hard (especially when you're young) to tell a
good job/company/role vs. a bad one before starting, so salary gets overvalued
as a signal, because of the opacity in the career variables that, in the long
term, matter a lot more.

~~~
lsc
>I feel like paying attention to salary signals is actually close to the
optimal strategy, most of the time.

Yeah, when I was starting out? I was always shocked at how closely the salary
correlated with how well you are treated in general. I mean, personally? If I
feel like I'm overpaid, I am okay dealing with more bullshit, but that's not
how it works. If anything, as I got paid more, less was expected of me. I
mean, less of the hard stuff. Showing up on time, for example, became much
less of a big deal as I got paid more. (For me, showing up on time is often
the hardest part of the job.) - I mean, sure, I was expected to solve harder
problems... and I was expected to actually come up with a working solution
more often... but that was never the hard part for me.

------
67726e
For what it's worth, your website doesn't work in Opera.

~~~
kevinchau
I'll admit, I didn't code it.

But I thought Opera switched to WebKit?

~~~
trustfundbaby
Not yet, I think the next version of the browser (13) is supposed to have it.

------
kalakagatha
Dude, proof read your blog posts. Risk taking and career power plays must be
all about comma splices, dangling modifiers, and incomplete sentences, if your
writing is any indication.

