Ask HN: How to stay engaged in your career? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to stay engaged in your career?

10 pointsthrowaway2018sc12 comments

I'm continually feeling disengaged at every workplace I've been at after some time.

Even though I perform well externally I'm starting to yearn for harder intellectual challenges. Data Science looks like one avenue of harder work, but it seems like I will have to retool my skillset completely as I am mostly an enterprise software developer. If I stick on with my work, I am sure I will be promoted but I'm not sure whether I will be fulfilled managing others who will replace doing my low level work.

Any advice? How do you sustain your passion for the work you do? How do you know when it's time to be okay with retooling and trying something radically different?

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It isn't abnormal to outgrow current positions, teams, or even companies as time goes on. Not only do we change as individuals (we grow up, want different things in life, start families, etc.), but companies also change (they hire more people, pivot, reorg, etc.).

To me, staying passionate and excited about the work you do is simply following what excites you. It's easy to feel more constrained than you actually are. You don't need to follow the management track at your company at all. You can be an IC forever. You can also find a new team, or a new company! You can be a consultant and chose which companies/projects to work with/on (and only choose the ones that genuinely give you goosebumps, they're that exciting!). You can, as you mentioned, transition into new fields/industries.

Your career doesn't have to be linear. I went to grad school to get my PhD in Neuroscience because I thought I wanted to be an academic professor. Two years in, I dropped out because, even though it was intellectually challenging, it didn't fan my flames. (I felt so trapped and uninspired.) I then worked as an operations manager at a startup called Homejoy. It was there where I realized how powerful coding was. After Homejoy, at 26yo, I learned to code. For two years, I did freelance web development and then almost exactly one year ago today, I started working on a side project that very quickly became the only thing I wanted to work on. I'm now a founder of a company (Key Values) and every single day I'm doing something that's new, challenging, and exciting to me.

>>> How do you know when it's time to be okay with [...] trying something radically different?

You should always be okay with trying something radically different (ie. don't be afraid). Maybe the real question is when do you pull the trigger?

It helps to first know what your personal values are, and then you can ask yourself: "Are my behaviors in alignment with my values?" If the answer is no, it's time to make a change!

If you ask me, you should be excited / stimulated / challenged / inspired every single day. We have a pretty limited amount of time on planet earth, so it's really on us to make the very most of it.

It's amazing how much you can learn in your free time, to get a taste of a new field. I've watched some lectures on type theory. Which is super hard, and I didn't understand most of it but it gave me a flavour. I attended meetups on compiler design, spent a few hours on machine learning courses online. Most of these things gave me a flavour of that field but no expertise of course.

I've settled on Elm development as something I am passionate about for various reasons (wont go into here) and want to spend a lot more time on, so I am building a side project that could become commercial in the future. So I found what works for me by experimenting in my spare time, but you only need a few hours to "spike" if you will like a topic.

I guess it's a bit like the 'fail fast' approach used in start ups. For example I thought that I 'should' enjoy stats/machine learning but really I hate it. Someone else can do that thanks, glad I only spent 10 hours on it.

This question strikes me as something I was searching for as well. About 3 years ago someone shared this with me and it changed my whole perspective of the "Life KPIs" I was monitoring.

Here it is:

"Life is not about happiness but rather the ability have purpose, to do something meaningful, and to have it matter that you lived at all. Keep adding value to the world big or small, and you'll never be short of gratitude."

I wont be prescriptive, instead, all I can tell you is that it's changed my life. I started optimizing for the above and haven't looked back since.

> How do you sustain your passion for the work you do?

This may be a cliche, but, passion comes automatically and sustains indefinitely if you are doing what you really like to do as opposed what you have to do because its your job. That's all there is to it. I have been lucky in that I found jobs that excited me, and I would be self employed soon, so I have no advice wrt finding passion in a forced marriage.

> How do you know when it's time to be okay with retooling and trying something radically different?

This feeds off the previous point. Retooling must be an organic development and not forced. If you are trying to learn something new simply to get a higher paying job with a cooler image, then you are doing it wrong, and are bound to revisit the feeling of being disengaged. However, if the need arises out of having to move on to the next stage because the current stage is lacking and the new stage will be a better replacement or better augments the current stage, you'll know it without needing to ask.

Take me as an example. I was a C++ developer focusing on desktop products all my career, which is more than a decade. I quit my well paying job in order to pursue some product ideas. A few months into the hiatus I realized that my products are better served and used on the web platform as opposed to being the traditional desktop products. Reasons included upgrade cycles and platform specific building and testing headaches. I had never gone beyond basic HTML and had to learn everything - DOM, JavaScript, databases, server side scripting and the whole gamut - from scratch. This was quite drastic a change. However, I was thoroughly immersed in the learning and experimenting process because that was an absolute necessity. It was imperative to my future plans. As painful as front end JS development is, I completely enjoyed (still enjoying) the experience. The backend development is even more fun. Had I shifted to web development only to get a "better and more challenging" job, I would not have survived three weeks.

Have you talked to many data scientists? Most of the ones I know spend a large chunk of time cleaning, and filtering data. And they don't describe it as particularly satisfying intellectually.

And the actual algo part is mostly just making some API calls.

In an analogous situation. I try to think of my current work as a stepping stone to other opportunities, but admittedly it's tough. I'm also genuinely interested in data science, but am skeptical that to do data science you have to 'retool'. I think it's about striking a balance between the skills you have and developing in areas that make you more productive. Good employers know how to motivate people and keep them engaged (if they speak up).

Find a way to keep learning new stuff. Preferably at least tangentially related to your work.

If you keep trying to find stuff to do that is interesting, and none of it can be related back to your job, then I think that would be a good time to start thinking about your long-term plans and how much longer you want to be where you are.

Marshall Goldsmith offers an excellent framework to self-assess and directly improve your own engagement > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k882gTkCCxY

I stay engaged by taking on more complex tasks and letting my line manager know if I don't feel like I'm moving in the direction I want. They help course correct my position/responsibilities to get my trajectory back where I'd like it to be.

I think once you have both of these engagement is lost:

1. You’re not learning anything new.

2. Hard work and results gets no more reward (either promotion/financial or even just appreciation).

I don’t think there’s anything you can do after this point. Start something new.

Making just barely enough money to survive is a good way to stay engaged.

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