Early-Career Setbacks Can Set You Up for Success | Hacker News Reader

Early-Career Setbacks Can Set You Up for Success

nytimes.com

77 pointsKaibeezy61 comments

Irresponsible sanguine BS. Path dependence is huge. Family problems, leaving school, bad boss, bad partner, spiteful interviewer, health/injury problems: these things can knock you out of the “high-achiever” game very quickly. Comebacks are rare and you can’t go back to being “high-potential”. This game has less to do with ability than mass psychology, like stock trading or politics. Hardships are a nice flair to your success story, but only if they come before stepping into the competitive part of the pipeline, or after you already made it out. The middle is brutal and unforgiving.

The other option is to get out of that game, stop living in the cult of personality, and focus your life on exchanging money for direct value to the customer ( i.e. indiehacker). This seems much harder than peddling a resume in exchange for salary or investment or a professorship or whatever.

On the other hand, they do give you perspective and help you realize that maybe being "high potential" isn't all its cracked up to be.

So what would the "responsible" message be, in your book? "If you get unlucky and have bad boss, family problem, health problem, etc, too bad, sucks to be you!"?

Cause trust me, people who have bad stuff happen to them already know it sucks.

This is a good point. I don't know. I suppose there are two options: 1) stick with it 2) do something else. I have heard of cognitive biases in both directions, and I don't know which is generally stronger* in most people. Probably the best advice is to seek better advice from someone that knows what it takes to win.

*You could probably study this with outcomes of job switching and divorces. I'm not sure how though...

Do something else is great advice.

My manager was a great people manager and would generally rank high in terms of emotional intelligence (imo), but getting into details and weeds was not his strength.

When the problem we are trying to solve requires a decision maker to remove abstractions and deal head on with complexity, he would do the opposite. He would avoid the tough conversations - Every. Single. Time.

My boss saw his reports (me specifically in this case) as the abstraction. It removed complexity from his plate and made his job easier, but honestly, his poor decision making set me up to fail. I did my best, but when it was clear that I need management support and I won’t receive it, I had no other choice.

I left. :)

The responsible message would to report the study accurately and not suggest that the experience of scientists writing grants is broadly applicable to everyone.

"Family problems, leaving school, bad boss, bad partner, spiteful interviewer, health/injury problems"

Ruthlessly competitive people are affected by all of those things. But because they're ruthlessly competitive, they usually won't allow those things to set them back.

Now, you don't have to be ruthlessly competitive, but you should at least be aware that other people are, so don't think they'll be set back by the same things that set you back.

I actually thought it was weird OP mentioned those things, even when they are exactly prime example of the people the article and many of us are talking about.

You see them, for example, at College/University (in my country, at least): They are single and have to keep their parents so they have to work at the same time as they study; or they have families so they have to go to night/weekends school and they manage to overachieve and graduate while working and having that family; I have a friend with short arms, like a T-rex, and he works right next to me (he sets up his own environment so it’s more ergonomic for him), and he goes to parties, drinks, plays soccer with us and he has a family.

My own experiences are not that... how to say it, bold, but I have my fair share of setbacks, but when you see these people, and while they are not the majority, at least here in my country you see a lot of them. Some of us suffer health or family problems, but at some point you realize that's life and simply try to tackle such issues however you can while keeping sanity. The first examples I mentioned... I don’t know how they do it, but I guess that’s what the article is trying to say.

I actually agree with this. You can steamroll a lot of problems if you never depend on other people for anything, truly don't care about people that need you, and can't be distracted from your mission.

However, it seems this not the typical "high-achiever" game of institutionalized low-risk resume and relationship building. This is the high-risk "ultra-achiever" game of household-name superlatives like Jeff Bezos, Floyd Mayweather, and the like.

Of the people I know personally that made it big as entrepreneurs and athletes, it was a major setback that started their success by knocking them out of a game they were losing. They were the ones that could let go of it and do something else, over and over. Others with the same setbacks ended up dead.

"If everything did not go perfect at the start, you're hosed for good." Sounds like a real winning mentality.

If your idea of success is of the unicorn-flavored, Elon Musk, startup/VC-world kind, then it's pretty much true.

So not being a billionaire is failure? Wow.

Anyone can experience hardship. Resilience is a powerful force to overcome it. It doesn’t solve all problems obviously, however a growth mindset[1] is still invaluable.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset#Fixed_and_growth

That seems pretty obvious because anyone who succeeds on the first try just got lucky.

Reality is very complex and it takes years of failure to understand the full complexity of anything. Sometimes you just try something and it just happens to work the first time; this doesn't mean that you know what you're doing.

If you succeed too early, it can give you false confidence about your abilities and this makes you unwilling to accept advice from 'unsuccessful' people who have a very thorough understanding of what's going on.

People who've endured constant failure throughout their careers and who never gave up are often way more talented than successful people who've only experienced a few failures.

Failure is relentless. It's the default outcome for essentially every action, no matter how well it was planned beforehand. There is almost always something completely unexpected which pops out of nowhere and ruins everything.

Small things which pop out of nowhere to ruin everything are extremely common. When you have a lot of capital, you don't even notice those, but if don't have capital and you've failed many times before, you learn to operate at a different level; the essence of your strategy is not about looking at numbers and making broad, obvious projections, instead, your strategy is centered around anticipating and mitigating all possible small unexpected things that can go wrong.

> When you have a lot of capital

just causes a different set of failure modes (cocaine burnout, celeb wannabe, reality shock, etcetera).

> Failure is relentless

Very true.

I don't agree with this article and this culture of making failure a beautiful thing. A Failure is a failure.

When people fail, a lot of things go bad. Many of them get depressive, they go through a lot.

It's like saying that having abusive parents make you a strong person. Completely bullshit.

I doubt this has any positive effect on "setting somebody up" for success. It is much easier to be successful if you don't mess it up. For most of the world, people aren't even allowed to fail once.

I agree failure is a failure but not that it's bad. Failure is neither good nor bad by itself. I think it's important to learn that a failure is not a reason to hate yourself - which is what usually feeds the depression. It's not constructive to dwell on the failure. It's necessary in fact to find out what the learning is and then see what strategies exist to minimize harm. That's not glorifying it in anyway. Falling down, for example, is not a beautiful thing but it's imperative to learn to get up - otherwise, what's the alternative? The article seem to make the claim that setbacks train your mind to accept failure as part of the process and not treat it any differently. What's wrong in that? There's no need to be a contrarian in everything.

+1.

Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is “I am bad.” Guilt is “I did something bad.” - Dr Brene Brown. Failure treated as a guilt may lead to learning and be fixed, but if treated as Shame may lead to depression.

I get your point, but this is a bit simplistic. One also has to realize when a game is full out rigged — you did your best (perhaps the best) and you still failed because perhaps success wasn’t allowed for you. Then you need to learn to play a different game.

Sort of like when college failures end up as leaders and go into tell everyone to work hard because obviously that is what is stopping everyone else /s

There's a spectrum between "I failed -- awesome!" and "I failed -- I will stop trying". I think articles like this are trying to push us away from the second end of the spectrum, not necessarily push us to the first.

There's also an art to realizing you've failed (or are going to fail), and making the best outcome possible from it. Many things don't work out the way you expect them to first time. Things may initially be "failures," but maybe ultimately be some form of "success."

But failure can also be a message that you're doing the wrong thing.

> It's like saying that having abusive parents make you a strong person. Completely bullshit.

The population being investigated is significantly smaller than that, though.

Specifically, it's people with STEM PhDs, and everything that comes along with that: Likely from a wealthier than average family, performed extremely well in school (at least in their area of interest), etc. And they're in a position to write a grant proposal, which requires a good deal of confidence.

So, among those extremely successful and intelligent people who are very confident and likely never experienced much hardship at all, if you experience a setback you may be better off in the long run.

It is useful to learn to expect and deal with failure. It is also useful to read about people who have failed yet succeeded in the end, you can learn from it. Obviously it's not absolute that a failure is positive as much as it isn't absolute that failure is damning. One thing is certain though, try hard enough and you can fail at pretty much anything, so you better get ready to deal with a failure or two if you are trying to be successful.

> It's like saying that having abusive parents make you a strong person. Completely bullshit.

I don't get this analogy at all.

Failure falls on a pretty broad spectrum, from minor setbacks to complete catastrophes. IME, failures across a wide center of that spectrum are really valuable (if you choose to learn from them), with the left being not very useful, and the right being disastrous. Ideally, one doesn't take so much risk that their failures fall on the right.

Personally, I feel like most of my wins today are consequences of my past failures.

Failure is also normal, and common - and frankly every healthy adult needs to learn how to cope with failure.

Modern childhood seems to go out of its way to isolate children from feelings of failure and learning healthy coping mechanisms thereof.

With this in mind, its probably helpful to learn the sting of failure earlier rather than later in your career.

A failure is a failure, but it can also be a learning experience. I was once forced into a failure because despite my protests my employer sold a solution that was no longer vendor supported. The sales person didn't want to hear it, the business owner didn't want to hear it. They just wanted to make the sale. By the time I spent months trying to fix what couldn't be fixed the former marine business owner gave me some "come back with your shield or on it" speech to go out and fix the problem or else. I tried to fix the problem but couldn't and chose or else, i.e. I quit.

I learned to document everything in writing so that I have a paper trail for later. Fortunately it didn't come to a lawsuit from the unhappy customer but it got close. Having everything documented so it was 100% clear I never wanted to sell the system and spent scads of time trying to fix it anyway, not to mention communication from the vendor saying "It work won't and we told you it won't work" would have made life much easier for me if it came to discovery.

failure is a weird word, it can mean all kinds of things. I can fail to get up on time for example.

i wouldn't consider What happened to you a failure, that's just work. Wrong decisions happen all day every day in all kinds of businesses. What part of the experience would you consider the "failure"? The only thing i can think of is just lack of experience for that particular situation. I wouldn't qualify lack of experience as failure.

A failure to me is not delivering what you promised with it being in your full control to do so. But, like i said, failure can mean all kinds of things.

Yeah it was more failure to protect myself, really. I was 18 at the time and still early in my work career.

There's another thing about this article. They are comparing near misses with narrow wins. At that point, the near miss vs narrow win might be put down to luck, and people who had a near miss might learn from it and work harder. People who had a huge loss might drop out completely or change careers or so on but they are not being talked about here.

Having abusive parents is not your failure. That analogy does not work.

Maybe it’s just the choice of words, but a failure that presents an opportunity to learn is great! But it’s true that there are many kinds of failure where that attitude is completely impermissible. You know, the life or death stuff, or the illegal stuff.

In the cases where the stakes aren’t so high, then we’re just talking about compassion and not being a complete jerk to someone who fucked up.

But it’s absolutely necessary to come up with an actionable follow up if you do this. That’s where the success is. Just throwing up your hands and saying “awww gee, I done did it all wrong!” and letting the opportunity slip by is a great way to encourage even more failure, and not the useful kind.

That is to say, it’s gotta be failure with some self-imposed accountability.

Failure is not a binary 1 or 0 thing. There are at least 256 levels. If your failure was down to 193 in the first decade of your career, you may be better off over three decades than soneone who was consistently at 240 in the first decade and later went down to 170 in the second decade, because you may have greater information exposure, it all depends on what happened.

Also...please define failure?

Yes and there is another dimension also! Failure is a vector, you can fail on your career progression but succeed on health, happiness, family, meaning, doing right to others. I can count exactly zero people ive met who have succeeded in all four categories. You choose where to fail, and how much to fail on a spectrum in order to succeed on other dimensions.

Early career setbacks are also likely to set you up for much lower lifetime earnings. Like it or not, how much more you will earn in your next job depends on how much you were making in your previous one. So does how much more you will earn after you get promoted (which happens more often early on). In negotiation this is called "anchoring". So it _really_, _really_ pays, quite literally, to find, get, and hold the highest paying job available right out of school.

How much you make is a powerful signaling mechanism that (if you have a modicum of skill to back it up) utterly dominates everything else, and has a compounding effect over the rest of your career. You will be able to afford to not care about money as much 10-20 years in when you're all set, but initially it's very important that you get the highest paying job you can.

While I really can't argue with the "get the highest paying job you can as early as you can", there are also many market dynamics at play and quite frankly your own ability to navigate and bluff and take risks are a major part of it. But yes, on average I would say, aim for the highest paying job you can.

>> navigate and bluff and take risks

All of this is _much_ easier to do when you're pulling down six figures right out of school.

>Early career setbacks are also likely to set you up for much lower lifetime earnings. Like it or not, how much more you will earn in your next job depends on how much you were making in your previous one. So does how much more you will earn after you get promoted (which happens more often early on). In negotiation this is called "anchoring". So it _really_, _really_ pays, quite literally, to find, get, and hold the highest paying job available right out of school.

I graduated in 2012 with a biomedical engineering degree, and the vast majority of my collegiate graduating class made more than me right out of school, including the non-engineers; I worked as a server/busboy and also as a cashier for about 6 months while constantly applying for jobs. In case you're wondering, I did have internship experience most summers in college, nothing stellar, but it was on there. I will say that 2012/2013 was an absolutely awful time to be a non-CS fresh grad in the job market. I hadn't imagined working as a server after completing an engineering degree, and the difficulty I faced in getting industry roles led me to immediately apply for a MS program.

My first "relevant"/industry job was a contract role at a medical device company that paid $22/hr in an extremely high COL area (SF Bay Area). I was likely in the bottom 15th percentile of earnings at this point. 3 years later, I'd worked my way up to ~70k annualized salary. All while doing the MS program part time.

Today, sure there are plenty of people whose earnings far exceed mine, but I'd be surprised if I wasn't at least in the 80th-90th percentile of both salary and lifetime earnings of my graduating cohort.

Now, obviously you won't hear any objection from me against finding, getting, and holding the highest paying job out of school. But I certainly question if it's really as important as people claim it is. And I will say I don't know if I'd be earning as much as I do today, and I'm not sure I'd have a MS degree, had I landed a better, higher paying role out of college.

Frankly I can't imagine why someone would stay in Bay Area if they can't land at least a $80-100/hr job. How do you pay $3K/mo rent on $22/hr? How do you buy that $5 gallon gas or pay twice as much for utilities?

MS is a waste of time IMO, and I say so as a MS myself (my alma mater only offers 6-year MS degrees, so I couldn't bail; if I could, I would). I got zero benefit out of my master's, and I'd be further along in my career (as well as monetarily) if I studied 2 years less. In fact, I'd say I got zero benefit from my degree period, other than to serve as a confirmation to the potential employer that I can survive at the toughest tech school in the country. That's worth something, but I wish I could be done with this hazing ritual in a year or two. Everything I use day to day I had to learn myself, school was barely involved.

70K is where things _start_ in the software industry nowadays, for the bottom of the barrel candidate who's still able to code somewhat competently. Talented grads pull $100K+ right out of the gate pretty easily. FAANG will drop $120-150K on you like it's nothing, and if you don't suck it goes way up from there. Quite obviously, these numbers are US-only. Few people in Europe make this much even at the more senior levels, let alone as a fresh grad.

Strange post.

First, you realize the vast majority of workers in the Bay are not software engineers? And even less people make $80-100/hr?

Second, when you make $22/hr, you aren't staying in a studio for $3k a month. You're in a house sharing a bathroom with a few others roommates for <$1000/mo.

Third, you may have missed the part where I indicated while I currently work in tech, I studied biomedical engineering and worked in the medical device industry. BME salaries do not start at a floor of $70k like software.

As for why? Had I not done all the grinding early in my career I wouldn't have ended up at a "top tier" tech company today. THAT is why one stays in the Bay Area. I agree with your point that everything useful you must to learn yourself for the most part, rather than being taught it in school, but I disagree with the rest of your sentiments.

Why is it "strange"? I'm referring to software industry in particular, with its expectations around career progression, income, standard of living, etc. It's like I was talking about lawyers in SV, and you'd responded with "do you realize the majority of people who are in SV are janitors".

This is borne by my own experience, and is not guaranteed to apply to other industries. Most have much lower earning potential, and for them SV is truly unlivable, so I don't get what they're looking for there either.

That's a poor and inaccurate analogy; neither the original link nor my comment was specifically about the software industry. In fact, my comment was specifically _not_ about it. You responded to my comment, not the other way around, and are going off into some tangent about your personal livelihood, which is hardly relevant to the article as a whole.

There's an unfortunately-not-uncommon "software engineer superiority complex" and general myopia and my spidey sense is going off right now.

Anyhow, I'm not sure how much more to spell it out. My early career setbacks and determination to stay in the Bay Area led me to my current situation in a competitive tech company in a career I enjoy. Had I followed your worldview I'd probably have left for some miserable place in the middle of nowhere and be far less successful than I am today.

Lots of disagreement against this article.

Today I'm at a Letter Corp in tech, and while sure there are plenty of people whose earnings far exceed mine, I'd be surprised if I wasn't at least in the 80th-90th percentile of both salary and lifetime earnings of my graduating cohort.

That's a great story, and I think something a lot of people need to hear things like your story especially for the jump from school to working. I have a friend who basically became a nomad and only recently landed his first professional job, and it seemed like every year he got more anxious and doubtful about himself.

Absolutely. Better to do a startup early and see it fail than make the same mistake mid-career. It showed me startups are a mug’s game.

Yeah it’s best to get the lesson early on that venture-backed startups are 99% of the time just smoke and mirrors.

What about bootstrapped startups vs. VC backed startups?

This article seems to be drawing a very broad feel-good conclusion from a very weak foundation.

Non-paywalled: http://archive.is/bUZBu

"Setbacks are an integral part of a scientific career, yet little is known about their long-term effects. Here we examine junior scientists applying for National Institutes of Health R01 grants. By focusing on proposals fell just below and just above the funding threshold, we compare near-miss with narrow-win applicants, and find that an early-career setback has powerful, opposing effects. On the one hand, it significantly increases attrition, predicting more than a 10% chance of disappearing permanently from the NIH system. Yet, despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run. Moreover, this performance advantage seems to go beyond a screening mechanism, suggesting early-career setback appears to cause a performance improvement among those who persevere. Overall, these findings are consistent with the concept that “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” which may have broad implications for identifying, training and nurturing junior scientists."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12189-3

Well duh. If you're barely getting the grant, you're not going to be in a place where you can impress people and progress very well.

If you miss the grant by a bit, you'll find somewhere where you're a better fit.

It's not the setback that helps

We find that the near-miss group naturally received significantly less NIH funding in the first five years following treatment, averaging $0.29 million less per person (Fig. 2d, t-test p-value < 0.05, Cohen’s d = 0.28), which is consistent with prior studies. Yet the funding difference between the two groups disappeared in the second five-year period (Fig. 2d, t-test p-value > 0.1, Cohen’s d = 0.02).

From the paper [0]. This does not look like the rejects found similar opportunities in more suitable places.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12189-3

[Note: I can't read the article. Sorry.]

Early-career setbacks can also set back your career permanently.

My first job out of college was with Taligent. That did not go well. (Well, there was OS/2 for a short time before that...) Then I worked on the WorkplaceOS/IBM's uKernel. That didn't go well either.

Since those first years, I went back to grad school, worked for a university, and got comfortable for far too long. Then I went back to IBM. (Don't do that.) Since then, I have worked for various "enterprise" things and other low-risk, low-reward endeavors. My salary peaked at about $120k.

Be careful when you take advice from people who are successful.

Worth noting that the paper is specific to science careers, while the Times article tries to extrapolate it to careers in general regardless of field.

People who fail are also bigger risk takers, I wonder if this has any effect. I've failed a couple times already and I always come back stronger. It seems like it is because I take risks that keep things growing. If I wasn't a risk taker, I'd probably be where I started, and even though maybe I'd be happier, I'd be much less successful.

failures in the first phases of your career may mean you can come back stronger than those who never stumbled

Similar to plants that live in too controlled of micro-climates. They don't develop the correct stress hardening and fall over / wilt at the first sign of normal weather.

Love how we play a game where only about 1 in 5 people tops can "win" or suffer harshly.

Failure can be a powerful teacher.

licks finger and holds it up

Nope, still screwed.

Encouraging, but I'll remain cautious about this. Regardless of early career stumbles I'll be successful by the average person's idea, but I doubt I'll be considered successful by my own ideals or by that of many people here, for example.

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