It’s not that hard to be in the top 10% of your field | Hacker News Reader

It’s not that hard to be in the top 10% of your field

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47 pointsvictorronin14 comments

Certainly a nice positive message, and there's no doubt that consistency and discipline can take you very far. "Slow and steady wins the race" is a mantra we've all heard before.

But it really depends what "your field" is, and how old you are. For example, good luck pivoting mid-career from software engineering to professional hockey.

Also, "not that hard" means different things to each of us. Some people are so passionate about their hobbies that giving them up to be in the top 10% (according to whatever metric) is not even close to an attractive tradeoff.

In life we all have a trajectory determined by our genetics, environment, childhood, and life decisions. Don't let that limit your imagination and ambition. But you'd be foolish to believe the laws of physics don't apply to you.

OP here. First of all. You are 100% right. Genetics, environment, and everything else put you on some trajectory. It's much easier if this trajectory helps you. It's much harder if it works against you.

I overgeneralized the title. However, within the article, I mentioned that my blog is mostly for software engineers (and not hockey players).

Talking about getting in pro hockey is unfair. It's like saying, I want to be in the top 10% of Olympic participants( which actually put you in 0.000001% of all people participating in the sport).

It would be the same thing if I said, it's easy to get to top 10% of 1000 best AI experts in the world.

I am more talking about the whole field (all of the software engineers).

Fair points and thanks for bringing balance to the discussion, I did take some creative liberty there and may have extrapolated your thesis to an extreme that you did not necessarily advocate.

> For example, good luck pivoting mid-career from software engineering to professional hockey.

I think part of it is due to professional hockey employing only the top X% of players, with X really low. So even if you're top 10% it doesn't matter, at all.

“If you no longer go for a gap that exists, you are no longer a racing driver” -Ayrton Senna

When you are growing in your career go for the gaps in work that develop. Even and especially the work no one else wants.

I was hoping for more quantitative analysis. All this boils down to is do your work, go a little bit further, and be curious. Where I work, that’s just the baseline for getting into the company.

Working in any enterprise, it seems incredibly apt.

After spending a long time in enterprise, it does feel like 80% of people are there to warm up the chairs and fill in the occasional form. This is not a problem for mgmt because the more staff they have, the more budget they get to throw at their business objectives.

The solution IMO is to break the divide between the director level and the grunts by having upper mgmt walk the floor, and to have a coherent program of work with measurable outcomes. As far as I can tell this happens almost never.

Doing what you don't want to do, is hard though.

OP here. Two notes: - Doing what others don't want to do - And yeap. It's not trivial, but it's not rocket science.

Sturgeon's law says "90% of everything is crap"

So to be in the top 10% - just don't be crap.

I hope people won't take "just don't be crap" too literally.:))

The Pareto's principles is the result of applying the 10,000 hours principle.

It's not that hard just for 10% of the people.

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