My 25-year engineering career retrospective | Hacker News Reader

My 25-year engineering career retrospective

hybridhacker.email

158 pointsthunderbong120 comments

Disagree with most points. This seems like another "hyper-productivity" driven blog post that is so common nowadays. If you don't grind 10h and have a clear career path, you are a failure. Couldn't disagree more.

- Have good sleep habits. Sleeping 4-6 hours per day because of "productivity" is not cool.

- Don't be obsessed with "productivity" and "efficiency". It's okay to take days off and relax.

- Which leads to... Prioritize your mental and body health.

- Career path? Big aspirations? Nothing in life is promised except death; don't forget to enjoy every day. Build habits that you truly enjoy doing every day.

- Take care of your family and friends. Don't see people as a "network" to use for your own benefit. Love and be loved as a genuine human.

- Absolutely do write blogs and do some public speaking because you enjoy it, but not to clickbait people into buying your motivational courses.

In summary, find balance and true happiness for yourself. This post was sad to read.

For sleep, I really enjoyed Matthew Walker's book "Why We Sleep".

It really helps cement the need for sleep, even if you _think_ you don't need it. Not getting enough is going to kill you in the long run, both mentally and physically. And no, you're not "built different" if you think you don't need 7 hours of sleep.

While I agree that getting good sleep is necessary, I think the book does tend to over exaggerate the negatives. Alexey Guzey's article on this[1] is excellent and I recommend everyone to give it a read.

[1] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

Also worth checking out his retrospective a couple of years later: https://guzey.com/2022-lessons/#get-minimum-possible-sustain...

I'm not sure whether he's gone back on any of the specific criticisms he made, but his overall attitude towards sleep certainly seems different to before.

the fact that humans need a book to tell them sleep is good shows how broken this society is.... or how stupid the average person is

* Work four-day weeks. It's a much better work/life balance.

Interesting would polyphasic sleep (sleeping little, but in a polyphasic pattern) fix that? Probably not, since it tends to eliminate slow-wave sleep where body regeneration happens, in favor of REM sleep (brain consolidation), but that's an idea worth checking out, scientifically.

From the article

* Enforce strict boundaries between work and personal life.

* Learn to decline tasks that could put these boundaries at risk.

> If you don't grind 10h and have a clear career path, you are a failure.

The post doesn't say this.

And it's a post about someone's career, it makes sense that they talk about their career, not about their friends, and the inevitability of death.

There's having perspective and then there's completely missing the point. People should be able to discuss an aspect of their life without giving an overall life philosophy.

Note that this is just one perspective.

I also have almost 25 years under my belt in total, now, and I consider myself very successful. Yet I am a very different person than the author here. A lot of the points don't resonate with me. Just to pick two random points: I sleep a lot, more than average (at least 8.5 hours almost every day, but often more), and I started coding very young, always enjoying it (author sounds like he just recently started really getting into it), still doing it for fun.

I have reached every career goal I wanted, and more. I've been promoted past my goal. I have been and still am very well paid (this was also never a direct goal for me). I shipped some impressive stuff.

The advice I would give, is: Do what you are passionate about, what really interests you. But of course I have been very lucky, there.

On the same boat with 25 years of programming behind me, and similar thoughts.

My 3 counter points to OP.

1. Sleep as much as you can. Looking back I have produced the best results when I've slept close to 9 hours. Too much sleep is almost never a problem because I can't produce high quality code for more than about 6 hours per day. When I try, I just tread water, because I have to fix what I did the day before. (If you have more than 10% monotoneus coding you can do almost asleep, you haven't yet fixed the code to eliminate that work, or are in the wrong place.)

2. Try to get to a place where your "career" doesn't matter. This is a privilege that may be impossible to get, but if you can, try to be "just" a team member many times during the years, no matter how high up the ladder you've ended up earlier. IMO that's the best way to keep learning and improving in the craft.

3. Most importantly, read, understand and internalize how you impact to the world as a technologist. Get a deep understanding about society, ecology and ethics related to technology. Know where the money flows, keep crystal clear who gets wealthy and what gets destroyed to generate that wealth. Aim to get to a place where your code is net positive for the world based on that knowledge.

> The advice I would give, is: Do what you are passionate about, what really interests you.

I don't mean to offend, and I'm happy for you that you've been so successful, but the advice does not make sense for people whose interest is not in popular demand.

For example, there are many failed artists out there, and it would be more helpful to these people if they were given realistic advice early on.

Finally, I meet a lot of young people (developers as well), who do not know exactly what their passions are. They are quite miserable in feeling lost, searching for their "true passion" -- which they probably simply don't have.

> I don't mean to offend, and I'm happy for you that you've been so successful, but the advice does not make sense for people whose interest is not in popular demand.

That argument comes up often enough, but it's built on an assumption that "interest" is singular. Most everyone is interested in a wide range of things, and they'd be happy doing any of them at a high level. Some of those are likely to pay enough to cover the bills.

Exactly, I find this argument weak. People can have many interests. I enjoy gardening, photography, reading history, and travel. It turns out those are things you do not get paid for.

Fortunately I also find financial markets interesting enough that the programming problems they present to be engaging. It helps if you have "T shaped skills" as they say, where you can apply your technical skills & domain knowledge.

Most jobs will not be as fun as sitting at home and arguing on the internet, for example.

In some cases, you can align interests though. At peak, I had a job that involved traveling almost 50% of the time. It wasn't all fun and games but enough was.

Well that's the idea right.

If you have the mindset to make the best of things - hey I'm traveling, let me do a little sightseeing and max out rewards points, cool.

If you view your job exclusively as a burden then every minute commuting/in office/logging in/travelling is bad, and you probably won't have a great career.

I was never in a position where every minute had to be scheduled so business travel actually allowed me to subsidize a lot of personal travel which I made a lot of use of (and I like doing). I understand it's a burden on many people for various reasons--including not having a choice and routinely going to less interesting places.

Also, I have seen several times someone "following their passion" and doing something that was not required by the business. The end result is a huge mess of overcomplicated things that doesn't do what was needed and no one else can fix.

Many times the business just needs a boring old solution for a tedious problem that no one would be passionate about, and it's normal to engage in that kind of grind.

I would change that advice to "do what you are passionate about, among the things that the business needs, and understand that sometimes you just can't do that".

On the other hand I have seen several devs who were just good at quickly tackling whatever was necessary at the moment and became very successful without ever showing a sign of passion for computing. For them it's just a craft and they go do some hobby after that.

On the other hand, I often do non-required things just because I'm curious and they have often been boons for my team. As an example, as a proj manager at a big org I went through the steps of setting up my own tenant account in our org's AWS system so I could play around with compute nodes. A year later they had issues with the team that managed the AWS environment and couldn't create new accounts for almost a year. As a result, no one in the org could bring on new contracts requiring cloud computing. Except my team: Our contractors could be added to my tenant account and continue work. This was a huge deal when we were trying to get a few experimental projects off the ground very quickly.

Almost all of my success has been a result of doing things no one else did because I was curious about them.

That's just because your metric for success is different. I consider someone who was able to pay their bills and do what they really care about well everyday for 10 years far more successful than the person who did a passing job at something they didn't care about but were able to afford a house or whatever.

My advice is do what you care about and make sure you won't go broke. If you're good and lucky you'll have that opportunity. If you're extremely lucky you'll do better financially.

Ah, to be capable of being that optimistic/irresponsible

Money doesn't solve all of life's problems... But it does solve a lot of them, and just paying the bills is a safety factor of approximately 1

Depends on where you live I suppose, but you can get by even on unemployment benefits in most of the EU from my experience. That's a good safety factor.

And I don't think anyone here said to only do things you want to do at all costs. I doubt _anyone_ gets away with that. But I'd argue you can generally use the skills related to your passion to make good money.

Being realistic: If you're doing things you reasonably enjoy 80% of the time, that's pretty much a dream job.

Yes. This sort of advice can be so misguiding, even though it came from a good place.

Reality is that your passion is only profitable if it’s in high demand or if you are an outlier. It looks like OP is technically capable so he is probably above the median, and he is passionate about a field in high demand. That’s like a double bingo! A lot of people on HN fall into these two buckets so for them this advice works.

You left off an important caveat from the next sentence:

> But of course I have been very lucky, there.

You do have to be lucky enough to be relatively secure in life, but nearly everyone in tech can achieve an adequate living. Not everyone will be a top earner and there are of course compromises you have to make, but should actually consider if the trade-offs for potentially earning less yet being more fulfilled at work are ones they are happy with.

In some sense I'm the starving artist in my family. I eschewed money and moving up the tech management hierarchy to pursue my passion. In pursuit of my goals, I've previously been unemployed and in recent years paid 10x less than I was in big tech.

I'm totally happy with that trade-off.

> For example, there are many failed artists out there, and it would be more helpful to these people if they were given realistic advice early on.

I don't like "follow your passion" advice either, but as someone who knows more than one failed artists in real life, I believe it has little to do with whether they followed the passion (anecdotally ofc).

As others are commenting, failure has little to do with "following passion". There is a market for everything.

I tell my children to do whatever they want.

But I also tell them they'll always have programming skills in their back pocket should they ever need to finance their passions.

I'm also 25 years into my programming career, and since my children arrived, I've been getting less sleep and have become accustomed to it. I must admit that my mental capacity and productivity have plummeted, as has my overall mood. It reminds me of the time early in my programming career when I quit using weed because I noticed a significant reduction in focus and memory, especially when working on complex codebases. I wish I could return to regular sleep patterns, but after a few years, it seems extremely difficult, if not impossible, without medications, which I'd prefer to avoid.

I hope the OP can try sleeping longer and compare his productivity.

Excellent advice I also give! If your main passion is something other than making money (I know plenty of people whose primary passion that seems to be), I guess you can't really go wrong with trying to do something you're good at and passionate about for a living.

Back when I was 17, I enrolled into a CS focused high school (we have these trade specific ones in Germany). It was right after the dotcom bust. My class was rather empty. I got lots of comments about how "you can't get rich with computers anymore". For me, and the other folks in my class, "who cares?" was the answer. We'd been obsessed with computers since we could think, seemed odd that anybody would get into it just for the money.

Great response. You sound like me. Sleep more people!

Im with you on the follow your interests, but one observation I have, most people cant figure out step 1, the "interests"...

Well I don't match with your experience almost at all (20 years under the belt, but I don't count 5 years at university studying software engineering so almost same range as author). Self-assessments of your own success are frankly... looking for polite word as non-native speaker... not advised, since ego creeps in, such as in your case.

I don't see a single mention about private life, which is where real long term satisfaction from life comes from, career is just an unimpressive optional cherry on the top. I don't see words like balanced, happy and so on.

I never had any goals, just went with the flow. I moved when I felt like it, stayed when I preferred it. Listened to my intuition with mix of cold rationality, always. Increased my income cca 30x over those 20 years, for exactly same work (100% permie), but obviously at different companies and even countries. That tells nothing about 'success in life', at least to person like me.

Having tons of personal passions like extreme mountain sports, learning 4 foreign languages and using them continuously, having healthy lifestyle, seeing the world as a backpacker for what it truly is, choosing a good wife, trying to raise 2 kids well (thus playing the game on life on hard difficulty, more challenging but also more rewarding just like say in computer games). Career success? Meh, thats not what life is about, not to me.

Have you ever wondered if your 30x revenue increase is what allowed you to pursue these passions, be able to find a good wife and raise your children?

I'm sorry if this comes out a bit strong but i really find this discourse kind of gross. "Yeah I have a ton of money but it doesn't matter to me. My real happiness is that I can go scuba diving in fun places 3 times a year. That's real success for me."

Like you I consider that my success in life is tied to my family more than my career, but I won't bury my head and pretend that one doesn't enable the other.

You need money to say money does not matter :)

Like oxygen, money is only important when you’re not getting enough of it.

I have no idea what you read in my post to come to such a conclusion. I was talking about career because the blog post was about career. I am not singularly focused on work, quite the opposite. The older I get, the more time I invest into my numerous hobbies and my wonderful family instead.

> Since I was younger, I have always been obsessed with time and how to save more of it.

> This is probably why my body got used to sleeping just 4-6 hours per day, and today I find myself reflecting at 4 AM in the morning on what I could have done better

You can die up to 30-40 years earlier than you would've by playing this game of training yourself to sleep less. Heart failure from accumulated sleep deprivation is a big deal.

Indeed. I earned a nice stress-induced LAD heart attack at age 46 in no small part due to cheating my body out of sleep in order to attain unreasonable productivity.

But think of all the value you generated for the shareholders!

In my case it had less to do with unreasonable demands from management and more as a result of my own workoholic mentality and unrealistic expectations.

I feel like I am making better life choices when well-rested. Think about it. To be well-rested 95% of the time has a huge impact on a knowledge workers 25-year retro.

That’s why they’re writing their retrospective now?

No you can't, e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep21480

The abstract of that article concludes: "The results suggested that 7 hours/day of sleep duration should be recommended to prevent premature death among adults."

Your link shows a U shape around 7 hours for all cause mortality, which says you're wrong.

The parent claimed that you "can die up to 30-40 years earlier than you would've" which is completely insane and unsupportable. The review I linked shows that short sleep is associated with a 1.01-1.07x increased risk -- closer to a single year of expected lifespan decrease compared to optimal.

I'm the parent. You seem to mistake population level effects to single person events. For a reduction of a few years in a global population, a bunch of those people will be walking around and suddenly drop of heart failure and die 30 years earlier than they would. You should look up additional papers on this subject to get a better idea than a single random metastudy. There's plenty available on the effects.

I'm not saying if everyone sleeps 1 less hour a night they will all die 40 years earlier, but if you start sleeping 4-6 hours a night consistently you will have problems, and if you're unlucky you might have an accute heart issue that may take your life. There's no reason to play with sleep in extreme ways.

On average not wearing a seat belt reduces global life expectancy a certain amount. But for the guy laying on the tarmac spit out of the windshield it takes 40y of his life.

This is dumb. Of course anything can happen. You could die from tripping on the stairs. Certainly someone has died very young by falling down the stairs. But it's obviously stupid to suggest to people that they avoid stairs, and it's obviously alarmist to phrase this as, "taking the stairs could take 30-40 years off your life."

Previous common advice was 8 hours sleep. The graphs show that 5-6 is about as risky as 7 hours and 4 hours is as risky as 9 hours. Given this info it seems that 4-6 hours is not the a huge risk factor.

Check out the book "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker.

I'm about 25 years into my professional career too. Can't disagree much with this. I'd add: prioritise both mental and physical health, and relationships.

Consistent healthy sleep patterns (please don't blog at 4am like the author), seeing a therapist, try and get outside and see some nature (that can be just pigeons in a park if you're in a city), for 30-60 minutes a day. It all makes a huge, huge difference in your ability to learn, to work, and to love back those people in your life who love you.

> please don't blog at 4am like the author

It's less about when the author blogged and more about how much deprivation is built up.

I regularly stay up til 4am but my day doesn't start until 11am, so I get my regular 7 hours of sleep. I split my work day in order to pull this off, working the over night hours and daytime is for meetings.

This pattern works best for me as I produce better and think clearer late at night.

Yeah sometimes I can’t/don’t go to bed until 3am but I still make sure I get a full nights sleep. Sometimes I just take the day off work and sleep in, which is obviously a luxury, but many people don’t take days off for personal needs even though they have that luxury available to them.

Most advice boils down to the advisor recommending others to be more like himself. The advice in this blog post is basically for someone with a similar set of career goals and interests, and would allow the recipient to do modestly better than the author on his own career track.

I did this for a long time. I lift weights, so I recommended other people to lift weights. I read classic literary fiction (Tolstoy, Marquez) so I advised other people to do the same.

My best advice now is to deeply self-analyze your own psychology in terms of the Big 5 trait system and then pursue a career and lifestyle based on this assessment. Do not try to become a doctor if you are not conscientious. Do not go into sales if you're not extroverted. Travel is good for open-minded and extroverted people. If you're neurotic, develop lifestyle habits that will help address this condition (meditation, yoga, hiking).

Learning I was low conscientious was super helpful for my programming career. It explained why I was okay taking big risks which was helpful for my career, but where I needed to spend extra time on unit testing, functional testing, feature flagging etc, since I'm prone to making production incidents.

Also no to-do app in the world works for me, I wish I could make it work and get myself organized.

I've got the same number of years as this guy, and my biggest career regret is I focused too deeply on the technicals and never learned how to bullshit and self-promote.

The people who graduated with me, but put all their "skill points" into Charisma instead of Technical Mastery, are all Directors, VPs, very high level people right now, running their show. Some switched careers into investment banking or consulting and are now set for life. I'm still sitting here after 25 years and an advanced degree, chugging along as a mid-level individual contributor, no budget, not even a single direct report, let alone a tree of engineers under me. It doesn't seem fair, but it is the way it is. I gambled that "knowing what I'm doing" was enough and lost.

If I had to give advice to a 20 year old getting ready to graduate from university and go into engineering, it would be: Learn how to dress well, how to smile, how to engage with small talk, how to exaggerate in ways that you can plausibly defend later, how to figure out what someone wants to hear and tell it back to them in a way that makes you look good, how to take something you did and explain it in a way that makes you look like a much bigger contributor than you were. These are the actual skills you need in the modern workforce.

I recently changed back from multiple years as a manager of software engineers.

I did not dislike it as such, but just was indifferent really. There no satisfaction to be had (for me at least) in people development or "making decisions" or landing features etc.

For me the real satisfaction was in coding, but I basically did zero coding while a manager and I miss that. All I did was meetings and spreadsheets and people reviews. Easy, but boring and dull. Imagine how dull it is doing your own career reviews and performance reviews etc - now multiply that up for each person you are managing. Boring boring boring.

I also focused on the technicals, am an individual contributor and wouldn’t change a thing. I don’t want a budget and people to manage; just do my job and go home.

This is such a bitter take.

You have two things you can control: your impact to your company, and the company you choose to impact.

Step 1 is focusing on impact. Be a profit centre not a cost centre. Know your customer. Know from start to finish how your company finds customers, makes them aware of your solution, and delivers value and in the end how you get them to pay for it.

Twiddling bits and bytes is the “how” of delivering value.

Focus on the what (job you customer is trying to do)

and the why:

(why does your company exist, what problem does your customer have, how do they meet in the middle and create value for everyone)

An engineer who can help the product management discover the right problem is infinitely more valuable than an engineer who can solve hard problems if they are just told what to do.

Get good at delivering value and find a company you are happy delivering value with

it reads more like you're bitter because he exposed the simple formula for success in a modern corporation and you're gatekeeping ICs from seizing this opportunity

I don't think the person you are replying to was gatekeeping ICs, BUT I have seen a lot of gatekeeping up and down the corporate hierarchy. I've had a high-level manager directly tell me, "Oh, you don't really want to be a Manager, and definitely not a Director. It's so much work and responsibility. You should be happy being an IC!" I'm not sure if he drove away in his Porsche 911 after that, but I'll choose to remember it that way.

Very Huxley. Almost exactly like: "Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas."

Why do you see this as a negative? I quit being a software manager after 8 years and I couldn't be happier with my decision to do so.

Being an individual contributor now has more upside. I am senior enough as an IC to influence decision makers, but I don't have to deal with stupid management bureaucracy, attend endless meetings, nor deal with people (reports).

I like knowing and doing it myself as an IC, than faking and pretending as a manager.

You might have had a more prestigious job doing that but would you have been happier?

Sometimes I have regrets about my career, if only certain things had gone differently i’d be much further along.

But also i’ve had fun and at this point I have money and a nice house so maybe it doesn’t matter…

> would you have been happier?

Yea, people reach for this one a lot when this discussion happens. Personally, I think "but at least you're happy" is a bunch of hollow "cope" that people in the middle tell each other in order to not be so envious of the people who made it big. It's not one or the other. There exist plenty of rich people who are also happy. Happy+rich always beats happy+poor.

I'm sure there are CEOs out there who are unhappy. No doubt. But they can wipe their tears with $100 bills, and they have the option to quit their job any time they want to take up painting or become a monk to "find themself". Optionality usually beats raw happiness.

Exactly. Many staff/principal ICs I work with are genuinely happy and passionate about their work, they literally do it for fun having achieved financial independence.

But are they happier than they were when they were L5s? That’s my point, if my career had gone “better”, my life looks the same, my company is the same, my scope is almost the same but wider. Maybe my car is fancier and I take swankier trips? I dunno…

> is a bunch of hollow "cope" that people in the middle tell each other in order to not be so envious of the people who made it big

I’m not sure how it’s a cope. I like my job, I get to play with cool tech. I have an awesome 2m dollar house, decent car. My family is great, i’ve got a million bucks in the bank.

Would I be happier if I had a four million dollar house and a GT3?

Maybe marginally, and I can imagine a world in which I was an L7 at FAANG instead of a top of band L5.

But I wouldn’t trade more money for just any job for sure.

I have a close friend who was making 7 figures as an exec at a F500, and he hated it. He quit before 2 years. Now he already had a few mill in the bank from a startup exit, but more money and prestige wasn’t worth misery.

I'm honestly not so sure. I think I feel a lot better about myself knowing that I don't deliberately exaggerate and mislead people for personal gain. Maybe it depends on the person, and I'm just not destined to be able to be a happy conman.

I suspect a lot of senior-level tech people wouldn't actually have enjoyed their jobs as mid- to senior-level management even if they would possibly have earned more money. I certainly had the opportunity (and credentials) to go beyond individual contributor but was never much interested in doing so. I did, at one point, travel a great deal and was on a fair number of calls at odd times but I was fine with that.

> how to exaggerate in ways that you can plausibly defend later, how to figure out what someone wants to hear and tell it back to them in a way that makes you look good, how to take something you did and explain it in a way that makes you look like a much bigger contributor than you were.

How do I learn this? Some people seem to have this gift naturally.

Same feelings here. I think we are living in a grifters economy. Grifters and bullshiters are getting everything on a silver platter

This article is a great source of information for young people who still are at the start of their life. But for the OP and for us older ones, instead of saying "what could I have done better?", it's better to say "what should I do better today". This is because a lot of things that could have been done better don't matter now anymore. Instead, use the knowledge learned from looking back to the past to improve your future.

The only thing I disagree with though is to define a clear education and career path. It's always easy to say that in hindsight, but if you are at the start of the path and already fix your destination then, you are closing off a lot of opportunities. I've seen people who had a very clear goal at the start of their career, and then burn out because that goal turned out to be not obtainable, and I think they would have been happier if they cared less and just switched to more obtainable goals as they went along.

It is amazing how fast 25+ years went by. I'm in this picture... and when I think about the jump from C++ to Java 1.1, going through the transition of EJBs to what would be considered modern Java, doing XQuery/functional development, and now Rust -- it really does not seem like a few decades have flown by.

Watched the death of our AIX systems (perhaps undead, as it really never goes away), the rise of PCs, the fading of Unix workstations. Desktop compute exceeding what could be done on my Cray time. The world circled back a few times: stand alone, client server, stand alone, distributed... with variations on a theme. Same is true about frameworks, languages, and development religions.

On reflection, creating new developers is a lot like parenting. You give recommendations, guidance, and opportunity. They still might footgun something, but you love them none the less. I'm proud of them and have launched some really solid Dev Leads over the years. So much satisfaction in shaping people.

The thrill of peeking/poking assembly as a youth is still there when I compile and the damn thing actually does what I set out to. Fixing broken is still very satisfying. Discovering that you can change a culture by leading was eye opening.

I still have no idea what I'm going to be, when I grow up. I consider myself fortunate.

> On reflection, creating new developers is a lot like parenting.

Indeed. This resonated with me.

Quite a few similarities between parenting and training people.

Sometimes you have to let them suffer a bit, suffering consequences so that they can learn, and sometimes you have to keep them from hurting themselves too much.

You also grow with them. Learning together from different perspectives.

After some time together, you see how your actions, not your words, shape their actions, even some unintentional or unconscious ones.

I'm only 20 years into my career, but my retrospective would be that I wish I'd realized that work sucks and that software was not going to save the world a little sooner. Then I would have focused less on impressing business people and people one level above me in the org chart. They talk about a work-life balance, but don't believe it: there shouldn't be a balance, the scale should be tipped toward the life part.

As a career switcher, I think there IS a balance to this, but only because of the competitive aspect as you're getting going.

I was in a director position in an unrelated field as a 30yo, and solidly in the camp you're describing before switching into a more junior software position.

You do need to stand out until you've developed credibility. I think most people relax a bit once they have the power to safely do so. Everyone's situation is different, so this point may vary in each individual's career.

>> I'm only 20 years into my career, but my retrospective would be that I wish I'd realized that work sucks and that software was not going to save the world a little sooner.

Yeah, me too (that's why also gave you an upvote).

Maybe if all that energy to burn yourself out translates to higher and higher salaries and bonuses and stock options, so you work your ass off for a few years and save for a lifetime. Then it could make sense.

But most people will make average money by definition case when I sure won't do any heroics. Here's an alternate retrospective, or as some may recognize it, the "loser's strategy in a Gervais hierarchy environment": work the absolute minimum which keeps you gainfully employed (which also those familiar with Gervais know it's not slacking, just avoid to be a worker bee as all that attracts is more work for the same pay). Preserve your energy, do what you like with what you got left. Go hiking, spend time with your kids, build your side business empire. To each their own. Just don't kill yourself over anything, it rarely pays off.

My advice 4 years into my engineering career is to work out, sleep a lot, eat good good, see your favorite musicians at festivals, read the Dune book in the sun at the beach and enjoy your free time with friends and family.

I'm 10 years into mine with a kid now and I couldn't agree more

The trick is how do we balance these with our desire of always wanting more

I have about 25 years behind me and I'm not the richest man alive, and I certainly could have made smarter choices.

But just like 25 years ago, I get to wake up and play with computers. And I get paid decent. A key to a happy life is a very small set of expectations and lot of enjoying the process.

Hopefully I'll still be doing this in 25 years and joke's on who will be paying my wage, as I'll still get to get up and play with computers, and paid for it.

Only time I'm laying awake at 4 AM and thinking about bad choices is when my back hurts so much from having stupidly strained it a few days before that it's better to stay up half asleep and desperately tired than lay in bed awaken by back pain.

So one advice: take care of your back. It's easy to sprain it, hard to heal it back. You're a developer who mostly sits all day, not a pit worker handling a pickaxe all day. Beware especially of overloading your back due to unavoidable social situations. A friend asks you to help him move the furniture. A stranger asks you to help him pick up his handicapped spouse who felt to the ground. Some neighbors decide to do maintenance work around the block themselves (because they enjoy it but you don't) and make you feel guilty if you don't join the communal effort with a pickaxe (literally, that's what happened to me two days ago and now I'm agonizing with back pain).

Protect your back at the cost of being rude or a jerk.

I highly recommend strength training. To anyone. But especially us developers.

Big compound lifts like squats, deadlifts, rows etc all hit a lot of muscle and posterior groups and have made my back bullet proof.

It doesn't take a lot of equipment - any commercial gym with a power rack, or BYO home gym with a rack and barbell will do. Start with a simple program like Starting Strength and then pivot to something more intermediate friendly when you get there like 531. You can run these programs for decades.

Even moreso, I'd recommend bodyweight exercises and long hikes. Humans aren't quite built to do repetitive heavy lifting movements. We're built to jog, to climb, to pull ourselves up a tree or wall, and hike long distances.

Best thing is, you can do it pretty much wherever you live!

Make sure you walk. I've had a pretty serious back injury about 15 years ago which included surgery. I still MTB, I go to the gym and deadlift and squat. But the foundation of all of that is walking a lot.

Yes, I do that fairly regularly. Walking exercises a lot of muscles just to fight gravity and keep posture. Laying in bed also causes muscles to relax which isn't ideal when the back is out of line. Like, laying in bed "relaxing" meant essentially agony for my back while "exercising" by walking made the pain completely disappear. I can tell it's not a bad sprain so it'll be completely gone in two or three days but walking is an essential part of the healing process, I know from experience.

Back pain has plagued me for many years. Something that has helped me is Foundation Training. You can find a lot of the exercises on youtube.

After passed 50, I started to do non competitive long distance running (jogging). With proper running form, it builds up core muscles and endurance naturally. And I do my coding either standing up or lying down on the couch, avoiding sitting as much as possible.

Take it easy and go slowly.

You should go to the gym and do yoga so your core isn’t so weak. If you can’t even pick up a person or move a couch you have some serious strength problems.

Some things I have realised after working in the industry for around 13 years:

- I focus on my health more. So I control my screen time, my posture, I avoid sitting down too much

- Because of the point above, I do not work 8h/day, even though my contract as an employee say so. I don’t feel bad about it: I receive positive feedback constantly and raises so it’s a win-win

- I don’t give a damn about any company, but I do care about doing a good job

- Tech stacks come and go. Good computer science fundamentals are invaluable

- I don’t do on-call rotation. The money isn’t worth it at all

> I don’t do on-call rotation.

What's the nature of your work that this is acceptable?

You can always just refuse. They will find somebody else for it if they need it (usually they don't, system outages/errors are opportunity cost most of the time, not actual emergencies) but they will most probably still keep you for your normal "day job". I never understood devs who took on-calls without very significant pay bumps. Imagine that in other industries except medical where human life is involved. The market is really not that bad, even now.

I'm about 10 years in doing business software development commercially and I always simply refused.

Software engineer. Normal stuff (k8s, python, aws, postgres, etc)

On-call rotation is not always mandatory, and I always ask in the interview about that.

I'd have told his 20-year-old self to stick with college too. While I'm 100% convinced that you don't need a college degree at all to be a great developer, the barriers you'll find to landing a role, getting promotions, getting compensation commensurate to your experience etc. will all be (unnecessarily) way more difficult.

I truly hope that in 15 years, when I am celebrating my 25 year anniversary, I wont lay awake at 4am and think about what I could have done better…

Oh you will. It'll be that time you passed on an early job at a company that went on to IPO, or the project that went sour despite your best efforts. It'll be a time you said the wrong thing to a colleague and damaged a friendship, or the time someone gave you good advice you ignored.

You can't hold on to these things, but they'll bounce around your head sometimes, when life gets more challenging.

That being said, it's also balanced by a lot of good memories. Not so often at this time of the night, the small hours, but nonetheless a fond memory will strike you now and then. The time when you came through clutch, or the project really went amazing even though everything went wrong, the time you helped an intern gain confidence and they went on to do amazing things. The small moments when you helped someone solve a problem and they returned the favor, that's what makes the job worth doing.

If you're lying awake at 4am in the morning, I sure as hell hope it is over mistakes you've made in your personal life, not your professional one.

In your obituary, when your life is tallied, nobody who matters is likely to give two figs about your work projects.

Maybe if I was in a more important profession with higher stakes I’d stay up at 4 AM thinking about those sorts of regrets, but I’m a software developer making B2B apps, not a trauma surgeon.

I'm about 25 years in, and no, I don't have regrets about work stuff that I come back and think about. Partly I've been very lucky in how things have worked out, of course, but also work just isn't that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. I have a few wistful "wonder what it would have been like if I took the other fork in the road back then" thoughts sometimes, but they're not about work and career choices.

> Oh you will. It'll be that time you passed on an early job at a company that went on to IPO, or the project that went sour despite your best efforts.

I’m only a bit further into my career than the person you’re responding to, but this sounds truly depressing and (personally) incredibly unlikely. I’ve been in the situation where I was offered a spot at a company which later got acquired for a few billion dollars. I barely ever think about it, and when I do it’s simply as a “huh! Life is weird!” kinda thing. It’s not something that weighs on me and never has been. I really can’t emphasize enough how little of a regret it is.

Maybe I’d feel differently if I was worried about becoming fabulously wealthy, but that’s always seemed like a fool’s errand to me. It’s much easier to be happy if you just aspire to have enough money to take care of yourself, your family, and at hopefully contribute to your community a bit.

Totally agree on the interpersonal stuff though.

Author mentioned they switched through many different note-taking apps over the years. To be fair, I haven't dug into some as much as I should have, but I basic just keep ending up back in the Apple Notes app. I wonder what they landed on as obviously they are focusing on writing more.

I tried many as well and craft.do hit a sweet spot for me because I can log in with multiple devices and my work computer as well with a different Apple ID. The markdown, calendar and links features are great.

I love Bear.app for the raw speed. It’s faster than any other note app I’ve tried by a huge margin.

That's one of his self-promo materials to get into paid subscriptions.

In many arcicles he claims he has 25 years long engineering career, but it's never mentioned what he was actually doing.

Typical "though leader" behavior.

My advice after ~17 years[1] - don't take unsolicited advice from blog posts written by "though leaders" who spend all day enjoying the smell of their own farts and are trying really hard to sell you their farts too.

[1] oh, lol, this dude is counting years since he turned 18 as his "career". Suddenly I'm at 20+ years now too.

looks like his 'engineering' career was mostly just talking, I think

Reading comments I'd like to help younger folks if I may.

Always follow your talent and entertain your passions - not vice-versa.

Take notes.

I’m not passionate about insurance but it sure pays the bills, provides a great life and I get to code as an engineer at a big insurance company. Do what you’re good at, not what you’re passionate about. Build real, practical skills and get good at something. Good at computers? Learn everything you can about them, learn how to program and how to fix them. Love cars? Learn how to fix them, get good at it, go to school for it

It's funny but when I think about it, I realize I don't find much continuity in my career. Officially, I'm a SWE today as I was in my first internship 25 years ago. But everything was different. The people, the tech, my skills, my brain, the expectations, even the country I was living in, the type of company. In that sense, I don't feel I have much more useful experience than my 30 years old colleague.

This is also true outside of professional life. When you're 50 years old, you're a different person than when you're 20, facing totally different sets of situations.

>This is probably why my body got used to sleeping just 4-6 hours per day

I have a strong bias against the claim that most people can actually get used to less sleep, especially such a severe deficit as this.

You can train yourself for this and you will start waking up naturally after less hours, but it is unhealthy and will catch up to you. In fact it's then hard to train yourself in reverse again.

I like this article and agree with much of it. However, everyone writes these things from the perspective of feeling like they didn’t meet the bar. “What I could have done better” I’d like to see the same article written from the perspective of “what I did right”. To me, articles like that have a bigger impact and it’s easier to internalize.

/turning 48 in a few days and have been writing code and everything that goes with that professionally since I was 22

> Understand how procrastination works; as they say, know your enemy. Today there’s a lot of literature you can easily access.

What literature helped the author? SMART goal setting? I don't think treating yourself like manager treats an employee is a universal strategy. There are multiple forms of procrastination that have different causes.

Why would I think my career was something that would fail if I didn't engineer the hell out if it. Markets blame you.

As many others have pointed out, “sleep as much as you need”, my brain is on a completely different level after a good night’s sleep - especially after having kids.

The author may be trading their cognitive well being in later life for career goals now. It’s not a trade I would make, but I get why people do it.

> what I might have done differently if I could go back 25 years to when I was 18.

I would have written WB-DOS, a DOS-compatible DOS.

In retrospect, there just wasn't that much to it.

Yeah but what would have been the point? There were several of these, like DR-DOS and 4DOS etc. They were modestly successful but without Bill Gates' ambition and cruelty and connections, were never going to go anywhere.

Those other ones came much later.

It says “Publice exposure” on the first set of bullet points. In case Author sees this; polished piece of writing and article otherwise.

Thanks for sharing your experiences. Great Read!

If I'd retro my journey of 20+ years, the advice for my younger self would be to network more and have a better work-life balance.

So you need the app to read this on mobile?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com