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Comment by ganbatekudasai | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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