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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

That's really nice, but the point where the vision is should move too. You learn as you progress. What you enjoy changes. The entire industry moves. Being focused on the goal you defined 30 years ago is almost certainly wrong for most people.

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After ~15 years, I've realized that no good things come to you without sustained focus / attentiveness, and gentle pressure in the direction of attention. What everyone here is saying is "be closed loop", vs the drunkards "open loop". Combined with a bit of progress every day, it's (so far, at least) magical what happens.

Another bit to consider: It took a long time to realize that basically everyone wants basically everyone to succeed, as long as incentives align. It was very easy to imagine I was swimming upstream early in my career - especially my early mentors urging me to specialize to find success. My initial temptation was to "specialize" in hot/attractive topics in an effort to be the "indispensable X authority". But my PhD advisor urged me to "not swim in red water", where the incentives are inherently conflicting - everyone wants to be "the X person".

Much better to find a team working on a good problem somewhat like the ones you want to solve and just push along with them. You can save yourself a lot of energy by slotting yourself into a system that aligns with your preferred direction of travel, even if only a little bit. The current carries you.

I always wondered about that.

Seemed like everyone was doing topics in the “red water” and felt useless to not.

I found my areas of interest were the “red water” of 20 years prior and there was little left and it didn’t solve problems relevant to industry.

Quit PhD and got a job where I was grossly underpaid until the next one.

I literally fell into anti-fraud and email security back in 2012 and spent a totally unexpected chunk of my career around those topics.

The amount of people I've heard of say they want to go into email security is very small.

I think this demostrates a far more important perspective than "have a vision" - which is easy to explain and almost impossible to execute, which is be curious, intentional and open to lots of things. The curious & open part leads you to new oppportunities, and the intentional part helps you figure out how to evaluate & where to go next.

This sounds like much better advice. Trying to plan out a tech career over decades seems like very premature optimizing. Being curious and making sure you keep learning is not only very pleasant, it’s useful. And when the tech changes, fine, no problem. Most of the big features of my life have not been plannable ahead of time.

Exactly. You can “have a vision” to accelerate full speed and hit the hard wall and just before going full throttle you are offered an opportunity to enter an open door around the corner which you have never even thought about. And that door helps you discover a new vision, that might stick for lifetime.

Also, while the original advice about “vision” sounds reasonable, it also sounds a bit dogmatic. The filpside of “career vision” is “tunnel vision”. And life is not deterministic, it has a much more probabalistic nature. Hence, curiosity and open mind.

I can’t emphasize this enough. Every 5 years or so I reassess what my goals are and refocus my vision on where I want to apply my skills.

Things change fast in our industry so being able to pivot to something nearby is paramount for maintaining a career in this field.

Not everyone has the fortune to spend 15 years at a FAANG or other large corporation. Sometimes you have to build it.

Every five years or so, my wife asks me, "What do you need to learn now for the next five years of your career?"

It's the same as what you do, except I need the reminder...

>>Being focused on the goal you defined 30 years ago is almost certainly wrong for most people.

I think there are certain things that are not likely to change, and must be aimed for. For starters, being healthy, proactively working towards a retirement nest egg, so that you don't end up homeless and starving in case things go south too fast.

There are many such things I hold as things I would want several years from now. Good health, free time and enough money to not need a job to just put food on the table, and a roof above my head.

>> Good health, free time and enough money to not need a job to just put food on the table, and a roof above my head.

Sound like the utility function for a lot of people I would say.

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