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Comment by georgeburdell | Hacker News Reader

Disagree. This kind of comment is furtively pulling up the ladder behind you. Do as I say not as I do. Junior is the time to learn as much as possible and take risky bets (and suffer accordingly). When I was in a junior in a factory, the night shift knew me well. Nowadays, I've pared it back to 50 or so hours per week, because I now have a family, which is fine but it came at the cost of basically zero time to learn or do things other than what my manager asks.

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> Junior is the time to learn as much as possible and take risky bets (and suffer accordingly). When I was in a junior in a factory, the night shift knew me well.

That would require a whole, separate article.

Many (most?) juniors grinding like that in a major company will work hard to get nowhere. Speaking from experience. Yes, I learned some lessons:

1. Get a different job. Deadend jobs definitely exist, and are quite common.

2. Ignore senior folks who say "You're whining. It's crappy everywhere. Just learn to take it."

Number 2 has been wrong every single time someone said it.

> Nowadays, I've pared it back to 50 or so hours per week, because I now have a family,

This is not the endorsement you think it is. I've done quite well by insisting on 40 hour weeks. I'm going to assume you're doing much better than I am, because otherwise it seems like a life wasted.

Don't get me wrong. If you want to go much farther than I have, you likely will have to grind and work hard and smart and be lucky. But I assure you - most of the people I know who worked hard are not in a better position than I am (or if they are, the difference is incremental).

I was clear that the junior should be learning and experimenting. That's different from saying yes to everything and grinding it out. The juniors in my group, for example, are the ones leading the LLM charge and learning the new tooling ahead of management's awareness of them, so almost by definition they're not just filling their time taking orders from management. That's exactly how they should be spending their excess capacity.

> This is not the endorsement you think it is. I've done quite well by insisting on 40 hour weeks. I'm going to assume you're doing much better than I am, because otherwise it seems like a life wasted.

HN is not the kind of place I'm going to toot my own horn

> I was clear that the junior should be learning and experimenting. That's different from saying yes to everything and grinding it out. The juniors in my group, for example, are the ones leading the LLM charge and learning the new tooling ahead of management's awareness of them, so almost by definition they're not just filling their time taking orders from management. That's exactly how they should be spending their excess capacity.

Agreed that they should explore and experiment and learn. And they should do that at 40 hours a week on the job (I did!).

Not all jobs allow for it. Change jobs if that's the case. Chances are your pay will be the same and more, and you'll have more time for this. You simply don't need to stay and work evenings to do this.

This is a correct view point to have.

As you get to the downswing of your career, you should have already worked and made enough mistakes to have most of your experience. You must cruise on that experience when you are older.

When you are old, that is not the time to work and make mistakes.

That is, most of the heavy work must be done as early as you can. Eat that frog.

I agree. When new programmers come from uni they sometimes barely did any programming. So at some time in their life they got to actually put in the time and learn how to be a competent developer. It is obviously great if you can do it on somebody else dime in a 9 to 5 but if you can’t get that you should just put in the time and learn. In the end you can at best get paid for the value you can create and if you are incompetent that is not going to be a lot

You realize “pairing it back to 50 hours a week” is not a great outcome don’t you?

If I graduated post 2012 instead of 1996, I would have tied my horse to a safe BigTech company and made a lot of money in cash and liquid RSUs long before I joined a bullshit startup that statistically wouldn’t have gone anywhere.

Hell I made that choice at 46 when my youngest (step)son graduated. I chose to work at BigTech instead of getting a meaningless “CTO” founding engineer position at a startup.

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