Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

Ouch. Having taken some terrible risks-- understand that none of them appeared like such from the outset-- let me just come out and say:

... No.

You want to learn skills that will increase your job security, make you happier, and advance your career. All that is true.

You might end up taking financial risks that seem heavy. $100 for an out-of-print book on a topic that you're really interested in. $750 (including airfare and hotel) to go to a conference. A couple hundred dollars of computing resources to try something out. Go for it. Those small financial risks are minuscule if they're making your life and prospects better.

That's different from risking your whole career.

"Career" is just a make-nice word for "reputation" (plus the time series of money infusions) and you don't want to take risks with that. Play a conservative game, because people are assholes and will take advantage of you as soon as there's a weakness in your story.

The tough part of all this is that it's hard to know where the worst career risks are. For example, academia is presented as a low-risk track for smart people, but the truth is that the long-term career risks are severe, even if unexpected job loss is extremely uncommon. (Finance, on the other hand, has more job volatility but much less existential career risk.)

Having read a number of your posts Michael, I can't help but see a pattern which is skewed by 2 things:

1) you seem to have worked a quite a few terrible companies ("salary is how much it costs to waste your time"?? Really?)

2) your attitude is almost always negative, which may have had a significant effect on #1

Don't chase money. Go for experience. And that's not just career experience. Life experience. Travel. Choose adventure, and connections with others.

Some of the best things that happened during my 20s:

- getting fired from my first job after only 6 months. I didn't demonstrate my value to the mostly non-technical management enough, and a later hire above me made it seem like my role was unnecessary. He got a 30% raise and 14 hour days, I lost my job

- after working for a few years and feeling confident in my skills, pushing pause and leaving to travel the world for the better part of a year. During that time I learned to ride motorcycles and scuba dive which have become my non-code passions

- deciding that coding was not just my job, but a craft and skill I would make an effort to always try and improve

- most recently, joining a group of awesome folks to do a startup that has already begun to change people lives for the better, and I hope will continue to grow and do so even more

There have been ups and downs, I've never fought super hard for the highest salary possible, but I've always felt fairly compensated and been comfortable. Most importantly, I've learned to enjoy every experience of it all, even the bad ones.

When it comes to your career, it's pretty simple: have a good attitude, be honest, do the things you say you will, to the best of your ability, and always be improving (aka learn from your mistakes and move on). Out of that, you will have a career. There is no end game, there is just the journey

I think that my anger/negativity come from two sources, that I've conflated even though they're separate.

1. I consider the ratio between how much value programmers do add and what we could add to be unacceptably low. (See: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/programmer-au... .) It means we have low leverage, few opportunities to excel, and that we can rarely become financially independent. It sucks to lose 90+ percent of what we're capable of to the fact that the wrong people call the shots.

2. I had a 16-month period (1/11 to 4/12) in my career that was astonishingly negative. First, I had a startup fail for reasons that were not my fault and completely out of my control. Then, I had a manager at Google for whom I found out recently that recruiters consider him to be the worst manager in Google NYC (my perceived pattern of him using fake performance problems to tease out health issues then fuck with people is actually well-known; N >= 5 and probably 7, but not knowing all the individual details, I'm unsure on duplicates). Third, I observed something that I can't talk about but would be legendary if it got out. Fourth, I worked for a startup with the most unethical management I've ever encountered (worse than Google; Google's a good company with some really bad actors and terrible HR infrastructure, this company's management was just rotten all the way through) and, after I left it, the CEO (the black sheep of a powerful family) mounted a personal campaign to destroy my reputation.

So... (1) is why my fights matter to the world. We really do need to unlock the trillions of dollars of value we'll add to the world by making programmers more autonomous and powerful within organizations. It's probably (2) that's behind a lot of my personal anger.

You need to step away from all this. You clearly have a toxic mindset (though not necessarily by any fault of your own), and the fact that you insist on perpetuating it and projecting it on arguably unrelated situations is evidence of that. I feel like every thread I read has an identical anti-corporation or anti-manager comment from you!

I've said this before, but you often have some great insights in your posts. This negativity achieves nothing and simply works to discredit the rest of what you say.

So you had a bad experience, so what? The world isn't out to get you. Learn what you can from it and move on.

Appreciate the additional details, Michael.

I agree, you're right. My thoughts stemmed from a lot of my peers who are still in college wanting to focus on money straight off the bat, and put themselves in to terrible places inside various companies.

I feel like paying attention to salary signals is actually close to the optimal strategy, most of the time. Here's why. Your salary is how much it costs your employer to waste your time. (You'll find out that a lot of managers like wasting their reports' time. It's a status thing.)

Should you take a $105,000 offer at a company you hate over $100,000 at a great company? Of course not. However, if an offer comes in below market, you have to question whether that's for legitimate economic reasons (lower cost of living, cash-poor startup) or because it's a lower-level position than you deserve and, if it's the second, run.

Unfortunately, it's still really hard (especially when you're young) to tell a good job/company/role vs. a bad one before starting, so salary gets overvalued as a signal, because of the opacity in the career variables that, in the long term, matter a lot more.

Agreed. It's all about knowing how to ask the right questions.

>I feel like paying attention to salary signals is actually close to the optimal strategy, most of the time.

Yeah, when I was starting out? I was always shocked at how closely the salary correlated with how well you are treated in general. I mean, personally? If I feel like I'm overpaid, I am okay dealing with more bullshit, but that's not how it works. If anything, as I got paid more, less was expected of me. I mean, less of the hard stuff. Showing up on time, for example, became much less of a big deal as I got paid more. (For me, showing up on time is often the hardest part of the job.) - I mean, sure, I was expected to solve harder problems... and I was expected to actually come up with a working solution more often... but that was never the hard part for me.

I couldn't agree more with kevinchau. I'm also 24 and a semi recent grad. My first two jobs were at mega corps (a fortune 100 telecom and a fortune 500 energy company). They were well paying but I, they stripped me two things I hold near and dear to myself . My autonomy of work and schedule. I left mongocorp and went to worked at a start up with great/smart people for the past year. I recently left the start up to scratch my own itch. I lived pretty frugal even while being employed by the super corps, so I have enough saved to last me at least a year or so.

The past 4 months of my corporate sabbatical/"start up" has been one of the happiest times of my life. I'm learning the technologies I WANT to learn by applying them to solving real problems in my (still in stealth mode) product . When I see my past early twenties colleagues posting the " time of my life" weekend pics to the social networksphere, I laugh inside. I see past the distractions they engage in to make themselves feel like they've made it because, I remember the conversations we had daily about how much we hated the low quality work, stale tooling, and sometime poisonous corporate enviorments in which we worked.

I have no kids (I do have a dog that eats better then some people) and am only responsible for my self right now. I'm spending this time exploring and learning, not producing value for some clueless middle manager. 9 Months clean off corporate and hacking daily to keep it that way.

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