What helps me is keeping around my TODO.txt month by month, as well as a lot of screenshots and images of the things I find relevant for sharing in stand ups and meetings and such (as well as presentations).
So if I need to review the past month/year (e.g. when I want to update CV/site or catch up with management), it’s just a matter of going through a bunch of text and images without a lot of unnecessary fluff, like digging through Jira. Maybe if I want to get the approximate time/effort spent on particular stuff, based on the amount of activity there.
Alongside that, it’s also nice to document stuff that was particularly good, or all the ways software broke in (and what broke how often), as well as stuff that pissed me off and made me want to quit (sometimes people/mindsets, sometimes tangible code or practices).
When the default is just going with the flow and not documenting anything and doing no self reflection, every improvement upon that helps.
Typically I'll have a folder with a bunch of numbered files in the order that I want to talk about them, since it's easier to just quickly share my screen and run through then when I want to let others know what I've done, for example along the lines of:
01-migrate-gulp-grunt-to-vite.png
02-vue-prebuild-script-check-unused-translations.png
03-java-add-compile-memory-limit-ide.png
04-server-update-python-for-ansible.png
...
> It is well known the drunken sailor whos taggers to the left or right n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about sqrt(n) steps from the origin. But if there is a pretty girl in one direction, then his steps will tend to go in that direction and he will go a distance proportional to n. In a lifetime of many, many independent choices, small and large, a career with a vision will get you a distance proportional to n, while no vision will get you only the distance sqrt(n). In a sense, the main difference between those who go far and those who do not is some people have a vision and others do not and therefore can only react to the current events as they happen.
Just a tiny bit of bias towards a direction will get you very far very fast.
I once modeled+visualised this with a bit of javascript[1] and it's quite surprising to see the huge difference from even a tiny multiplication factor on each random/probabilistic decision.
Edit: well of course it is. I was thinking expected position (which should be 0) not distance
"expected distance" is average abs(coordinate), so for biased walk (and big enough time) it's simply abs(bias)*time, and for unbiased it's deviation==sqrt(variance)
For a binomial distribution of probability p and (1-p), after N steps the expectation value of right steps is Np.
The Variance is Np(1-p), so the standard deviation (or Root-Mean-Square) scales as Sqrt(N).
It does make me reflect on this piece I wrote 9(!!) years ago though, which hasn't completely materialized. I think I'm due for a re-alignment of priorities.
Most people, even when they do not sit down and think about it, follow one of the two career paths:
- Some people will actively pursue the next logical progression (senior, lead/manager, head/vp, exec).
- Some will happily stay in their position unless the next one is offered to them.
Being deliberate will always work better compared to being random, but it is not like all people who succeed in their careers deliberately planned to get where they are.
I would even guess that for the vast majority of successful careers, competency and luck played a much bigger role than being deliberate about it.
I think this is true. I had a while where my career was doing really well constant steps up, I was learning, getting promoted, was working on great projects and problems that were engaging and led to easy promotions. Then I got a new manager and it was downhill. Then I got a new job and the problems are insignificant and there's no room for growth of any kind. If my latest job was earlier in my career my career would be very different.
Also, I find it hard to believe that people don't move into the general direction they want to be in. So I'd like to see some examples.
Or someone else that “can’t get their stuff together?”
A lot of people never even “move”.
"If you don't have your own story, you become part of someone else's."
If you guide your own direction too strictly you will both risk moving yourself into a dead end, but also miss out on unexpected opportunities.
If you don't design your career, in most cases I guess no one will. In the comments are good examples, like the random walk of the drunken sailor. The cases in which you could use the phrase "someone else designed it for me" in a meaningful way seem rather rare to me.
In other words, the problem in designing your life is that you’re almost always going to pick things you already know. Maybe that gets you to the peak of your current profession over twenty years…but maybe some other job is actually a lot more fulfilling to you.
I’m not sure how to incorporate this into a young person’s real life experience, but I do think gap years, varied internships, volunteering, etc. are probably a good start.
I recently listened to a podcast with a guy that wrote a book advocating that young people spend 4 years getting a pilot’s license, working on a ranch, becoming an EMT, and various other useful skills/jobs. That seems like a great idea, although I didn’t like the hostility to traditional college he had in offering this plan.
https://www.artofmanliness.com/people/fatherhood/podcast-108...
The book itself is called The Preparation.
100% this. When I started working in recruitment, it was literally intended to be a temporary means to an end. I stumbled across Hacker News back in 2010 and accidentally uncovered a niche (tech startups) that has evolved into a career where over the past 15 years has evolved into holding VP level roles at YC startups to now running my own successful recruitment and HR advisory business for startups. I can legitimately attribute that entire path and growth to accidentally stumbling across this website and couldn't possibly have guessed the impact it would ultimately have on my career.
I've seen fear as the primary obstacle to trying something different when the current route is not working. It's really hard to step outside the comfort zone in those situations.
While you definitely need a higher than average tolerance for uncertainty, the big thing is just not seeing all the options. Many choices are occluded by the options presented to you by employers, the educational system, etc. The spectrum of careers, which is a continuous higher-dimensional blob of "things you can do to make money", is systematized in such a way that while there are paths to unusual career outcomes, most of those paths can not be expressed.
You may on some level want to reach some career or lifestyle goal, but often the path to that destination isn't obvious, and it's definitely never presented to you as an option among the things you can choose, and more than likely you'll have few if any role models or people to ask for guidance if you find yourself on that track.
My "career" is just a means to an end to put food on the table. Also being in my 30s I think I have mostly maxed it out anyway. Sure I might increase my wage a little bit but all in all as for being an IC it is a good as it gets. Sure there is always room for improvement but I am already constantly the person with the most technical skills in the room so it would not grant me any benefit.
I don't think your "career" needs to be a major focus in your life once you are set up at least. Especially if you don't do any meaningful work that actually helps people like being a doctor or teacher or something.
In the end my work just makes someone else richer, it doesn't have any meaning. It does not make the world a better place. Probably a worse place sometimes. I just do it to not starve.
The job market and my visa status meant that it's either impossible or I need to make significant sacrifices.
So that's life.
What people need aren't more options. What they need is MONEY; which is the ability to obtain the options which exist. And the only way to give people more money is through political means. This is why I was interested in crypto; it seemed to get straight to the point...
I later quit crypto due to too much corruption in the space and launched a mainstream startup with a co-founder centered around helping people find 'the perfect job' but I quit as co-founder because the idea of it almost makes me want to vomit now.
The system is firing people en masse. The system itself doesn't want people to have jobs... So me, trying to work against the system by offering a solution that operates within the system feels futile and like gaslighting users and myself. It's selling a dream. There is no perfect job. Reality is our socio-economic system doesn't even have a shitty job for you... Let alone a perfect job.
It's extremely hard to find an idea that's both truly useful and profitable these days. That's a shame because that's exactly what I want to do with my life but I feel like this does not align with what is possible within the current system. I cannot find any such opportunities.
Someone told me I should get into politics but again if I think about what the typical politician does, I want to vomit. The only kind of politician I could possibly be is the honest kind that gets assassinated... And of course I don't want that. Besides, nobody would fund me. It feels like only crooks get funded to run for politics.
I need to integrate with tools that prematurely deny me because I'm not a big company. I basically already lost, despite my tool being much more reasonable and maintainable (I've worked at the competitors and it was a mess).
The world doesn't care about good products, they just care about how it looks. Big companies look good, you don't. It got me demotivated early on. You really need thick skin to start selling a product.
That "decision" required a safety net most will never have
Designing your career isn’t about self introspection, it’s about leverage
And leverage is stolen from the invisible hands that keep your world running while you journal
The problem isn't individual, but systemic: why is the freedom to choose rationed so narrowly?
For a lot of people, work isn't a career to design, it's survival math
hwhehwhehegwggw•1h ago
ramon156•1h ago
nottorp•1h ago
fifilura•1h ago
ManuelKiessling•1h ago
y-curious•1h ago
Turtles all the way down
ramon156•10m ago
So, I guess it would be "Turtles all the way up"
ramon156•15m ago
I'm at the bottom of the chain here and have no authority to change this. Given that I'm being let go soon there's not much reason for them to care about my mental state either.
But from the time I've been here, yes, you need to set boundaries or they'll do it for you. It seems like most PMs are used to talking to robots, because that's how they talk to us lately.
madduci•1h ago
paganel•1h ago
integralid•33m ago
Believing "most of the normal people" have no agency is condescending.