The fact that the learning curve is mostly climbed at the beginning.
You will come across many very competent people with only a few years of experience, who are still at the bottom of the ladder due to how organisations are structured rather than a lack of ability.
Understanding this is key to overcoming impostor syndrome.
You will never just be given something based on merit even if you feel you've earned it. You need to ask for it, then if you've earned it you will be given it. People can't read your mind and it's surprising how what you want is not what they think you want. A simple 5min convo on what you actually want and tracking the steps outlined to get you there will push you faster along than anything else.
I would almost say the opposite at my place. Excelled in my position, everyone felt I was competent and able for the next step. But after asking for more work and more responsibility I was basically told that I was out of line and this was something given to me, not asked for.
+1. I've seen a mix of both... though, if you fill very confident about your skills, just ask for it. It will put the pressure on them even if the culture is about waiting for someone to name you king. They know you can get it somewhere else so it'll move the needle.
There's a book I've never actually read that has a brilliant title, so good I don't even feel the need to read it. :)
"In Business As in Life, You Don't Get What You Deserve, You Get What You Negotiate"
Yes, that's the name of the book, just google it. :)
But I have most definitely found this to be true. While it is sometimes the case that good deeds are rewarded, to really get what you want and to go beyond what you thought was your potential you need to be assertive and go after things. Negotiate for yourself rather than waiting around for something to happen. Push the boundaries.
Completely agreed on the "slow down and really read" part.
Googling for immediate answers on Stack Overflow is not reading and doesn't lead to understanding. It's "fast food calories" for your mind, and if one solves every problem that way, it's like eating at McDonalds for every meal.
Googling for immediate answers on Stack Overflow definitely leads to understanding in my case. The trick is to not just immediately paste the code, but to dig into it and understand why that specific set of instructions is the solution. A bit of reverse engineering if you will. It tends to be faster than reading through all the docs (which contain too much info about things you won't need right now) and inventing the wheel yourself.
I don't know why you're being downvoted, this is a good insight. Particularly in the Java Enterprise world, the documentation can be very wordy, and of the form 'indoctrinate you into this way of thinking'. A barebones example from someone who knows the framework can be much more illuminating than pages of prose.
My dad does competition shooting. The format is that you can as many rounds as you want to hit 5 targets. So you can shoot off a lot of rounds. But the key insight is: "You can't miss a shot fast enough to justify not aiming."
A quote I've always liked that echos a lot of your message: "Go slow to go fast". I can't remember where I heard it first, but I think it's great advice.
But how do you deal with politics? Ambitious or egotistical or just assholes like to take advantage of slow people, right? I tend to get paranoid that these people will appear when I'm taking mine time to understand.
That's exactly what I do everytime I buy a new iPhone! I pause for an hour and read the documentation before jumping right into it!
Wait a minute... does it come with a docunentation? Hell no - like any other piece of code you come across at work. Who writes documentations anymore???
The fact that no one really knows what to do; that no one has the magic formula. That you just have to try different things and see what sticks. Keep moving forward.
Shakespeare was right: we are poor players that strut our hour upon the stage and are heard no more.
The main insight here is that people don't need more software. There are a lot of people out there that can validate whether your product is cool, or provides something that nobody else does, or that there is a pain point they're currently working around. But especially in B2B, most people aren't in the business of buying software.
To get around this, you need to paint the picture of what life will be like after they've bought your software. With good products, this can be as easy as explaining it to them, then helping them rally the support to sign the $25,000 check to purchase the software. With less good products, this can mean doing providing real, actionable advice that the software sort of supports.
I'll give you an example. I used to sell performance monitoring software: think of New Relic or Datadog, but better for distributed environments. This is pretty crucial for bigger teams, as performance problems tend to cross ownership boundaries. Most engineers believe that performance is important. However, it is not easy to convince any given engineer to make performance their crusade, especially their crusade across multiple teams. So not only do they have to be convinced the product is easy to set up and maintain (a good onboarding flow in product can do most of this for you), but you also need to educate them on how to sell this to their boss and how to evangelize this to other teams. Or go evangelize for them. Our best customers had one person who was fired up about what we did, but a lot of their help was to point us to the right 5 people in their organization that might also care about performance.
Freemium helps here, but if the main problem is "getting my coworkers to care sounds hard", freemium and frictionless signup will never be the answer. So you need to sell the product, even if it's something the organization desperately needs.
Seriously, I was one who used to sneer at the advice, thinking I can handle multiple things and by trying several things in parallel I increase my chances. Boy, was I wrong!
Pick one and only one battle (market), and fight it with all you have. Iterate quickly.
My major insight in 2016 was realizing that literally everyone has impostor syndrome. After talking to a few people about it, I've started asking pretty much everyone I meet who works in tech and found this to be universally the case (even John Carmack, according to Wikiquote - https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_D._Carmack, the "Seriously? I'm good?" quote and the one at the bottom about not being Richard Garriot).
What this has allowed me to do is 1) recognize that I'm really not a failure because I can't do X, just that I haven't yet gotten experience with X, so I need to read and play/experiment with X more (and therefore there's pretty much nothing that I or anyone else _can't_ do with enough experience), and 2) learn how to better talk to my coworkers and technical friends so as not to say things that might make them feel impostor-y (because there are definitely things other say that will set off that anxiety in my brain, even unintentionally). I feel like both of these things have allowed me to be more effective and productive at work.
I've never had impostor syndrome, but I imagine it comes from not realizing that everyone is finite and has a finite amount of time to experience the universe. But the universe is infinite, so you can never know everything there is to know. Even if you limit it to a narrow field like programming, the infinitude is still there. The universe is literally infinite in every respect; you cannot escape it. No matter how small you limit your focus, there is an infinite amount of information to learn in that thing. I think studying fractals gave me this insight, but it's not hard to realize that the universe itself has the same property that no matter how carefully you examine some aspect of it, the complexity is never eliminated. In fact it only increases.
I've never had imposter syndrome either. I don't really relate to your fractal example. My experience was when I was 13, my older cousin was bragging that he'd used up all the memory on his trs-80 making an adventure game (BASIC). I was very impressed until I saw his program. It was all if/else statements, he hadn't used any subroutines. I was astounded. That was an early lesson to me, no one knows all this stuff. That and the realization that these damn machines make fools of us all at one time or another :)
Everyone is just at different stages of learning. When you've been doing this long enough, you've forgotten a lot you knew before. At some level, 'refreshing your memory' about what your forgot is not much different than learning it the first time.
Yeah, agreed. I guess the real point I want to make is that you need to forgive yourself for not knowing everything, and don't delude yourself into thinking your value as a human being is based on how much you know about computer stuff. It's a fine thing to learn, and we have a professional responsibility to learn on a constant basis, but if your whole identity is defined by your work, then you're building your house on sand.
I worked through impostor syndrome by realizing two things:
1) almost no company will just up and fire a developer without warning, even in "right to work" states. A company will always
2) have the manager or HR talk to the developer to try to resolve a performance issue. It's cheaper than firing and rehiring a new developer. It also saves time.
Now, because of these two factors, I realized that if my performance were an issue, my manager or HR would have a meeting with me to address the situation. The fact that such a meeting has never come up means the company is satisfied with my performance. So, if there's a down day at work, then I don't feel so guilty about surfing the web reading up on new languages or techniques, even if everyone else (usually in different departments) are on a tight deadline.
Another thing I've learned (not at work) are the three rules for dealing with worrisome situations. Given you are worried about some situation:
1) Can you do anything about it now? If so, do something about it and stop worrying.
2) Can you do anything about it later? If so, wait til later and stop worrying about it.
3) Can you do nothing about it? Don't worry about it because there's nothing you can do.
> 1) almost no company will just up and fire a developer without warning, even in "right to work" states. A company will always
2) have the manager or HR talk to the developer to try to resolve a performance issue. It's cheaper than firing and rehiring a new developer. It also saves time.
Hmm, I've been fired from my last two positions without any warning or prior notice. In the first instance, I was a full-time employee and I got stuck on a piece of functionality and I was simply let go. I made co-workers aware of the fact that I needed some sort of help, but one day after a prolonged period of being denigrated, I was let go. When asking how come no prior warning was given, I was told "you could see it coming."
The most recent position was as a consultant and I was working with deadlines that had slipped for a number of reasons mostly outside of my control and I had to handle numerous support requests in addition to that -- which led to a severe case of burnout. My contract was abruptly terminated one day, without prior warning.
I took what I could from both experiences and improved my skills as much as I could, but there is always the domain-specific hurdles that arise.
My point is that there are some companies out there that are ruthless, so far in my experience it seems that this mostly applied to the smaller ones. I never oversold myself or my skills and I did ask for a second opinion when I felt things were taking too long. It could just be my luck thus far.
> I've been fired from my last two positions without any warning or prior notice
This feels more like the exception than the rule - especially if they are willing to spend a whole day denigrating you. Obviously, I don't have the same context as you on this, but I have never seen someone get let go suddenly for poor technical performance.
True, it is more of an exception based on the majority of other cases that I have heard as well. PIPs and/or warnings are usually issued first. The one commonality between the two companies is that they were very small (3-5 developers).
Have you ever been through a re-org? I've seen people get escorted at the door by security on the exact same day of the public annoucement. People who worked 15 years for the company. Also, do you know that some companies rank and keep track of their "least valuable employees"? So when the time comes there's to time to waste trying to find out about who should go and who should stay.
Technically, yes. The company that hired me was bought by another company (B), which in turn was bought by yet another company (C). There was much shuffling of upper layers of management (mostly VP and higher) but that's about it.
Sam Altman's advice to "always ask" has been very helpful. I can't find the link but the sense is: do not skip asking for something you want because you assume you'll get a "no".
Totally agreed. I got my degree from a mediocre university. Then went on to get PhD from a top 5 university.
I audited a few classes and the difference in student behavior was immediately evident. They freely questioned assertions or topics that didn't make sense! At my first university students would just muddle on and hope to figure things out as exams approached.
That little experience changed the way I approached learning and life in a massive way.
Work to increase your luck surface area. Network, meet new people, get involved in OSS, go to meetups, volunteer.
When you are just starting out, get good at a tangible skill that people will pay you for, and which will let you play in the arena where you ultimately want to be. For me, it was IT development, even though I had a business background.
If you are in technology, or work as a developer, work in a non-tech firm that leverages technology, rather than in a technology firm. It will be easier to stand out, and your contributions will be held in much higher regard. This point was actually made by Zed Shaw in one of his books, and although he took some flack for it, it's actually very good advice. I've seen it play out a number of times.
Don't let it dominate your life, of course, but you are unlikely to make money unless you actually want to, and you are unlikely to build a successful business without actually making money somewhere along the way.
There's nothing wrong or distasteful about money. It's a neutral substance with a lot of good uses.
That's a good one. In life %99 of the people are looking for
1.security 2.comfort 3.rich
I will go to school and get a degree, get a nice and stable job. Buy a house (mortgage) a car (loan) then in my spare time, i'll try to launch my business! I want to get rich so bad! Life is tough...
Rich people simply think the other way
1.rich 2.comfort 3.security
Why would I spend most of my time working on things that are not inline with my goal? I'll buy a house and pay cash when I'll get rich. Let's go get that money!
Don't rely on someone else to make your career (or your life) better. If you want something, it's on you to do it. The loser blames something else (other people, society, bad luck) for their problems. The winner takes control of their life, accepts personal responsibility, and creates their own future.
This is definitely true. However, as a sort of tangent, I think there are some types of problems in our industry that are systemic (like sexism) that can perpetually inhibit someone's success. I don't want to derail this conversation into a political one, but I also don't want to unfairly tell someone "the reason you aren't successful is because you blame others for your problems" when it may in fact be the case that the person has the odds unfairly stacked against them.
I don't disagree. But I recommend you assess the reality of your situation and fight for what you want and deserve. One person can't end sexism, but plenty of people overcome sexism and other -ism's. Be the person who overcomes it and inspires others. Don't be the person that uses sexism as an excuse.
Nobody expects you to know everything when you're starting out, even if you have that fancy degree that you spent years on. That degree just shows them you have the aptitude to learn how their business works and they're willing to take the time to train you if you're willing and able to learn.
Career: 1) You can increase your salary dramatically by changing your job 2) Job interviews are like exams, study for them, find and practice example questions 3) In tech, contracting is where you make bank. If you work it out, with the same breaks you take with salaried employment you're still much better off.
Startups: 1) The goal is to make money, not build something. Focus on that. 2) It typically takes a long time (many months or years) to create a business. Be patient, stick with it. Think of it as a marathon, and an experiment.
Courses, e-books: 1) There's much more involved in their creation as what you initially think. It'll take much longer to build than you imagine (if you're about doing a proper job) 2) They won't sell themselves, you need marketing channels. 3) the trick with courses / books is to build audiences and funnel the audience into them. You can do this by creating free books / courses and upselling collected emails, or by collecting emails from other places / affiliating and collaborating. So don't count on a single book / course from making you so much money you can quit work. Build a series of books / courses instead - you'll see the results of compounding.
I'll comment on career growth. First of all, make sure you can learn from the team you're joining. If you get an offer, ask if you can grab a drink or lunch with the team before you decide. If a manager says no to this, that's actually a pretty big red flag. When you hang out with the team, probe their experience and get an idea of their communication style. Understand what you can learn from them and understand how different people might mentor you. You should also make sure your manager is strong and will do regular one on ones with you. Groups that do occasional skip-level 1on1s are even better.
When you're working, look to take the initiative when you can and always try to over deliver. Work hard and find opportunities to take leardership roles on something. Good managers will encourage this. But don't be annoying, look for real needs you can fill.
Talk to your manager very explicitly and figure out your career path. You can and should talk to your manager about exactly what it takes to get to take the next step in your career; a good manager will define this very clearly. Then, I'd say every 2-4 1on1s with your manager, check in on your progress. This is also a good opportunity for for him/her to point you to additional learning resources to get there. You should do something similar with other members of your team, especially those you respect the most. It also doesn't hurt to ask everyone what they're favorite books and blogs are.
Being on strong teams and working on complicated problems is key. Once you feel like you're not learning a lot anymore, make a career change. Early on in your career, I think your rate of learning should be the main factor in changing jobs. Change a few times early on (1-2 years a job), I thinks is also very healthy since you get exposed to some different environments/perspectives.
> Talk to your manager very explicitly and figure out your career path. You can and should talk to your manager about exactly what it takes to get to take the next step in your career; a good manager will define this very clearly.
Asked this in 1-1 with my manager yesterday. Got mostly vague answers. I feel it's easier to get both raise and next level by changing companies then trying internally. Have seen good people leave the company, they'd Hire from outside and give that person raise/promotion + the additional training and time to ramp up.
Have confidence in what you do. When you're starting something new - a new company, a new role, a new technology - you'll often find yourself wondering if you're doing it normally, or correctly, or the best way.
It's good and normal to ask people who might know, or research the answer. But sometimes the quickest way to learn is doing the thing naively, and then asking yourself what worked and what didn't.
Don't let your own second-guessing remove your confidence in what you're doing, or slow you down to the point of inaction.
1. Nobody cares how hard you work. Results — not effort — are the only things that matter.
2. It's infinitely easier to produce excellent results when you like the job you're in. You may never find "The perfect job" but the closer the match to your skills, the better.
3. You'll be amazed at how few people give a sh*t about your new startup.
4. Paychecks are addictive. Then often essential. If you want to start your own business, try not to become dependent.
My seventh grade teacher strongly enforced #1. Parents would complain to her all day long that their kid spent a lot of hours on so-and-so assignment only to receive an average grade. Her response was always that she did not care how much time was spent on an assignment- if the end result was crap, you were not going to get a good grade.
- "what I am good at" is often very different from what I think I will be good at, or what I think I should be good at, or what I would like to be good at.
- I find working on big, daunting, time-bound things where I need to educate myself to deliver on, very rewarding (not necessarily easy and not necessarily fun).
- The right job for me is a mix of doing things that make me happy, and doing things that I find rewarding.
These are all broad generalizations but they are derived from my career. I worked in the music industry as a technologist for many years, and because I'm also a musician, I thought I should be happy doing this. I wasn't. I moved to working at an investment bank, the work was a mix of very challenging things that were a huge stretch for me, and also specific technical things that I was very good at delivering. I loved it, my career took off, and has been great since (I've done a number of different things after said investment bank).
Superficially, you wouldn't think that a person like me would be happy working in a large bank, but it turned out I really liked it, and was great at it. and if you met me, you would have thought I'd have loved the music industry, but I didn't, and didn't do very good work as a result.
70 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadYou will come across many very competent people with only a few years of experience, who are still at the bottom of the ladder due to how organisations are structured rather than a lack of ability.
Understanding this is key to overcoming impostor syndrome.
I would say it's very dependent on culture.
"In Business As in Life, You Don't Get What You Deserve, You Get What You Negotiate"
Yes, that's the name of the book, just google it. :)
But I have most definitely found this to be true. While it is sometimes the case that good deeds are rewarded, to really get what you want and to go beyond what you thought was your potential you need to be assertive and go after things. Negotiate for yourself rather than waiting around for something to happen. Push the boundaries.
I say it jokingly but early on -- I gained quite a reputation among people far smarter than I am, for being able to solve the most difficult problems.
But I never really did anything other than read. And most of the time I never had to go beyond the documentation.
The trick I guess, is to slow down and really read. There is no shortcut to understanding. And there is no solution without understanding.
R.T.F.M. and you ahead of 99.999999..% on anything (compared to the whole earth population on one specific topic)
Googling for immediate answers on Stack Overflow is not reading and doesn't lead to understanding. It's "fast food calories" for your mind, and if one solves every problem that way, it's like eating at McDonalds for every meal.
Wait a minute... does it come with a docunentation? Hell no - like any other piece of code you come across at work. Who writes documentations anymore???
Shakespeare was right: we are poor players that strut our hour upon the stage and are heard no more.
Before I started my career, I thought there was a point where products mostly built themselves. Coding changed that.
When I was in engineering, I thought there was a point where products mostly sold themselves. Sales changed that.
When I was in sales, I thought there was a point where the message mostly spread itself. Marketing changed that.
When I started my own company, I thought there was a point where most of the business ran itself. I certainly never reached that point.
The main insight here is that people don't need more software. There are a lot of people out there that can validate whether your product is cool, or provides something that nobody else does, or that there is a pain point they're currently working around. But especially in B2B, most people aren't in the business of buying software.
To get around this, you need to paint the picture of what life will be like after they've bought your software. With good products, this can be as easy as explaining it to them, then helping them rally the support to sign the $25,000 check to purchase the software. With less good products, this can mean doing providing real, actionable advice that the software sort of supports.
I'll give you an example. I used to sell performance monitoring software: think of New Relic or Datadog, but better for distributed environments. This is pretty crucial for bigger teams, as performance problems tend to cross ownership boundaries. Most engineers believe that performance is important. However, it is not easy to convince any given engineer to make performance their crusade, especially their crusade across multiple teams. So not only do they have to be convinced the product is easy to set up and maintain (a good onboarding flow in product can do most of this for you), but you also need to educate them on how to sell this to their boss and how to evangelize this to other teams. Or go evangelize for them. Our best customers had one person who was fired up about what we did, but a lot of their help was to point us to the right 5 people in their organization that might also care about performance.
Freemium helps here, but if the main problem is "getting my coworkers to care sounds hard", freemium and frictionless signup will never be the answer. So you need to sell the product, even if it's something the organization desperately needs.
Seriously, I was one who used to sneer at the advice, thinking I can handle multiple things and by trying several things in parallel I increase my chances. Boy, was I wrong!
Pick one and only one battle (market), and fight it with all you have. Iterate quickly.
"No, stop fucking around, do it right."
What this has allowed me to do is 1) recognize that I'm really not a failure because I can't do X, just that I haven't yet gotten experience with X, so I need to read and play/experiment with X more (and therefore there's pretty much nothing that I or anyone else _can't_ do with enough experience), and 2) learn how to better talk to my coworkers and technical friends so as not to say things that might make them feel impostor-y (because there are definitely things other say that will set off that anxiety in my brain, even unintentionally). I feel like both of these things have allowed me to be more effective and productive at work.
Everyone is just at different stages of learning. When you've been doing this long enough, you've forgotten a lot you knew before. At some level, 'refreshing your memory' about what your forgot is not much different than learning it the first time.
1) almost no company will just up and fire a developer without warning, even in "right to work" states. A company will always
2) have the manager or HR talk to the developer to try to resolve a performance issue. It's cheaper than firing and rehiring a new developer. It also saves time.
Now, because of these two factors, I realized that if my performance were an issue, my manager or HR would have a meeting with me to address the situation. The fact that such a meeting has never come up means the company is satisfied with my performance. So, if there's a down day at work, then I don't feel so guilty about surfing the web reading up on new languages or techniques, even if everyone else (usually in different departments) are on a tight deadline.
Another thing I've learned (not at work) are the three rules for dealing with worrisome situations. Given you are worried about some situation:
1) Can you do anything about it now? If so, do something about it and stop worrying.
2) Can you do anything about it later? If so, wait til later and stop worrying about it.
3) Can you do nothing about it? Don't worry about it because there's nothing you can do.
Plan accordingly.
Hmm, I've been fired from my last two positions without any warning or prior notice. In the first instance, I was a full-time employee and I got stuck on a piece of functionality and I was simply let go. I made co-workers aware of the fact that I needed some sort of help, but one day after a prolonged period of being denigrated, I was let go. When asking how come no prior warning was given, I was told "you could see it coming."
The most recent position was as a consultant and I was working with deadlines that had slipped for a number of reasons mostly outside of my control and I had to handle numerous support requests in addition to that -- which led to a severe case of burnout. My contract was abruptly terminated one day, without prior warning.
I took what I could from both experiences and improved my skills as much as I could, but there is always the domain-specific hurdles that arise.
My point is that there are some companies out there that are ruthless, so far in my experience it seems that this mostly applied to the smaller ones. I never oversold myself or my skills and I did ask for a second opinion when I felt things were taking too long. It could just be my luck thus far.
This feels more like the exception than the rule - especially if they are willing to spend a whole day denigrating you. Obviously, I don't have the same context as you on this, but I have never seen someone get let go suddenly for poor technical performance.
I audited a few classes and the difference in student behavior was immediately evident. They freely questioned assertions or topics that didn't make sense! At my first university students would just muddle on and hope to figure things out as exams approached.
That little experience changed the way I approached learning and life in a massive way.
When you are just starting out, get good at a tangible skill that people will pay you for, and which will let you play in the arena where you ultimately want to be. For me, it was IT development, even though I had a business background.
If you are in technology, or work as a developer, work in a non-tech firm that leverages technology, rather than in a technology firm. It will be easier to stand out, and your contributions will be held in much higher regard. This point was actually made by Zed Shaw in one of his books, and although he took some flack for it, it's actually very good advice. I've seen it play out a number of times.
Don't let it dominate your life, of course, but you are unlikely to make money unless you actually want to, and you are unlikely to build a successful business without actually making money somewhere along the way.
There's nothing wrong or distasteful about money. It's a neutral substance with a lot of good uses.
1.security 2.comfort 3.rich
I will go to school and get a degree, get a nice and stable job. Buy a house (mortgage) a car (loan) then in my spare time, i'll try to launch my business! I want to get rich so bad! Life is tough...
Rich people simply think the other way
1.rich 2.comfort 3.security
Why would I spend most of my time working on things that are not inline with my goal? I'll buy a house and pay cash when I'll get rich. Let's go get that money!
Startups: 1) The goal is to make money, not build something. Focus on that. 2) It typically takes a long time (many months or years) to create a business. Be patient, stick with it. Think of it as a marathon, and an experiment.
Courses, e-books: 1) There's much more involved in their creation as what you initially think. It'll take much longer to build than you imagine (if you're about doing a proper job) 2) They won't sell themselves, you need marketing channels. 3) the trick with courses / books is to build audiences and funnel the audience into them. You can do this by creating free books / courses and upselling collected emails, or by collecting emails from other places / affiliating and collaborating. So don't count on a single book / course from making you so much money you can quit work. Build a series of books / courses instead - you'll see the results of compounding.
When you're working, look to take the initiative when you can and always try to over deliver. Work hard and find opportunities to take leardership roles on something. Good managers will encourage this. But don't be annoying, look for real needs you can fill.
Talk to your manager very explicitly and figure out your career path. You can and should talk to your manager about exactly what it takes to get to take the next step in your career; a good manager will define this very clearly. Then, I'd say every 2-4 1on1s with your manager, check in on your progress. This is also a good opportunity for for him/her to point you to additional learning resources to get there. You should do something similar with other members of your team, especially those you respect the most. It also doesn't hurt to ask everyone what they're favorite books and blogs are.
Being on strong teams and working on complicated problems is key. Once you feel like you're not learning a lot anymore, make a career change. Early on in your career, I think your rate of learning should be the main factor in changing jobs. Change a few times early on (1-2 years a job), I thinks is also very healthy since you get exposed to some different environments/perspectives.
Asked this in 1-1 with my manager yesterday. Got mostly vague answers. I feel it's easier to get both raise and next level by changing companies then trying internally. Have seen good people leave the company, they'd Hire from outside and give that person raise/promotion + the additional training and time to ramp up.
It's good and normal to ask people who might know, or research the answer. But sometimes the quickest way to learn is doing the thing naively, and then asking yourself what worked and what didn't.
Don't let your own second-guessing remove your confidence in what you're doing, or slow you down to the point of inaction.
2. It's infinitely easier to produce excellent results when you like the job you're in. You may never find "The perfect job" but the closer the match to your skills, the better.
3. You'll be amazed at how few people give a sh*t about your new startup.
4. Paychecks are addictive. Then often essential. If you want to start your own business, try not to become dependent.
5. Learn to recognize The Dips from the cul-de-sacs (http://guykawasaki.com/the_big_dip_ten/).
- For me, doing what I am good at makes me happy.
- "what I am good at" is often very different from what I think I will be good at, or what I think I should be good at, or what I would like to be good at.
- I find working on big, daunting, time-bound things where I need to educate myself to deliver on, very rewarding (not necessarily easy and not necessarily fun).
- The right job for me is a mix of doing things that make me happy, and doing things that I find rewarding.
These are all broad generalizations but they are derived from my career. I worked in the music industry as a technologist for many years, and because I'm also a musician, I thought I should be happy doing this. I wasn't. I moved to working at an investment bank, the work was a mix of very challenging things that were a huge stretch for me, and also specific technical things that I was very good at delivering. I loved it, my career took off, and has been great since (I've done a number of different things after said investment bank).
Superficially, you wouldn't think that a person like me would be happy working in a large bank, but it turned out I really liked it, and was great at it. and if you met me, you would have thought I'd have loved the music industry, but I didn't, and didn't do very good work as a result.