Ask HN: I am not a competitive guy, how will it affect my career?

So the fact that you can own this perspective in that way may say something about your resilience in subjectivity. Your ability to say "here's my thing, here's how I understand myself," combined with the conclusion, "let's say I don't change that. So what?"

For the sake of reasonable contingency--just in case the opposites, all that grand stuff you _don't do_, starts to form into a cognitive blind spot later on, I'd probably start to objectively define those opposite things you are setting up against, ASAP. What is excellence really, what do people really expect of a non-boring person, and so on. This needs to be objectively outlined so it doesn't compromise your ability to keep an open mind if life change is ever really needed.

On your question of uplifting yourself: I'd start with what you're showing you're good at right here--explaining your position gently, and seeing what other people offer in response. You will definitely be able to learn a lot of new perspectives that way.

Eventually some of those positions can probably turn into experiments you can conduct, to find whether there are new paths worth exploring, or whether you already perceived them all. :-) You could document this, train others on it, use the experience for all kinds of advancement purposes toward uplifting yourself.

Regardless, life is effort, career activity is effort--you'll be putting in some long-term effort anyway, so I think your circumspect analysis of such effort in this way is laudable and worthwhile.

Good luck in wherever your path takes you.

P.S. In regard to underdog paths, I'd look for underdog companies with counter-philosophies. Start with the extremes, heck even anti-work if you need to. It will be really important to find some grounding for your conceptual position and it's key to ground it where it connects well for starters. That will lend your efforts authenticity, which is key to seeing your thought position and experiments roll out in full effect.

Since that works like compound interest, the missed opportunities can add up quickly.

That is, if you don't feel like being competitive most of the time...fine. But there may be some benefit to doing it once in a while (yearly review, etc).

I think you should try to overcome this and become an expert in some narrow domain. That way, you will not have to be explicitly competitive about your career.

Note: I genuinely believe if you're here asking this question you are more interested in tech than the average, so you're probably putting yourself down a little.

There are no free lunches. Nothing comes for free. So why should success? If you want something, you HAVE TO work for it.

So this brings me to my three steps for you:

1. Give a hard look within yourself for what you want. Keep in mind that this can change with age and what you want for yourself now won't be what you want 5 or 10 years from when you will have to do this exercise over again.

2. Once you've figured out what you want, the hard part is figuring out EVERYTHING, and I mean absolutely EVERYTHING, that you will need to succeed at it. It is completely easy to delude yourself at this point. People delude themselves into thinking a 1 hour YouTube video can make them a programmer or a 497 dollar course can make them a real estate mogul. There is real work involved and you have to research to KNOW WHAT YOU'RE GETTING INTO. If you ignore this step, you are going to enter a field with a false sense of security and, to some extent, entitlement because you will expect your dreams to come true but wont have the hard skills needed to survive long enough to achieve them.

3. Finally only if you decide that the hard work is worth it, COMMIT yourself to it. Commitment is a word which does a lot of heavy lifting and I personally believe that very few people, especially the younger ones, know what that word entails.

Only if you do all of these 3, will you be successful. If you skip 1, you will be passionless and hate your career. If you skip 2, you will trampled by your competition because you won't even know what you don't know. If you skip 3, you will just give up at the first sign of hardship.

I, for myself, decided that I'm not very competitive and would rather live life easily rather than kill myself to compete with others. I've given up hope on a lot of things and know there are a few things I'll never have but I'm OK with that for now.

Good luck with your decision.

I'm only a few years into my career myself so I can't say how far you will go but you sound like an awesome coworker to me.

You sure you're not depressed, etc? Done any bloodwork or checked test/hormone levels? Eating and sleeping well?

Everyone, particularly men, have that thing that reveals their core passion - that topic/thing where they could talk the ear off anyone about it, that thing which fulfills their need to satisfy meaning and purpose.

If you're just punching the clock in life, something is off.

If you enjoy life in the most boring way, then it sounds like something in your life is already fulfilling. Boring and exciting are entirely in the eye of the beholder.

Especially early in your career it can be daunting to see the success and skill of other people in the field but recognize that their success took a long time to build up, and probably some amount of thrashing around too.

So again, what do you want? Do you enjoy continually learning new things and getting satisfaction from exploring new ideas? Do you enjoy the act of building something new from scratch? Do you enjoy optimizing parts of what you build at a small level until the details are just right? See if you can clarify for yourself what you really care about and focus on doing more of that.

For now, I would also counsel against avoiding being 'a boring copy-cat'. It already sounds like you have an interest in going broad - embrace that.

For me, I want to put my attention onto helping others, in this case by using computers, data, and statistics. I also put attention onto playing music for others, listening to their problems, and cooking for them. There's no need to one-up anyone if your goal is simply to help others.

And btw, it's not bad to spend attention on yourself, it's good to improve your fitness, nutrition, sleep, quality of life, and your own satisfaction and joy. There's nothing wrong with a Giver Giving to Themselves, which will enhance their overall health + giving abilities.

Set your own goals. Don't just ladder-climb or be competitive for the sake of it. Don't live someone else's life.

You can definitely do fine without being competitive. I don't think competitivity is a plus, really.

Can you do fine without being curious about technology, just doing enough to get by?

Honestly, in the current market for software engineers -- I don't see why not. You might not get to the "top levels". You'll still make more than 90%+ of non-software engineers. There are people who arne't even competent who are getting rich, so.

A lot of ambition these days is misplaced in my opinion. Why don't you try crossing over some of these diversified interests? Some very interesting things can happen when you mix disparate interests and before you know it, you could be one of the authorities in something new.

Or if not, then at the very least just keep being a great employee. There's plenty of room in tech for people that are consistently good but average. Remember "average" means you're already better than half the people! Rockstars are way overrated but they get all the attention. Don't buy the hype. Right now in tech (and the economy in general - speaking of the US here), employers would give their right arm just for a solid worker that shows up consistently and on-time. Showing up is half the battle.

Also maybe lean into the boredom a little. Sometimes boredom can be a great motivator into doing something different, wacky or new.

If nothing done actively in work, consequences include:

Lower salary.

Fewer oppy's like management track.

In those type of companies you don't, necessarily, have to be competitive/ambitious to move ahead, because the incentive programs would make it so that your managers would push you forward. You'd still need to be able to express how you'd like to progress and to then take steps to make sure you could achieve it (learn new skills, work on your weaknesses, etc.), but you wouldn't need to drive it forward entirely on your own.

In my personal experience managers who do this well are extremely rare, however.

If you find yourself in a situation where your boss wants you to compete with your teammates and the outcome for the loser is getting fired or making a lot less money, then find another job ASAP!

Find places that reward teamwork.

I became a programmer, and I stayed a programmer. Like, I tried managing projects once; didn't agree with me. And I was obliged to take on the management of a support team, once; that didn't agree with me either. I retired a programmer.

I didn't get as rich as I'd have got as a man-manager; I suppose a really good project manager must be worth their weight in gold, because I've never met one. But I earned enough to raise my kids, buy a house, etc. So that's not so much about competitiveness, as about ambition. I have had the ambition to make something really cool; but I wasn't ever lucky enough to have a really good idea and the time to implement it. And probably I just wasn't clever enough.

If you enjoy your life, and you earn enough, my advice would be not to worry about competitiveness and ambition.

He was perfectly happy. He came in at 9:30, napped at lunch for an hour, left at 5:30, and did ok work, good enough that you could give him a boring task and he'd get it done in a fairly timely manner. We made enough money to cover his mortgage and expenses, and he really had no ambition to go farther.

And there was nothing wrong with that. He enjoyed himself, wasn't bitter or angry or anything like that. Last I heard he retired at 67 and collected social security.

You can't have one without the other. If you don't want to do the work that's totally fine, but you have to come to agreement with yourself that you stop measuring yourself against that. Really, the secret to tech is caring enough about the people and the results to do a good job. Do that and you will be more than fine. Just be sure you're getting something you want out of your job!

Decide what you want exactly, and be willing to sit with the question for a long while without an answer. Do you want to be in tech? Do you want to be deeply technical? Do you want to mix technical work with people management?

Once you know what you want, you will find work you want to do to get there, if need be.

Someone once said "quantity has a quality all its own." A diverse skill set can be a force multiplier when tackling challenging problems. Bringing a wider perspective can lead to more optimal solutions.

> If one doesn't aim for excellence, is it a bad thing?

Is it a bad thing if other people don't aim for excellence? The guy fixing your brakes? The airplane mechanic on your next flight? The front-end developer of the corporate chat program you use every day?

That's not to say everything you produce must be perfect in every way - but I've always found that I never feel bad when I know I've given my best effort. Whereas knowingly under-performing does tend to eat at you.

> I am really early in my career and sometimes I get cold feet when I see how incredible other people are.

Lack of experience is a temporary state. The smartest, most experienced person in the room started from ignorance. They put in the time and effort to improve and you can certainly get there too if it interests you.

> What does it take to uplift myself and my own levels?

My recommendation would be to find a hobby or side project that is at least somewhat related to your field. Something that you find interesting and can use as a springboard for skill development. Getting involved in an open source project is a good example of somewhere one could contribute as well as benefit.

Competitiveness is just a motivator to be productive and focus. Arguably non-competitive high producers are the best for keeping objectivity and not getting too emotionally attached to one approach or another.