I mean if you're 30 and (taking from the article) married badly, chose sciences instead of humanities or did a misjudgement, you absolutely definitely can fix it up. Even at 40, it just gets harder and people don't always find the supposed effort worth it but you totally can.
I am in my fifties and taking a masters degree mostly for fun while keeping my software engineering job. I am working a lot harder than I have in a long time, specifically in an intense super hard homework due in 8 hours crank it out way. I do learn a lot of complicated stuff at work, but mostly can optimize for well rested and ready to learn and don't use it till I am confident kind of mode. Kids and work was hard but for different reasons. But when I forget my age and just dig in, I do feel younger. But also I am way more mature and able to talk to professors with less fear and like send that email asking stupid question or let people know ahead if I will have logistic problems etc. Best of both worlds except so much hard work.
Well done! I've studied with people in their 60s who decided they wanted to expand their knowledge or change domain, very inspiring.
Recently, I also decided to improve my knowledge and went on doing 2 more masters in UX/UI and design, as I felt I was lacking those "softer" skills. I was surrounded by 20 year olds but it didn't matter and by the end I feel this choice was as natural as any other I took before.
I'm not in my 50s yet but I still hope I will do like you did :D
(although I'm quite done with writing papers/theses, so maybe not yet another master :P)
From my experience, the number of chances you have is not the limiting factor in life. I see people making the same kind of mistakes over and over again. The problem is often the pattern of reaction to externalities. The pattern is then the problem, and it is very hard to break habits.
Yes! Many bad decisions—choosing the wrong partner, making bad health choices, or even getting the wrong degree, can be changed in 6-36 months, if the mistake is realized.
But the person who makes the mistake takes too long to see the mistake, and then goes about making the same mistake (or failing to make a different decision) for years after they start to question their decision. There’s the bottleneck.
That’s why I’ve invested a lot of energy into being more flexible, changing my mind readily, and learning from my mistakes very quickly.
At least in relationships that's not the case. Unless you are naturally extroverted or charismatic, if you mess up and haven't figured things out by the time you are in your 30s then you may as well give up. American society just isn't built for finding love outside of school/college.
That's a pretty strong claim to make completely unsupported by evidence. In fact, I think you'll find more people than ever before are settling down in their 30s and starting families, etc.
>> if you mess up and haven't figured things out by the time you are in your 30s
> In fact, I think you'll find more people than ever before are settling down in their 30s and starting families, etc.
I did not interpret GP post to mean "If you haven't settled down and started a family by 30, you may as well give up".
I interpreted it more as "If you haven't made a decent sized social network, or haven't figured out how to approach strangers, or haven't been in a committed/long-term/love/etc relationship, or didn't socialise enough to develop socialisation skills, etc... THEN you may as well give up!"
I think the GP's point is that those people who are settling down in their 30s and starting families, well, they didn't mess up, and figured things out before age 30.
Maybe he'll clarify, but I agree with my interpretation: if you haven't figured out romantic relationships by age 30, you may as well give up, because post-30 it's exceedingly difficult to find an environment with lots of socialising with peers.
Almost impossible, in fact, because, as you said, most people are already out of that scene anyway...
In reality this isn't black/white, but a spectrum. Some may have a harder time than others, but giving up is reductionary and depressing and leads nowhere.
Obviously it is in the West in tech circles where everyone is introverted and they work 14 hour days. The protestant work ethic has decimated society and all that matters.
I also disagree strongly with that. I live in Seattle (a city well known for being not social and welcoming - aka the seattle freeze), and didn't recover from being a shy introvert until around 30. The skills and mindset for human connection was hard for sure, but I found many pockets of really welcoming social environments around shared interests. My personal interests run to the outdoors, so for me it was hiking/biking/mountaineering/run clubs. However, groups and clubs around shared activities exist for almost any interest, and the whole point of them is to socialize and meet people! It DOES take some effort and discomfort, but it's not even close to "almost impossible".
I had a dreadful marriage that ended in my forties and am now ten years into a relationship where I am so persistently happy I had to rescale my idea of happiness. Maybe by a factor of 1024 or more. I have step kids and my kids have a step mom but they all have been exposed to more happiness than before. And I finally got able to be myself and found a spouse who can talk math with me and gets me in a way I was too blind to conceptualize as a young adult.
This is one of those areas where money can solve your problem. It's a lot harder to rebuild if you're not making good money. Especially for those who are on the hook for alimony & child support.
In my case it took a few decades to plumb utterly the idea that perfecting myself, or trying extremely hard to do so, would not make a bad relationship good. It was a hard lesson for me but I learned it in every cell of my system. Not that I am against being flexible, but some people need life to really beat that lesson into them.
Easier to identify and work around your characteristic errors. Go slow into romance, or make sure to lint and test the code, or be wary of saying yes to things you don't really care about, maybe offload some judgment calls to a trusted delegate. Whatever it is, we all have weaknesses and we can learn to work with them better. And realize when they crop up it isn't uniquely shameful to have broken bits.
It's important to recognize that life is path-dependent. But as a counter-point, worrying too much about each decision as a potential mistake can lead to the kind of fear-based paralysis described by Sylvia Plath in the Bell Jar:
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
I think a meta analysis of this is that the character in your quote should realize they themselves are inside of their own unique fig. The reason the others have withered is because she's chosen a fig. In real life, it seems that what usually happens is people don't realize they are heading for a fig that's not that bad all the while staring at all the others imagining how their life might be. Basically, be more grateful for what you have now.
In all the heartwarming animes I watch it goes like this: the main character has an absurd, unrealistic aspiration with a strong emotional motivation for it. She makes a lot of desperate and ridiculous efforts to get somewhere, and as a sort of karmic reward she gets somewhere else, not exactly what she intended, but a situation with a lot of fun and friendship and purpose develops, and it turns out that this is now what she wants and it serves the original emotional purpose just the same. However, the initial foolish aspiration was crucial or nothing would have happened.
To be fair, “anime protagonists” are not the same category as “arbitrary human” so in this context saying “she” actually does come off more like virtue signaling given the statistical prevalence of male anime protagonists
Statistical prevalence is irrelevant when talking about a specific person's experiences watching anime. They may predominantly watch shows with female protagonists, or they may have had just a few particular female-protagonist shows in mind when they wrote the comment.
Personally speaking (as someone who watches very little anime and has mostly only seen the famous ones, like Spirited Away and Kiki's Delivery Service), I think only ~10-20% of the animes I have watched have had male protagonists. It is surprising to me to hear that protagonists in that genre are mostly male, given my own overwhelming experience, and I'm not totally sure I believe it.
If you watch very little anime.. why would you presume to weigh in on this topic? Shōnen is the most popular category of manga / anime and it’s targeted at adolescent males with mostly male protagonists.
Is there much Shonen that you'd describe as "heartwarming", though? I like stories about personal emotional growth, and magic. Wasn't using "she" for virtue signalling, just as what seemed to me to be a statistical fact. There's one I can think of with a male protagonist, and his great aspiration in life is to be murderer, and he targets his classmate, who is a tall and slightly dim-witted model ... and ends up filled with protective feelings toward her, which begin when he impulsively lends her his intended murder weapon (a boxcutter) to cut some card for a school project ... and by the end of the series they're going round a mall together at Christmas, holding hands. That was a pretty good one. Recommendations for ones with male protags are welcome, if they're not full of tanks and battles and so on.
Because we aren't talking about anime in general. We are talking about one specific person's personal experiences with the subset of anime they watch.
If I say "she" when talking about generic protagonists in some Miyazaki films I've seen, are you going to say I'm wrong and should say "he" instead because some genre of anime I've never heard of is popular with some demographic I'm not a part of?
If that's really how you think, then do you also opine that we should say "she" rather than "he" when talking about generic human beings, seeing as women outnumber men? Somehow I suspect not.
Apart from that intial quote which to me sounds like road to absolute passiveness, thats my life so far.
Never had clear goal and wasnt given any, and I've massively surpassed anything anybody ever expected from me when growing up. But I largely let the flow of life take me as it went, and only in those few crucial moments when you are branching all your future life I went the harder but more interesting way and persisted despite hardships as long as it still made sense. Reasonable hardships are great, they often give back much more than initial costs, in many ways. And walking it alone without any external help is also sort of reward multiplier.
I am in a place in life in early 40s where I have nothing more to achieve or prove, just keeping the direction now is enough to be dying happy about life well lived.
Of course the last thing you wanna do in such place is to think you have it all set and figured out, life has nasty ways to remind you of the chaos just behind many corners.
I feel similarly. Pick the most interesting opportunity you’re aware of, seasoned with some realism. Excel to the best of your ability. Continuously increase your abilities. Leave everything better than you found it; but don’t exhaust yourself needlessly. Leverage the advantages you have and don’t mourn the ones you don’t.
That's a great approach to this issue. I believe this is exactly what happened to me, and to most people who are not "lucky" in having all the necessary conditions for their original "dream" to be realized. Anyway, the older I get, the more I believe there's no way a person can just have "one" dream the want to pursue their whole life, what you really want keeps changing every decade or less. I still remember what my dream was when I was 12 years old or 20, and I can tell you with confidence I am happy I ended up in a different place 30 years later.
I don't know how you figure that affordable place means you can't be a developer, when software engineering is probably one of the little professions where this doesn't apply.
Also doing a year of FAANG should be enough to travel for a long while. What I earned in a 3 month internship was enough to pay my remaining studies and anything I wanted to buy for a long time. Don't take for granted what you get.
The dev jobs obviously still exist but they aren’t financially viable anymore and I would need to change careers to fit the local market.
> doing a year of FAANG should be enough to travel for a long while
yes and at the end of my big travels I’ll come back to a 1k/month rent increase for an even lower quality of life. This is not a viable long term plan. I already need to spend an extra 800 to rent the same unit I’m in if I was on the market today
> "I feel like I’ve always known what the best choice is"
That's an astonishing level of confidence / hubris. Also, many people choose to enjoy extended travel -- having saved $ in advance, and typically finding ways to live with much less luxury than your FAANG lifestyle takes for granted, and/or doing odd jobs or remote work/gigs, or teaching....
I would recommend that you find a way to broaden your horizons, either literally w/ travel or by way of books and ideally interactions with people outside the very narrow band of your current environs and perspective.
I live in a tiny old 1 bedroom apartment with no car and spend less than $100 on entertainment most months. You Americans are extremely spoiled. I’ve been doing this for 3 years already and I still can’t even afford a 2 bedroom condo. I need to save and live like this for 3 more years before I’ll have enough
What country are you from? Obviously this is all context dependent.
I do agree that thinking you’ve always made the best decision is a contradiction at the very least. You never know it’s the right decision until after the fact but also it’s impossible to guess how other outcomes would play out.
I’m Canadian. The only thing I could have done better is move to the states. I thought FAANG in Canada was the right choice in the long term despite the low pay but it’s a huge mistake. My life is a dead end right now and I need to get out. Until then I just sit here and cope and seethe
The mistake is Canada, not FAANG. Essentially no career choice pays enough to afford RE in Canada without supplementation. I recommend moving because things are going to get much worse before they get better.
Saying "FAANG" without clarifying "in Canada" was completely misleading. Since the only reason you brought it up was to signal high income, it must have been deliberate.
Also, you went straight from "I've always known what the best choice is" to "I thought FAANG in Canada was the right choice... but it's a huge mistake."
You're spouting nonsense and contradicting yourself.
Everyone else, sorry for having accidentally fed a troll.
Are you illiterate? I said in my original post that my compensation is adjusted for my own country.
> I feel like I’ve always known what the best choice is and the “path” is which trade offs I choose. There are no good options
Why do you act like I chose to work here on purpose? I wasn’t smart enough for the jobs i wanted so I picked the best option that was available to me. I was wrong. I know that an American FAANG job is better
Not to belittle your situation, which I know nothing about, but there’s nothing unusual about living very modestly the first few years of one’s career.
Well, yes. This is the aim of a civilisation, isn’t it? To render banal what was previously trying, and raise to daily concern what was previously trivial.
Well, it depends on what is meant, by "second chance."
If it is a complete reversion to the path that would have been followed, then it likely won't happen.
However, I have been privileged to spend the last 43 years, watching second chances become realities, where the second chance turns into something that far surpasses the original vector.
Great catch as chance is an inclusive term. Therefore, when seeking a second chance one should consider what aspect(s) of the path should change to succeed.
Well, in the "advice-industrial complex" as the OP correctly identifies it, the OP being in the advice business (sort of) himself, has two choices: join the inflationary 'self-help, you can do it' camp and have a hard time getting himself remarked from the crowd, or join the tried and true 'contrarian' camp, yielding much better results for a minority who wants to hear and feel 'different'.
Truth is that there's no one true way. Statistically there will be people who get second chances and people who don't. My guess is that the latter crwod gets even more bitter and depressed hearing all "it will get better, you will overcome the hurdles".
I genuinely think it's neat how all of our impulses have been commoditized. People want to feel "different"? Great, there's ways to make money from that. Money is such a spur for creativity.
Nothing is better than a comeback story and I try to feel as inspired as I can every day because the truth is people have made groundbreaking discoveries in their 50s, started businesses in their 70s and completely overcome much harder obstacles than picking sciences instead of humanities? Like really that’s an example? Career changes are literally one of the easier things in life to do if you’re determined. This article is just too pessimistic for me.
Nothing is better than a comeback story and I try to feel as inspired as I can every day because the truth is people have made groundbreaking discoveries in their 50s, started businesses in their 70s and completely overcome much harder obstacles than picking sciences instead of humanities?
There are of course such people, but they are for a good part the few notable exceptions you hear about. For each of those there are thousands of people that don't manage to pull it off.
Because the struggle is with yourself. The parent post is correct when they say:
> Career changes are literally one of the easier things in life to do if you’re determined
What makes it hard is changing yourself; not externally imposed forces. The article is full of hubris in my opinion. The author looks around at the failed friends in their peer group and goes “there, but for the sake of ‘my own intelligent choices’ go I”. The start and end of their wisdom is “make prudent choices, as you reap what you sow”. Granted, but this never ends - the “second chance” may not exist in the sense of a “do over”, but at any point of life the branches flow out, and better choices can be made.
I don't know. My experience is that as you get older, you're constantly evaluated against what could have been, and experiences that in youth would have been seen positively become discounted or, strangely, even held against you.
It often feels as if a second chance at a certain point in life requires more than a change in yourself; it requires an even bigger change than earlier, once over to make the real change, and twice over to convince others or overcome their biases. Either that or the luck of finding someone who understands second chances and is willing to give them.
The narratives change when we’re older; but I think there are still “sorting my life out”, or “taking on a new adventure”, narratives that work. And that’s all this side of things is - a story to tell yourself and others while the real work of changing habits and working consistently toward a goal occurs.
I’m not disagreeing that it’s harder than when young, or the number of options have significantly reduced. However, I do think we too often feel trapped by circumstance (when older), when much is still possible.
When looking for guidance for life, a good example might be Jesus. Did he make the best decisions in his life? He didn't really care about his life, he gave it away. He only cared about the well-being of others.
As you get older, probably you are the one doing the evaluating and realizing you won't be a heart surgeon or discover a major math theorem (that was two from my own teenagerhood). Mostly people not you don't give it two thoughts. But whatever. Learn from your life and don't judge it. I mean sure being old is held against a lot of people but that's just some political social change you can work for a little. Other people's opinions aren't the truth and it seems hard to get a few decades in and not realize this. You can make your own chances each morning, especially to be free and to be helpful to others.
> Career changes are literally one of the easier things in life to do if you’re determined
What nonsense. What makes it hard is everything around it. People can't choose to take a 50% pay cut to change careers. They can't let their families starve or lose their homes for it. They can't move move when they need to take care of a loved one.
This idea that changing your mind is the hard part is absolute bonkers unless you're so privileged that you don't care about the real externalities of those choices, or you don't have any.
Phrases like this one only worsen the situation, as for the majority of the world, that's simply not true. If, for you, all you have to do is change your mindset then good for you. You're very, very lucky. But please, don't assume everyone is as privileged.
A part of their success has to be dependent on millions of people not trying to do the exact same thing, no? What a disaster it would truly be if everyone had the same realizations
I'm not sure. Since I've never seen a situation where millions of people earnestly try for something they want, I would only be theorizing on the outcome. I think certainly there'd end up with more than 2 or 3 success stories, which is mainly my point though
An interesting comment on Trump by Ukraine's army head of intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov: “There have been nine instances in his life when he went to the top, fell to the very bottom of life, and went back again.”
When he won in 2016 i remember thinking. The campaign was so long and so intense and for all of it it seemed clear that he would lose. I remember thinking, this guy in every other respect is a despicable person, but I can't help but be impressed that he just kept going.
Anything can be relatively easy if you've either already succeeded the first time based on sheer determination and/or you've successfully done other harder things that were at least as abstract as having a successful career. This article is not about the moment you make a decision, because that's as easy as it's set up to be based on all of the previous dice rolls of your life, but about the likelihood that you'll be able to bounce back from rolling snake eyes on what seemed like a sure thing at a time when time itself was cheap.
If determination alone qualified as the criteria for succeeding in a career change, then that means whatever situation you're in already has prepared you perfectly for a marginally different path forward, or the risk involved is relatively trivial. Imo, this article isn't pessimistic enough, but it doesn't mean one can't be inspired by rare anomalies, it's just that you'd be naive to believe an arbitrary person can replicate those results merely by trying hard. It doesn't work for a primary career, and it won't work for a secondary career, there are many more factors involved.
> In the novels of Ian McEwan, a pattern recurs. The main character makes a mistake — just one — which then hangs over them forever. ... This plot trick is said to be unbecoming of a serious artist.
Hmm, yet Thomas Hardy is (correctly IMHO) is considered a great artist worthy of having novels like The Mayor of Casterbridge included in the canon.
Robert Frost's, often misinterpreted [0], “The Road Not Taken” also comes to mind here.
"In many ways, the poem becomes about how—through retroactive narrative—the poet turns something as irrational as an “impulse” into a triumphant, intentional decision. Decisions are nobler than whims, and this reframing is comforting, too, for the way it suggests that a life unfolds through conscious design. However, as the poem reveals, that design arises out of constructed narratives, not dramatic actions."
I think this is quite terrible advice because our (Western) culture is already way too biased towards quarter and mid-life crises, ageism and fatalism when there is objectively little reason to panic.
One conversation I had that had extreme influence on me was working with an old software developer from China who had seen the cultural revolution as a kid, had family sent to farm labor, his parents had their company taken from him, he lost his own companies twice during reforms of the 80s and 90s and had his life turned over like half a dozen times in ways that where I grew up nobody had ever experienced once. He had to completely start from scratch when he was in his early 50s.
So when someone aged 28 at work was having a mental breakdown over their wrong phd specialization the guy always just laughed and said, you're younger than 45, you can start over, what's the problem?
The article is right that life is path dependent, in the sense that if you went to war and lost both arms you have a problem, but no, what obscure degree choice you made has not in any serious way taken real agency away. That is just our bizarre and neurotic culture. At least for most people their own perception of their history weighs them down significantly more than what is in reality genuinely the case.
We love to romanticize the path not taken too. If I look at the mistakes I have made in my life, if I could go back and change them I would still just end up making different mistakes on a different path.
Some of those alternate paths would have been a dead end too, literally. We take the value of the path that was chosen is one that means you are alive to read this on 4/28/24 completely for granted.
There's Orwell's essay Such, Such Were the Joys, where a horrible ordeal of preparation, in a preparatory school, for a scholarship and a successful future in Edwardian society, is completely nullified by coinciding with the First World War and the nature of society changing.
The problem is people want to enjoy their lives and starting over means forfeiting many years of that life, as well as potentially closing doors they wanted to leverage. People often put their lives on complete hold for a phd. Discovering that was a waste is awful.
There's merit to this but it's not the advice that most people need. Most of us already worry too much about making mistakes and need to know that course correction, at least to some degree, is almost always possible.
For those who always decisions rashly, this might be useful, but I would expect they are the minority group.
You reach an age when life becomes a (text) adventure game: you wake up in a field next to a mailbox with a letter in it, and on the ground is a bag with items some of which are useful now, some that may be useful later, and others that are not useful at all.
It may or may not be your beautiful house and your beautiful wife (if I may mix the metaphors a moment) but it's all you have. The challenge is working out what to do with what you have within the limitations of the game, which can involve challenging your idea of what the limitations of the game are...
On the job side, this is a scary consequence of specialization. If you can learn a job in a day or a week, you can go where opportunity is. If it requires a degree (or a graduate degree!) then you're so much more stuck.
I've wondered if this is part of the reason for high software salaries. When so many industries needs software, developers can hop from the failing industry to the lucrative one, forcing more efficient competition. Not so for many careers, where the skill set and the industry are tied together.
I'd bet the whole second chance thing gets more brittle as competition and specialization get more important in general, even beyond jobs.
> If it requires a degree (or a graduate degree!) then you're so much more stuck.
That's a situation I've been in now for a few years now. I'm somewhat burnt out on software engineering, but the last 13 years of work history, a bachelors in CS, and about half a PhD in theoretical CS, my options on who will hire me are kind of limited.
It seems like my only options are:
1) Start a fresh career with a fresh new degree and accept about 1/3 of my salary that I have now for the next 13 years after that.
2) Take a career in non-degreed labor and probably permanently have about 1/3 of my salary.
3) Try and pivot into the management side of things.
4) Start a business.
5) Just live with it.
Since I don't really want to take a loss salary for 13+ years, I'm extremely risk-averse, and I don't want to become a manager, I'm more or less stuck with option 5.
I like software and computer science, but "software engineering" barely counts as either. I expected to be utilizing a million data structures or figuring out proofs of correctness or designing the next amazing distributed system, but it feels like 2/3+ of software engineering is "add field to JSON" or "write a for loop to convert something to a different shape" or "change color of button" or "change width of page layout and then modify selenium tests", and the only data structures that ever get used are hashmaps and arrays. I spent so much time learning the minutia of CSP and TLA+ and set theory and I feel like I have basically nothing to show for it, and now I can't really even change to a career where I would get to use them.
Not that it's really a thing to complain about; I'm pretty lucky to be in a postion where I make about 3x more than I realistically need, so I'm not really trying to garner sympathy, but it's also a situation that becomes kind of easy to burn out on, and sometimes it depresses me more than it really should.
There are jobs (e.g. database engine development) where knowledge of distributed systems algorithms comes in handy. Most likely not nearly at the level of your theoretical PhD, but also much more stimulating that adding fields to JSON.
I've never worked on database engine stuff, so I cannot speak to it, but I've worked a million jobs, many of which have titles like "Distributed Systems Engineer".
My frustrations come from the fact that "Distributed Systems Engineer" seems to broadly translate to "we use Kafka to glue two services together" for most companies. While that can still require some level of clever engineering, it doesn't really require a ton of theory. At multiple companies, when I do on rare occasion come across a project that requires some more elaborate planning, I will try suggesting using TLA+ to test things out, and management will look at me like I suggested kicking a puppy or something. "Math" is sort of a dirty word in industry, at least in the places I've worked. Maybe I just don't do a great job selling it. In every single job I've ever had, I've always been "that weird math guy", despite the fact that I really don't think I suggest anything that arcane, at least shouldn't be to a software crowd.
Again, it's hardly something to complain about; "Woe is me, I'm making yuppie money but I don't feel fulfilled all the time". It's just something that annoys me.
Lots of us are increasingly interested in formal methods coming out of the labs and ivory tower and seeing more casual usage in industry.
But pitching this sort of thing to management is hard, where if they’ve heard of it at all then they associate it with big brain critical path shit at the highest levels of huge orgs like nasa or aws.
Can’t blame people for not seeing the value yet though.. we need to make things easier/cheaper. Plain old testing is often seen as a cost/effort sink that dev teams and management resent and so of course Model checking looks like a whole different layer of ambiguously-worthwhile effort.
Mere advocacy here won’t win people over, because they care more about costs than “correctness” as an abstract virtue. We probably need progress on things like generating code from models and models from code if we want to see more adoption
I agree, and part of the issue is that if the formal methods work as intended, then by design nothing interesting happens, making their success less visible to managers that aren't paying close attention. Ideally something like TLA+ would catch a bug that you wouldn't notice for multiple years (e.g. infinite money glitches), but that means that value becomes less obvious because it can take multiple years to manifest, and that means you're waiting multiple years for TLA+ to show its value, which would be "nothing happened", which can be harder to measure.
I've debated trying to write a PlusCal->Java transpiler [1], and I haven't really ruled that out yet; while I don't think it should be necessary to have that for PlusCal to be useful, I think it would potentially sweeten the sales pitch.
[1] I think PlusCal would translate better to a sequential Java style program than raw TLA+ would.
Why don't you try using PlusCal/TLA+ on some portion of the code at work (if you still care to stay there) to prove its effectiveness? Whittle down the code to something basic to show how it'd work so your manager/co-workers can see for themselves on code that they're reasonably familiar with.
Unless your manager/colleagues are intimately familiar with such tools, I'd think that your touting their usage at work, is more like wishful thinking.
Just do the math and don't worry about management. If you are generally productive you can take a quarter here and there to focus on a thing only you know the value of.
Yeah, I've taken to occasionally testing some of the simpler stuff I write in PlusCal without telling managers. If they think I'm dicking around with "theoretical" math stuff they might get annoyed but if I submit code that works correctly within a deadline I suspect they'll be alright.
My long term plan on this is to submit a bunch of code that works correctly the first time, and eventually once I am established at this job as "clever" I'll reveal the PlusCal/TLA+ specs and hopefully have a decent sales pitch.
What you’re describing are just run of the mill backend jobs. They aren’t very sophisticated in terms of algorithms or theory. What I had in mind is working on say Cassandra or ElasticSearch, or internally within FAANG on one of their database engines. If you’re high enough there (which, granted, may take multiple years) to decide on the future direction of the engine, you get to ponder a lot of theoretical or at least very complex stuff.
I did try applying to MongoDB a few times, even made it relatively far in the interview process both times but eventually get the "We regret to inform you..." emails for it. I also failed a phone-screen for CockroachDB though I'm actually not 100% sure why. ElasticSearch never got back to me. I certainly applied for these kinds of jobs (and many, many more), but there's not much more I can do than wait for the companies to recognize my brilliance.
When I worked at Apple I did an internal interview for a team that worked on a distributed-RAID-style thing, did really well on the interview, almost got to the offer stage, but then they saw the previous year's review where I got a "Needs Improvement" for (I think) purely bureaucratic reasons that I've talked about on HN before, and they decided not to move forward.
It's tough, because I think a lot of those jobs are in pretty high demand, and as such a lot of really qualified people apply to them and they can be picky, and I don't really blame them for that. There's a lot more generic unsexy backend jobs.
The statement "my options on who will hire me are kind of limited" is a bit misleading. Limited compared to whom? Your options are abundant compared to most people.
It sounds like you are waiting on a fantasy position that has both interesting work and pays at least the same as your current position, which you have 13 years of experience in. That's not usually how life works. There are trade-offs.
If you want to do a different type of work that you don't have any professional experience in, you are going to have to take a pay cut. As you mentioned, you're fortunate to be making 3x what you need. It's up to you whether it's worth "only" making 2x what you need in order to do work you find more engaging.
This is not a unique circumstance. People make this trade-off all the time. Maybe talk to some people who did.
> It sounds like you are waiting on a fantasy position that has both interesting work and pays at least the same as your current position, which you have 13 years of experience in. That's not usually how life works. There are trade-offs.
I mean this with all the respect in the world, but no shit. That's what I'm frustrated about. I feel like the entire thing I wrote was specifically because I am aware of these tradeoff. Just because the tradeoffs exist doesn't mean I have to like them.
I know that my dream job doesn't really exist, at least not in numbers large enough to even bother considering, and I'm not naive enough to really think that pivoting to another career will suddenly solve all my problems and frustrations.
There's no requirement to put qualifications or experience on the CV that aren't necessary for the role. Hiring managers make a lot of assumptions, and if specialisation is going to limit opportunity then leave it out.
Possible other option: I hope to soon go part-time.
IE keep my current job with the pay rate, but change the balance of hours worked.
And if it doesn't work how I like, go back to full time.
I like the idea of studying physical design... but we'll see how that pans out.
Yeah, I've debated doing that; just doing contracting work half-time and spend the other half of my time focusing on the stuff I actually enjoy. The thing that stops me is health insurance.
My wife is wrapping up her school this year, so once she's working then I might be able to use her insurance and give this experiment a try.
> Insurance is a fair point I hadn't thought of. I guess there is some link between "full time" vs "part time" and insurance in that sense.
It can depend somewhat on the job. When I was a part time adjunct last year teaching two classes (six credit hours) at a public university, I was given the option for health insurance. I don't remember what the premiums were but I remember they were lower than marketplace plans.
> I assume it isn't worth being "part time" and paying for the insurance gap out of pocket. Bargaining power tends not to work that way.
Since the Affordable Care Act, the prices are somewhat more regulated and they're not really allowed to "decline" you anymore, so the "bargaining power" thing isn't as bad as it used to be. Paying out of pocket for insurance is expensive but not insurmountable for basically anyone working in tech, and certainly you can factor into an hourly rate. In NYC there's the MetroPlus system, and the cheaper plan on that is around $1250/month for two people, which equates to roughly $15,000/year [1]. An employer plan in NYC will still typically have anywhere between ~$100-$600 monthly premium for a family plan, so anywhere between $1200-$7200 per year of just premiums (not counting what you pay before reaching your deductible), depending on the company and which plan you choose within the company. The US healthcare system is needlessly complicated.
Still, it would certainly be better to not pay $15,000/year if I can avoid it, so before I try doing half-time contracting I am going to wait for my wife to start working.
I'm in the US. I just had to turn down my dream job because it doesn't have health insurance benefits. The cost of insurance on your own is so ridiculous that we were around 35k apart in salary just to make up the insurance difference.
Obviously don't dox yourself, but roughly where do you live? I just looked up insurance premiums for Oscar Health and it was $2,000/month for one of the budget plans, so about $24,000/year?
It can be extremely variable between cities so I'm not saying that this applies to everyone, but when I checked against my NYC zip code, that's the number it gave me.
> I like software and computer science, but "software engineering" barely counts as either. I expected to be utilizing a million data structures or figuring out proofs of correctness or designing the next amazing distributed system, but it feels like 2/3+ of software engineering is "add field to JSON" or "write a for loop to convert something to a different shape" or "change color of button" or "change width of page layout and then modify selenium tests", and the only data structures that ever get used are hashmaps and arrays. I spent so much time learning the minutia of CSP and TLA+ and set theory and I feel like I have basically nothing to show for it, and now I can't really even change to a career where I would get to use them.
So, around 6-7 years ago I was on a development team and was getting tired of a bunch of things - the frontend treadmill (react/redux, do it this way, no that way, then a few months later there's a new "right way"), how we kept getting new product owners and the "vision" was lost so we were just reacting to customers (and kept remaking the same pages but differently), and a slightly more personal one (no one liked my idea for one of those pages, then a few months later our designer came up with the exact same thing, no one remembered mine, and the page has been unchanged since). Our company was also drifting heavily into silos during that time, some people were frontend-only, some backend-only, where I like the whole stack and didn't want to limit myself.
So after all that I did something that surprised and confused my manager: Asked to get moved to the maintenance team instead of new development. They were intrigued because apparently that team is where new hires often ended up, and they almost never had someone experienced on it - which surprised me because I figured that job would be harder than new development. So far I've been on this team longer than any others and have yet to get tired of it. I know some of it is how good a manager we have, but the work is also very directly about fixing things. It's much more self-directed, no product owner initiated rewrites on a whim, large projects still happen when something is really bad, but because it's considered legacy there's no treadmill-chasing. And the random fixes can end up anywhere in the stack, so I get to keep using everything I'd learned from linux through the database and server to frontend, instead of sticking to a silo.
So even "5) Just live with it." does have sub-options.
I've debated doing that exact move as well, simply because I do enjoy making "incorrectly" designed code "correct", by either moving to a simpler model or utilizing a more tried-and-true way of doing things, and since no one wants to be in "maintenance" it might afford me some more freedom.
At a previous job, I would occasionally spend time on the weekend rewriting and simplifying code because there wasn't really a "maintenance" team and I knew the only way that it would ever get better was if I fixed myself on my own time. I've since drawn a line in the sand that I do not work for companies on weekends but I did sort of enjoy that process.
If you are really making 3x what you really need, you should be building wealth at a rapid pace. Once you are financially secure, you can stop doing unfulfilling work just because the pay is good.
I 'retired' early because I don't need to work for anyone anymore. My wife and I saved and invested so we are set financially. I still love to program so I spend my time and energy working on a project that is personally fulfilling to me even though it has yet to bring in meaningful revenues.
BTW: it is a new data management system that is designed to be a distributed system. Have you considered teaming up with someone on a side project?
> If you are really making 3x what you really need, you should be building wealth at a rapid pace. Once you are financially secure, you can stop doing unfulfilling work just because the pay is good.
I didn't word it terribly well, so apologies for that, but for "really need" I was talking about subsistence wages in this case. I make perfectly fine money, and I do save/invest as much as I can, and I do own my house in NYC, so I do alright. I do hope to retire somewhat early, at least by American standards, but it's not like I'm making "fuck you" money.
> BTW: it is a new data management system that is designed to be a distributed system. Have you considered teaming up with someone on a side project?
Outside of something I did with my dad a few months ago, not really. I have a decent job now that's not psychotic about non-competes, so I've been ramping up to build something.
Well, I think the suggestion remains: live on subsistence income whilst working for as long as it takes to be able to live on subsistence income whilst not working. (All the while you can be attempting to effect changes that allow you to earn more than subsistence income at something you enjoy going.)
Yeah, I don't really disagree; I'm still trying to get out of debt from the six months I was unemployed last year (which also ate a bit into my savings, but I live kind of boring so it wasn't super bad). Hopefully that should be coming to a close pretty soon (even sooner if Gemini actually reimburses the money that they ponzi'd out of me like they claim they will). I've been trying to invest in a combo of relatively-low-risk ETFs (VOO and VTI primarily) and US Treasury Bills, to give myself a combo of potentially-higher-than-inflation-reward but also zero-risk-and-still-higher-than-bank-interest money.
Once my wife starts working, we figured that we'd put nearly 100% of her paycheck into some forms of savings to accelerate the process a bit further, since my salary has traditionally been enough to cover the bills. I'd like to have enough money to retire comfortably by my mid-to-late 40's. I think that's realistic.
2023 was one of the worst years of my life, maybe the worst. It was really horrible being laid off twice and having to spend so much time on LinkedIn and doing Zoom whiteboard interviews and waking up to dozens of rejections every morning, not to mention that being laid off twice in a year makes your resume look insanely bad (each stint being about 3 months). As a result, I think I've become more frustrated than I probably should, and grown a strong resentment towards companies, with a nearly-complete lack of optimism that they'll ever do anything even remotely actually-technical.
My current gig seems a lot better but I've learned my lesson about getting my hopes up. We'll see if it lasts more than three months.
I guess you’re in USA. Luckily I am in poor Germany with way lower salaries. Which opens me another option
6) go into trades. Becoming certified electrician takes a lot of time or money or both. My university degree with an expensive course was enough. Salary stays the same as long as I am self employed.
Otherwise 5) since 4) does not really work for me. Helped too many brilliant guys as an electrical engineer. Products got traction, but nothing big happened.
This is your chance to decide what your values in life are. Money or fulfillment. Maybe you can alter the software job somehow to make it more fulfilling to you. An organization with a purpose or mission that you believe in. A role with different type of expectations or work. Maybe writing on the side or starting a family.
I think Americans are kind of trained by the propaganda machine that you need to find fulfillment from your job, but fundamentally I think you're right and I need to take things into my own hands.
I have a few ideas that I think I might be able to turn into papers, and might even be able to get them published in a real journal. I doubt that my current gig will have too much of a problem with that (they're much more in the chemistry/healthcare space than pure CS), so I might be able to have some fun with that while giving myself an excuse to use pure math.
What I'm describing is friction. In a market where demand changes over time, supply friction affects efficiency. The time scale over which the market reaches equilibrium and that time scale's affect on the people providing supply is what I'm talking about.
> A girl misidentifies a rapist, and in doing so shatters three lives, including her own ( Atonement).
That's not what happens, is it? I thought she falsely accuses her sister's boyfriend/lover as being a rapist for reasons left slightly unclear to the reader (misunderstanding the situation vs wanting to cause attention).
A friend of mine has deep wounds around their experience of making the wrong decisions during formative (college years) they they feel has set them back in life.
Everyone around them sees their story differently: a successful career pivot into a field that they love which compensates them well. They have truly inspired many!
Yet for my friend, the story they tell themselves is that their poor decisions in college will essentially haunt them forever because they don't have the academic pedigree and work experience of their peers.
I have my own relationship with rumination, and appreciate this perspective from Michael Pollan in his book "How to Change Your Mind"
"A lot of depression is a sort of self-punishment, as even Freud understood. We get trapped in these loops of rumination that are very destructive, and the stories that we tell ourselves: you know, that we’re unworthy of love, that we can’t get through the next hour with a cigarette, whatever it is. And these deep, deep grooves of thought are very hard to get out of. They disconnect us from other people, from nature, from an earlier idea of who we are."
My advice for anyone reading this is to listen to the stories that you tell yourself. Ask yourself how you can adjust these stories to have a more empowered understanding of yourself.
Yes precisely. If I had a pound for each time a dev told me they wish they were a doctor, and another pound for each time a doctor told me they wish they were something else!
I believe in the Myth of Second Chance and Third and so on. It is what we tell ourselves to keep going. Nothing wrong with that.
At the time you make a decision it is often impossible to know what its consequences are, so if we had made a different decision things might actually be worse.
Not making a decision in time can also have negative consequences.
Hindsight living, is like hindsight investing (I should have bought Apple stock in 1999) useless.
With hindsight it's easy to cherry-pick missteps. And from those missteps fantasize a hypothetical outcome. And obviously in this alternate universe you only ever come out better.
Yes, there are pivotal moments. I've made big decisions along the way. I've made some mistakes.
But everything good in my life has come from this one path.
I make a choice to celebrate the present, not hanker after a mythical alternative. I choose to be content with the present, and contentment is the source of my happiness.
It's easy to compare my life with others, and find others richer, or more famous, or married, or unmarried. Social media amplifies this.
But it's also easy to compare to others who walked a harder path, and have a harder path in front of them. At this stage of my life its less about climbing one more rung, and more about helping those below me, smoothing their path as much as possible.
No one goes through life perfectly. Hindsight living is not helpful and contentment beats regret every day of the week.
100% correct but I think what more people should do is post-mortems on import decisions.
Too many people blame others for their current situation. Try taking a philosophy that we have more control and look back upon decisions we made and why we made them.
Not "I should have bought apple stock". but "why didn't I buy apple stock?"
I can relate 100% to that with my own experience coming from a poor economic background and coming to a more affluent background right now where any misstep can make me goes back 10+ years of economic development.
Others placed something like "fear-based paralysis" and I get it, but when you're responsible for making that transition between poverty and minimum affluence, you start to develop a "defensive-based proneness to action" instead.
For instance, since I was quite bit ambitious to get out of my past situation, at least for me most of my decisions were made thinking in some factors like:
- Do not get involved in situations where I can get murdered (doing something stupid myself or getting into other people's path that can lead me to be murdered)
- Avoid any situations in which I could end up in jail
- Avoid having children without any financial and societal conditions
- Avoid any drugs
- Avoid any error that could impact my net worth more than 5%
Living in a world of avoidance is not pleasant, most of the time, it sucks, and the feedback loop is sometimes so subtle that you need to exercise your mind to think in the future most of the time.
I have a happy life today, because I saw some of those things happen to some close friends, and there's no comeback from those. Sometimes you can find contentment in some other areas of your life, but if you have a certain level of ambition, you will never recover.
Yes. False beliefs breed more false beliefs, and at some point they catch up with us.
I had a colleague who was fanatically into soccer. I asked how does he feel when his team loses? It is devastating for many especially in big games. But he said he is willing to take the risk of rooting for a specific team and possibly losing because it gives him excitement. It's a bit like a drug really you get addicted to your team winning. It's a bit like any gambling addiction.
If you had no interest in the outcome of a soccer-match you wouldn't get very excited watching it.
In reality most people don't have a real interest in a soccer-game since they don't gamble money on it. Therefore it seems people pick a soccer-team to root for BECAUSE we want to get excited. We want that adrenaline. (or is it dopamine?) We want to believe that the arch of history tends towards our team winning.
False Belief 1: If my soccer-team wins I'll be much better off, much happier.
Consequent False Belief: Since my team did not win I must now be desolate. I must feel bad.
I've many regrets similar in vein to that of your friend. Over time I've decided that it's rather reductionist to think that things connect together so simplistically. The "how my life could have been better if X, ceteris paribus" can be a really painful analysis, but -- in this case favourably -- there is no "ceteris paribus" in real lives.
There's a collection of techniques in the mental health field called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that is about helping people identify and replace these negative stories. If folks are having a hard time applying these ideas themselves alone, look into this therapy as it can be good to have a therapist help you through using the technique.
I think the idea that our lives are a set of branching paths, where once you go down one path you can't go down others, is partly a consequence of how the academic path of many careers is designed to "weed out" promising students from others. This "branching tree of time" illusion is created by the elitist, rejecting attitude of the gatekeepers of our society... and by our sensitivity to taking rejection personally in our young and formative years.
And maybe secretly we all wish things could've worked out with our first love... when in reality our first loves are those we are least likely to be compatible with in the long term.
If I'm still breathing, I can still have another go. At least at things I'm not legally or culturally barred from due to age or diagnoses, e.g., no flying planes for me because ADHD.
But I think it's rare for anyone to end up where they had planned, and even rarer for them to get there the way they had intended.
I think lots of times this is the essence of agism: that old dogs can't learn new tricks etc. I'm not sure path dependence needs to be as strong as it is, but it often is because society disallows it.
"Many people are miserable and accepting of it" does not disprove that you can, in fact, make career moves after 30, or study the humanities you ignored in undergrad at a later point. Many people are fragile; does that mean that you shouldn't try to be resilient?
You might never get end up with the life you wanted when you were 15, but few people do. Does "getting exactly what you wanted when you were young and then never being challenged/learning/changing" sound like the recipe for a happy life well lived?
Most of us do make decisions that aren't exactly resounding successes. Most of us have regrets. So it's "be unhappy about the regret and dwell on it while staying where you are" or "try to move on and change things to make you pay less attention to it."
> You might never get end up with the life you wanted when you were 15, but few people do. Does "getting exactly what you wanted when you were young and then never being challenged/learning/changing" sound like the recipe for a happy life well lived?
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 398 ms ] thread[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40162438
Recently, I also decided to improve my knowledge and went on doing 2 more masters in UX/UI and design, as I felt I was lacking those "softer" skills. I was surrounded by 20 year olds but it didn't matter and by the end I feel this choice was as natural as any other I took before.
I'm not in my 50s yet but I still hope I will do like you did :D
(although I'm quite done with writing papers/theses, so maybe not yet another master :P)
But the person who makes the mistake takes too long to see the mistake, and then goes about making the same mistake (or failing to make a different decision) for years after they start to question their decision. There’s the bottleneck.
That’s why I’ve invested a lot of energy into being more flexible, changing my mind readily, and learning from my mistakes very quickly.
> In fact, I think you'll find more people than ever before are settling down in their 30s and starting families, etc.
I did not interpret GP post to mean "If you haven't settled down and started a family by 30, you may as well give up".
I interpreted it more as "If you haven't made a decent sized social network, or haven't figured out how to approach strangers, or haven't been in a committed/long-term/love/etc relationship, or didn't socialise enough to develop socialisation skills, etc... THEN you may as well give up!"
I think the GP's point is that those people who are settling down in their 30s and starting families, well, they didn't mess up, and figured things out before age 30.
Maybe he'll clarify, but I agree with my interpretation: if you haven't figured out romantic relationships by age 30, you may as well give up, because post-30 it's exceedingly difficult to find an environment with lots of socialising with peers.
Almost impossible, in fact, because, as you said, most people are already out of that scene anyway...
In reality this isn't black/white, but a spectrum. Some may have a harder time than others, but giving up is reductionary and depressing and leads nowhere.
Is it really necessary to both slip in an insult and try to shame opposing ideas into silence before stating your point?
Tell me you're a programmer without telling me you're a programmer :-)
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
— H. Simpson
In all the heartwarming animes I watch it goes like this: the main character has an absurd, unrealistic aspiration with a strong emotional motivation for it. She makes a lot of desperate and ridiculous efforts to get somewhere, and as a sort of karmic reward she gets somewhere else, not exactly what she intended, but a situation with a lot of fun and friendship and purpose develops, and it turns out that this is now what she wants and it serves the original emotional purpose just the same. However, the initial foolish aspiration was crucial or nothing would have happened.
Personally speaking (as someone who watches very little anime and has mostly only seen the famous ones, like Spirited Away and Kiki's Delivery Service), I think only ~10-20% of the animes I have watched have had male protagonists. It is surprising to me to hear that protagonists in that genre are mostly male, given my own overwhelming experience, and I'm not totally sure I believe it.
If I say "she" when talking about generic protagonists in some Miyazaki films I've seen, are you going to say I'm wrong and should say "he" instead because some genre of anime I've never heard of is popular with some demographic I'm not a part of?
If that's really how you think, then do you also opine that we should say "she" rather than "he" when talking about generic human beings, seeing as women outnumber men? Somehow I suspect not.
Never had clear goal and wasnt given any, and I've massively surpassed anything anybody ever expected from me when growing up. But I largely let the flow of life take me as it went, and only in those few crucial moments when you are branching all your future life I went the harder but more interesting way and persisted despite hardships as long as it still made sense. Reasonable hardships are great, they often give back much more than initial costs, in many ways. And walking it alone without any external help is also sort of reward multiplier.
I am in a place in life in early 40s where I have nothing more to achieve or prove, just keeping the direction now is enough to be dying happy about life well lived.
Of course the last thing you wanna do in such place is to think you have it all set and figured out, life has nasty ways to remind you of the chaos just behind many corners.
I don't know how you figure that affordable place means you can't be a developer, when software engineering is probably one of the little professions where this doesn't apply.
Also doing a year of FAANG should be enough to travel for a long while. What I earned in a 3 month internship was enough to pay my remaining studies and anything I wanted to buy for a long time. Don't take for granted what you get.
> doing a year of FAANG should be enough to travel for a long while
yes and at the end of my big travels I’ll come back to a 1k/month rent increase for an even lower quality of life. This is not a viable long term plan. I already need to spend an extra 800 to rent the same unit I’m in if I was on the market today
I think eddd-ddde was implying doing remote work.
That's an astonishing level of confidence / hubris. Also, many people choose to enjoy extended travel -- having saved $ in advance, and typically finding ways to live with much less luxury than your FAANG lifestyle takes for granted, and/or doing odd jobs or remote work/gigs, or teaching....
I would recommend that you find a way to broaden your horizons, either literally w/ travel or by way of books and ideally interactions with people outside the very narrow band of your current environs and perspective.
I live in a tiny old 1 bedroom apartment with no car and spend less than $100 on entertainment most months. You Americans are extremely spoiled. I’ve been doing this for 3 years already and I still can’t even afford a 2 bedroom condo. I need to save and live like this for 3 more years before I’ll have enough
I do agree that thinking you’ve always made the best decision is a contradiction at the very least. You never know it’s the right decision until after the fact but also it’s impossible to guess how other outcomes would play out.
Also, you went straight from "I've always known what the best choice is" to "I thought FAANG in Canada was the right choice... but it's a huge mistake." You're spouting nonsense and contradicting yourself.
Everyone else, sorry for having accidentally fed a troll.
> I feel like I’ve always known what the best choice is and the “path” is which trade offs I choose. There are no good options
Why do you act like I chose to work here on purpose? I wasn’t smart enough for the jobs i wanted so I picked the best option that was available to me. I was wrong. I know that an American FAANG job is better
May I ask how old you are?
Well, yes. This is the aim of a civilisation, isn’t it? To render banal what was previously trying, and raise to daily concern what was previously trivial.
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/204
If it is a complete reversion to the path that would have been followed, then it likely won't happen.
However, I have been privileged to spend the last 43 years, watching second chances become realities, where the second chance turns into something that far surpasses the original vector.
Great catch as chance is an inclusive term. Therefore, when seeking a second chance one should consider what aspect(s) of the path should change to succeed.
Truth is that there's no one true way. Statistically there will be people who get second chances and people who don't. My guess is that the latter crwod gets even more bitter and depressed hearing all "it will get better, you will overcome the hurdles".
There are of course such people, but they are for a good part the few notable exceptions you hear about. For each of those there are thousands of people that don't manage to pull it off.
> Career changes are literally one of the easier things in life to do if you’re determined
What makes it hard is changing yourself; not externally imposed forces. The article is full of hubris in my opinion. The author looks around at the failed friends in their peer group and goes “there, but for the sake of ‘my own intelligent choices’ go I”. The start and end of their wisdom is “make prudent choices, as you reap what you sow”. Granted, but this never ends - the “second chance” may not exist in the sense of a “do over”, but at any point of life the branches flow out, and better choices can be made.
It often feels as if a second chance at a certain point in life requires more than a change in yourself; it requires an even bigger change than earlier, once over to make the real change, and twice over to convince others or overcome their biases. Either that or the luck of finding someone who understands second chances and is willing to give them.
I’m not disagreeing that it’s harder than when young, or the number of options have significantly reduced. However, I do think we too often feel trapped by circumstance (when older), when much is still possible.
What nonsense. What makes it hard is everything around it. People can't choose to take a 50% pay cut to change careers. They can't let their families starve or lose their homes for it. They can't move move when they need to take care of a loved one.
This idea that changing your mind is the hard part is absolute bonkers unless you're so privileged that you don't care about the real externalities of those choices, or you don't have any.
Phrases like this one only worsen the situation, as for the majority of the world, that's simply not true. If, for you, all you have to do is change your mindset then good for you. You're very, very lucky. But please, don't assume everyone is as privileged.
The peer group, ever the reserve of the lazy journalist for "facts".
An interesting comment on Trump by Ukraine's army head of intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov: “There have been nine instances in his life when he went to the top, fell to the very bottom of life, and went back again.”
If determination alone qualified as the criteria for succeeding in a career change, then that means whatever situation you're in already has prepared you perfectly for a marginally different path forward, or the risk involved is relatively trivial. Imo, this article isn't pessimistic enough, but it doesn't mean one can't be inspired by rare anomalies, it's just that you'd be naive to believe an arbitrary person can replicate those results merely by trying hard. It doesn't work for a primary career, and it won't work for a secondary career, there are many more factors involved.
Hmm, yet Thomas Hardy is (correctly IMHO) is considered a great artist worthy of having novels like The Mayor of Casterbridge included in the canon.
It’s the opposite of the Nobels in this regard.
"In many ways, the poem becomes about how—through retroactive narrative—the poet turns something as irrational as an “impulse” into a triumphant, intentional decision. Decisions are nobler than whims, and this reframing is comforting, too, for the way it suggests that a life unfolds through conscious design. However, as the poem reveals, that design arises out of constructed narratives, not dramatic actions."
[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/89511/robert-frost...
One conversation I had that had extreme influence on me was working with an old software developer from China who had seen the cultural revolution as a kid, had family sent to farm labor, his parents had their company taken from him, he lost his own companies twice during reforms of the 80s and 90s and had his life turned over like half a dozen times in ways that where I grew up nobody had ever experienced once. He had to completely start from scratch when he was in his early 50s.
So when someone aged 28 at work was having a mental breakdown over their wrong phd specialization the guy always just laughed and said, you're younger than 45, you can start over, what's the problem?
The article is right that life is path dependent, in the sense that if you went to war and lost both arms you have a problem, but no, what obscure degree choice you made has not in any serious way taken real agency away. That is just our bizarre and neurotic culture. At least for most people their own perception of their history weighs them down significantly more than what is in reality genuinely the case.
We love to romanticize the path not taken too. If I look at the mistakes I have made in my life, if I could go back and change them I would still just end up making different mistakes on a different path.
Some of those alternate paths would have been a dead end too, literally. We take the value of the path that was chosen is one that means you are alive to read this on 4/28/24 completely for granted.
For those who always decisions rashly, this might be useful, but I would expect they are the minority group.
I remember another comment on HN where someone talked about their 50s and looking through the rear view mirror wistfully.
It's not like you can do nothing when you get older, it's more like you know you can't do everything.
It may or may not be your beautiful house and your beautiful wife (if I may mix the metaphors a moment) but it's all you have. The challenge is working out what to do with what you have within the limitations of the game, which can involve challenging your idea of what the limitations of the game are...
I've wondered if this is part of the reason for high software salaries. When so many industries needs software, developers can hop from the failing industry to the lucrative one, forcing more efficient competition. Not so for many careers, where the skill set and the industry are tied together.
I'd bet the whole second chance thing gets more brittle as competition and specialization get more important in general, even beyond jobs.
That's a situation I've been in now for a few years now. I'm somewhat burnt out on software engineering, but the last 13 years of work history, a bachelors in CS, and about half a PhD in theoretical CS, my options on who will hire me are kind of limited.
It seems like my only options are:
1) Start a fresh career with a fresh new degree and accept about 1/3 of my salary that I have now for the next 13 years after that.
2) Take a career in non-degreed labor and probably permanently have about 1/3 of my salary.
3) Try and pivot into the management side of things.
4) Start a business.
5) Just live with it.
Since I don't really want to take a loss salary for 13+ years, I'm extremely risk-averse, and I don't want to become a manager, I'm more or less stuck with option 5.
I like software and computer science, but "software engineering" barely counts as either. I expected to be utilizing a million data structures or figuring out proofs of correctness or designing the next amazing distributed system, but it feels like 2/3+ of software engineering is "add field to JSON" or "write a for loop to convert something to a different shape" or "change color of button" or "change width of page layout and then modify selenium tests", and the only data structures that ever get used are hashmaps and arrays. I spent so much time learning the minutia of CSP and TLA+ and set theory and I feel like I have basically nothing to show for it, and now I can't really even change to a career where I would get to use them.
Not that it's really a thing to complain about; I'm pretty lucky to be in a postion where I make about 3x more than I realistically need, so I'm not really trying to garner sympathy, but it's also a situation that becomes kind of easy to burn out on, and sometimes it depresses me more than it really should.
My frustrations come from the fact that "Distributed Systems Engineer" seems to broadly translate to "we use Kafka to glue two services together" for most companies. While that can still require some level of clever engineering, it doesn't really require a ton of theory. At multiple companies, when I do on rare occasion come across a project that requires some more elaborate planning, I will try suggesting using TLA+ to test things out, and management will look at me like I suggested kicking a puppy or something. "Math" is sort of a dirty word in industry, at least in the places I've worked. Maybe I just don't do a great job selling it. In every single job I've ever had, I've always been "that weird math guy", despite the fact that I really don't think I suggest anything that arcane, at least shouldn't be to a software crowd.
Again, it's hardly something to complain about; "Woe is me, I'm making yuppie money but I don't feel fulfilled all the time". It's just something that annoys me.
But pitching this sort of thing to management is hard, where if they’ve heard of it at all then they associate it with big brain critical path shit at the highest levels of huge orgs like nasa or aws.
Can’t blame people for not seeing the value yet though.. we need to make things easier/cheaper. Plain old testing is often seen as a cost/effort sink that dev teams and management resent and so of course Model checking looks like a whole different layer of ambiguously-worthwhile effort.
Mere advocacy here won’t win people over, because they care more about costs than “correctness” as an abstract virtue. We probably need progress on things like generating code from models and models from code if we want to see more adoption
I've debated trying to write a PlusCal->Java transpiler [1], and I haven't really ruled that out yet; while I don't think it should be necessary to have that for PlusCal to be useful, I think it would potentially sweeten the sales pitch.
[1] I think PlusCal would translate better to a sequential Java style program than raw TLA+ would.
Unless your manager/colleagues are intimately familiar with such tools, I'd think that your touting their usage at work, is more like wishful thinking.
My long term plan on this is to submit a bunch of code that works correctly the first time, and eventually once I am established at this job as "clever" I'll reveal the PlusCal/TLA+ specs and hopefully have a decent sales pitch.
When I worked at Apple I did an internal interview for a team that worked on a distributed-RAID-style thing, did really well on the interview, almost got to the offer stage, but then they saw the previous year's review where I got a "Needs Improvement" for (I think) purely bureaucratic reasons that I've talked about on HN before, and they decided not to move forward.
It's tough, because I think a lot of those jobs are in pretty high demand, and as such a lot of really qualified people apply to them and they can be picky, and I don't really blame them for that. There's a lot more generic unsexy backend jobs.
It sounds like you are waiting on a fantasy position that has both interesting work and pays at least the same as your current position, which you have 13 years of experience in. That's not usually how life works. There are trade-offs.
If you want to do a different type of work that you don't have any professional experience in, you are going to have to take a pay cut. As you mentioned, you're fortunate to be making 3x what you need. It's up to you whether it's worth "only" making 2x what you need in order to do work you find more engaging.
This is not a unique circumstance. People make this trade-off all the time. Maybe talk to some people who did.
I mean this with all the respect in the world, but no shit. That's what I'm frustrated about. I feel like the entire thing I wrote was specifically because I am aware of these tradeoff. Just because the tradeoffs exist doesn't mean I have to like them.
I know that my dream job doesn't really exist, at least not in numbers large enough to even bother considering, and I'm not naive enough to really think that pivoting to another career will suddenly solve all my problems and frustrations.
I like the idea of studying physical design... but we'll see how that pans out.
My wife is wrapping up her school this year, so once she's working then I might be able to use her insurance and give this experiment a try.
I assume it isn't worth being "part time" and paying for the insurance gap out of pocket. Bargaining power tends not to work that way.
I'm in Australia so this isn't a thing for me.
It can depend somewhat on the job. When I was a part time adjunct last year teaching two classes (six credit hours) at a public university, I was given the option for health insurance. I don't remember what the premiums were but I remember they were lower than marketplace plans.
> I assume it isn't worth being "part time" and paying for the insurance gap out of pocket. Bargaining power tends not to work that way.
Since the Affordable Care Act, the prices are somewhat more regulated and they're not really allowed to "decline" you anymore, so the "bargaining power" thing isn't as bad as it used to be. Paying out of pocket for insurance is expensive but not insurmountable for basically anyone working in tech, and certainly you can factor into an hourly rate. In NYC there's the MetroPlus system, and the cheaper plan on that is around $1250/month for two people, which equates to roughly $15,000/year [1]. An employer plan in NYC will still typically have anywhere between ~$100-$600 monthly premium for a family plan, so anywhere between $1200-$7200 per year of just premiums (not counting what you pay before reaching your deductible), depending on the company and which plan you choose within the company. The US healthcare system is needlessly complicated.
Still, it would certainly be better to not pay $15,000/year if I can avoid it, so before I try doing half-time contracting I am going to wait for my wife to start working.
[1] https://metroplus.org/plans/individual-family/marketplace/br...
So I had to say no to it. This is life in the US.
It can be extremely variable between cities so I'm not saying that this applies to everyone, but when I checked against my NYC zip code, that's the number it gave me.
So, around 6-7 years ago I was on a development team and was getting tired of a bunch of things - the frontend treadmill (react/redux, do it this way, no that way, then a few months later there's a new "right way"), how we kept getting new product owners and the "vision" was lost so we were just reacting to customers (and kept remaking the same pages but differently), and a slightly more personal one (no one liked my idea for one of those pages, then a few months later our designer came up with the exact same thing, no one remembered mine, and the page has been unchanged since). Our company was also drifting heavily into silos during that time, some people were frontend-only, some backend-only, where I like the whole stack and didn't want to limit myself.
So after all that I did something that surprised and confused my manager: Asked to get moved to the maintenance team instead of new development. They were intrigued because apparently that team is where new hires often ended up, and they almost never had someone experienced on it - which surprised me because I figured that job would be harder than new development. So far I've been on this team longer than any others and have yet to get tired of it. I know some of it is how good a manager we have, but the work is also very directly about fixing things. It's much more self-directed, no product owner initiated rewrites on a whim, large projects still happen when something is really bad, but because it's considered legacy there's no treadmill-chasing. And the random fixes can end up anywhere in the stack, so I get to keep using everything I'd learned from linux through the database and server to frontend, instead of sticking to a silo.
So even "5) Just live with it." does have sub-options.
At a previous job, I would occasionally spend time on the weekend rewriting and simplifying code because there wasn't really a "maintenance" team and I knew the only way that it would ever get better was if I fixed myself on my own time. I've since drawn a line in the sand that I do not work for companies on weekends but I did sort of enjoy that process.
I 'retired' early because I don't need to work for anyone anymore. My wife and I saved and invested so we are set financially. I still love to program so I spend my time and energy working on a project that is personally fulfilling to me even though it has yet to bring in meaningful revenues.
BTW: it is a new data management system that is designed to be a distributed system. Have you considered teaming up with someone on a side project?
I didn't word it terribly well, so apologies for that, but for "really need" I was talking about subsistence wages in this case. I make perfectly fine money, and I do save/invest as much as I can, and I do own my house in NYC, so I do alright. I do hope to retire somewhat early, at least by American standards, but it's not like I'm making "fuck you" money.
> BTW: it is a new data management system that is designed to be a distributed system. Have you considered teaming up with someone on a side project?
Outside of something I did with my dad a few months ago, not really. I have a decent job now that's not psychotic about non-competes, so I've been ramping up to build something.
Once my wife starts working, we figured that we'd put nearly 100% of her paycheck into some forms of savings to accelerate the process a bit further, since my salary has traditionally been enough to cover the bills. I'd like to have enough money to retire comfortably by my mid-to-late 40's. I think that's realistic.
2023 was one of the worst years of my life, maybe the worst. It was really horrible being laid off twice and having to spend so much time on LinkedIn and doing Zoom whiteboard interviews and waking up to dozens of rejections every morning, not to mention that being laid off twice in a year makes your resume look insanely bad (each stint being about 3 months). As a result, I think I've become more frustrated than I probably should, and grown a strong resentment towards companies, with a nearly-complete lack of optimism that they'll ever do anything even remotely actually-technical.
My current gig seems a lot better but I've learned my lesson about getting my hopes up. We'll see if it lasts more than three months.
Otherwise 5) since 4) does not really work for me. Helped too many brilliant guys as an electrical engineer. Products got traction, but nothing big happened.
I think Americans are kind of trained by the propaganda machine that you need to find fulfillment from your job, but fundamentally I think you're right and I need to take things into my own hands.
I have a few ideas that I think I might be able to turn into papers, and might even be able to get them published in a real journal. I doubt that my current gig will have too much of a problem with that (they're much more in the chemistry/healthcare space than pure CS), so I might be able to have some fun with that while giving myself an excuse to use pure math.
And you will find a very crowded place, populated with all the other guys who leant the job yesterday.
> I've wondered if this is part of the reason for high software salaries. When so many industries needs software,
You are describing demand and offer: nothing more, nothing less.
That's not what happens, is it? I thought she falsely accuses her sister's boyfriend/lover as being a rapist for reasons left slightly unclear to the reader (misunderstanding the situation vs wanting to cause attention).
Everyone around them sees their story differently: a successful career pivot into a field that they love which compensates them well. They have truly inspired many!
Yet for my friend, the story they tell themselves is that their poor decisions in college will essentially haunt them forever because they don't have the academic pedigree and work experience of their peers.
I have my own relationship with rumination, and appreciate this perspective from Michael Pollan in his book "How to Change Your Mind"
"A lot of depression is a sort of self-punishment, as even Freud understood. We get trapped in these loops of rumination that are very destructive, and the stories that we tell ourselves: you know, that we’re unworthy of love, that we can’t get through the next hour with a cigarette, whatever it is. And these deep, deep grooves of thought are very hard to get out of. They disconnect us from other people, from nature, from an earlier idea of who we are."
My advice for anyone reading this is to listen to the stories that you tell yourself. Ask yourself how you can adjust these stories to have a more empowered understanding of yourself.
Now fifty-seven, he confided, "I think I made the wrong decision."
I had a friend who was an engineer for a few years, decided to do something different, and now she's a physician.
> Now fifty-seven, he confided, "I think I made the wrong decision."
Don't worry; many lawyers, at age 57, are saying the same thing!
(There are more lawyers of the Saul Goodman size of practice than the LA Law type of practice)
At the time you make a decision it is often impossible to know what its consequences are, so if we had made a different decision things might actually be worse.
Not making a decision in time can also have negative consequences.
With hindsight it's easy to cherry-pick missteps. And from those missteps fantasize a hypothetical outcome. And obviously in this alternate universe you only ever come out better.
Yes, there are pivotal moments. I've made big decisions along the way. I've made some mistakes.
But everything good in my life has come from this one path.
I make a choice to celebrate the present, not hanker after a mythical alternative. I choose to be content with the present, and contentment is the source of my happiness.
It's easy to compare my life with others, and find others richer, or more famous, or married, or unmarried. Social media amplifies this.
But it's also easy to compare to others who walked a harder path, and have a harder path in front of them. At this stage of my life its less about climbing one more rung, and more about helping those below me, smoothing their path as much as possible.
No one goes through life perfectly. Hindsight living is not helpful and contentment beats regret every day of the week.
Too many people blame others for their current situation. Try taking a philosophy that we have more control and look back upon decisions we made and why we made them.
Not "I should have bought apple stock". but "why didn't I buy apple stock?"
Others placed something like "fear-based paralysis" and I get it, but when you're responsible for making that transition between poverty and minimum affluence, you start to develop a "defensive-based proneness to action" instead.
For instance, since I was quite bit ambitious to get out of my past situation, at least for me most of my decisions were made thinking in some factors like: - Do not get involved in situations where I can get murdered (doing something stupid myself or getting into other people's path that can lead me to be murdered) - Avoid any situations in which I could end up in jail - Avoid having children without any financial and societal conditions - Avoid any drugs - Avoid any error that could impact my net worth more than 5%
Living in a world of avoidance is not pleasant, most of the time, it sucks, and the feedback loop is sometimes so subtle that you need to exercise your mind to think in the future most of the time.
I have a happy life today, because I saw some of those things happen to some close friends, and there's no comeback from those. Sometimes you can find contentment in some other areas of your life, but if you have a certain level of ambition, you will never recover.
One thing wrong with it is that the myth leads us to blame ourselves for the failure to recover as well.
I had a colleague who was fanatically into soccer. I asked how does he feel when his team loses? It is devastating for many especially in big games. But he said he is willing to take the risk of rooting for a specific team and possibly losing because it gives him excitement. It's a bit like a drug really you get addicted to your team winning. It's a bit like any gambling addiction.
If you had no interest in the outcome of a soccer-match you wouldn't get very excited watching it.
In reality most people don't have a real interest in a soccer-game since they don't gamble money on it. Therefore it seems people pick a soccer-team to root for BECAUSE we want to get excited. We want that adrenaline. (or is it dopamine?) We want to believe that the arch of history tends towards our team winning.
False Belief 1: If my soccer-team wins I'll be much better off, much happier.
Consequent False Belief: Since my team did not win I must now be desolate. I must feel bad.
One's self-identity is important. The truth about what one's "narrative in life" is is not a brute property etched into the universe.
We should be pragmatic about what what thoughts we nurture.
And maybe secretly we all wish things could've worked out with our first love... when in reality our first loves are those we are least likely to be compatible with in the long term.
If you don't have those two things, then it doesn't work.
But I think it's rare for anyone to end up where they had planned, and even rarer for them to get there the way they had intended.
You might never get end up with the life you wanted when you were 15, but few people do. Does "getting exactly what you wanted when you were young and then never being challenged/learning/changing" sound like the recipe for a happy life well lived?
Most of us do make decisions that aren't exactly resounding successes. Most of us have regrets. So it's "be unhappy about the regret and dwell on it while staying where you are" or "try to move on and change things to make you pay less attention to it."
Easily yes