One thing you can do is expose yourself to a lot of different projects. I am in consultancy and man have I see some things. Someone told me once that a year of experience as a consultant is worth five as an employee. I kind of laughed it off... then I thought about the time I was responsible for managing eight projects as technical lead or sole technical person. They weren't all equally active, and I'm in hardware so there's always downtime as you're waiting for physical activities to take place, and that's well into the article's burnout zone (this was not sustainable or common practice for me), but... it does help explain why I can charge as much money as I do!
Good question, I decided to pace myself far from burnout and ended up only getting 90 years experience in 45 years.
It was still worth it in a scientific field which each year builds rather than eventually drops out of support.
There's almost nobody walking around with even 45 years of experience, and far less who made compounding progress.
It was hard to pull ahead to begin with, and never-ending effort to maintain, but once there is a tangible edge you can leverage, then it only grows over time.
I may be very lucky for good health right now, but maybe it can be due to not having a very similar social life, family, or diet, relative to the mainstream to begin with ;)
Based on my own experience, probably not. When my startup was acquired a decade ago there was a six month period of extreme overwork and stress to get that deal over the finish line. Diet, health, social life all fell apart completely. I feel like it took a solid year to fully recover from that!
(I was using a Withings digital scale at the time and you can pretty much plot the entire progress in terms of my weight gain.)
Six months is pretty extreme, but I think the occasional three month period once every five years or so may be tolerable for a lot of people.
It reminds me about Barthes studium (applying yourself to gain skills) and punctum (applying your skills to make your masterpieces) in photography.
I think we have the feeling of "gaining years of experience in a few months", when we experience multiple skills we developed coalesce into a synergic unity that enables rapid growth. The author touches it too:
> To be honest, the whole process felt the final exam after my then 6 years spent at the company. To get the expected results I really had to leverage all my skills and energy.
It's worth noticing that all the progress in his diagram measures one dimension, but this is a sour recipe to measure life as it pushes yourself beyond your boundaries into burnout. It's much better to measure things using Pareto frontiers: pick up the important dimensions that you want to measure a decision or your progress against, then ask yourself how you are doing when you fix some or all but one. If you pick your important dimensions in life based on your long-term goals, it's harder this way to push beyond your limits into burnout or to slack off if you strive to be close to the optimal frontiner.
> It's much better to measure things using Pareto frontiers: pick up the important dimensions that you want to measure a decision or your progress against
This is very interesting, could you develop more on this as I feel like I haven't completed understood it
Following that thought, and reading the article, I believe that if I really wanted to have a baby all I would need to do is to get 8 women together to work with my wife and we'd both be proud parents in just under a month.
I like the model. I might add percentage of time spent on work in addition to the intensity. Burnout gets you faster when you can’t fully turn your attention to your family and a fulfilling physical activity for a few hours.
This is really distorting the literal meaning of "years of experience". The "1 year repeated 5 times" sentiment does the same thing.
To do these conversions, you'd need a solid understanding of what each YOE entails, and there is no good or widely accepted definition on that, otherwise it would be the hiring standard and career path standard.
I only say this because you can't literally put down that you gained 6 YOE on your resume - you will instead convert it to milestones and accomplishments and deliverables, all of which are completely understandable concepts and better suited to get your point across.
There is 1 aspect of YOE that literally is tied to actual years and cannot be rushed. I will die on this hill.
You are not a senior, if you haven’t stuck around on a project/product for 3 years to experience the lifecycle of your own amazing decisions turning into that awful stuff you need to maintain. It takes about 3 years, longer if you’re lucky. Cannot be rushed.
The most dangerous engineers have about 5 years of experience. They have the skills and the big brains, but not yet the wisdom to keep it in check.
You need to stick around for 10 years or more. I've been on my current project for 15 years, and only now am I realizing how some of the things I did back then were bad. Now I'm stuck with those decisions, or I'm stuck trying to figure out how to fix them.
Big companies give a 7-10% raise to everyone every few years to get back to competitive. I agree this is a big problem with the industry, but the C suite doesn't realize that. I always check the yearly inflation rate just before raises are announced to see how my raise compares to inflation - as a senior engineer I don't expect a raise anymore, I expect my salary to match inflation though. Often I get a pay cut every year instead. It has gotten bad enough that I moved (I found a transfer in the same company which came with a raise to the next pay grade - in that in turn pushed the old management to realize they had real problems with not giving promotions and a bunch of people who didn't move finally got their deserved promotion)
It doesn’t matter. This is just the way the industry works. You will be looked at with suspicion if you stayed at one company for too long working on project doing maintenance.
I mean if you look at the leveling guidelines of every single tech company that I’m
aware of, “senior” is defined by “scope”, “impact” and “dealing with ambiguity”. They may state it different ways. But it all boils down to this.
You are not a “senior” if you spent 3 years pulling tickets off the board with well defined business goals.
I agree. I would add that it’s best if those 3 years were spent growing a product rather than bouncing around the company (or companies) doing whatever comes.
It's interesting because the example he makes (a person that has worked 5 years on the same things, vs one that has had more varied tasks) makes me think the opposite of what he claims: the person working the same job for five years gained five years of experience in that job; the other one, has a one year experience in each of the various things he did.
Of course there's a good balance between repetition and variation, but beware of those who have written terrible junior code in a lot of different technologies.
I don't think that's necessarily true, but I do believe you can gain more experience early in your career at the right job, vs being in for example an established Java or .NET environment.
In my personal experience, I did a "traineeship" the one time and within a few months went from Java / web (jquery) to learning iOS native development / obj-c, scrum, working in a team, single page applications, NodeJS, etc etc etc. It was super valuable, but, granted, difficult to keep up for a long time because at one point the new experiences will dry up, unless you go job hopping.
It's wishful thinking to believe any of this works. When you get older, have bills to pay, have to work, you have to give something up. Those morning runs, playing warcraft, taking your kids to school, spending time with your wife in the evening. Something has to give, and for how long is the question.
This should be pinned as the top comment on 80% of these kind of blog posts as a reality check. Don't get me wrong, I'm (relatively) young, ambitious, and love growth and learning. So I eat these posts up.
But as I age and grow, I notice the challenge of the balancing act more and more.
"I wouldn’t do it every year, because I would probably collapse from exhaustion, but I’m grateful to have been able to contribute to such a project."
Why should the comment be pinned when it doesn't even grasp that the blog post isn't advocating, at all, that people should be in high-growth sprint mode 24/7/365?
I think because of that very error - it’s not advocating that, but it’s so easy to think you must always be like that, when reading articles like this.
Articles like this are written and promoted expounding the benefits of this kind of productivity, regardless of the actual reality of it. It's not just easy to think it, its the cultural millieu to push people in this way.
> I think because of that very error - it’s not advocating that, but it’s so easy to think you must always be like that, when reading articles like this.
I've met hundreds of co-workers and literally none of them has ever advocated for an unbalanced work-life balance, except in the case of over-balancing towards life (that is, neglecting very reasonable duties at work, that are relied upon by others).
I've also read hundreds of thousands of HN comments, and very, very few of them advocate for a bad work-life balance or spending all of your time and energy at your job, being vastly outnumbered by comments calling for balance.
I don't see any evidence that "it’s so easy to think you must always be like that, when reading articles like this" - especially because only someone lacking basic critical thinking skills will think that a description of what something is, is advocating for doing that thing.
Don't forget that one of your co-workers will die. I just got out of a meeting where I was told the guy who called it died over the weekend so his department needs to find someone else to reschedule it. That happens a few times and you start thinking do you really want to be working at all (you of course needs to eat and all that, but is what you are doing really how you want to spend most of your waking hours). Something has to give, and often what really gives is not what you want to give unless you are really careful.
One thing you can’t give up though is your employability. Jobs come and go either by choice or by force.
I was definitely the “expert beginner” between 2002-2011. It wasn’t until my 4th job in 2012 that I realized how far behind I was. That’s also the same year I got (re)married with 2 step sons. I’ve stayed in the learning phase mostly since then.
I'm not a fan of these types of posts because they're not really saying anything quantitative - it's just a bunch of a "feel good" text - so I'll throw my hat into the ring.
What the author calls the "fast growth phase" - I call "walking the tightrope and/or knife's edge". Our minds are in a constant state of attempting to optimize away any task. This is why there's a huge difference in skill levels between a person who has driven a car for 5 weeks vs 5 years, but nearly zero difference between somebody who has driven a car for 5 years vs 50 years.
The CHALLENGE is in constantly forcing your mind back to the knife's edge - and it varies from person to person.
Back when I was a highschooler, I was unsatisfied with my sheet reading capabilities. To fix it, I
- started playing only new sheet music
- grabbed a old hymnal (from the 1950s) which are rhythmically simplistic but usu. have four voices.
- Wrote a very simple app that generated random sheetxml
- Borrowed a friend's sheet music for the organ (which has three staves) and tried to transpose it on the fly to play with just the two hands on the piano
The author never said you should spend most of the time at the “fast growth” stage. But you should spend most of your time at the “learning” stage and go back to the “comfort” stage as outside life events happen or just to take a mental break
Sure, I think you can just boil that down to learn to exercise basic moderation, and don't be manic.
For myself, I find that our natural state is in the basic learning phase, so for me personally, I'm always trying to figure out ways to force myself back on the tight rope.
I'm not sure I agree. I can almost guarantee that if you give a common task to a driver who's driven five years and 30 years - there's virtually no difference.
Lower premiums might just be because they've been in less accidents for that long, so they've sustained consistent level of safe driving and it doesn't translate to the idea that they necessarily are more skilled drivers.
Doing a task consistently is what insurance companies are rewarding, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're more skilled at it, they've just been at it longer.
>a driver who's driven five years and 30 years - there's virtually no difference.
Not so much with driving ability, but very often a proportional gap in recognizing and handling vehicle problems, especially situations that don't come up very often.
Insurance premiums suggest there is a big difference between 5 and 50 years of a safe driving record, not of driving experience.
The implication isn't that drivers get steadily better as they age but that the longer your history of safe driving, the less likely you are to become a liability.
The zones of experience just screams of Vernor Vinge.
Yes, experience compression is absolutely possible without sacrificing an appendage. This is actually an expectation for military officers and corporate executives. The solution is just to stay continuously busy.
The counterpoint to this is alienation. Most people at the individual contributor level absolutely do not think about this. The problem then is that if you are that guy who is a 10x producer you are completely out of alignment from your peers. If you are in a line of work where people are replaceable cogs like Java and JavaScript this out of bounds levels of initiative is probably doing your career more harm than good.
Staying in the comfort zone means doing 5 times 1 year of experience. It’s safe, but you are taking a long term risk of becoming less relevant and end up reducing your options.
This makes no sense to me. If you spend five years working on a tech stack that goes out of favor, then some will say you've wasted your time. Personally, I disagree, because experience is experience and what we do is learn, but good luck getting through an HR filter with that.
This just seems like one of those "I'm the beneficiary of luck, now let me tell you how I credit myself for it" posts.
My personal experience is that I've had the greatest growth when I was allowed to pursue what I'm interested in (e.g. coding styles, new libraries, new methods of structuring code such as functional vs OOP). When I get a meddling manager insisting that I do things some other way, I don't learn and grow nearly as much.
I agree with the experience. I myself had a few nights that learned so much just by burning candles on tough projects (comparing to my skills).
But for anyone who wants to have such an experience for more than a few weeks, I believe they need to be strategic:
- They need to figure out what area they need to work in early, like really early, preferably during/before college, because it is the first job that counts. They need to get in ASAP, because there is a hell lot of difference between someone starting at 10 and someone at 30;
- They need to think strategically about which kind of people they want to marry to, or do they want a marriage at all. IMO, if they want to be high-achievers (it's not an accurate word, but you know what I mean), there are only two kinds of good partners -- comrades or servants. Comrades keep you motivated and can interact with you on the same page, while servants take away most of your distractions. Kids are 100% a time sinker even for the best of them, so don't get them too early;
- They need to find a good mentor, or more, along the road, at least before they reach where they can grow by themselves. Or they are lucky to have an above average amount of perseverance (which I believe is defined by gene and early education -- again, mostly genetic) so they can throw themselves at any wall and still preserve;
So basically, they need to be lucky. And if they are not that lucky, they need to be at least lucky enough to realize and think about it strategically at an earlier age (like, before 30, I think) and plan accordingly. They need to muscle into the positions they want. They need to push things and people around to make their own career paths.
Pretty different from the blog post, but I've definitely had periods in (and out of!) my career where I learned a ton that weren't super-busy. I got to do some really high-leverage work in a strong environment with great colleagues, and the fact that I wasn't under a bunch of external/artificial pressure let me learn more (and accomplish more!) while still having plenty of time and energy for other things.
Seems like most people really overvalue pressure and long hours, when those are neither necessary nor sufficient—hell, probably harmful—for doing and learning a lot. I'm not entirely sure why, but I expect a cultural "no pain, no gain" attitude is part of it. People want to feel like the pain they went through was worth something, and we're conditioned that anything that's worth doing takes pain, and the two attitudes reinforce each other.
> Seems like most people really overvalue pressure and long hours
I think it’s likely just a difference in personality for people. Some people thrive in that environment and thus believe that it’s the “best way”. Others thrive in a more laid back environment and think the same
I've been self-improving at full capacity for 15 years straight (20 years if you count school years were I was distracted by school work). I basically worked with every piece of software you can imagine. Countless programming languages, C++ game programming, shaders, artificial neural networks (implemented from scratch), frontend, backend, microcontrollers (ATMEL), proof of stake blockchains, large range of databases, vector databases, kubernetes, TCP, websockets... I built successful open source projects, I implemented a lamport signature library from scratch with an improvement from Ralph Merkle to cut the signature size by half and also implemented a merkle signature tree library for key-reuse. I implemented a decentralised deterministic orderbook and DEX to trade between quantum-resistant blockchains which I also built from scratch... At the end of the day experience doesn't really matter. Socializing is far more important. You don't need much skill to go places. Most people who do well don't that know much outside of their niche. You don't need to be hustling like crazy to be a leading expert in one narrow domain.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadIt was still worth it in a scientific field which each year builds rather than eventually drops out of support.
There's almost nobody walking around with even 45 years of experience, and far less who made compounding progress.
It was hard to pull ahead to begin with, and never-ending effort to maintain, but once there is a tangible edge you can leverage, then it only grows over time.
I may be very lucky for good health right now, but maybe it can be due to not having a very similar social life, family, or diet, relative to the mainstream to begin with ;)
(I was using a Withings digital scale at the time and you can pretty much plot the entire progress in terms of my weight gain.)
Six months is pretty extreme, but I think the occasional three month period once every five years or so may be tolerable for a lot of people.
I think we have the feeling of "gaining years of experience in a few months", when we experience multiple skills we developed coalesce into a synergic unity that enables rapid growth. The author touches it too:
> To be honest, the whole process felt the final exam after my then 6 years spent at the company. To get the expected results I really had to leverage all my skills and energy.
It's worth noticing that all the progress in his diagram measures one dimension, but this is a sour recipe to measure life as it pushes yourself beyond your boundaries into burnout. It's much better to measure things using Pareto frontiers: pick up the important dimensions that you want to measure a decision or your progress against, then ask yourself how you are doing when you fix some or all but one. If you pick your important dimensions in life based on your long-term goals, it's harder this way to push beyond your limits into burnout or to slack off if you strive to be close to the optimal frontiner.
This is very interesting, could you develop more on this as I feel like I haven't completed understood it
To do these conversions, you'd need a solid understanding of what each YOE entails, and there is no good or widely accepted definition on that, otherwise it would be the hiring standard and career path standard.
I only say this because you can't literally put down that you gained 6 YOE on your resume - you will instead convert it to milestones and accomplishments and deliverables, all of which are completely understandable concepts and better suited to get your point across.
Time to drop this flawed thinking IMO
You are not a senior, if you haven’t stuck around on a project/product for 3 years to experience the lifecycle of your own amazing decisions turning into that awful stuff you need to maintain. It takes about 3 years, longer if you’re lucky. Cannot be rushed.
The most dangerous engineers have about 5 years of experience. They have the skills and the big brains, but not yet the wisdom to keep it in check.
- build and ship
- then move around
- repeat
Is sorely lacking in vital important experience towards becoming a rounded senior.
You are not a “senior” if you spent 3 years pulling tickets off the board with well defined business goals.
Sources:
https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html
https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/
(The only BigTech company I have worked for)
https://www.levels.fyi/blog/amazon-leveling-progress.html
Of course there's a good balance between repetition and variation, but beware of those who have written terrible junior code in a lot of different technologies.
In my personal experience, I did a "traineeship" the one time and within a few months went from Java / web (jquery) to learning iOS native development / obj-c, scrum, working in a team, single page applications, NodeJS, etc etc etc. It was super valuable, but, granted, difficult to keep up for a long time because at one point the new experiences will dry up, unless you go job hopping.
But as I age and grow, I notice the challenge of the balancing act more and more.
"I wouldn’t do it every year, because I would probably collapse from exhaustion, but I’m grateful to have been able to contribute to such a project."
Why should the comment be pinned when it doesn't even grasp that the blog post isn't advocating, at all, that people should be in high-growth sprint mode 24/7/365?
I've met hundreds of co-workers and literally none of them has ever advocated for an unbalanced work-life balance, except in the case of over-balancing towards life (that is, neglecting very reasonable duties at work, that are relied upon by others).
I've also read hundreds of thousands of HN comments, and very, very few of them advocate for a bad work-life balance or spending all of your time and energy at your job, being vastly outnumbered by comments calling for balance.
I don't see any evidence that "it’s so easy to think you must always be like that, when reading articles like this" - especially because only someone lacking basic critical thinking skills will think that a description of what something is, is advocating for doing that thing.
I was definitely the “expert beginner” between 2002-2011. It wasn’t until my 4th job in 2012 that I realized how far behind I was. That’s also the same year I got (re)married with 2 step sons. I’ve stayed in the learning phase mostly since then.
What the author calls the "fast growth phase" - I call "walking the tightrope and/or knife's edge". Our minds are in a constant state of attempting to optimize away any task. This is why there's a huge difference in skill levels between a person who has driven a car for 5 weeks vs 5 years, but nearly zero difference between somebody who has driven a car for 5 years vs 50 years.
The CHALLENGE is in constantly forcing your mind back to the knife's edge - and it varies from person to person.
Back when I was a highschooler, I was unsatisfied with my sheet reading capabilities. To fix it, I
- started playing only new sheet music
- grabbed a old hymnal (from the 1950s) which are rhythmically simplistic but usu. have four voices.
- Wrote a very simple app that generated random sheetxml
- Borrowed a friend's sheet music for the organ (which has three staves) and tried to transpose it on the fly to play with just the two hands on the piano
For myself, I find that our natural state is in the basic learning phase, so for me personally, I'm always trying to figure out ways to force myself back on the tight rope.
Now skills decline at 70 so that may offset some of it.
Lower premiums might just be because they've been in less accidents for that long, so they've sustained consistent level of safe driving and it doesn't translate to the idea that they necessarily are more skilled drivers.
Doing a task consistently is what insurance companies are rewarding, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're more skilled at it, they've just been at it longer.
Not so much with driving ability, but very often a proportional gap in recognizing and handling vehicle problems, especially situations that don't come up very often.
The average person at 66 is much more risk averse than they were at 21.
The implication isn't that drivers get steadily better as they age but that the longer your history of safe driving, the less likely you are to become a liability.
The process of learning and gaining an experitise in a subject is basically a four steps:
1. being overwhelmed with the subject
2. naively thinking you know it all
3. learning about nuances
4. finally accepting that after all these years you still know nothing about the subject, but you're comfortable with the niche you carved in
Yes, experience compression is absolutely possible without sacrificing an appendage. This is actually an expectation for military officers and corporate executives. The solution is just to stay continuously busy.
The counterpoint to this is alienation. Most people at the individual contributor level absolutely do not think about this. The problem then is that if you are that guy who is a 10x producer you are completely out of alignment from your peers. If you are in a line of work where people are replaceable cogs like Java and JavaScript this out of bounds levels of initiative is probably doing your career more harm than good.
You can be burnt out doing fast paced repetitive work. It’s not always true the faster you go the more you learn.
This makes no sense to me. If you spend five years working on a tech stack that goes out of favor, then some will say you've wasted your time. Personally, I disagree, because experience is experience and what we do is learn, but good luck getting through an HR filter with that.
This just seems like one of those "I'm the beneficiary of luck, now let me tell you how I credit myself for it" posts.
My personal experience is that I've had the greatest growth when I was allowed to pursue what I'm interested in (e.g. coding styles, new libraries, new methods of structuring code such as functional vs OOP). When I get a meddling manager insisting that I do things some other way, I don't learn and grow nearly as much.
We are stuck. Or software development will be a two-tiered system.
But for anyone who wants to have such an experience for more than a few weeks, I believe they need to be strategic:
- They need to figure out what area they need to work in early, like really early, preferably during/before college, because it is the first job that counts. They need to get in ASAP, because there is a hell lot of difference between someone starting at 10 and someone at 30;
- They need to think strategically about which kind of people they want to marry to, or do they want a marriage at all. IMO, if they want to be high-achievers (it's not an accurate word, but you know what I mean), there are only two kinds of good partners -- comrades or servants. Comrades keep you motivated and can interact with you on the same page, while servants take away most of your distractions. Kids are 100% a time sinker even for the best of them, so don't get them too early;
- They need to find a good mentor, or more, along the road, at least before they reach where they can grow by themselves. Or they are lucky to have an above average amount of perseverance (which I believe is defined by gene and early education -- again, mostly genetic) so they can throw themselves at any wall and still preserve;
So basically, they need to be lucky. And if they are not that lucky, they need to be at least lucky enough to realize and think about it strategically at an earlier age (like, before 30, I think) and plan accordingly. They need to muscle into the positions they want. They need to push things and people around to make their own career paths.
Seems like most people really overvalue pressure and long hours, when those are neither necessary nor sufficient—hell, probably harmful—for doing and learning a lot. I'm not entirely sure why, but I expect a cultural "no pain, no gain" attitude is part of it. People want to feel like the pain they went through was worth something, and we're conditioned that anything that's worth doing takes pain, and the two attitudes reinforce each other.