Disagree. This kind of comment is furtively pulling up the ladder behind you. Do as I say not as I do. Junior is the time to learn as much as possible and take risky bets (and suffer accordingly). When I was in a junior in a factory, the night shift knew me well. Nowadays, I've pared it back to 50 or so hours per week, because I now have a family, which is fine but it came at the cost of basically zero time to learn or do things other than what my manager asks.
> Junior is the time to learn as much as possible and take risky bets (and suffer accordingly). When I was in a junior in a factory, the night shift knew me well.
That would require a whole, separate article.
Many (most?) juniors grinding like that in a major company will work hard to get nowhere. Speaking from experience. Yes, I learned some lessons:
1. Get a different job. Deadend jobs definitely exist, and are quite common.
2. Ignore senior folks who say "You're whining. It's crappy everywhere. Just learn to take it."
Number 2 has been wrong every single time someone said it.
> Nowadays, I've pared it back to 50 or so hours per week, because I now have a family,
This is not the endorsement you think it is. I've done quite well by insisting on 40 hour weeks. I'm going to assume you're doing much better than I am, because otherwise it seems like a life wasted.
Don't get me wrong. If you want to go much farther than I have, you likely will have to grind and work hard and smart and be lucky. But I assure you - most of the people I know who worked hard are not in a better position than I am (or if they are, the difference is incremental).
I was clear that the junior should be learning and experimenting. That's different from saying yes to everything and grinding it out. The juniors in my group, for example, are the ones leading the LLM charge and learning the new tooling ahead of management's awareness of them, so almost by definition they're not just filling their time taking orders from management. That's exactly how they should be spending their excess capacity.
> This is not the endorsement you think it is. I've done quite well by insisting on 40 hour weeks. I'm going to assume you're doing much better than I am, because otherwise it seems like a life wasted.
HN is not the kind of place I'm going to toot my own horn
> I was clear that the junior should be learning and experimenting. That's different from saying yes to everything and grinding it out. The juniors in my group, for example, are the ones leading the LLM charge and learning the new tooling ahead of management's awareness of them, so almost by definition they're not just filling their time taking orders from management. That's exactly how they should be spending their excess capacity.
Agreed that they should explore and experiment and learn. And they should do that at 40 hours a week on the job (I did!).
Not all jobs allow for it. Change jobs if that's the case. Chances are your pay will be the same and more, and you'll have more time for this. You simply don't need to stay and work evenings to do this.
As you get to the downswing of your career, you should have already worked and made enough mistakes to have most of your experience. You must cruise on that experience when you are older.
When you are old, that is not the time to work and make mistakes.
That is, most of the heavy work must be done as early as you can. Eat that frog.
I agree. When new programmers come from uni they sometimes barely did any programming. So at some time in their life they got to actually put in the time and learn how to be a competent developer. It is obviously great if you can do it on somebody else dime in a 9 to 5 but if you can’t get that you should just put in the time and learn. In the end you can at best get paid for the value you can create and if you are incompetent that is not going to be a lot
You realize “pairing it back to 50 hours a week” is not a great outcome don’t you?
If I graduated post 2012 instead of 1996, I would have tied my horse to a safe BigTech company and made a lot of money in cash and liquid RSUs long before I joined a bullshit startup that statistically wouldn’t have gone anywhere.
Hell I made that choice at 46 when my youngest (step)son graduated. I chose to work at BigTech instead of getting a meaningless “CTO” founding engineer position at a startup.
We work in different timezones so it's a mess. Either people give up their morning or they give up their evening time.
I'm at the bottom of the chain here and have no authority to change this. Given that I'm being let go soon there's not much reason for them to care about my mental state either.
But from the time I've been here, yes, you need to set boundaries or they'll do it for you. It seems like most PMs are used to talking to robots, because that's how they talk to us lately.
Statements like this one come for a position of privilege, which is to be expected on a forum like this one targeting techies who are most probably solidly middle-class, but just wanted to point that out. More exactly, most of the (normal) people are NOT in the position of designing their lives, believing otherwise is, again, tainted by said position of privilege.
You either misunderstood or we disagree fundamentally. Everyone can and should design their life. Of course richer people have a lot more choices, and poorer people a lot more constraints, but everyone can make informed choices.
Believing "most of the normal people" have no agency is condescending.
Oh they have agency. They also have bills to pay, families to take care of and many other obligations that folks of privilege do not need to be bothered with. It is immediately obvious how privileged we are compared to many others who are not a liberty of designing their lives or careers.
>They also have bills to pay, families to take care of and many other obligations
I honestly don't get your point. I also have bills to pay and a family to take care of. Almost everyone does. I can't just quit my job and spend my life sunbathing on a sunny island, even though that sounds way better than my office job.
The number of people who have so much that they don't ever need to worry about bills or affording a family is tiny, even among HN users. This is also not what "designing your life" is about.
To be clear, I acknowledge my privilege - I have a relatively high salary (but not US-high, not even 6 USD figures) and don't need to worry about day-to-day survival. I just fundamentally disagree that there is some threshold below which people can't make decisions about their own life or career.
> I just fundamentally disagree that there is some threshold below which people can't make decisions about their own life or career.
Stuff happens to you and to one's family that you just cannot "strategize" your life around just like that, unless you have (some, a good amount even) money, this is just how things are. If you haven't ever been in that place consider yourself very lucky.
I'm going to add my perspective here, I'm new to the website and have noticed people here might not fully understand not having any opportunity and what that is like. My mother, father, and grandparents all died before I was 19. I was homeless for a bit, and slept behind bushes while working at a local Kmart. I would have stayed homeless if not for some friends (that I barely knew then) inviting me to rent an apartment with them (they did not know about my situation).
The one thing I had going for me was that my grandmother prepaid my college tuition. So I scraped by working bullshit jobs, completed college, and now in my 30s I'm doing sort-of okay as a programmer for a start up (the pay here is bad, which is why I'm here).
It was awful getting here and I was always one small step away from being permanently homeless or dead. Maybe he didn't mean it like this, but a "normal" person means a person living in poverty in China or Indian or wherever else, and they all have it even worse than me.
I'm writing this here because, not you, but others on this website tend to just give some form of "bro, just stop sucking so bad if you want to improve your life" and it doesn't seem like they really understand what having no option is like.
I don't think it's condescending to believe a large number of people mostly cannot design their lives. At best they can try to make it better for their children, if at all.
Why is this condescending? It's not their fault, it's how the system works and their bad luck in not being born into a more privileged position. For people who cannot make ends meet, trying to make ends meet takes most of their available time and energy, there's not much left to ponder about life's choices.
What it is, in my opinion, is terribly unfair. I agree with the GP commenter that us here mostly ignore this reality. And that's OK, clearly TFA is aimed at privileged people like us, not most people.
> I don't think it's condescending to believe a large number of people mostly cannot design their lives. At best they can try to make it better for their children, if at all.
If they have children, barring some violent circumstances, then they've already participated in designing their life.
This is not a binary issue. All of us have choices and make decisions (feeding family, paying rent, not robbing a bank - all of these are choices). Yes, people in privileged positions have a much larger "choice space". And yes, plenty of underprivileged folks simply refuse to pursue the choices they have. Both these things can be true.
But sure - no one is denying that some folks exist who, either due to their own design or otherwise (e.g. health issues), may be stuck and their agency is significantly diminished.
> If they have children, barring some violent circumstances, then they've already participated in designing their life.
This is not the kind of design we're discussing here; "not having children" is usually a privileged, informed decision which most people are not in a position to make. It's certainly very far from "designing your career". Regardless, a lot of people don't have much choice here either, through a system conspiring on denying them choices (see: anti-abortion and anti-sex education lobbies, a health care system that conspires against their free time and energy, etc).
There's an illusion of choice, especially to us pontificating from our privileged lives, but no real choice.
> But sure - no one is denying that some folks exist [...] their agency is significantly diminished.
> This is not the kind of design we're discussing here
It certainly seems to be.
> "not having children" is usually a privileged, informed decision which most people are not in a position to make.
As I said - barring some violent circumstances, having a child, or at least the actions leading up to it, is a decision one makes.
> It's certainly very far from "designing your career".
This thread is not about designing one's career, but designing one's life. See the top level comment.
> Regardless, a lot of people don't have much choice here either, through a system conspiring on denying them choices (see: anti-abortion and anti-sex education lobbies, a health care system that conspires against their free time and energy, etc).
I've yet to meet someone who is not underage and doesn't understand that having kids is a consequence.
Sure, poor education and lack of abortion play a role, but none of that negates the fact that the person had a choice. It's exceptionally insulting to those who made different choices that led to positive outcomes to be told that people just like them in the same circumstances didn't have a choice.
Sorry, but your stance is very much coming across as privileged, who is trying to sympathize with people you don't understand. It's a very different perspective when you actually come from the background you're claiming didn't have a choice.
> As I said - barring some violent circumstances, having a child, or at least the actions leading up to it, is a decision one makes.
This is simply a falsehood you believe.
Or rather, it's a very constrained, mostly unfree "choice", with a lot of pressure from society telling them it's the wrong choice to make, barring them from access to abortion, contraception, and in many cases decent access to health and education. In many cases they are not even aware the choice existed, because it was concealed from them. I'm not sure if you are even aware a lot of people are not sure how babies come to be.
It's easy to claim everyone has access to these choices when you are, well, privileged.
> Sure, poor education and lack of abortion play a role, but none of that negates the fact that the person had a choice.
It absolutely negates it.
> It's exceptionally insulting to those who made different choices that led to positive outcomes to be told that people just like them in the same circumstances didn't have a choice.
Statistically, very few do. The odds are stacked against them. So it's not insulting at all; what's insulting is claiming from a privileged position that they "had a choice".
> Sorry, but your stance is very much coming across as privileged
Nope.
> It's a very different perspective when you actually come from the background you're claiming didn't have a choice.
Let me guess: your family was starving and dirt poor, your siblings were all addicts, but you managed to overcome this, educate yourself, and raise yourself to entrepreneurship. Is this where this is going?
> Or rather, it's a very constrained, mostly unfree "choice", with a lot of pressure from society telling them it's the wrong choice to make, barring them from access to abortion, contraception, and in many cases decent access to health and education. In many cases they are not even aware the choice existed, because it was concealed from them. I'm not sure if you are even aware a lot of people are not sure how babies come to be.
> Statistically, very few do. The odds are stacked against them.
I've already acknowledged much of these circumstances, right from my first comment. It doesn't change the very trivial fact that engaging in such behavior is a choice. Nor does it change the fact that virtually everyone has choices. I'll repeat what I said:
"Yes, people in privileged positions have a much larger "choice space". And yes, plenty of underprivileged folks simply refuse to pursue the choices they have. Both these things can be true."
As I said, even if you have kids, deciding whether you will feed them or let them starve (with all its consequences), is still a choice. Unless there are mental health issues involved, the person is making choices.
> Let me guess: your family was starving and dirt poor, your siblings were all addicts, but you managed to overcome this, educate yourself, and raise yourself to entrepreneurship. Is this where this is going?
No. But I didn't have easy access to contraception and abortion. And I was not a big outlier in the choices I made.
And let's be real: The majority of people who come to me and complain that they didn't really have a choice did not have siblings who were all addicts, coming from a dirt poor starving family.
> It doesn't change the very trivial fact that engaging in such behavior is a choice. Nor does it change the fact that virtually everyone has choices.
Quite the contrary, it does change it.
> As I said, even if you have kids, deciding whether you will feed them or let them starve (with all its consequences), is still a choice.
It's very hard to take you seriously after this.
> Arguments from extremes are not helping you.
This isn't about me or you; I don't need help. And you've just made an extreme argument which I quoted above.
By the way, it amazes me you consider the real world "an argument from extreme". I suppose from a very limited sample one might draw the same conclusion as you.
> It's very hard to take you seriously after this.
I take it you've not encountered such folks? It must be nice to be shielded. As I said, your comments definitely give off "privileged" vibes.
I don't know your background, but spend some time in various countries - both wealthy and not. Both repressive and not. When people debate the virtues and vices of freedom, much of what we discussed in this thread come into play. The US is very much a country centered on freedom, and the reason many are in a bad state is precisely because the US gives them more freedom by letting them have these choices. Statistically, they will choose poorly, but the fact that their behavior is predictable via statistics doesn't negate the fact that they made those choices.
> I take it you've not encountered such folks? It must be nice to be shielded.
What are you even trying to argue here? "Not dying and not letting your kids die is a choice"? I mean, sure, in a bizarre alien logic kind of way, but as someone once told me: "you're not helping yourself by using extreme arguments".
If that's your main point, we can stop here. I won't argue with extraterrestrials or robots.
> I don't know your background, but spend some time in various countries
Exactly, you don't know my background, so don't lecture me. Your lecturing comes across as very condescending and, well, privileged.
> The US
I'm not from the US.
> Statistically, they will choose poorly, but the fact that their behavior is predictable via statistics doesn't negate the fact that they made those choices.
> The only thing I have left to say is: Try not to confuse obligations with choices.
That is meaningless, though doubtless it seems very deep to you.
Look, you made the bizarre argument people always have choices because feeding your kids is a choice. In whatever alien world you live in that might be a clever argument. Meanwhile, in the real world...
I never considered that angle because no one ever explained it to me. It feels like this "privilege" concept explains a great deal about society. It is like a master key.
Someone recently told me about Jesus and the fact that he died to cleanse my sins. I never heard that one before either.
