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.
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.<p>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.<p>The CHALLENGE is in constantly forcing your mind back to the knife's edge - and it varies from person to person.<p>Back when I was a highschooler, I was unsatisfied with my sheet reading capabilities. To fix it, I<p>- started playing only new sheet music<p>- grabbed a old hymnal (from the 1950s) which are rhythmically simplistic but usu. have four voices.<p>- Wrote a very simple app that generated random sheetxml<p>- 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
This is really distorting the literal meaning of "years of experience". The "1 year repeated 5 times" sentiment does the same thing.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Time to drop this flawed thinking IMO
One thing you can do is expose yourself to <i>a lot</i> of different projects. I am in consultancy and man have I see some <i>things</i>. 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, <i>and</i> that's well into the article's burnout zone (this was <i>not</i> sustainable or common practice for me), but... it does help explain why I can charge as much money as I do!
It reminds me about Barthes studium (applying yourself to gain skills) and punctum (applying your skills to make your masterpieces) in photography.<p>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:<p>> 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.<p>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.
Pretty different from the blog post, but I've definitely had periods in (and out of!) my career where I learned <i>a ton</i> that <i>weren't</i> super-busy. I got to do some really high-leverage work in a strong environment with great colleagues, and the fact that I <i>wasn't</i> under a bunch of external/artificial pressure let me learn <i>more</i> (and <i>accomplish</i> more!) while still having plenty of time and energy for other things.<p>Seems like most people really overvalue pressure and long hours, when those are neither necessary nor sufficient—hell, probably <i>harmful</i>—for doing and learning <i>a lot</i>. 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.
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.
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).<p>But for anyone who wants to have such an experience for more than a few weeks, I believe they need to be strategic:<p>- 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;<p>- 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;<p>- 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;<p>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.
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.
I would add another axis to the graph. So x axis would be pace at which you work, and y axis would be novelty of work.<p>You can be burnt out doing fast paced repetitive work. It’s not always true the faster you go the more you learn.
<i>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.</i><p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
The zones of experience just screams of Vernor Vinge.<p>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.<p>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.