Beware tech career advice from old heads – Jacob Kaplan-Moss

35 点作者 raybb2 个月前

17 条评论

This is a big problem with younger devs right now, too.There are a lot of young developers who got new jobs in the 2021-2022 job market who don’t have any other frame of reference. They preach their experience to even younger devs and college grads as if it was normal, without understanding how unusually good the job market was at that time.Browse any of the advice forums and you’ll find people confidently telling others to quit jobs they don’t like because it’s really easy to find a new job. Then you ask for details and they reveal that they did this in 2021 and it was fine.I can’t count how many times I’ve had to tell young developers to ignore bad advice from people with 5 YOE who have never experienced a difficult job market.

jarsin2 个月前

> The tech industry of 15 or 20 years ago was, again, dramatically different from tech today. I used to joke that if you knew which was was up on a keyboard, you could get a job in tech.Nope, guys that started 20 years ago came into very brutal tech job markets. Dotcom bust / 911 / with the cherry on top, the GFC a few years later. Very worth listening to.

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mlhpdx2 个月前

Having decades of experience doesn’t necessarily blind one to the reality of less tenured folks. The reality is that there are externally observant and empathetic people at all ages who see and internalize the cause and effect patterns around them, and those that aren’t and don’t. The latter are for some reason more vocal than the former lately.

chiffre012 个月前

I remember being told to 'specialize in something' when I first started. Looking back I think this is terrible advice.

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cadamsdotcom2 个月前

You can shorten it and say, beware of any advice at all.Advice is someone trying to crystallize lessons they learned from doing something that worked for them in their circumstances.Understand their context before deciding what weight to give their advice.

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fragmede2 个月前

I'm guilty of giving this but the old head advice that falls short is "use your network". Easy to say when you have one having been in industry for 20+ years. A bit harder to do when that number is zero.

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kennysoona2 个月前

I'm hesitant to consider anything said by anyone who uses the term old heads seriously.

mixmastamyk2 个月前

Kind of a silly piece. I don't think young people take advice verbatim, obviously it is going to need some adjustment to their current situation.And, if you read "The Mythical Man-Month," you'll be surprised how little has changed.

gmuslera2 个月前

Technology changed a lot in the last 20 years. And don't take advice from someone that have been only working at the same place and same technology all that time.But what about the old folks that have been changing and adapting to the new technologies, work conditions and reality all along the path?

snapetom2 个月前

Ok. So why? What's changed?

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daviddever23box2 个月前

Newer fangs are sharper fangs - don't gum your career options to death.

vaxman2 个月前

Closing in on 50 years experience, under 60, USDA Grade A genius and son of one who is closing in on 100 with a bigarse certificate above his bed signed by a US Secretary of Defense....Sadly, the man with a law firm of a last name is probably from the era of tech professionals that began to emerge after the (dot-com-crash) nuclear winter ended, when most all over age 40 had been permanently purged from the tech industry for financial reasons. (People over 40 typically cannot survive for 5-6 years without earning an income and have to transition to other occupations in support families/mortgages/etc.) He most likely didn't come up with any grey-beards mentoring him at all. I can't even imagine having education, talent but the wisdom of random Google searches and Reddit posts. You can only go so far in life without knowing the "why" of everything! So, with all due respect, likely coming up without the mentorship trade professionals with even 20 years of experience means he doesn't know what he doesn't know about whether or not to take advice from "old heads." Case closed. (So depressing, how about a near-endless stream of beautiful women <a href="https://www.youtube.com/live/gqOeWBxN4_Q" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/live/gqOeWBxN4_Q</a>)PS: First new grey-beards since 2000 (outside of Defense/Big Tech, Europe and Russia) should be around soon. A legit example of the handful left from before 2000 are like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage</a> Want some actual "career advice"? Figure out why Dave knows more about DeepSeek R1 than everyone YOUR age? (Hint: None of those people are going to make it in this field to Dave's age.)

yieldcrv2 个月前

its also an interesting prisoner’s dilemma:telling people what works for me, crowds out what works for meI see lots of takes on this thread alone, tempting to comment on them but it messes with the money

xela792 个月前

this basically related to any career advice, no matter if it is tech or not. Too generic an advice

drivingmenuts2 个月前

Tying an onion to your belt, like in the old days, is a sure way to a new career.

readthenotes12 个月前

"My advice is to not take my advice. But seriously, take my advice!"

PaulHoule2 个月前

It's a toughie. I like the Marshall McLuhan quote “We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future” [1] [2] but I also bemoan what I call the "ahistoric turn", the tendency I perceive that people today aren't interested in the past at all. I can point to many old obscure books that were quite prophetic [3] [4] and lines of research such as neuro-symbolics in the 1990s that went from science fiction to obvious. In the late 1960s, before the CMOS transistor was established as the universal computing element there was a lot of interest in neuromorphic computing and speculation about the "intelligence explosion" that was fresh, not the dogmatic and narrow-minded dogma of the Yudkowsky cult.Lines of argument that have long gone out of favor are likely to come back [5] as much as some concerns will be reversed [6] and one book that spoke to the zeitgeist of the 1970s is accepted in Japan as an interpretation of the Tokugawa period [7]One of the ways to deal with rapid social change is to extend your reach to the widest range of cultures and history.(Funny I was talking the other day to a coworker from a previous job who started programming on 370 mainframes in the 1970s and was telling me how he built a test harness for fly-by-wire control systems for military aircraft based on a cluster of 80386 PCs in the later 1980s.)[1] <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/618118-we-look-at-the-present-through-a-rear-view-mirror" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/618118-we-look-at-the-prese...</a>[2] <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Forward-Through-Rearview-Mirror-Reflections/dp/0262522330" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Forward-Through-Rearview-Mirror-Refle...</a>[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Image:_A_Guide_to_Pseudo-events_in_America" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Image:_A_Guide_to_Pseudo-e...</a>[4] <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Their-Impact-Media/dp/B001IOS2FW" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Their-Impact-Med...</a>[5] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth</a>[6] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb</a>[7] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_of_Narcissism" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_of_Narcissism</a>

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