Chapter 20. Don’t Take Advice from Graybeards
John Looney
Don’t take advice from graybeards just because they seem confident. No one has any idea where the tech industry is going. Hedge your bets; 90% of predictions turn out hilariously wrong. The first career advice I got was, “With MS-DOS 6.1, the world doesn’t need any more software. Go into hardware.” The second was, “No one pays for generalists; you need to specialize.” Now I’m an SRE.
Heinlein told me, “Specialization is for insects.” Try a stint as a software engineer. Sysadmin. Front end. Back end. Hardware. Product. Bartender. Founder. Learn something new every birthday.
Burnout is a bitch. It will happen a few times, and each time you think, “I’ll never fall for that again.” Again, you will work too hard, too long, without reward or appreciation. It can permanently damage your health. The young and invincible assume it won’t happen to them. Life is a marathon, not a sprint.
Maybe you’ll be a manager; maybe you won’t. You could work for a famous multinational or always be in startups no one heard of. Your stock options might be worth millions. You might build something that makes you famous in the eyes of people you respect. Blindboy warned me not to put my “locus of evaluation” into other people’s hands—even my mother’s. And he wears a plastic bag on his head.
Mental health isn’t binary. Plomin taught me there ...
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