The Next Next Job, a framework for making big career decisions | Hacker News Reader

The Next Next Job, a framework for making big career decisions

andrewchen.com

35 pointsyarapavan11 comments

The problem I always find with these "career decision frameworks" is that they vastly underestimate the randomness of life. Also they always seem to come from people whose problems were "should I work for high flying startup or start a new company with my Ivy league buddies?", with massive survivorship biases.

Point in case: in 2019 I had to make the decision of whether to relocate to the US or stay in the UK. My wife had just gotten a job after a long unemployment period. We ran all kind of alternative scenarios and "simulations" in our mind, calculating the pros, cons, and probabilities of each outcome. We finally decided to stay in the UK one year longer, in order to give her some working experience and confindence.

Then in 2020 we got Covid and all of my plans ended in the gutter.

All of this advice is great, so long as you accept that you are only slightly reducing the chaos and randomness of real life.

> so long as you accept that you are only slightly reducing the chaos and randomness

Life is not chess, it's poker. Gently putting your thumb on the scales is the best we can do.

Certainty is an illusion, only probabilities are real. So what you do isn't "Plan the next 10 years", it's "Make $goodOutcome a little more likely than $badOutcome", then adjust in real-time as the situation changes.

Yes, I agree. Usually these posts rely on a very deterministic ontology to make logical ‘frameworks’ stick. The word framework here is a huge exaggeration for what is essentially a single question. The question is made to seem very interesting but only because there is huge uncertainty in providing any answer.

I still find this type of post interesting in a bizarro kind of way. It’s funny how people try to struggle against all the unknowns in their lives and force life into the shape of an engineering problem. I notice it’s usually younger people doing this, maybe before too many illusions of control have been wrested from them.

You make decisions. Sometimes the work out amazingly. Sometimes not. But make sure that when they do not you're not screwed.

I think of it as playing xcom. There's always a 5% chance to miss. If you put yourself in a position where a random failure destroys you, you should look for a better position.

I feel like it has been an okay framework for living for me.

I asked myself a very related set of questions which helped me realize it was time to switch jobs:

1. fast-forward and picture myself at my own retirement, assuming reasonable progression based on my current trajectory.

2. from there, reminisce about when I was at the peak of my career, really at the top of my game, the most accomplished I ever was.

3. am I satisfied with that peak?

If not, then there is a problem with my current trajectory and it needs to change.

Though not necessarily a bad way to make your decision more concrete, I feel like it would be delusional to think that you'll care about not just your career, but what your younger self thought about anything. In order to shoot higher, you have to decide what higher means now, and think that later you'll agree with that in retrospect, and I think if you're truly growing, you won't.

I most likely won't be able to retire, but when I'm around that age, something will have to have seriously gone wrong if I care about my career status a veritable lifetime prior. There's already so much more to derive from life outside of work than I could possibly derive from work, and while it's good to think about increasing the value I get from work in the future, there's nothing I could think of doing that would bring me so much more value that I'd make a significant sacrifice on the other side for it.

All I see is a blank white page with a popup inviting me to subscribe with no cancel button.

agreed its disappointing I wanted to read not subscribe

Bur does it support client-side interactions?

Sorry, stupid pun, it's Friday night here.

I usually avoid career-related content, and the headline got me with its intentional-or-not ambiguity.

If you think I'm rambling nonsense, I was talking about next.js, and this still lines up pretty well with the first paragraph.

I have to admit that I didn't read the full FA, so I'm spending more time commenting than reading.

But the advice in the first money quote is good, I think.

I switched jobs fairly recently. I don't do this frequently.

The reality, though, is that you have no idea what your next next job is.

I would have NEVER predicted my job would be in AI two jobs ago.

This is the challenge with these frameworks - you really can't look beyond one corner in tech -- and especially software

This is an amazing framework. I'm definetly sending this to my interns.

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