Comment by angarg12 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by angarg12 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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