Unhappy with career, please help. | Hacker News Reader

Unhappy with career, please help.

16 pointskannappan9 comments

I'm at crossroads in my career. I'm looking for some advice. My case should be fairly typical, so I expect the responses I get to be useful to others in my situation too.

First, some context: I work for a big company on a popular online service. I have a masters degree and my field is machine learning. I'm smarter than all my peers at work.

I started off with a my-code-is-going-to-change-the-world attitude. I remember my heart racing the first time I was looking at results of my code processing petabytes of data. Then, slowly my smart, idealistic, I-will-create-perfect-AI self started bumping into reality. Rather than math/ML challenges, I was faced with problems like technical debt, missed deadlines, unmet expectations, unhealthy peer competition, endless frog-eating, fragmented days, daily scrums... to cut a long story short, it has been a long time since I did anything that I'm proud of.

And I have been in the company for more than 7 years now. Yes, I should just leave and go to a better place - that much is obvious. But here's the thing - I don't expect it to be better anywhere else. I don't want to join another big company and slowly nudge some KPIs upwards. I want to solve hard problems. Problems not solved yet. Problems that are important and that matter. The answer that I'm going to get maybe "go join a startup". But I'm an immigrant on work visa and this is risky. Also, I have a pretty demanding family life and I'm not sure I'd be able to put it the long hours.

After being frustrated for a long time and some failed attempts to change the situation, I have decided to go all-in and explore all my options aggressively. I cannot afford to not change things any more. I plan to interview a lot.

I could use the advice of people on HN. Have you had similar experiences? How did you get out of it? Am I being too pessimistic about potential opportunities? What are the things I should look out for before accepting my next offer? Is there hope for me?

Today is not a good day to post this, likely your message will get drowned in the NSA noise.

> I'm smarter than all my peers at work.

There's part of your problem. If it isn't true then you'll be looking down on those you need to work with on a daily basis and this will be a source of much frustration. And if it is true - which is definitely possible - then you will be frustrated because of that.

Wherever you go make sure you fix this, either by having an accurate way to measure on how you relate to your peers so you don't end up looking down at them or by hooking up with a crowd that you'd be honored to work with - provided they'll have you.

I'm going to go way left field. If by being an immigrant (I assume you are having trouble getting residency) you are being bound into slavery (that's my term for working on something you hate, just to earn money) then have you considered relocating to somewhere else where you can have more freedom and possible pursue something truly innovative?

As much as many people will argue otherwise, startups by their very nature are demanding, exhausting and exciting places to work. With strong family commitments you might find it hard to find a mutually acceptable lifestyle balance.

>> I'm smarter than all my peers at work.

No, you're just conceited than your other peers and this is your biggest problem. It's not the job, it's you. Wherever you go if you have this attitude you will always feel like crap and things will just fall apart again. You know, "technical debt, missed deadlines, unmet expectations..." and so on.

>> But here's the thing - I don't expect it to be better anywhere else.

How would know? You never tried it.

From what I see, you have an attitude problem and you have to fix that first. Joining a start-up won't make you feel alive if you can't change your attitude.

> I'm smarter than all my peers at work. If you are sure of that, then create something on your own. Try to apply your AI skills, find a problem to solve (big data, NLP etc) and get a prototype running. If you can't find a new problem to solve, you could as well solve an already solved problem in a better way. But set the target. Re-evaluate yourself at the end.

I want to say 'go work in academia' but as you are probably aware that environment is easily as political as any large corporation, you waste lots of time wrangling over funding and departmental politics and so on. Since you're foreign, a career in the intelligence service isn't on the cards either :-)

I think you do have a strong possibility of success at a startup - your comments about being smart seem matter-of-fact rather than ego-driven to me. Your big problem is that instead of nudging KPIs you may just find yourself on a growth-maximization/VC funding treadmill instead. The best thing I can think of is to seek out ML problems focused on natural phenomena (weather, epidemiology and suchlike) rather than market-driven ones involving consumer behavior, which will inevitably revert to revenue-maximization problems.

If you really want to work on machine learning, do a PhD. If you have a bit of experience and if you are good at it, it should be very easy to find a paid position. In academia, especially during your PhD, you are very free to work on your own thing (depending on the professor whose group you join).

What country are you in? If US, I think it takes less than 7 years to go from H1B to green card. I can't think of other high-tech immigrant destination countries where after 7 years one still does not have permanent residency.

Dude ..Innovate something.. People dont have talent like you.. Take few days off, think something that is kinda impossible and code it

PS : Put it on GITHUB so that everybody knows that you created it..

somewhat OT: how can one get reasonable technical career advice these days. I definitely have a few questions myself, but i never felt like asking everybody on HN was the best way to go about it.

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