The following is copied from Tom's website.
Perhaps you are considering a career, maybe in "data science", maybe in some other form of cyber wizardry, or maybe something totally different. And perhaps you are wondering what you should learn, how to get a job, how to market yourself, &c. I have assembled some advice for you!
There are all kinds of reasons why the career that interests you would appeal to you. The nominal reason is often that you want to be able to afford to live, or at least pay off your student debt. But there are so many more motivations that I see behind career choices!
You might be looking for a purpose, a way to contribute to the world. Or you might not care so much about such a purpose and care more about meeting friends. Or even future mates! Maybe you want to make lots of money, not just enough to survive, but enough to afford fancy cars and limousines. Or maybe you actually like doing the thing.
If I were sitting right next to you, we could try to pick apart why you are interested in this career, and then I might give you advice that is more specific.
Since you're not sitting next to me, I'm not going to do that now, but I here are three things to consider. First, anything that motivates you towards a particular career is real and totally valid, even if it sounds very unprofessional or childish. Second, a job probably isn't the easiest way to accomplish those things you might want out of job. (The exception is making money.) Third, it is possible that you have found something that you like doing but need some special status, position, institutional affiliation, &c. in order to do; in this case, you should question whether you actually like doing the thing and whether you really need the special status, as you might be wrong about one of these two things.
As I indicated above, I think that making money is pretty much the only good reason to take your career seriously. The other things that people supposedly get out of a job are way easier to accomplish elsewhere. If you want a purpose in your life, start doing something that's actually worthwhile. If you want to meet friends, find fun things to do all day. And if you want to pay back your student debt, don't pay back your debt.
Here are some things that took me way too long to learn and might apply to you if you care at all about making money.
In the real world, everyone is pretending that she or he belongs there and that she or he knows what she or he is doing. This should explain why everyone seems to like his or her job and to be making more money than you.
Also, since most people are lying, they probably won't call you out on any lies that you make; calling you out on your lie will remind them that they are lying, and they don't like being reminded of that.
If you want some practice in pretending, fill your LinkedIn profile with buzzwords and respond to the recruiters. Or, even easier, just ask me to refer one of them to you, and you can try to keep up the act.
I often hear of people trying hard to do good work inside of an organization that doesn't appreciate their work or makes their good work hard. A cliché example is designers who advocate for their users so that the resulting product is useful but repeatedly get shut down by their managers who think they know better.
Why do you care!? If you have to fight with your manager to do good work, all of your colleagues probably do too, and that's a lot of fighting. If you really want to do good work, find another place to work.
I find it much easier to run away from conflict. I would make only light suggestions, avoid getting very stressed out about the mismanagement, and make some money. If you really care about doing good design or whatever, you can quit your job to do that and live off the money you saved while working.
My wages have so much less to do with the work I provide than I had innocently hoped they would. If you decide that your normal rate is $10,000 per hour and that anything less than $7,000 per hour is absolutely insulting, then that suddenly becomes reasonable. Okay, maybe it shouldn't be that outrageous.
This gets back to the point about pretending. People don't really know what a reasonable salary is, so if you act like something ridiculous is totally reasonable, nobody's going to call you out on it. Especially in startups.
This is an extension of the previous one, and it is especially relevant when your pay is based on time you worked rather than on the completion of a project.
I think that working "hard" is more about creating a feeling of comradery, where a group of colleagues are making sacrifices towards a greater goal; it doesn't usually change how much is accomplished, and if it does, the change is usually that less being accomplished.
Even if working harder does improve how much is accomplished, you are unlikely to be appropriately rewarded for it. Your pay is based on what seems like a normal amount to pay someone, rather than on what work you did for the people.
People sometimes say that God says that we shouldn't kill each other and still decide to go to Israel to fight a holy war. Similarly, people sometimes say that they are in the business of making money and then hire hip rockstar programmers so they can feel cool.
The typical examples of this is that women, certain ethnic groups, and old people are seen as incompetent, but that just scratches the surface.
For example, I think that much of "data science" is people with advanced degrees who didn't find jobs in academia but want to feel like they're still doing "research". It can be really fun to use the fancy stuff that you read in a paper, but I very rarely manage to find situations where any of the fancy things I read in fancy books and journals is practical; I think that people say they need their analysis, science, &c. skills because they want to feel like researchers, not because it is particularly helpful for the business.
If people actually wanted to make money, things would work a lot differently.
I periodically consider going to graduate school. I still haven't gone, and here is much of the reason.
I could join the academy, spend half of my time doing grant-funded research, spend half my time teaching, and spend the third half of my time applying for grants. Or, I could do whatever I want most days ("research"), work for a few weeks a year at real jobs, and sleep the rest of the time.
Some people like to say that you should apply to things even if you don't think you'll get them because "you miss all the shots you don't take". This advice is horribly misguided, as you will also miss all of the shots that you do take.
This advice ignores that applying to things is a lot of work and that it rarely leads to anything; if you actually want a job, there are far better things that you could do. In fact, I think that you're better off sleeping rather than applying for jobs if your goal is to get a job.
Applications are very noisy processes with very little feedback. They involve a lot of work from the applicant, and it's practically impossible to figure out how to make an application good. And if the organization actually wants to hire someone, application processes are even more work on their end.
As I said before, profit and greed are the least of motivations in business. Nominally, the goal of the job application is to select good candidates for a role that they need to fill, or something like that. Here are some other reasons that a company might ask for job applications.
- People in the organization are pretending that they knows what they're doing, so they post jobs just like all the other companies do. Or they're pretending that it has enough money to hire people.
- People in organization don't really know what they wants and are deferring their decision until later. I think this is more common with grants and short projects than with jobs.
- People really started the company because they want to make friends, not because they want to make money.
- People in the organization want to feel like they are smart, and interviewing people makes them feel smart.
It's not any one of these is the only reason in any case, of course. Lots of things are going on, and making money is often the least of them.
In some cases, you might know someone in the company and basically have the job but need to apply as a formality. This has a slight chance of working, but even then, it's hit-or-miss; the policies of the organization that you are applying to are likely to be complicated enough that your contact doesn't fully understand the policies. One of the times I applied for graduate school, my would-be advisor realized only after I had been accepted that funding for me wasn't available because I wasn't an European citizen. There are too many little things like this that take way too long to learn when application processes are so long.
I remarked when I had just graduated from college that people were treating me like a "recent graduate" who didn't know anything. I think that if I had just hung out on the beach for a few years and not touched a computer that people would think that I had some "experience". Or I could have just lied about my age.
But there is, in fact, more to bullshitting than fitting your background into a mold. Even if you think that you don't know anything or that you're slow at computers, you could probably learn everything that you needed to do for lots of entry-level programming work on the job. The issue is that you have to convince the company that you know the appropriate amount of each of the buzzwords and incoherently fancy language.
I haven't figured out exactly how this bullshit works, but here are two things that come to mind.
First, you can develop arbitrary preferences. For example, learn to explain why a particular software is best and to complain about all of the problems about all of the alternatives. There is a diversity of experiences in the human condition, so most of these softwares are probably just fine, but briefly suspend this reasonability while you act like you're all experienced and shit.
lot of you could do work that companies are supposedly hiring for
My view is that it is best to do horrible work for brief periods and then to spend most of your time sleeping and otherwise having fun.
I haven't actually used most of the above advice to get jobs; a lot of it is outrageous stuff that I think would work but haven't really tried. Some of the reason that I haven't tried it is because I haven't been working very long, but much of it is that I feel horrible about deceiving people, even if it is the only way to make money.
I want to retire so I'm happy to do horrible work if it pays ridiculously well. But I don't want to do not-horrible work that pays okay, because I'd rather just sleep.
I think I enjoy working in stuffy companies because I like to see why people act the way they do. I think it's hilarious that the real world is just as arbitrary as they say it is in the movies.
I always find it absolutely bizarre that someone would want to start a company. Here are some explanations I have come up with.
- One person wanted to do the work that his parents did.
- Another person wanted to meet rock stars and programmers.
- A higher-up in one company was used to corporate sales and kept doing that because she needed something to do all day, even though the company didn't have much to sell.
- One person wanted to go traveling, but he lives in San Francisco, so he started a backpack company instead.
The stuff I say above makes perfect sense to me, but other people think it wouldn't apply to them. I think this is the bigger message you should take from the present writing.
People grew up in all different places, learned different things when they were young, had different relationships with their families and other people, have different genes, and so on. It's quite likely that the person giving you advice was different enough that what he or she did won't always work for you; moreover, it's not like we can know whether the advice will apply.
For example, some people are especially interested in making money. I find that these people often came from relatively poor families and are hoping to provide for their parents or for their (future) children.
Even a single person will have totally different career motivations throughout her or his (or zir) life.
Various fancy people came up with ideas as to what motivates people. Here are some of them
- Two-factor theory
- Erikson's stages of psychosocial development
- Maslow's hierarchy of needs
- Behaviorism
- Ecological systems theory
I particularly like a way of thinking that we attribute to Erik Erikson, mainly because his name is "Erik Erikson". His father left when he was young, so he changed his name from "Erik [whatever-his-father's-last-name-was]" to "Erik Erikson". But they're all good.
The point here is that your motivation will change throughout life, so you can't even expect someone of a very similar background to give you relevant advice.
Lots of people have no idea how to do what they want to do and want to feel like they do know what they are doing. Giving advice can reassure yourself that you are doing something reasonable. For example, if you think that you should sleep a lot, you might suggest that other people learn sleep a lot, in order to convince yourself that sleeping really is a good idea.
Similarly, people often give advice in order to convince themselves that they are experts. For example, you might give people career advice in order to convince yourself that you know a lot about career stuff.
I quite enjoy saying outrageous things as if they're totally normal and am also rather frustrated by how much of the advice I have been given is totally irrelevant. My career advice above can be summarized as "Tom used to believe common wisdoms, so he is surprised, frustrated, and amused when he finds that they are totally wrong. He also likes being outrageous."
There are so many other reasons why people would give advice; my point is that helping you out is the least of the reasons. If someone is giving me advice, I usually see the advice as advice that the other person is giving himself or herself (or zirself) rather than as something that has anything to do with me.
I'm only 24 years old and have been out of college for only three-and-a-half years (as of January 2015), so it is absolutely hilarious that people think I actually know anything about anything. On the other hand, it's not like I'll have much better of an idea when I'm 30; there is a diversity of experiences in the human condition, and everyone has been exposed to only a tiny portion of them.
I enjoying how my career advice is both totally outrageous; while it is perfectly reasonable to me, it surely doesn't apply entirely to you, and the places where it doesn't apply might be kind of obvious.
Lots of people give career advice, and while it isn't as outrageous as mine, I doubt it is any more reasonable. People have all different reasons why they work, and people come from all different backgrounds, so it is quite likely that well meant advice won't apply at all to you.