Readit NewsI've noticed within myself some long-ingrained fear of failure, and this seems to manifest as dreading my work for fear of a suboptimal "outcome" (I don't know how to solve a problem, a project takes too long, rejection/setbacks on the funding front).
Any tips or strategies that have helped you shift your mindset to being more about "inputs" other than diligent repetition/journaling?
Then I considered I could just go back to working a normal job. Pays well, I get all my social status back. All these icky feelings go away. And I genuinely considered this. There is nothing wrong with that life. I loved those jobs!
What I found though, was that even in the face of all that risk it seemed a lot more interesting to try to do my own project.
But with those considerations I approached it a lot different. The daily risks feel like the activity more than whatever this may or may not look like in 10 years. I think this is better for the company too because it's possible to constrain yourself if you're convinced you already know what the end is like. Better to follow your own curiosity.
That's the theory anyway. Again, this is advice coming from someone who feels extremely unqualified to give it haha.
There is also a book by Carrol Dweck called 'Mindset' that speaks pretty directly to what you're asking about. You can get a pretty good idea of the concepts by googling fixed mindset vs growth mindset. The book itself has a couple slow parts but is pretty good overall.
I found myself experiencing feelings similar to what you're describing. Something that helped was not focusing on the future end state so much.
I remember one time seeing this interview with Bezos where they were congratulating him on Amazon's stock price at that time. And he was talking about how he tries to encourage Amazon employees to think in terms of inputs to Amazon, not outputs (like stock price).
I really like that idea of focusing on doing the hard work at hand and not worrying too much about what comes out on the other side.
Obviously this can go too far, you still need some vision to aim at. But I find that not only with this experience, but with learning other things too there can be sort of a stall where it feels like nothing is happening. You keep showing up every day but it feels like there are no results.
There is value in having a sort of stubbornness in the face of that. Focusing in on doing the work of the day and finding joy in it, rather than worrying about a payoff that may or may not ever come.
I think this is one of the reasons that startups work better when it's a topic you're sort of obsessed with. It helps to be able to work on something that you don't even care all that much if it leads to anything. Just a weird and interesting thread you keep pulling on.
I've been meaning to goof around with discord bots. When I do, I'll be sure to check it out.
You can make it completely optional and for the most part not upset users who don't buy them.
There is basically no upper threshold on how much you can charge. You want to have really cheap stuff too obviously. Something for everybody.
In gaming this trend of being able to buy cosmetic items has also been developing. In some games users pay hundreds of dollars for one cosmetic item.
Rather than counting on your own creativity to create the digital goods you can also create a marketplace for user created goods and then take a fee off the top.
You could do all this with crypto, or NFTs. There would be nothing wrong with doing it that way. But you could also just store that stuff in databases and it would work about as well for these purposes.
This is 70% of my job as a Sr Staff Engineer and I love it. But yes, it does take a certain temperament to enjoy it or find it satisfying. I like collaboration and pairing and helping other ICs grow their careers. And I love teaching, which this role allows me to do in abundance in all sorts of ways. Sure, I enjoy sustained technical work as much as the next engineer - but usually that work is better done by someone else who can use it to learn and grow and can own it down the road. Otherwise it becomes another piece of company knowledge that lives only in my head, and there's too much of that already.
I think there is still a bit of a perception that IC levels higher than Senior are about "Senior but with more interesting technical problems". This is largely false. In most organizations those roles are about empowering other people. You can see this if you read the stories Will Larson's new book, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track. Done right, it can delivery a ton of business value. Yes, it may be a continuation of the IC track, but it's a qualitatively different job. I think that could be stressed more in career guidance from management or when promoting folks into these roles, so that we don't keep promoting our most effective programmers into jobs for which they're not really suited and won't enjoy.
Anyone know of a career path where this is actually the case? Lately it seems like everywhere I turn it's meetings and PowerPoint. Ideally I'd like to keep working on harder and harder engineering problems until I die of old age.
As you implied it would be expensive to experience the cutting edge right now but here is what it would look like:
You would want a really high end headset, a haptic suit, haptic gloves, graphics cards and a pc to run it, and game to actually experience it.
-Pimax 8k $1500
-Research grade haptic gloves[0] $5000-$10000?
-Tesla Suit $2750
-Gaming pc and Scalped 3090s to run in SLI $10000
You could do a treadmill too but I actually don't think that tech is quite there yet and question just how much more immersed you would be at that point.
Now once your discount iron man suit is fully equipped what game do you actually play? You mentioned skyrimVR it actually has ok haptic support via mods.
However, what you really would want to play for the full Oasis experience is VRChat where with your haptic suit you could high five someone or feel them tap on your shoulder. It's also a thriving community full of bizarre worlds and avatars. Most of the hardware isn't directly supported in VRChat but you can find guides online of people getting it to work.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK2y4Z5IkZ0