Now What?

http://lispy.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/now-what/

by raganwald • 18 years ago

18 12 18 years ago

lispy.wordpress.com

Hexstream• 18 years ago

... What was this post about? (or: "Now what?")

learninglisp• 18 years ago

An average programmer learns a variety of tools that lead him to a series of epiphanies.

With his eyes open, he no longer can cope with the lame blubiness of his career, but he finds him self pigeonholed by his old job description. He doesn't have the credentials to strike off into a job that would allow for more professional growth. But he had no idea that the many small development choices he'd been making over time would lead to this crisis. Now what?

mechanical_fish2• 18 years ago

Grad school.

I'm not normally found arguing in favor of the grad school option, but every tool has its use. If you're in a place where you can't imagine getting a job outside of the narrow boundaries of your resume, you need a different environment with different friends and colleagues. It's time to escape the resume-ruled world for a while and get a master's degree.

When you emerge from school it will be like being born again: Society will understand it when you declare that you no longer want to be known as a Blub guy -- you'll have moved to a higher plane, or at least a different one. Plus you'll have a lot of smart friends who might want to help start a company.

Other options include: start a company [1], downshift your career (find the job that you think you want, find the entry-level job that leads toward that, and get that job -- swallow your pride), build some independent projects (websites or open-source projects) and launch them... or all of the above.

[1] Here on news.yc I'm contractually obligated to include this advice somewhere in every post.

comatose_kid2• 18 years ago

Screw the credentials. Work on interesting things, publish them, repeat. The opportunities will come.

andreyf• 18 years ago

I mean… will any employer possibly care if I told them that I've worked through half of SICP, internalized maybe thirty Emacs commands, can do some moderately interesting stuff with sed and pipes on Unix, and can write crappy Perl code? Will all of this stuff remain merely a secret weapon of mine while I continue on in work environments where such tools are unknown, actively feared, or completely off the radar?