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Author: tlevine

career-advice-from-tom.markdown

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+*The following is copied from [Tom's website](http://thomaslevine.com/!/career-advice).*
+
+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!
+
+## Why do you want a job?
+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.
+
+## How to make money
+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](http://strikedebt.org/drom/).
+
+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.
+
+### Pretending
+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.
+
+### It is okay to produce bad work
+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.
+
+### Be insulted when you are paid anything less than ridiculous wages
+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.
+
+### Try to work just enough not to get fired and no more
+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.
+
+### Profit and greed are the least of motivations in business
+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](http://www.newsweek.com/2015/02/06/what-silicon-valley-thinks-women-302821.html),
+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.
+
+### Do real work for short terms rather than trying to find something that you enjoy and still pays
+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.
+
+### Don't apply for jobs.
+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](/!/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](#profitandgreedaretheleastofmotivationsinbusiness).
+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.
+
+1. People in the organization are [pretending](#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.
+2. 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.
+3. People really started the company because they want to make friends, not
+    because they want to make money.
+4. 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.
+
+### The main reason you need "experience" is so you can feel confident when you're bullshitting.
+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
+
+
+### Work only if it pays well.
+My view is that it is best to do horrible work for brief periods and then to
+spend most of your time [sleeping](/!/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.
+
+### Treat your career like a game, and have fun with it
+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.
+
+## Why Tom's career advice may be totally irrelevant
+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.
+
+### Different backgrounds
+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.
+
+### Career motivations change throughout life
+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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor_theory)
+* [Erikson's stages of psychosocial development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erikson%27s_stages_of_psychosocial_development)
+* [Maslow's hierarchy of needs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs)
+* [Behaviorism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism)
+* [Ecological systems theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
+
+### Why people give 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](#tomscareeradvice) 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.
+
+### The blind lead the blind
+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.
+
+## Conclusion
+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.

readme.markdown

@@ -16,6 +16,7 @@ the javascript language
 * [streams](streams.markdown) - learn how to using streaming I/O in node.js
 
 * [career advice from Tom](http://thomaslevine.com/!/career-advice)
+    ([mirror](career-advice-from-tom.markdown))
 
 ....and so much more! Check the list of files above for
 notes on other topics covered.