It ultimately doesn't change the advice. Strongly deciding I wanted a career change led me to putting in some extra time and tripling my income. It's easier if you can reduce obligations and noise and focus on what matters to optimize for whatever you want. It may not be easy, but you have some degree of power to alter your trajectory to some extent

This is a framing issue. You can't control the times, but good advice is applicable in good and bad times. If Hamming was operating from a "good time", it should be true that his policies are also applicable in the "bad times".

His advice to "work on the worlds hardest problems" was spoken to people who had worked their way past the initial difficulties. General advice to "Move towards important problems", which is precisely the same thing, applies in good and bad times, and is very likely to produce in you a valuable expertise.

>I don’t think it’s unreasonable to take what job you can get or stay in a job you don’t care for until the trade winds return.

Having a goal does not seem at all at odds with weathering a storm. Your choices can then be what you learn in your free time, or what horizontal moves you make at that job, or which people you get closer to, for example.

> Hamming was also writing from a highly privileged position.

Hamming had a lot of career capital. He was the only person in the world with his track record. If you needed his kind of research/output/teaching/etc, he was the person you needed.

Cal Newport talks a lot about this. Great books.

Have something [unique/valuable] to offer and you'll be surprised how many doors it opens. Yes it takes time to stairstep your way there. A fresh grad has less career capital than a seasoned engineer with a track record of building billion dollar companies.

> Programmers had a lot of labour power back then.

Huh? Back then, there was very little glamor to software engineering. Computing just wasn't serious enough. There was relatively little competition, salaries were unremarkable, and sure, you could land a job for life, but that still exists today. If you are an IT guy for a lumber mill, a regional ISP, or a grocery store, it's not going to be as cutthroat as Big Tech. It's just that you're not gonna be making millions.

We're pretending that this type of cozy tech jobs don't exist anymore, but they do. They just don't come with IPOs and RSUs.

When I got into the industry over 20 years ago, it was unheard of for an IC software engineer to retire early. Unless you got extremely lucky like working at Microsoft or Apple pre-IPO, you just weren't making the kind of money big law or doctors made.

That is not the case now. Yes the competition is incredibly fierce but the pay has skyrocketed.

Is this still a valuable read today (specially taking it into account)? It's been in my reading list for a while now but I'm always postponing :|

After ~15 years, I've realized that no good things come to you without sustained focus / attentiveness, and gentle pressure in the direction of attention. What everyone here is saying is "be closed loop", vs the drunkards "open loop". Combined with a bit of progress every day, it's (so far, at least) magical what happens.

Another bit to consider: It took a long time to realize that basically everyone wants basically everyone to succeed, as long as incentives align. It was very easy to imagine I was swimming upstream early in my career - especially my early mentors urging me to specialize to find success. My initial temptation was to "specialize" in hot/attractive topics in an effort to be the "indispensable X authority". But my PhD advisor urged me to "not swim in red water", where the incentives are inherently conflicting - everyone wants to be "the X person".

Much better to find a team working on a good problem somewhat like the ones you want to solve and just push along with them. You can save yourself a lot of energy by slotting yourself into a system that aligns with your preferred direction of travel, even if only a little bit. The current carries you.

I can’t emphasize this enough. Every 5 years or so I reassess what my goals are and refocus my vision on where I want to apply my skills.

Things change fast in our industry so being able to pivot to something nearby is paramount for maintaining a career in this field.

Not everyone has the fortune to spend 15 years at a FAANG or other large corporation. Sometimes you have to build it.

>>Being focused on the goal you defined 30 years ago is almost certainly wrong for most people.

I think there are certain things that are not likely to change, and must be aimed for. For starters, being healthy, proactively working towards a retirement nest egg, so that you don't end up homeless and starving in case things go south too fast.

There are many such things I hold as things I would want several years from now. Good health, free time and enough money to not need a job to just put food on the table, and a roof above my head.

Which is fine. Goals shift and can even completely disappear, forcing you to pick another one. But having and pursuing long term goals at most times is still the ticket for success. My 2c.

You're right, sqrt(E[d^2]) > E[|d|] because of Jensen's inequality. The latter is about 0.8 sqrt(N).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Aim_at_the_Stars

> Despite his moral quandaries, von Braun participates in the Nazi's V-2 rocket program during World War II to further his ambitions in rocket engineering. The film carefully depicts his efforts to reconcile his love for scientific exploration with the knowledge that his work is being used for destructive purposes.

I have a similar short story idea where a person of the calibre of Elon Musk who works so hard is made to feel and see his successful moonshot projects being used for destroying and subjugating nations. This would be similar to Oppenheimer. Another twist I can take with the story is Hero "Elon" knows about this outcome but still in the hope of change in institutional ideology over decades hopes for better use for his technology. In the movie Watchmen, Ozymandias feels the pain of millions he is going to kill to save future billions.

Watchmen: Killing millions to save billions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu2DdkOxLNs

Vision is not a dictator, it's just having half an idea of where you'd love to be in X years.

It can and probably will move as you age and gain experience.

But if you're thinking you'd love to be your own boss and, as you have that vision, you find something much more interesting, you can still re-assess.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/sharks-use-math-hunt

A new study suggests that some sharks and other marine predators can follow strict mathematical strategies when foraging for dinner. The work, reported online June 9 in Nature, is the latest aiming to show whether animals sometimes move in a pattern called a Lévy walk.

Unlike random motion — in which animals take similar-sized steps in any direction, like a drunk stumbling around — Lévy walks are punctuated by rare, long forays in any direction. Draw a Lévy walk on a graph, and its squiggly pattern echoes a fractal, the mathematical phenomenon whose shape remains similar no matter the viewing scale.

yep

"expected distance" is average abs(coordinate), so for biased walk (and big enough time) it's simply abs(bias)*time, and for unbiased it's deviation==sqrt(variance)

The “expected distance” is not what you think here.

For a binomial distribution of probability p and (1-p), after N steps the expectation value of right steps is Np.

The Variance is Np(1-p), so the standard deviation (or Root-Mean-Square) scales as Sqrt(N).

I never really had a plan for a career but I never settled. I borderline almost did at my last job as it paid enough and I loved the people like family but the move from that job landed me in the most interesting and well paying job I've had yet. Luck totally played a part in most of my jumps and the ones I thought were good were often bad and the ones I wasn't interested in ended up being the most interesting.

> would even guess that for the vast majority of successful careers, competency and luck played a much bigger role than being deliberate about it.

I think this is true. I had a while where my career was doing really well constant steps up, I was learning, getting promoted, was working on great projects and problems that were engaging and led to easy promotions. Then I got a new manager and it was downhill. Then I got a new job and the problems are insignificant and there's no room for growth of any kind. If my latest job was earlier in my career my career would be very different.

You don’t know anyone in your life that “talks big game?

Or someone else that “can’t get their stuff together?”

A lot of people never even “move”.

Drift made me think of electron drift under applied voltage or electric field.

This reminds me of a take on art, that goes something like "you don't need talent, but you do need to have taste". Taste is the same kind of driver as direction in this case.

Probably butchered the quote, can't remember who said it, but the message stuck.

Taken out of context, this line seems like a valid description of our ethos these days lol.

That's just a bonus.