Yesterday I read a work reflection on the 1Point3Acres forum, “One Year at Work: Three Things to Talk About.” The author works at Amazon and spent the past year doing a lot of migrations and non-coding work. On the whole their mindset is positive, and they took away many meaningful lessons. The comments underneath are interesting, though. Most people felt the manager had strung the author along with big promises to keep them settled, and advised the author to think about their own goals: an engineer still needs hard skills, coding work should be on impactful projects, you should raise your value inside the company, and ideally find good projects or switch teams, and so on.
Reading that post also reminded me of another article, The Role of Luck in Life Success Is Far Greater Than We Realized, about how luck influences success in life far more than we imagine. Lately I have also been thinking often about how to improve professionally, and how to do my work at the standard of the next level so I can earn a promotion. But at the same time, I feel that good luck matters too. Part of it is decided by fate and cannot be changed, but another part of luck comes from a person’s values and choices. In other words, some choices can make a person feel very lucky in hindsight. A simple example: back when Yahoo was at its peak, an engineer who left Yahoo to join Google, or later Facebook, made what now looks like a wise and lucky decision. A simple example in the opposite direction is drunk driving, which is, by the odds, always a choice that invites bad luck.
In the post I wrote two posts back, 2018 Updates and 3 Book Recommendations, I quoted a line from my notes on a book about the road to financial freedom:
Everyone else stares at money. I have decided that ability matters more. Stare at your own ability, stare at your own growth. That is the true master key.
But growth runs into bottlenecks. At certain moments, in certain environments, growth may have its limits. For example, engineers who work on Amazon’s website in the US face the extreme traffic challenges of Black Friday, and the experience they gain is orders of magnitude beyond that of engineers at a small local website.
Zhu Yun’s blog, Tick Tock Tick Tock, has a post, When We Say Our Growth Has Hit a Bottleneck, What Have We Actually Hit?, with some observations on the challenge of growth:
On the road of growth, the information, opportunities, and experiences from the outside world that can benefit you grow harder to obtain as your own accumulation increases. How to stay as open and receptive as possible, and become more sensitive to every signal that can still improve you, is a problem we will all face. Balance an “absolutely good” mindset against your own opportunity and time costs. Think actively, examine your habitual thinking, and break free of the stubborn mindset that stalls your growth, and you will keep improving.
These articles have helped me think, and helped me examine my own situation. Of course, I also know that life’s road is made of multiple-choice questions, not true-or-false ones. The same choice, at a different time and for a different person, can lead to completely different results. Five years ago I gave up environmental science and started writing code. Three years ago I quit my job, moved to California, and started over from zero. Looking back, judged by the results, those were hard choices, but they turned out to be the better ones for my life today.
My title is “Mindset, Growth, Luck, and Choices.” I hope I keep a healthy, positive mindset, keep making choices that are good for my own growth, keep an open mind, stay willing to learn and to start again from zero, and that luck will also help me because of my choices.
If it were you, would you stay on your team for a year doing work that is not purely technical, like the author of that forum post? Or how do you weigh the different sides of choices and growth? Comments are welcome.
This post was originally published on my former blog, 「半路出家軟體工程師在矽谷」, on May 24, 2018. The blog is now offline, and the full text is preserved by the Wayback Machine. It has been lightly edited for this site.
