How I think about my career as I turn 40.
Over the years, I’ve written a variety of career advice. The past several years, how I think about my career has shifted a bit, and I wanted to write up some notes on that, as a handful of things occur all around the same time: I turn forty in a few weeks, I started a new job at Imprint a month ago, and my fourth book is deep in the editing process.
Forty-year career framework
Five years ago I wrote A forty-year career, which has two core ideas:
- each role you select as a balance between financial outcomes, learning, the people you work with, the day-to-day pace, and prestige
- over forty years, your career allows you to strike many different balances across these five dimensions
This remains the core framework I use when thinking about my career, and when giving career advice. Some of my earlier roles had a truly unsustainable pace, some taught me an extraordinary amount, and a number of other combinations.
That said, this framework has gotten less helpful to me as my writing network, personal network, and work experience have become more valuable over time. Today, I think could generally achieve any combination of these parameters–although perhaps not slower pace, which remains an elusive target in the sorts of environents I find myself enjoying–so the bigger problem becomes deciding how I want to invest my remaining productive years.
Scarcity of time
As I turn forty, the concept of “remaining years” is premature, but I’ve personally felt pressure from the scarcity of time since I first began working, and continue to feel it to this day although the reasons for the pressure have changed. In the first years of my career, I was fixated by the belief that the industry was in its prime and opportunities might not exist in the future. It was time to plant seeds while the weather was still good.
More recently, as I got closer to half way through my forty year career, I’ve had a series of scares from minor skin cancer surgery last year to the rather less minor stroke four years ago. Combined with the desire to provide for my family and young son, time continues to feel scarce, and the desire to use that time remains a drum.
Introspection through goals
The annual year-in-reviews are a good read as well
Advancing the industry
Something I’ve come to believe increasingly over time is that the technology industry is something that we can ourselves change through intentional efforts.
Writing and publishing less
Sometime later this year, O’Reilly will release Crafting Engineering Strategy, which is my forth book.