What to do when your career crumbles before your eyes
‘Find Your Passion’ Is Awful Advice
A major new study questions the common wisdom about how we should choose our careers.
Chasing life goals is a recipe for disaster – so try these tiny experiments instead
Whether its our careers, health or relationships, we often set the bar too high and end up feeling disappointed when it doesn’t work out. Try this new way of thinking … and you may just see some real results
20 years in, a "professional" rollout, and only 2k streams. This was my last hurrah and I’m feeling defeated.
325 votes, 326 comments. I’m struggling to process a massive disconnect and need some perspective from other career artists. I’ve been in the…
No One Dies in this Dystopia
I am all done with grading for the semester just past, but the work sticks to me in a way I can’t yet manage to fling off.
Opinion | The Age of Interdisciplinary Slop
The corporate jargon of change masks the decimation of intellectual life.
How contemporary academic structures constrain scientific creativity and hold back early-career researchers
We argue that contemporary scientific systems progressively constrain high-risk and conceptually innovative research while being increasingly structured around short funding cycles, productivity-based evaluation criteria and risk-averse frameworks that favour predictable and non-transformative research outputs. Drawing on recent empirical literature, we show how such systems can place disproportionate pressure on early-career researchers by incentivizing safe, tractable and easily evaluated outputs. Structural academic mechanisms such as peer review and funding, escalating publication costs and institutional inequalities interact with precarious employment and hierarchical dependencies. In this environment, we contend that strategic conformity becomes a rational career path. This risks suppressing creativity and critical thinking precisely at the stage when scientific independence could otherwise emerge. Consequently, the probability of substantive contributions by early-career researchers is declining, while talent may increasingly abandon academia or cluster within a limited number of well-resourced institutions and national systems. By adopting a systems-level perspective, we argue that scientific creativity is not merely an individual trait but an emerging property of a supportive academic landscape and that maintaining or restoring it may require substantial structural reforms. These include promoting stable research pathways, decentralized decision-making and evaluation frameworks that better recognize collaboration, originality, persistence and nonlinear career trajectories. Without systemic change, we risk stifling the potential of early-career researchers to go beyond the confines of existing methods and approaches and deliver transformative advances. This would limit their capacity to meaningfully change our understanding of the world or benefit society, with impacts that fall short of their potential.
Engineering Career Paths at Big Tech and High-Growth Startups
Levels at big tech, the most common career paths, and what comes after making it to Staff
The Death of Software Development
The job of software developer is dead. You might still be coding, but the profession as you knew it is gone.
Read the docs like a book - Aaron Francis
Reading the docs straight through, like a book, can provide outsized benefits for your career.
I'm addicted to being useful
When I get together with my friends in the industry, I feel a little guilty about how much I love my job. This is a tough time to be a software engineer. The job was less stressful in the late 2010s than it is now, and I sympathize with anyone who is upset about the change. There are a lot of objective reasons to feel bad about work. But despite all that, I’m still having a blast. I enjoy pulling together projects, figuring out difficult bugs, and writing code in general. I like spending time with computers. But what I really love is being useful.
the role of the university
i am over halfway through my degree at cambridge, and i am a little underwhelmed
Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice | Kalzumeus Software
I got into tech six years ago because I figured I could have an outsized impact on making a less harmful, more empowering world for workers and marginalised people. Only this year, I started connecting IRL with people who think this way. Here I tried to write about the ways that's transformed me.
DWeb, Culture and Resistance
meri.garden