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PAK's avatar

This is all wonderful stuff. Especially your points about HR (I'm a 42 year old dude who has literally never worked for a company with a competent HR staff) and running the race you want to win.

The first piece of advice I have for young people is kind of a corollary to that second point, something I had to learn hard for myself a couple times before getting my career on track:

Sometimes it's the job that's bad.

It's not you. It's not your chosen career. It's where you've chosen to work. And while that sucks, it is correctable. It's easier to move sideways into a better job in your current career path than the blow it all up and start from scratch, so if you find yourself thinking very early in your career that you've made a horrible mistake and you need to get out, it can often* be a lot better idea for you to give it one more shot with a different employer in a slightly different position and see how the change of scenery suits you. Misguided career counselors may warn against job-hopping, but employers don't care unless it's, like, 3 jobs in a year with no plausible explanation.

The second piece of advice I have is to avoid job situations where people's passion for the trappings of the job blind them to the realities of the job. Video games (especially AAA studios). Sports-adjacent industries (*cough* blogging nation of the sporting kind *cough*). Any industry where there's a wave of naïve kids in their early 20s graduating every year that the industry can chew up and spit out. Companies will absolutely take advantage of the demand for their jobs and use it as leverage to keep down your compensation and use it as an excuse to ignore bad working conditions.

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Pete Gaines's avatar

As you know, I spent part of the past week hanging out with my dad. At 69 years old, he's finally starting to look towards a future that doesn't include all-consuming work. He's quietly left most of the many boards and nonprofits he's been involved with, no longer attends industry conferences, and has receded into the background of his company (spending most of his time now working to sell it, actually, but shhhhh).

So this week, it was interesting to catch him in a much more relaxed and introspective mood than I'm used to seeing from him. Over dinner my last night in FL, I started to ask him about his career and how he went from being a CPA to an expert on dementia care over the past 30+ years. I watched it happen in real time, of course, but he was too busy and scarce to really give me any context at the time and I was far too young to understand anyways.

Talking about his greatest successes, prides and also failures, I more-or-less tactfully asked him why he was so driven by his work all these years at the expense of his family, his marriage, watching his kids grow up, and any of the other many things that have hurt and angered me over the years (we have a wonderful relationship now but it's taken my entire adult life to get to that point). And you know what the answer was? He wanted his face on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. THAT would mean that he made it. THAT was his measure of a good career. He kinda ruefully snorted as he said it because now, finally, he realizes how ridiculous it sounds. He never made it, either. He *almost* made it, supposedly, but his crosstown business rival made it and he never did.

This is going to probably haunt me for the rest of my life. I feel bad for him that he never quite made it, despite all his many business successes. But mostly I feel sorry for him, that he was so blinded by this for so long that I don't think he'll ever really understand how much of life he missed out on. Even now as someone who's made massive strides towards being a good dad, friend, and grandpa, he'll never know how much he missed while chasing that weird, singular metric.

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