from Hacker News

A career decision influenced by Nassim Taleb

by mwsherman on 6/10/18, 2:19 PM with 53 comments

• by rossdavidh on 6/10/18, 6:22 PM

  While I agree he made the right decision, and I also agree that Taleb has interesting things to say that bear on career choices, I don't think he needed Taleb's ideas on risk to make this choice. In programming, becoming obsolete is not a risk, it is guaranteed. This is just short term pain vs. long term pain. Which is also a difficult decision, but not one you need to have read "Fooled By Randomness" or "Black Swan" to understand.

  Losing your job (eventually) if you become obsolete isn't tail risk, it's the most likely scenario. And losing your job right when everybody else is losing their job is also not tail risk, it's the most likely scenario. So, if you're not learning anything new, you aren't at risk from a black swan, you're doomed.

  If anything, it relates more to the idea of "Antifragility"; many small shocks strengthen you. The small shock of learning a new technology (and feeling underproductive while you're on the steep side of the learning curve) is the small shock that makes you stronger. Don't let yourself avoid those small shocks for too long.

• by niklasd on 6/10/18, 4:55 PM

  A concise abstract of Talebs last book can be found here https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/25/skin-in-the-ga...

  Besides the problems I have with Taleb I'm happy that the OP had the courage to quit his job and that it worked out. Courage is a good charater trait, and in this case it got rewarded.

• by trentmb on 6/10/18, 3:23 PM

  I feel like im in the authors worst case scenario, as a PHP dev coming up on three years experience, im having a hard time even getting interviews at java/.net shops.

  I've lost track of the times ive heard "you have a math degree? Not CS?"

• by pwaai on 6/10/18, 7:10 PM

  After reading Fooled by Randomness, I tried to replicate Nassim Taleb's strategy of buying far OTM options in anticipation of a particular stock being outed as a fraud.

  I made a killing when a certain blockchain company traded on NASDAQ was investigated by the SEC and soon faced delisting.

  With those winnings, I went all in-purchasing near expiry far far far OTM put options, expecting imminent OTCBB quotes.

  It took 2 months for it to happen and my put options expired worthless.

  So what I learned is that I suck at trading and I should not gamble.

• by archlight on 6/11/18, 4:06 PM

  I am in this situation where I really hope I could apply some risk framework to help me make decision.

  I recently signed an offer with a company, US bank with large python community. Now I am counter offered with more pay and promotion and internal transfer to a new team. Conventional wisdom is never accept counter offer. but this one I am giving second thought as it is not for original role but transferred to new team. I will be only one in my location and I will be building MVP for business users. it will be exposed to a lot of tech stack but it won't be scale as large as new company.

  However to join a new company, there is always uncertainties like team and project. I had bad experience before. It is difficult to find it out through interview only. It seems to confirm this as I find that hiring process is a bit not taken seriously. It is greenfield project but no coding tests. There is no front end expertise in the team so I was only got asked things like "you worked with angularjs right?". Hiring manager is recruiting three altogether which he thinks will be good team.

  risk is about managing uncertainties. I hope decision like this can be priced so it is easier to decide.

• by anonu on 6/10/18, 4:23 PM

  I don't know if I can really agree with the risk classifications the author makes in relation to his career.

  I would simply sum what the author is trying to say in one word "Complacency". Having a decent well-paying job can blind you to whether you're on a good career path.

  A good career path is one where you are challenging yourself, you learn something new everyday and you position yourself to take on new projects or new leadership roles (if that's your thing).

• by paultopia on 6/10/18, 6:15 PM

  The idea of latent risk is interesting, but it doesn't seem like the interesting part of a latent risk is it's riskiness. It's true that smoking a cigarette a day accumulates your risk of dying early, but the important part is the accumulation. We can see that if we replace smoking cigarettes with eating donuts, and replace dying early with suffering from obesity. Then we've got exactly the same phenomenon---a bunch of small decisions that are rational taken singly, but disastrous when put together. But there's nothing risky about it---if you eat 5 donuts a day and leave everything else about your life equal, you will become obese with probability 1.

  We don't have a really great theory of this kind of boil-the-frog-by-inches phenomenon yet (unless Jon Elster has buried one somewhere in one of his many books, which wouldn't surprise me... and honestly it wouldn't surprise me if Elster anticipated a lot of Taleb somewhere, he's done so so much work on rationality over time), but latent risk probably isn't it.

• by cryptozeus on 6/10/18, 3:33 PM

  Good article but didn't summarize properly at the end.

• by ak39 on 6/10/18, 3:08 PM

  Nice read but the use of latent risk to explain his choices (both in tech stack and career) could just as easily (if not more appropriately) be explained through opportunity costs and trade offs.