After seeing your comment here yesterday, I started reading your book Initiative.
I am in the middle of the first exercise and have some questions.
Many of the examples in your book show people connecting these separate ideas that are reasonably understandable and applicable to the general population--the girl who recognized that many people have a fear of needles and sought to design a medical to device to help, or the student who liked going to festivals and thought about aligning attendee interests with the festivals' interests and waive attendance fees for attendees by having them volunteer at charities. It sounds like students in your class came up with relatable ideas by looking at problems in their lives that they noticed.
Right now, I'm merely a year into my career as a software engineer (having switched careers last year) and I am very interested in learning about good software engineering practices. I like seeing great CI/CD pipelines and being able to deliver very quickly. I like the sound of good DevOps practices (currently reading slowly through Accelerate by Forsgren) and I so far have really enjoyed reading books on scalability and reliability (Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Kleppmann is frequently recommended and I got a lot out of the book). I'm vaguely interested in MLOps.
I'm pretty happy being more of a cog in a machine right now so that I can see how an established company runs from the inside. I don't know that I'm immediately interested in a project that is more generalizable, the way your book examples are. But it does seem like an entrepreneurial mindset is still core to career progression since in the end a job is also about solving people's problems (where people may be inside or outside of the company). Thus I want to figure out how to use Initiative to iteratively improve my career.
I am wondering if people found success applying your Method Initiative concepts to a narrower scope in a specific technical field, and whether you could share some of those stories.
Andreas is a later example (p.77) who started from a strong software background. You'll see that he went in a different direction for a while, developed skills doing things outside software, and applied those skills when he returned to software, now contributing to strategy where he works. Jonathan (p. 10), whose project landed him in Y Combinator, began with a narrow legal issue of a specific chapter of bankruptcy.
The first time you do the exercises, you mostly develop skills. Sometimes a project of a lifetime emerges the first time, but more often, those skills lead you to see opportunity where you didn't before because your expectation of success increases. The next time you do it, or if you switch projects, I predict you'll say the technical aspect set the direction of your project but that you could do what you're doing in any field you wanted to.
Few people had identified problems before starting the exercises. A few did, but most of the problems they found came from the exercises. Even then, the first problems they identified, and likely yours, were only seeds for the next exercises, which refine them.
What you wrote above looks like the foundation of what would go in your first exercise. That exercise gives direction. The later exercises will have you move in that direction. They will lead you to find and solve problems and create working relationships with people in your areas of interest.
For one single data point, I currently live in Southern California, am paid just barely six figures, and receive overtime at 1.5x pay. I believe all of my coworkers who are software engineers also receive overtime (there are about 50 of us at this company).
Peazip is great. I love that there's a portable version--it has come in handy before when I didn't have installation permissions. At the time (not sure if it's still the case now), WinRAR or 7zip didn't seem to have portable versions listed on their homepages and the other sites proclaiming that there are looked shady.
At my current company, it seems like about half the folks here are from bootcamps (generally career switchers). On my team specifically, out of 6 developers 4 are bootcampers, including me. My company is currently hiring more software engineers, and it seems like every other candidate interviewed is a bootcamper, and they vary in skill. The folks I work with are all very enjoyable to work with, so I think the interview process seems to work in our case to bring in excellent people regardless of the presence of a CS degree.
Speaking personally, I am continuing to self-study CS topics by taking online courses and going to universities' class websites and doing their assignments if they put them online. This won't compare to actually having been in that class environment with peers and mentors and grading feedback, so I have to maintain my learning to discover and fill in the gaps I have in my knowledge. I think if you're able to find two people who are equivalently good at communication and soft skills and one has a CS degree and the other is a bootcamper, generally speaking I'd expect the CS degree holder to have superior technical skills.
I wanted to chime in that I found that link helpful! I'd wondered why I didn't relate with spoon theory in the past. Spoon theory seems to apply for me only when I'm near capacity and don't have much slack (in the vein of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLLkWMDbC9ZNKbjDG/slack). In those cases, I definitely notice that I will crave downtime, especially if I've had a lot of social activities. If I'm below 75% capacity, I think the momentum model best describes my situation. So if I could spend a couple more hours studying a new concept, working on a side project, or even just chores and life maintenance, it doesn't use up any of my spoons--I just have to put some effort in and collect the momentum to do more.
I am in the middle of the first exercise and have some questions.
Many of the examples in your book show people connecting these separate ideas that are reasonably understandable and applicable to the general population--the girl who recognized that many people have a fear of needles and sought to design a medical to device to help, or the student who liked going to festivals and thought about aligning attendee interests with the festivals' interests and waive attendance fees for attendees by having them volunteer at charities. It sounds like students in your class came up with relatable ideas by looking at problems in their lives that they noticed.
Right now, I'm merely a year into my career as a software engineer (having switched careers last year) and I am very interested in learning about good software engineering practices. I like seeing great CI/CD pipelines and being able to deliver very quickly. I like the sound of good DevOps practices (currently reading slowly through Accelerate by Forsgren) and I so far have really enjoyed reading books on scalability and reliability (Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Kleppmann is frequently recommended and I got a lot out of the book). I'm vaguely interested in MLOps.
I'm pretty happy being more of a cog in a machine right now so that I can see how an established company runs from the inside. I don't know that I'm immediately interested in a project that is more generalizable, the way your book examples are. But it does seem like an entrepreneurial mindset is still core to career progression since in the end a job is also about solving people's problems (where people may be inside or outside of the company). Thus I want to figure out how to use Initiative to iteratively improve my career.
I am wondering if people found success applying your Method Initiative concepts to a narrower scope in a specific technical field, and whether you could share some of those stories.