From the preface to Andy Grove‘s (recommended) Only the Paranoid Survive:
“The sad news is, nobody owes you a career. Your career is literally your business. You own it as a sole proprietor. You have one employee: yourself. You are in competition with millions of similar businesses: millions of other employees all over the world. You need to accept ownership of your career, your skills and the timing of your moves. It is your responsibility to protect this personal business of yours from harm and to position it to benefit from changes in the environment. Nobody else can do that for you.”
Excellent. My only question: Should that be sad news or empowering news?
It is also interesting the Grove does not seem to support true free market capitalism. This is a secondary quote:
“Our fundamental economic beliefs, which we have elevated from a conviction based on observation to an unquestioned truism, is that the free market is the best of all economic systems—the freer the better. Our generation has seen the decisive victory of free-market principles over planned economies. So we stick with this belief largely oblivious to emerging evidence that while free markets beat planned economies, there may be room for a modification that is even better.” from http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204630904577056490023451980.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read#articleTabs%3Darticle
As much as I respect Grove as a businessman, I wonder sometimes about his philosophical convictions.
A career is a long range planned out set of events, the variation caused by monetary policy is making long range planning very difficult . To illustrate this advice would not apply to the 18 year old son of a Chinese rice farmer that is in lock down. And on the other end of the spectrum I barely see how it applies to a lawyer operating in today’s world.
There is a time for strategic retreat and maybe one retreats into the education for a career at a better time in the future (while trying to keep up with rent increases, food price increases, massive variation in employment hours and conditions, very high levels of frustration among pretty much everyone, very high levels of uncertainty caused by malinvestment, ridiculously priced education system that offers little value)
We have ~20,000,000 government employees to support making somewhere around 100,000 a year. We have to bare the burden of military support and economic aid for many many countries. And that is not enough, they want lots more and that will be accomplished with more shenanigans. How does one do long range planning in the face of that burden? Many people are answering with quiet quitting and lying flat.
So all in all its sad. Andy’s advice is a relic from a time where he was riding a very nice wave. Even if it is true it is not primary right now.