What Still Matters

A carp rarely becomes a dragon.

In Vietnam, people call the final high-school exam vượt vũ môn, after the old image of a carp that clears the Dragon Gate and turns into a dragon. For many families, it carries the hope that a child will do well at school, find a good profession and live better than the parents did. Behind the exam are years of the whole family pulling together. Parents make sure the child can study as far as they're able, and the child studies in the belief that those years will open the way to a better life.

But that isn't the hardest test. A bad result can be mended: sit the exam again, choose another school, or take another route. The bigger test may come later, with the first paid job. By then, a young person has to turn what they've learned into work someone is willing to pay for. The degree is in hand, but the distance from finishing school to being able to do the job can still be long.

At school, there's a curriculum, an exam and a score that tells you whether you've met the bar. Looking for work, it's hard to know how much you're still missing. Applications go unanswered, interviews end in rejection, and some people take course after course without knowing whether it's enough yet to be hired. To get experience you need a job, and the jobs want people who already have experience.

I often come across questions like: how do you get a job with no experience, and how do you learn fast enough to start working without spending much? Some people know a trade takes years to learn, but it's already time to earn a living. Their family has supported them for a long stretch and has its own bills to pay. Every month without work is another month leaning on home. Whether to keep studying becomes a sum of the money left and how long the family can still wait.

Even with a job, people can still be stuck. The daily work gets done and the salary comes in, but a few years on they can't see how much they've grown. Moving needs the experience the new place asks for; staying means the same work over and over. Some start to wonder what their working years have actually given them. Meanwhile their responsibilities to their family grow, and starting over costs more than it used to.

Worry about AI makes the future harder still to picture. Students wonder whether what they're learning will still earn them a living when they graduate. People with years in the trade wonder how much their experience will still be worth. Someone may be willing to keep learning and still not know what to spend the next few years on, when the work they're aiming for is changing too.

Questions like these take time to answer. The rent, the food and what the family needs still come due.

I don't have many answers. What I can do is tell my own stories, the times I struggled with some of these same things, and hope you find something useful in them.

The familiar answer is to do good work: put in the time and the effort, work harder. That answer is right, and the whole book stands on it, but it's only half. In twelve years in software, I've worked with a lot of people who did good work. Some were seen for it and handed bigger work. Others were just as good and stood still year after year. The book is about the other half.