You’ve just met a starry-eyed youngster getting his or her start in whatever your profession/area of specialty happens to be and they’re actively soliciting your advice. If you could distill all your years of toil into just three short chunks of wisdom no longer than a couple of sentences each, what would you tell them?
(*Please remember to share what it is you actually do if it’s not immediately obvious, unless you’re SDMB-famous for your career like Bricker or QtM)
Architect
Don’t specialize. Being a generalist will serve you better then being a specialist. In general being well rounded will help you through the ups and downs of your career. Being just a technical architect you won’t be employed when there is only design work, and vice-versa. If you are solid in all phases you will become the go-to person, strive to be that go-to person. It will serve you well.
If you are really good, like top 1% then disregard rule #1. Top 1% of architects will always have work. You aren’t in the top 1% so you better plan accordingly. I know your ego tells you that you are the best designer the world has ever seen and that you are in that top 1% but you aren’t. Your ego is a liar and a fool, if you listen to it, 10 years from now you will regret it.
Save for your retirement. The more you can save the earlier you can retire. When I say save, I don’t mean $100 a year, I mean 15% of your annual salary in a 401k. Don’t give me the bullshit you can’t do it, just do it. You will thank me later. This is advice I will give anyone regardless of their profession. The younger you start the better off you will be later in life. Save for your retirement–now!
That is my advice to all the young interns that work for me.
International Development:
Forget development. Get an MBA instead, go start a business or otherwise invest in a developing country, and watch yourself do waaaaaay more good than you could have imagined.
Barring that, join Peace Corps as soon as you are out of college. It’s the easiest way to get that essential field experience that will help you get further jobs abroad. And besides, everyone else in the field has done Peace Corps. You don’t want to be that one who didn’t.
Learn French.
I’m a transactional lawyer at a larger firm.
Everyone knows that you don’t know anything, so don’t be nervous about that or try to hide it. We know. And we deal with you on that basis.
Don’t be afraid to be wrong. Giving bad advice is rarely fatal and can almost always be corrected.
When someone asks you to research something (or, later, for your advice about something), don’t be afraid to slow them down and get all the facts presented to you until you are satisfied you don’t need any more.
Lawyer, with aspirations towards public interest practice:
1.) Learn Spanish. Start freshman year of college. Yes, I know most people will say it doesn’t matter what you do in college if you’re planning on law school, so long as you do well at it. This is one of the big exceptions. If you want to work with any sort of indigent clients - immigration, criminal law, other non-profit work - Spanish will be invaluable.
2.) Don’t go straight into law school from college. Yes, I know your political science degree didn’t give you actual job skills. And the job market is crap. I promise, it’ll still be crap when you graduate law school. Go do something in the real world - the law is all about how the real world works, so consider this part of your legal education. And who knows? You may find a career you love that doesn’t require three years of your life in school and six-figure debt.
3.) Unless you know you want to work elsewhere, and have a job offer lined up, there are only two bar exams worth taking: New York and California. Take one of those for your first exam. (And possibly New Jersey along with New York.) Yes, these bar exams have a reputation for being difficult. Every bar exam is difficult - if you’re going to do this difficult thing, you might as well get the greatest possible payoff for it, by getting into the biggest legal market you can.
Former Lawyer (Federal/Transactional):
Learn a second language, especially Chinese or Spanish.
Get an undergraduate degree in something mathey/quanty combined with your qualitative major-it gives you more options to take your law degree and get a job in finance and you won’t have to pay for your third quant degree after you realise you’re sick of being a lawyer.
If you have ANY interest in working in the private sector, do not get a federal job right out of law school, or leave ASAP after your clerkship appointment finishes. Except for a few agencies like the DOJ, federal work = lazy asshole to the private sector…even if your full-time federal job was working with BigLaw doing transactions with Goldman Sachs. I’m speaking from 5 years of experience here.
MBA-ish:
Having a leg up on written communication gives you a huge advantage in business school.
If you’re a career switcher, know what you’re going to recruit for before you go get your MBA. Recruiting blackout will be over before you know it.
Go to all the parties and be nice to everyone. You aren’t paying to learn how to do a WACC analysis, you’re paying for a network, which means you need to show your face around school. At the same time, remember that if you know nothing going into your internship, 2nd year is going to be a pain. It’s all about balance…pick a couple of extra-curriculars (I’m on the board for a business conference and feel it’s more than enough responsibility!) and go out to the big parties and you should be all good.
Elementary School Teacher:
In general, I’m a stagehand and I have 3 basic rules for anyone who wants to make a living (or even a career) in the field:
Show up on time. We work at all hours of the day and night, in many different locations. There are thousands, or even millions, of dollars riding on getting whatever tasks we are set done by a certain time, and people are counting on you to be there to help with the work. Don’t let them down by being late, ever.
Show up sober. Pretty much the same reasons as #1, but also because it’s way too easy to get hurt or killed in my line of work. No one wants a drunk forklift driver or a rigger high on meth or an electrician who just ate a bunch of shrooms. Save that shit for your own time.
Ask what you can do. If you don’t know how to do anything, we’ll teach you how to do something. If you have no tools, someone will loan you what you need to get by. Being aggressively willing and able to help out is worth a lot, and people will notice and encourage a good attitude and want you around more than they want the guy who’s slacking, even if he’s been in the biz for years.
Anyone who can do those 3 things consistently and who is able to learn can make a living as a stagehand. It’s not an easy life (I swear stagehands overall have the highest divorce rate I’ve ever even heard of, for instance), but for those of us who enjoy it, it can be vastly rewarding. For instance, kraft services has cookies!
Project Manager for an IT firm:
Learn MS Project backwards: it’s a horrible piece of software, but it’s the one 99% of firms use, and knowing its quirks (and how to avoid them) will make life easier.
You don’t need to be an expert in a field to manage a project: you need to be able to ask the right questions and insist on the right type of answers (i.e. make 'em give you specifics)
Managing your managers is as important as managing your delivery teams: if senior management expectations change, doesn’t matter how well your project went you’ll still get a kicking.
hijack. I feel disappointed by Wallenstein’s post. What, no details on planning a Catholic mercenary army rampage through Central Europe? 
programmer:
be obsessive about note taking. Sometimes your job is more about taking enough notes to figure things out than about writing a bit of kid to fix the issue you have figured out. So take the notes. Don’t chase after split screen code editors and other BS invented by uber-overengineering types because just pasting disparate bits of code and text into a Notepad file and then looking at it is enough, more often than not. Remember - human mind cannot analyze, or even remember, a bunch of items at once, but it sure can analyze 3 paragraphs of notes. So write those paragraphs, and then the straightforward implementation plans for elegant, efficient code will proceed effortlessly from there.
logging is key. They wouldn’t always let you write good unit tests, but you have to be logging stuff continually to understand what is happening. Sell your debugger, write some logging code for free. Then write some code to better manage your logs and to keep them from slowing down the edit-compile-test cycle if this becomes a problem. If your legacy codebase doesn’t log squat, consider making automated tools to insert certain sorts of logging code into the source. Err, did I mention logging? Maybe I should write a lyrical drinking song about this…
learn from your codebases, picking out both the good and the bad. What they teach in college is BS, your colleagues are too busy and may be dyslexic, but what you learn from the code of the good programmers, the so-so programmers and the ugh! programmers is the true gospel of the trade. Avoid the temptation to just hack things where they need to be hacked without taking the time (at employer’s dime) to look at the big picture and learn. Employers don’t care about big picture, “10 years of proven experience at jumping from project to project messing things up” people don’t care about the big picture, but you sit up and learn while you have the time and opportunity. Oh, and which skill mentioned in my post will help you learn your codebases better? You guessed it.
Real Estate:
This used to be a vital and thriving industry, but those days are long behind us and not likely to come back within any span of time worth persuing. There’s work and there are jobs, but you will give ten dollars worth of effort for every dollar in compensation that you’ll ever see which is a terrible return on the investment of your time. The job market in the field is also swamped with people who have more experiance than you do and so even getting your foot in the door is supremely difficult when you have middle aged folks willing to work for college kid level money.
Environment (in both oil and gas, and aggregates)
Be prepared to work with a small budget unless the project you are working on is reactionary and a big deal (i.e. the spill has already happened and it’s in the water), or you are a consultant.
Having a degree in some sort of science is worth more then having a generalist degree.
Work at staying positive. You will have a lot of people that don’t want to do what is right (usually because it costs too much money) at all levels in the organization you are working for. If you are attracted to this field of study because you have a moral and ethical interest in it, prepare yourself for disappointment, because you’re one of very few.
To succeed at any profession:
Never, under any circumstances, send an email from your business computer that contains anything unprofessional, even to someone who you consider a friend.
Whenever possible, pick up the phone or meet with somebody rather than communicating electronically, particularly in response to hostile emails/letters. If you must answer by email, wait a day before hitting the “send” button.
Senior Product Manager for a company dealing with government entitlement programs:
Keep your mouth shut, eyes open and work. Yes, you should be approachable and friendly, but never, ever start off a job as a gossip. And be one of the people who actually gets things done, even if it’s gruntwork.
Contrary to your belief, having letters behind your name does not equal credibility. Most people you’ll start working with have been in the workforce for at least a decade; though a post-grad degree is nothing to sneeze at, understand that experience teaches you a lot more than what you learn on paper. So, just because you’ve got an MBA or JD or both, don’t treat the admins like they’re dirt. Unless you have a really big job, make your own damn copies, especially if it’s just one sheet of paper. Yes, she’ll mail it for you, but it’ll take you longer to use the task system to “assign” it to her than it will to walk to the copy machine and use it. (Okay, so this could’ve been two points, but still…we have a newbie around here who does this - he’s a young kid with a shiny new MBA.)
Learn a little humility and ask a lot of questions. Acting like you know everything makes you seem arrogant and sets you up for mistakes that could’ve been easily avoided.
Dear new electrical engineer,
Become an effective communicator. You *do not *want to be the engineer that nobody ever notices because he’s working on C code in the corner of the lab. Excellent written and oral communication will get you recognized by managers who don’t really know what you’re doing, even though it may be groundbreaking stuff.
If you were thinking of getting an M.S. in engineering or even PE licensure, reconsider. Make sure it will ACTUALLY help you in your chosen field. Engineering grad degrees and a PE license often prove to be useless. Don’t misunderstand, you may choose a path where those are helpful. Just make sure about it first, otherwise it can be a waste of your time and effort.
Do not commit to having a project or task finished within an unreasonable time. I know you think you can easily get this stuff done in no time at all, but trust me, you probably can’t. And when you exceed your own timeframe, you’ll look bad. I’ve seen multiple kids out of college say, “I can get this finished in a month,” when I know it will take them six.
These are 3 basic rules for Life, not just jobs.
High School Teacher:
(Accept LHoD’s examples as a given)
You don’t need any 16 year old friends. Your students need positive adult role models and adult guidance. Friends they have.
The secretaries and custodians are the Secret Rulers of the School. Respect them, cultivate them, talk to them. They can solve problems Admin can’t be bothered with.
If you have to prove how much smarter you are than your students, you aren’t.
Watch how people treat the people on the lowest rung of the ladder. Nobody has to be nice to the secretaries. They show their true colors.
Learn to say “I made a mistake and I’m sorry.” In today’s world of everything being someone else’s fault, this goes a long way.
Every office has the “Alpha-Dog”: one person who know everything that is going on. Befriend them.
Librarian - higher ed, systems department
Learn everything you possibly can about the technology around you and industry developments. It’s all about e-resources. Ejournals, ebooks, online discovery tools.
Forget about the damn books. We already know how to select and take care of them. It’s second nature to us, after several hundred years. So stop obsessing over them and pay attention to the demands of the online environment.
This is a profession, not a religious calling. When you accept a ridiculously low salary (or worse volunteer at a library that has laid off all its professional librarians!) you’re saying “what we do isn’t worth paying us a decent wage for - our contributions are not valuable.” Cut the crap and demand for a decent salary!
IT Network Manager
Patience. Good gods above and below, you need huge huge huge amounts of patience in this job. Always take a deep breath when talking to people, and remember that their world was just destroyed when that file got deleted. Don’t react to their chaos - its not your fault, breathe deeply, and find out what happened.
Learn How To Say The Same Thing Five Different Ways. The users on the other end aren’t really listening to what you say. Learn to say it five different ways so that it will engage their brain cells at least once.
“Is the computer plugged in?”
“Does the power cord from the computer go to the wall?”
“Does the black power cord going from the back of the computer plug into the powered wall outlet securely?”
“Does the power cable that goes from the wall to your computer look secure?”
“Hey, have you checked the power cable? I know its silly, but I have to ask ::grin grin::”.
Cool! Now your computer works!
I don’t care if you are in IT, and I don’t care about the “paperless office”. Save every damn thing you ever print out and use, because the website you reference today may be gone tomorrow. Print it, then scan it to PDF if you have to. You’ll never know when you’ll have to find the proper jumper sequence for a 4-gig hard drive to run Windows95, and you’ll need IT NOW!