How to find good opportunities

In my current role, I often mentor people who ask, “How do you find good opportunities?”—whether that means cool technologies, great projects, speaking at conferences, joining exciting companies, or meeting interesting people. Is it all luck? Mostly, yes. Reflecting on my career and life, the defining moments that had the biggest impact were pure luck.

A Few Examples

When I finished school in Rome, Italy, my mother gave me a copy of DER SPIEGEL magazine, which ranked German universities. The takeaway was that smaller universities were better for meeting professors and securing lab seats. I applied to the smallest ones and was accepted by Clausthal Technical University. This became the start of a very happy and formative period of my life. Who knows where I’d be if my mom hadn’t brought home that magazine—or if another university had responded first?

During my studies, I worked at the university’s compute center. One day in the mid-90s, my boss (the head of the compute center) asked me to explore this “World-Wide-Web” thing he’d heard about. That’s how I became the campus webmaster, attended the 3rd International WWW Conference at the Fraunhofer Institute in Darmstadt, and experimented with web servers like CERN HTTPD, Spinner, and Apache. I also tried new browsers weekly—Mosaic, Athena, Netscape (the ancestor of Firefox). Google didn’t exist yet; we used AltaVista and Yahoo!.

A sysadmin from the mineralogy institute, whom I’d helped set up their first web server, later joined Sun Microsystems in Germany. He emailed me about a student job Sun was offering in partnership with a German public broadcasting agency. I took it because Sun was my “hero company”—I’d used their workstations daily (a brilliant hiring pipeline strategy: discount educational customers to cultivate future employees). That’s how I ended up running the ARD.de web server on a Sun Ultra 1 in Sun’s Hamburg demo room. I wrote my diploma thesis on bringing web technology to TV set-top boxes and eventually joined Sun full-time.

Life is a Game of Pachinko

These are just a few early examples. You can see how much randomness shapes where you move, what technologies you specialize in, or which careers you pursue. For me, the rest is history: Sun’s focus evolved from workstations to servers, microprocessors, Solaris, ZFS, the cloud, and now AWS. Along the way, I met great people, played with cool tech, attended inspiring events, and watched IT history unfold. Life is shaped by random events—like a Pachinko ball bouncing unpredictably. Adrian Cockcroft (whom I first met at Sun and later at eBay, Netflix, and AWS) described similar “Pachinko moments” in his blog: What Adrian Did Next — Part 2 — Sun Microsystems.

Luck with a Side of Decision-Making

Looking back, a few patterns emerge:

• It’s always your decision. Unlike a Pachinko ball, you choose whether to pursue an opportunity. My strategy was simple: follow what interested me most.
• Decisions can be influenced by random events. At the 3rd WWW Conference, I visited the SGI booth, where they demoed early VRML (the “Metaverse” of 1995). I asked about an internship, but an employee dismissed me. Nearby, another booth showed a browser plugin that ran code across any OS—Java. The team was enthusiastic and approachable, which steered me toward Sun instead of SGI.
• How do you decide? “Follow your passion,” “trust your gut,” or make a pro/con list (à la Benjamin Franklin). I found that instincts work well—your subconscious aggregates experiences, fears, and ambitions into surprisingly good advice. Derek Sivers’ rule: Hell yeah or no.
• Missed opportunities are okay. There’s no FOMO. For every opportunity you skip, others will arise. Keep your eyes open for the next “hell yeah!” moment.

Gaming Your Luck at the Pachinko Table

While luck plays a big role, you can improve your odds:

• Keep your options open. Maintain an “opportunity buffer” of time, money, and resources to seize unexpected chances. Without spare capacity, you can’t invest in new skills, projects, or career moves.
• Increase your area of exposure. The more people you meet, conferences you attend, or technologies you try, the higher the chance of stumbling upon a great opportunity. Ways to expose yourself:
  • Try new hobbies, technologies, or activities.
  • Attend meetups, conferences, or forums.
  • Write blogs, host podcasts, or give talks.
  • Move to new cities, teams, or companies.
  • Start projects.

Turning Your Life into a Game of Pinball

By staying open to opportunities, keeping reserves to act, and choosing “hell yeah!” moments, you nudge your path toward serendipity. Life may feel random, but you can tilt the odds—like a pinball player guiding the ball toward the jackpot. As Tim Bray advised: branch out, contribute, network. In uncertain times, keep your reserves ready, your exposure wide, and watch for your next “hell yeah!” moment.

What were your favorite Pachinko moments? How did you find opportunities in your career or life? How did you turn your path into a game of Pinball?