The following was advice an accomplished PhD wrote to me discouraging me from co-founding Pretty Litter which would eventually become a billion dollar (sold to Mars) CPG business:
“here is some free consulting advice: you need to think very carefully through the economics and competitive environment of the cat litter business. At the end of the day there needs to be a real business, not just an exercise in PR and crowdfunding, and the risk-reward in cat litter is not at all appealing.
Cat litter is a commodity product, and there are huge brands that know how to manufacture, distribute, advertise, and market it at massive scale. There are already other color-changing cat litter products. Your team has zero expertise, IP, or competitive advantages in manufacturing, chemistry, consumer products, animal health, diagnostics, or distribution. Cat litter is not an industry that needs disruption.”
While there is some truth to this depending on the context, for the most part, especially in software engineering world, you don't know everything. Don't be afraid to say if you need to research something or do POC or investigation. No one will be mad at you and if they are, you don't need to be working with that person. I spent many nights frantically trying to figure out things, to make it seemed like I was up to par, when I should have been more chill about it.
- Do what you love, and the money will follow.
My parents, my high school guidance, society, everyone told me this thing in 2002. Many of my friends went into music education and I can say only one or two got a job in this field. Then 2008 hit. This view, it is the survivors bias, what you should do instead is what will make you money, then figure out how to use that skill to do or add to what you love.
Ironically, both of these platitudes have been crucial to my own success. But I think they probably only work for certain types of people, so I don't disagree with you.
My personal approach with "fake it until you make it" has been to decide I am a $thing (one example: an "ultramarathon runner"). OK, now what do I do as a $thing? I do x, y and z. Then, I do those things, because I am a $thing. Ultimately, I trick myself into becoming the $thing.
This all occurs inside my head. I've never discussed or mentioned it to anyone. I've done it time and time again for career decisions and for personal hobbies. I don't believe it's very ego-driven. In my head, I crucify myself for hypocrisy and not admitting faults.
With "Do what you love, and the money will follow", well, like many of you here, that was computers. And like with many of you, the money followed.
If a young person says they want to make a living as a influencer/youtuber/writer/streamer/musician I would tell them to strongly reconsider unless they have a reason of substance besides pure ego to think they can beat the odds. When someone has the foundations to be one of those things it’s usually obvious. There have been people I’ve met in life who I thought “I’m not sure how but this person will be famous”. There many people who just don’t know how to judge their own skills and usually they just need to be pointed to the right place for information.
Tragically, many of the jobs that people dream of and grind for have secret underbellies that young dreamers don’t understand. For example, Hollywood is a vipers nest where films get made. The music industry had its own Weinstein/Epstein combo recently with Diddy. Politics is the same. The most direct path to success in these fields is being willing to sell your soul and body to powerful evil people. So to be successful in those fields with your dignity intact requires a very rare constitution.
There is a lot of bad advice I’ve received over the years:
- you don’t need to go to a good university, this one (low tier uni in my country) is fine.
- don’t fight bullies back.
But the worst is not receiving bad advice, but receiving no advice at all, and staying in a dead-end job and city for too many years. Having no emotional support early in life leaves yourself “damaged” and gives you a cynical view of the world.
quit that dead end job | end that toxic relationship | start the business you've been dreaming of | write that book you're planning
and your friends suddenly start telling you how glad they are that you finally figured out the bad thing was hurting you.
Could have used that info while I was in the middle of it, my dude. Tell the people you care about when they are doing it wrong. If they can't see it, they will appreciate the outside viewpoint. If they can't take it, they're not good friends.
> Tell the people you care about when they are doing it wrong. If they can't see it, they will appreciate the outside viewpoint. If they can't take it, they're not good friends.
It’s rarely that simple. People are really bad at being told what to do, and will often double down. Especially in bad relationships. Usually the best you can do is be there for them when they do decide to fix things on their own.
No it is the right advice. The key is to improve yourself and make yourself more attractive. Accomplish more, work out, become more capable, make more $ etc.
I did that myself by improving my diet, doing kick boxing, get educated, interact more with woman etc. It worked.
If you don’t, you will end up with a partner who loves your fake persona and not you. Forcing you to continue living a fake life. That is not a healthy way to live.
That's probably what the "be yourself" advice was getting at. When you try to be someone you're not you show it through your body language, it looks contrived and it's picked up rather quickly. "Be yourself" was probably meant to be more like act less desperate for attention and more confident in oneself, don't try to impress, etc.. But I agree that it is not a good advice to people who do indeed need to improve.
"reach into the future and pull the best possible rendition of yourself backwards to now forthwith such that you can become thatself once thineself agrees that it is indeed thou that thou wishes to become"
Not sure about US culture, but this seems to carry a peculiar assumption that men should date around same age? Because I doubt most 20yo women in "midwest" are married with a kid or two. Maybe some bits of cultural bagage you need to shed there.
Might not have two kids, but not single is absolutely true. People here tend to find a partner pretty quickly in life.
Anecdotally, a friend is trying to date in her early 30s and basically has no dating pool. Not many single men in their 30s have a stable job, crime free background, and avoid hard drugs.
A good lesson for everyone: your life's time horizon isn't anywhere close to your life expectancy. There are things you need to get right before 30 if you don't want the rest of your life to be misery.
The dad of one of my son's friends told me this, and he was a computer programmer himself (as am I). "Don't get your kid into programming, it will all be outsourced to India".
I didn't give my kids any such prescriptive advice, and he got into game dev which has always been his passion and outsourcing hasn't come for his job yet.
The modern day equivalent would be "don't get your kid into programming, it will all be done by AI soon".
India has a boom in outsourcing right but it’s going to get squeezed especially hard from AI. I work with Indian web app developers from major Indian cities. In the last 10 years ive noticed that the technical ability of Indian devs has reach parity with dev in US or Europe. However, there’s still a huge gap when it comes to product design and communication chops because Indian dev teams were structured to be the coders as a service rather than product teams. The issue is that AI is on the cusp of being the coder as a service. If you want a job in software in the post AI era you basically need to be either cutting edge in some vertical or you need to basically be a product manager who also has the skills to manually debug the generated code.
But I 100% agree with your advice overall though. I tell people don’t be a coder unless you are the type of person who codes for fun.
I got such GOOD advise from my mother 40 years ago, she took me even to place where she worked to show how boring it is. It was pure amber magic in mysterious world of murmuring machines. If I had listened to her, I would have time just for the music, for sure.
"You are ugly and need to learn to live with it", from my Father at my 18th birthday.
I share this not to garner sympathy. I am more than 30 years over it, but it did impact more than I understood at the time. If you are still hung up on historic lies I would recommend you find a way through or you they will dent you, even if part of you knows they aren't true.
My view of myself was later shaped by christian faith. The Bible tells me I am fearfully and wonderfully made. I have an attractive wife and good looking children but even that was not even enough to fix the dent. As humans we do not have all truth inside our own heads. We need a second opinion on much of our internal thoughts and processes.
Every person in the real estate industry has given me literally the worst advice.
We had to threaten to fire our last agent because he was continually working against our best interests. Not just professional opinion type or stuff, but recommendations exactly the opposite what we said we wanted to do.
The whole field seems to be filled with people who only survive on hope.
We eventually landed a phenomenal real estate agent, who had a great story. She was originally a school teacher, but after getting conned into buying a home with serious defects by a real estate agent who ended up suing her (!), she ended up becoming one to prevent others from falling into the same faith.
She consistently maintained realistic expectations and over delivered, ultimately negotiating a way lower price than asking, and never pushing us in any direction.
Most real estate agents are snakes, but ours was golden.
A meta-comment: whether an advice is good or bad should not be assessed based on a specific outcome.
You can follow a good advice and end up with a bad outcome. Similarly, you can follow a bad advice and end up with a good outcome. This is more obvious in poker (Annie Duke wrote a few books on the topic), but I think the same principle also applies to life in general.
Sure, "I went against this sensible advice and look at what I accomplished!!" makes for good storytelling. But that does not help us decide which advice to follow now and in the future.
A college CS professor told me to go into management. The thinking was, as you get older, it will be hard to continually compete with the younger developers and keep your skills current. After 20 years I have stayed a developer, and have seen former developers who went into management get laid off. One former manager went back to being a developer.
Because it's often a lie (at least in my experience). When I worked in defense contracting people loved trotting out stuff like "the work is stable", "you can't get fired from a government job", etc. all while dealing with furloughs, government shutdowns, geographic consolidation of work to different states, contracts changing hands, companies being acquired, etc. Employment in the US is at-will and nobody is going to guarantee you a job, especially these days, and employers at the lower echelons of the industry are very fond of selling the dream of "stability" by sowing fear of the unknown to prevent attrition while building a culture of malaise and low compensation.
I'm not saying that one should work exclusively for seed-stage crypto startups that sell blockchain-verified probiotic dog food or anything, but at some point you should critically examine whether it makes sense to be someplace that's 10 years and tens of thousands of dollars behind the curve just because it's "stable" when it so obviously isn't.
...where did I say that it was? They're both in the same space (figuratively and sometimes literally) and both of them have the same problem insofar as they aren't as bulletproof as they're made out to be. You can, in fact, be fired from a government job and things like the government shutdown circus and BRAC are real.
My apologies if I misinterpreted. I assumed it was tied together with this:
> When I worked in defense contracting people loved trotting out stuff like "the work is stable", "you can't get fired from a government job"
It's truly a shame that the employees who keep the government glued together -- be it via direct government employment or contracting -- are subject to unnecessarily turmulous conditions because of one political party's antics.
You’re likely better off getting a job that pays better, but being laid off more frequently.
If the layoffs never happen, you’re in a massively better position. If they do, the extra income still puts you ahead of staying at a stable, but poorly paying job.
Yup. Maybe this was true in the days of the 50s or so when the boomers entered the workforce and where "retired at 60 after 40 years working for the same employer" was something of a norm, but it definitely isn't the case nowadays. You can have a great job with a great team doing work you enjoy for what seems like the most stable situation known to man (large company in a boring industry or a government department) only to find yourself out on your ear when the economy hits a downturn and your whole department gets laid off.
That's what happened to me in the last set of layoffs, along with many other people.
May as well try and get as rich as possible as quickly as possible instead.
I remember this one, not only because it was bad, but it really made me angry when I got it
"Don't go into programming, you're not in Silicon Valley and life isn't like what you see on the internet, you have a good thing with your grandpa, just become a Mechanic like him"
My biggest passion in life have always been with computers, and I know (Now even with empirical experience) that I'm a horrible fit for a mechanic
But lets say I wasn't, and take it that it wasn't said in bad faith; It still enraged me that he didn't thought I'd be capable, I managed to learn and earn enough, escape my birthplace and (Sadly) The good thing my grandpa had going on went down in flames (Due to external circumstances)
It's been years and it still pisses me off, but I'm confident that he doesn't even remember that we ever talked about it
Or something like that. I do think that working on your own thing (like a company you start or a project you created) is a precious thing. Working for others is not; it’s a simple exchange of time for money.
Our school's headmaster advised me not to take computer science classes as they are "too difficult." It ended up being the class in which I got my best marks, I was the top student and made my living out of programming ever since.
Emacs is archaic and dying. Use JEdit instead. JEdit is the new Emacs. JEdit is already better than Emacs because it's being written using an excellent new language named Java.
i think this advice is a bit too vague and it's just something people say to sound smart to trick people into thinking there's a shortcut to mastery
i genuinely believe that if you work hard to hone your skill on something, it will do you good. if you want to get good at something, you gotta put in the hours, the grind. e.g. to learn how to play a tennis, you gotta, you know, actually get down to the court and play tennis instead of watching tutorial on how to play tennis. Same goes with programming, music, etc.
now pair working hard with the ability to retrospect -- you'll master a lot of skills in life
The following was advice an accomplished PhD wrote to me discouraging me from co-founding Pretty Litter which would eventually become a billion dollar (sold to Mars) CPG business: “here is some free consulting advice: you need to think very carefully through the economics and competitive environment of the cat litter business. At the end of the day there needs to be a real business, not just an exercise in PR and crowdfunding, and the risk-reward in cat litter is not at all appealing.
Cat litter is a commodity product, and there are huge brands that know how to manufacture, distribute, advertise, and market it at massive scale. There are already other color-changing cat litter products. Your team has zero expertise, IP, or competitive advantages in manufacturing, chemistry, consumer products, animal health, diagnostics, or distribution. Cat litter is not an industry that needs disruption.”
That's not bad advice - you just managed to overcome a lot of real obstacles. Humble brag.
I'm guessing he was "accomplished" in writing papers and sounding smart, rather than in a way that'd pay off his mortgage?
Hope you forwarded him a newspaper clipping about the sale
So how did you overcome your "zero expertise, IP, or competitive advantages" limitations, assuming they were accurate?
When you work really hard at something, you get pretty good at it
Was it only the last sentence that was wrong?
Would you mind indicating what advice you think the PhD person should have written to you based on what they knew of you at the time?
Genuinely curious, and thank you for the anecdote.
- Fake it until you make it.
While there is some truth to this depending on the context, for the most part, especially in software engineering world, you don't know everything. Don't be afraid to say if you need to research something or do POC or investigation. No one will be mad at you and if they are, you don't need to be working with that person. I spent many nights frantically trying to figure out things, to make it seemed like I was up to par, when I should have been more chill about it.
- Do what you love, and the money will follow.
My parents, my high school guidance, society, everyone told me this thing in 2002. Many of my friends went into music education and I can say only one or two got a job in this field. Then 2008 hit. This view, it is the survivors bias, what you should do instead is what will make you money, then figure out how to use that skill to do or add to what you love.
Ironically, both of these platitudes have been crucial to my own success. But I think they probably only work for certain types of people, so I don't disagree with you.
My personal approach with "fake it until you make it" has been to decide I am a $thing (one example: an "ultramarathon runner"). OK, now what do I do as a $thing? I do x, y and z. Then, I do those things, because I am a $thing. Ultimately, I trick myself into becoming the $thing.
This all occurs inside my head. I've never discussed or mentioned it to anyone. I've done it time and time again for career decisions and for personal hobbies. I don't believe it's very ego-driven. In my head, I crucify myself for hypocrisy and not admitting faults.
With "Do what you love, and the money will follow", well, like many of you here, that was computers. And like with many of you, the money followed.
Right, or at least that is just one part of the criteria. Your job should be something:
- you are naturally good at - takes years to master - the job market values - you like doing or don't mind doing all day
If a young person says they want to make a living as a influencer/youtuber/writer/streamer/musician I would tell them to strongly reconsider unless they have a reason of substance besides pure ego to think they can beat the odds. When someone has the foundations to be one of those things it’s usually obvious. There have been people I’ve met in life who I thought “I’m not sure how but this person will be famous”. There many people who just don’t know how to judge their own skills and usually they just need to be pointed to the right place for information.
Tragically, many of the jobs that people dream of and grind for have secret underbellies that young dreamers don’t understand. For example, Hollywood is a vipers nest where films get made. The music industry had its own Weinstein/Epstein combo recently with Diddy. Politics is the same. The most direct path to success in these fields is being willing to sell your soul and body to powerful evil people. So to be successful in those fields with your dignity intact requires a very rare constitution.
There is a lot of bad advice I’ve received over the years:
- you don’t need to go to a good university, this one (low tier uni in my country) is fine.
- don’t fight bullies back.
But the worst is not receiving bad advice, but receiving no advice at all, and staying in a dead-end job and city for too many years. Having no emotional support early in life leaves yourself “damaged” and gives you a cynical view of the world.
The worst is when you finally
quit that dead end job | end that toxic relationship | start the business you've been dreaming of | write that book you're planning
and your friends suddenly start telling you how glad they are that you finally figured out the bad thing was hurting you.
Could have used that info while I was in the middle of it, my dude. Tell the people you care about when they are doing it wrong. If they can't see it, they will appreciate the outside viewpoint. If they can't take it, they're not good friends.
> Tell the people you care about when they are doing it wrong. If they can't see it, they will appreciate the outside viewpoint. If they can't take it, they're not good friends.
It’s rarely that simple. People are really bad at being told what to do, and will often double down. Especially in bad relationships. Usually the best you can do is be there for them when they do decide to fix things on their own.
Haha if you think that works and you wouldn't be calling your friends assholes.
"Just be yourself". Such terrible, useless advice to give to someone who is struggling with dating.
I'd even call that non-advice a type of mockery.
Since that's, after all, how everyone starts, obviously the cohort who thereafter asks for advice has found that not enough.
No it is the right advice. The key is to improve yourself and make yourself more attractive. Accomplish more, work out, become more capable, make more $ etc.
I did that myself by improving my diet, doing kick boxing, get educated, interact more with woman etc. It worked.
If you don’t, you will end up with a partner who loves your fake persona and not you. Forcing you to continue living a fake life. That is not a healthy way to live.
Mark Twain once said “Be yourself is about the worst advice you can give to some people.”
What worked for you then?
Becoming a cooler, fitter, more interesting version of yourself
That's probably what the "be yourself" advice was getting at. When you try to be someone you're not you show it through your body language, it looks contrived and it's picked up rather quickly. "Be yourself" was probably meant to be more like act less desperate for attention and more confident in oneself, don't try to impress, etc.. But I agree that it is not a good advice to people who do indeed need to improve.
Maybe it should be "become yourself"
"bootstrap your future now"
or
"reach into the future and pull the best possible rendition of yourself backwards to now forthwith such that you can become thatself once thineself agrees that it is indeed thou that thou wishes to become"
Believe in the me who believes in you.
Move to a better dating market
This is the real answer. If you’re 26 in the Midwest, odds are many of the women a person would date are already married with a kid or two.
Not sure about US culture, but this seems to carry a peculiar assumption that men should date around same age? Because I doubt most 20yo women in "midwest" are married with a kid or two. Maybe some bits of cultural bagage you need to shed there.
Might not have two kids, but not single is absolutely true. People here tend to find a partner pretty quickly in life.
Anecdotally, a friend is trying to date in her early 30s and basically has no dating pool. Not many single men in their 30s have a stable job, crime free background, and avoid hard drugs.
A good lesson for everyone: your life's time horizon isn't anywhere close to your life expectancy. There are things you need to get right before 30 if you don't want the rest of your life to be misery.
The US is also very expensive place to live. If you don’t get with someone similar to yourself, you’re sandbagging your financial situation.
Most people can’t afford a single income household here in the US.
I'm not really in the market, but I would expect that most Midwest women wouldn't be opposed to dating a man who is a few years older.
Don't become a computer programmer, the industry is being outsourced to India.
So I became a plumber instead. Don't have to worry about someone from India flying here to crawl under a house to snake out a line.
Was this a bad advice though? Are you being paid enough for your work? Does it work out for you?
The dad of one of my son's friends told me this, and he was a computer programmer himself (as am I). "Don't get your kid into programming, it will all be outsourced to India".
I didn't give my kids any such prescriptive advice, and he got into game dev which has always been his passion and outsourcing hasn't come for his job yet.
The modern day equivalent would be "don't get your kid into programming, it will all be done by AI soon".
India has a boom in outsourcing right but it’s going to get squeezed especially hard from AI. I work with Indian web app developers from major Indian cities. In the last 10 years ive noticed that the technical ability of Indian devs has reach parity with dev in US or Europe. However, there’s still a huge gap when it comes to product design and communication chops because Indian dev teams were structured to be the coders as a service rather than product teams. The issue is that AI is on the cusp of being the coder as a service. If you want a job in software in the post AI era you basically need to be either cutting edge in some vertical or you need to basically be a product manager who also has the skills to manually debug the generated code.
But I 100% agree with your advice overall though. I tell people don’t be a coder unless you are the type of person who codes for fun.
Well, maybe the advise was right, but 20 years too early.
> Don't become a computer programmer
I got such GOOD advise from my mother 40 years ago, she took me even to place where she worked to show how boring it is. It was pure amber magic in mysterious world of murmuring machines. If I had listened to her, I would have time just for the music, for sure.
Doesn't sound THAT different than my programming job. It's pipes full of shit either way...
"You are ugly and need to learn to live with it", from my Father at my 18th birthday.
I share this not to garner sympathy. I am more than 30 years over it, but it did impact more than I understood at the time. If you are still hung up on historic lies I would recommend you find a way through or you they will dent you, even if part of you knows they aren't true.
My view of myself was later shaped by christian faith. The Bible tells me I am fearfully and wonderfully made. I have an attractive wife and good looking children but even that was not even enough to fix the dent. As humans we do not have all truth inside our own heads. We need a second opinion on much of our internal thoughts and processes.
You needed to resort to imaginary friends to cope with being ugly? Jesus. Pun intended.
From my mother, a very emphatic "Don't sleep with women unless you love them!"
Wise mother
What's wrong with that ?
That's how you don't have sex in your life.
Nah just learn to love more people. It’s the “one weird trick” we’ve all been looking for.
I had a mortgage broker try to get me into a variable rate mortgage I truly couldn't afford just before the rate hikes.
"The Bank of Canada won't raise rates, they can't, it'll tank the market."
I knew even then that was unhinged financial advice. This was a man who had a radio show about finances in Montreal.
He also tried to saddle me with a real estate broker who only showed properties to me that she was selling (and outside my price range/location).
If I followed his advice, I'd have had to sell the house the same year I bought it.
The story ends happily, I bought a great place that was affordable and a mortgage that I've never struggled to pay.
Keep a wide birth of Terry Kilakos if you are in Montreal folks.
Every person in the real estate industry has given me literally the worst advice.
We had to threaten to fire our last agent because he was continually working against our best interests. Not just professional opinion type or stuff, but recommendations exactly the opposite what we said we wanted to do.
The whole field seems to be filled with people who only survive on hope.
We eventually landed a phenomenal real estate agent, who had a great story. She was originally a school teacher, but after getting conned into buying a home with serious defects by a real estate agent who ended up suing her (!), she ended up becoming one to prevent others from falling into the same faith.
She consistently maintained realistic expectations and over delivered, ultimately negotiating a way lower price than asking, and never pushing us in any direction.
Most real estate agents are snakes, but ours was golden.
> This was a man who had a radio show about finances in Montreal.
That should've been a red flag.
A meta-comment: whether an advice is good or bad should not be assessed based on a specific outcome.
You can follow a good advice and end up with a bad outcome. Similarly, you can follow a bad advice and end up with a good outcome. This is more obvious in poker (Annie Duke wrote a few books on the topic), but I think the same principle also applies to life in general.
Sure, "I went against this sensible advice and look at what I accomplished!!" makes for good storytelling. But that does not help us decide which advice to follow now and in the future.
In 2015: “don’t waste time learning CUDA”
A college CS professor told me to go into management. The thinking was, as you get older, it will be hard to continually compete with the younger developers and keep your skills current. After 20 years I have stayed a developer, and have seen former developers who went into management get laid off. One former manager went back to being a developer.
Get a safe, secure job.
Why dis it turn out to be bad?
Because it's often a lie (at least in my experience). When I worked in defense contracting people loved trotting out stuff like "the work is stable", "you can't get fired from a government job", etc. all while dealing with furloughs, government shutdowns, geographic consolidation of work to different states, contracts changing hands, companies being acquired, etc. Employment in the US is at-will and nobody is going to guarantee you a job, especially these days, and employers at the lower echelons of the industry are very fond of selling the dream of "stability" by sowing fear of the unknown to prevent attrition while building a culture of malaise and low compensation.
I'm not saying that one should work exclusively for seed-stage crypto startups that sell blockchain-verified probiotic dog food or anything, but at some point you should critically examine whether it makes sense to be someplace that's 10 years and tens of thousands of dollars behind the curve just because it's "stable" when it so obviously isn't.
Defense contracting is not a government job.
You work for a private organization that provides services to the government.
Big difference.
...where did I say that it was? They're both in the same space (figuratively and sometimes literally) and both of them have the same problem insofar as they aren't as bulletproof as they're made out to be. You can, in fact, be fired from a government job and things like the government shutdown circus and BRAC are real.
My apologies if I misinterpreted. I assumed it was tied together with this:
> When I worked in defense contracting people loved trotting out stuff like "the work is stable", "you can't get fired from a government job"
It's truly a shame that the employees who keep the government glued together -- be it via direct government employment or contracting -- are subject to unnecessarily turmulous conditions because of one political party's antics.
_My_ apologies for not making the distinction more explicit - reading it in hindsight it is a bit ambiguous.
In an ideal world the government would operate a little more sanely but I'm not holding my breath.
You’re likely better off getting a job that pays better, but being laid off more frequently.
If the layoffs never happen, you’re in a massively better position. If they do, the extra income still puts you ahead of staying at a stable, but poorly paying job.
Yup. Maybe this was true in the days of the 50s or so when the boomers entered the workforce and where "retired at 60 after 40 years working for the same employer" was something of a norm, but it definitely isn't the case nowadays. You can have a great job with a great team doing work you enjoy for what seems like the most stable situation known to man (large company in a boring industry or a government department) only to find yourself out on your ear when the economy hits a downturn and your whole department gets laid off.
That's what happened to me in the last set of layoffs, along with many other people.
May as well try and get as rich as possible as quickly as possible instead.
I remember this one, not only because it was bad, but it really made me angry when I got it
"Don't go into programming, you're not in Silicon Valley and life isn't like what you see on the internet, you have a good thing with your grandpa, just become a Mechanic like him"
My biggest passion in life have always been with computers, and I know (Now even with empirical experience) that I'm a horrible fit for a mechanic
But lets say I wasn't, and take it that it wasn't said in bad faith; It still enraged me that he didn't thought I'd be capable, I managed to learn and earn enough, escape my birthplace and (Sadly) The good thing my grandpa had going on went down in flames (Due to external circumstances)
It's been years and it still pisses me off, but I'm confident that he doesn't even remember that we ever talked about it
Be nice, forgive, don't retaliate, work hard.
At least you saved the bad advice for last :)
IDK... define "being nice." If it means having a default policy of yielding to others, that is in fact horrible business/career advice.
We don't need to treat every situation as an adversarial/machiavellian game, however "being nice," is in fact often bad advice.
Maybe be calm, collected, respectful, but strong and self-advocating (because generally no one else is going to advocate for you out of good will.)
That's a great idea, take it to an incubator.
You can't joke in the office, you won't be taken seriously if you do and that will prevent you from advancing
Work dignifies man/Work is a precious thing.
Or something like that. I do think that working on your own thing (like a company you start or a project you created) is a precious thing. Working for others is not; it’s a simple exchange of time for money.
Our school's headmaster advised me not to take computer science classes as they are "too difficult." It ended up being the class in which I got my best marks, I was the top student and made my living out of programming ever since.
Emacs is archaic and dying. Use JEdit instead. JEdit is the new Emacs. JEdit is already better than Emacs because it's being written using an excellent new language named Java.
"You just need to apply yourself, Mike"
I had no idea what that meant, for decades.
"work smart, not hard"
i think this advice is a bit too vague and it's just something people say to sound smart to trick people into thinking there's a shortcut to mastery
i genuinely believe that if you work hard to hone your skill on something, it will do you good. if you want to get good at something, you gotta put in the hours, the grind. e.g. to learn how to play a tennis, you gotta, you know, actually get down to the court and play tennis instead of watching tutorial on how to play tennis. Same goes with programming, music, etc.
now pair working hard with the ability to retrospect -- you'll master a lot of skills in life
Work smart not hard is not about mastery it's about maximizing your output.
"Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme" ... in 2010
The current cryto landscape is shady though imo
Try Clojure
"You chose this. Keep your head down and work at it. It will all work out in the end."