Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?

When you tutor someone, don't tell them what to do step by step. When they ask you how to solve a problem, don't solve it for them.

It's tempting to explain in minute detail something you are good at, but if you always tell people how to do their job, they will become dependent on you.

Let them figure it out on their own.

When there's a bug in their code, point it out, but don't tell them how to fix it.

If you alwaystell people how to do stuff, they will never learn to think for themselves.

The need for exponential back off when retrying a connection to a server. Learned after deploying to millions of client devices :)

Know when it's time to quit, and when to accept failure.

Putting hours, effort, and emotion into a person/project won't save it from inevitable collapse if that's the direction it's headed in. Set a timeline, create metrics, and if you aren't on a positive trending track, quit, otherwise you'll just keep chasing something that will lead at best to mediocrity.

The danger of overly ambitious goals is their brittleness, and when they break, they break all the way. Much like "the best camera is the one you have", the best diet is the one you keep, and the best course is the one you'll attend. It's better to set yourself up for modest success than spectacular failure.

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Community matters. Relationships with other people matter. When I thought strong work would scratch my every itch, it's because I'd yet to discover the contours of other ways of life one might have. I was fine being an antisocial workaholic at 20. As I approached 30, my face went white as some unspoken emotional thing in me began to realize what I'd missed. But you can come back from that, and it's very worth it. If you're willing to suss out the rules of engagement and play it straight, the world is happy to have you.

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Western religion and American conservatism (archetypically, not the current implementations) have interesting and important insights about society and conduct, and they're things that off-the-shelf liberal culture suppresses or misunderstands, not from raw malice, but from calcified disinterest.

Revisiting the bible and last-generation conservative ideology with the idea that it might be an imperfect set of abstractions with something to teach rather than a guidebook for cruelty to be read literally led to a lot of personal growth, since the stories are archetypes about different types of conduct and their potential consequences. These stories aren't always right, and aren't always useful, but they were a second voice that, living in a coastal/liberal/progressive filter bubble, I had never heard. Seeing and understanding the "best" of what the right thinks, instead of the most "otherizing", led me to a worldview that feels more balanced, more centrist, and less polarized. It makes me assume positive intent in more people, and pick sides and fight less often.

I credit Jordan Peterson's lecture courses for packing these in a way that my progressive athiest self didn't immediately reject.

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https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

Everything @Patio11 says about salary is true. I missed out on gigantic sums of money, but later got them back on the table. The mental models in the article have, on a 5 year timeline, resulted in serious earning growth with absolutely no negative consequences.

Thank you, I think there’s generally some perfectionism on the technical side and things that are easier to address later that don’t require delays