"Just be yourself". Such terrible, useless advice to give to someone who is struggling with dating.
Mark Twain once said “Be yourself is about the worst advice you can give to some people.”
Ask HN: What's the worst advice you've ever received?
71–78 of 78 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst advice you've ever received?
#72Get a safe, secure 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.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst advice you've ever received?
#73- 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…
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.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst advice you've ever received?
#74Don'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.
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.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst advice you've ever received?
#75Re: Ask HN: What's the worst advice you've ever received?
#76Work 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.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst advice you've ever received?
#77There 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 wor…
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…
Haha if you think that works and you wouldn't be calling your friends assholes.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst advice you've ever received?
#78"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…
Work smart not hard is not about mastery it's about maximizing your output.