I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected • Hacker News Board

Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected

#421

Post by mojomark » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 1:18 AM UTC

badpun wrote: post #370

mixmastamyk wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us like to eat.

So it DOES matter, after all. Screw up enough at job and your ability to eat goes away.

So, here's the point - as a baseline, if you have a fishing pole or can read a book about which plants are edible and which are not, you are not going to starve. Everything else is icing on the cake. Of course your actions matter, but there is a sea of minutiae that people tend to spend time on that simply doesn't matter in the grand scheme of the universe.

You will screw up. There are people smarter than you. Do your best to contribute and be honest about what you know and don't know, and you will be highly valued by your peers.

Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected

#422

Post by nexus2045 » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 3:00 AM UTC

turk73 wrote: post #62

augustl wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately I spent a lot of that free time playing video games. It was fun but i could've achieved way more. I'm currently beta testing a new optimization - I'm only allowed to play WoW Classic after my todo-list is done. One if the items on the todo-list is "do something productive for 30 minutes" (and currently, there's no shortage of things to fill those 30 minutes with). Maybe I can use the extreme gravitati…

You should throw out all the games. I'm serious. I never really began to succeed until I stopped playing stupid games and became a man. Now I'm managing younger guys who can't put down the controller. Last fall I had to fire someone who was clearly staying up all night playing video games and was never prepared for work nor doing an adequate job at it. Sadly, his own sense of privilege prevented him from being able t…

I did the same, but it was because I have very low self control since a young age, and telling myself "OK this will be the last round I'll ay tonight" (of League of Legends, Super Smash, etc.) never, ever worked. The cumulative result of all that gaming means next to nothing for my career now, aside from being more calm when getting trolled. Not worth it.

Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected

#423

Post by harimau777 » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 11:14 AM UTC

l_t wrote: post #375

badpun wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally, my goals are to have an interesting job (i.e. using a modern tech stack) I always wonder why using a modern tech is interesting? Let's say there's a job where you're using J2EE 1.4 or some other outdated technology from the early 2000s. The thing is, I remember when that technology was hot shit and people considered working on it very interesting. So, it looks like, over the course of time, doing the ve…

I think it's a heuristic signal. Old tech stacks are usually used in old projects that solve old problems. I doubt the OP would mind building a J2EE project from scratch to solve a novel problem. But nobody does that -- usually if there is a J2EE job, it's maintenance, which can be less interesting. And if there is a novel problem, it will likely be solved with the current status quo ("modern") technology.

Sorry for the delayed reply. I had missed your guys' posts.

For me it's couple of things:

My experience has been that newer languages and frameworks tend to be more user friendly. In particular, I tend to enjoy the abstraction and design aspects of programming more than the nuts and bolts technology aspects. So, for example, I find the low level aspects (e.g. memory management) of C annoying and I appreciate that React lets me use all of the abstractions that a programming language provides to define UI.

I tend to like functional programming techniques and dislike object oriented ones. FP techniques seem to be popular with the current generation of tech while the previous generation seems to have been dominated by OO. Of course that's not true in every domain and could change in the future.

This is a stereotype, but I tend to associate older tech stacks with companies that are more conservative, less innovative/more established, and/or less technology focused.

Finally, like you guys have mentioned, newer tech is associated with less maintenance work and greater future job prospects; even if that's just signaling as opposed to being inherent to the technologies themselves.

Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected

#424

Post by jl2718 » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

ikeyany wrote: post #395

jl2718 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This forum in particular attracts a certain type of ‘lazy intellectual’: people that value thought and introspection above constant action. They were the type of children that easily mastered early school subjects without working, but are so fascinated by ideas that mere action bores them. I think it’s important to recognize the advantages and limitations of this mindset. I’ve considered the possibility that it is si…

Apply your own logic on yourself. Have you consideed that the arbitrary demand for constant action could itself be a mental disorder?

I used the first person plural specifically because I was applying this logic to myself. I also used third-person in an attempt to de-personalize the observation, but really it's a first-person account.