151–160 of 286 posts
Strong "no" on this one. Always buy quality tools. These are priced at a premium, but unlike "inexpensive" tools will:
• Do the job expected of them w/o creating a new problem
• Be enjoyable to use
• Last a long time (often, a lifetime)
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There is no limit on your ability to improve yourself, but the effect can be described as a log function.
A sublinear function seems like the way to model it, but even log(x) will eventually reach a very high value. Even if I could live forever, I'd never reach von Neumann's intelligence. Better to use a function that tends toward an asymptote, such as 1 - 1/(x+1)
Forever is a long time ...
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Debt is risk. What happens when you lose all your income (as millions are right now)? Payments can't get made, and repossessions happen. If losing a job doesn't sound like a disaster to you, you've probably never experienced it, and/or you have the privilege of having a career in an in-demand field.
And that's why there are products to insure you against this risk called payment protection insurance (PPI). It's a shame that in the UK, PPI is now synonymous with mis-selling. The true cost of debt should be the interest rate and the costs to insure the debt (buildings insurance, landlords insurance, car insurance, PPI...)
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Software is also weird when it comes to skills. While the total domain knowledge possible in software is absolutely massive, the set of baseline skills required to rapidly learn new domains and perform is surprisingly small. Any good programmer can learn a new language and a new portion of the stack within at least year, probably less, because the core skills of the profession are very very small. It’s not clear to m…
That's dated. This used to be true, absolutely. But the size of various eco-systems is such that if you want to really master something now you have to invest a lot of time and if you bet on the wrong horse then you can lose a lot of time and effort for little return. Front end is especially brutal in this sense.
> The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. This is very powerful. Reminds me of the "system 1 vs system 2" discussion, and some descriptions of e.g. ADHD and depression causing what could be described as "failure to terminate in self-negotiation".
> Don’t be the smartest person in the room. Hangout with, and learn from, people smarter than yourself. Even better, find smart people who will disagree with you. I've often struggled with this one. It might sound arrogant, but I am 90% of the time the smartest person in the room. This is a frequent cause of unhappiness as I just feel I'm carrying others and I'm not able to learn anything myself. I've changed jobs ma…
I often try to reinvent myself every couple of years. Moving from technical fields that I'm comfortable with into less technical fields where I'm forced to be a beginner has helped remind me what it's like to ramp up from an ignorant state. It's uncomfortable but worth it.
The analytical mindset (which cerebral people tend toward) is disproportionately powerful for tackling various problems, but there are many open-domain problems--laden with tons of uncertainty--that only yield to heuristic approaches and trial-and-error. It's useful to learn what it actually feels like to be engaged with problem domains where analytical approaches aren't as effective.
Here's something to consider: take a sampling of large multinational U.S. companies and look at the biographies of their executives. You'll likely find that most of them only have a bachelor's degree and often from middling schools, yet they are at the helm of these large corporations. It's tempting to think all of them got to where they were because they knew how to play the politics game in their orgs -- which is true in part -- but having worked with folks of this ilk, I would submit that there are some non-technical skills that these folks have that we tech folks don't often recognize.
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A sublinear function seems like the way to model it, but even log(x) will eventually reach a very high value. Even if I could live forever, I'd never reach von Neumann's intelligence. Better to use a function that tends toward an asymptote, such as 1 - 1/(x+1)
> Even if I could live forever, I'd never reach von Neumann's intelligence Forever is a long time ...
In reality, there are limits to what you can do with a trained ape. An usually long-lived ape doesn't much help you. I suspect the same applies here.
> Buying tools: Start by buying the absolute cheapest tools you can find. Upgrade... Strong "no" on this one. Always buy quality tools. These are priced at a premium, but unlike "inexpensive" tools will: • Do the job expected of them w/o creating a new problem • Be enjoyable to use • Last a long time (often, a lifetime)
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True for the programming part of front end development, not so much for the making things look good part.
To make things look good on the Web, you just find something that you think looks good and steal what it's doing.
The same is true about learning anything else. Personally, when I've been first starting programming, I learned a lot of useful programming techniques by stealing bits and pieces from videogames and demos whose source was available and incorporating them into my own attempts at writing a game engine.
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> The majority of my mortgage payment goes towards ownership of a product - my house For many (most?) people that's not true. Even ignoring that mortgage payments often include property taxes and/or private mortgage insurance, you can expect to pay more interest than principal for the first fifteen years or more of a thirty-year mortgage.
Yes, if you look at your mortgage payments, very little is going to principal. On the flipside, when you rent, you get certain services—maintenance of property and major appliances—that you don't get as a home owner. When I started my mortgage I was surprised at how much money I started spending on home stuff that I never used to spend as a renter. Partly it's because you own it so you have higher standards, but part…