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I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

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Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#591

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

VRay wrote: post #589
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point, and a relevant one.

Actually that happened to me too, it turns out there's such a thing as being TOO confident I'm getting that vibe from you a little as well, where you're refusing to jump through the hoops that companies put in front of new hires (binary tree crap) I'd recommend you either knuckle under and play ball, or even better: Get into consulting / make a SaaS business like the Expat Software guy

Nah. It really is freeing to not have to do that.

I sincerely want to help people that help people. The rat race is just too exhausting for me. I didn't realize how exhausting, until I had a couple of years of working on my own to see the difference.

I'll probably never get paid a dime for my work, ever again, and the thought brings me great joy.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#592

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

rumanator wrote: post #587
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference, these days, is social media. It acts as an accelerant to prejudice, recklessness, and disunity. Disrespecting elders is a time-honored aspect of nature. Even critters have it (watch puppies and kittens ignoring their parents). But puppies don't have a worldwide graph of other puppies that establish feedback loops to encourage each other to eat chocolate.

> Disrespecting elders is a time-honored aspect of nature. Even critters have it (watch puppies and kittens ignoring their parents). Nonsense. Puppies and kittens are not adults, are they? The "ok boomer" meme originated in people from older demographics criticizing adults in their 20s and 30s based on blanket and entirely baseless assertions that somehow they knew better just because they were born earlier. If you w…

I think you're replying to someone else. I never mentioned "OK Boomer."

My comment on social media applies to many different things; not just ageism.

And, as is being amply demonstrated by thousands of people all over the world, it's not particularly helpful for people that aren't in a certain class, to dismiss the experience of people that are in a class.

I'm not a woman, black, brown, gay, or disabled, so it is not helpful for me to judge whether or not those folks experience difficulty from people that look like me.

I am, however, an older tech worker, and can confirm, from personal experience, that people like me, get a lot of friction; sometimes, from other people like me (It's not just young folks that engage in ageism).

BTW: I grew up in Africa. I'm familiar with the way lions deal with each other; including the practice of new pride leaders killing all the cubs from the previous pride. I think that may also resonate in our industry.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#593

Post by arvinsim »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #583
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't say ageism the main reason I moved from programming to tech writing, but it's certainly been something on my mind. I look younger than my 53 years, but I'm pretty clearly not in my early 30s anymore. But, I haven't experienced any real ageism in this field, at least yet.

Thanks for your Service. We desperately need a lot of skilled tech writers. The state of documentation, these days, fills me with despair.

Is there a free resource on how write great documentation?

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#594

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

arvinsim wrote: post #593
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your Service. We desperately need a lot of skilled tech writers. The state of documentation, these days, fills me with despair.

Is there a free resource on how write great documentation?

I believe so. I think I have encountered references to them, on HN. I think there was a thread about this, a week or two ago.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#595

Post by arvinsim »

l0ner wrote: post #260
imtringued wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst mistake a lot of people make is put stuff on a backlog aka procrastination. If what you want to do is worth doing then do it today.

On the other hand, why do so many highly skilled people push themselves so hard? I do not have any stats, it's just an observation looking at all the people in my environment, and then some public exponents. I've grown up in a family where there was always enough, yet not much in excess. Most grown up people I knew in my childhood would probably complain that they would want more, yet they mostly just did their job,…

> On the other hand, why do so many highly skilled people push themselves so hard?

In this day and age, being productive is considered a virtue.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#596

Post by sushshshsh »

frankbyte wrote: post #459
sushshshsh wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sits in an account until the day that he gets suckered into marriage and home ownership

After that a messy divorce and funds are in lawyer and exwifey account and back to the commune

Commune will be 2beaucoup after a tech-salary divorce, only solution is evading the lifetime alimony police by sleeping in the desert, where your only friends are scorpions and your only food is the same ;)

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#597

Post by vidarh »

mkl wrote: post #427
Aeolun wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that your twenties are prime money earning years? I know that for me my earnings have only gone up over time.

Earnings go up, but so do expenses and responsibilities for most people. And would your earnings be where they are now if you had a big gap in your twenties where you did a failed startup? (Depends on the experience it gave you, I guess.)

My career is almost entirely startups. ~25 years of it. Several failed. Several paid out inconsequential amounts. It's never been anything but a positive in interviews, as long as you can talk to lessons learned and as long as it doesn't seem like you were the primary reason it failed.

Despite a family, I have more disposable income net of tax now than my gross salary for most of my 20's.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#598

Post by vidarh »

boring_twenties wrote: post #503
cactus2093 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, not so surprising that the high risk path is risky. What's surprising is the low risk path is so high reward.

Also, while it might be a lower risk path than the one you took, it certainly wasn't the lowest risk path available. The people who did really well had basically all their net worth tied up in one company's stock for many years. That level of concentration risk is extremely ill-advised no matter how promising the company might be. Sure, it works out great when GOOG goes up 200%, but it could have just as easily gone…

To emphasis the risk aspect.

I worked at Yahoo for 3 years. I joined at a very fortunate time, and left at a very fortunate time that let me basically double my options. It wasn't a fortune, but it was a nice extra chunk.

But when I left, one of the guys reporting to me was still under water on the far larger chunk of options he had been granted prior to the dot-com bubble bursting. As far as I know they wouldn't have gotten over water at any point before they expired.

At the time I joined, Yahoo seemed like it was on a solid upwards trajectory. By the time I left you might have started seeing signs but things were still going the right way for a while, and had I not been offered a very interesting job I'd likely have stayed and lost a significant proportion of the value of my options.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#599

Post by 0xdde »

BeetleB wrote: post #505
0xdde wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be the one with a weird idea of what a city is. I'd wager most people think of something like the top 20 metropolitan statistical areas by population when they hear the term. In the U.S, at least, those generally all have terrible traffic and subpar transit.

You just made my case for me. The majority of people who live in cities in the US are not in the top 20 metropolitan areas, I think the majority will disagree with your idea of a city. Every city I've lived in was not in the top 20. And frankly, even looking at some of the top 20 areas, some of them have pretty decent traffic. I know people who live in Phoenix (ranked 10th) whose commute is definitely under half an h…

It's always amusing to me how stubborn and pedantic HN commenters are over basic things. I can't help but play the game this once. I don't doubt that plenty of people share your view and plenty will share mine. We're discussing a subjective interpretation after all. But to come in like you did and try to claim that our totally standard view of what a city is is "weird" is just so absurd.

>If you get the right neighborhood, the commute to work by public transit will be 30-40 minutes.

Okay, so one of your idealized cases and it's still closer to the "1 hour by public transit" scenario than "10 minutes by driving" you originally chose. But you know people in Phoenix so case closed.

>The majority of people who live in cities in the US are not in the top 20 metropolitan areas

I'm curious where you get this, too. The top 5 MSAs already cover 25% of the population.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#600

Post by ReaLNero »

tayo42 wrote: post #153
papito wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are now terrified of putting down a screen and being left alone with their own thoughts for more than 30 seconds. It's horrifying what's bouncing around up in that dome, and having to process it. But this is exactly what we did before. We got bored , we were wasting time, we were experimenting, and that's how great ideas came around.

Idk if it's just terrified, but I think we're addicted. This probably sounds ridiculous but I recently blocked some apps and sites on my phone and actually felt a little off for a day, like my sleep was weird. I think there was a slight withdrawal from the constant bombardment of stuff. It is helping kill my Facebook habit. I don't even really like the site, I just check it impulsively. It's weird. Reddit is another…

You can use extensions to either delete or remove the infinite scroll.

In my opinion, the infinite scroll is both addictive and fruitless. I rarely find something fun when it's buried deep in the feed. That's pretty obvious. If it was a fun post, it would've been at the top, right?

If you don't trust any extension with site-reading capability, here's a simple solution: scroll down as much as you are comfortable, and then work upwards!

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