It's so hard to read with all of them lowercases. My eyesight is poor.
Agreed, I actually stopped reading for this reason. The author seems allergic to capitals.
How to stop feeling lost in tech: the wafflehouse method
41–50 of 113 posts
Re: How to stop feeling lost in tech: the wafflehouse method
#42For some reason, I see this style of "everything lowercase" more often recently. It distracts me from the content a lot. Was there a reason this style has become more popular?
It's the writing pattern of younger Gen Z and older Gen Alpha. Combined with minimal-to-no punctuation, it can be very distracting to read. However, this is typically used in informal settings like group chats. It is very odd to see it in formal, serious, or professional settings outside of, again, DMs and the like.
I personally only made it about thirty seconds before I had to stop reading the article. The excessive line breaks and paragraphs-that-are-just-run-on-sentences on top of sporadic sentence casing and missing punctuation presents the writer as partly illiterate. I just can't shake the feeling that I'm reading the words of an, for lack of a graceful term, idiot.
Re: How to stop feeling lost in tech: the wafflehouse method
#43This isn't realistic.
Wanting things to be true does not make them true.
“Get a promotion this year, be a manager next year, manage the division in three years” is not a plan you can execute.
This is just the old self affirmation stuff you hear all the time: you won't succeed if you want it a bit. You wont succeed if want it and do nothing. You will succeed if you go all in, 100%.
It is BS.
You wont succeed if you go all in, statistically.
You might get a different outcome, but you wont hit your goal.
It is provably false that everyone who goes all succeeds; Not everyone gets to be an astronaut, no matter how hard they work.
The reality is that some people will put a little effort in and succeed, and some people will put a lot in and succeed. Other people will fail.
Your goals are not indicators of future success.
Only actual things that have actually happened are strong signals for future events.
The advice of having goals is helpful, but the much much more important thing to do is measure what actually happens and realistically create goals based on actual reality.
Try things. Measure things. Adopt things that work. Consciously record what you do, how it goes, how long it takes and use that to estimate achievable goals, instead of guessing randomly.
Re: How to stop feeling lost in tech: the wafflehouse method
#44This is sidestepping that the market for CS degrees has gone from new grads making more than median income to some of the highest unemployment among college grads. I hope this is temporary, but the problem right now isn't focus or goal setting. It's that the entry rung to the ladder ceased to exist.
I don't think that's the case. I think an implied point is separating the "I want to be programming computers in 5 years" folks from the "I want a stable job with good pay" folks. If you are in the latter point, then the entry-rung to the ladder disappearing means you should probably switch majors!
Re: How to stop feeling lost in tech: the wafflehouse method
#45> you have to be careful though.
> if you actually do this you get a very stressful side effect:
> there is no one to blame but yourself
Uh no thanks!
Re: How to stop feeling lost in tech: the wafflehouse method
#46Could've been written better, and also, it is posed as something new and illuminating - that style too could've been changed. But kinda agree on the high points.
Just figure out what you want. That is your "goal". It does not need to be 1,2,5 years - can be anything. Things can change and are always in flux. Be open to changing both your goals and/or your daily habits. Change goals when you achieve or grow out of them, change habits when they aren't getting you closer to your goals or not helping you enjoy the journey.
Work backwards from your goals and break them down into something you can do as daily habits. The daily habits should have very STRICT success metrics in the direction of the goals' success metrics. If you do not have STRICT metrics for both the GOALs and the DAILY ACTIONs, you do not have good FEEDBACK.
If you do not have good FEEDBACK, you can spend a lot of time, even years - which I did, doing things that FEEL like you're working towards something with nothing to show at the end. There HAS to be a way to SHOW to yourself whether you are making progress or not. In too many things in life I have at times felt bad about my life not being a certain way, when I actually look at what I've done - like truly sit down and note things down, I realize my mind has been playing tricks on me - years of a lot of apparent struggle, but not much truly done - perhaps just a bit here and there.
I know there's many counter arguments to the STRICTness and GOAL setting nature of this way of living life. One counter argument is it's too rigid - but I like to think of it as chaos within constraints - btw you can tune the constraints to suit yourself. Another is once you reach a goal then what - I would say then another goal or just improving/maintaining that goal. Another one is Goodhart's Law - to which I say you will slowly learn to set good metrics and to use them as directional measures.
Despite all the problems with metrics and strictness, I think it is still the best way to go. Also I am personally against grandiose systems or too much complexity. I would say the core of it is just being AWARE. As long as you are AWARE of the inputs you're putting in and what outputs you'll get out of em I think it's fine to decide whether to do stuff or not. You can be lazy or free flowing or instinctual or whatever. (Your fast instincts could actually be very well aligned with your slow goals - though those kind of people are super rare I feel).
Re: How to stop feeling lost in tech: the wafflehouse method
#47For some reason, I see this style of "everything lowercase" more often recently. It distracts me from the content a lot. Was there a reason this style has become more popular?
I've seen the argument made that "when people talk and text, they don't use punctuation." This seems like nonsense to me, since when people talk they inflect in rather varied ways, and there is punctuation in texts every time the "send" button is hit. 2300 years ago, the Greeks didn't have punctuation, and they had to invent it!
Re: How to stop feeling lost in tech: the wafflehouse method
#48This is definitely something I did when I was younger (DAGs and everything, sans Waffle House - maybe a Vietnamese restaurant named "Vietnamese Restaurant" before it burned down).
Also, normally this style of writing would annoy me but I found it very charming and fun, somehow.
These days, I think just visualizing what my "proudest self" in 5 years would be would be enough to help me sort of 'manifest' it without all of the excessive planning bits. The visualizing bit is kind of the hard part.
Given everything happening in the world at the moment the FUD has been strong the last few years making it nerve-racking to plan anything big.
Re: How to stop feeling lost in tech: the wafflehouse method
#49This is the opposite of what helped me to stop feeling lost in life. I grew up very goal oriented and executed towards those goals with focus and determination. Around when I turned 40 I realized I wasn't all that happy and I'd spent my entire life so far living for rewards that would come in the future. The problem is that those rewards didn't give sustaining satisfaction. They pass remarkably quickly when you get t…
My experience would be the opposite. I'm not goal oriented > Instead I now just trust my instincts and follow what seems interesting or meaningful to me right now for me that means watching anime, playing video games, reading HN and social media, and maybe writing small programs like solving S.O. questions, And now I look back, have accomplished nothing of significance, and have huge regrets. Regrets that I didn't se…
I think there's a middle ground between trying to follow a path you set for yourself and thoughtlessly wandering by gut feeling: set a direction you want to go, not a destination.
You'll find that it doesn't require much thought at decision points to choose the options (in aggregate) that push you in that direction. As they say, it's about the journey, not the destination.
With that said, it's still difficult because you have to learn to forego long term expectations and/or acquire discipline not to just "stay put" lest you fall back into the habit of stressing over end goals or the comfort of a stress coping loop (anime, video games, etc), respectively.
Re: How to stop feeling lost in tech: the wafflehouse method
#50This is the opposite of what helped me to stop feeling lost in life. I grew up very goal oriented and executed towards those goals with focus and determination. Around when I turned 40 I realized I wasn't all that happy and I'd spent my entire life so far living for rewards that would come in the future. The problem is that those rewards didn't give sustaining satisfaction. They pass remarkably quickly when you get t…
My experience would be the opposite. I'm not goal oriented > Instead I now just trust my instincts and follow what seems interesting or meaningful to me right now for me that means watching anime, playing video games, reading HN and social media, and maybe writing small programs like solving S.O. questions, And now I look back, have accomplished nothing of significance, and have huge regrets. Regrets that I didn't se…
Does your instinct really say “watch anime for 6 hours right now”, or does your instinct say something else and you just aren’t listening to it?