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Ask HN: What advice messed up your life?

• mduvall 16y ago
  Everybody in college pretends to be not working hard as they like to admit, thus the advice that comes from colleagues along the lines of "don't do the homework, it's really a waste of time" when everybody is actually doing it, could screw you over. It didn't mess up my life per se, but definitely had an impact on my grades when I was a naive freshman.
  • lifestyleigni 16y ago
    How much of that homework is just busy work? Working hard on busy work is useless when it doesn't help foster any learning. It's unfortunate that many professors assign useless assignments and that it has become an accepted part of the curriculum.
  • Jach 16y ago
    > Everybody in college pretends to be not working hard as they like to admit Is this true when it's a student telling the outside world? It's a useful strategy to claim one's working really hard in school to explain why he hasn't been calling / doesn't want to visit over spring break / doesn't have a girlfriend / why the parents should keep sending money / etc.
  • nostrademons 16y ago
    It's funny, all the advice I had from upperclassmen when I started college was "do your homework and go to class", and I did neither, and I don't regret it at all. Yes, it hurt my grades. However, I've found that my grades haven't mattered at all.
    • ronnier 16y ago
      I never thought grades mattered much either, until recently. I was asked my GPA a few weeks ago.
      • nostrademons 16y ago
        I was asked my GPA at my first job, told them (it was bad), then they made me an offer anyway.
    • hackerblues 16y ago
      Given grades are correlated with having understood the material, I assume the implication is that the material you might have learned but didn't hasn't been at all relevant.
      • nostrademons 16y ago
        It's more that understanding the material is a necessary but not sufficient condition for getting good grades. It's quite possible to understand all the material and still get bad grades.
    • l0nwlf 16y ago
      I am graduating from CS, currently in my final year. GPA does matters a lot when you are a fresher. Companies which visit universities for hiring (Campus recruitment drive) places a GPA cutoff, henceforth making low GPA fellas ineligible to even appear in their hiring process. All the big guns do so (Google, Y!, Amazon etc etc).
  • frankus 16y ago
    If there's anything you don't want as a role model in college, it's the mythical "slacker genius" (I say mythical because pretty much everyone who falls into this category is either a work of fiction or someone who works both hard and efficiently). Go to class, do the homework, study (and if you don't know how, learn!). If you get good at those things, there's plenty of time left over to have fun.
  • nradov 16y ago
    You should treat college homework and studying as a constrained optimization problem. Decide up front how many hours you're going to put in per weak and then figure out how to maximize your GPA within that limit. In the remaining time you can do whatever you want.
  • masterj 16y ago
    > Everybody in college pretends to be not working hard as they like to admit My experience was the exact opposite. People liked to compete to see who had the most coursework to do. People would complain about having to pull all nighters, but still spend hours on youtube or facebook beforehand. Some people were genuinely overwhelmed with work, but it was never downplayed as far as I could tell.
    • hackerblues 16y ago
      I have been told that it might be a cultural thing by someone who has studied in the UK and the US. US = overplay amount of work done, UK = under play it.
• groaner 16y ago
  "Good news should travel fast, bad news should travel even faster." Sure, but not in an environment where "shoot the messenger" is the m.o. I learned to keep my head down pretty quickly, and now I'm looking for an exit strategy.
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• geoffc 16y ago
  In the early 80's at Rice University my academic advisor steered me from computer science which I enjoyed (APL rocked!) to chemical engineering because "computers will be programming themselves in 20 years and comp sci isn't real engineering anyways". I hated chem eng but after a decade of detours final came back to coding. I didn't mind the detours but it was spectacularly bad advice and I was dumb enough to take it.
• stelfer 16y ago
  Pretty much everyone who I looked up to who was an X and said: "You should be an X".
• iamwil 16y ago
  "It'll just happen when you least expect it." It's just something people say to console, not actually anything that's remotely useful or true. Magic never happens on its own. You have to go out there and make it happen.
  • j_baker 16y ago
    I'm honestly not sure I'm understanding you properly, but if I am, this is true up to a point. We like to believe in a world where everyone's results are directly correlated with how much work they've done, but that's just as much a fantasy as it is to believe that all you have to do is sit around and wait for the right opportunity to magically appear. I hate to break it to you, but the most successful people in society usually got there not only from hard work but from being in the right place at the right time.
    • Xurinos 16y ago
      I hate to break it to you, but the most successful people in society usually got there not only from hard work but from being in the right place at the right time. According to studies on "luck", one key is to be in a LOT of places. It increases your chance of being in some right place at some right time. Another key is a positive attitude, of seeing opportunities and taking advantage of them. So it is difficult to tell when someone's behavior (work) causes a success versus when it truly is a lucky break.
      • syllogism 16y ago
        The best way I've heard this described is, you've got to maximise your luck surface area.
    • iamwil 16y ago
      I was mostly talking about dating girls. It may seem obvious in hindsight, but at the time, I just took it as word. But it's also applicable to other aspects of my life. Whenever I've taken initiative and grabbed the situation by the horns to change, it's been for the better.
• deleted 16y ago
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• Wilduck 16y ago
  "You're smart." It took me five years of coasting on that presumption before I realized that being "smart" isn't nearly enough. I'm still working (after a few more years) to develop the habits that would have come from hearing "you're a hard worker."
  • Vivtek 16y ago
    Man, I have to second that one. Growing up smart in a small town is great until you leave - which is inevitable.
    • pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      I got the best exam grades in my town on leaving school - uni hit hard.
    • pjscott 16y ago
      The internet really helps with that, by expanding your world to include some people who are just dazzlingly brilliant, and remind you how far you have to go. This guy, for example: http://blog.sigfpe.com/ http://blog.sigfpe.com/ The nice thing about this kind of ego-shrinking is that it's combined with inspiration to do something about it, rather than just feeling deflated. There's so much interesting stuff out there.
  • starkness 16y ago
    Your experience sums up the research in this article to a tee: http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/ http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/ "Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts." tl;dr: Praise kids for their hard work, not for being smart.
    • _delirium 16y ago
      To some extent education tries to do that, but imo it's pretty bad when it really does it consistently. The person who spent a lot of hours on a-not-really-working project gets a better grade than the person who actually produced an impressive result, but managed to pull it off the night before and made the mistake of not hiding the fact that they didn't spend a lot of hours on it. That's not actually that uncommon in college, since there's a huge range of ability and prior experience in a typical class, and professors do try to base some of their grade on how earnestly the student appeared to work on it: to save face, they can't give an A to the student who did the whole semester project in a day, even if the result was objectively better than most of the others. End result of that approach is that the kids learn that hard work matters, but results don't. Now you have someone who'll optimize for "hours put in", worrying more about whether they're impressing the boss with their work ethic than about the quality of the end results they're delivering. Sort of a common feature of corporate culture, where the guy who stays late and comes in weekends is praised, even if the guy who went home at 5pm every day is the one producing most of the working code. The other lesson you learn from that is: if you solve a major problem in two hours, withhold the result and pretend you spent two weeks working on it, then present it later and get praised for working hard on the problem for two weeks and solving it.
• hasenj 16y ago
  Not from any specific person, but the idea that you have to step outside your comfort zone and do X and Y even though it doesn't come naturally to you. Every time I did that things got messed up and I ended up worse than I was before. If you're outside your comfort zone, you will act in non-authentic ways, and when you're not being authentic, you can't be the best possible you. Examples of stepping outside comfort zone: * Wear a suite and act professional for a job interview * Say hi to random strangers so you can make friends (even though you're introverted and doing this makes you look like a fool) * Go to social events where you don't know anyone there. EDIT: thanks for the down votes. Now let me explain why this is bad advice: - Act not like yourself for a job interview: This is bad because instead of showing them your strong points, you'll be busy trying to hide your weak points and seem like a "good, obedient" employee. Eventually you fail at both: your bad points will still show, while your good points won't get a chance. - Begging friendship from random strangers: Makes you look like a fool, insecure person that nobody wants to be friends with. EDIT2: I'm not talking about little steps. Venturing into new areas is fun. Throwing yourself into the middle of an extremely uncomfortable situation is completely different. One of the reasons I found "step outside your comfort zone" to be bad advice is that they never tell you how far to go and when you should stop. It seems consequential that you never know when you have gone too far, because you're outside the zone where you can use your intuition sensibly. If you were able to tell that you've gone too far, then by definition you're still inside your comfort zone. If something only makes you a little bit uncomfortable, it will feel like it's still inside your comfort zone, and if you're trying to follow the "step outside your comfort zone" advice, you'll be tempted to go even further.
  • brendoncrawford 16y ago
    As a musician doing non-mainstream music, I hear this a lot too. People will say something like, "just write somethin catchy and mainstream and you will make a million dollars!". What they don't understand is that you cannot force yourself to create something that is not in your head, no matter how "simple" it seems.
  • rbranson 16y ago
    It seems like you didn't quite apply the idea of "step outside of your comfort zone" correctly. It's about little steps, and repeated trying of things until you get it right. It means stop being so worried about what other people think and start being the person you want to be, not someone who's fearful of trying and doing new things. How do you think you learned most of your social behavior up to this point?
• amichail 16y ago
  The pressure to do well in school/university had a really negative impact on my life. Better advice would have been to find a way to make money that I enjoy.
• tiffani 16y ago
  "Watch your mouth." and "Wait your turn." Perhaps, it's something girls are harassed about more than guys, but until I stopped following that "advice" (early college), things were quite mediocre for me.
  • cubicle67 16y ago
    Perhaps it's time for some Harry Enfield http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjxY9rZwNGU&feature=youtube_gdata_player http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjxY9rZwNGU&feature=youtu...
• ryan-allen 16y ago
  I wouldn't stay it stuffed up my life, but I wish I hadn't listened to it: "Music is a hobby." I'm catching up though.
  • jberryman 16y ago
    Maybe that's just what you needed to hear! you probably have a greater understanding of what music means in your life than someone who went to a conservatory straight out of highschool or made it big in a band without trying.
  • antareus 16y ago
    Expand on that.
• CWIZO 16y ago
  "You must go to college" by everyone. What a waste of perfectly good 3 years (I finally dropped out then).
  • watty 16y ago
    Everyone says you "must" go to college? I don't think so...
• zaidf 16y ago
  Its hard for me to find any piece of advice that 'messed' up my life per say. From the sounds of it, it seems like I'm blaming some advice when I should be accepting majority of the blame myself.
• usinglogin 16y ago
  "You're time will come": You will make it your time. "Only geniuses go to Harvard": No they don't. Hard working people and wealthy people go to Harvard (those not mutually exclusive)... not geniuses. Intelligence doesn't mean crap, only hard work. This isn't a dig against Harvard, just a dig against people who don't go to Harvard but think they know how to get in. "Be a generalist": Bullshit. Nobody wants to hire a generalist, they a php rockstar or a rails god.... not a guy who can do mediocre programming in 10 languages. Specialization is the key. "Read widely": That is an excuse from people who like to read widely for its own sake, but the truth is FOCUSED reading is a better strategy. You'd be better off reading two programming book than reading one programming book and a novel.
• cookiecaper 16y ago
  I've found most "conventional wisdom" to be bad advice. "Wait for marriage", "wait for kids" are both bad advice. "Go to college" is not necessarily bad advice, but the universal expectation that one will do so is bad, and it is bad advice for a lot of people. There's a lot of other bad advice out there.
  • nostromo 16y ago
    Why are "wait for marriage" and "wait for kids" bad advice?
    • Tichy 16y ago
      Because suddenly you are too old.
      • Jach 16y ago
        Not buying it, old people get married all the time and some even adopt kids. But I'm in the camp that thinks one should wait for marriage and kids, not horribly long, but wait, so don't listen to me. :) I know a lot of people in Utah who got married way too soon and suffered for it.
        • Tichy 16y ago
          I wouldn't advise to marry and have children age 18. But I just had my first child and I am 38, wish I was younger. If my son had children at the same age I do, I would be 76. Will I still be a fit and healthy grandfather by then? Also, how fit will I be age 50, to play soccer with my boy? Better late than never, though - I am certainly happy.
          • Evgeny 16y ago
            Also, how fit will I be age 50, to play soccer with my boy? Please try to use this as a source of motivation for staying fit, rather than as a reason for sorrow.
• jiganti 16y ago
  You're special.
  • delano 16y ago
    That was advice?
    • seltzered 16y ago
      Not quite advice, but was a running theme of what many millenial-generation kids were told in the US (think "Mr. Rogers" era). Many argue it's made use seem overly demanding to others, particularly bosses.
      • benreyes 16y ago
        Though I think some of the thinking given to millenial-generation kids in making them think that they can be what ever they want to be for example an astronaut, is still useful. It's just most people forget about it or give up on that thinking. The naivety in thinking that you could become an astronaut or something special will probably mean you are more likely to reach your goal or at least go further than other people. I guess if you believe you have the ability to change the world, you probably will.
        • seltzered 16y ago
          yeah, I agree. I thought about this today and realized some of the worst advice we got was from our middle school principal telling us to be well-rounded and develop real-world skills. It's the opposite of forcing yourself to focus on things that make you be "special". And it made me more concerned about fitting into little social groups than focusing on what I want to do.
  • AndrewMoffat 16y ago
    What's with all the jaded young adults on here and reddit blaming their shortcomings on being told that they were special? My take on it is this: "you're special" is not a declaration of your supposed super-human intellect or abilities, but a reminder of your uniqueness and independence as a person who can choose to distinguish yourself if you choose to. The moment you stop believing in that is the moment you cease to be special, by that definition. Don't reject the wrong mantra. "You're special" is fine. "Special means you're better" is what causes you problems.
• kabdib 16y ago
  Close call: My dad (a college prof) saying to me (when I was 17) that computers were a dead end and that I should do something else. I ignored his advice. I've had a fantastic career and shipped a bunch of different products. 30 years later, he apologized to me.
  • robryan 16y ago
    Parents still to this day share this sentiment. Although my Dad has come around a lot in recent years when I've explained how some internet startups have done and the types of jobs available in programming. Plus it's easier to see now, Dad uses the internet every day now so it's easier to see how much job opportunity is there.
  • po 16y ago
    When people ask me about "computers" I often remind them that it's the only skill that will allow you to work in just about any industry. Art, hard science, medicine, whatever... If I were a blacksmith in a mediaeval village I would make sure my kids knew that they were tool makers, not blacksmiths. People will always need tools weather they are made in a forge or a factory.
  • davidandgoliath 16y ago
    Similar scenario -- though I admit, a lot of what I was doing on the computer during those years was probably 'deadend'. A lot of my formative years were spent digging into MUDs, building computers & just random nerdery as a whole. Despite a lot of it simply consisting of mucking around, a lot of generic information and knowledge stuck consistently. Despite being told frequently I was 'wasting my life away', in the process I was slowly sponging in information that would later assist me in launching a startup that nowadays employs even my father. :) I do wish that early on my parents were more supportive of my passions and interests, and it's a mistake I hope not to make with my own children. When you see passion in someone, be it with any topic, it shouldn't matter whether or not it's something that can generate financial stability. These days with the sheer size of the internet -- there's a market (rule 34 I think ;)). Do what you love, find interesting ways to fuel others with your passion and you can make just about anything pay the rent.
• YuriNiyazov 16y ago
  "You should buy a house in the ghettos of Philadelphia, property values are skyrocketing".
• ible 16y ago
  "Go with the flow" - it's ok for being friendly, but crap for making the life you want to live "Run away from a fight" - A knife fight sure, but in grade school and in metaphor it's pretty bad advice. "Smart is sufficient" - it's not even necessary
• johnrob 16y ago
  It didn't mess up my life, but when I was in high school the conventional wisdom was that being well rounded helped you get into good colleges. I spent a lot of time playing team sports and the saxophone; neither of those are hobbies of mine today. I wish I had spent some of that time doing something that would still be relevant to me today, like programming (there are a LOT of successful founders that started programming in their early teens; I didn't start until college).
  • delano 16y ago
    Starting early is not a requisite for success. I started programming when I was 19 or 20 (not that I'm necessarily a successful founder but I have found some measure of success during my IT career). Your knowledge in various domains likely helps you in ways that aren't immediately apparent. (Team sports, for example, are great for health but also for social skills.)
    • johnrob 16y ago
      Starting early certainly isn't a requisite, but it can be a pretty big advantage in most fields.
      • nostrademons 16y ago
        The big advantage is that you can get to your mid-20s with 10 years of experience and lots of practice, and then be mentally ready without having the commitments of a house, wife, kids, mortgage, etc. tying you down. You can get those same advantages by delaying dating & childbirth until later in life, although then you sacrifice in that your kids may never know their grandparents.
        • timr 16y ago
          When it comes to software, I don't think starting age matters that much, except perhaps on the margins. The field changes too quickly for amateur technical experience from 10+ years ago to have much of an impact on quality. The kind of experience that ages well is the kind that you can't easily get as a teenager with a Linux install. Also, every time I interview someone, I ask them how they got into programming. So far, there's been no strong correlation between quality and years of experience. The people who started programming in elementary school are just as likely to be crappy as those who didn't start until college. The strongest predictor I've seen for engineer quality is college GPA. People who work hard and get things done also tend to get good grades.
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• hellrich 16y ago
  Complete your degree - if you don't believe in it, it isn't worth the time!
• groaner 16y ago
  I learned to resist peer pressure and defer gratification early on. Sound advice, except I followed it to an extreme. Now I dress like a slob and have no motivation in life, and I don't even care.
• tommusic 16y ago
  It's interesting: when I look back on my life so far, I don't feel like my path has been messed up significantly because of any particular piece of advice. There were times in my life where acting on a particular bit of advice kept me from getting what I wanted. Those were frustrating times. But those times caused me to learn to deal with being frustrated; to stop and reflect on why I was reacting with such emotion. There were times when the advice that I received was unclear, which made it easy for my motivation-to-follow to falter. I would waste time and not get homework done. Familiarity with a topic would grow more faint and my class performance would show it. And then I started to learn how to best use my time to learn the material. (In small groups, using multiple forms of engagement; reading/writing/speaking/listening) The advice that, on-balance, seemed least helpful at the time: * "such-and-such will happen when you least expect it" * "don't ever give up" * "don't run with scissors" But in later reflection these lead me to different conclusions about these same items: * The advisor understands that you're in pain, but really likes who you are when you're not moping. They're trying to help you get there, but they're not sure how. * Admitting defeat is OK, and you can change focus (pivot) without stopping (giving up) entirely. This is a loophole. Use it. * This has always been a good idea. Still is. The advice I would offer would be to use advice wisely. Don't follow it blindly; reflect often, and be adaptable.
• SRSimko 16y ago
  Go to school, get a good education, go get a good job and live happily ever after. Guess what the world changes and that doesn't cut it anymore. Now I believe in making my own future.
  • watty 16y ago
    There's a lot of hard work required as well but that advice has worked for many people including myself.
• ora600 16y ago
  "You should be a DBA, its a good career for a woman". Even though DBAs have more flexible hours, I wouldn't recommend a job with a pager to my worse enemies. 10 years later and I'm still trying to come up with a good way to get rid of it.
  • tomjen3 16y ago
    Loose it in a cup of tea. It kills electronics very well, and the tea taste a little better for it.
• Jach 16y ago
  I'm not exactly sure how to word it, and I'm not aware of a single source who advised me on it, but it seems like there's a pervasive feeling in society that "If I want to learn something, I need a teacher." I outgrew this mental model around 14, and now in college I feel so much further ahead of many of my peers who are lucky to have taken a HS programming course once before choosing a programming degree. I wish I had outgrown it much earlier, I feel like there was a lot of lost potential in my earlier years that I wasted because I had no interest in teaching myself things. Who knows how devastating this "cultural advice(?)" is to people who still haven't outgrown it.
  • Mongoose 16y ago
    I can definitely echo your feeling of lost potential in my earlier years. I too am a current college student and wish I could go tell my 15-year-old self to learn Python instead of spending most of my free time playing Counter-Strike.
  • rudd 16y ago
    The truth isn't that you don't need a teacher. You may be able to learn everything from a book or solitary practice, like yourself. But others probably can do that sometimes, may sometimes need a teacher, may sometimes need to discuss with peers, etc. And I don't mean that some people are visual learners, or readers, etc. I mean that people learn different topics in different ways, on different days, with different contexts, etc. I think the cultural norm should be that if one way of learning isn't working for you, try another way. Practice, read it yourself, ask a friend for help, get a tutor, whatever you need.
    • Jach 16y ago
      Absolutely, I'm not saying teachers are never useful or needed. I'd much rather have a conversation with someone familiar with a large codebase to get a feel for it than diving in and creating assumptions. But the bad advice is that a teacher of some form is essential, and that's wrong-headed, and it paralyzes people when asked instead to not just solve a well-rehearsed problem, but actually to discover the problem that needs solving.
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• bstar 16y ago
  Without a doubt, I would say all advice on my college education. The first bad advice I got was that I absolutely needed to go to a small school that would give me more personal time in the classroom. This ended up stressing me greatly in school... I wouldn't find out until long after I graduated that I excel greatly in environments that require me to investigate and learn on my own with some guidance. The other poor advice was that county college is only for loosers. My advisors and teachers impressed this on me bigtime. In retrospect, county college would have been awesome to buy me a year or so until I was able to maturely handle a challenging curriculum. I needed some time to learn how to learn and gain some confidence in my ability to learn.
• drpancake 16y ago
  My parents: "Economics is where the money is; don't switch to Computer Science" Glad I ignored that one. At universities in the UK, you choose a degree at the beginning then that's it.
  • pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    That's not true of all institutions in the UK - you can transfer credits between Unis and you can change courses with in them too. Some courses are harder to switch between for sure. After 2 years of Uni (4year course) I had option still to graduate in 3 different faculties.
• TotlolRon 16y ago
  Things along these lines: As long as you've made something that a few users are ecstatic about, you're on the right track. ... It may take a while, but as long as you keep plugging away, you'll win in the end. That's not realllllllly how it works in the valley.
• j_baker 16y ago
  "Go to college, get a degree, and get a good GPA." It isn't that this is necessarily bad advice. It's just that it was bad advice for me.
• chegra 16y ago
  "Quit your job and start a company" - Yep, that totally didn't work out as I had hoped. Stuff that are easy to do when there is no pressure suddenly become impossible. Thinking about it as walking on a board one foot wide on the ground, easy right. Now, put that board one thousand foot up in the air now try walking on it, not so easy now that your life depends on it. For some bootstrapping after your normal work hours is a better path to startup. "Change the system from the inside" - If you are apart of a system that encourages physical and mental abuse of its members, don't try to change it, leave. Systems include: Fraternity, Brotherhoods, Cults, Gangs, Churches, Country, Jobs and the like. In general don't try to change systems, just move to a better one.
  • spirulina 16y ago
    Amen to that.
• rfrey 16y ago
  Worst advice for me was "don't let any doors close", "keep your options open", and variations on that theme. Did a lot of damage because it sounds so reasonable, yet the net effect is to prevent or forestall commitment.
• codeglomeration 16y ago
  Nothing that messed up my life, but the pieces of bad advice I'm glad I dropped are "you should try to please everyone" and "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" which are a rough translation of two Romanian proverbs encouraging obedience and complacency. As soon as I ignored those I started accomplishing meaningful things.
• frankus 16y ago
  Don't have sex until you're older.
• Almaviva 16y ago
  Variations of "you'll just meet someone" and "dating will get easier in your 30s" and "the important thing is you do well in school, and everything else will follow". Fuck that. Someone should have shaken the shit out of me when I was 18, forced me to go to a school with a normal gender ratio, and gotten me to strike while the iron was still hot while I still had some sexual attraction to women, and never take for granted any time a woman is vaguely interested.
  • orangecat 16y ago
    Right there with you. My life would probably be much better had I spent more (well, any) time drinking and partying in high school and college. The traditional advice to be responsible and avoid peer pressure is correct for the majority of the population, but geeky introverts need to develop social skills much more than we need to incrementally improve our GPAs. "dating will get easier in your 30s" Supposedly this really is true for men. Not for me yet.
    • Almaviva 16y ago
      > Supposedly this really is true for men. This is not just untrue for me, but dramatic and stark in a way that has surprised me a lot. I have some really awkward hair loss and I get mistaken for a college student at age 34, and that doesn't help. To a couple orders of approximation, women now have absolutely and universally no sexual interest in me, and this just wasn't true in my 20s. (This is despite me having more money now and being lot more sure of myself, more comfortable with people, less shy, and in better physical shape.)
  • AndrewMoffat 16y ago
    Someone should have shaken the shit out of me when I was 18, forced me to go to a school with a normal gender ratio, and gotten me to strike while the iron was still hot Why is it someone else's responsibility to make you live your life the "right" way? I thought your bad advice post was fine up until you were blaming other people for how you lived your life.
    • 16y ago
• hackerdude 16y ago
  In 1987 or 88, when I was a teenager, my parents, noting my emerging passion for coding, tried to sign me up for a Explorer Scout "post" whose focus was programming. This should have been good, but I came back from the first meeting not wanting to go back. I just didn't click with the group, and the language/environment they were using (Fortran on an IBM System/3x0 variant, I think) were of no interest to me. This upset my father, in particular, because he was convinced that the programming I was doing in my bedroom (C, on a Commodore Amiga) was of no value. Programming a personal computer was fine for a kid, but making a career in software meant doing "serious" work, which to my (very non-tech) parents, meant programming IBM mainframes. In retrospect, their career advice was about as bad as it could have been. I was learning exactly what I should have been learning. I was completely right to ignore them and continue doing what I was doing. Except I could never shake the idea of "serious" vs. "not serious" software development. So while I continued to learn C, then learned C++, when I finished college in the mid-90s I went into a "serious" industry . Despite living within walking distance of Netscape's old headquarters, I completely missed out on the dot-com era, justifying it by telling myself that I was doing "serious" work. And while I've never been unemployed, until this year, I can't say I ever did anything remotely notable, or fun, either. And worse of all: it became obvious within the last 3-4 years that my industry was a career dead-end. If I stuck with it, I'd eventually be one of those stereotypical unemployed, and unemployable, 40-something developers. But there is a silver lining: over the last couple of years I started playing around with some new technologies and ended up reinventing myself. Earlier this year, I quit my old job and am now working for a startup that's doing stuff that's nowhere near my Dad's old idea of "serious". But I've treated my new job seriously, working harder than at any time in my career. And I'm happier now than I've been in nearly a decade.
• Tycho 16y ago
  Stuff they tell you in Sunday school which is impossible/undesirable in practical terms yet leaves a lingering sense of unworthiness about one's own character and a lack of healthy ambition: - love thy neighbour - don't be selfish - don't care about money/possessions - don't judge Oh, and also: install OpenOffice.org
  • larrywright 16y ago
    What about those things is undesirable? Leaving religion aside, it seems like all those (OpenOffice aside :) lead to a much happier state of mind than the alternative.
    • Tycho 16y ago
      1. Automatically loving thy neighbour (ie. everyone) is a ridiculous notion. You love the people that are most important to you, that deserve your utmost respect and kindness, so of course this will mean you love a select few. Furthermore, trying to think up reasons why you should love any random neighbour would be an exhausting exercise in self-deception. Plus if you don't love people for their qualities, but instead for the mere fact of their existence, then your love doesn't mean anything. So not only does this advice set a near impossible task, but it devalues real love. 2. Obviously being an inconsiderate jerk is a bad life strategy, but it's easy to embrace 'unselfishness' as the reason for not pursuing your talents until you reach brilliance, or not maximizing your earning potential. Most people don't have the energy to live their lives in the service of others (becoming aid workers or whatever), but many dabble in a sort of self-congratulatory mediocrity. Also breeds an unhealthy resentment for the entrepreneurs and geniuses that propel our civilization. 3. Not caring about money/possessions, all the while enjoying the material comfort brought by your parents' or society's wealth, is a sure fire way to end up in a situation when you don't have that comfort anymore. At which point you'll realize that you really do care about money/possessions, because you can't pretend anymore, reality has caught up with you. 4. 'Judge not and ye shall not be judged' is another ridiculous notion. Obviously it should be 'judge, and expect to be judged' - which leads to principles and integrity. Of course Christians want you to have principles/morality etc., but simultaneously to refrain from pronouncing judgement on those that fail to meet these standards. This means the bad people get away with a lot of stuff, and also makes you timid and unsure about what's right. Nothing's anchored, everything's a case of 'who knows what I would have done in their shoes.' Undermines your own will/agency (just say what you would do in their shoes, or what they should have done), and self-esteem (your only a noble person because you have an easy life blablabla) In short these sorts of teachings make you constantly unsure of your place in the world and encourage poor career decisions.
• J3L2404 16y ago
  No advice messed up my life, I did.
• jraines 16y ago
  "Houses always go up in value" -- paraphrase of David Allen's "Automatic Millionaire Homeowner" which convinced me to buy a place in Atlanta in 2005. Could've been a lot worse, but taking on a mortgage & furnishing a place at 23 was not the best idea.
  • TGJ 16y ago
    They do go up. Wait 20 years and it will be worth more.
• starpilot 16y ago
  "Happiness comes from achieving goals" I achieved plenty, but realized late in college that constantly studying was a defense mechanism for depression and loneliness. It's my biggest college regret. I even think that if I had studied less and spent more time getting to know housemates and classmates, I would have been happier and more relaxed, leading to higher grades. Sharing life with others is a reward in itself though, which took me a while to understand.
• dedward 16y ago
  None. I messed it up all by msyelf.
• wyclif 16y ago
  "You should know what you want to do with your life by the time you start college." (Age 17 for me, US citizen.)
• petercooper 16y ago
  I wouldn't go quite as far as "messed up" but between 2003-2007 I was frequently hassled by people to "buy a house" because it "never goes down (much) in value." I argued that that was a nonsensical claim, although over the previous 30 years it was pretty much true (the UK dip in the early 1990s was quite short and localized). In mid 2007 I noticed prices continuing to go up and up and bit the bullet. Naturally, I exchanged contracts the very month before prices started to go down. Out of principle, I'm stuck with this house until it's worth more than I paid for it ;-)
  • sagarm 16y ago
    Your obligations are spelled out in the contract, and defaulting is (normally) a legitimate course of action. The bank and you made a mutually beneficial contract: the bank loans you money, and in return you promise to give them back their money plus interest or your collateral. If you've elected to assign a moral value to one of your options, it can only hurt you. I've never done this myself, so definitely make sure you know what you're getting into.
    • petercooper 16y ago
      That is not true in the UK (or much of the world). Indeed, people here are typically shocked to learn how flimsy US mortgages are, though I'm aware of abandonment as an option there (and I think it's totally crazy that they allow it - it's not at all beneficial for them to make a loss due to falling house prices). You can, of course, default but if they sell your property for less than the outstanding amount, you're still on the line for the difference and can be bankrupted over it. Hardly a moral choice when so much of your life can be disturbed over it. The "principle" I was referring to was not "not defaulting", btw, but not making a loss. I could sell, move, and take the loss, but I refuse, considering it'd put me in the tiny percentage of home owners who've ever made a loss. Sunk cost fallacy, sure, but I don't need to move yet, luckily.
• lisper 16y ago
  "Honesty is the best policy." This is quite possibly the single biggest lie we tell our kids. There are times when dissembling or even outright lying is the right thing to do. It's important to learn to recognize when telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is not the right thing to do. It's not easy.
  • nradov 16y ago
    It's still good advice for young children since they lack the judgment to know when a lie is appropriate. Gaining that judgment and learning when and how to lie is a natural part of growing up.
• imran 16y ago
  awesome comments guys ! i love hacker news :) btw totally agree with jdietrich and ericb ..
• ronnier 16y ago
  I was never told this, but I know it is said, and said often that "you can be whatever you want". I don't believe that, nor do I think it's healthy for children to be told it because it's flat out not true.
  • rradu 16y ago
    Why is it not true? As a child, future possibilities are endless. There's no need to set limits so early. I hold firm to the belief that I can do anything I set my mind to--even if it means failing a few times.
    • Jach 16y ago
      Insert story about a kid born to a family with a long history of shortness, say all under 5'6", it is very, very doubtful he will get to be in the NBA on that factor alone. Though in general I agree, we often overestimate the limits, that doesn't mean there are none, and I'd rather let the children explore than have a path set out for them before they're even teenagers.
  • coryl 16y ago
    I think you miss the point in that expression. It isn't advice, nor is it literal. They are words of encouragement, of optimism and hope. I don't even think kids understand what it means.
• a5seo 16y ago
  Advisor suggested I should go ahead and to start my next venture concurrent with my 3 yr earnout on the company I'd just sold. Long story short, my idea + my money + 25% of my time + nontechnical cofounder getting salary and 40% sweat equity = 9 mos of dev turned into 24, launching after several competitors, all seed money burned on dev, no money for marketing, slow sales ramp, running out of cash, selling my stake to another investor for 50% of what I paid. Company still exists, cash flow breakeven, but my equity is all but washed out. Had I focused 100% I would have 100% of a very nice micro ISV.
• grandalf 16y ago
  "Just do your best". This advice is intended to allow focused effort without harping on competitive aspects, but it has the effect of detaching the doer from any sense of responsibility for the outcome, and also leads to self-deception if you lie to yourself and claim that you did your best. Sometimes it's OK to do less than your best, other times your best isn't good enough. Results are what matter, so figure out what result you want and accomplish it.
• ashleyreddy 16y ago
  Growing up I though engineer meant making cool shit. But going to engineering school meant learning things from first pricipals and not making cool shit. I should have gone in to arts and gotten laid more while making stuff on my free time.
• etherael 16y ago
  That investing time and effort into the skills necessary to build things with technology is a waste because within a couple of years it will all be outsourced to third world countries and there will be no jobs left in this area for people in first world countries. I should develop my interpersonal skills, design and creative arts ability with a view to becoming a translator between large corporate insensibility and those that will have to actually get things done for them in the future in aforementioned third world countries. This was not 100% terrible advice, because it did make me actually look outside the sphere of science and technology into areas I was before utterly uninterested in and considered to be faintly grimy. However in retrospect the premise is utterly flawed and there would have been much, much better ways to expand my interpersonal skills without feeling guilty about being passionate about technology and actually getting things done with it myself. I got this advice in 2002. As long as I actually considered it useful, my life has been worse, as soon as I gave up on it, my life immediately got immensely better.
  • aikinai 16y ago
    I don't remember if anyone in particular gave me this advice, but it was definitely a prevailing notion around 2002 and it's probably the biggest reason I didn't study computer science in university. I didn't give up on technology entirely, but studied nanotech instead because I thought that was the next big thing and couldn't be outsourced so easily. Now that's only useful in a few huge companies or universities and I wish I had been programming all this time so I could do my own cool projects without millions of dollars.
• aelaguiz 16y ago
  My best friend told me re: having to pee at night "you just gotta go man otherwise you will just lay there and suffer" since that day I've not had a full nights sleep. I'll never forgive him.
  • iopuy 16y ago
    I don't know if this allegory for chasing your dreams or not but I like it.
• dmoney 16y ago
  I don't think anything messed up my life, but if I had it to do over again, I might choose music as a career and programming as a hobby, instead of vice versa.
• arithmetic 16y ago
  Well, this advice didn't mess me up but pushed me in the opposite direction. When I was a kid, my parents told me that little girls like me should study in a local college, get good grades, find a comfortable job (preferably an accountant), settle down in the same city (as my parents) and get married by 21 (years). My college was in a different city as compared to where I grew up. This really helped in teaching me how to live on my own. I took to computers, interned at a couple of companies and got hired by another software company, moved to the United States, and dated and married a fellow computer nerd a little over a month ago (let's just say I'm way over 21 now). I think I did well.
• Goosey 16y ago
  I believe I understand the intention of this entire thread: in order to flush out good advice try to first highlight 'bad advice'. However I hope that all those who read it and all those who posted in it remember something very important. Regret is suffering. It is being attached to a different reality that you "should" be experiencing that is somehow better than the reality you are in. Everything that happened in your life, every single stupid thing, was required/essential/instrumental in your life being exactly as it is right now. I hope we can make use of this thread as a means to help us guide future decisions without it functioning as a way to make us feel regret. Do not expend energy suffering over that which is not only out of your control, but an illusion. Your past is not reality: you are, right here, right now.
• GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
  Bad advice: Don't be a programmer, programmers can't find work and is miserable work. I had a major passion for it at the time (pre college) and had I taken this advice from everyone in my family, I would probably be working in McDonalds at this point.
• Aron 16y ago
  Skipped a grade in elementary. The relative physical immaturity circa puberty made socialization tougher, and the virtues of the move are dubious. I think I'd rather have done the reverse.
• jdietrich 16y ago
  Never, never, not in a million years, listen to a single word of advice uttered by someone who isn't happy with their life. They have absolutely nothing to teach you. This is strong stuff, granted, but I think it is tremendously important. Every single piece of bad advice I have ever received was from someone who didn't like their life. If you're unhappy, you have two basic options. You can do something to make yourself happier, or you can rationalise a reason why happiness isn't possible. The former is generally a steady upward slog. The latter is like quicksand - the longer you're there, the more solidly you become stuck. All the bad career advice I got was from people who didn't like their job. Some believed that jobs were just inherently unpleasant, so you might as well go for the unpleasantness that pays the most and gives the best pension. Some believed that good jobs were just inaccessible for 'the likes of us', so there's no point getting you hopes up. Some were so uncertain of their employability that they took the first job offered to them and never dared do anything to jeopardise it. I heard rationalisations dressed up as philosophy, as ethics, as macroeconomics, but they were rationalisations all the same. Learning from the mistakes of others is useful and productive, but an unhappy person can never provide any insight into how to be happy. Either they don't know what would make them happy, or worse, they do know but won't do it. Never underestimate how hard someone will work to rationalise why they just can't go back to college or start their own business or visit Europe or leave their awful wife. When seeking advice, ignore status, intelligence and experience. Seek out the happy people, they're the only people who can help you.
  • berntb 16y ago
    I buy the implication one way, but not the other. >>When seeking advice, ignore status, intelligence and experience. Seek out the happy people, they're the only people who can help you. That argument needs that I would become happy following the same path as the person giving advice. That is just not true for quite a few happy people I know.
  • olalonde 16y ago
    > Never, never, not in a million years, listen to a single word of advice uttered by someone who isn't happy with their life. Out of curiosity, are you happy with your life? :)
• hugh3 16y ago
  Y'know, I've racked my brain and I can't recall ever following any bad advice. I can remember a lot of good advice that I didn't follow, though. Conclusion: maybe I'm just not very good at following advice.
• ohyes 16y ago
  Bad advice can't mess up your life. Taking action on bad advice can mess up your life, but the advice itself can't do anything. I can't think of any examples of situations where I took particularly bad advice, but if I did, it is totally on me. From that perspective; that I am in control and making the decisions in my life... I can't really say that any of the decisions that I have made have 'messed up' my life. Whatever I've done, it clearly seemed like a good idea at the time. I probably couldn't have made the decision any differently. (I find this kind of an interesting paradox, as my agency with regard to one thing, bad advice, implies my lack of agency with regard to my own bad decisions).
• delinquentme 16y ago
  Attractive females are scarce... turns out females actually out number males ...
• neworbit 16y ago
  "People are mostly good"
  • alexro 16y ago
    Maybe you were extremely unlucky or mostly in the unusual situations, but people ARE mostly good, for me and other I know. Also, think about this: if people were mostly bad and that would mean they were getting worse and worse every next generation (because all the good ones were 'eaten' by the bad ones), how it'd have been right now? I think our world isn't THAT horrible!
• iopuy 16y ago
  Study Project Management instead of Computer Science, then you can manage teams of Computer Scientists!
• laxj11 16y ago
  "don't try too hard" I used to be a star student/great work ethic. then i figured that i was working too hard thanks to this advise and my work ethic became horrible and i am struggling to keep my grades. always work at full capacity. itll get you places in life
• buckwild 16y ago
  "I want you to hit me as hard as you can." A whole downward spiral started from there. Until I hit bottom. :-D
• kadavy 16y ago
  "You should buy a house - it's the best investment you can make!" This was the advice I was given countless times when I lived in Nebraska in the early 00's, at my first job out of college. Thank God I didn't listen. It just didn't make any sense: I was 23 years old, had plenty of talent, and could't wait to get out of Nebraska, but I was supposed to buy a house? I couldn't think of a worse way to spend my money, time, and freedom. Instead of spending my evenings fixing up my "house," I was blogging and learning to code. Instead of spending my money on a mortgage and property taxes, I bought GOOG & AAPL. After a few years, a startup in Silicon Valley found me, liked my blog, and moved me out to California. Once I was done working for other people, I had enough of a stock portfolio to fund starting my own business. If I had followed that advice, I would still be in Nebraska, would owe more than my house would be worth, and would hate my job/life. "The best investment you can make" is always in yourself.
  • evgeny0 16y ago
    +1 I think many people like houses as investments because they FEEL so "real" and tangible - you can touch them! Feelings are not a good way to decide what to invest in, however.
    • syllogism 16y ago
      People also like houses because they've seen them go up all their life. In their anecdotal experience, it was the best investment. But the fact that house prices rocketed up in their lifetime is exactly the problem! People think it's a good investment for precisely the reason it's a terrible investment! The property bubble in Australia hasn't burst yet, so I'm still listening to this. It's painful. Sometimes I find it hard not to advise people to sell their houses now...
• thingie 16y ago
  Anything coming from people significantly older than me, who are still talking about how they wanted to live their lives 20 or 30 (even 40) years ago, in a world completely different from the current one.
• bromley 16y ago
  "Just do it, you've got nothing to lose." In my experience, the people that make this statement rarely understand opportunity cost. It took me years to figure out that it's OK to let new opportunities pass you by if pursuing them would take your time away from the opportunities you're already committed to. The more successful you get, the more opportunities come your way, so I think this is something successful people have to figure out eventually. If you make a success of one opportunity, it's always at the expense of another. It's good to be selective.
• mindcrime 16y ago
  Pretty much everything I was ever told about love, dating, sex and romance, prior to discovering the "seduction community" a couple of years ago. Then again, it's not that a lot of the advice I got about women was bad, it just wasn't useful. Take the stock "be confident" tidbit for example... well, that's not bad advice (in that being confident is not harmful) but it's not actionable advice, because telling someone who isn't confident to "be confident" is useless. I also bought into the generic "there's somebody for everybody, don't look for a girl, you'll just stumble into somebody one day and it'll happen if it's mean to" crap. Uuuuggggghhh... Outside of that, not much. But I tend to be pretty selective about the advice I take anyway... I'm the kind of person who tends to "keep my own council" more often than not (or, as my dad would say, I'm hard-headed). So I tend to ignore a lot of the well-meaning advice I've been given.. so I miss out by ignoring some good advice here and there, but I also avoid most of the bad advice. For the most part, I'd look back and say that approach has worked out well for me.
• wtimoney 16y ago
  "Don't bother people"
  • mahmud 16y ago
    That one hurt me bad. Life is much better after you gather a few restraining orders.
• loginitin 16y ago
  that "You should fear GOD"....its like a new born baby should fear his mother....utterly useless, rather opposite of truth GOD loves us as desperately as one can possibly imagine
• agentcris 16y ago
  GPA is just a number. It isn't important.
• amorphid 16y ago
  I listened to too many people who told me what to do instead taking in information and making up my own mind.
• radioactive21 16y ago
  Knock on wood, nothing that has ruined my life, but little things that I have caused me opportunities. -"Should I tell a recruiter or HR person about my current salary?" Friend of mine said always tell, reveal everything and be truthful. The reality, I got fucking low balled on salary, pretty much they would not go above $5K of what I currently made. It wasn't till I spoke to someone else that told me NEVER tell your salary, either say you rather not say or give a large range. So far giving a range has worked out for me every time. I give a large range and they tend to lean towards the high end. - Never talk about sex, politics and religion on a date. I found out it is the BEST way to quickly find out if you are compatible or not with someone. I am referring to if you're dating for a serious long term or possibly marriage relationship. Of course the way you talk about it does matter. I have done this to everyone of my dates and I can tell right away if it's wort the effort or not. Usually it's the politics that is the deal breaker.
• tomotomo 16y ago
  Worst advice: Go back to school and get your bachelors in the middle of an economic bubble. Wait til it bursts, you can go back then when it's harder to find lucrative work.
• tomotomo 16y ago
  Oh, don't get greedy when taking supposed insider tips about a stock :)
• mattm 16y ago
  Listening to any advice that wasn't what I truly believed. I believe the only valuable advice you can give to someone is along the lines of "Do what you feel is the right thing for you to do."
• zackattack 16y ago
  I think it's best to listen to advice from people with the results you want. Moreover, it's best to understand the rationale behind successful people's processes rather than copy them outright.
• goldroger 16y ago
  You only take as you've given, and now your hope is all but gone - though you lost your way (Now is not forever). But I know your pain. We all fall sometimes you're not the first ! But I know it hurts. In the end you'll find what you deserve, still I know it hurts.
• ajude 16y ago
  Going to University. Even though I had a great time, got two great degrees and actually found a really good job in the City I cannot help but feel why I couldn't have gone straight to work skipped all this debt and invested even more money/time in other endeavours like getting solid operational experience in a company. For instance, my head of opts at my firm built the biggest mutual fund in the UK around the age of 20.
• motxilo 16y ago
  "There is nothing unfixable but death". Bullshit, mom.