This is fantastic advice. When I moved to California in the jobless pit of the dot-com bubble burst, my first two jobs involved knocking on doors. The first w

This is fantastic advice. When I moved to California in the jobless pit of the dot-com bubble burst, my first two jobs involved knocking on doors. The first was soliciting donations for the D.A.R.E. program for a Sydcor company called "Synergistic Marketing Concepts". The second was pushing Electrolux vacuums. Nothing forces a geek to face their social ineptitude like knocking on a door and trying to convince an annoyed stranger that they should trust you enough to give you money. I was never very good at either job, but I managed to keep from starving. By getting from "terrible" to "barely competent", I learned some essential communication skills that have helped me greatly as a hacker. Besides direct sales, another good training is to do technical support for a terrible company; the worse the product, the better the experience. If it's related to finances in some way so that your customers don't get paid if it doesn't work, so much the better. When you hear raw unadulterated panic in the voice of a customer, and the rage that this panic creates, and learn to convince them that you're going to make everything alright, it forces you to have a lot of compassion for users.