Good for you! I think one of the more important lessons is to realise that the programming community can be very disconnected from reality. This is especially t

Good for you! I think one of the more important lessons is to realise that the programming community can be very disconnected from reality. This is especially true for HN with its heavy focus on “interesting”. Judging by HN, things like Erlang, Rust and previously Go, would see a lot of attention and so would the Kubernetes way of doing CI/CD. Interestingly there hasn’t been a single Rust, Erlang or Go job offering available in the region of the world where I live since I started tracking them out of interest after a similar discussion on HN in 2019. There are however a constant demand for JAVA, C# and PHP developers. Because that’s the languages that are used in my region of the world, and as interesting as something like Rust might be, you’d have a hard time actually finding a job working with it. Even JavaScript isn’t that outspread here, if what you’re after is a full-time JavaScript job, because there is almost always a JAVA, C# or PHP backend to go along with it. You can of course find C++ job, there aren’t many, but there are some and I’m sure some of those places actually use Rust behind the scenes, but they don’t advertise it. Anyway, I think my point is that there can be a big disconnect between HN and what you’re actually going to end up working with, and you’re likely not going to work with just one toolset for your entire career either. Before I became a manager, I spent almost a decade working mainly with .Net, but with the rise of things like Azure Services I stated working more and more with Python and Powershell, these days I almost exclusively work with Python as I’m mostly handling data for BI or management purposes and let the programming get done by my developers. We have recently picked up PHP though, which you likely wouldn’t think would happen in 2021 if you go by how dead PHP is supposed to be. Well, it so happened that there is a big open source project in my country that utilises Drupal to create a “forms generating” CMS system, that we want to be capable of building modules for, which means we needed someone to learn PHP. Another really valuable lesson in humility I learned, and it took me years to do so, is related to the arrogance many software developers adopt when we get into the real world and start building things with the business side. Because our skill-set is so linked to dissecting and understanding problems, some of us adopt the unfortunate habit of thing we know... well everything. I’ve been arrogant enough to think I understood how our payment business process worked better than our director of payments, and of course I didn’t, but it was just so used to handling problems that I though I did. If you can, do better than me and apply your humility to everything, not just tool chains.