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It’s not necessarily about how hard it is, but what’s the ROI on learning a skill. If soldering was something I did at work or if I often repaired my own electr
by caseyy 2y ago
It’s not necessarily about how hard it is, but what’s the ROI on learning a skill. If soldering was something I did at work or if I often repaired my own electronics, then it could even be worth learning it if it took a month of evenings. But as I’d not have many of the tools and schematics to do component level repair on today’s electronics and I almost never need to solder anything at my software engineering job, so this skill would be used maybe once or twice in a decade on a hobby project, it is mostly not worth investing even one weekend.
We can learn a lot of skills that are useless. Coming from a conservative family, I learned to play the violin and piano at a very young age instead of spending time with friends. These are skills I never have any use for and I’d rather just have some better memories from my childhood. Even if learning to play piano was relatively easy — with one weekly lesson over about 6 months it is extremely doable.
Those are sort of the real costs and benefits of learning skills. Easy or hard doesn’t mean necessarily that it’s worth or not worth learning.
- ifyoubuildit 2y agoRespectfully, you're over thinking it. In the time you took to write this post (what was the ROI on that?), you could have soldered your first thing. Unless you're really not interested, you should just do it.
- caseyy 2y agoTouché
- grobbyy 2y agoHonestly, learning things and doing projects together brings memories too. If that wasn't the case, your family was doing it wrong. Plenty of kids jam together in a garage, have awesome memories from the school band, or otherwise. Great memories are formed. Or sitting around a camp fire playing a harmonica or a guitar. If you're learning "instead of" rather than "as a means to," well, there's your problem.
- ssl-3 2y agoLearning how to solder (and to solder very well) is much easier than learning to play the piano or the violin. It's also tool-using skill that changes the way one thinks about stuff; it opens doors. These days I'm fairly comfortable and confident with ordering custom PCBs to support various hardware and software projects. This lets me build stuff that I would not have imagined without the ability to solder. I don't do component level repair at work or at home if it goes beyond changing out an obviously-bad electrolytic capacitor or something, but I have rescued many things quickly and inexpensively by swapping things like obviously-bad electrolytic caps. That saves me money, and by extension it also saves me time. I wouldn't have ever considered any of that if I didn't know how to solder. Bonuses: Unlike learning piano, it doesn't take six months to learn soldering. And unlike the piano itself, the soldering kit is inexpensive, portable, and low-maintenance.