5 ms·

Gaining Years of Experience in a Few Months

80 points by kiyanwang 2y ago

exmadscientist 2y ago
One thing you can do is expose yourself to a lot of different projects. I am in consultancy and man have I see some things. Someone told me once that a year of experience as a consultant is worth five as an employee. I kind of laughed it off... then I thought about the time I was responsible for managing eight projects as technical lead or sole technical person. They weren't all equally active, and I'm in hardware so there's always downtime as you're waiting for physical activities to take place, and that's well into the article's burnout zone (this was not sustainable or common practice for me), but... it does help explain why I can charge as much money as I do!
m463 2y ago
But can you do it and have a social life, a family, a balanced diet, good health, etc...
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  Good question, I decided to pace myself far from burnout and ended up only getting 90 years experience in 45 years. It was still worth it in a scientific field which each year builds rather than eventually drops out of support. There's almost nobody walking around with even 45 years of experience, and far less who made compounding progress. It was hard to pull ahead to begin with, and never-ending effort to maintain, but once there is a tangible edge you can leverage, then it only grows over time. I may be very lucky for good health right now, but maybe it can be due to not having a very similar social life, family, or diet, relative to the mainstream to begin with ;)
- simonw 2y ago
  Based on my own experience, probably not. When my startup was acquired a decade ago there was a six month period of extreme overwork and stress to get that deal over the finish line. Diet, health, social life all fell apart completely. I feel like it took a solid year to fully recover from that! (I was using a Withings digital scale at the time and you can pretty much plot the entire progress in terms of my weight gain.) Six months is pretty extreme, but I think the occasional three month period once every five years or so may be tolerable for a lot of people.
rlupi 2y ago
It reminds me about Barthes studium (applying yourself to gain skills) and punctum (applying your skills to make your masterpieces) in photography. I think we have the feeling of "gaining years of experience in a few months", when we experience multiple skills we developed coalesce into a synergic unity that enables rapid growth. The author touches it too: > To be honest, the whole process felt the final exam after my then 6 years spent at the company. To get the expected results I really had to leverage all my skills and energy. It's worth noticing that all the progress in his diagram measures one dimension, but this is a sour recipe to measure life as it pushes yourself beyond your boundaries into burnout. It's much better to measure things using Pareto frontiers: pick up the important dimensions that you want to measure a decision or your progress against, then ask yourself how you are doing when you fix some or all but one. If you pick your important dimensions in life based on your long-term goals, it's harder this way to push beyond your limits into burnout or to slack off if you strive to be close to the optimal frontiner.
- u_sama 2y ago
  > It's much better to measure things using Pareto frontiers: pick up the important dimensions that you want to measure a decision or your progress against This is very interesting, could you develop more on this as I feel like I haven't completed understood it
theodorewiles 2y ago
welcome to parenting
- bregma 2y ago
  Following that thought, and reading the article, I believe that if I really wanted to have a baby all I would need to do is to get 8 women together to work with my wife and we'd both be proud parents in just under a month.
1123581321 2y ago
I like the model. I might add percentage of time spent on work in addition to the intensity. Burnout gets you faster when you can’t fully turn your attention to your family and a fulfilling physical activity for a few hours.
Fin_Code 2y ago
Isn't this just saying apply more master hours faster? Its hours at the task not x time passing.
hnthrow90348765 2y ago
This is really distorting the literal meaning of "years of experience". The "1 year repeated 5 times" sentiment does the same thing. To do these conversions, you'd need a solid understanding of what each YOE entails, and there is no good or widely accepted definition on that, otherwise it would be the hiring standard and career path standard. I only say this because you can't literally put down that you gained 6 YOE on your resume - you will instead convert it to milestones and accomplishments and deliverables, all of which are completely understandable concepts and better suited to get your point across. Time to drop this flawed thinking IMO
- Swizec 2y ago
  There is 1 aspect of YOE that literally is tied to actual years and cannot be rushed. I will die on this hill. You are not a senior, if you haven’t stuck around on a project/product for 3 years to experience the lifecycle of your own amazing decisions turning into that awful stuff you need to maintain. It takes about 3 years, longer if you’re lucky. Cannot be rushed. The most dangerous engineers have about 5 years of experience. They have the skills and the big brains, but not yet the wisdom to keep it in check.
  - brianmcc 2y ago
    Totally. 5 years of - build and ship - then move around - repeat Is sorely lacking in vital important experience towards becoming a rounded senior.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    You need to stick around for 10 years or more. I've been on my current project for 15 years, and only now am I realizing how some of the things I did back then were bad. Now I'm stuck with those decisions, or I'm stuck trying to figure out how to fix them.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      Well, if salary compression wasn’t a thing and companies kept internal raises consistent with market rates, that might be tenable.
bloomingkales 2y ago
Unless you got absolutely fucked in the process, then you didn’t get years of experience in a few months.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  I don't think that's necessarily true, but I do believe you can gain more experience early in your career at the right job, vs being in for example an established Java or .NET environment. In my personal experience, I did a "traineeship" the one time and within a few months went from Java / web (jquery) to learning iOS native development / obj-c, scrum, working in a team, single page applications, NodeJS, etc etc etc. It was super valuable, but, granted, difficult to keep up for a long time because at one point the new experiences will dry up, unless you go job hopping.
Reeddabio 2y ago
It's wishful thinking to believe any of this works. When you get older, have bills to pay, have to work, you have to give something up. Those morning runs, playing warcraft, taking your kids to school, spending time with your wife in the evening. Something has to give, and for how long is the question.
- lamename 2y ago
  This should be pinned as the top comment on 80% of these kind of blog posts as a reality check. Don't get me wrong, I'm (relatively) young, ambitious, and love growth and learning. So I eat these posts up. But as I age and grow, I notice the challenge of the balancing act more and more.
  - thundergolfer 2y ago
    The post already contains the caution. "I wouldn’t do it every year, because I would probably collapse from exhaustion, but I’m grateful to have been able to contribute to such a project." Why should the comment be pinned when it doesn't even grasp that the blog post isn't advocating, at all, that people should be in high-growth sprint mode 24/7/365?
    - buildbot 2y ago
      I think because of that very error - it’s not advocating that, but it’s so easy to think you must always be like that, when reading articles like this.
      - KittenInABox 2y ago
        Articles like this are written and promoted expounding the benefits of this kind of productivity, regardless of the actual reality of it. It's not just easy to think it, its the cultural millieu to push people in this way.
      - throw10920 2y ago
        > I think because of that very error - it’s not advocating that, but it’s so easy to think you must always be like that, when reading articles like this. I've met hundreds of co-workers and literally none of them has ever advocated for an unbalanced work-life balance, except in the case of over-balancing towards life (that is, neglecting very reasonable duties at work, that are relied upon by others). I've also read hundreds of thousands of HN comments, and very, very few of them advocate for a bad work-life balance or spending all of your time and energy at your job, being vastly outnumbered by comments calling for balance. I don't see any evidence that "it’s so easy to think you must always be like that, when reading articles like this" - especially because only someone lacking basic critical thinking skills will think that a description of what something is, is advocating for doing that thing.
vunderba 2y ago
I'm not a fan of these types of posts because they're not really saying anything quantitative - it's just a bunch of a "feel good" text - so I'll throw my hat into the ring. What the author calls the "fast growth phase" - I call "walking the tightrope and/or knife's edge". Our minds are in a constant state of attempting to optimize away any task. This is why there's a huge difference in skill levels between a person who has driven a car for 5 weeks vs 5 years, but nearly zero difference between somebody who has driven a car for 5 years vs 50 years. The CHALLENGE is in constantly forcing your mind back to the knife's edge - and it varies from person to person. Back when I was a highschooler, I was unsatisfied with my sheet reading capabilities. To fix it, I - started playing only new sheet music - grabbed a old hymnal (from the 1950s) which are rhythmically simplistic but usu. have four voices. - Wrote a very simple app that generated random sheetxml - Borrowed a friend's sheet music for the organ (which has three staves) and tried to transpose it on the fly to play with just the two hands on the piano
- scarface_74 2y ago
  The author never said you should spend most of the time at the “fast growth” stage. But you should spend most of your time at the “learning” stage and go back to the “comfort” stage as outside life events happen or just to take a mental break
  - vunderba 2y ago
    Sure, I think you can just boil that down to learn to exercise basic moderation, and don't be manic. For myself, I find that our natural state is in the basic learning phase, so for me personally, I'm always trying to figure out ways to force myself back on the tight rope.
- ipaddr 2y ago
  There is a big difference between 5 and 50 years driving. Your insurance has stats to back this up and will give lower premiums. Now skills decline at 70 so that may offset some of it.
  - 2y ago
austin-cheney 2y ago
The zones of experience just screams of Vernor Vinge. Yes, experience compression is absolutely possible without sacrificing an appendage. This is actually an expectation for military officers and corporate executives. The solution is just to stay continuously busy. The counterpoint to this is alienation. Most people at the individual contributor level absolutely do not think about this. The problem then is that if you are that guy who is a 10x producer you are completely out of alignment from your peers. If you are in a line of work where people are replaceable cogs like Java and JavaScript this out of bounds levels of initiative is probably doing your career more harm than good.
nelsondev 2y ago
I would add another axis to the graph. So x axis would be pace at which you work, and y axis would be novelty of work. You can be burnt out doing fast paced repetitive work. It’s not always true the faster you go the more you learn.
snozolli 2y ago
Staying in the comfort zone means doing 5 times 1 year of experience. It’s safe, but you are taking a long term risk of becoming less relevant and end up reducing your options. This makes no sense to me. If you spend five years working on a tech stack that goes out of favor, then some will say you've wasted your time. Personally, I disagree, because experience is experience and what we do is learn, but good luck getting through an HR filter with that. This just seems like one of those "I'm the beneficiary of luck, now let me tell you how I credit myself for it" posts. My personal experience is that I've had the greatest growth when I was allowed to pursue what I'm interested in (e.g. coding styles, new libraries, new methods of structuring code such as functional vs OOP). When I get a meddling manager insisting that I do things some other way, I don't learn and grow nearly as much.
- Shorel 2y ago
  No tech current stack will go out of favour, because the reliance on LLMs will prevent new tech stacks from being used. We are stuck. Or software development will be a two-tiered system.
yamazakiwi 2y ago
Flow Theory - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
markus_zhang 2y ago
I agree with the experience. I myself had a few nights that learned so much just by burning candles on tough projects (comparing to my skills). But for anyone who wants to have such an experience for more than a few weeks, I believe they need to be strategic: - They need to figure out what area they need to work in early, like really early, preferably during/before college, because it is the first job that counts. They need to get in ASAP, because there is a hell lot of difference between someone starting at 10 and someone at 30; - They need to think strategically about which kind of people they want to marry to, or do they want a marriage at all. IMO, if they want to be high-achievers (it's not an accurate word, but you know what I mean), there are only two kinds of good partners -- comrades or servants. Comrades keep you motivated and can interact with you on the same page, while servants take away most of your distractions. Kids are 100% a time sinker even for the best of them, so don't get them too early; - They need to find a good mentor, or more, along the road, at least before they reach where they can grow by themselves. Or they are lucky to have an above average amount of perseverance (which I believe is defined by gene and early education -- again, mostly genetic) so they can throw themselves at any wall and still preserve; So basically, they need to be lucky. And if they are not that lucky, they need to be at least lucky enough to realize and think about it strategically at an earlier age (like, before 30, I think) and plan accordingly. They need to muscle into the positions they want. They need to push things and people around to make their own career paths.
tikhonj 2y ago
Pretty different from the blog post, but I've definitely had periods in (and out of!) my career where I learned a ton that weren't super-busy. I got to do some really high-leverage work in a strong environment with great colleagues, and the fact that I wasn't under a bunch of external/artificial pressure let me learn more (and accomplish more!) while still having plenty of time and energy for other things. Seems like most people really overvalue pressure and long hours, when those are neither necessary nor sufficient—hell, probably harmful—for doing and learning a lot. I'm not entirely sure why, but I expect a cultural "no pain, no gain" attitude is part of it. People want to feel like the pain they went through was worth something, and we're conditioned that anything that's worth doing takes pain, and the two attitudes reinforce each other.
- coffeeindex 2y ago
  > Seems like most people really overvalue pressure and long hours I think it’s likely just a difference in personality for people. Some people thrive in that environment and thus believe that it’s the “best way”. Others thrive in a more laid back environment and think the same
jongjong 2y ago
I've been self-improving at full capacity for 15 years straight (20 years if you count school years were I was distracted by school work). I basically worked with every piece of software you can imagine. Countless programming languages, C++ game programming, shaders, artificial neural networks (implemented from scratch), frontend, backend, microcontrollers (ATMEL), proof of stake blockchains, large range of databases, vector databases, kubernetes, TCP, websockets... I built successful open source projects, I implemented a lamport signature library from scratch with an improvement from Ralph Merkle to cut the signature size by half and also implemented a merkle signature tree library for key-reuse. I implemented a decentralised deterministic orderbook and DEX to trade between quantum-resistant blockchains which I also built from scratch... At the end of the day experience doesn't really matter. Socializing is far more important. You don't need much skill to go places. Most people who do well don't that know much outside of their niche. You don't need to be hustling like crazy to be a leading expert in one narrow domain.

80 points by kiyanwang 2y ago

One thing you can do is expose yourself to a lot of different projects. I am in consultancy and man have I see some things. Someone told me once that a year of experience as a consultant is worth five as an employee. I kind of laughed it off... then I thought about the time I was responsible for managing eight projects as technical lead or sole technical person. They weren't all equally active, and I'm in hardware so there's always downtime as you're waiting for physical activities to take place, and that's well into the article's burnout zone (this was not sustainable or common practice for me), but... it does help explain why I can charge as much money as I do!

m463 2y ago

But can you do it and have a social life, a family, a balanced diet, good health, etc...

fuzzfactor 2y ago
Good question, I decided to pace myself far from burnout and ended up only getting 90 years experience in 45 years. It was still worth it in a scientific field which each year builds rather than eventually drops out of support. There's almost nobody walking around with even 45 years of experience, and far less who made compounding progress. It was hard to pull ahead to begin with, and never-ending effort to maintain, but once there is a tangible edge you can leverage, then it only grows over time. I may be very lucky for good health right now, but maybe it can be due to not having a very similar social life, family, or diet, relative to the mainstream to begin with ;)
simonw 2y ago
Based on my own experience, probably not. When my startup was acquired a decade ago there was a six month period of extreme overwork and stress to get that deal over the finish line. Diet, health, social life all fell apart completely. I feel like it took a solid year to fully recover from that! (I was using a Withings digital scale at the time and you can pretty much plot the entire progress in terms of my weight gain.) Six months is pretty extreme, but I think the occasional three month period once every five years or so may be tolerable for a lot of people.

rlupi 2y ago

It reminds me about Barthes studium (applying yourself to gain skills) and punctum (applying your skills to make your masterpieces) in photography. I think we have the feeling of "gaining years of experience in a few months", when we experience multiple skills we developed coalesce into a synergic unity that enables rapid growth. The author touches it too: > To be honest, the whole process felt the final exam after my then 6 years spent at the company. To get the expected results I really had to leverage all my skills and energy. It's worth noticing that all the progress in his diagram measures one dimension, but this is a sour recipe to measure life as it pushes yourself beyond your boundaries into burnout. It's much better to measure things using Pareto frontiers: pick up the important dimensions that you want to measure a decision or your progress against, then ask yourself how you are doing when you fix some or all but one. If you pick your important dimensions in life based on your long-term goals, it's harder this way to push beyond your limits into burnout or to slack off if you strive to be close to the optimal frontiner.

u_sama 2y ago
> It's much better to measure things using Pareto frontiers: pick up the important dimensions that you want to measure a decision or your progress against This is very interesting, could you develop more on this as I feel like I haven't completed understood it

theodorewiles 2y ago

welcome to parenting

bregma 2y ago
Following that thought, and reading the article, I believe that if I really wanted to have a baby all I would need to do is to get 8 women together to work with my wife and we'd both be proud parents in just under a month.

1123581321 2y ago

I like the model. I might add percentage of time spent on work in addition to the intensity. Burnout gets you faster when you can’t fully turn your attention to your family and a fulfilling physical activity for a few hours.

Fin_Code 2y ago

Isn't this just saying apply more master hours faster? Its hours at the task not x time passing.

hnthrow90348765 2y ago

This is really distorting the literal meaning of "years of experience". The "1 year repeated 5 times" sentiment does the same thing. To do these conversions, you'd need a solid understanding of what each YOE entails, and there is no good or widely accepted definition on that, otherwise it would be the hiring standard and career path standard. I only say this because you can't literally put down that you gained 6 YOE on your resume - you will instead convert it to milestones and accomplishments and deliverables, all of which are completely understandable concepts and better suited to get your point across. Time to drop this flawed thinking IMO

Swizec 2y ago
There is 1 aspect of YOE that literally is tied to actual years and cannot be rushed. I will die on this hill. You are not a senior, if you haven’t stuck around on a project/product for 3 years to experience the lifecycle of your own amazing decisions turning into that awful stuff you need to maintain. It takes about 3 years, longer if you’re lucky. Cannot be rushed. The most dangerous engineers have about 5 years of experience. They have the skills and the big brains, but not yet the wisdom to keep it in check.
- brianmcc 2y ago
  Totally. 5 years of - build and ship - then move around - repeat Is sorely lacking in vital important experience towards becoming a rounded senior.
- bluGill 2y ago
  You need to stick around for 10 years or more. I've been on my current project for 15 years, and only now am I realizing how some of the things I did back then were bad. Now I'm stuck with those decisions, or I'm stuck trying to figure out how to fix them.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    Well, if salary compression wasn’t a thing and companies kept internal raises consistent with market rates, that might be tenable.

bloomingkales 2y ago

Unless you got absolutely fucked in the process, then you didn’t get years of experience in a few months.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago
I don't think that's necessarily true, but I do believe you can gain more experience early in your career at the right job, vs being in for example an established Java or .NET environment. In my personal experience, I did a "traineeship" the one time and within a few months went from Java / web (jquery) to learning iOS native development / obj-c, scrum, working in a team, single page applications, NodeJS, etc etc etc. It was super valuable, but, granted, difficult to keep up for a long time because at one point the new experiences will dry up, unless you go job hopping.

Reeddabio 2y ago

It's wishful thinking to believe any of this works. When you get older, have bills to pay, have to work, you have to give something up. Those morning runs, playing warcraft, taking your kids to school, spending time with your wife in the evening. Something has to give, and for how long is the question.

lamename 2y ago
This should be pinned as the top comment on 80% of these kind of blog posts as a reality check. Don't get me wrong, I'm (relatively) young, ambitious, and love growth and learning. So I eat these posts up. But as I age and grow, I notice the challenge of the balancing act more and more.
- thundergolfer 2y ago
  The post already contains the caution. "I wouldn’t do it every year, because I would probably collapse from exhaustion, but I’m grateful to have been able to contribute to such a project." Why should the comment be pinned when it doesn't even grasp that the blog post isn't advocating, at all, that people should be in high-growth sprint mode 24/7/365?
  - buildbot 2y ago
    I think because of that very error - it’s not advocating that, but it’s so easy to think you must always be like that, when reading articles like this.
    - KittenInABox 2y ago
      Articles like this are written and promoted expounding the benefits of this kind of productivity, regardless of the actual reality of it. It's not just easy to think it, its the cultural millieu to push people in this way.
    - throw10920 2y ago
      > I think because of that very error - it’s not advocating that, but it’s so easy to think you must always be like that, when reading articles like this. I've met hundreds of co-workers and literally none of them has ever advocated for an unbalanced work-life balance, except in the case of over-balancing towards life (that is, neglecting very reasonable duties at work, that are relied upon by others). I've also read hundreds of thousands of HN comments, and very, very few of them advocate for a bad work-life balance or spending all of your time and energy at your job, being vastly outnumbered by comments calling for balance. I don't see any evidence that "it’s so easy to think you must always be like that, when reading articles like this" - especially because only someone lacking basic critical thinking skills will think that a description of what something is, is advocating for doing that thing.

vunderba 2y ago

I'm not a fan of these types of posts because they're not really saying anything quantitative - it's just a bunch of a "feel good" text - so I'll throw my hat into the ring. What the author calls the "fast growth phase" - I call "walking the tightrope and/or knife's edge". Our minds are in a constant state of attempting to optimize away any task. This is why there's a huge difference in skill levels between a person who has driven a car for 5 weeks vs 5 years, but nearly zero difference between somebody who has driven a car for 5 years vs 50 years. The CHALLENGE is in constantly forcing your mind back to the knife's edge - and it varies from person to person. Back when I was a highschooler, I was unsatisfied with my sheet reading capabilities. To fix it, I - started playing only new sheet music - grabbed a old hymnal (from the 1950s) which are rhythmically simplistic but usu. have four voices. - Wrote a very simple app that generated random sheetxml - Borrowed a friend's sheet music for the organ (which has three staves) and tried to transpose it on the fly to play with just the two hands on the piano

scarface_74 2y ago
The author never said you should spend most of the time at the “fast growth” stage. But you should spend most of your time at the “learning” stage and go back to the “comfort” stage as outside life events happen or just to take a mental break
- vunderba 2y ago
  Sure, I think you can just boil that down to learn to exercise basic moderation, and don't be manic. For myself, I find that our natural state is in the basic learning phase, so for me personally, I'm always trying to figure out ways to force myself back on the tight rope.
ipaddr 2y ago
There is a big difference between 5 and 50 years driving. Your insurance has stats to back this up and will give lower premiums. Now skills decline at 70 so that may offset some of it.
- 2y ago

austin-cheney 2y ago

The zones of experience just screams of Vernor Vinge. Yes, experience compression is absolutely possible without sacrificing an appendage. This is actually an expectation for military officers and corporate executives. The solution is just to stay continuously busy. The counterpoint to this is alienation. Most people at the individual contributor level absolutely do not think about this. The problem then is that if you are that guy who is a 10x producer you are completely out of alignment from your peers. If you are in a line of work where people are replaceable cogs like Java and JavaScript this out of bounds levels of initiative is probably doing your career more harm than good.

nelsondev 2y ago

I would add another axis to the graph. So x axis would be pace at which you work, and y axis would be novelty of work. You can be burnt out doing fast paced repetitive work. It’s not always true the faster you go the more you learn.

snozolli 2y ago

Staying in the comfort zone means doing 5 times 1 year of experience. It’s safe, but you are taking a long term risk of becoming less relevant and end up reducing your options. This makes no sense to me. If you spend five years working on a tech stack that goes out of favor, then some will say you've wasted your time. Personally, I disagree, because experience is experience and what we do is learn, but good luck getting through an HR filter with that. This just seems like one of those "I'm the beneficiary of luck, now let me tell you how I credit myself for it" posts. My personal experience is that I've had the greatest growth when I was allowed to pursue what I'm interested in (e.g. coding styles, new libraries, new methods of structuring code such as functional vs OOP). When I get a meddling manager insisting that I do things some other way, I don't learn and grow nearly as much.

Shorel 2y ago
No tech current stack will go out of favour, because the reliance on LLMs will prevent new tech stacks from being used. We are stuck. Or software development will be a two-tiered system.

yamazakiwi 2y ago

Flow Theory - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

markus_zhang 2y ago

I agree with the experience. I myself had a few nights that learned so much just by burning candles on tough projects (comparing to my skills). But for anyone who wants to have such an experience for more than a few weeks, I believe they need to be strategic: - They need to figure out what area they need to work in early, like really early, preferably during/before college, because it is the first job that counts. They need to get in ASAP, because there is a hell lot of difference between someone starting at 10 and someone at 30; - They need to think strategically about which kind of people they want to marry to, or do they want a marriage at all. IMO, if they want to be high-achievers (it's not an accurate word, but you know what I mean), there are only two kinds of good partners -- comrades or servants. Comrades keep you motivated and can interact with you on the same page, while servants take away most of your distractions. Kids are 100% a time sinker even for the best of them, so don't get them too early; - They need to find a good mentor, or more, along the road, at least before they reach where they can grow by themselves. Or they are lucky to have an above average amount of perseverance (which I believe is defined by gene and early education -- again, mostly genetic) so they can throw themselves at any wall and still preserve; So basically, they need to be lucky. And if they are not that lucky, they need to be at least lucky enough to realize and think about it strategically at an earlier age (like, before 30, I think) and plan accordingly. They need to muscle into the positions they want. They need to push things and people around to make their own career paths.

tikhonj 2y ago

Pretty different from the blog post, but I've definitely had periods in (and out of!) my career where I learned a ton that weren't super-busy. I got to do some really high-leverage work in a strong environment with great colleagues, and the fact that I wasn't under a bunch of external/artificial pressure let me learn more (and accomplish more!) while still having plenty of time and energy for other things. Seems like most people really overvalue pressure and long hours, when those are neither necessary nor sufficient—hell, probably harmful—for doing and learning a lot. I'm not entirely sure why, but I expect a cultural "no pain, no gain" attitude is part of it. People want to feel like the pain they went through was worth something, and we're conditioned that anything that's worth doing takes pain, and the two attitudes reinforce each other.

coffeeindex 2y ago
> Seems like most people really overvalue pressure and long hours I think it’s likely just a difference in personality for people. Some people thrive in that environment and thus believe that it’s the “best way”. Others thrive in a more laid back environment and think the same

jongjong 2y ago

I've been self-improving at full capacity for 15 years straight (20 years if you count school years were I was distracted by school work). I basically worked with every piece of software you can imagine. Countless programming languages, C++ game programming, shaders, artificial neural networks (implemented from scratch), frontend, backend, microcontrollers (ATMEL), proof of stake blockchains, large range of databases, vector databases, kubernetes, TCP, websockets... I built successful open source projects, I implemented a lamport signature library from scratch with an improvement from Ralph Merkle to cut the signature size by half and also implemented a merkle signature tree library for key-reuse. I implemented a decentralised deterministic orderbook and DEX to trade between quantum-resistant blockchains which I also built from scratch... At the end of the day experience doesn't really matter. Socializing is far more important. You don't need much skill to go places. Most people who do well don't that know much outside of their niche. You don't need to be hustling like crazy to be a leading expert in one narrow domain.