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I found the article anodyne enough, so this is not a knock on it, but something I've noticed as I've gotten older that I find a bit amusing and curious. What i
by huhkerrf 1y ago
I found the article anodyne enough, so this is not a knock on it, but something I've noticed as I've gotten older that I find a bit amusing and curious.
What is it that makes people in tech in their late 20s and 30s write about life lessons like an old sage? I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this.
- wbrd 1y agoDo you regularly read the writings of farmers and roughnecks? I didn't get into tech until I was 40 but I definitely was going through some of the same personal growth as the writer when I was about 30 and if I had a blog I probably would have written about it.
- huhkerrf 1y ago> Do you regularly read the writings of farmers and roughnecks? If you count Facebook posts from high school friends, yeah. I grew up in a very rural environment.
- wwweston 1y agoBeing very online, probably. Also, it’s writing code for a social product. Also, Wendell Berry isn’t exactly just a farmer but grew up one and kept as much as he could while becoming a fine writer who talks about life lessons. More people should read him.
- the_gipsy 1y agoTech people are good at writing, maybe not like an actual writer or journalist, but we definitely write more than farmers. Tech also evolves very fast, so we probably perceive time differently, and think we "have seen a lot" in less time.
- xoac 1y agoMost tech people are only good at trite linkedin type writing and larping as pg.
- kjellsbells 1y agoHumbly disagree. The majority of tech writing sucks.Or perhaps I should say that it never has a chance to be better because the medium of choice, the blog, is clunky at best and little more than diary entries for the most part (which perhaps makes it harsh to judge them, but then, don't put your diary online). The worst of them are look-at-me/SEO/LinkedIn audition spam. The best are entries that are useful in the moment and then quickly forgotten. I like some tech writing, but the number of tech authors who I return to for the long view, reflective of industry understanding and life lessons learned, like I might do with writing about any other topic, is extremely small.
- the_gipsy 1y agoApparently we also can read, but are also not good at "getting" it.
- astura 1y ago"Good at generating vacuous platitudes that sound profound to dumb people" is not the same thing as "good at writing."
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ashwinsundar 1y agoI have never read whatever farmers write, but I am almost certain it is miles better than the average tech writing drivel
- grigri907 1y agoI recommend starting with Wendell Berry
- sharadov 1y agoReally, probably the most uncreative writing comes from tech writers.
- Bilal_io 1y agoI think it has to with the audience, or a platform. A young farmer would probably pretend to know a lot and even talk to impress if you put an audience in front of them.
- Yreval 1y agoThey may be far from having learned all their lessons in life--and hopefully are open to the wisdom of those with many more years in similar shoes--but that doesn't mean that can't have learned valuable lessons in ten, fifteen years of adult life. I know I have plenty of wisdom now that I wish I could have passed to a five-years younger version of myself. I don't think writing, sharing, or publicizing that sort of retrospective is necessarily presumptuous. Sometimes young tech personalities are pompous, but there are also plenty of my own peers (and juniors!) that I'm happy to take lessons from.
- close04 1y agoYou learn extremely valuable lessons even during your traineeship. But it takes many more years to realize if that lesson is truly unique and worth sharing, and if it won’t be turned on its head as you learn more later in life. I learned very different versions of the same lesson given 20 more years of experience. Sometimes just having my confidence in “old” life lessons shaken was a huge deal, it takes a lot to shake what I thought is bedrock. If you watch 20 minutes from a 2h movie can you really tell something about the whole movie or just about its beginning?
- the_real_cher 1y agoThe quintessential American author Oprah Winfrey didn't write her first book untill she was 42.
- blitzar 1y ago> write about life lessons like an old sage Take it from me, an old sage who has seen some things, people writting life lessons like they are old sages have absolutely no idea. They might strike the correct time twice a day like the broken clock they are, but there are an awful lot of hours in the day that they are wrong.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoI draw analogies with junior / medior / senior developers; juniors don't know anything and they know it, mediors know something but think they know everything and want the world to know, seniors know something but know they know nothing. ...if that makes any sense, I'm sure someone else put it more eloquently than that.
- freetime2 1y agoMy experience is that most people in tech don't write about life lessons. But the ones who do frequently appear on HN because the audience on HN likes this sort of article.
- michaelcampbell 1y agoI think their point is not that people in their mid 20's are WRITING LIFE LESSONS, but more that PEOPLE IN THEIR MID 20'S are writing life lessons.
- achenet 1y agoIn this particular case, the guy seems to be in his late 30s or 40s (he says "until my late twenties, I could count the number of times I had been to the gym on on hand", and later "fast forward almost to a decade"). But even if he was in his mid 20's... I understand being cautious about taking life lessons from young people, because they've had less chance to learn and correct the false things they might have learned, but the lesson he is sharing here - that your identity determines your actions which in turn will determine large parts of your life outcomes is one that even someone young can understand, and it is a useful one - I'd argue that no matter your age, if you've got a self-image that is blocking you from 'living your best life'/'doing what you want to do'/'being happy', knowing that you can change it, and this will get you closer to your goals, is useful.
- carlosjobim 1y agoWhy not? Experience and maturity is not very dependent on age. Getting those depends on doing it, not just waiting on time passing by. I'm much older than the article author, but it would be foolish of me to think that I couldn't learn things from 20 year olds – including important and profound teachings and advice.
- the_af 1y agoI would say experience is correlated with age. You need to live to gain experience. Someone in their 20s simply hasn't lived long enough to be giving life lessons. (Give or take some extraordinary exceptions of people who accumulate a lot of hard-earned experience very early in their lives; but the general rule applies).
- conductr 1y agoAs a older than this person, I feel like it’s around the time most people have that first large step of retrospectiveness where they see their current self has deviated from their self they thought they were previously. They realize they have autonomy to craft themselves. They realize there are more important aspects to life than their grades/sports/hobby or whatever things they built their identity around for the first 20-25 years. Anyways once you realize it, it’s an interesting topic to write about as you’ve become a completely different person from the one you were maybe 5-10 years prior. Because you’re likely transitioning into adulthood (maturity wise). As this continues in your later thirties and forties, it’s just status quo adulting and not as interesting to write about.
- Brendinooo 1y agoThis is good, and I'll add that for the kind of person who grew up sitting in front of a computer and is now working full-time sitting in front of a computer, this is most likely to manifest in recognizing problems with physical health and taking steps to fix it, steps that are tangible and highly achievable for someone in their 20s and 30s. EDIT: Oh, and farmers do not have this particular problem, lol
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- netbioserror 1y agoPrecisely this. For all the (woefully young) science about brain development and maturity, it doesn't seem to stop for quite a while, and my late 20's and early 30's have been the most interesting time of reflection and self-appraisement I've had. It's becoming clear to me that what we call a "mid-life crisis" is probably just Jung's self-actualization, where a person becomes aware they've been wearing a mask to some degree until then. It seems most people find a way to drop it, stop doing what they don't want, and start doing what they do want. Hence the development of grumpiness, divorces, moving far afield, buying sports cars, becoming ascetics, whatever it is that reflects a truer identity than their young selves that satisfied expectations and chased approval. I've found that the people I know who naturally reject molds and masks while young and pursue what they want early on don't seem to go through this.
- wer232essf 1y ago[dead]
- zzzeek 1y agoexactly. there's just an attitude of hubris in a lot of tech nerds that remains unmoved even when they've "swapped out a whole new operating system" for themselves
- spacebanana7 1y agoNetscape was only released 30 years ago. Someone in their early 30s could’ve been a developer for half the existence of the browser platform.
- cl3misch 1y agoMaybe the old farmers and rednecks don't have blogs which you can read online. They might well tell their friends and family!
- sharadov 1y agoBut wait, how will they get their dopamine kicks in the form of likes.
- ludston 1y agoSharing ideas leads to feedback. People in their late 20s and early 30s are only just feeling like they are cementing their identities, so they seek validation.
- satisfice 1y agoI attempted to write a life’s lessons kind of book when I was 17. It took 26 years to finish it. Turns out, it takes a long time to test ideas. I kept asking myself “but how do I know this works.”
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bongripper 1y ago[dead]
- turnsout 1y agoSoftware people reply heavily on systems, patterns and frameworks in planning their work. It leads them to think that all of life is like a coding challenge that just needs the right framework, and as soon as they think they’ve discovered something, they want to share it in the spirit of open source. That’s the charitable read anyway.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y agoI think it's a social media thing that's not limited to tech. There are tons of tiktok videos where some 18 year old explains the world with passion.
- clickety_clack 1y agoMaybe you’re just exposed to tech blogs and not the farmer/roughneck equivalent?
- tomrod 1y agoThe tools have a short lifecycle. So if you've used the tool for a week, that's equivalent relevant lifecycle experience to a farmer using a tractor for 50 years. /s this is totally a riff on how fast frontend and data science tooling changes
- VoodooJuJu 1y ago[dead]
- bryanlarsen 1y ago> I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this. Hang out in a bar with 32 year old farmers or roughnecks as a teenager and you'll hear lots of similar shallow anodyne life wisdom.
- spookie 1y agoThis is true, it's normal with the age.
- __alexander 1y agoThere was an article or comment a couple of years back discussing how people are now writing grandiose blog posts like they are describing how and why they broke up Pink Floyd. I wish I could find the original source because I still think about it.
- Aurornis 1y ago> What is it that makes people in tech in their late 20s and 30s write about life lessons like an old sage? Some of my friends tried going down the influencer path. Some on LinkedIn, one as an Substacker, others on Instagram. Seeing their influencer content in contrast to their personal lives made it abundantly clear that they were using their influencer side as an outlet for their thoughts. As ideas or epiphanies came to them, they would jump to their influencer accounts and preach their realizations as if it was knowledge they had held for decades. The optimistic angle is that they were using the outlet as a place for sharpening their thoughts. Thinking in public and putting your thoughts into words forces you to sharpen your ideas and make them more coherent. The part that never sat well with me was how they were trying to preach it to others and present themselves as the wise, experienced guru sharing this advice to others when really they were just barely figuring it out. The content can be helpful for others to sharpen their own thoughts or catch up on basic realizations about life, but for others it feels weird to see so much fanfare around basic social and workplace understandings.
- dansmith1919 1y ago> The part that never sat well with me was how they were trying to preach it to others and present themselves as the wise, experienced guru sharing this advice to others when really they were just barely figuring it out. Honestly, you probably have to bring it like this if you want to generate a following. I guess people like it when someone just hands them a truth in a confident enough way.
- sharadov 1y agoI am in my late 40s. I went through my own journey. This is not the first generation to do this. The difference being, they did it in private. Not post every thought and idea as if they've figured out the meaning of life. And I disagree, you don't need to share your thoughts for validation. Rather, you need to live them. Most roads taken will appear as mistakes, but they have their own teaching moments. There is nothing better than lived experience.
- spookie 1y agoThey feel the need to prove themselves to others. Not a jab or anything, it is normal.
- renewiltord 1y agoI suppose it’s true. You don’t notice them doing it. The problem here is that you’ve concluded that the detection instrument functions. That’s bad engineering. Check your equipment.
- pavel_lishin 1y ago> I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this. Do you read the blogs of 32 year old farmers or roughnecks?
- neutronicus 1y agoIn tech there's more to be gained building a personal brand online than in petroleum
- altcognito 1y agoI'm decently older than this and I'm all for it. Age is just one modest, fallible signal for wisdom, to say nothing of occupation. Farmers and roughnecks definitely spout plenty of "life lessons".
- noduerme 1y agoAn unkind answer is these are the sort of navel-gazing observations had by most teenagers, and people in tech are just late bloomers. But an even less kind answer would be that self-help is big business, and to run the scam you have to build an audience.
- alexchantavy 1y agoKind of like if /r/im14andthisisdeep met LinkedIn B2B SaaS prose :) (side note in all seriousness I did enjoy the article)
- viridian 1y agoYou should choose to practice kindness and charity if you can at all help it. Accusing a whole class of people of arrested development is incredibly derogatory. There are healthier ways to frame criticism.
- noduerme 1y agoYeah, I guess it's not really fair to single out the tech worker class. Pretty much everyone in America under the age of 35 now suffers from some form of arrested development.
- begueradj 1y agoTrue. But it's the same trend in every other field: new born babies lecture soon to die people about life. Example of such lessons: recently, a well known dating coach who gives lessons that costs around 8000 euros per hour about how a man can become a high value man and attract high value women, called Sadia Khan, proved she is in the position to give lessons about how a woman can be of high value: private calls of her were released recently and it is shown she is a side chick of a married man.
- HankStallone 1y agoI was listening to a book-review podcast that was talking about one of Ernest Cline's books. They were on a section where the 17-year-old protagonist is remarking on how his personality probably reflects his dad's interest in something or other, and one of the hosts laughed and said no 17-year-old does that kind of self-analysis. I immediately said, "Au contraire, maybe you didn't, but plenty of them do." I certainly did. There may be something about the kind of mind that's drawn to tech that correlates with navel-gazing. We like to know how things work, and that doesn't necessarily only apply to computers and gadgets. Of course, that only explains why we think about it; not why so many of us write about it like we think other people need to hear it. That probably comes down to being smarter than average and thinking you've got everything figured out by the age of 15, also a common trait of tech people. Fortunately some of us manage to outgrow it and be embarrassed by what know-it-alls we were.
- stronglikedan 1y ago> farmers or roughnecks doing this Oh, they do it. They just do it in their preferred medium, which is usually in person on the job, not the internet.
- ratelimitsteve 1y agoacross the rim of a pint glass, ime
- m463 1y agoI can't help but think of Don Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming. Looking at wikipedia, he started it in 1962 (at age 24), and it is still incomplete in 2025 (he is 87) By the time you're old, it might be too late to start your "wise" framework.
- ratelimitsteve 1y ago>I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this. Not for nothing, but you might if you spent time on the FarmersAndRoughnecksNews forum instead of here
- nachox999 1y agoold farmers do the same, they just don't blog
- isaacremuant 1y agoBlog posts are branding. A version of them is self help style but there's all kinds. It just sells well.
- firecall 1y agoArrogance.
- AlecSchueler 1y ago> What is it that makes people in tech in their late 20s and 30s write about life lessons like an old sage? I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this. They have blogs and the means to distribute the links to their blogs via sites like this. Spend some time at your local pub and you'll hear people of all backgrounds over you their sagacity.