Idk about this, I have gotten almost every job I have ever had on cold-apply, including internships. The only one that wasn't that way was talking to a (internal) recruiter in college.
Don't discount that path. I did not have the best grades or anything, but (IMO) a mix of skills that was a good fit for the job at hand and confidence I could apply them.
Most of the people you will interact with in the (corporate) world have no understanding of their own understanding, and are operating in unknown unknown territory. Being confident, demonstrating competence in something jointly known/unknown or known/known helps a ton.
That's fascinating. I know only a handful of people who got their jobs through cold applying. The majority of my friends were either referred by colleagues or received inbound recruiter email. That is, with the exception of my cohort in CS undergrad; we attended our university career fair for out entry into the workforce.
It's heartening to know that the cold apply method can be successful.
Cold applying works reasonably well IME, but you have to be able to nail the interviews for it to make sense. I'm great at what I do, I only apply to jobs which should be a good fit, and I still only get interviews 1-2% of the time. I then get offers 95% of the time, which keeps the process manageable.
I've gotten 3/4 of my tech jobs through cold applying though [0], and been offered many, many more. I know it's possible.
Ok that note, I love my current job, and I would've never found anything like it through my network. Cold applying was a literal game-changer in that regard.
[0] One was through Google Foo Bar, and one was through Codefights (now Codesignal or something), so those were slightly more tailored than cold applying.
Every job I’ve ever gotten has been cold apply, with no degree except a GED high school diploma equivalent. You can certainly get jobs through cold apply, I get a job offer for basically every job that gets to the interview, even when I hadn’t worked as a dev I had two job offers I had to pick from. I like to think my passion, knowledge, and genuine interest shines through in my cover letters and my interviews.
When did you last do that? I’ve heard from multiple friends that the job market has completely collapsed in the last couple of years & that it’s much tougher than in the past.
For me it is more curiosity about what they are doing. If you work in the same field you should be able to have a chat. If it doesn't flow you can't work there if you get along perfectly it would be dumb not to hire you.
The thing is, some people don't view "maintaining networks" as work, and it's something that not only comes naturally when they do it, but they actually do it naturally, automatically.
These people have a real advantage.
It's like how I may have a real durable advantage because I really enjoy reading about software, computers, etc, so I just consume a lot of information passively.
Or maybe how I get a lot of practice arguing or convincing people on reddit or space battles.com.
If someone viewed reading Hacker News as work, I'm not sure they'd EVER do it.
That's where the author is, and it's fine. IMO, these people tend to be better represented online, because getting a job through connections/influence/visibility is necessarily going to be louder than clicking submit on a form.
My current job was done via a connection, but every previous job has been through spamming my resume to every job I'm even remotely qualified for and/or I find interesting.
I have a degree now, but I dropped out of college the first time around, and so I didn't have any connections in the software industry, or anywhere really. When I dropped out, I assumed any desk job career was out the window. I applied to Aldi, Lowes, Burger King, McDonalds, Starbucks, and Taco Bell in one day (driving and applying in person).
On a lark, and almost as a joke to myself, I applied to exactly one software job from an ad on Craigslist, and they were the only ones who actually got back to me, thus jumpstarting my software career. I've had a lot of jobs in a lot of different places, and despite knowing lots of interesting people I've only managed to convert that to a job one time.
I have no idea how people use friendly connections to get jobs.
Same. Much more difficult as an immigrant because you have to prove a lot more than other candidates but I have always managed to get a job with cold-applications, zero referrals, which even I find interesting because I dozens of people at different companies, have thousands of followers on LinkedIn, and am super active in local meetups as an organizer, which means lots of locals know me, at least by name, but still no good referrals whenever I apply for a job, which is why I always resort to cold apply.
Congrats!
I have never heard anyone saying that this "easy apply" function/button leads to _anything_ - Ive tried it myself couple of times, I do not get event a rejection: Its just like its going to dev null
> I have ever had on cold-apply, including internships
FYI cold-applying to bigtech (e.g., FAANG) is like throwing your application away. Pro-tip: ping people on LinkedIn and ask for a referral. If you're a decent candidate they'll happily do it because there's a O(1k) referral/hiring bonus at all of these companies.
Overall I think it’s a good perspective and worth reading to learn your perspective and experience. Just for anyone who doesn’t come from a good place, please be kind to yourself. You probably really need to work exceptionally hard and need to have top 1% resume. And articles like this can be quite depressing. Don’t let it you down
The author tries to be mindful about it and I appreciate it, but from a perspective of someone from a shithole it still might feel bad
Referring to:
> I've never gotten a job by applying to it. It's always been referrals or someone reaching out to me. So honestly, my resume is shit compared to my peers. I'm terrible at interviewing, and I've never done LeetCode. This is not a brag; it's just not my style. Am I a nepo baby? I don't know. Was I a morale hire? I'm pretty disagreeable. Was it merit? Also not sure
> I recognize that not everyone has access to the same networking opportunities, and the traditional job application process can be a valid and necessary path for many. But social media, when used correctly, is a great way to get an opportunity
Choosing is a big one. Something I learned later in life about emotional maturity and controlling your emotions is that it's just choosing to feel an emotion.
Like, feeling angry for longer than I needed because I didn't know how to make the choice to feel happy or calm.
Of course there's more nuance to it but I agree with choosing
Emotions are not controllable or choosable but our reactions to them are trainable. One good technique for this is mindfully observing and labelling the emotion until it goes away; not trying to change it but also not acting on it. With practice one can observe the emotion subsiding within a minute or so. This, eventually, leads to less emotional reaction overall because we're taking away the habitual pattern of the mind to constantly react to everything it likes or dislikes.
You are controlling your emotions with that technique, accepting and waiting emotions out is just not the only option.
Getting indoors from a cold rain is an obvious choice. I can't really decide to stop shivering, but changing my clothes and grabbing a hot chocolate helps. It still takes a while to warm back up, meanwhile I can actively choose not to open windows or go right back in the rain.
A popular perspective is that emotions are the result of quick analysis of a situation, trained on survival instincts originally but later mostly pattern matching and beliefs. By observing emotional reactions you can drill down to the underlying belief, and over time adjust to new circumstances. For example, based on this theory, anger is the result of an analysis that determines that something is deemed wrong and it is within your power to change it (or extract yourself from the situation). If it’s judged to be not within your power, the resulting emotion is sadness. And these judgments can be changed to have a different emotional experience - beyond feeling them or acting on them. This adjustment requires to identify the original deep pattern/beliefs, not just surface-level desire to do so. This introspection typically requires third party assistance, available in various therapeutic and coaching settings.
My favourite example from my own experience is cycling through hail. I used to hate it. It made me miserable. My face hurts. My body is cold. I just want to die.
Once I started playing around with the ideas of Stoicism, I decided to try an experiment. The next time I got caught out by hail while cycling, I raised my fist up in the air and said "fuck you Universe, this is exactly what I wanted, you fell for my plan!".
I felt a lot better. I like to think of it like the Sith in Star Wars. Whenever they get their butt kicked, they go "It is as I had forseen!" I no longer get surprised by events.
I'm sorry to hate but it's extremely rich to write
> Do not send me anything longer than you would send to a crush. Some people email me six-paragraph essays about the time they saved a cat from a tree
...in a rambling piece that is not written with much consideration for the reader. I know this is just a blog post, ostensibly written for the author's younger sister, but if the author really wishes to position himself as someone to take advice from, he should make some effort to make his ideas digestible. I would suggest he include some transitions between ideas, bother to do some research to back up his claims instead of e.g. referring vaguely to an experiment he heard of supposedly involving "lucky" and "unlucky" people (truly sounds like science).
And for the love of God don't tell me right off the bat that you assume I'm going to keep reading, let alone read closely enough to "notice" anything about your writing. Yuck
Finally, while I know it's popular in Silicon Valley/coastal tech types to use the language of agency to justify being an uncharitable dick to people around you, the spirit of this particular stanza is helpful to deploy only in a small number of settings, generally low complexity environments where the stakes are low and there's a lack of psychological safety, and you desperately need the paycheck.
In any event the good ideas here are largely betrayed by the author's bad writing and overgeneralizing his experience working in coastal tech. Do yourself a favor and find other role models
>... if the author really wishes to position himself as someone to take advice from...
>... the good ideas here are largely betrayed by the author's bad writing and overgeneralizing...
The author clearly doesn't want to be someone most people take advice from, and admitted that the piece wouldn't be well written, lack nuance, and largely were just things that worked for them, not anybody else. I don't know how one could possibly take this so seriously when they make it very clear up front:
>I'm not really qualified to give advice.
>Don't read this if you are seeking a nuanced perspective.
>These are simply the lies I tell myself to keep on living my life in good faith. I'm not saying this is the right way to do things. I'm just saying this is how I did things. I will do my best to color my advice with my own experiences, but I'm not going to pretend that the suffering and the privilege I've experienced is universal.
My advice is: Don’t let someone else control your life.
Switch occupation every 2 years, even if you find a great environment. Don’t chase, for what you need must come to you.
Understand no one can give you the answers you seek; you have to live it.
if you change jobs despite being in a great environment, aren't you chasing something? if you follow this advice, don't you let the advice control you?
in particular for jobs, if you think that jobs are controlling you (which is not unreasonable) then switching jobs is not helping you to escape that control.
if you don't want to let someone else control your life you need give up your traditional career and become a freelancer. i did that. i had jobs too in between, but only when they helped me advance my own goals.
You can also "job hop" internally if you want to stay at the same company but want a new experience. The thing about huge companies is that they're huge! You can switch to a team that functions completely differently from the team or org that you were in before.
In my country, it would certainly be odd, so it would raise questions. Would not be a showstopper, though we would definitely carefully consider hiring.
When I watch how little influence I have on my children from my spoken advice, and recall how many lessons people tried to teach me which I had to learn myself, I laugh at the eternal pointlessness of writing like this.
My interpretation of the newspaper image-counting experiment is quite different from that of the author.
My view is that unlucky people don't trust the system (for a good reason) so they don't trust the text; given the nature of the experiment, it is reasonable that they would think the text is a trap to mislead them. It actually mirrors reality perfectly because most people are constantly misled about everything... But a few lucky 'chosen' people are not. In terms of the experiment it would be like showing unlucky people text which shows an incorrect number and the lucky people would see text showing the correct number. That's what's actually happening in real life.
What lucky people don't understand is that merely surviving, without receiving special treatment, is actually very difficult and it requires constantly jumping over all sorts of hurdles and deceptions and you can't afford trust third-party information because every time you did, you ended up losing everything or wasting years of your life. Lucky people are wrong to trust third-party information. They only learn how wrong they were when they stop receiving special treatment; then reality comes as a shock!
What is shown to the majority is what the media wants to show them. The media's purpose is to mislead people. Only a small handful of people are actually lucky enough to have mentors who will tell them "The media is misleading, I know because I influence the media; here is reality: ..."
The reality is that nothing in life can be trusted but everything can be modeled.
For example, you never know what a driver going 60 miles/hr will do, but you do know that the laws of physics say that the driver can’t suddenly go backwards.
Once you figure this out, you realize you can work through absolute chaos because you can work with black boxes.
It doesn’t matter if the media is lying. For example, the source might say there’s this magic pill that has cured cancer, but if that were actually true, we wouldn’t have chemotherapy still. Therefore, without ever having to grapple with the question of the trust, the actual truth is bounded between “fake news” and “there maybe be potential new developments.” If you still care, you can still look into it, but 3 seconds of modeling already gave you a good black box answer.
What people mistakenly do is try to determine if the statement is true or not, but that’s a waste of time in most cases. It’s better to model the system enough to work within it and then move on.
Sure, but I think the media mostly misleads through omission and shifting the focus.
It seems trivial, but on a national or global scale, so many things happen that it becomes a powerful force.
Every day, the media ignores millions of events that happened in the country. It only reports on a few hundreds. The way it chooses what is important give it massive power.
Every day, some politicians somewhere act in a corrupt manner. The media covers a tiny fraction of those. Instead the media might fill the space with celebrity gossip. This creates a false impression that things are alright when they are not.
Unfortunately it's hard for us to get a general sense for how people in our society are doing because our perception is badly distorted.
My sense is that our current society is terrible and many people are harmed and left behind but the suffering is covered up and nobody is held accountable. This is based on what I've observed of people who I used to go to school with (for example).
Sure but I think it’s more a deeper structural problem.
When in human society have we had access to information at this rate? Yes there are bad people but there were have always and will be bad people (like people selling crock medicines 200 years ago).
We’re in this situation because it’s a brand new problem (information density) and we are still looking for a solution. I mean we now have a way to ensure medicines you buy are reasonably vetted, but it took us a while to figure that one out.
It just sucks that we have to live during the times where we haven’t figured it out, but there’s always going to some new problem grappling human society.
Fair to say unlucky people are skeptical/pessimistic/realistic and lucky people are naive/optimistic?
If yes, the question is why? What came first? Their luck or their perspective? Maybe a couple instances of things working out tips the scales early in life!
> Fair to say unlucky people are skeptical/pessimistic/realistic and lucky people are naive/optimistic?
Optimism vs pessimism is basically only a valid framing in very neutral times. If things really are significantly tilted towards up or down, then you either notice that or you don't, and only framing that makes sense is realism vs confusion/delusion
> and only framing that makes sense is realism vs confusion/delusion
I think it's very hard, if not impossible, to have objective realism. We all have a tilt. Most people are probably a bit deluded. The frameworks of pessimism and optimism maybe work given the broad inability to have objective realism?
I'm not talking about people's personal predispositions / decision strategies per se. I'm talking about the outcome-based labels that we stick on them after the fact.
Make a table where the world is 3-valued (up/down/neutral) and our subject is only 2-valued (up/down), you'll see what I mean. World up, person down: person is wrong/confused. World up, person up: person is correct/realist. Optimistic / pessimistic roles only work when the world is neutral. This is very silly of course; that's what I'm trying to point out.
In terms of discussing personal predisposition we need to address whether the individual uses strategy to determine appetite for risk, accepts and integrates feedback or doesn't, etc. But yeah.. a completely generalized and non-situational predisposition based on no trends in evidence, on no expected-value considerations, ignoring feedback.. is also called confused or delusional. Notice that the outcome doesn't matter here actually. Intent does matter.. if you're trying and failing to evaluate evidence properly, suffering from imperfect info, you might still be realist. Realists aren't perfect, they just try to align with what is real
People in my life routinely talk about how lucky I am. Its a big enough thing that it's kind of a meme. I think a big part of it is strategic disassociation. You can't do it with every decision in your life but if you pick and choose some focal points where you just pick the choice with the unknown but possibly positive outcome, commit to it fully, and internalize the value of the joy of discovery without worrying about it too hard you often come out ahead.
I'm pretty sure the luck came first because optimism/pessimism is a learned trait.
I say this as someone who considers themselves "Optimistic by nature, pessimistic by experience."
I was born in lucky circumstances but that luck turned in my teens due to factors outside of my control. I have seen firsthand how it works.
Even now, I constantly have to catch myself and force myself to think pessimistically... And my pessimistic projections are usually right or sometimes not pessimistic enough.
But I know I'm a natural optimist by the fact that I don't give up. I've built so much software and startups over the years; most of them I'm still running on the side and keeping up to date even though I know consciously that there is zero chance they will succeed. Deep down I have a deep optimism that something will change and all the opportunities will come at once. Consciously, I know it is delusional but I'm fundamentally motivated by emotions, not thoughts.
It's a weird feeling having built products that work very similarly to (or better than) other products which rake in millions of dollars but not being able to find a single customer due to all sorts of weird contrived socio-political reasons.
> These are simply the lies I tell myself to keep on living my life in good faith. I'm not saying this is the right way to do things. I'm just saying this is how I did things. I will do my best to color my advice with my own experiences, but I'm not going to pretend that the suffering and the privilege I've experienced is universal.
It's interesting the author chose to wrote this as "advice" given his awareness of this. There are a number of ways he could have shared this information without presenting it as "advice."
> I've never gotten a job by applying to it. It's always been referrals or someone reaching out to me. So honestly, my resume is shit compared to my peers.
> How to Get a Job
Idk about this, I have gotten almost every job I have ever had on cold-apply, including internships. The only one that wasn't that way was talking to a (internal) recruiter in college.
Don't discount that path. I did not have the best grades or anything, but (IMO) a mix of skills that was a good fit for the job at hand and confidence I could apply them.
Most of the people you will interact with in the (corporate) world have no understanding of their own understanding, and are operating in unknown unknown territory. Being confident, demonstrating competence in something jointly known/unknown or known/known helps a ton.
That's fascinating. I know only a handful of people who got their jobs through cold applying. The majority of my friends were either referred by colleagues or received inbound recruiter email. That is, with the exception of my cohort in CS undergrad; we attended our university career fair for out entry into the workforce.
It's heartening to know that the cold apply method can be successful.
Cold applying works reasonably well IME, but you have to be able to nail the interviews for it to make sense. I'm great at what I do, I only apply to jobs which should be a good fit, and I still only get interviews 1-2% of the time. I then get offers 95% of the time, which keeps the process manageable.
I've gotten 3/4 of my tech jobs through cold applying though [0], and been offered many, many more. I know it's possible.
Ok that note, I love my current job, and I would've never found anything like it through my network. Cold applying was a literal game-changer in that regard.
[0] One was through Google Foo Bar, and one was through Codefights (now Codesignal or something), so those were slightly more tailored than cold applying.
Every job I’ve ever gotten has been cold apply, with no degree except a GED high school diploma equivalent. You can certainly get jobs through cold apply, I get a job offer for basically every job that gets to the interview, even when I hadn’t worked as a dev I had two job offers I had to pick from. I like to think my passion, knowledge, and genuine interest shines through in my cover letters and my interviews.
When did you last do that? I’ve heard from multiple friends that the job market has completely collapsed in the last couple of years & that it’s much tougher than in the past.
For me it is more curiosity about what they are doing. If you work in the same field you should be able to have a chat. If it doesn't flow you can't work there if you get along perfectly it would be dumb not to hire you.
Every one of my jobs has been cold applying. I don’t like maintaining networks explicitly because it takes a lot of work I have no interest in doing.
The thing is, some people don't view "maintaining networks" as work, and it's something that not only comes naturally when they do it, but they actually do it naturally, automatically.
These people have a real advantage.
It's like how I may have a real durable advantage because I really enjoy reading about software, computers, etc, so I just consume a lot of information passively.
Or maybe how I get a lot of practice arguing or convincing people on reddit or space battles.com.
If someone viewed reading Hacker News as work, I'm not sure they'd EVER do it.
And I am exactly the opposite - aside from my first job out of university 10 years ago I have gotten every job since through connections
That's where the author is, and it's fine. IMO, these people tend to be better represented online, because getting a job through connections/influence/visibility is necessarily going to be louder than clicking submit on a form.
My current job was done via a connection, but every previous job has been through spamming my resume to every job I'm even remotely qualified for and/or I find interesting.
I have a degree now, but I dropped out of college the first time around, and so I didn't have any connections in the software industry, or anywhere really. When I dropped out, I assumed any desk job career was out the window. I applied to Aldi, Lowes, Burger King, McDonalds, Starbucks, and Taco Bell in one day (driving and applying in person).
On a lark, and almost as a joke to myself, I applied to exactly one software job from an ad on Craigslist, and they were the only ones who actually got back to me, thus jumpstarting my software career. I've had a lot of jobs in a lot of different places, and despite knowing lots of interesting people I've only managed to convert that to a job one time.
I have no idea how people use friendly connections to get jobs.
Same. Much more difficult as an immigrant because you have to prove a lot more than other candidates but I have always managed to get a job with cold-applications, zero referrals, which even I find interesting because I dozens of people at different companies, have thousands of followers on LinkedIn, and am super active in local meetups as an organizer, which means lots of locals know me, at least by name, but still no good referrals whenever I apply for a job, which is why I always resort to cold apply.
My last two jobs I got from Easy Apply on LinkedIn, which is the lowest effort application possible.
Congrats! I have never heard anyone saying that this "easy apply" function/button leads to _anything_ - Ive tried it myself couple of times, I do not get event a rejection: Its just like its going to dev null
> I have ever had on cold-apply, including internships
FYI cold-applying to bigtech (e.g., FAANG) is like throwing your application away. Pro-tip: ping people on LinkedIn and ask for a referral. If you're a decent candidate they'll happily do it because there's a O(1k) referral/hiring bonus at all of these companies.
Does that include internships as well or regular positions only?
Yes.
Edit: sorry internships don't usually carry a referral bonus but people are usually helpful enough to refer for internships "for free".
Overall I think it’s a good perspective and worth reading to learn your perspective and experience. Just for anyone who doesn’t come from a good place, please be kind to yourself. You probably really need to work exceptionally hard and need to have top 1% resume. And articles like this can be quite depressing. Don’t let it you down
The author tries to be mindful about it and I appreciate it, but from a perspective of someone from a shithole it still might feel bad
Referring to:
> I've never gotten a job by applying to it. It's always been referrals or someone reaching out to me. So honestly, my resume is shit compared to my peers. I'm terrible at interviewing, and I've never done LeetCode. This is not a brag; it's just not my style. Am I a nepo baby? I don't know. Was I a morale hire? I'm pretty disagreeable. Was it merit? Also not sure
> I recognize that not everyone has access to the same networking opportunities, and the traditional job application process can be a valid and necessary path for many. But social media, when used correctly, is a great way to get an opportunity
Choosing is a big one. Something I learned later in life about emotional maturity and controlling your emotions is that it's just choosing to feel an emotion.
Like, feeling angry for longer than I needed because I didn't know how to make the choice to feel happy or calm.
Of course there's more nuance to it but I agree with choosing
Emotions are not controllable or choosable but our reactions to them are trainable. One good technique for this is mindfully observing and labelling the emotion until it goes away; not trying to change it but also not acting on it. With practice one can observe the emotion subsiding within a minute or so. This, eventually, leads to less emotional reaction overall because we're taking away the habitual pattern of the mind to constantly react to everything it likes or dislikes.
You are controlling your emotions with that technique, accepting and waiting emotions out is just not the only option.
Getting indoors from a cold rain is an obvious choice. I can't really decide to stop shivering, but changing my clothes and grabbing a hot chocolate helps. It still takes a while to warm back up, meanwhile I can actively choose not to open windows or go right back in the rain.
No, people are not choosing emotions. You can show them or not, but it is not true that one "chooses" them.
A popular perspective is that emotions are the result of quick analysis of a situation, trained on survival instincts originally but later mostly pattern matching and beliefs. By observing emotional reactions you can drill down to the underlying belief, and over time adjust to new circumstances. For example, based on this theory, anger is the result of an analysis that determines that something is deemed wrong and it is within your power to change it (or extract yourself from the situation). If it’s judged to be not within your power, the resulting emotion is sadness. And these judgments can be changed to have a different emotional experience - beyond feeling them or acting on them. This adjustment requires to identify the original deep pattern/beliefs, not just surface-level desire to do so. This introspection typically requires third party assistance, available in various therapeutic and coaching settings.
My favourite example from my own experience is cycling through hail. I used to hate it. It made me miserable. My face hurts. My body is cold. I just want to die.
Once I started playing around with the ideas of Stoicism, I decided to try an experiment. The next time I got caught out by hail while cycling, I raised my fist up in the air and said "fuck you Universe, this is exactly what I wanted, you fell for my plan!".
I felt a lot better. I like to think of it like the Sith in Star Wars. Whenever they get their butt kicked, they go "It is as I had forseen!" I no longer get surprised by events.
Popular twice in 2024
(148 points, 72 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38902596
(155 points, 62 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39926081
I'm sorry to hate but it's extremely rich to write
> Do not send me anything longer than you would send to a crush. Some people email me six-paragraph essays about the time they saved a cat from a tree
...in a rambling piece that is not written with much consideration for the reader. I know this is just a blog post, ostensibly written for the author's younger sister, but if the author really wishes to position himself as someone to take advice from, he should make some effort to make his ideas digestible. I would suggest he include some transitions between ideas, bother to do some research to back up his claims instead of e.g. referring vaguely to an experiment he heard of supposedly involving "lucky" and "unlucky" people (truly sounds like science).
And for the love of God don't tell me right off the bat that you assume I'm going to keep reading, let alone read closely enough to "notice" anything about your writing. Yuck
Finally, while I know it's popular in Silicon Valley/coastal tech types to use the language of agency to justify being an uncharitable dick to people around you, the spirit of this particular stanza is helpful to deploy only in a small number of settings, generally low complexity environments where the stakes are low and there's a lack of psychological safety, and you desperately need the paycheck.
In any event the good ideas here are largely betrayed by the author's bad writing and overgeneralizing his experience working in coastal tech. Do yourself a favor and find other role models
>... if the author really wishes to position himself as someone to take advice from...
>... the good ideas here are largely betrayed by the author's bad writing and overgeneralizing...
The author clearly doesn't want to be someone most people take advice from, and admitted that the piece wouldn't be well written, lack nuance, and largely were just things that worked for them, not anybody else. I don't know how one could possibly take this so seriously when they make it very clear up front:
>I'm not really qualified to give advice.
>Don't read this if you are seeking a nuanced perspective.
>These are simply the lies I tell myself to keep on living my life in good faith. I'm not saying this is the right way to do things. I'm just saying this is how I did things. I will do my best to color my advice with my own experiences, but I'm not going to pretend that the suffering and the privilege I've experienced is universal.
I like the old parts of this piece.
Seems like the new additions are all about money as the goal. Oh well.
My advice is: Don’t let someone else control your life. Switch occupation every 2 years, even if you find a great environment. Don’t chase, for what you need must come to you. Understand no one can give you the answers you seek; you have to live it.
if you change jobs despite being in a great environment, aren't you chasing something? if you follow this advice, don't you let the advice control you?
in particular for jobs, if you think that jobs are controlling you (which is not unreasonable) then switching jobs is not helping you to escape that control.
if you don't want to let someone else control your life you need give up your traditional career and become a freelancer. i did that. i had jobs too in between, but only when they helped me advance my own goals.
Yes, it’s contradictory to some degree. On purpose. That’s part of living it.
My “advice” is also US-centric, where I have observed time and again what truly leads to one getting their fair share.
Freelancing is a way to achieve this.
2 years of job hopping is almost a death sentence in some countries.
You can also "job hop" internally if you want to stay at the same company but want a new experience. The thing about huge companies is that they're huge! You can switch to a team that functions completely differently from the team or org that you were in before.
In my country, it would certainly be odd, so it would raise questions. Would not be a showstopper, though we would definitely carefully consider hiring.
When I watch how little influence I have on my children from my spoken advice, and recall how many lessons people tried to teach me which I had to learn myself, I laugh at the eternal pointlessness of writing like this.
Carry on, world, carry on.
My interpretation of the newspaper image-counting experiment is quite different from that of the author.
My view is that unlucky people don't trust the system (for a good reason) so they don't trust the text; given the nature of the experiment, it is reasonable that they would think the text is a trap to mislead them. It actually mirrors reality perfectly because most people are constantly misled about everything... But a few lucky 'chosen' people are not. In terms of the experiment it would be like showing unlucky people text which shows an incorrect number and the lucky people would see text showing the correct number. That's what's actually happening in real life.
What lucky people don't understand is that merely surviving, without receiving special treatment, is actually very difficult and it requires constantly jumping over all sorts of hurdles and deceptions and you can't afford trust third-party information because every time you did, you ended up losing everything or wasting years of your life. Lucky people are wrong to trust third-party information. They only learn how wrong they were when they stop receiving special treatment; then reality comes as a shock!
What is shown to the majority is what the media wants to show them. The media's purpose is to mislead people. Only a small handful of people are actually lucky enough to have mentors who will tell them "The media is misleading, I know because I influence the media; here is reality: ..."
The reality is that nothing in life can be trusted but everything can be modeled.
For example, you never know what a driver going 60 miles/hr will do, but you do know that the laws of physics say that the driver can’t suddenly go backwards.
Once you figure this out, you realize you can work through absolute chaos because you can work with black boxes.
It doesn’t matter if the media is lying. For example, the source might say there’s this magic pill that has cured cancer, but if that were actually true, we wouldn’t have chemotherapy still. Therefore, without ever having to grapple with the question of the trust, the actual truth is bounded between “fake news” and “there maybe be potential new developments.” If you still care, you can still look into it, but 3 seconds of modeling already gave you a good black box answer.
What people mistakenly do is try to determine if the statement is true or not, but that’s a waste of time in most cases. It’s better to model the system enough to work within it and then move on.
Sure, but I think the media mostly misleads through omission and shifting the focus.
It seems trivial, but on a national or global scale, so many things happen that it becomes a powerful force.
Every day, the media ignores millions of events that happened in the country. It only reports on a few hundreds. The way it chooses what is important give it massive power.
Every day, some politicians somewhere act in a corrupt manner. The media covers a tiny fraction of those. Instead the media might fill the space with celebrity gossip. This creates a false impression that things are alright when they are not.
Unfortunately it's hard for us to get a general sense for how people in our society are doing because our perception is badly distorted.
My sense is that our current society is terrible and many people are harmed and left behind but the suffering is covered up and nobody is held accountable. This is based on what I've observed of people who I used to go to school with (for example).
Sure but I think it’s more a deeper structural problem.
When in human society have we had access to information at this rate? Yes there are bad people but there were have always and will be bad people (like people selling crock medicines 200 years ago).
We’re in this situation because it’s a brand new problem (information density) and we are still looking for a solution. I mean we now have a way to ensure medicines you buy are reasonably vetted, but it took us a while to figure that one out.
It just sucks that we have to live during the times where we haven’t figured it out, but there’s always going to some new problem grappling human society.
Fair to say unlucky people are skeptical/pessimistic/realistic and lucky people are naive/optimistic?
If yes, the question is why? What came first? Their luck or their perspective? Maybe a couple instances of things working out tips the scales early in life!
> Fair to say unlucky people are skeptical/pessimistic/realistic and lucky people are naive/optimistic?
Optimism vs pessimism is basically only a valid framing in very neutral times. If things really are significantly tilted towards up or down, then you either notice that or you don't, and only framing that makes sense is realism vs confusion/delusion
> and only framing that makes sense is realism vs confusion/delusion
I think it's very hard, if not impossible, to have objective realism. We all have a tilt. Most people are probably a bit deluded. The frameworks of pessimism and optimism maybe work given the broad inability to have objective realism?
I'm not talking about people's personal predispositions / decision strategies per se. I'm talking about the outcome-based labels that we stick on them after the fact.
Make a table where the world is 3-valued (up/down/neutral) and our subject is only 2-valued (up/down), you'll see what I mean. World up, person down: person is wrong/confused. World up, person up: person is correct/realist. Optimistic / pessimistic roles only work when the world is neutral. This is very silly of course; that's what I'm trying to point out.
In terms of discussing personal predisposition we need to address whether the individual uses strategy to determine appetite for risk, accepts and integrates feedback or doesn't, etc. But yeah.. a completely generalized and non-situational predisposition based on no trends in evidence, on no expected-value considerations, ignoring feedback.. is also called confused or delusional. Notice that the outcome doesn't matter here actually. Intent does matter.. if you're trying and failing to evaluate evidence properly, suffering from imperfect info, you might still be realist. Realists aren't perfect, they just try to align with what is real
People in my life routinely talk about how lucky I am. Its a big enough thing that it's kind of a meme. I think a big part of it is strategic disassociation. You can't do it with every decision in your life but if you pick and choose some focal points where you just pick the choice with the unknown but possibly positive outcome, commit to it fully, and internalize the value of the joy of discovery without worrying about it too hard you often come out ahead.
I'm pretty sure the luck came first because optimism/pessimism is a learned trait.
I say this as someone who considers themselves "Optimistic by nature, pessimistic by experience."
I was born in lucky circumstances but that luck turned in my teens due to factors outside of my control. I have seen firsthand how it works.
Even now, I constantly have to catch myself and force myself to think pessimistically... And my pessimistic projections are usually right or sometimes not pessimistic enough.
But I know I'm a natural optimist by the fact that I don't give up. I've built so much software and startups over the years; most of them I'm still running on the side and keeping up to date even though I know consciously that there is zero chance they will succeed. Deep down I have a deep optimism that something will change and all the opportunities will come at once. Consciously, I know it is delusional but I'm fundamentally motivated by emotions, not thoughts.
It's a weird feeling having built products that work very similarly to (or better than) other products which rake in millions of dollars but not being able to find a single customer due to all sorts of weird contrived socio-political reasons.
> These are simply the lies I tell myself to keep on living my life in good faith. I'm not saying this is the right way to do things. I'm just saying this is how I did things. I will do my best to color my advice with my own experiences, but I'm not going to pretend that the suffering and the privilege I've experienced is universal.
It's interesting the author chose to wrote this as "advice" given his awareness of this. There are a number of ways he could have shared this information without presenting it as "advice."
How would it be framed? He's sharing what actions that he's taken, that has led to certain life outcomes.
He could just tell his story, explain his approach to life/guiding principles and leave it at that.
> I've never gotten a job by applying to it. It's always been referrals or someone reaching out to me. So honestly, my resume is shit compared to my peers.
alright, checks out.