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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

Well I read a bit, then thought "things like being verbose, generic, and over-guarded in offering advice and so wasting lots of readers time without making an impact on their behaviour"?

If they'd given one direct piece of easily actionable advice the actual impact might have been far larger ...

"So what?" - a Church sermon I heard well over decade ago, the speaker said basically if there's nothing that listeners will remember and act on then your sermon is moot. You can give a tonne of great advice, but sometimes less is more impactful.

Perhaps they do that to. The title gave me high hopes.

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80,000 hours appeals to a particular type of person, and I think this is good but vague advice for that sort of person.

Reputation and social standing matters, you have to network, be humble and learn from people older and wiser than you, don’t try to go it alone, be willing to work on smaller challenges — these are all things I think people in this specific subculture probably would benefit from hearing.

There should be no shame in admitting you made a mistake - I've made several hundred thousand dollars in mistakes - sometimes they turned out to be the same mistake twice - but I owned up to them, and worked harder to make it right.

I've been bit often by:

Poorly Defined Requirements

Incomplete Understanding of the Problem

Incomplete Understanding of the Solution

Customer Created Access Difficulty

Customer created process issues

Poor documentation or data inputs

Excessive Complexity Customization driven by customer needs

I'm getting better with time, and I'm better at determining what the actual requirements are, and I now more fully understand what my solution is capable of too.

There's no shame, but it is still a signal.

Similar to the study a while back of whether VCs would rather fund someone who's a "natural" at what they do or someone who's had to work hard to reach that "natural" level. (It's the former.)

I get replies from Enterprise support reps of this sort. They vaguely address my question without commiting to an answer or solution.

That way the onus is on me to guess what might work for my case, and meanwhile they can mark the issue resolved.

That's terrible. A support agent should never mark an issue resolved until the client has said the issue is resolved or been unresponsive to followip communication for some time.

Unfortunately in practice, the lowly paid support agent is being bean counted on the number of outstanding tickets they have, and being told to periodically fix that problem.

"You get what you measure."

At least the enterprise support people have a harder time just lying and making up stuff in order to close the ticket, as I have experienced consumer support reps to do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18072989

Luckily, they do state the lessons to be learned up front:

> In brief, it raises the importance of finding good mentors, consistently seeking advice and feedback from experienced colleagues, and ensuring you’re a good fit for a project before you take actions with potentially large or long-term consequences.

Well, but that is not what the title presents, just the dual (what to do if you want to help).

Keep reading until you get to the "how to mitigate these risks" section.

But I have to agree that the article could have been written by Chidi Anagonye. It had that "no matter what you do, you're always wrong" sort of vibe.

Totally agree on the case for focus and efficiency.

I'd also add that much of what we hear or read has slight effects on us that can be profound over time.

In the case of books, nearly every book I read changes my outlook and direction, sometimes imperceptibly, but I believe the effects can be large over time.

Of course, quality matters - "you are what you eat" or in this case what you read.

Reminds me of a quote by Charles de Gaulle:

"Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life."

I think 80000 hours targets a fairly specific audience. Their style is in general to be in depth and long winded.

I’m a long-time follower of 80000 Hours. I agree with your comment, but still found this particular post to be far too verbose. The advice borders on non-actionable far-mode thinking.

I haven't yet read this one, so it is certainly possible.

I'd expect an organization dedicated to making the most of the finite time people have wout care about not wasting so much time.

I was hoping we'd get a list of times people tried to help, and actually hurt etc. Felt the same way you describe after reading the article.

You did? It was broken down into types-of-failure and each type of failure had examples/hypotheticals of where this type-of-failure led to bad outcomes.

The unfortunate problem is that all real problems[1] are not amenable to "one direct piece of easily actionable advice" other than "take two aspirin and let me know when it gets worse". Their nuances have nuances, and the only absolutely true statement you can make is, "if you have a straightforward, easy solution to the problem, it is wrong."

[1] I originally thought "some", then "many", then "most", but all of those words underplay the situation.

Are you advocating for a listicle?

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