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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

the #1 advice I would give to a young engineer entering their career is to do everything they can to avoid becoming cynical. technology has cycles, but it also moves forward. it's a helix. most people who churn through a few cycles end up becoming cynical, failing to see the orthogonal dimension of progress.

how to avoid cynicism? the primary way is to remove cynics from your life, and add optimists. second to that, keep working on new enough areas that you maintain a beginners mindset and can offset some of the pattern matching that leads one to thinking everything worthwhile has been done before.

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One thing I've noticed is that if I talk about the stuff in tech I'm passionate about - people tend not to give a shit.

If I talk about the things I dislike, I am flooded with imaginary internet points.

The cynics are reading & commenting, the optimists are busy building? ;)

yes precisely this

People who disagree automatically feel like they have new information to bring, while it's often hard to express agreement while still feeling like you're adding to the conversation.

Yes, that's the worst thing about social media.

Now, here are some other things I hate about it...

Then the solution is to be passionate about the things in tech you dislike.

Since this sounds like a complaint, I will upvote it :)

Just make sure you fill your life with healthy optimists, and not dreamers.

In fact, I would call it a hyper-dimensional helix. :-) With each new iteration (or rewrite), we're often expanding in a conceptual dimension we couldn't realistically reach or even imagine before.

"Removing cynics from your life" sounds a lot like living in a bubble. Like exclusively watching Disney movies and thinking that is the general mindset. Instead try to accept reality for what it is.

step 3 — quit reading twitter

twitter can be good or bad depending on who you follow + engage with

I just wish the controls were more granular. There's people I follow for their actual posting who also just drag in a bunch of drama that they hit like on.

I like the people I follow but they get like 5 likes on interesting things they have to say, and 500 likes on depressing takes like "computers were a mistake", or "everything is bad because capitalism" or fake uplifting content like "my title is senior engineer and I googled a thing today, normalize failure". I think twitter algorithm promotes that kind of content and I guess they have to adopt if they want their follower count to go up.

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