Ask HN: How do you avoid or identify a poisoned skill?

Time, I would say. First, there's the sense that the poison will produce its effects, revealing itself in hindsight; of course, we'd rather catch it before it does, but that isn't always possible, and the best we can do is to limit the damage and apply an antidote as soon as possible. Second, time brings experience, which allows us to do that, recognize symptoms, early one and, with enough of it, enable us to do the closest thing to identifying it before it causes problems, by identifying patterns, comparing a potential skill with other skills which had turned out to be poisoned — hype can be a good indicator. I wish I could give you a set of rules by means of which you could know for sure beforehand, but I really do believe that this is a domain for heuristics, and subjective ones at that — insofar as a skill can be professionally valuable, yet dreadful at a personal level.

This is almost exclusively dependent upon personality. For me a skill’s value is directly proportional to what it enables. Poisoned skills are false promises, that is an ability that masquerades as something it isn’t.

For a long time I was a JavaScript programmer. The skill is qualified by what you produce and the quality of product. Does the product do what it claims, does it work well, is it portable, is it fast?

For most people in that line of work the primary qualifier of a skill was vanity, the appearance of doing work. As such everything was about social compatibility and tool fashion. I considered those poisoned skills.

Now that AI is becoming a thing expert beginners are falling out of favor in the work force. I may well be more valuable to my former line of work than I was when doing that work. I developed practical skills as opposed to just using tools.