Advice to young people, the lies I tell myself (2024)
jxnl.co
jxnl.co
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.
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.
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.
Edit: sorry internships don't usually carry a referral bonus but people are usually helpful enough to refer for internships "for free".
It's heartening to know that the cold apply method can be successful.
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.
I'll take your advice to heart next time I am looking for a role.
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.
region to region.
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: ..."
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!
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.
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
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?
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
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.
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).
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.
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
(148 points, 72 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38902596
(155 points, 62 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39926081
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.
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.
> 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
>... 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.
and the “self-identifying as lucky vs unlucky study” was both real,
and fascinating.
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
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.
But now I'm better at deciding to let negative emotions go and feel happy or calm.
Making choices to change your situation will change your feelings so I do believe feelings are a choice to be made in most situations.
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.
Seems like the new additions are all about money as the goal. Oh well.
Half of the new section is his lament for times and experiences he can’t get back,
even by having money.
He’s warning against overvaluing money at any one given time,
that there will be time to earn more next week or next month - especially if you’re cognitively or technically inclined.
The new additions feel more about the author maturing to money’s place in the goal.
alright, checks out.
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."
Carry on, world, carry on.