Comment by gexla | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gexla | Hacker News Reader

I want to start dating. I put my profile up to dating sites. I spend much of my days sending messages to women's profiles. I take their personality tests, but I never get messages (or replies to mine) even though I'm sure I get matches. I even started looking at niche sites such as "nerd dating..."

Dude, just get out and actually talk to women.

I'm not going to say how to get gigs, jobs, etc because I'm out of my league with the great people who post here. But whenever I see a post like yours, I see a lack of creativity and human contact.

I understand that you probably get tunnel vision from the stress. But try different things and different approaches. Try to get to know people. Get involved in different developer ecosystems. Talk to real people. Or get someone to talk to real time if not in person. Get that human touch going.

I like James Altucher's idea of list building. Brainstorm a list of different approaches you could take to land different work. Brainstorm other types of work that you could do. Brainstorm a list of side-gigs you could work on. Brainstorm anything, just to get that idea creation machine going.

You got lost somewhere by being the same for X years. What you need is chaos. You need to shake things up. Routine is good for the things you don't want to spend a lot of cognitive overhead (bedtime, eating, etc) on so that you can focus on creating explosive interactions in your mad scientist lab.

As a side note. Don't farm out your dev skills for less than a solid professional rate. Lowering the value that you get for your skills is a rabbit hole. No matter how far you go down that hole, there is still room for people to devalue you. They try to get the work cheaper, they complain about what you do. You could pay them for the opportunity to work for them and it would still be ugly. Better to take a minimum wage job than to farm your dev skills at less than a solid professional rate. Better to be a starving artist waiting tables than to cheapen your artistic skills by selling them to people who don't value them.

> Dude, just get out and actually talk to women.

That's a lot easier said than done.

The parallel with employment is actually not bad: one doesn't find a job by approaching random offices asking for work any more than one finds a wife by asking random if they would like to get hitched (yes, some small number of people succeed with both approaches); one often finds a job by being introduced to the right opportunity by people who know of those opportunities. Now, those introducers might be recruiters (matchmakers) or people one has worked with before (friends), but at the end of the day it's all about networking.

>That's a lot easier said than done.

Derive your self worth from yourself and you'll never feel awkward. Everyones interesting in some way. Just get out there and talk, if she doesn't like you or is rude, who gives a shit? Move on to the next.

> "one doesn't find a job by approaching random offices asking for work"

Actually one does, this is in fact one of the best (though not the easiest) ways to get jobs.

In my very first semester in college my whole class had to find internships (Waterloo representin'), and being effectively high school graduates with no real experience, it was pretty tough going.

The "smart" advice was to go to as many job fairs as possible, look at as many job boards as possible, apply to as many jobs as possible, and hope for the best.

A good friend of mine, who was a good deal older than the rest of us snotty 18 year-olds - who had a rougher life than most and was later to the college game - decided to drive down the highway with a stack of resumes and stop at every company along the way. He'd insist on talking to someone sufficiently senior (aka not the assistant) before leaving his resume with them.

Took about a week for him to get a job - while the rest of us were still waiting by the phone for a call-back. The job was unadvertised at any job board or job fair, and they in fact weren't planning to hire an intern at all.

It's not conventional, but it does work. Most job opportunities are unadvertised, and indeed many job opportunities don't exist until you ask for them. A lot of companies have problems they'd like solved but haven't formalized it into an open position.

To be clear - soft skills are incredibly important for everyone, and by all means you should be networking your butt off, but randomly approaching offices asking for work does work, really well.

But that's still how you are most likely to get women(or jobs) and how it's been done since forever.

Well said. Why are we so apt to forget how things worked in the past?

Two points on this.

"Cold calling" is a great method for making sales.

Cold calling and talking to women is hard, but doing hard things is a great first step for breaking out of a shell and getting ahead.

The more you practice defeating your resistance to change, the more you build your confidence that you can do it. It may or may not become easier, but at least you can become familiar with and even embrace the pain. Feel the burn!

Taking it easy may have been what got him into this mess in the first place.

> one doesn't find a job by approaching random offices asking for work

Maybe not "random" offices, but otherwise that's exactly how I found my first programming job out of college. No one does this, and you'll get a lot of rejections, but it can work to get a quick in-person chat with a hiring manager about your skill set. Doing some research on the companies beforehand is useful, of course.

There are varying degrees of this though. Singles have things like speed dating and singles only volleyball leagues. We have meetups and conferences. I have found all of my jobs through networking. My first 2 were directly from meetups. The 3rd came from a former classmate. My current role came from a coworker from my 2nd job. Most of my other interviews have come from meetups too. It is a lot easier to do this when you know there's some common ground.

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