Advice to young people, the lies I tell myself (2024)

> How to Get a Job

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.

Overall I think it’s a good perspective and worth reading to learn your perspective and experience. Just for anyone who doesn’t come from a good place, please be kind to yourself. You probably really need to work exceptionally hard and need to have top 1% resume. And articles like this can be quite depressing. Don’t let it you down

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

Choosing is a big one. Something I learned later in life about emotional maturity and controlling your emotions is that it's just choosing to feel an emotion.

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

Popular twice in 2024

(148 points, 72 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38902596

(155 points, 62 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39926081

I'm sorry to hate but it's extremely rich to write

> 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

I like the old parts of this piece.

Seems like the new additions are all about money as the goal. Oh well.

My advice is: Don’t let someone else control your life. Switch occupation every 2 years, even if you find a great environment. Don’t chase, for what you need must come to you. Understand no one can give you the answers you seek; you have to live it.

My interpretation of the newspaper image-counting experiment is quite different from that of the author.

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: ..."

> 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.

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."

> 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.

alright, checks out.

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