Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50107366

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172631

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939977

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It seems like you measure "friendship" not by the time spent with them when you go to events or in school, but what happens afterwards. In other words, you are discounting to zero the moments that are actually happening in your life, for an imagined future of what a friendship might turn out to be. But life only ever happens moment to moment. That time that you spend with people at an event, that IS the thing.

There is no "friendship certificate": some people, you'll only spend ten minutes with; some, you might spend an afternoon with; others you might end up seeing once a week for a term. You might date a girl for a fortnight, or a couple of months, and then break up and never see each other again. It's ALL GOOD.

If I understand correctly, none of the above would qualify in your eyes as "real friendship", only the deep, deep kind. You might find it helpful to learn about Dunbar's number, and the size of the model's concentric social circles. Most people end up with 1-2 very close friends (possibly including their spouse). That is the outcome over a lifetime of making connections. Popular culture markets this idea that we should all be carousing with a tightly knit group of friends - no statistical social evidence bears this out.

When sinking into deep analysis about all your self-perceived inadequacies, your attention beam is directed inwards. That's unhealthy. When it's directed OUT, into the world, it takes you out of your head, and lets you see that everyone, every single one (person or otherwise), is struggling in their own way. Everyone's got a thing. Looking out builds empathy and kindness and affection towards things that make you happy, and gazing inwards makes you miserable.

You are surrounded by people in school, and are at a stage in life where you get to be interested in whatever. Any experience you have, even if it doesn't lead to lifelong friendships, is worthy in the space of time it occupies.

Throughout my undergrad I had friends come and go. I'm not in touch with anyone I met at Uni during those years. It doesn't make the actual time spent with these people any less special.

Eventually, what they did was set up two-week dev cycles. Before each, they'd write down suggestions for features/WIP and stick everything on the board. They would also estimate if a feature was large (one week of work or over), medium (2-3 days) or small (up to a day). Then, they'd pick the most urgent things off that list, and work only on them. Two weeks later, same thing. But you don't keep a list of the ideas, the other things don't go into a queue.

I applied this for a product I was building last year, and it definitely helped build faster.

Not sure about measuring things in LOC or commits.

A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again (originally titled 'Shipping out') David Foster Wallace goes on a luxury cruise. There's a PDF version online, but the reading experience doesn't compare to reading it in a book. My copy is tatty by now, still keep going back.

Some people might say "But I only enjoy video games!" and if that's the case, I don't really know what to say to that. All the people I know who have found great alignment with a path of progress are ones where the effort tickles an itch they would have regardless, so might as well scratch that itch.

And there are still goals, that doesn't change.

The feeds have become really terrible. This wasn't always the case. Before, a lot more weight was given to posts from people you were connected to, vs. the weight given to their overall engagement. This offered two kinds of value: One, you were more likely to keep updated on what's happening within a professional niche (assuming lots of your connections were in that niche too.) Two, your own writing would be shown mostly to people in your business niche, which helped foster trust.

I've formed a lot of useful connections this way. A lot of client relationships, past and present, started out this way. A bunch of people helped me in a bunch of ways (intros, advice) because they felt I was a real person, not a rando profile image.

That's mostly gone now. A useful post is now so rare, and the rest is "engagement" fodder. Eventually, I turned off the feed, and that's how it stays most of the time. (I installed an extension someone once posted about here.)

The chat feature, which was always really powerful, is still there. But it used to be that the flow was written insights -> chat -> in person/Zoom. Without that slower process of getting acquainted, the connecting itself has less potential to become really useful.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40414177

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I found that filling in the application, without even sending it, is a useful exercise. It makes you think hard about what it is you are trying to achieve with whatever it is your building. It's very helpful when you come to talk with clients.

You know how they say launch fast, launch early? That's part of it, because launching means talking about it to other people. Those people will have questions or objections or an incomplete understanding of pre-existing solutions. A lot of the application is about this kind of stuff.

Personally, I wanted to fill the application irrespective of YC. I figured, if I'm serious about building something useful, I shouldn't just build it and que sera, sera. I should know what to focus on. And since they've learned a bunch about building companies, if they care about something enough to ask about it, that's a good pointer that I should care enough about it to be able to answer it.

For example, I filled it in when a solution was just an idea, as if it were already built. So it made me set expectations, and clarify what I want this thing to be. Then, once it was built, the first thing that happened when that solution met with clients was this: I'd give them the short description I've written in the application, and they'd ask - Oh, but does it have to do just that?

Without the application, there wouldn't have been the short description, without which there wouldn't have been the useful client feedback...So, again: do it for yourself, not for the approval.

But it does mean that all the gaps you are describing are, in many ways, there by design. So going against them is going against the grain of the organization. I think it generally helps to bring something to the table. A point of view on something external to work that could add value inside it. In many ways, though, it still requires hustle, in the sense of reaching out to people and creating opportunities.

For example, you might take an interest in a certain type of antipatterns, and want to propagate the knowledge internally about it, and how to resolve it. (I'll assume the company doesn't actively seek to cultivate this anti-pattern deliberately. You never know.) You might say, oh, I can put together a colloquium about it. So you find the person in the org who's in charge of the events, and talk to the person who books the rooms, and talk to people around you to get ideas on how to promote it internally...you get the drift, it's not all that different to doing these things outside a company. (Except the part where you risk treading on more toes.)

One book that's really useful for just about anything is "The Goal". It teaches you to think in terms of processes, bottlenecks and constraints. With this perspective, you learn to look at the work you and others do not as a series of discrete tasks, but as part of a flow of production. It broadens the perspective on the types of questions you can ask.

I'll be honest, would I pay for it? Probably not, because I already pay Spotify. But I did look you up on LinkedIn earlier today, so as a calling card it works.

And, judging by the parent comment, you clearly have a knack for marketing it, which tends to be the differentiating factor...

For one, unless people have had direct experience with spectrum diagnosis, I think most still think of autism as the extreme end of the spectrum, of severe disability. For another, the label itself doesn't offer any knowledge of what to do differently.

In my mind, there are two things that you can do that might help:

First, it helps other people understand better when you make it about vulnerability. When you say things like "I dislike crowded spaces, it stresses me out." or "It takes me a little longer to come up with a retort, I've always been this way" it does exactly what you want: allows you to be your authentic self in a social way. Everyone has things that are outside their comfort zone, so being honest about yours is very relatable.

Second, you mention people "viewing hints of antisocial behavior". It's very challenging - to yourself and to other people in the situation - to be both "social" and "antisocial" at the same time. Social behavior requires effort from everyone. That's why advice columns have always existed, that's why there are so many self help books. Recognize that, as a baseline, practically everyone is walking around with some internal sense of inadequacy, and that in social situations most everyone puts on a front. Granted, most will understand the codes to putting on the front better than you. But the effort is there. Which is to say, if you decide you are going to be in a social situation, there isn't a way to square the circle, be anti-social and have it glide. But you can manage the effort to your capacity: step aside, limit the time, set boundaries - whatever works. It can help to know that really everyone else is doing it too.

I think the first thing worth saying is that, in my experience, this anxiety is more common than you'd think. The common narrative is that a young man (and it's always a man, right?) has only a few short years to make it big before it becomes clear to the world they're worthless. Never mind that zero data backs this up, this is about narrative, and storytelling always trumps data.

So you come out of college, you've taken two breaths, got some kind of job, you're 24 and time is running out. Naturally, you begin to question everything you've done up to this point, and feel you have one last ditch to fix it...or else.

The thing to understand is that this is not life. This is not how life works. This is a story that is so evidently fictional, that the only thing stopping you from seeing it is sheer panic.

You say you're scared for your future in software engineering. I am assuming you see, right now, a future you want in software engineering? (Because maybe you don't actually want it, just feel it's 'the path' to somewhere?) Because if you do want to be in software engineering, school is not the fix. Learning and doing is the fix. (I am massively formally educated in CS. And I still stand by everything I just said.)

Life is long - especially from where you're standing now. You've just started. You're not doomed. If you lose your job, then you'll have lost your job. You may be out of a job for a while, and then you find another job. And then you leave that one, because you got a better one. You may get an opportunity to relocate and seize that. You may meet someone and decide it's a good idea to move halfway around the world. All along, you're picking up skills and know how. If you're even just a bit methodic about building up your skills, you'll find that jus five years down the line, you already know some actually useful stuff.

It's just the way it goes.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39245322

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