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Comment by wai1234 | Hacker News Reader

IMO, this is terrible advice. The core concept that school is passive and life is active is, at best, partially true. Very few people answer to no one and the rest get told what to do, all too often, throughout their lives. The rest is mostly based on the author's life in the academic bubble pretending they know what the 'outside' is all about. For example, the claim that college "is fond of seeing imaginary connections, like Arts and marketing, or Maths and computer programming" obviously doesn't understand any of those subjects.

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The core advice is to figure out what you want to do in your career, and choose an academic path that supports that. He's pointing out that the mistake people make is to choose an academic subject and assume there'll be a job that maps perfectly to that subject, when there usually isn't.

The issue I have with it is that when I was in college, one of the few things I knew least about is what I wanted to do with my life.

I was the other way. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, but my university had extremely competitive programs, so getting into the CS program was nearly impossible, even if you were already admitted to the university.

> Very few people answer to no one and the rest get told what to do, all too often, throughout their lives.

I don't know about this. I run a team of ML engineers, and the ones who require being told what to do in order to be productive are simply worth less to the team. Sure, the scope of work is very specific (often limited to the teams purpose/mission), but autonomy is very much sought after and rewarded where I work. I simply don't want to work on a team where I, as the boss, am the sole person responsible for finding high leverage problems to solve, and have to then package the work then assign it.

"the scope of work is very specific" and not under your control. Word.

I think there is a large gap between "go solve this large engineering problem, how is up to you" and "here are pre-groomed tickets, do not deviate from them". Do you disagree?

> The core concept that school is passive and life is active is, at best, partially true. Very few people answer to no one and the rest get told what to do, all too often, throughout their lives.

I don't agree with your framing. Yes, people vary on how much autonomy they have in their job, but your life is still yours to live. A big part of being an adult is getting to make choices you didn't have as a kid.

Even if your job is very rote, you can still try to find other jobs, or move to a new place, or whatever.

Many people don't exploit the autonomy they have because they don't have the mindset that they can make choices. Instead they do everything they can let other people make choices for them. I beleithr author is encouraging the mindset of making the most of whatever autonomy you do have.

> Maths and computer programming

I’ll have to inform the 50+% of math PhD’s I graduated with that now work in tech…

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