Hacker News Reader

Comment by hresvelgr | Hacker News Reader

A guiding principle I've stuck to is: "In every job, you should be learning, earning, or leaving." This is especially important if you want to remain technical.

Learning is a painful process. It is natural to feel stupid when learning so it's important to prevent your ego from trying to "protect" you from the early follies of learning. In time, this process will humble you and make you a better person. You may even come to like it.

Follow your passions. More often than not, you'll learn and "stay ahead of the curve" just by learning adjacent subjects to what you care about. Don't learn anything you are not passionate about (within reason).

Look after your health, nothing else matters more, that includes mental health as well.

View on HN

a problem with tech careers is that we have to learn all the time. it never ends.

many careers do not require this. for example law. maybe you’ll have to get up to speed on a new law here or there once a year. but you will not be learning a new tool set all the time.

in tech every year there is a new tool set which means you spend every hour catching up and you will never get caught up.

Indeed, if you can only withstand the treadmill so long, be ready to hop off at some point. That’s why (imho) a lot of tech folks subscribe to early financial independence; the recognition that we have a shelf life and the odds of continuing employment (voluntarily or not) diminish as we approach late 40s and early 50s.

It’s fine to be willing to spend significant amounts of your personal time earlier in life staying current on whatever the new hotness is, but it gets old later in life and can encroach on having a quality life with loved ones and friends.

From the NY State Bar: "Experienced attorneys must complete a total of 24 accredited CLE credit hours during each biennial reporting cycle (the two-year period between your attorney registrations)."

No, they don't have to learn a new JavaScript framework every two years, but they do have to take classes.

In tech, you have to learn new stuff. I would have left the industry if I was still writing the same code on the same platform that I was using in the 90s. It's a feature, not a bug, and it's a good profession for people who like learning. (Electrical Engineering is still there for people who want to learn one thing and nothing else for the rest of their career.)

You're never going to know it all.

Awesome answer, wish I had met you when I was young. I would say networking with people helps to provide opportunities to implement your principles.

Couldn't be expressed better than this. Kudos :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com