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Comment by notRobot | Hacker News Reader

> My only advice for people starting out their career is to make sure you are surrounded by really good people.

I keep hearing this, but I have a hard time actually finding such people. There unfortunately aren't events like hackathons around where I live, so although I'm sure there are cool (in a professional context) people around me, I'm never able to figure out how to find them. I have an amazing set of friends but they're entirely into the arts so coming by tech work I can do through them is rare.

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One thing that tech people tend to focus on it tech. As I replied to my own comment, good does not necessarily mean “good at tech”. Really talented people will attract other really talented people. You just need to make sure you are in the same orbit and “networking” with these people.

An amazing artist will bring all sorts of fascinating people into there sphere of influence.

It makes the advice go from practical to superstitious though.

The smartest people around me seem to hang out at obscure/niche programming language meetup events.

You’re gonna get a very different crowd at something like your local Rust/Elixir meetup group vs the .NET User group, as it’s likely a strong signal they like to tinker with new paradigms/programming languages vs just showing up for “networking opportunities”.

Meetups are a crapshoot. When people are involved in the community out of passion it's a great thing. Unfortunately, and this was often the case at meetups I was going to in NY, a lot of folks are there to add organizing and talks to their professional reputation to get some kind of edge at work. These people also tend to find each other easily and coordinate to give each other the best opportunities.

Not to single out any specific community here...and my experience especially in the Elixir community was lots of passionate people.

I'm not sure how well "like to tinker with new paradigms/programming languages" correlates with "really good", though. Some of the best people i've worked with were quite conservative technically (some weren't keen on this new 'Java' thing), but were masters at finding the right way to approach problems, being conscientious in their work, etc. The correlation coefficient probably isn't negative, but it's not 1 either. 0.3?

> There unfortunately aren't events like hackathons around where I live

last time i went was so bad that i decided to never go again :D

> I'm never able to figure out how to find them.

try meetups… they used to be active in my area prior to covid

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