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Comment by sigmoid10 | Hacker News Reader

Getting older, one of the most important things I've learned is that no technical skill is useless. Especially since you never know where you end up. I've had so many things at university where I was absolutely sure that I'd never need them. And for like 90% of them I was right. But the remaining 10% were incredible boosters to my career and I never would have thought they could have such a huge a impact.

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Being a techie also means that you aquire meta skills like being able to figure out and troubleshoot random tech very fast, no matter how trivial or complex. Where most people would never bother to dig deep enough or quite really fast, techies can deep wide and deep, over a long period if need be.

You seem to contradict yourself. You claim no technical skills are useless then claim that you didn’t need (use) 90% of them. Am I reading this wrong?

Practical skills are useful - school isn’t.

Some young people aren't sure what they want to do with life and school is a reasonable place to figure that out and hopefully pick up some practical skills/networking/life experience along the way.

Seen from the perspective of my own education that is a very strange thing to say. Did you never learn anything practical at school or university? My own education was full of things that I have used all my life in my career as an engineer.

Some schools are more practical/focused than others.

Oh man, I couldn't disagree more. Learning is learning. My education was broad in a few ways, and so many of the thing I learned that were seemingly unrelated to technical skills have made me a better engineer in many ways.

100% disagree.

Imagine how much better off our society would be if every adult was grounded in the fundamentals of political science, ethics, economics, and philosophy.

An educated electorate demands higher quality candidates. The populist demagogues of the last several decades wouldn't have stood a chance.

You are going to be very surprised when you find out that all your “practical” skills are nothing but the distillation of decades of research and applied science, most of it done at schools and universities.

The argument is that you cannot know ahead of time which skills you are going to use, so at best you can only determine which were useless after you're dead. However, there's also the "practice" argument: piano learners don't play scales so they can play a scale at Carnegie Hall, the practice fits within broader learning.

None are useless. They are right about that.

It is about coverage and opportunity in our lives.

The more skills one picks up, the greater the chance any one of them will make a big difference.

Here is a crazy example:

Paper tape. In the late 80's, I worked in some smaller shops using paper tape to drive their CNC machines. I learned all about it and can patch, the whole nine.

A few years ago a call for help found it's way to me and it turns out there are STILL people driving CNC machines off paper tape! I was able to fix the setup and get them running, edit a few programs and repair a damaged tape or few. Made a nice bit of extra cash.

> You claim no technical skills are useless then claim that you didn't need (use) 90% of them.

Restating their (apparent) point more explicitly: there are no technical skills that have probability 0% of being used; there are many (most) technical skills that have probability less than 100% of being used. There are cost-benefit tradeoffs to consider, but assuming the cost is low enough, it's better (useful) to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

If you let your interest guide you when you have time to explore and play, you'll set yourself up with skills that support you in a career you enjoy.

I believe my lego play informed my career in software development, but that might be a stretch.

If 10% of your skills are useful, you still want to increase your total skills to increase the value of that 10%.

You don't know what 10% you are going to need.

>And for like 90% of them I was right. But the remaining 10%

I'd argue that this kind of language isn't even right. It's not only that you don't know when you need something, you don't even know when you use it. If we've learned one thing from the success of ML systems it's that the proper representation of knowledge is extremely complex and connected. Everything influences everything else. You can't learn "10%" of a language, or "10% of programming", as if there exists some chunk neatly separated from the rest.

It's much more likely everything you learned contributes to most of what you do, even if we're not actively aware of it. You can't learn x% of Mandarin by learning y% of the words, it's not even appropriate to separate anything into useful or useless. Almost everything you pick up just illuminates your mental model just a little bit more.

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