Advice to young people, the lies I tell myself | Hacker News Reader

Advice to young people, the lies I tell myself

jxnl.co

155 pointsherbertl62 comments

> I've never gotten a job by applying to it. It's always been referrals or someone reaching out to me.

This is always a bewildering one, but I've heard similar stories on HN, so I guess it does happen! I've never understood how this would work in practice, outside of 1. tiny companies who have no HR department and hire you by having the CEO shake your hand, OR 2. you're applying to be some big shot CxO/SVP guy and they have a special process for you.

Sure, I've had people reach out to me, like recruiters, former co-workers, and so on. They'll tell me about the role, find out if I'm interested, but at some point, inevitably will say, "OK Great! Go to this URL and fill in the application. Good luck!" How the f- do you skip that step? Do companies actually just mail you the job offer after a few chats, bypassing the application, phone screens, in-person interviews, coding challenges, take-home-tests, and so on??? What kind of a Captain Of Industry do you have to be to get this kind of special treatment? I've never seen it, and while I'm no John Carmack, I'm not a schmuck either.

I don't think he means he never had to fill out an official application for consideration. Hell, I have to do that just for inter-company transfers.

I think he means in the true sense, in that he simply wasn't cold-calling around applying for jobs. The application didn't get him the job; the relationship did. I've found that to be mostly true as well. At least for the jobs I wanted.

more like i've never gotten a job from an official application :( failed most interviews

I can relate. When I had little in the way of a professional network I applied to a job once, but that was no more than sending an email that was essentially "Hey, I think we should work together." And it turned out they agreed. From that I started making connections.

> What kind of a Captain Of Industry do you have to be to get this kind of special treatment?

Word on the street is that times have now changed, it might not work anymore, but there was a software heyday where companies were happy to find anyone willing to work for them. You didn't have to be anyone particularly special. You just had to be the only person to show up, which was easy because nobody else did.

Still works in other industries, though. I just hired a customer on the spot in a non-tech businesses because they happened to mention that they had recently left their previous job in the same industry. I wasn't going to risk losing them over some silly application process.

> Word on the street is that times have now changed

I'm not that old, but back when I got into the IT world, it was not seen as a particularly desirable profession; I rather liked the idea of being the troll in the basement who didn't need to talk to people and just kept the machines running. I suppose I grew up a bit along with the industry, and that is a good thing, but once it became a bit more lucrative it started attracting a fair amount of attention that I'd rather it didn't have.

Twenty years ago, people joined IT because they loved computers. Many of them were on the autistic spectrum. Today, people join IT because they know that's where the money is.

For the people who are on the autistic spectrum, this is a bad news, because now they are expected to become happily extraverted, work in noisy open spaces, get interrupted by meetings all day long (and then be on call during the night), keep networking, and get sufficiently good at office politics so that they don't get fired for understanding some corporate bullshit literally. Technical skills are still important, but secondary.

tl;dr -- IT was gentrified by normies

It was common during the dot-com days. I interviewed with the "VP" who asked me to draw an architecture diagram of a recent system I worked on. He said that looked pretty cool, asked some basic questions. Next day I had a job offer at a 20% raise. No take home, no additional interviews, no white board coding, no written application. Most interviews were like that actually, up until 2010 or so. I remember being shocked by my first white board coding interview.

I haven't gone to a link and filled out an application in a very long time. The way that has generally worked is that the internal contact puts your resume (or just a linkedin profile link) directly into the top of the "do a phone screen" funnel. This is indeed more common at smaller or earlier stage companies.

My current job was an "internal contact" at a smallish ~20 person company, where that entailed the CEO still personally manning the "reach out if you're interested in working with us and tell us why!" email address. My "this is why I understand and would be excited to work at your company" message, along with my linkedin profile, was a close enough match for what they were looking for right that moment to make it into the phone screen funnel right away.

But recruiters can do this as well. It's sort of the whole point... I think it would be weird for a recruiter to do a direct reach-out, and then say "ok here's the application link, good luck!". Like, what did they actually do there? Just making you aware of the application link? That's marketing, not recruiting...

But I also haven't ever skipped past the phone screen(s) and interview(s) straight to a job offer. I agree with you that this can't be as widespread as people make it seem. I could see that happening if I'm applying to work directly with / for someone I've already worked with a bunch in the past. But even then, we would need to meet for coffee or a drink a time or two to discuss the opportunity, and ... that's an interview!

> This is indeed more common at smaller or earlier stage companies.

This is anecdotal of course, but the last three companies that I’ve worked for that employ over 100k employees followed the exact same process. Strong internal referrals are little more than basic due diligence and welcome aboard if they hit during hiring season. There are some other interviews, but unless you’re seriously bad at conversations they are mostly a formality.

Which ones?

There aren't that many software companies of that size. I worked for one of them (Google) until a couple years ago, and I never knew of any ICs, at least up to the "Staff" level, who skipped the interview gauntlet on the back of an internal referral. It was a good way to get an interview though (which was already a big advantage). Maybe it was different for managers though.

Is this different at Meta/Amazon/Microsoft? That has not been my impression, but I don't have personal experience with those companies.

Possibly an artifact of the enormous number of startups that appeared in the past 15 years. I've been a 3rd and 10th employee of two, and both times there was no application. There isn't even an HR department. You meet a few people and that's it. They're too busy doing their actual jobs to specialize in hiring and make this any kind of a real process you're familiar with from longer standing larger companies.

And, for what it's worth, I was in the Army before I got into software and you don't apply to jobs in the Army, either. You certainly go through a long, drawn-out, highly formal structured process, but it isn't filling out a job history and sitting through rounds of interviews.

#1 describes essentially every company I've ever worked for beyond basic retail stuff.

I hate the impersonal feel once you get above 50 or so. If I'm not on first name terms with the boss, at least the local one, I'm not interested.

I've only taken 1 job where I applied and interviewed through a normal pipeline, which was when I moved country. Now, I have been through the whole application and interview process quite a few times, getting either rejected or an offer, but for one reason or another I've never accepted the offer.

So for every other job I've had I've either been approached or I mentioned I was looking, and by doing so I got to skip some or all of the process. Once the process being "I still have to interview you though" "ok..." "That was your interview, did you enjoy it?"

I didn't aim for this though. I'm not a networking type person. I'm very shy. I've been active on various local or niche tech forums and chat servers, been to tech meetups where I've mostly been quiet.

If I am a former coworker, and I reach out to you, and give you a URL, it's a unique URL that ties back to me as an internal referral. You are then given higher priority over the general stack: you have just cut through the automated tracking system.

On the other side, we will have 200 people apply in a day for some jobs. 190 of them will be people we wouldn't even consider for the job, and it's entirely possible that a blind submission that is good will get swept up with the bad. This just doesn't happen with internal submissions.

Now, the days of "any referral of X is an auto-hire" is gone for any company under 20 people, at this point, because there are many ways that can go wrong legally. However, that doesn't mean it's useless: you have a significant advantage with an internal submission.

For me it also was a lot like that. During my freelance time I not once had to search for a client and they all came via referral.

I was above average good and fast at what I did while being extremely clear in my communication. That alone meant people recommended me when someone had a problem or a project revolving about what I am good at.

Nearly all of that happened during my studies, with some of it being direct contacts from university.

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/my-wild-experience-interview...

I've seen it happen at small companies (under 30 or so.) You get the white glove treatment during the interview. They'll skip the leet-code because you have a strong internal referral and they're desperate to fill a role fast.

The recruiter reaches out, we have a chat, and if things align well enough, they put me in the pipeline for a phone screen.

If the recruiter has you filling out the formal application, then that’s probably them soft-rejecting you and your application will join the majority of the hundreds or thousands of other cold-appliers in the ether of digital oblivion.

Having said that, every job I’ve gotten in my career has been through a recruiter reaching out first. Any attempt to cold apply via online application has been met with automated rejection or ghosting. Any attempt to reach out to a recruiter first has them directing me to the online application form that leads straight to oblivion.

There are people out there that can leverage their networks to easily land jobs. However the catch here seems to be that you can’t be picky about where you end up. Unless you’re lucky enough that most of your friends and ex-colleagues are in influential positions at highly desirable organizations.

Heck, I could probably leverage my network to land a job pretty quickly. It’s just highly unlikely it will be at a company I’d want to work for unless I’m desperate.

I've networked my way to every job except my first one. You make friends at work, have lunches where they bring their friends from other companies or keep in touch with folks after they move on.

When you reach out, you'll hear a "Sure, we've got a spot open for <job>. Let me introduce you to the hiring manager," or "Send your resume to <mgmt-email> and tell them I sent you." A vouch is a powerful social tool.

I have had three jobs so far, and I applied for none of them.

It was just people reaching out to me via mail, or LinkedIn DM.

I would be asked to take interview rounds. After those interview rounds, I would just receive the contract PDF via email. I would then start on a stipulated date.

I of course failed one on the 4th rounds (of 5 total). One other job, I had done everything good, but they ghosted me anyway.

There was one Engineering Manager reaching out to me from FAANG, which I did not take up, because I had multiple different things going on, and studying for FAANG interview takes time- no matter who you are. So, I said that I would be in touch after some of those things were over. But, then came the big layoffs...

Then I reached out and they let me know that their team wasn’t hiring anymore, and encouraged me to apply to somewhere else. Which I was not again interested at that point.

I regret that the most.

Surprisingly lots of good advice, especially when one got a few years of professional experience.

> Do It Scared

True. I've deep dived enough topics and technology to confidently say that pretty much everyone is just cooking with water as they say. .... The special specialist doing super professional job with X? - well they are probably just using this or that standard tool. Resolving problems with some very sound approaches (which they probably taught themselves through experimenting, through practice).

Especially with software: Just have a go at it. The worst that could probably happen is that you need to reinstall your Operating System (and please don't ask me, how I developed some kernel-patch-performance-evaluation)

To your closing note, one interesting narrative (lie?), "Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time" https://www.theguardian.com/news/oliver-burkeman-s-blog/2014...

I agree that most of the great technologists I’ve worked with have been like this. But it’s certainly not true of everyone. I’ve got one friend who is what I would classify as a slow learner. He doesn’t pick up new languages or technologies well and he flounders for a long time when out outside of the areas he feels confident in. What he is though is incredibly consistent within that space he is comfortable with. I can turn around amazing things during a hackathon or POC when the realities of every day development don’t get in the way, but I’m average at best at day to day delivery of the same type of work. This guy though churns out code reliably every day. Over and over again. He’s able to achieve more through attrition than I am by being able to quickly learn new things and then quickly get bored.

So I completely agree with the sentiment of “just have a go at it”. It’s what I’ve done all my life. But I also acknowledge there are many very productive developers who can’t really do that well. Consequently he has a much more difficult time landing new jobs, and he’s much more likely to hold onto jobs for way longer than I would have bailed on it. He’s a lot more difficult to hire than someone who is confident in their ability to figure things out along the way.

> Confidence is the memory of success

This really stood out to me as something true and obvious yet never before stated in such plain language.

Experience isn’t the only source of confidence though

i expect personal experience to be the most heavily weighted source of confidence

most people have limited experience. Thus if you are deriving confidence mainly from experience, you will have hard time bootstrapping confidence for a very long time. 2c

which is definitly the case for me, but at this point it just comes from the fact that ok, i just know i have the capacity to work hard so i dont the confidence will come

author here, I agree, but i feel like i've had so many self esteem issues growing up, its the only way i can believe it.

Confidence is just from working really fucking hard.

but again these are the lies i tell myself :)

It's a really good counterweight to "You're only as good as your last ___," a narrative which leads a person to feel frightened/shaken after a failure.

Remembering past successes in times like that can be nice grounding. I've always liked Julia Evans' brag document, which presumes you and your co-workers won't remember your past successes: https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/

Also consider confidence as the potential for success. Prospective motivation is empowering.

Some more details on the photograph experiment from https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2007/09/how-lucky-people-...

---- [Experimenter]: They'd go through, and after about three pages, there'd be a massive half-page advert saying, STOP COUNTING. THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER. It was next to a photo, so we knew they were looking at that area. A few pages later, there was another massive advert -- I mean, we're talking big -- that said, STOP COUNTING. TELL THE EXPERIMENTER YOU'VE SEEN THIS AND WIN 150 POUNDS [about $235].

For the most part, the unlucky would just flip past these things. Lucky people would flip through and laugh and say, "There are 43 photos. That's what it says. Do you want me to bother counting?" We'd say, "Yeah, carry on." They'd flip some more and say, "Do I get my 150 pounds?" Most of the unlucky people didn't notice.

I have read HN for over a decade. I like this article. In this article, the author put his entire life on the line. It was well written. Hats off sir. "The greatest gift you can give yourself is the gift of being enough." Ok, yeah I walked around the house thinking about this for 2 hours.

This reads more like advice _from_ young people.

The "luck" experiment has problems, not the least of which is that "luck" seems to include assuming what newspapers say is true.

It's consistent with other self-help advice, though I think it's worded in ways that make it easier to relate to on a day-by-day basis. I think it was particularly insightful for being such a short read.

In particular, the "what would I do if I really loved myself" is a common theme in therapy. It's the 2nd of Jordan Peterson's 12 rules for life -- "Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping." He's not the first therapist to offer a relatable thought exercise for expressing self-love.

I very much liked this quote on choosing happiness:

> In the short term, you would be much happier if you accepted and admitted to yourself that the reason you don't have what you want is simply because you do not want it badly enough. The sooner you accept that, the happier you'll be. Then the next question is: Do you want to be happy or do you want to achieve what you want?

"Desire’s a contract you make to be unhappy until you get what you want." https://nav.al/desire

That advice — given in many forms by many people — to me almost seems immoral to at this point. It manages to pack so much into a brief assertion, that people who don't achieve something just don't want it badly enough. It's meaningless and insulting to everyone who finds themselves in circumstances beyond their control, in whatever ways that might be obvious or subtle to other people not in the situation. It blames victims, it enshrines survivorship bias, and it relies on a sort of nondisprovable assertion, which in itself speaks volumes about its validity.

Of course, the author adds the end bit, about "do you want to be happy or do you want to achieve what you want", which ameliorates it a bit and makes it more accurate. But by the same token it makes it softer and murkier and less useful.

Then again, the whole essay is predicated by "these are simply the lies I tell myself to keep on living my life in good faith". I can understand where that statement is coming from, but then what use is it?

I appreciate the desire to put advice into the world, but too often I find it completely useless out of context. Or maybe even actively harmful. They're like Barnum statements that can be interpreted in all sorts of ways in any given situation.

I guess I just feel like we as a society need to stop taking advice from people based on their own personal philosophies, which have all sorts of self-justifying biases (regardless of how their life goes).

>Then again, the whole essay is predicated by "these are simply the lies I tell myself to keep on living my life in good faith".

I read the whole thing, and it seemed like the opposite of "the lies he tells himself."

Rather, it sounded like he was telling the truth as he sees it. I don't understand why he chose that title for his essay.

It's good to remember that even if it seems like you have figured things out, there is still a lot left to learn, or even completely overturn.

Calling these "lies" is a way to keep a beginners mind, which is a path towards greater knowledge and discovery.

author here:

good liars deceive others great liars deceive themselves,

my goal was to call out that i do believe these are true, but i must acknowlege they are lies

Self deprecating title to counterbalance life advice from a guy who is in his 20s

I'm not his target audience but I saw everything he wrote as true and wise

There is some nuance to the assertion that if one doesn't get something they didn't want it enough.

But, as pointed out in another comment, the idea is that you either get it or die trying. As long as you haven't given up, there's a chance you'll get what you want.

A more socially acceptable "spin" is to emphasize on perseverance. But, at least in my belief system, it's not only the physical act of perseverance that eventually gets you there, but also the mental aspect of actually really wanting it.

There are also many other nuances like people thinking they want something but instead they want something else (eg. people thinking they want a Lamborghini, but maybe they just want to be respected). And then there are cases where people want something but at the same time kind of want the opposite thing (eg. want a high status challenging job, but also want to live a peaceful and chill life.)

So yeah, with such nuances it's probably not a great idea to just randomly throw these ideas out there without some detailed follow up explanations, that part I agree with you.

But what I disagree is the "victim" part. Nobody is a "victim" of not reaching a goal unless they choose to be one. I mean, let's say for example a person fails to pass an exam because they had to take care of their sick mother -- well, good for them, because taking care of their mother is more important than the stated goal of getting good grades for the exam. Nobody is a victim here. Instead, everyone's free choices are respected. As long as we don't judge people for their lack of apparent, socially-acceptable "successes".

Am I missing something? The writer claims:

>The reason you don't have what you want is because you don't want it badly enough.

That is absurd. And I say that as someone who has nearly everything material I might want in life. Wanting something really, really badly doesn't ensure that you are going to get it.

Consider every failed startup. Those founders just didn't want it enough?

I don't get it, and I also don't get the second sentence:

>Then the next question is: Do you want to be happy or do you want to achieve what you want?

What if the thing you want to achieve is being happy? Why can't those be the same?

I feel like something is going way over my head here, but I'm not sure what it is.

I think the point is: if you truly want something, you'll get it or die trying. Being happy, then, is at some point accepting that you don't actually want the things you don't have yet.

You got plenty to learn, but this is a good start. Take it from someone learning.

As an "unlucky" person, I can't help but wonder: what about an alternative version of the experiment where the newspaper contained the big "This newspaper has 43 photographs" text - followed by 44 photographs?

(This "unlucky" - or perhaps "paranoid" - mindset has, frankly, made me a damn good programmer and debugger.)

Tbh If I noticed the text(s), I'd still have counted the photos and still looked at every page in case there were other prizes.

See other top-level comment - direction was to keep counting, and you would indeed have won another prize (although it's unclear whether they actually paid out).

Especially since commonly followed wisdom seems to be "trust, but verify."

> Pessimists Are Losers

I resonate with almost every single thing he says, except this.

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.”

― Henry Ford

Maybe it's worth trying to be optimistic.

I'm pretty well known, where I've worked, for being brave and bold. Confident to a fault, as it were. Pessimism is not at odds with this.

I believe in Murphy's Law

Could you unpack what you mean by pessimism? The author and some people here probably understand it differently.

I’d define pessimism as the mindset that things usually don’t work out, despite our best efforts. That’s different from believing in Murphy’s Law while also believing that you still have the ability to get shit done.

Context? Who is this guy?

Did you read the page? It's right there.

just a dude

Exactly my conclusion, but I was very impressed. I hope he doesn't burn out

Discussed earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38902596 (72 comments)

I enjoyed reading this, but it seems the jiu jitsu segment was just thrown in there, felt out of place.

"Okay, I'm focused on getting X, but let's not forget to read the headlines." -> this is probably the hardest part of "being lucky".

And also encapsulates a problem embedded in the way the author expresses the differentiation.

Luck is not just about recognizing opportunities when they arise, its also about being in a position to act on those opportunities.

I've read several times that professional poker players are very good at doing math in their head to evaluate how good a bet actually is. Basically, you take the apparent cost of an operation (maybe the raise from a previous player), multiply it by the odds of losing, then decide if that value is above or below what you can "afford" to lose. So if the fee to stay in is $5,000, and the odds of losing the next hand are 3 in 5, then the gambler has to decide "can I afford to lose $3,000 right now?". If the answer is yes, then bet. If not, then fold. The hard part is ignoring the apparent sunk cost.

So if I'm chronically unlucky, either I'm garbage at recognizing opportunities, or when I do recognize opportunities, I'm not in a position to act on them. It can certainly be the case that the former contributes to the latter. But it can also be the case that you just never get an opportunity to get in the game, so to speak, in the first place. Everybody needs that one big break to get in the game. Not everybody gets that break.

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