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Comment by armcat | Hacker News Reader

It's best not to take advice on direction of careers from anyone. It's better to find and work on things that interest you, and then take advice from people that are amazing in that specific field. In mid 2000s in Australia all the "top people" were telling me not to get into a software engineering career because it was dead. It's certainly challenged right now, but it took off during those 15+ years.

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“It's best not to take advice on direction of careers from anyone. It's better to find and work on things that interest you, and then take advice from people that are amazing in that specific field.”

What bucket should I put this advice in?

Understandable irony. The way I see it, there are no buckets, only context surrounding the advice and your awareness thereof. If the context is unknown, best to take it with a big chunk of salt... Or spend time familiarizing yourself with the context if you think it's worth the time/effort; working on things that interest you is a nice way of doing that.

But some advice is less specific than other advice though. Some things are always stupid, and some things are always smart, if you look at the context of our world and society. I find myself pursuing these "fundamental truths" with great interest lately, especially now that the world is changing so quickly.

> It's best not to take advice on direction of careers from anyone. It's better to find and work on things that interest you,

Agreed, my previous stated "ignore both and do whatever the fuck I want" approach has worked out very well for me in life, people should probably focus on identifying better what their gut tells them, rather than what randoms on the internet thinks and writes.

A lot of the advice that is relevant for top performers in a field has no relevance to an average person interested in that field.

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