Ask HN: What's the best advice you ignored and later wished you hadn't?
9sylm85/8/2025, 3:22:25 PM
Comments (8)
ThrowawayR2 · 6h ago
Being competent at coding is mere table stakes for being a software engineer. Success at being a software engineer is mostly about combining that coding skills with people skills: coordinating with people, negotiating with people, communicating effectively with people, working with people who are difficult, etc. I would have been far more successful if I'd improved my people skills early in my career alongside improving my coding skills.
OnionBlender · 4h ago
How do you improve your people skills? I mean besides just experience.
ThrowawayR2 · 3h ago
You can accelerate the benefit of experience by paying closer attention to what your co-workers and immediate managers do when there's a crisis, disagreement, etc. Try to figure out what tactics they're using and think about how well or badly what they did worked. Also think what you would have done in their shoes and try to game out how others might have responded to that.
There's also plenty of books out there on people skills. 99% of them are rubbish but a few have stood the test of time, e.g. the Dale Carnegie books.
JohnFen · 6h ago
"Pay yourself first"
Take 10% of any money that you receive and put it somewhere safe and where it takes real effort to get it back out. Then don't touch it unless your need is truly dire.
The idea is that regardless of your income level, you can almost certainly live on 10% less without a substantial hit to your standard of living, so pay it to Future You. The earlier in life you start, the better.
marssaxman · 4h ago
> regardless of your income level, you can almost certainly live on 10% less
This did not become true for me until my very late 20s, and by that point I was so well adapted to living on the edge, in a world which offered no end of surprising new ways to knock my financial situation out from under me, that it took years more before I started to see any value in planning for anything more than a couple months away.
taurath · 5h ago
Don’t drop out of college to work, even if you have to go into debt. People value the social signal more than you think. If you’re ever up against someone with a degree, even if you’re amazing, they’ll choose the degree 9 times out of 10. It’s not meritocratic, it’s CYA.
mcsniff · 50m ago
It is a great social signal -- excellent way to weed out people or orgs I dont need to waste time with.
Value real life world experience less than college? Not compatible, move on.
sleepyguy · 6h ago
Drip into an SP 500 index fund. I still did all right, but it took a lot more work and many mistakes to achieve the same results after 30+ years. To my credit, I still picked some amazing stocks, but I had weak hands and would have done much better if I had just forgotten about them.
There's also plenty of books out there on people skills. 99% of them are rubbish but a few have stood the test of time, e.g. the Dale Carnegie books.
Take 10% of any money that you receive and put it somewhere safe and where it takes real effort to get it back out. Then don't touch it unless your need is truly dire.
The idea is that regardless of your income level, you can almost certainly live on 10% less without a substantial hit to your standard of living, so pay it to Future You. The earlier in life you start, the better.
This did not become true for me until my very late 20s, and by that point I was so well adapted to living on the edge, in a world which offered no end of surprising new ways to knock my financial situation out from under me, that it took years more before I started to see any value in planning for anything more than a couple months away.
Value real life world experience less than college? Not compatible, move on.