What is the most unhelpful advice you have received?
I’ll go first: “You have to have children when you’re young,” told to me when I was in my late 20s, with no desire to ever have kids, and no means to support them, by someone divorced multiple times with at least one adult child who does not speak to them.
Also: Responding to “How do I deal with this problem?” questions with “Oh, don’t worry about it, it’s enough that you’re even thinking about it!”
The usual acne related ones, like washing my face more or using tooth paste on my spots. Turns out clearasil won’t fix your hormones.
Use olive oil instead of sun screen because it works better than SPF and isn’t full of chemicals.
When taking a taxi on a short stop over in Dubai, the taxi driver told me not to have blue hair (which I had) or no man will ever want me, while my then boyfriend was also sitting in the taxi, masquerading as my husband (we were wearing rings and just letting people assume we were married, which everyone did. Including the taxi driver!)
Work related: don’t make my code too “complicated” or my one coworker can’t understand it (read: my coworker doesn’t know what async means, and instead of him learning, I’m just not ever meant to do anything async… When processing huge amounts of data… Also, error handling is too hard, don’t do that either) yes, I will forever be salty about this. He deleted weeks worth of work while I had covid because he didn’t even try to understand it - his reasoning being “it doesn’t work anyway, so there’s no point in understanding or learning what I’m doing”
Someone did that to my whole project. I had catefully migrated all the source control to a new and improved system. Out boss decided which project went into which organization.
Some idiot went and intentionally deleted a project I was meant to do maintenance because he had decided all by himself that it wasn’t meant to be there.
I had to do a long train ride to the idiot’s office for a training and when he told me what he did (proudly!) I gave him the sort of verbal bollocking I have never done before or since.
To the point where he contacted our boss to complain. I got a call from my boss to excuse himself on behalf of the idiot.
I typed a long reply, forgot to hit send and my reply is gone lol
But yeah, we actually do use git. I was brought into the team to be the git “expert” of the team. But while I was away, not only did he delete my work, he replaced it with something that can’t work in the long term and then presented it to my boss, stake holder equivalent and the non-technical testers as the final version. His implementation was “finished”, mine was not and I was too angry to look at his work. So in the end, I made it crystal clear that this can never happen again and I made it super clear to everyone involved in the project that my responsibility lies in the X part, and if someone needs something done for the Y part, they are to go to my co-worker. So like a clear division of responsibility.
I also don’t have the time to un-fuck up his work. I asked him to integrate certain parts of the original implementation, but he threw a tantrum and yelled that I have no right to tell him what to do. (Ok but even if I were telling him what to do, I have 6 years of experience and a CS degree on his 1 year and no formal training, so like…)
A game changer I had for acne as a teen was putting a new towel on my pillow every night. My pillow was likely riddled with Cutibacterium acnes from sleeping with acne.
It helped another friend with an acne problem as well.
Mind you that bacteria isn’t always the cause of acne, but it’s worth trying this trick for any people out there going through it.
Same. The amount of times I’ve heard “have you tried Proactiv?” as though it wasn’t the first thing I went and bought when I was 15 is just aggravating. The fact that not even doctors seem to know much about the internal causes of acne and how to treat it is really just embarrassing.
I’ve also heard the “change your pillowcase” thing far too often. If your pillowcase is so dirty that it’s the one thing that stands between you having acne and not having acne, then it sounds like you might have bigger issues lol.
tho to be fair “change your pillowcase” is probably a decent bit of advice for a lot of teen boys in particular. I knew a lot of guys in college who only washed their sheets once a semester. 🤢 It’s the “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” of acne advice.
That would have been actually useful advice! I actually did start doing that a couple of years ago, and it really did help. It didn’t clear it up, but the acne hasn’t been quite as aggressive since. I also do other things now too, so I’m in a pretty good place for my face skin at last lol
When I used to make notes because I don’t retain information instantly my boss said “Just don’t forget” I exclaimed: “Thanks, I’m cured!” The office got a laugh but it still bothers me that he thought it was a choice
For me it’s the opposite, at school I was forced to take notes. Teacher would give me bad grades if they saw me not talking notes. But notes are completely useless for me, and if I take notes I don’t understand the lecture. So I started the habit to sketch on notebooks pretending to take notes. Schools can be pretty stupid
Idk man, I’ve never gotten married and it’s been fine for me. My girlfriend and I have been together for 14 years, have 2 kids, and our family is all that has kept me going through this shitty world. Never married though, so many there is some truth to the advice.
I like reminding my colleagues they don’t get paid more for working harder.
Probably why I didn’t get that manager promotion though.
Being perceived to work hard and identifying what’s important to your manager / director is second only to being their mates. Good lunk in your endeavours!
When I would have a problem with my body like shoulder impingement and ask for advice, I would often be told by people “nah, you’re too young too have that”
Hey, what did you end up doing about that? I allegedly have one in my left shoulder and the doctor is acting like there’s not really anything I can do about it.
I had quite bad impingement from months of poor exercise selection at the gym. Changed the routine to be balanced internal/external rotation, did 1/2 above 1-2 times a day. Took a few months but now it’s completely better. I still do the stretching as a prehab now.
It bugs me when told “nothing you can do” what they really mean is “the problem is chronic so the recovery will take a long time. Patient compliance is often very low and most people won’t last the months required for a solution so I’m not going to waste my time. I can help more people if I focus my efforts elsewhere.” If you’re willing to put in the time, you can fix this. And I suggest you do, if you do nothing impingement inflames each time it happens, decreasing the space in your shoulder, increasing the likelihood, etc.
Formal education was great for me, promise of working with cutting edge technologies. Vast amount of opportunities working in the IT sector. I was excited and happy for starting my second career choice.
As for the job I’ve landed, acceptable-better pay/benefits than most, the most backwards tech to work with and managing environment. I’d like to fantasize about leaving but with the work ethic in my area I can’t escape it without a drastic move.
I’m having the opposite experience, unfortunately. I loved working at {co-op company} where I had a choice of developer environment (OS, IDE, and the permissions to freely install whatever software was needed without asking IT) and used Golang for most tasks.
The formal education has been nothing but stress and anxiety, though. Especially exams.
Ah wow that’s a great experience for your co-op! You know maybe i’m rose tinting a little bit now that you’ve mentioned exams haha, but yeah I’d still say it’s been interesting working in the field for me to say the least.
Yep! I ended up doing my entire co-op with them, and it meshed really well with my interest in creating developer-focused tooling and automation.
Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to make the necessary changes and get approval from legal to open-source it, but I spent a good few months creating a tool for validating constraints for deployments on a Kubernetes cluster. It basically lets the operations team specify rules to check deployments for footguns that affect the cluster health, and then can be run by the dev-ops teams locally or as a Kubernetes operator (a daemon service running on the cluster) that will spam a Slack channel if a team deploys something super dangerous.
The neat part was that the constraint checking logic was extremely powerful, completely customizable, versioned, and used a declarative policy language instead of a scripting language. None of the rules were hard-coded into the binary, and teams could even write their own rules to help them avoid past deployment issues. It handled iterating over arbitrary-sized lists, and even could access values across different files in the deployment to check complex constraints like some value in one manifest didn’t exceed a value declared in some other manifest.
I’m not sure if a new tool has come along to fill the niche that mine did, but at the time, the others all had their own issues that failed to meet the needs I was trying to satisfy (e.g. hard-coded, used JavaScript, couldn’t handle loops, couldn’t check across file boundaries, etc.).
It’s probably one of the tools I’m most proud of, honestly. I just wish I wrote the code better. Did not have much experience with Go at the time, and I really could have done a better job structuring the packages to have fewer layers of nested dependencies.
In the 90’s before I was doing it professionally, I used to go on massive 10 - 15 hour binge programming sessions only stopping when I realized I hadn’t eaten in that entire time. It was some of the best fun I’ve ever had. But it happened rarely and organically, not 5 days a week on a predetermined schedule.
Totally relatable! As you already pointed out, it’s the “a day” part. I like listening to the radio but I talked to a former car radio tester who said that his car radio is never on and he enjoys the silence. It’s one thing to do stuff you like when you want to, maybe even binge, and another to have a schedule.
I started programming at school and when I studied computer science, another student asked me after the first semester what I’m going to program on vacation. I stared at them and said I have vacation. Now I programm full time and barely in my free time.
I like programming, and I program for a living, but there is nobody on earth who gets out of bed every day and is like “Aw yiss I’m gonna go code a bunch of salesforce integrations!”
I’ve been working long enough that at this point my work goal is like, I want a job that 95% of the time I do not actively dread. I don’t need to be excited about it, I just need it to be fine.
On the other hand I avoided going into the field until I hit 30 because I didn’t want to spend all day on a computer and then have it effect my willingness to use a PC at home.
Of course you don’t have to be a programmer to be stuck in front of a PC all day so I figured I might as well do something I’m good at. The main shift was that I now strongly prefer console/couch/tv gaming over PC/monitor/desk gaming.
That said I still find I come home unmotivated for hobby dev, if I’m going to work on my hobby projects I need to get out of bed 60-90 minutes earlier and do that while I’m fresh.
The main shift was that I now strongly prefer console/couch/tv gaming over PC/monitor/desk gaming.
This is the big one for me. My co-workers all wonder why I switched from pc to PlayStation, and I’m like, “dude, you just watched me troubleshoot 10 machines that failed our OS upgrade, and you think I want to come home and find that Windows update just broke my sound drivers again?”
“Just be yourself and you’ll make lots of friends at your new school.”
Four years of constant bullying and loneliness later: I have one acquaintance that would eventually become my friend after a few more years. I also have basically no self-confidence, and my social development is set back half a decade as I’m still looking for friends to have sleepovers with when everyone else has moved on to normal teenager stuff.
I’m 33 now, I don’t remember my sleepovers and all of my highschool friends are gone. We see each other every now and then when it’s convenient, but the new friends I made late 20s are the people closest to who I am now.
You aren’t “missing out” and feeling like you are is only going to make your confidence issues worse. High school is not what defines who you are.
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment. (Markus Aurelius).
You have the power to feel confident by altering your estimate of pleasing people. Please yourself, confidence and everything else you feel you want will come much easier. Good luck!
Particularly devastating when you reflect on a lack of success after following this advice because now you can no longer think you were a victim of unfair circumstance or something external, but rather, you are , at your very core, just unlikeable. After all, you were yourself and it turned out nobody liked you.
That said, I think it’s only bad advice in as much as it’s glib and shallow, but I can’t exactly fault it per-se. I mean, I can’t really say the inverse is particularly healthy either. We’d think an adult telling a child specifically not be themselves would be pretty fucked up, but in any case, it’s just horrible advice to give because it doesn’t prescribe any actual changes one can enact that would result in a different outcome and the advice is insidious because of the implications for the any lack of success you encounter when following it. The other problem is that, you were already being yourself when you sought the advice, and you mostly can’t really help but be yourself even when trying not to because you ultimately become yourself trying to be someone else rather than someone else and that doesn’t doesn’t tend to work very well since if you could have been someone else you probably would be them rather than yourself given how much being yourself has sucked of late.
While I hate that advice though, I can see why it’s tempting to give and also how tricky it is to have anything useful to say, especially to a child in school. School is such a hellish jungle. It’s an environment so ripe for cruelty and all the worst of human nature at the very worst time for people to be exposed to it and there’s so little one can say that really does help because it’s such an inherently difficult situation to do anything about. You have to be there for years, you can’t rely on any level of maturity at all because the perpetrators of the cruelty are often your peers who are children, none of the adult world’s methods of navigating this type of situation are really applicable and the whole institution breeds an environment where this type of thing is such a regular occurrence that the best, kindest and most well meaning staff have to build a kind of immunity to it or risk emotional collapse from empathy for all the children that go through this every year and then you have the staff who are not good people, who don’t have empathy and are perpetrators of the cruelty itself whilst charged with the care of the children. This turned in to a big ramble, but yeh, school, fuck school man.
I mean, good advice if it’s for someone who’s prone to build codependent relationships. Which still, no one but a professional therapist should be diagnosing.
That doesn’t really say much though. “Never use cement to fill a pillow” is also crappy advice for someone that feels lonely but can be considered very good advice for someone thats considering filling their pillow with cement.
I think it can be helpful as a first sentence, but it needs more. “By loving yourself, I mean treat yourself better. Get a style and work it. Work out occasionally. Eat better. Find a hobby. Find another. If you want somebody else to love you, you have to first take care of yourself or nobody will think you could take care of them. Secondly, you have to make yourself into a person that’s interesting because anybody can be nice. You need more than nice. Third, having a life is how you meet people, and you gotta meet 'em before you can ask 'em out. That’s why you have to love yourself first.”
It’s not wrong, but spectacularly unhelpful. I mean, a brain surgeon has to be confident to go cutting into somebody’s head, but clearly that’s not enough, right? Confidence as a romantically-attractive quality is a very particular (and peculiar) performance. Going to a party 110% certain of one’s own value, sitting in a corner with a confident set of one’s jaw, and silently waiting for the ladies to form a queue is…
…sufficient, apparently, because you just to be confident.
Nah that’s actually useful. May help the other person remember if they saw it/moved it/whatever or at least gives them a place to start helping you look for it. If they don’t know they wouldn’t be able to help question or not.
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