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Discussion on: What's the worst advice you've ever received?

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thefluxapex profile image
Ian Pride • Edited

The worst advice I ever received (in programming, at least) was something to the effect of "leave programming to the educated professionals; stop invading/infecting our world". It was 20 years ago when I went to a forum asking for help on something basic, yes, I was clearly a novice, and I expressed that my only interest was as a hobbyist to give them an idea of how to help me and he commenced to go on a page long rant about all the "idiots" wasting valuable data storage space and bandwidth (these were bigger issues back then). This is why I always pre apologize for wasting forum posts (if it seems like something I should know already) on the rare occasion I do need help anymore. Old habit, hard to break. The pretentiousness of experienced programmers was far worse than it is today (though we still have the Stack Overflow :().
If I had taken his advice and given up I never would have built all the utilities on my machines and on the net that make my "hobbyist" life happy. I'm addicted to anything programmatic/problem solving. Just comes naturally and makes me feel amazing. Truly helps me with lots of issues, not just in computing.

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mxldevs profile image
MxL Devs

Some people spend way too much time interfacing with a computer that they forget how to interface with other humans lol

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iamarya profile image
Arya

Hahaha! It's funny because I find it to be true nowadays! We need HumanDebugInterface HDI for them to do a life-boot rescue 😁.

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thefluxapex profile image
Ian Pride

I've had countless experiences like this throughout the years with these types and lots of them are frustrated they spend all the money on an education and expect everyone else to have to do the same.

I love helping people and do it regardless if I get anything out of it or not and I pay the help I've received forward any time I can.

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ddm50 profile image
Din

Who said that? Cause many "educated professionals" don't know much

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_hs_ profile image
HS

Although some of the devs get to be like that in my opinion, as they did a lot for something and should have an excuse SOMETIMES (hey we all get in bad mood and make misstakes), most of these behave as they are affraid that people who didn't waste their lifes reading all books ever written about it, are gonna take their jobs and the only thing they were good at will be taken away and they will be exposed that it's not so hard to do their job. I guess it's not only devs but a lot of things connected somehow to sinence or actual science. Take for instance doctors, if you eve think that there might be a different way to solve your health issues automatically tag on a forehead as conspiracy theorists. I had some bad cases with medical professionals were they made wrong calls because tests indicated something. It's like if people see them as other human beings who also makes mistakes world will end

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iamarya profile image
Arya

I can agree, some people can be very toxic to a community as a whole, on the other hand its great that you didn't let it get to you and kept up what you want to do.