Ask HN: I'm 20 and I need advice.
I am 20. My goal is to amass $1m (Australian) by 35 so I can do some substantial things later in life (I've got an idea for a business of maintaining water wells built by various charities in African villages and charging the US government for it.). I could do this by getting a high paying job within 5 years and getting above average returns investing $50,000 a year. I could also do this by building a successful small business and reaping a high income or even gasp selling that business for $1 million.
I imagined that if I was 35, and I became 20 again and asked myself what I would be doing... I'd be saving money, learning how to invest in stocks, a girlfriend, learning to drive, finding a part time IT job, building random stuff and trying my hand at making a mini-business.
I've saved up several thousand dollars which I've invested into various stocks (and got lucky :] ). I have a girlfriend, and I make stuff in my spare time. All I think I need to do now is learn to drive and get a job. Driving lessons cost money so I'll do that when I get an IT job first or some other form of income.
The problem is, I can't find a job.
I've been reading lately about how IT-related university degrees are worthless if you want a job in IT... Either you've been putting effort into learning programming so you've become proficient and easily become hired, or you don't.
I'm still in university studying software engineering / commerce (3rd of 5 years). I've applied for many (every) programmer job that seems remotely doable for me, but besides a telephone interview for a internship and an email or two I haven't gotten anything back.
I am alone.
In my software engineering degree year, there are people of various degrees of competency. There are some who are so good they already have jobs in IT companies before they entered university. There are average people who seem to get 60-70% in their assignments... but wouldn't be able to start a proper project for real. Then there are students who copy and paste code instead of using for loops and still managing to pass.
The smartest people (ones with jobs already) seem to be stuck ups and they talk about students not in their clique as if they're lower life forms, so I haven't bothered making friends with them. My friends in uni are of the second group... good enough to do the degree but not quite people I'd choose to work with on projects with.
I feel like I'm one of a kind... I get full marks for most of my assessments but I know nowhere near as much as the smartest students. They each have slick personal websites and portfolios of past projects and stuff, know the latest version control tools, can solve homework problems in seconds, etc. I have past projects too but not of the type I'd show to people....
I spent most of my free time programming things. My latest 'project' is a site for trading used textbooks, (I needed one and IMO the existing ones sucked). This is my most ambitious to date. I keep looking for people in my university to work with me but students seem to either be not good enough, or they're too good for me : /. I did find a acquaintance yesterday who was doing a design degree offering to do a landing page for me, though. Progress is chugging along but I have no one to guide me. I've razed the project and rebuilt it half a dozen times after finding some fatal architectural flaw and recently I've just found out using tables to layout pages is a bad thing : / . Every time this happens I get some what discouraged however I push on because I still need to make an extra $1000 by the end of the year to spend * (It doesn't look like I'll make it). If this site becomes popular enough I was thinking I could charge for extra services like bolding a textbook listing, or sticky-ing it for a short period of time; Ads is also an option.
I'm not getting anywhere.
I'm learning a lot the past two years but it seems like I'll never quite get good enough to be doing 'real work'. It's like entering the ocean ...
96 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadLive to be happy now, because the future is never what it's cracked up to be. Not that "live in the moment" do karaoke bullshit, but look after "you".
Maybe it's time for your country to experience inflation at last - it's been mostly immune because it's the world currency, but your government has been spending like mad. (sorry, was thinking about the US, but I guess it applies to Australia too !!)
I've seen HUGE inflation rates in my country, so while I also think a million will still be a lot of money in 15 years, it's not a foolproof bet.
That said, the spirit of the question is understood (it's not about an arbitrary sum of money, it's about being wealthy enough to pursue other things).
I've been trying to buy these last few weekends and will be trying again this weekend. A mortgage at 21? We are crazy.
That's the thing. You don't need $1M to fund a startup. Even one that ends up making millions for you, or that can be acquired. Try not to let the money act as an excuse for not starting. (I know, it's hard! :)
You can actually start the life you want at 35, now.
Maybe housing affordability will never get better but at the moment I would rather rent.
Which made getting my 2nd (and current) programming job much easier and more lucrative.
Point being, there is always someone smarter than you out there in the world. It's also highly likely there is someone smarter than you in your current town looking for the same work, but that doesn't mean you count yourself out immediately. As a few people said above, be confident.
All four have caused my wedding cost to spiral out of control. I've spent 3x what I expected already, and the equivalent of what I live off of for two years.
If you can't get people to work with you, may be you can get to work with them. Great people may need someone to help with some projects. Be indulgent, help others, if they have lesser capacity than you do (on some things, they'll be better than you on other things ).
The trading textbook website is a good idea. I can feel how this idea came from your experience, and trying to solve an issue for yourselves is a good way to start a project.
1. Things chance. It's fine to have a rough goal, but don't think you'll be able to plan to road there for the next 15 years now. Things change, often.
2. Sounds like, apart from this long-term goal, you have an initial goal too: get a job. You mentioned you don't know the latest version controls? I assume git? Just learn it. You just found out using tables for layout isn't hip? Learn css. It sounds like you have a lot to learn, to be quite honest, I wouldn't hire someone who didn't know those things. Learn and study.
3. Because things change, what seems very hard now will seem very easy later. So keep things into perspective :)
If I was 20 years old right now, I'd take any crap job for 3 months, live with my parents, save the money and then take off with a cheap ticket on a trip around the world going as cheap as I possibly could, no return date. While oil (= tickets) is affordable :)
Focus your 20s on personal growth, relationships, skills. The money is a distraction and not a very inspired goal, it will come.
Because it harms your application, or because you read somewhere that is a bad thingt? Hacker News actually uses tables for layout... Don't worry about what you are supposed to do. Maybe a layout without tables would be better in a way, but to the end user it doesn't matter. Just focus on launching.
Spending your time second guessing the way you have started something (if you are anything like me) based off stuff you have read is not going to get you anywhere.
Build it as best you can, but don't waste time redoing things just to make it better internally. Think of it as if you were working for a company, and you spent a month re-writing a piece of their software, how can you explain to the directors the benefits of them paying you for that last month. If you think they'll scoff, don't do it.
* Finish your degree, but be aware it's probably just a meal ticket.
* Adopt a philosophy of lifelong learning.
* Setting goals is good, but don't fixate on the number such that you miss an opportunity.
* Show your projects to your friends in the second group; someone will surprise you.
* Do your homework or hack your side projects at Jelly or a similar co-working group.
* Unless your project is very small, don't raze it, iterate it. This more or less applies equally to code and business (pivot).
* As you grow in confidence, show people from the first group your projects; someone will surprise you.
* Learn a new language about once a year. Be sure it's sufficiently different from the last one, i.e. C family one year, ML family the next etc.
* Read news.yc and make a note of the interesting tech people here are using. Read up on it.
* Don't read too much news.yc.
What school are you studying at?
Jelly is a casual working event. It's taken place in over a hundred cities where people have come together (in a person's home, a coffee shop, or an office) to work for the day. We provide chairs and sofas, wireless internet, and interesting people to talk to, collaborate with, and bounce ideas off of.
You bring a laptop (or whatever you need to get your work done) and a friendly disposition.
I imagine your uni exams are drawing to a close soon; if you're up for a drink in the sydney area, let me know. My contact inforamtion is in my profile.
Some tips from my small experience so far.
(1) Don't take life to seriously. When I was in college, I started a simple business that kept very good pocket money flowing in - like your textbook business _might_. I spent every single cent that business brought in. I reckoned that after I graduated, my first couple paychecks will probably cover 3 years worth of pocket money savings. They did.
(2) Being a billionaire by 30 requires something extraordinary. Being a millionaire doesn't. The best way to do it is by working hard, saving money and being really good at something most companies will pay you for doing. You don't even need to be excellent - just really good, That, combined with a disciplined saving mentality will get you there quickly. It helps to live with your parents for as long as absolutely possible.
(3) When you start earning real money (after graduating - or maybe before if things go well) then save up a nice little bit. Invest in shares and so on, like you are doing now, but as soon as you can, buy a little house and start renting it out. Then pay it off and get another. And another. You'll hit that million mark pretty quickly that way.
Let me copy from what I read in an article lately here on Hacker News: better beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.
You can only do substantial things if you live like it. Not even a billion dollars is going to help on water problems without vision.
And you can make a difference already without any money.
Simply untrue. We all feel that way sometimes, but try asking someone familiar with yourself two years ago if they think you've progressed. (Hint: you have.)
Where are you studying? Email me if you'd rather not reply.
Quote from George Foreman about longshoremen. Longshoremen are the people who work on docks, loading and unloading giant container ships.
Mr. Foreman, who stared down financial collapse as an adult despite a troubled, impoverished childhood, said he knew real wealth when he saw it. "If you're confident, you're wealthy," he says. "I've seen guys who work on a ship channel and they get to a certain point and they're confident. You can look in their faces, they're longshoremen, and they have this confidence about them...I’ve seen a lot of guys with millions and they don't have any confidence," he says. "So they’re not wealthy."
Confidence is best gained by mastery: get good at some things.
I'm 20, Australian and finishing a Bachelor of IT degree. I've worked part time at a small marketing agency (developing websites, managing servers) in Brisbane. Getting the job was easy, they needed someone that had an idea of how MVC worked and how to program PHP. There's so many low barrier programming jobs around, I don't understand why you haven't been getting much attention.
I contribute to and start open-source projects as much as I have time to. I have a tiny portfolio:
http://github.com/pufuwozu
A month or two ago, I applied for a Graduate Developer position at Atlassian and got asked for an interview. I think my open-source experience had a bit of influence, there (many Atlassian employees are open-source developers). I studied up on algorithms, data structures and Java. I was able to ace the interview and I'll be working at that really nice company next year.
My naive advice, get some work experience at any small business, contribute to open-source without being embarrassed and study hard for interviews.
Then again, do the opposite of what I do if you think that's best. I'm just working on instinct and it's possible I'm not going in the right direction.
1) Building an asset base that provided me with an unearned income equal to whatever my needs are at the time (e.g I need $1000 per month to live, I make an asset that generates $1000 per month without any significant effort on my part)
2) To achieve 1) I would be investing my time and energy in learning web based technologies. Specifically: Java 1.6+, Ruby, RESTful web services, XML, JSON, AJAX, Spring, Maven, GITHub, SVN and so on.
3) To achieve 2) I would spend my evenings writing code for my own medium sized project (e.g. travel review site) with no intention of selling it. My work would involve learning how to make things work efficiently on the web so that my own involvement was kept to zero, with the system continuing to work perfectly.
4) To achieve 3) I would work closely with people who really know how to code for the web. I wouldn't worry about how "cliquey" or anal they were. I would ask them questions and listen carefully to their answers - particularly if I didn't understand them.
Hopefully this will help you, but if you'd like more information then feel free to contact me via www.gary-rowe.com.
This is what I did to get a good job - 1. Play in programming contests - topcoder, codejam, etc. and get under top 20 in India, and hence learn to solve algorithm questions 2. Apply to companies
I recommend that route. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, now Facebook as well - they all look at problem solving first. Next comes Computer Science knowledge - can be gained in dedicated 2-3 months' time. Do it. It's worth the result.
Let me know if you are in Brisbane, there has been a couple of opportunities for vacation/part time work at my company that I haven't been able to find anyone for previously. Not sure if there is any right now, but wouldn't hurt to know where to contact you (assuming you are in Brisbane).
I'm a senior software developer in Australia who have spent the last 4 months searching for talent at the junior level. I believe that experience is less important than attitude; particularly enthusiasm and initiative. If you have both--and it sounds to me like you do--and are smart enough, we can teach you the rest.
Please do me a favor and send your resume to me: sebastian@e-channel.com.au--make sure to reference this HN thread. While my team is currently full due to recent hires, we're growing rapidly and could be in a position to put on another full or part-time developer soon.
And even if I can't give you a job, I can hook you up with other budding entrepreneurs to collaborate with on projects. I might be available to give you a hand myself.
You'll get there. I've seen quite a few of your peers lately, and you seem to be way ahead of most of them in the areas that matter (at least to me). Trust in yourself and your drive will take you where you want to go.
Because you are doing exactly what ecaradec said:
> Be indulgent, help others, if they have lesser capacity than you do (on some things, they'll be better than you on other things ).
Sounds a lot like you're designing a system to have a good design by your internal metrics, then measuring it by how much money it's bringing in, which is giving mixed results.
Your guides should not be some idol programmer person but your customers. What do they need? What do they want? What value can you/your site add so they can't not use you? What deals can you work towards - e.g. getting your site in the freshman handout literature, getting it endorsed by the student union, finding which textbooks are needed for which courses, adding amazon links for textbooks for particular courses that you don't have used copies of, buying the textbooks yourself and reselling them? Escrowing the transaction somehow? Are you solving this as a problem which scratches an itch for yourself?
Your architecture will always have flaws - leave them alone. Go find some people wanting to trade used text books and put some adverts up around you (not on the site).
You should aim to get a good software job within a year. For this, I recommend - Work on small projects or contribute to open source with the aim of lightening your resume. - Start taking part in online programming contests (TopCoder, etc) to clear those interviews. This also ligthens your resume. - You seem to be do-it-from-scratch-everything-myself guy. Instead learn technologies like Wordpress, Joomla, GWT, etc and get yourself one of those fancy personal websites. - Keep trying for a good job and get over your failures after a beer. It may take a hell lot of interviews but eventually you only need one job and it won't matter how many interviews you did fail.
In other words: you're doing a lot of thinking about how to achieve a goal, but have you considered that the goal may have been hasty and not give you what you want, or may not give you what you want efficiently? You don't necessarily need $1m to do substantial things, or to run a company that can make a difference to African villages. You might do, sure, but I'd want to be certain that I wasn't making an assumption before drawing up a plan that will rule a significant portion of my life.
If $1m does turn out to be vital to your requirements, do you need to raise it yourself? Could you instead raise a small amount, launch a startup that helps African villages, and get someone else to invest the million?
For example, there was a couple who appeared on Dragon's Den (UK investment-based TV programme) a while back, who had invented a water carrier that used the rolling motion to filter the water inside as it was being carried back from dirty creek to village. It's in use now, and has doubtless saved lives already. It could quite conceivably still be a pipe-dream if they'd have decided to raise all the money themselves.
Knowing what I know now? Fixing my mental hangups.
I can't really tell from one post, but possible hangups in your post include fear that you can't do something you want if you don't have a big bankroll, fear that you aren't doing enough or accomplishing things fast enough, fear that you aren't going in the right direction, worry that you are inherently unhirable, worry that you aren't good enough, worry that your past work isn't good enough, worry that your present work isn't good enough / fear of showing it in an unfinished state, fear that you don't know enough, desire for external reassurance before you can feel assured.
Anyway, things like this are all deeply in your head, and fixing them would go a long way to the confidence that wallflower describes.
I mean, that's the sort of thing I'm trying to do to myself now, and that's the sort of thing I really really would have benefitted from when I was 20. Would (I think) have made a lot of difference to the intervening years.
You don't need to feel afraid of this, and worried about that, and inferior or unworthy because of the other. These are learned mental behaviours - not everyone has them, some people can do things we are afraid of without fear because they haven't learned some arbitrary and overly cautious fear link. And they are hackable, fixable behaviours, I think.
Wouldn't you like to be happy to show off your current project and eager to ask for advice, enthusiastic and unafraid? Wouldn't you like to feel good enough even if you sit around doing nothing? Do you think cats wander around feeling inferior because they eat food given to them and don't work? Wouldn't you like to stop worrying about going in the wrong direction and needing reassurance?
Can you see how, if you changed these sorts of things, you would do things differently and your approach to the next ten years of life would change a lot? That's why I put it as something to work on sooner rather than later in my imaginary being 20 again reply.
It's not easy ... but it's not difficult because it's a lot of effort, it's difficult because it's mind twisting and emotional. And because there's a lot of ra-ra just-do-it useless self-help fluff all over the place that needs to be avoided along the way.
All of this indicates to me that your years of experience have taken you down a similar, if not, the exact same path that I face ahead of me (Age: 23). Having identified and explored so much of what I'm experiencing so quickly and easily (in several paragraphs), I'm curious to know if you have a further understanding of the hacking and fixing? If any exist, I would hate to struggle for extended periods of time exploring my own. I'm already 3 years behind!
It's only in the last three months or so that I've found this approach, which is PJ Eby's work.
I don't know what to say about it - I could (edit: will!) write a lot about it, but since I'm so new to it it might not be accurate or present it well, but I'll try and summarize, and I can link you to some more good stuff (see below).
Anyway, the main bits are an overview of how humans learn behaviour: we animals have brains to model the world around us and predict when situations are going to be good or bad for our survival. Those parts of our brain signal using feelings - we get alert and nervous at a sharp twig snap, spooked when all the noises around us suddenly stop, pleasant anticipation for friends showing up, anger at enemies showing up, etc. That signalling happens whether a situation is happening or if we just imagine it happening.
Along the way in our normal lives we accidentally learn a lot of these {situation -> feeling} links which are unhelpful or tied to really dumb / irrelevant things, and they guide our behaviour too.
Things like: once upon a time if we were shunned by the group we would starve to death, so being shunned by people generally is a bad thing. We might bring a drawing to show and tell and the teacher makes a comment and the class laughs. Some people might get a dislike of show and tell, or being watched, others a dislike of drawing, others a dislike of feeling proud of their work, others a dislike of being good at something. (Or you might be fine with it).
Now having a dislike of show and tell probably wont affect your life much, but if you get: doing work that you feel proud of makes you feel bad (because your brain is predicting people will shun you), you're going to have lingering problems for a long time.
And the worst bit is, we have two problems on top of this. Westerners/western males shun emotions as being childish or girly, and humans have self conciousness which isn't always privy to the causes of our feelings and makes up "logical" explanations like "I don't want to be proud of my work because pride is a sin".
This is one big difference between people who say "I don't see what all the fuss is about, starting a club is easy - ask people - just do it" and people who can't "just do it" because the very idea of asking people makes them feel bad.
This sets the stage for the next bit: a kind of meditative/imagination skill to learn to get from "I don't want to be proud in my work because it's a sin" back down to "if I feel pride in my work people will shun me".
After that, he teaches various techniques to break that kind of learned link, or delve into it further or whatever. I don't want to go into that because I don't yet know them well, there isn't space to do justice and text isn't great for it, I don't feel right to give away his source of income from teaching it.
But I do want to direct you to this:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/21r/pain_and_gain_motivation/1uz6?co...
Read it as it turns into a discussion between PJ Eby and ChronoDAS, and follow the link to carry on the thread.
Also http://lesswrong.com/lw/21r/pain_and_gain_motivation/1v0a
And where I say it isn't difficult because of effort, it's a simple act but difficult because it's mind twisting, note this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/21b/ugh_fields/1vyj
Anyway, that's the kind of thing I was working from when parroting the parent post back. Seen in this light, reading "recently I've just found out using tables to layout pages is a bad thing" takes on a different meaning. Yes it's a bad thing, but that doesn't mean you need to feel ba...
I'm confused though, about my email address. It appears that I have it entered into my account. Maybe I'm getting caught in one of HN's noob nets. Anyway, I'd love to break this off into an email if you're still down. Drop me a line at akaGOMEZ at gmail dot com.
Again, thanks for the reply.