If you set out to do something and stop doing it before you've succeeded, even though you could carry on with at least some possibility of further and future success, calling it anything other than "giving up" is just sugar-coating it.
I'm sure it's sensible and wise to give up in many circumstances, but giving it a fancy name really shouldn't be part of the process of justifying that decision.
The quoted sentence is the summation of an article trying to distinguish between quitting because you can't do it, and quitting because you no longer care. Focusing on the renaming aspect is taking it too literally; that's just a rhetorical device.
Wholeheartedly agree. It may just seem like it's sugarcoating it, but there is definitely a difference in changing focus and just giving up. Saying something other than, "I just gave up on it," (which is what quit generally implies) gives more a story behind why.
Side projects come to mind when I think of quitting. Sometimes the project becomes much bigger than what you expected. You and your buddy don't have the time nor resources to dedicate towards seeing it through or scaling it up. It really all depends on the situation.
I live in a world where people have the capacity to make more informed decisions as time moves forward and they gather more information about both the world and their own self. That is, people know themselves better at a later point in time than they did before (but it is entirely possible these reverse) and they have a different set of options because the overall state of the world tends to vary with time.
If you make a goal at time t1 and decide at t2 that that goal was a hasty and thoughtless goal, then I think the person you are at t2 should be the person you evaluate yourself as, rather than clinging to statements you might have uttered in the past. Black and white thinking of "success / failure" is a good way to make sure everything in your life goes exactly as planned, while wearing blinders. You need a combination of both in order to really be successful.
Being mean to yourself doesn't necessarily lead to success. If you've only got a mile left in the marathon and you've already ran 25, yes, that extra mile is kind of important, but also, no, it really isn't.
I spent 20 years building a successful career as an enterprise software engineer, bouncing around between configuration management, development, and ops. It's a secure, good paying, stable career. And I grew to resent and sometimes hate it.
Then I started building something for myself, discovered the idea of creating my own startup to solve problems I experienced doing enterprise software projects in a general way, and I love that. It makes me feel like I'm doing something that actually matters.
Right now, I'm back in the enterprise to make ends meet and building on the side, which sucks and drives me crazy - but at least I see the exit and can keep moving toward it. And I figure I can get five or ten years out of building a company before I'm done with that as well.
Once you hit a certain age and a certain level of success, the things you realize you'll never do weigh on you more than the things you haven't done yet. And the things you do look more like impediments than accomplishments. That's when you need to change.
I'll be back with a "Show HN" once I get the beta running. I took several months last year to work on it full-time and got an alpha version working, which taught me a ton of things I didn't know I didn't know about the problem I'm tackling. Now, I'm working on a beta based on lessons learned from the alpha.
The product is a way to answer the simple yet awful question, "What changed?" Configuration change is the primary cause of failure in complex software systems. But the part that breaks isn't necessarily the part that changes. For example, a database schema change can break apps that rely on the database. But in large organizations, where the database is administrated by an entirely different team from app development and developers may not even be allowed to look at the production environment, it's a huge pain point.
Detecting configuration change and finding the relationships and impact is a really difficult and challenging problem. The biggest takeaway from the alpha for me was that "noise shaping" is a hard problem. For example, Wordpress alters the schema of its MySQL database several times a day. It's a tiny thing (an autoincrement value on a single column), but it makes sorting important changes like upgrades that only happen weekly or monthly or yearly from unimportant changes that happen daily.
The trick now is to get a product out of it good enough to make money, so I can afford to quit dayjobbing and live off my own creation, rather than sitting at someone else's desk and counting the number of times a day I wish I had my own product here to help solve the problems I deal with over and over, every damned day.
As someone who has worked on larger enterprise stuff this would be incredibly (like a salary a year incredibly) useful tool.
It would do in software what a really good reliability engineer with years of knowledge can do "Foo has broken" "Nah foo is fine, someone changed Bar again without reading the wiki" stuff.
It's funny, the reactions I get. A lot of startup programmers who have never worked on large systems don't understand why it's so valuable. But those who have done big enterprise use phrases like "holy grail".
But this is a HARD problem. Man, abstracting change in an actionable, readable, efficient way has been difficult. Not to mention the security issues and other headaches.
I'll bet, it's a truly monumental task to take on (so kudos for giving it a try), stuff I work on these days doesn't need that level of monitoring (We have 4 servers and a bunch of desktops laptops, it's pretty much vanilla small business stuff) but I know a few people who would love that kind of stuff.
A different focus, but same basic idea. ScriptRock, too. I met the founders of both of those companies at a conference last fall, and it was really interesting. The products diverge a lot, but we all see the same fundamental problem.
Well said. I've also reached the point where my job - or any job - feels more like it gets in the way than anything else. In some ways my current gig is a dream job. I get to work from home, part time, doing stuff that's in some ways the culmination of stuff I've been working toward for a long time. As the tech lead for the next major release, I get to explore the best that the project has to offer. Nonetheless, I can only work up a few rare moments of genuine excitement about the whole thing. Working on a large and old codebase, on an infrastructure that's in even worse shape, still subject to someone else's priorities and schedules, is still more draining than energizing. I look forward more and more to the day when I can toss it all and do my stuff my way on no particular schedule at all, without having to worry about whether it makes me any money. Soon.
Why the assumption that Ellen Pao was not fired? It felt like one of these cases when an employee has a lengthy talk with her supervisors, after which she is given an option to quit, as a way to save her face.
An evidence for that would be how fast was a new interim CEO found after the previous one "quit".
The example of Ellen Pao was merely a way to start the conversation. That specific example does not diminish the message of the piece which I find very insightful.
I'm not sure what to make of this blog post. The author writes:
>By resigning from Reddit,
Behind the scenes, Ellen Pao could have been forced out (also known as being "fired") but presented publicly as a resignation. I thought we don't really know what happened? Therefore, it seems biased to frame a thematic essay about "quitting" around Ellen's circumstances. If she didn't voluntarily separate, it's not "quitting" -- it's getting fired. Does the author Ernie Smith know the inside details of Ellen Pao's situation that we don't?
>Ellen Pao is choosing to focus her attention on the other things that interest her.
The underlying Washington Post article that this sentence links to is ~900 words written by Ellen Pao. She makes no mention of "other things that interest her."
> But I don't think it has anything to do with Pao's resignation.
I agree. When I read the post, the mentions of Pao seemed very out of place, with respect to the flow. The meat of the post was interesting, but the attempt to connect it to Pao's departure felt like a big (and unnecessary) stretch.
Who's making assumptions now? The ONLY hard facts we have are what they announced: A mutual separation. Why are you so sure it was a firing?
I think it's a relatively reasonable logical conclusion that Ms. Pao, freed from responsibilities at Reddit, is pursuing things that interest her. Are you saying that she's most likely pursuing things that DON'T interest her? The 900-word essay seems to set out a thesis or mission statement for what she might do now...
Also note that atlasobscura is a site which tries hard to make a content which is dangerously close to the blogspam (the supposed topic of the site is still according to their about page "the definitive guide to the world's wondrous and curious places" and according to their tags "Travel tips, articles, strange facts and unique events.") and that user rshrsh only exists here to post the links to the atlasobscura articles.
And privong notes here: "the mentions of Pao seemed very out of place" and 300bps also explains: "The Art of Blogspam: Put sort-of related recent news item in first paragraph to seem timely." I think the conclusion is obvious.
Ellen Pao was one of the examples. There are many other examples mentioned which the author uses to support their argument which is not whether Ellen Pao quit to pursue other interests but
Everyone should quit something that really matters to them, at
least once. We all need to feel what it’s like on the other side
of a big success story. Only then will we all understand that
quitting isn’t "giving up," but setting the stage for something
else.
Isn't the theme of the article that quitting to start another pursuit is quite productive and not justifying Ellen Pao's move? I agree that the author may not know the reason behind Pao's resignation but that single argument doesn't break their point.
The more I hear about the corporate politics at Reddit, the more I realize it's an impossible ship to steer. I don't think Ellen Pao realized the level of communication and transparency that online communities like Reddit demand (or that anyone with "power" over such communities will have complete transparency forced upon them); but at the same time I don't think she was the driving force behind many of the changes carried out under her watch. She just wasn't there long enough. But the job is kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. It's impossible to satisfy the users screaming "free speech at all costs!" when the board is demanding you get rid of the trolls whose main reason for trolling is usually some variation of "because we have free speech".
And she didn't leave to pursue other interests; she was forced out for reasons not made public. She certainly was unpopular on Reddit, though it's hard to know how much of the Reddit zeitgeist/groupthink/circlejerk is manufactured by small groups of influential users. I think the board decided she had to go simply because they didn't want their user base leaving en masse, and getting rid of Ellen was the only thing that would satisfy the user base (or at least the "power user" base). From what I've read, the board is anxious to monetize the platform in some way, and it's hard to monetize a platform where trolling and harassment are as commonplace as they are on Reddit.
And to some extent, I'd say that Reddit itself actively resists commercialization. One of the greatest benefits of Reddit as a user is that the algorithm is relatively simple to understand: users upvote and downvote, and while it's easy to see how to game that system, it also allows for the possibility that content will rise to the surface organically (even if a lot of the content is manufactured and upvoted via click farms). You don't get that if you're restricting the content, and I think trying to commercialize it would destroy the feeling of chaos that makes it so successful.
This submission reached third place on the front page before it was removed. I'd be interested to see whether certain user names and/or anonymized hashes of IPs always upvote atlasobscura articles. I don't understand why sites like reddit, HN, etc. hide the identities of who upvotes and downvotes things. It would be nice to be able to audit any submission or comment's vote tally at will.
The examples in the article are really poor examples for a number of reasons.
First of all, Jordan didn't "quit" to go play baseball. He had already won three championships and had already done pretty much anybody at that level could do. He wasn't "begging for a new direction" either. He always wanted to play baseball and wanted to fulfill a childhood dream is all. After doing so (no matter how bad he was) he went back to basketball and achieved even more when he came back. No exactly someone who quit and stayed away.
If you actually read the Jordan Price article, it talks about the boss he had and the psychological abuse he was taking. Sure he was at his "dream job" but the jokes and insults from his negative boss drove him to quit. It wasn't really his choice to quit, it was more he was driven out by an his boss who was a douchebag.
And the Ellen Poe situation? Quitting is completely different than being set up to fail. Again, using her as an example of "goal disengagement" completely misunderstands her whole situation. She was set up to fail, then driven into submission by the inmates who are running the asylum at Reddit.
If you want to use a better example, try Robert Smith, the running back for the Vikings who abruptly quit after a career year in the NFL. He was about to get a huge contract extension, but he gave up the money so he could pursue a career in medicine. He also wanted to get out of the NFL without any lingering physical issues. He still appears on some NFL and college football shows, but for the most part lives a pretty private life post NFL career.
It would be really nice to talk about leaving a job, seeing your goals and expectations change, or finding yourself in a position that previously seemed like a "dream job" only to find yourself not as fulfilled as you expected. Rather than fixating on the specific example of Ellen Pao. The piece is about an experience that many people face not about Ellen Pao.
1. Quit: I spent a summer in investment banking, at a prestigious bank after 2 years of hustling at a state school (way easier to get this type of job at an ivy league). I left after a summer despite loving the people and perks -- it wasn't for me.
2. Persevere: While learning computer programming, it was rough to start from scratch. Seeing how slow I was compared to others was discouraging, but I pushed through and now love what I do/the skills I have. I recall taking a graduate level computer systems course, while working full-time, which was fairly challenging for me at the time (this course required writing and debugging assembly, writing programs like malloc from scratch, etc. with no other formal CS background). It was 100% worth it!
Perhaps the lesson here is that learning at the early stages is tedious, and one should push through. Or that you should have a motivator that isn't financial in taking on something tough.
It seems like a recurring theme in these types of posts is that people leave high-paying jobs and that we should applaud them for "giving up" their salaries to do what makes them happy.
Not that this is a bad thing (I applaud anyone who does something difficult in the pursuit of long-term happiness), but the fact that many people enter into unfulfilling job situations because they're drawn to the high profile and/or salary probably plays a large part in why they feel unfulfilled after working there for a while.
High pay is definitely a positive outcome. But it is one of several things that matter, not the only one. The fallacy I think lots of people fall for is to over-weigh its role in contentment - but it definitely does have a role.
You can learn about coding on your own time anytime you want, at any age, on your own and with the help of free online courses, meetup's or paid courses etc.
Learning about M&A, building your professional network in investment banking, the financial markets is not so much accessible. Nothing against his enthusiasm/passion, I don't think OP was very wise to quit his job.
I feel another rant about terrible marketing practices coming on after a minute on that site. No, I don't want to sign up for yet another email list for a site that I've read zero content on so far. No, I don't want to like you on FaceTwitInstaLinked yet. Let me read a few things in peace, and maybe if they're good, I'll like your stuff then. You're already starting off in a bad hole asking me for that stuff in a way that interrupts what I'm trying to do before I've read one word of your content.
You're resume would only be a problem if the company was looking for good little worker bees who don't ask questions and who will take shit all day long and ask for more. It's almost the perfect filtering mechanism for crap companies hahah.
What's problematic is that the more jumping you do to avoid dumb workplaces, the greater the possibility that only dumb workplaces will be desperate to hire you.
It's a no-win situation. Unless, of course, you can do a better job of evaluating a job before you take it. But people need to pay rent, and heck yeah, companies straight-up lie about the jobs they offer.
Perhaps it's time for hiring companies to consider that even though employees are discouraged from saying negative things about a former employer, that sometimes yeah, that former employer was a jerk royale.
This is the same attitude I take. I have worked in many industries, and have participated in a few startups, but the bottom line is I don't put up with crap. I spent too much time in the Corps where I was basically a slave to ever function like that again (the civilian equivalent would be a salary job that underpays but expects you to work 60-80 hours a week without OT because you are "exempt").
Sometimes I felt bad for leaving, because I know whoever would be replacing me couldn't do as good a job, but it's just business (the business of my life).
One of the things that is good about this is that I have gotten a few vacations in between jobs I wouldn't have otherwise, not to mention the vast array of experiences that have really helped me have a bigger picture understanding of sysadmin'ing.
Would you care to share a bit more on how you pulled that off? I am not asking in bad faith but everything I know says that you should have become unemployable after the first 7-10 years of doing that. Even assuming you quit (and conveniently left out of your resume) 2 jobs during the first few weeks for every one you stayed longer than a year, your job history would come as a major red flag in most places I have worked at.
Of course, you have been building your career for longer than I have been alive, so there's stuff I obviously ignore.
Would you care to share a bit more on how you pulled that off?
Pretty simple, actually:
1. Do the right thing, even if it's not popular.
2. Tell the truth.
3. Be nice.
Most importantly:
4. Be the best you can be. (You'll probably end up better than anyone else.)
I have never been unemployable because I have always added much more value than I've taken. Maybe I got this way because I never put up with too much shit.
Ok, thanks a lot. Like many things in life, it is not rocket science, but it requires other skills like courage and perseverance. :)
I gave a visit to your ebook. Nice stuff. congrats!
Although in this case, Pao isn't resigning from anything she put blood, sweat and tears into. Rather she showed up to a fully functioning project, kicked a hornets nest she had no right to kick based on a personal worldview of how people should be nice and more notably, profitable for her shareholders on the internet, then she got stung and ran away crying. I'm all for the type of quitting that this article talked about, but I doubt that "routine career failures recast as 'damsel in distress harassment', stemming from rather dubious claims" is what we should aim for. Pao is no role model for me.
Separately, this is just bad writing. If a college student turned this in to me I would write 'good start, delete all the irrelevant stuff about Pao and either use an example that supports the main thesis or don't use an example at all'. The threads linking this paper together are very weak.
I'm guessing 'Pao' and 'reddit' are to drive traffic. Ugh.
Wow. After all the truth that's come out which makes everyone else look like a turd (especially Reddit's own users), you still can't find no love for Pao? Ask your doctor if reality is right for you.
49 comments
[ 959 ms ] story [ 2153 ms ] threadIf you set out to do something and stop doing it before you've succeeded, even though you could carry on with at least some possibility of further and future success, calling it anything other than "giving up" is just sugar-coating it.
I'm sure it's sensible and wise to give up in many circumstances, but giving it a fancy name really shouldn't be part of the process of justifying that decision.
Side projects come to mind when I think of quitting. Sometimes the project becomes much bigger than what you expected. You and your buddy don't have the time nor resources to dedicate towards seeing it through or scaling it up. It really all depends on the situation.
If you make a goal at time t1 and decide at t2 that that goal was a hasty and thoughtless goal, then I think the person you are at t2 should be the person you evaluate yourself as, rather than clinging to statements you might have uttered in the past. Black and white thinking of "success / failure" is a good way to make sure everything in your life goes exactly as planned, while wearing blinders. You need a combination of both in order to really be successful.
Being mean to yourself doesn't necessarily lead to success. If you've only got a mile left in the marathon and you've already ran 25, yes, that extra mile is kind of important, but also, no, it really isn't.
I spent 20 years building a successful career as an enterprise software engineer, bouncing around between configuration management, development, and ops. It's a secure, good paying, stable career. And I grew to resent and sometimes hate it.
Then I started building something for myself, discovered the idea of creating my own startup to solve problems I experienced doing enterprise software projects in a general way, and I love that. It makes me feel like I'm doing something that actually matters.
Right now, I'm back in the enterprise to make ends meet and building on the side, which sucks and drives me crazy - but at least I see the exit and can keep moving toward it. And I figure I can get five or ten years out of building a company before I'm done with that as well.
Once you hit a certain age and a certain level of success, the things you realize you'll never do weigh on you more than the things you haven't done yet. And the things you do look more like impediments than accomplishments. That's when you need to change.
The product is a way to answer the simple yet awful question, "What changed?" Configuration change is the primary cause of failure in complex software systems. But the part that breaks isn't necessarily the part that changes. For example, a database schema change can break apps that rely on the database. But in large organizations, where the database is administrated by an entirely different team from app development and developers may not even be allowed to look at the production environment, it's a huge pain point.
Detecting configuration change and finding the relationships and impact is a really difficult and challenging problem. The biggest takeaway from the alpha for me was that "noise shaping" is a hard problem. For example, Wordpress alters the schema of its MySQL database several times a day. It's a tiny thing (an autoincrement value on a single column), but it makes sorting important changes like upgrades that only happen weekly or monthly or yearly from unimportant changes that happen daily.
The trick now is to get a product out of it good enough to make money, so I can afford to quit dayjobbing and live off my own creation, rather than sitting at someone else's desk and counting the number of times a day I wish I had my own product here to help solve the problems I deal with over and over, every damned day.
It would do in software what a really good reliability engineer with years of knowledge can do "Foo has broken" "Nah foo is fine, someone changed Bar again without reading the wiki" stuff.
But this is a HARD problem. Man, abstracting change in an actionable, readable, efficient way has been difficult. Not to mention the security issues and other headaches.
An evidence for that would be how fast was a new interim CEO found after the previous one "quit".
1. Put sort-of related recent news item in first paragraph to seem timely
2. Rehash old content
3. Close with sort-of related recent news item in last paragraph
4. Add clickbait headline
>By resigning from Reddit,
Behind the scenes, Ellen Pao could have been forced out (also known as being "fired") but presented publicly as a resignation. I thought we don't really know what happened? Therefore, it seems biased to frame a thematic essay about "quitting" around Ellen's circumstances. If she didn't voluntarily separate, it's not "quitting" -- it's getting fired. Does the author Ernie Smith know the inside details of Ellen Pao's situation that we don't?
>Ellen Pao is choosing to focus her attention on the other things that interest her.
The underlying Washington Post article that this sentence links to is ~900 words written by Ellen Pao. She makes no mention of "other things that interest her."
Overall, a blog post of dubious quality.
I think it is actually a good post, and I agree with it conceptually. But I don't think it has anything to do with Pao's resignation.
I agree. When I read the post, the mentions of Pao seemed very out of place, with respect to the flow. The meat of the post was interesting, but the attempt to connect it to Pao's departure felt like a big (and unnecessary) stretch.
I think it's a relatively reasonable logical conclusion that Ms. Pao, freed from responsibilities at Reddit, is pursuing things that interest her. Are you saying that she's most likely pursuing things that DON'T interest her? The 900-word essay seems to set out a thesis or mission statement for what she might do now...
And privong notes here: "the mentions of Pao seemed very out of place" and 300bps also explains: "The Art of Blogspam: Put sort-of related recent news item in first paragraph to seem timely." I think the conclusion is obvious.
Isn't the theme of the article that quitting to start another pursuit is quite productive and not justifying Ellen Pao's move? I agree that the author may not know the reason behind Pao's resignation but that single argument doesn't break their point.
And she didn't leave to pursue other interests; she was forced out for reasons not made public. She certainly was unpopular on Reddit, though it's hard to know how much of the Reddit zeitgeist/groupthink/circlejerk is manufactured by small groups of influential users. I think the board decided she had to go simply because they didn't want their user base leaving en masse, and getting rid of Ellen was the only thing that would satisfy the user base (or at least the "power user" base). From what I've read, the board is anxious to monetize the platform in some way, and it's hard to monetize a platform where trolling and harassment are as commonplace as they are on Reddit.
And to some extent, I'd say that Reddit itself actively resists commercialization. One of the greatest benefits of Reddit as a user is that the algorithm is relatively simple to understand: users upvote and downvote, and while it's easy to see how to game that system, it also allows for the possibility that content will rise to the surface organically (even if a lot of the content is manufactured and upvoted via click farms). You don't get that if you're restricting the content, and I think trying to commercialize it would destroy the feeling of chaos that makes it so successful.
First of all, Jordan didn't "quit" to go play baseball. He had already won three championships and had already done pretty much anybody at that level could do. He wasn't "begging for a new direction" either. He always wanted to play baseball and wanted to fulfill a childhood dream is all. After doing so (no matter how bad he was) he went back to basketball and achieved even more when he came back. No exactly someone who quit and stayed away.
If you actually read the Jordan Price article, it talks about the boss he had and the psychological abuse he was taking. Sure he was at his "dream job" but the jokes and insults from his negative boss drove him to quit. It wasn't really his choice to quit, it was more he was driven out by an his boss who was a douchebag.
And the Ellen Poe situation? Quitting is completely different than being set up to fail. Again, using her as an example of "goal disengagement" completely misunderstands her whole situation. She was set up to fail, then driven into submission by the inmates who are running the asylum at Reddit.
If you want to use a better example, try Robert Smith, the running back for the Vikings who abruptly quit after a career year in the NFL. He was about to get a huge contract extension, but he gave up the money so he could pursue a career in medicine. He also wanted to get out of the NFL without any lingering physical issues. He still appears on some NFL and college football shows, but for the most part lives a pretty private life post NFL career.
1. Quit: I spent a summer in investment banking, at a prestigious bank after 2 years of hustling at a state school (way easier to get this type of job at an ivy league). I left after a summer despite loving the people and perks -- it wasn't for me.
2. Persevere: While learning computer programming, it was rough to start from scratch. Seeing how slow I was compared to others was discouraging, but I pushed through and now love what I do/the skills I have. I recall taking a graduate level computer systems course, while working full-time, which was fairly challenging for me at the time (this course required writing and debugging assembly, writing programs like malloc from scratch, etc. with no other formal CS background). It was 100% worth it!
Perhaps the lesson here is that learning at the early stages is tedious, and one should push through. Or that you should have a motivator that isn't financial in taking on something tough.
Not that this is a bad thing (I applaud anyone who does something difficult in the pursuit of long-term happiness), but the fact that many people enter into unfulfilling job situations because they're drawn to the high profile and/or salary probably plays a large part in why they feel unfulfilled after working there for a while.
You can learn about coding on your own time anytime you want, at any age, on your own and with the help of free online courses, meetup's or paid courses etc.
Learning about M&A, building your professional network in investment banking, the financial markets is not so much accessible. Nothing against his enthusiasm/passion, I don't think OP was very wise to quit his job.
Lightweights! I've had 88 jobs since 1972.
Once a recruiter told me that everything on my resume was excellent except how often I switched jobs. How could that be?
I told her that was because as soon as anyone gave me undue shit, I quit.
No regrets. On many of them, I probably exercised too much patience and should have left a lot sooner.
(You get one life to live. If it's not the life you want because of your job, do something about it. Time flies.)
It's a no-win situation. Unless, of course, you can do a better job of evaluating a job before you take it. But people need to pay rent, and heck yeah, companies straight-up lie about the jobs they offer.
Perhaps it's time for hiring companies to consider that even though employees are discouraged from saying negative things about a former employer, that sometimes yeah, that former employer was a jerk royale.
Sometimes I felt bad for leaving, because I know whoever would be replacing me couldn't do as good a job, but it's just business (the business of my life).
One of the things that is good about this is that I have gotten a few vacations in between jobs I wouldn't have otherwise, not to mention the vast array of experiences that have really helped me have a bigger picture understanding of sysadmin'ing.
Of course, you have been building your career for longer than I have been alive, so there's stuff I obviously ignore.
Pretty simple, actually:
1. Do the right thing, even if it's not popular.
2. Tell the truth.
3. Be nice.
Most importantly:
4. Be the best you can be. (You'll probably end up better than anyone else.)
I have never been unemployable because I have always added much more value than I've taken. Maybe I got this way because I never put up with too much shit.
Separately, this is just bad writing. If a college student turned this in to me I would write 'good start, delete all the irrelevant stuff about Pao and either use an example that supports the main thesis or don't use an example at all'. The threads linking this paper together are very weak.
I'm guessing 'Pao' and 'reddit' are to drive traffic. Ugh.
I am in a CIA prison.
I would bet God will kill the CIA and make His temple popular.
You seem to be in denial on God talk, you God damn retard-nigger.
God damn you are one dumb fuck!
NIST is the whitest of the white, like NASA. You are such a dumb fuck.
I have a fucken SETI.
I have a fucken SETI, you God damn retard-nigger!