Deleted member 13779
Temporarily Embarrassed Chad
- Joined
- May 2, 2021
- Posts
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There are few things in life more important than choosing one's peer group well. The Internet gives you many more options than we had available prior to the existence of it. Choose wisely and re-evaluate that choice periodically to see whether your peer group continues to represent your goals and values.
Why? Your peer group literally gets arbitrary code execution on your brain. (It's a flaw in MonkeyBrainOS 1.01 which we haven't patched yet.) You'll tend to find yourself valuing what they value. You will tend to find yourself achieving outcomes strikingly similar to their outcomes.
Given this, picking a peer group whose values are not your values and whose outcomes are terrible is a poor choice.
There is some cognizable peer group of "the most misanthropic 10% of commenters on Internet threads about programming languages." The majority are not professional programmers. Most are not very happy people. You can generally tell a lot about what a person values by what they spend their time doing; someone who professes to value the great intellectual challenge that is Real Programming but actually ships comments which make other people feel bad probably, to a first approximation, values making other people feel bad.
If you do not also want to grow into a values system where making other people feel bad is the highlight of your day, consider choosing a better peer group, where e.g. feeding one's family through honest labor is valued and having very loud opinions about NodeJS not so much.
