About 8 or 9 years ago I was coming out of megacorpland into a software startup where I was hired as a principal, payed mostly in options etc. I was terrified and really had no idea what I was doing. I accidentally happened upon HN one day and ended up lurking for something like 4 years -- the information content was so compelling. Not even just the tech news feed, but the comments were a treasure trove that provided so much context and guidance that I needed to help understand what exactly it was that I was trying to do.
In a sense it provided too much information as I started to develop mental models for how the business should be working, and started to measure us by the information I learned from this community. We managed to grow pretty rapidly, then like many startups went out of business all of a sudden. But the long perspective HN gave me made me not feel as bad about it as I might have.
Instead I took what I learned, became a hard negotiator, and with the skillset I learned from crashing a startup into the sea excelled at my next megacorp job, then my next startup job, and now sit in a great position for a medium sized R&D firm. HN provided the context and perspective that really enabled it all and for that I'm forever thankful.
These days I mainly use it to keep on top of the shifting sands of tech trends and find that just by reading HN every day for 20-30 minutes I can usually keep up or a bit ahead of my technical staff in a fairly broad swath of areas. Which is nice because I don't really have the time these days to do it all myself.
In a sense it provided too much information as I started to develop mental models for how the business should be working, and started to measure us by the information I learned from this community. We managed to grow pretty rapidly, then like many startups went out of business all of a sudden. But the long perspective HN gave me made me not feel as bad about it as I might have.
Instead I took what I learned, became a hard negotiator, and with the skillset I learned from crashing a startup into the sea excelled at my next megacorp job, then my next startup job, and now sit in a great position for a medium sized R&D firm. HN provided the context and perspective that really enabled it all and for that I'm forever thankful.
These days I mainly use it to keep on top of the shifting sands of tech trends and find that just by reading HN every day for 20-30 minutes I can usually keep up or a bit ahead of my technical staff in a fairly broad swath of areas. Which is nice because I don't really have the time these days to do it all myself.