There’s often a skill that seem interesting, but I can’t see doing anything for me in my day-to-day life. What have you learned that was a lot more effort than the payoff was worth?
Learning the Dvorak keyboard layout.
It seemed worth it at the time when I was playing a lot of monkeytype and I still love typing with it. But I made the full switch and forgot how to touch type with qwerty. So now I have to switch layout every time I use hotkeys and switch back to type. Switching is fast but an extra step.
I decided to switch because I think it’s a superior layout but honestly it’s not even that worth it. You will not gain speed, just more comfortable and satisfying.
SystemC simulation, for school.
This was well over a decade ago now and the libraries we were using were absolutely ancient at the time. We had to simulate a game. I absolutely hated it.
If nothing else, that class prepared me for linking error induced headaches
People pleasing, spent nearly four decades getting so good at it thinking if only I could be just that little bit “more good” that I’d get what I want and need from people and relationships only to realize I’ve been plenty good this whole time, it’s a fools errand and I only attract people who will move the goal posts every time because it’s what I expect and have trained for
I learned how to work hard and be good at my job and actually get things done, not just look busy and act important.
Jokes on me, the entire management make 100x more than me and do 100x less. And they get to spend hundreds of millions on stupid projects that are horrible ideas, but I have to cut back on my area to save $100.
I should have put all my stat points into soulless bullshit corporate jargon and none into intelligence.
Descriptive Geometry.
Basically obsolete by the time of mastering the techniques due to CAD software.
Here’s lesson notes from somebody.
https://www.archweb.com/en/gallery/descriptive-geometry-lessons/
The field starts out simple with orthographic projections, but later you work on problems like : you have a top view of a 3D tube angled in space and another tube crossing it at an arbitrary angle, and then another view.
Find this smallest distance between the two tubes in space.
Neither are down the tube axis, so you start the process if finding the axes and producing a head on view to develop the crossing tube to then find a point to point minimum measure between the two cylinders.
By the time I’d gone through all this, in CAD you just click the two tubes and ask for the distance (min or max)
The vast majority of higher math and some industry-related chart interpretation as far as aviation goes.
I guess I’m probably older than 95% of the people here, so all the “spaghetti” charts we had to figure out, the actual trigonometry used to calculate wind correction angles, all of the math used to calculate EPR, thrust, and Mach speeds. Instruction in these calculations was very demanding and unforgiving. Then it all pretty much became useless as I followed the leading edge of software development and electronics moving into the cockpit. So I learned it all only to have it disappear within a few years.
Hold my MCSE in NT4 and Novell
Gained the year Win2k dropped
I honestly can’t think of any, even though I have many examples that objectively seem to not have been worth the effort.
Easiest example is flight school. I went to a tech college for its professional piloting program. Got my private pilot cert and multi engine rating, and completed IFR in the simulator. But when it came time to sign up for IFR in a real plane, I couldn’t get approved for enough student loans to cover the cost, so I dropped out, switched to business school, got a tech job, and dropped out of business school too.
By all accounts, the debt I racked up (like $75k) and the pilot license I haven’t exercised in 14 years are all a huge waste. And my flight instructor was such an impatient ass that I feel mildly scarred from the times he yelled at me.
But, I will never get over the massive feeling of accomplishment I got from earning my private pilot certification. And even more so, earning my multi-engine rating. Even if I failed a part of each of those checkrides and had to retake those portions, I passed them. Even if I never fly again, I am so fucking proud of myself for earning those.
I guess since I never actually graduated from any of the many colleges I’ve dropped out from (three or four depending on how you count), pilot license is my closest analog.
Also have a CDL and skill with docking 53 foot trailers, and tons of forklift experience. Those haven’t been used in a very long time and I may never use them again, but still feel like important parts of me.
Sorry the aviation route didn’t work out. The two hardest ratings (IMO) are the initial private and then the IFR license. The former is learning everything about aircraft and flying, but IFR is learning to fly all over again. If you get those two everything else just feels like an add-on.
As an old time computer nerd I have uncountable examples of deprecated knowledge. There is no use in knowing how to use the reserved upper memory in autoexec.bat and config.sys, nor how to use Napster or Kazaa.
But all these skills do shape your brain and way of thinking.
Assembly language taught me to be precise and think before typing. Flash taught me that nothing lasts forever, as big as it might seem.
Eventually, all this adds up and creates a profile that is very demanded in my career.
That said, my mom taught me to thread a needle without looking. And I can’t sew, so that’s that.
Man, 99.9% of those old commands are still 100% valid. Knowing about memory addressing is super useful when you need to help the computer remember that it does what it’s told, even if it doesn’t think you should be allowed to at first.
While knowledge like that is deprecated, the foundational skills and problem-solving it gave you are still very valuable. Modern systems are still built upon old roads, so people with this base level of knowledge have a far easier time sorting out what fixes are needed. Like being an old mechanic that diagnoses a car issue almost immediately because they can hear the issue without hooking up a digital diagnostic, they already know what to look for.
I miss older computers, lol. 2000-2010-ish was the golden era.
I had to learn himem.sys and loadhigh when I was about 10 years old and the family PC HDD crashed. I had a copy of DOS and a manual the size of a phone book. The only way out was to write my own boot disk.
But yes, these days it’s a bit of a useless skill.
Yeah and to think we had to learn and find out stuff reading a book. A book!!
Wait, how do you thread a needle without looking?
It’s pretty cool to see once mastered because it takes less than a second and not many catch what happened.
You take the thread and wrap it around the needle and pull tight. Grab the thread with two fingers and pinch it. Slide the needle out and shove the needle’s eye into the pinched thread. When the thread goes through, grab it and pull it all the way.
The skill comes into play aiming the eye correctly and doing it fast.
It’s probably easier to understand watching a tutorial video.
I was intrigued and found a video. I think this is what you’re describing.
Yes that is exactly it! I’ve just learnt it’s called the fold method. You can feel the thread and the eye in the fingers it’s impressive to see it done fast in one shot, my mom worked knitting and sewing and probably didn’t even need to think about it.
Thanks. I know this method but I’ve never tried doing it without looking. Sounds like I’m doing it too slowly, something for me to practice.
Making tofu from scratch. Also sourdough.
I love cooking in all forms, and there are a lot of things I happily do from scratch. I love baking bread, making my own oat milk, mixing up my own seitan from vital wheat gluten, and a whole bunch of other things.
But making tofu was something I tried a bunch of times and have ultimately given up on. It is extremely time consuming, very difficult to get right, and makes a worse product than what I can buy at the store. It isn’t even cheaper to do, as the cost of the soybeans and the cost of the premade tofu are about the same. I may make it on occasion if I plan on serving it on its own as a dish with soy sauce, but that is about it.
With sourdough, I found it easy to get into, but my husband and I both prefer our baked goods to be not sour, and we both have pretty sensitive tastebuds in that regard. It is easier for me to just use instant yeast whenever I need it and make something we both prefer to eat.
One day sourdough is not sour, and still easier than using commercial yeast. When I’m making sandwich bread I do it in a condensed timeline and the starter just works like a more robust version of yeast. You don’t have to make “the sourdough” as my kids call it (they ask for it because they like it but I do understand y’all’s preference.)
I use my starter to make bread, cinnamon rolls, donuts, once a puff pastry that was so annoying to make but maybe the best thing I’ve ever tasted. I just don’t buy yeast anymore.
I am not sure why, but my one day sourdoughs were still sour to me, and they would usually get more sour as the days passed after baking. I think it is because I live in a humid area that also tends to be cooler, as climate does impact the taste.
I am glad you got it to work for you! But for me it is cheaper to buy the yeast in a large block and use that.
Same with making ketchup! Just buy the cheap ketchup, it’s still better and less time consuming! I also agree with the sourdough. I prefer soft white breads over sourdough.
Butterfly shuffle
I got a bunch of software certs for when I was first job hunting and now they either no longer exist or have been so changed that the certs don’t matter.
Are you me?
certs are scam.
but they pad your resume and make test companies a lot of money.
Depends on the cert and the environment you are already in.
For example, I’m an IT Consultant, we kind of rely on ‘professional certs’ to get work at client projects, especially if a project is covering specific niches and we have consultants that have certifications within those niches.
Also, many of the more mainline certs can definitely be worth getting (especially in the early career stages), as a quick example some of the CompTIA certs like Networking+ (a colleague got his job with us solely with that cert btw)
Network engineer here, lacking experience that net+ lets me know a person has a base understanding of networking, enough to know if they even like it. I can work with that.
That’s probably the worst part of it. In some places they’re required or very helpful to have, even though they’re still complete bs and a scam. Cisco is the perfect example. Their certs are useless and constantly changing, they’re really expensive, and they don’t really teach you about the general subject (networking). They just shill their products and their proprietary, non compatible way of doing stuff, and you pay thousands for that. Yet jobs still want those certs, even if they don’t work with Cisco.
I have to disagree with you on the Cisco stuff. It absolutely teaches you foundation networking.
I remember looking into getting Azure and GCP certs some years ago and went through a few prep courses. It turns out getting the initial certs for cloud services like them is basically to be a salesman for them. It’s like they’re training IT people inside companies to be embedded salespeople for them. Insidious, and kinda genius.
Oh yeah they do. I got my Google GAIL a while back and my son just finished up some AWS one, they are both just variations of ‘Which of our products would you use for x?’.
C|EH was more fun to study for than test for.
Novell cert gang!
Netware 3.X checking in!
English sheep counting, a base-20 number system. Often called Yan Tan Tethera. Lincolnshire is the best version.
Must. Resist. Rabbit-hole…
Every time I try to get into sheep counting I end up falling asleep…
Taught myself how to snake spit. But now it sometimes happens on its own so I really wish I hadn’t trained my mouth so well.
Gleeking?
Haven’t heard that word since middle school.
Let me think -
Mostly software training at work for systems they immediately abandoned.
My interior design skills languish for lack of money.
Most of the other stuff I can do gets some use I think.
