Like, a phrase that captures a life lesson that you’ve learned. Something that condenses the experience down into a phrase that you can use as a reminder, or maybe something you’ve shared with other people to help them.
For me, I’ve learned that you never realize that you’re living in happier times until they’re behind you.
What are some of yours?
If someone can’t explain something in a way you can understand, they don’t understand it. And similarly, value clear thinking over remember facts.
One by a former boss, which I found to be really useful in life: “Never apologize for being late”
never admitting you did anything wrong, basically
IMO a lot of leftists suffer from overapologizing, at the very least, more of them do than chuds
I’ll give you the context: so I had to drive around to client sites and do some work but traffic was always bad so I was late often. I felt bad for being late so I would always apologize. Clients would then remark to my boss about the techs being late so she told me to never apologizing for being late and then people won’t remember you being late. I generally find that people would rather you get started immediately than hear an excuse. I do still apologize for being late if I’m more than a little late but I do it later when they aren’t as impatient.
If someone can’t explain something in a way you can understand, they don’t understand it.
While maybe true in general, being autistic I find it very hard to explain things I know I understand well. It’s been making it hard to get a new job because they’ll ask me to explain programming concepts and I’ll stutter out a basic explanation that sounds like I just read the Wikipedia page about it.
I’ve had the same problem, and I think the difference is that interviews have additional constraints. It’s high pressure, the audience is presumably highly knowledgeable, and usually brevity is expected. Those constraints make it difficult to improvise a good explanation even in the best cases.
I’ve also taught classes on the subject so this made the difference obvious; if I had a lesson plan I could effectively explain a topic, but any sufficiently off-topic questions would be a crap shoot. I try not to over-elaborate (which I have a tendency to do) but that means accurately gauging the knowledge and experience of the audience. Sometimes in interviews this can go horribly wrong, I once realized halfway through that the interviewer and I had totally different conceptions of “microservice architecture” and I faltered with no idea of how to continue.
I guess this illustrates the fundamental difference in stance: the interviewer was acting in an oppositional role and “testing” me, it’s far from a casual discussion. Usually these interviews drill you with question after question. Sometimes, like in this case, it can be really combative. That puts anyone who’s not neurotypical at a huge disadvantage. I wouldn’t assume you don’t know the topic just because you can’t give a good explanation in that kind of environment. Programming as a field is notorious for doing a terrible job of testing for the actual knowledge needed for the role.
I don’t think people have to explain it to you right away, patience is definitely required. But this advice is good in an academic setting where some teachers are full of shit and don’t really understand what they are teaching but they’ll pass the blame on you for not understanding.
“never apologize for wasting other people’s time” is just about the worst life advice I’ve ever heard. being late is rude and apologizing for it is just basic courtesy
Sorry I’m a bit late getting back to you on this thread. Maybe my rule is too extreme, maybe a better rule would be ‘you don’t always have to apologize for being late’ or ‘you don’t have to apologize right away if you’re late’.
There’s a difference in your wording, and it’s actually what I’ve always heard was the key difference: that you shouldn’t apologize for being late, but rather for keeping someone waiting. I don’t know if that’s actually good advice, it’s just something I’ve heard.
You do raise an interesting question about culture though: in which cases, if any, would it be ill-advised to apologize? In politics, and parts of the corporate world, it’s considered a bad idea in general because it means you’re accepting blame. As an immigrant, it seems self-aggrandizing behavior is big in the US and humility can be detrimental.
