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?
Cursive handwriting
In France, children learn only cursive. It’s kind of strange to learn how to manually write like a typewriter…
I think it’s a matter of how it’s framed.
It was already going out of fashion in schools when I was growing up, and people did not like it when a teacher (usually older) made them practice it. The original argument of it being faster didn’t apply once computers became common in schools/homes, and printed letters (writing like a typewriter) are better for clarity.
However, I think there is value to it when framed as an artistic skill. Calligraphy strengthens motor skills, and if you make the lesson less rigid then kids can have fun with it and figure out how to express themselves.
I don’t understand it, to be honest. It may be cultural. To learn two ways to handwrite is a waste of time, agreed, but why choose the one which was not thought to be handwritten?
Connected cursive with the stupid squiggles is terrible, regular cursive where you just join most of the letters is the fastest way to write.
Hard disagree.
There’s some debate to have here about neuroplasticity and whether cursive handwriting (or the process of learning something involving both the cognitive resources and some rather fine hand, wrist, fingers, a bit of an arm movement), but one thing is certain: it’s a faster way to write stuff down.
I have tried journaling and other writing both in printed and cursive, and the former makes me not write at all, because there’s not enough time in this world for me to be my verbose self on paper when trying to write legible printed letters.
Cursive is just that fast. Faster if you learn to write shorter forms of the same words. Even faster if you learn some special systems, but that’s a different rabbit hole.
But I will admit that learning to be concise with one’s words without losing meaning and gravity is also beneficial, even if only for trying to push Alzheimer’s and others further into the future.
Cursive is faster (and more comfortable) than printing.
But that assumes that you’re handwriting in the first place.
Typing is faster than cursive, and many people who work a lot with text can just type any substantial amounts of text that they want to write.
I do get what you’re saying, but most people nowadays just type rather than write.
When I write, I mostly write in print, but I actually seem to have a bid of hybrid cursive going on in there.
Why?
How much cursive you using these days? It’s pretty much useless outside of reading old letters.
Every single day!
Cursive is the only way I can write now. College destroyed my normal hand writing.
Every day, it is how I write. It is not useless if you want to write with a minimal degree of fluency.
Don’t you write at all?
Extremely rarely. And when I do I don’t use cursive.
I have excellent handwriting and it has been a valuable asset at almost every job I’ve ever had. So many times people have come to me and asked me to hand write a note to a client.
Also, love letters. Physical love letters written in cursive go fucking hard in the 2020’s.
Taking notes in interviews (job related). Allows me to scribble something down while maintaining eye contact and seeing the persons face. Does it well because i dont need to wonder how much space is in between characters like i do when hand printing.
I got my Realtor’s license without realizing just how much it cost to break into the business. I did it for a year, and then dropped it.
That’s the only one I can think of. Typically, I don’t learn on spec, I learn as I go, “on the job”. So, what I’m learning is directly applicable to what I need to do.
For instance, I recently refurbished an old, cheap desk. I learned to apply laminate with contact cement. It’s not hard, but it was my first time doing it. A few weeks later I’m at a counter at a business and they have laminate that is separating from the base, and I knew exactly why. They told me that someone had been hired just a few weeks earlier to repair the same problem, and it happened again. I knew how to fix it right, but I didn’t need a job so I just commiserated with them.
What’s expensive about breaking into the realtor business? Advertising for a customer base?
The crowbar.
I got half of my A+ certification before deciding fuck this and going into a different career. I can code very simply, I have very basic networking skills, and I use none of it. I’m amazed at people who can do it but I am not cut out for IT anything I don’t think. Too much work.
I’m a big believer that computation should be a skill we learn in school. I think a lot of normal people would benefit from being able to make some simple scripts in python for personal use or even just for fun. I hope you don’t always think that the coding skills are useless <3. That said I agree the networking stuff you can throw out the window! I know enough to know that I will never fully understand how network topology works. Every time I get to the /24 or whatever that’s called my eyes start rolling.
Not just computation, but algorithmics. People should learn how to break down any complex task in a suite of simple, logical, deterministic steps and conditions.
At least it would help me stop getting requirement written in “human logic” that are literally impossible to implement…
As a network guy at work, it took me a long time to grok it, but now it amazes me how poorly these concepts are usually taught. They’re actually fairly straightforward in concept. Oh well, it means I have a secure job, and most people don’t really need to know.
Too much work
Shit, brother, I got into IT largely because I’m too lazy to do mindless shit over and over the hard way. It was a strong motivator to learn regex and coding in general. I automate that shit and then I fuck off with the time saved.
Or at least I used to. I was too good at it so now they want me to keep other developers from fucking off all day, and that’s a lot of work.
I ruined my diaphragm learning how to burp my ABCs
It was only sort of worth it
Wait, that’s a thing?
Maybe ruined is a bit hyperbolic , the diaphragm is actually tough and iirc skeletalbut it strains the muscles so i gave myself acid reflux and burp when i talk sometimes
Worth it? Only when im not having acid reflux
It got better over time though, the secret was simply to stop being a weird dork child who learned to force burp for a parlor trick
Man, I got so lucky, I managed to learn how to burp my ABCs and I can still do it approaching 40 without I’ll effect. Also it turns out it is useful as a skill for managing a trans oesophageal ultrasound, a horrible procedure where you swallow something a bit smaller than a kiwi fruit connected to a tube and then have to just choke on it for 20-30 minutes. You can deal with the sensation because it is not dissimilar to the inhale of the burp but extended for the whole time.
Is organic chemistry a skill? I took that class twice and still feel like it barely left an imprint on me. Other than having a fight or flight reaction to benzene rings.
Otherwise, electrical wiring at a very basic level. I’m never going to be confident enough that I’m not going to burn the place down to do it on my own, and what I did learn I don’t really have a use for. Basic electrical safety knowledge is really all you need to get through day to day life.
I did the intro and year course for Chem majors. I decided to focus on the analytical stuff but left the field entirely to do software development. I don’t know what I’d study if I had to start over.
I guess it’s good that electrical wiring scares people because a lot of amateurs do a shit job, but it’s not that hard. Use grommets to protect the sheath from metal corners. Join wires in a junction box instead of just electrical taped rat tails stuffed into the wall. Use the current rating of the breaker to tell you what gauge of wire to use (it’s different solid vs stranded). Use solid conductor on anything that is never going to move (generally behind a wall). Use stranded for anything that is going to flex. Always have the breaker off when you’re working on it.
That’s pretty much it. Electrical is probably easier than plumbing. I’ve done plumbing, too, but I hate it. But when you have a 100 year old house and no money, you do what you must. Now I can swap out a toilet in an hour easy. Last year I had to learn to replace the rotted flooring at the same time as the toilet — that sucked. And I fucked it up, but not badly enough to tear it out and redo it.
Anyway, give me electrical any day.
All the useless mathematical technics from studying physics at university. Now working in software engineering, I barely use more than highschool math, sometimes.
Instead of spending weeks writing down equations I wish I had learned more about science history, breakthrough experiments, other sciences etc.
Those maths are only useful for a tiny percentage of the students that will eventually become theoritical physics researchers.
It’s the curse of studying science in France, it’s unnecessarily math heavy.I used to work for a software consulting firm and one of our clients was NASA. Nothing exciting, just replacing an expensive proprietary system written in a commercial language with an open source one used for analyzing data from the Parker Solar Probe (PSP) and the then to be launched Interstellar Boundary Explorer (I BEX).
The maths were so far beyond my two time community college drop out, barely graduated high school, self taught background I couldn’t even explain them. Fortunately we used paired programming and had enough mathemagitians on staff I never had to deal with the maths alone. My contribution was mostly UI and data visualization.
I think that the mathematical concepts that I learned were mostly generally useful.
But what was useless was the emphasis on doing work by hand. My particular pet peeve is all the time I spent in calculus classes being taught techniques to do symbolic integration by hand.
I was doing a math project once, working with the husband of one of my calculus professors. He himself was a mathematics professor. I dropped by his office. He had to work something out that involved a symbolic integration and fired up Mathematica. I said “You can probably do all this by hand”. He laughed and said something like, “Nobody who has to do actual work with this is going to waste time doing this by hand”. He was right.
Today, I use
maximato do symbolic integration. It’s in my Linux distro and on my Android phone.Often this kind of math is so specialized you can only learn it on a job with a senior. Adapting the math to discreet computing is also a challenge, but usually there some library doing it for you, like the Fast Fourier Transform.
For sure, even with several people on the team with advanced math degrees and even one former astronomer we still had to rely heavily on the NASA team for most of the math we built in to the program. Though we tried to include as little as possible because the client felt that anyone working in the software for publication would need to verify all of the calculations manually anyway so we gave them a python script tool to let them cook.
Another project we had was control software for a flow cytometer which did have to bake in a lot of math around particle physics but the physics math was done before I rotated onto the project so I only got a synopsis.
EE here and the math was hard. Barely touch any of it now, but I miss it and I wish it was more practical. Maybe it was in training me to be very precise and methodical.
But in solid state physics, having the math to follow and understand maxwells equations, e=mc^2, and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Priceless.
Priceless for your current job or your own enjoyment?
My own enjoyment. But EE degree has certainly paid for itself.
I really can’t think of any that weren’t worth the effort. Some took more effort than others, but even if they don’t make me any money, I don’t regret learning then.
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?
Novell cert gang!
Netware 3.X checking in!
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)
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.
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.
Probably morse code. It was required for my ham radio license back in the day to read it at 10 WPM. I put quite a few hours into learning it through the koch method.
At the end of the day I’m just not very interested in getting a lot of contacts. I just like building and tinkering with radios.
I have a full UK licence, and I’m thinking of learning it. It’s one of those things, it sounds interesting for QRP etc. However I’m the same, I rarely speak to anyone anyway!
My limited experience listening to ham radio operators with my scanner (listening to voice, not Morse code) is that when hams do get in contact with each other, they mostly talk about ham radios. Which, I mean, I guess is understandable, since it’s a common interest to all of them, but a lot of it is people who like building and tinkering with radios talking about building and tinkering with radios.
That’s often the topic on your local repeater or 80m ring.
Morse tends to be a bit more brief like “I’m in grid ab12cd and read you 599”, with a lot more abbreviations. Usually for competitions or just crossing off every square on your maidenhead-map.
I learned one of the major orchestration tools (puppet), dabbled in the second (chef), and got a third running everything in my home lab (ansible). I refused to learn the 4th (salt). I figured my time was better spent learning python.
I think that configuration management software is important for many people who admin a large number of computer systems, because being able to modify and spin up identical systems is important to them.
But if you don’t fall into that category, it may not buy one that much.
I can’t learn skills I don’t like to learn. As time wasted having fun is time well spent, I never learned a skill not worth the effort of learning it.
I’m a trained electrician. Despite taking and passing a reputable school for it, I can’t get licensed to do it in my state because you have to have 2 years apprenticeship. You get an apprenticeship you have to go through a school supported by the union. The only school supported is the one they own.
Despite being fully capable of wiring a building to code, installing a solar array or electric car chargers I can’t do shit with the information and it way a year and $2k fucking wasted.
That is fucked. Aren’t apprenticeships usually paid? They expect you to pay for it instead?
The apprenticeship is paid, but you can’t have the apprenticeship until you finish school. But no, not that school, this other school that we have specifically formed a monopoly with.
Oh hell — you already did 2 years of school and they want 2 more at their school? ☹️
Anyway to get credit via past knowledge? Like, test out of apprenticeship if you can? You may be able to prove experience via hours worked on timecards.
are you anti union or just anti this one school?
Unions are fantastic. The problem here is that after spending 2k and a year learning, I was told that the only way I could get the apprenticeship hours needed to get licensed is to spend another 2k and another year going to a different school for the exact same class using the exact same books because no one in my area will take you on unless you use this school.
I cannot test out, I cannot transfer credit, I cannot skip it. Because this is the standard in place and going against it violates their agreements with the union, I cannot work in my city. I’m all for unions, but any organization can be corrupted and this is exactly what it is.
Reading is hard.
They clearly already went to school for it before moving to that state.
Seems like he is anti monopoly.
Any chance you could get licensed in another state using what you know (without an apprenticeship) then seek licensing in your own state via some kind of reciprocity agreement with your home state?
Unfortunately my state doesn’t recognize it unless you have work history in that state. If I had the ability to move to another state to work for a year I wouldn’t come back to this hell hole.
That’s not useless, that’s a corrupt state.
Not your fault at all.
If I’d taken the time to call around and figure this out beforehand or picked a school that arranged the apprenticeships, wouldn’t be out the time and money.
I’m not upset about it, I know more now and there’s plenty of dubious electricians that will inspect my work and sign off on it if I need to do anything. Plus I’m in mental health now which is my real passion.
The local schools exist, so why would anyone really think to check if a school is locally applicable? It’s a type of problem I see often, in general: you wouldn’t have known what precise things to research until you’re faced with the actual problem. Sometimes kind and scarred souls will blast their warnings across the relevant initial source of information, but most people just move on.
But, that being said, that’s not a terrible amount of money for, presumably, a ton of relevant knowledge to any homeowner or home owning friends. I’d love some electrical knowledge and confidence, spent all my point son automotive. But I’m glad you found more passion in a different path, too.
Hey if you ever need it, hit me up. My favorite part of knowing things is helping others know things too!
Even if you don’t end up using it, the process of learning something often shapes us into who we are. So it’s tough to say something isn’t worth the effort.
For example, I learned to read sheet music when I was younger and taking piano lessons. It took a while and I don’t really use that skill today since I mostly play by ear or tab (fretted instruments). However, I appreciate understanding what the notes mean and think it made me more musical overall.
Getting a private pilot certificate. Was fun, but after going to every airport within range, not sure it was worth it.
The cost of leaded gas alone is financially painful.
I’ve been trying to figure out what to do in my life and this is tentatively on my bucket list. Problem is it’s crazy expensive and I don’t have use for it afterwards!
How did the process of getting the cert go for you?
You could steal planes
If I had to do it again, I’d start with the end goal and work backwards. It was a long time ago, I was single with no extra expenses, had a decent job, and thought it might be fun to learn. If I had wanted to become a professional pilot, the calculation would have been very different.
Getting the cert mainly involved putting in the hours. Having a good instructor helps a lot. Also, not making any stupid mistakes. I almost stalled the plane hard on my first solo touch and go. The hardest part was getting used to the ATC lingo and not stuttering too much. I got an aircraft band radio with a headphone and joined all the weirdos who liked to sit at the end of airport runways.
At least you didn’t go all the way through Instrument rating and Commercial license, only to realize ADHD was a thing and also not treatable while maintaining a medical.
I was already working in tech so the backup plan is chugging along fine; but goddamn the student loans…
What are the rules around flying a small plane with ADHD? I’m unclear if one needs to be off meds for an extended period to get a private license
I believe for even a third-class medical a pilot needs to be off ADHD medication for over 4 years, with additional screening/testing involved if they have been prescribed. My knowledge is limited since I have never been prescribed such meds and only realized I have some level of ADHD due to my son getting a diagnosis. He only took the meds for a year or two in elementary school before he opted to stop due to side effects and his brain overcoming that developmental hurdle.
It sounds terrible, but my advice would be that unless your ADHD is severe enough to demand medication you should never ever tell an Aviation Medical Examiner or standard doctor about ADHD suspicions if flying is something you want to do. I could technically still go fly if I found the time, and have never felt I was distracted given the degree that flying a plane engages all parts of your brain.
There is a dark side to this way of thinking though, as any sort of deviation from the norm with mental health or cognitive performance is often pushed under the rug instead of being treated due to fear of losing livelihood. A tragic example was Germanwings Flight 9525.
Cursive I guess.
