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?
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.
deleted by creator
Haven’t heard that word since middle school.
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’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!
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.
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.
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? ☹️
Yup. Fucking dumb.
are you anti union or just anti this one school?
Reading is hard.
They clearly already went to school for it before moving to that state.
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.
Seems like he is anti monopoly.
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.
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
Removed by mod
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.
Oh hey I did this a decade ago as well!
During that time, I was obsessed with typing faster thinking that would get me paid more at my job.
A major point: you can’t help people on their computer without mentally switching
Helping coworkers was annoying. Helping my mom set up her computer was annoying.
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)
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.
When I taught flight school, we flew planes that ran on automotive gasoline. (see also: Rotax 912). Even then paying for fuel ate us alive.
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…
I can relate! Left a longer comment elsewhere on this post but yeah I forgot and recently re-remembered how devastating to aviation prospects it is to be on ADHD meds. At least I got cut off midway through IFR tho so my loans weren’t even worse for no financial payoff
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.
Customer Service Skills, aka the skill of eating shit.
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.
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!!
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.
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.
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
That’s sad. I’m sorry.
