Ask HN: What’s Your ROI in Browsing Hacker News? I currently feel like I’m in a place where the cool stuff is something I can’t use because it’s too technical, not fully dependable, or just a cool concept at the end of the day. What value have you gained from hacker news submissions or comments that has helped you in your life? This is not meant to make HN look bad. |
There's also a bunch of subject matter experts lurking here. There's nothing better than when you have lay people discussing say, nuclear reactors and an actual nuclear physicist or engineer chimes in.
As far as content, I really read it more for the weird little obscure articles that are terribly interesting, more than I do for keeping up on tech. However, it is interesting to skim the comments of a submission for a particular technology stack: it really helps give insight into where that particular tech is going and how it's actually used in the real world.
There's also a lot of deeply personal, candid stories on here that I enjoy reading. HN is a forum run by a startup accelerator after all, so there's no shortage of people who have tried and failed repeatedly here. It's a wealth of knowledge and experience I'm very thankful to have.
The article was not about job search, it was a post reviewing a tech talk about technology that as you say may have been "too technical" for me at the time
This is not to say that I use hacker news for job search
I observed that giving my brain new(s) information in the morning makes it harder to concentrate later the same day. So I try to avoid visiting HN in the morning and wait until the afternoon.
To improve the noise to signal ratio, I also added a little widget to my new-tab-page showing me the current top 3 news of the 'best' list. That way I don't have to constantly monitor the site and don't miss the big stories either ;-)
I gain the most value from Ask HN posts. I used hckrnews.com to identify the top ones. I look at the top comments on these posts. If there are any good insights, I note them and favorite the post.
Since I would rather be "always learning" it is far more fun to watch technical talks at conferences and track any company that sponsors a speech I enjoy. I am doing this constantly (not just during active job search).
Since it is the norm for technical conferences to post to youtube, this strategy only costs time.
When you have a list of companies large enough, then it is easier to find competitors or get appropriate suggestions from networking platforms like linkedin.
I never track large or obvious companies, because I probably already know their name.
Now I've been in the field long enough to pull on my network, but don't really find it necessary. I have a list of 300+ companies that I can pull on reflecting my interests/expertise at different points in my career.
The only downside to this is it doesn't usually grow proportional to your geographical region, but there are ways to bias your results with other strategies.
I might have come across this without HN, but it definitely would have happened later. People post things that interest them on HN, and I find things interesting that others do.