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?
Driving. Never used it.
Ventriloquism. I dont use it at all anymore. Learned it because i thought it would be fun and one could make some jokes with it but nah
English sheep counting, a base-20 number system. Often called Yan Tan Tethera. Lincolnshire is the best version.
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.
Touching nose with my upper lip
Getting a private pilot certificate. Was fun, but after going to every airport within range, not sure it was worth it.
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?
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…
The cost of leaded gas alone is financially painful.
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.
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.
Recently there was a thread where a lot of people were expressing their hatred of handwriting, so according to them that was a waste of my time (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ I do even write much neater in normal script compared to handwriting.
Other than that nothing stands out, so either I’m unskilled or super focused
Cursive I guess.
Customer Service Skills, aka the skill of eating shit.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Reading is hard.
They clearly already went to school for it before moving to that state.
Seems like he is anti monopoly.
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.
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.
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!
Can’t think of anything.
Life’s a journey, not a destination.
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.
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?
