Practical Advice on Advice

If you click a button online, you can’t help but stumble into someone trying to give advice. Commenters on Reddit and Hacker News are anxiously waiting for the moment to drop a new best practice you need to follow. Even more helpful friends on social media won’t mind sharing a tip every now and then. But with any advice, you need to be careful.

Advice, especially of the unwarranted kind, usually (but not always) falls into one of two camps: either someone is trying to sell you something, or they’re giving advice that really means “here’s what worked for me.” That doesn’t mean advice from someone selling something or sharing personal experience won’t work for you—but you need to be cautious. Otherwise, you might run with something and waste a ton of time following bad advice. So how can you deal with advice that’s given to you?

Generally, there are three guidelines I like to follow:

• Understand the problem you’re trying to solve
• Understand the context of the advice being given
• Be agile with applying any advice

First, it’s important to understand the problem you’re attempting to solve. If you don’t have a problem or aren’t actively seeking advice, any advice you’re given is unwarranted and should be dismissed. In these situations, someone is giving you advice without any understanding of your context, and they have no way of knowing whether their input is helpful or not. In fact, most people providing advice in this context are doing so in a self-serving manner. They could be trying to sell you a product or selling you their own good feels. But if you don’t have a problem, you DO NOT have time for this.

If you do have a problem that needs solving, make sure you understand the context of your own situation before seeking advice. Otherwise, you’ll never know whether the advice actually applies to what you’re trying to solve. This is another great way to waste a lot of time.

In addition to considering your own context, the second point is to understand the context of the person giving the advice. A lot of times, they’ll share something that sounds really smart and they’ll often have proof to back it up. But the unspoken message is, “this is what worked for me in this very particular context.” That doesn’t mean the advice can’t be helpful to you, but it’s worth digging into what that context actually is. Advice without context is a solution to an unknown problem. And there’s no way to know if that solution applies to your situation or not.

Finally, after considering advice, if it’s something you want to apply, be agile in implementing it. Don’t accidentally lock yourself into bad advice. Instead, give it a trial run. See if it works for you. If it does—great! Keep applying it. But if not, be okay with pivoting and trying something new.

If you follow those guidelines, you’ll be better equipped to deal with advice. But you can also use these same principles to decide whether you should give advice. Is the person you’re advising open to it? Do you understand their context? Can you frame your advice with the context in which you might apply it? If you fail to do any of these things, you won’t sound trustworthy. Instead, you’ll come off like an internet reply guy (and everyone hates that person).

So to wrap it up, let’s get meta. Should you follow any of the advice I’ve shared here? First, I’m offering this for anyone who has struggled with knowing whether advice is good or has had issues applying advice and wants to get better at it. For context: I’ve personally fallen prey to bad advice in the past (I assume most have). In my younger developer days, naive little me would get caught up in the tech hype machine and assume everything shared was “best advice.” But as I progressed in my career, I became much more likely to assess the problem first and try to understand why advice might be given. So with that context, apply this advice if it makes sense for you (and please stop if you find it doesn’t work)!