Little correlation between effort and reward
My biggest payday came from a junior role at a startup I got extremely lucky at
Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
11–20 of 757 posts
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#12Work never ends. No matter how much you get done there will always be more. I see a lot of colleagues burn out because they think their extra effort will be noticed. Most managers appriciate it but do not promote their employees.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#13The most challenging and important problems to solve in an engineering organisation are rarely technical in nature.
I think this has become a cliché here (a true one, however).
The interesting question is what sort of jobs contain a lot of challenges that are technical in nature.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unsure what that means, can you elaborate
I took it to mean that smart people sometimes have low-status jobs, and conversely people in high-status jobs are not always smart. That's definitely something I have personally experienced given my career has taken me from working as a building labourer and factory worker through to being a C-suite exec, with stops through the trading side of investment banking and Silicon Valley on the way. It's a huge mistake to l…
As the years go by, I find myself craving a job with a physical labor component to it.
A friend of mine studied enology (wine making) at Cornell and his job is about 50% business management and 50% wine making. Some days he has to wear a suit to work, other days he comes home in a wine stained smock. It seems like a good balance.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#15You have the power to touch many people—most of whom will never cross your path—even with work that may not seem important. This is an honor and a responsibility, bordering on the sacred.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#16Everyone lies, all the time. even when they think they're not lying they often are.
I don’t count it as lying unless there is intent behind it. But it is certainly true that many people’s deeply held beliefs are not as true as they think they are, myself included obviously. The more experienced you get, the fewer absolute truths there are.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#17The people who get the most done are not the smartest, or the most skilled, but the ones who are most familiar with the organization they work in. To outsiders it looks like they end up with compromised solutions, but to insiders it looks like they achieved the impossible.
To me this has always been a management issue. Usually the business willingly allows for this to happen. Consequence is that you build an extreme dependency on this person. Knowledge needs to be built into the organisation through hard work, like documentation, processes and collaboration.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#18Work never ends. No matter how much you get done there will always be more. I see a lot of colleagues burn out because they think their extra effort will be noticed. Most managers appriciate it but do not promote their employees.
"The state of having tasks to be done is alone declared as the greatest of sorrows. When that exists, how do the two, happiness and absence of sorrow, arise?"
Tripurarahasyam (from wiki: The Tripura Rahasya (Devanagari: त्रिपुरा रहस्य, Tripurā Rahasya) meaning The Mystery beyond the Trinity, is an ancient literary work in Sanskrit believed to have been narrated by Dattatreya to Parashurama. It is an ancient prime text which is one of the treatises on Advaita school of classical Indian Metaphysics.)
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#19You can always be replaced.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#20The most challenging and important problems to solve in an engineering organisation are rarely technical in nature.
Holy shit, this.
Let me recommend to you "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams" by Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister (go with the 3rd edition) and "The Mythical Man-Month" by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (go with the anniversary edition). Both books expound the idea that most software projects fail not because lack of technology or innovation, but rather due to the mismanagement of people and a lack of understanding how teams work.