Learn to delegate/outsource at all levels from technical to mathematical: the best kind of delegation is to tools/systems/languages/type-systems (eg. "outsource your attention to the type-system") since it's always cheap enough to be in-budget...
Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
111–120 of 424 posts
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#112There is no list. It's not possible to say, "I know these 5 things, and they'll make me more productive." Feynman solved all his physics problems with Calculus. That's it. One tool. Part of is is knowing your tools. The other part is being able to see a problem, break it down, and understand how to manipulate it into something that's attainable. That's it. I worked with this guy Pat several years ago, and he was on a…
>being able to see a problem, break it down, and understand how to manipulate it into something that's attainable
Wasn't this Alexander the Great's approach: divide and conquer?
Every problem gets solvable if you break it into enough pieces
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#113Basic debugging knowledge is helpful, but I've found the ability to think about distributed, networked systems all the way down at the system level to be extremely helpful. We all encounter systems that are ill-documented, or complete black boxes, but peering at them with tools like `strace` / `jstack` (when a service is doing something itself with data) and `tcpdump` (when a service is asking another service to do s…
It always amazes me the number of people - especially programmers/developers - who absolutely can NOT read a stacktrace of any kind
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Fully understanding how SQL prepares queries; optimization strategies That might be very useful for me, but my career has taken a different track, and I have never needed that. I almost never touch SQL, and never in a situation where performance matters. However I know that I can look that up if I need it (or more likely find someone else - I expect looking it up will take months)
eh, I only brought it up because SQL is a funny beast. You have to think like the optimizer in some cases. I recently found a report query that was taking >90 seconds to execute. It was looking at something like 2 billion records, but it shouldn't have taken that long. It really tangled my mind. Each of the records had a `start` and `end` timestamp, and were being collated in a join on a separate key and sorted by MA…
reminds me of helping a friend at work years ago (the halcyon MySQL 3.23 days)
they had a query that ran every 5 minutes, but on non-trivial data sets (network monitoring data for more than ~200 devices on a network), the query would take more than 5 minutes to run ... throwing hardware at the problem didn't help noticeably (double the CPU speed? run time would drop by ~5%)
converting their query from OR form to IN() cut runtime by 90%
All because of how the SQL engine thought it should run comparisons (MySQL, at the time, at least, used the IN() as functionally equivalent to a jump table, whereas the OR format was treated as a series of it...then...elseif...else statements)
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#115There are three things that help me:
1.) Task prioritization. 'nuff said.
2.) Delegating non-priorities, or things that I can but also can be done well by a junior member. Just because I can do it, doesn't mean I should be doing it. This is a hard one for me.
3.) Really understanding the underlying tech before writing code.
I literally just had someone ask for SCIM help when they're dealing with authorization issues. We decouple authentication and authorization, and SCIM only updates user and group information. SCIM, for us, doesn't have anything to do with authorization. I don't know how long this person has been staring at SCIM docs trying to solve their issue when SCIM won't help here.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#116Learning small amounts everyday. Accumulation of knowledge provides compounding return E.g. reading books, curated twitter, https://getsuperpower.com/ , https://www.blinkist.com/
the problem I have with services like Blinkist (or any book summarizing offering) is that you get what the summarizers think is the "point(s)" of the material
You can read, for example, a Christian Apologetics work and come away with tools for public speaking and rhetoric that would be completely missed if you only got the "summary" of the apologetic argument in the religious context
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#117my 2c, I think 10x vertical (better individuals) is not viable for everyone, but 10x horizontal (better teams) is more accessible. Things like good documentation, testing, and collaboration tools and practices go a long way in 10x'ing a team. my only 10x personal practice is: take notes on everything. build a knowledge base. it doesn't have to be presentable, they can be scratch notes, dumps of important links and de…
you've just described the zettelkasten :)
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just had a recent situation like this which initially presented as a simple calendar / due date list, but then spiraled into some dreaded fuzzy set of if/then cases as the client began to add requirements for due dates of certain items in a certain order that would take priority over other items due on the same date, or missed items, or future items that could be done in advance. After two weeks of increasing horro…
>figure out the right questions to ask to get to the solution they needed This is how Jon Bentley starts his classic Programming Pearls "What are you doing...and why?"[0] is almost always the best place to start when tackling requests from customers ------------ [0] my review/reference in relation to this exact problem, of asking the right question
Yeah, it's kind of meta-coding at a certain point. Business people are great with the logic of making money and keeping customers happy, but they are bad at translating those operational requirements into pure logical processes. Particularly if they expect their employees or customers to use software that they expect to guide them to do things in a set order, they aren't good at thinking about the order from the software user's perspective. So just putting yourself in the shoes of both those people is really the job. It's understanding the desire of the business and seeing where that's going to run up against problems in the real world.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#119If you deal with computationally hard problems, I think there's a whole toolbox of utilities with unbelievable performance, in which millions of PhD-holder-hours have been poured, but that get ignored more often than not. - SAT modeling languages & SAT solvers - same for SMT (satisfiability modulo theories) - Constraint programming - MIP (mixed-integer programming) and its special cases, like - TSP (traveling salesma…
Mathematical programming (LP, (M)IP, etc.) feel like superpowers to me. Working with them also helped me realize that many optimization problems are actually just closely-related variations of the same problem.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#120To-do lists.
..insomuch as they can be converted to "now-done lists"