Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#121

Post by mindwok » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 11:05 PM UTC

oblib wrote: post #81

I was in my early 20s talking with a friend who was at least twice my age. I was bitching about a guy who'd look at the work I was doing who really didn't know squat about it and start telling me how I should be doing it. After listening to me for a bit he quietly said "Well, you can learn something from everyone if you focus on that." I spent a couple days pondering that. At first I tried dismissing it because he wa…

Props to you for putting your ego aside and finding something positive out of that shitty situation.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#122

Post by tchock23 » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 11:05 PM UTC

I consider myself fairly literate and a decent communicator.

Until recently I pronounced ‘segue’ how it is spelled. No one ever corrected me.

I shudder to think about the meetings where I pronounced it incorrectly.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#123

Post by ojbyrne » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 11:06 PM UTC

leipert wrote: post #23

Ah, some of the things in this thread remind me of https://xkcd.com/1053/

I feel related to that is hearing a word spoken that you’ve only read before, and the pronunciation is completely different from what you thought.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#124

Post by brrrrrm » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 11:07 PM UTC

massysett wrote: post #111

nicbou wrote: post #78

In college, meeting someone that was better than me by every conceivable metric. You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category. Perfect grades, involved in many communities, and generally pleasant to be around. There was no caveat, no excuse. Dude just straight up rocked. I have met more people like that while travelling. I felt badass riding my moto…

> You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category. This is literally impossible. A person cannot be Einstein and Picasso at the same time. A person cannot be Steve Jobs and Pope Francis at the same time. We all have limited time in life, and it is only possible to excel in one thing by focusing on it and, as a result, not focusing on something else. Th…

I’ve definitely met people whose stats are juiced. Probably not as good at scrolling tiktok as me tho

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#125

Post by sbayeta » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 11:09 PM UTC

bicx wrote: post #89

hu3 wrote: post #83

Learning that some folks can produce so much value with crappy code. I've seen entire teams burn so much money by overcomplicating projects. Bikesheding about how to implement DDD, Hexagonal Architecture, design patterns, complex queues that would maybe one day be required if the company scaled 1000x, unnecessary eventual consistency that required so much machinery and man hours to keep data integrity under control.…

My way of planning and writing software shifted a good bit after I went from working at a mid-size tech company to working for myself. Suddenly I cared very much about how long it took to reach a functional product and very little about developing sophisticated architectures.

Same here. This is what happens when business/developer interests align.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#126

Post by franze » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 11:17 PM UTC

I was hired into a company as product manager. And I struggled. As the company grew from 200 people to 700 in 6 months it was basically a mixture of Mad Max Thunderdome for tickets and products with a mix in of Darwin, Scrum, Story Points and Venture Project and Matrix Organisation.

One of my colleagues, a small, silent, kinda shy guy did get all his tickets done and all his projects done in time.

I did not know how he did it.

During one lunch, he told me. He always offered to write the meeting minutes of each meeting. Every time, all the time. Did not matter if it was his meeting or if he was just invited.

He knew the company was chaos. I knew the company was chaos. Everyone knew the company was chaos. He put order to the chaos. His order.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#127

Post by snipethunder » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 11:17 PM UTC

I am from China and I always thought I am very good at math, because I can get good grades at national Olympiad level math competitions. After I came to America, I realized that I got good grades in China because I internalized the math concepts by doing large amounts of problem sets and it was actually a very slow learning process. In college mathematics courses, I realized that some of my American classmates can grasp new concepts and mental models ways faster than me, without doing much problem sets. We have just been learning math in very different ways.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#128

Post by jnsie » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 11:17 PM UTC

Like many other people who should know better, I tried my hand at day-trading. I bought some course by someone who in hindsight I'm certain made more money off selling courses than they ever did off of day-trading. I got my account setup, had enough funds to allow me to trade short timeframes (I forget what this was called but there is a rule where you need X amount of money before you can do more than Y trades in Z timeframe) and was excited to trade short and long equities. I had some success and some failure with fees effectively eating my profits. I used to do my scans at night to know what I was planning to look at upon market open where there tends to be a lot of volatility and (I'm sure if you knew what you were doing; I didn't) opportunity. One morning I was certain that Boeing was going to plummet so I shorted a very small number of shares and was glued to the screen. I placed my market order, it hit, then Boeing immediately ripped upwards. Now, if you've traded you know that the difference between going long and going short is that going long you can lose everything you invested, going short you can lose everything you own. For about 3 seconds - my heart pounds when I think about this - I hemorrhaged money. I was down a couple thousand dollars before I could hit the key to cover the short at a huge loss (thinking back I know I had a stop loss but am not sure why it didn't trigger. Presumably it was a limit order and the price jumped the bid pre- and post- spike; I don't know). Right as I went to cover the stock dropped back down, as quickly as it shot up, and I ended up making maybe $500 on the trade. My last ever trade. I withdrew my funds and closed my brokerage account immediately thereafter.

There were so many learnings it's hard to know which is the most important, but I know that I am not cut out to day trade, I know that shorting is a fools game for (most?) non-institutional investors, I know that if it sounds too good to be true ("day trading will make you rich!") then it is and I know that even people of regular intelligence (I'd be average give or take) can do really stupid things. Never again. Never again!

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#129

Post by mablopoule » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 11:18 PM UTC

massysett wrote: post #111

nicbou wrote: post #78

In college, meeting someone that was better than me by every conceivable metric. You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category. Perfect grades, involved in many communities, and generally pleasant to be around. There was no caveat, no excuse. Dude just straight up rocked. I have met more people like that while travelling. I felt badass riding my moto…

> You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category. This is literally impossible. A person cannot be Einstein and Picasso at the same time. A person cannot be Steve Jobs and Pope Francis at the same time. We all have limited time in life, and it is only possible to excel in one thing by focusing on it and, as a result, not focusing on something else. Th…

You just need to meet someone like that, they are rare but they exists. It doesn't means that they are good at everything, just that they are better than you in every way.

I had a colleague like that. She was super nice, super smart, very good looking, was well-balanced emotionally, and dated a professional athlete. The kind of person who has a very good career, and then train for the marathon on the weekend. Even her name sounded cool.

I know it sounds like jealousy, it isn't, I'm honestly happy for her, but it's just a reminder that sometime people can be more advanced than you, and that you shouldn't place your self-worth only by measuring yourself with others, cause people like John Urschel[1] do exists.

[1] An up-and-coming american football player who abandoned his career at the NFL to focus on his PhD in Mathematics at MIT.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#130

Post by coderKen » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 11:19 PM UTC

I recently started building VR apps for VR headsets with Kotlin/Android after five years as a front-end/full-stack engineer. It has been humbling and scary, but I'm learning and loving it. The switch was motivated by several reasons typical to FAANG companies.