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Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

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Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#151

Post by esotericn »

grecy wrote: post #112
beefield wrote: post #51

That money is debt. In a very fundamental, literal and practical sense, debt or credit (i.e. someone owing somebody something valuable) is what money is . The traditional definition of means of unit of measure, means of payment and unit of value describe how money is used , not what it is . Like, knife is a sharp edged tool used to cut things vs knife actually is steel. (This also being my main reason objecting crypt…

I'm not sure I understand you. Are you saying that all money is borrowed from someone ? What if a friend has $100,000 in the bank of his own money, and he pays me $1,000 to fix his car? He's not in debt, and neither am I. I'm confused

Society owes him, otherwise his money would be worthless. You fixing his car is an example of repaying part of that debt.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#152

Post by NohatCoder »

Whatever job we think require the very best in the field are often not performed by the very best. You'd think a book on topic X is written by an expert in X, but the truth is that it only takes enough skill to fool the average reader to sell books.

TV chefs? Mainly have to be good at talking.

People who write libraries, compilers, OS kernels and so forth? All sorts.

So never ever assume that someone is an expert just because they do something "expertly".

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#154

Post by webew »

fxtentacle wrote: post #146

How much feel good and drinking relationships matter in upper management. And on the downside, how little facts weight in when compared to a manager's gut feeling. Enthusiastically presenting a (factually wrong) solution can be a winning strategy. In high school, I thought I was a math genius because all of my solutions were judged as correct. Turns out, I was just a good presenter and nobody made any effort to check…

This is what would now be termed a "blackpill".

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#155

Post by austinjp »

jaynetics wrote: post #48
enraged_camel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I manage a team. The reason I don’t promote or give raises to people who overwork is because I don’t want to encourage behavior that inevitably results in burnout. What I instead do when people overwork is I give them extra paid time off. Stayed in the office for a couple of extra hours yesterday helping a customer? Great, please make sure to take Friday afternoon off. You had to work extra last week to meet a deadli…

A rare but cool approach. Surely tracking extra time in such a way is a bit of extra effort?

Is it rare? That's not good to hear. It's certainly how I used to try to operate.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#156

Post by heurisko »

grecy wrote: post #112
beefield wrote: post #51

That money is debt. In a very fundamental, literal and practical sense, debt or credit (i.e. someone owing somebody something valuable) is what money is . The traditional definition of means of unit of measure, means of payment and unit of value describe how money is used , not what it is . Like, knife is a sharp edged tool used to cut things vs knife actually is steel. (This also being my main reason objecting crypt…

I'm not sure I understand you. Are you saying that all money is borrowed from someone ? What if a friend has $100,000 in the bank of his own money, and he pays me $1,000 to fix his car? He's not in debt, and neither am I. I'm confused

The bank is in debt, by $100,000 to your friend, the creditor. Your friend called in $1,000 of that debt to pay you.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#157

Post by alpha_squared »

- A vast majority of "cloud security breaches" are just a small setting/toggle that's misconfigured, sometimes intentionally for testing or otherwise, and never corrected until it hits the front page of a news site.

- Imposter syndrome can be incredibly crippling. It can affect just about anyone at any senior level. Also, some have no problem taking advantage of that in others.

- Appreciation of efficient code/design can be directly correlated with how much runway exists.

- I can't say I actually like programming. I like problem-solving, and programming is a neat medium for that, but programming also includes looking and maintaining legacy code. There's often a lack of documentation and things that you expect to take X time will more likely take rand(4) * X time. That rand() can itself be randomly inclusive/exclusive of 4. It can also be another number, you'll just find out when you do.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#158

Post by beefield »

grecy wrote: post #112
beefield wrote: post #51

That money is debt. In a very fundamental, literal and practical sense, debt or credit (i.e. someone owing somebody something valuable) is what money is . The traditional definition of means of unit of measure, means of payment and unit of value describe how money is used , not what it is . Like, knife is a sharp edged tool used to cut things vs knife actually is steel. (This also being my main reason objecting crypt…

I'm not sure I understand you. Are you saying that all money is borrowed from someone ? What if a friend has $100,000 in the bank of his own money, and he pays me $1,000 to fix his car? He's not in debt, and neither am I. I'm confused

First, the "own money" in the bank is not technically his money in the bank, but money the bank has borrowed from your friend. So the bank is in debt to your friend.

Now, in order for the bank to be able to be able to pay its debt to your friend one day, bank has assets. I.e. someone has borrowed money from the bank (e.g. mortgage), and those assets can be used/solde to pay your friend if your friend really wants the bank to settle its debts to him.

It kind of is turtles all the way down. Someone needs to be in debt for there to exist any money. Money is a really weird kind of bearer note. It just means that if you have money, you are owed some valuable goods by other people. And you are pretty free to choose who pays that debt to you from them who is willing to take that bearer note from you as a payment.

Note that debt is also how money is born. Technically everything a bank does when it adds for whatever reason money to your bank account is that it increases your balance in the database and boom, we have new money. Of course, usually banks are not stupid, and in order for them to increase their debt to you, they want something from you in exchange. Typically a promise to pay back a bit more some later day.

(As a disclaimer, money is really tricky to think through. So I give no guarantees my thinking is correct, but so far thinking money as a debt has been most useful way for me to understand it.)

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#160

Post by austinjp »

jakobegger wrote: post #42
cdoxsey wrote: post #26

That almost all software is unreliable and SaaS products only work because there are engineers behind the scenes fixing it all the time. The Wizard of Oz nails it: "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain" https://youtu.be/YWyCCJ6B2WE

On the contrary, my job taught me that desktop software can be extremely reliable and does not actually break all the time. Many of my customers use versions of my app that are a few years old without any troubles. When the user is in control of their environment, software doesn't suddenly break. That's not to say software doesn't have bugs. Only that bugs don't appear suddenly. Most bugs are caused by two things: (1…

> I think that the reason why SaaS have problems all the time is that typically devs are changing stuff all the time and accidentally breaking things left and right, not that software is inherently unreliable.

While I'm sure that some developers go rogue, this feels like a business or management issue. Teams pushed to release fast and early. I wonder how often the developers in teams that release buggy software have asked for time to improve processes and legacy code, and been denied.

If developers really are going rogue and changing code on a whim without testing processes picking it up, this is still a management issue.

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