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Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

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Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#171

Post by wiether »

plank_time wrote: post #79
wiether wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of my mentors at the first company I worked for in Silicon Valley never said “no” to one of my ideas. He said “okay, we’ll try it out and see what happens.” He was inherently supportive of new ideas and as a junior engineer it felt very refreshing to not have to argue my way into a feature that I felt strongly about. I’ve carried that same mentality throughout my career. I try to always have this kind of mindse…

There’s a difference between obviously absurd ideas and those that someone can go off and try in their own codebase. Giving some breathing room so people can experiment and try things on their own without disrupting the product is being supportive, in my opinion. It doesn’t mean everything should go in. But I give the person the opportunity to sell their idea. Maybe it’s better than I think, or maybe others on the te…

> Unless you’re the only competent person on the team, if the team thinks its a good idea then why not? If you’re the only competent person on the team however, you should really leave the company.

Sometimes I ask myself this question and I basically can't answer because, well. What are the odds that I am ? And what are the odds that it's the opposite, their ideas are great and I am in the wrong doubting them ?

Actually the most common situation is that someone will come with a very bad idea, and when asked what they think about it, the other attendants will something like "yeah, maybe that could work". They don't approve nor reject the idea. And it looks like more passivity than anything, but if nobody says "nope, that's wrong" and I'm convinced it actually is, maybe I am the one in the wrong ?

I see exactly what you are saying about CR. And that's exactly my mindset. But sometimes people argue that it's a matter of opinion while to me it's a matter of correctness. In those cases I'm lost because on one hand I deeply know that they are wrong, but on the other hand I don't want to be the bad guy that always reject PR because I think my opinion is more important than their.

TL;DR : I don't know where to draw the line between people's limits and my own stupidity.

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#172

Post by wiether »

DayDollar wrote: post #90
wiether wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of my mentors at the first company I worked for in Silicon Valley never said “no” to one of my ideas. He said “okay, we’ll try it out and see what happens.” He was inherently supportive of new ideas and as a junior engineer it felt very refreshing to not have to argue my way into a feature that I felt strongly about. I’ve carried that same mentality throughout my career. I try to always have this kind of mindse…

You can at least entertain the idea, bad ideas spin themselves apart at the planning stage. "I have a mobile smal bbq kit at home. I could bring that in for a try tomorrow. But were do we bbq. Fire detectors go off inside the building, so should be outside. Will bring it, but i wont grill out there in the rain, im for a rotating job on that. Volunteers?" There - death by self-execution. And you didnt even murder it b…

Thank you. I'll try to keep that in mind next time I'm in this kind of situation and see how it turns out.

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#174

Post by noir_lord »

adenozine wrote: post #168
noir_lord wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You drink 5L of water a day? (assuming 180lbs, 28ml Oz that's 5.04L)

No no, so it's half your weight in lbs, in oz. So for a 200lb man, it'd be 100oz. Just under a gallon. It seems like a lot at first, and for the first few days I peed a lot, but now it seems normal. Granted, I'm doing myself a small service by saying 200, but that's just a few covid pounds.

Ahh.

That makes more sense, I drink about that just for water excluding over drinks.

Pint of water soon as I wake up, Pint before bed and the rest through the day.

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#175

Post by softwaredoug »

From my least effective colleagues: you always need to think about _shipping_ to a _real customer_. Projects that go on for months and years chasing technical perfection without going to prod will get a bad reputation, and cancelled. The people associated with leading the project might carry a bad smell. Big rewrites definitely fall into this categories...

From outright jerks: learn to let go. You can’t control everything, you don’t know everything, and you need to take a break from work to get some perspective.

From my favorite colleagues: put humility and service to the customer first. Be selfless with junior people. “We step out ... seeking only peace and friendship – to teach, if we are called upon; to be taught, if we are fortunate.”[1]

1 - https://www.unf.edu/~n00006757/astronomylectures/Voyager%20M...

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#176

Post by devchix »

jawns wrote: post #143

I notice that the vast majority of comments here are lessons learned about office dynamics and interpersonal relationships. Which either indicates that soft skills are much more important than tech skills or that HN's mostly technical audience has had more to learn about soft skills than hard skills. To buck the trend, I'm going to add a few "hard skills" lessons I've learned from managers. From the best: "Every if s…

I appreciate this. I think one of the more valuable advice I was given re:conditionals is to make sure the positive path is the non-branching path. Branch your exception, let your expected path fall through.

    if ( unexpected = true )
      branch;
    do_expected_stuff
Caveat: ways to do things age. Maybe this is no longer true or even slightly advantageous, but so far it has served me.

I also prefer 20 lines of simple pedestrian code to 2 lines of clever code. I remind myself that I write for the maintainers, who do not have the benefit of my resident knowledge when they encounter the code.

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#178

Post by a3n »

jawns wrote: post #143

I notice that the vast majority of comments here are lessons learned about office dynamics and interpersonal relationships. Which either indicates that soft skills are much more important than tech skills or that HN's mostly technical audience has had more to learn about soft skills than hard skills. To buck the trend, I'm going to add a few "hard skills" lessons I've learned from managers. From the best: "Every if s…

Code like Hemingway.

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#179

Post by adenozine »

noir_lord wrote: post #174
adenozine wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No no, so it's half your weight in lbs, in oz. So for a 200lb man, it'd be 100oz. Just under a gallon. It seems like a lot at first, and for the first few days I peed a lot, but now it seems normal. Granted, I'm doing myself a small service by saying 200, but that's just a few covid pounds.

Ahh. That makes more sense, I drink about that just for water excluding over drinks. Pint of water soon as I wake up, Pint before bed and the rest through the day.

Nice! Good work.

I was terrible about it before. Coffee, energy drinks, sugary crap. I drink almost exclusively water and herbal teas, and I've been staying under 20g of sugar most days for the past few months.

I don't know if you're American or not, but I have struggled with just being surrounded with terrible snack choices and meal choices. It's been nice focusing on changing these behaviors.

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#180

Post by a3n »

Buttons840 wrote: post #20
alashley wrote: post #9

Best: It's okay to say you don't know something Worst: Don't tell employees you pay them so they shouldn't have to use Google.

Heh. I think the joke is that my company pays me 1 dollar a week to do Google searches, and 2000 dollars week to know which of the 100,000 results is worth following.

I took my semi truck to one of the company shops recently. There were some electrical problems that were getting progressively worse.

The technician thought, poked, checked, asked a colleague.

Finally he got out his phone, googled, and disconnected the batteries for about ten minutes. Then reconnected the batteries, and all was well.

I guess something needed to be put to death and reincarnated.

He laughed about it and told me how he fixed it. I laughed too and thanks him, but sometimes that's what you do, and you have to know enough to select the likely or possible out from the unlikely and implausible.

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