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Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?

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Re: Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?

#191

Post by smilesnd »

markdoubleyou wrote: post #122

If you're a dev, don't work for a company where software development is viewed as a cost center--you want your work to be viewed as something that brings in revenue. (Learned the hard way when I worked at a large bank.)

I agree with this full-heartedly I work for a company where my boss told me a couple months in having a dev department was a waste of money for the company, and we were lucky to have a job. The company bread and butter was software that transcribe medical records from paper to digital. What the CEO and sale force didn't tell anyone it was actually a cubical farm of humans transcribing it all since the software was horrible. The environment was so horrible every worth while dev/IT person regularly drop out as soon as there contract was over or till they just didn't show up one day. The only reason the company even keep "functioning" was out sourcing everything to India. There database was duck tape and string together in ways that only the elders understood how to pull things out of it.

If you walk into any company where different departments get praise more then others it is a sign to walk out. You will always get treated like a second rate employee in those environments.

Re: Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?

#192

Post by munchbunny »

dacohenii wrote: post #182
munchbunny wrote: post #156

I learned the value of patience and moving slowly through many mistakes where I moved too quickly. In the startup world, the default is to move as fast as you can, and it's often easy to mistake a maxim for product development as a maxim for life . The problem is that it's not good advice for many things in life. Examples: 1. Shopping. Especially big ticket items like cars and places to live. Urgency favors the selle…

1. Shopping. Especially big ticket items like cars and places to live. Urgency favors the buyer because you don't do diligence well and you don't shop around for better deals when you're in a rush. I assume you mean urgency favors the seller (unless you're urgently trying to sell, of course). Or, in general: (s)he who has the greater time constraint has the disadvantage.

Good catch, thanks!

Re: Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?

#193

Post by lightbulbish »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #123
throwaway713 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate a bit more? I’m not sure what to take away from this.

See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18133748 upthread for a story about trusting business people.

That's just a bad person, nothing to do with a business vs. a tech person.

Re: Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?

#194

Post by tralarpa »

madeuptempacct wrote: post #71
AuthorizedCust wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stretching is probably mostly hype. E.g., https://www.painscience.com/articles/stretching.php

Tell that to gymnasts and martial artists. I have seen the "science" of this over the years, but I have also seen the practical fact that it's absolutely unavoidable.

Gymnasts, martial artists, ballet dancers and some athlets (e.g. javelin throwers) stretch to increase their range of motion because the latter is beneficial for their activities. The effect is temporary (+) unless you start at a young age and ruin your joints (-> China). If you don't belong to those groups, stretching doesn't do much for you, as has been repeatedly pointed out in various publications. The other benefits attributed to stretching, e.g. a lower risk for injuries, are actually caused by the warming-up effect of the stretching movements and can be also achieved, in a much safer way!, by some simple exercises.

(Side note: When talking about the benefits of stretching, some people also mention Yoga, but that's a different story and 99.999% of Yoga teachers and practitioner don't have the slightest idea what they are doing.)

(+) That's the reason why you have the impression that you are stiff when you skip stretching for one or two days.

Re: Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?

#195

Post by swagtricker »

itsreallyme wrote: post #174
fhood wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Our code is self-documenting. If you need documentation then the code isn't written well enough" -Assholes who don't know what it is like to work with mature code bases.

"Our code is self-documenting. If you need documentation then the code isn't written well enough" -Assholes who don't know what it is like to work with mature code bases. - People who don't know how to write clean code

Sorry, parent poster: Gotta agree w/ above comment here. With the minor warning that the unit tests are included in this. In a good environment, I should be able to go to the tests to understand not only WHAT the code is doing but WHY it's doing it. No matter how 'mature' the code base is.

Re: Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?

#196

Post by madeuptempacct »

0xf8 wrote: post #188
Dirlewanger wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's your takeaway of someone who has decades-long career and has hours upon hours of free lectures available (of which none I'm sure you've watched), then yeah, you're an idiot and you're part of the problem of overreacting to ideas that don't safely reside in your bubble.

What profound discoveries has madeuptempacct made? To qualify as the "arbiter."

I am not trying to sell you books and lectures.

Re: Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?

#197

Post by sp527 »

Unless you're a founder or you personally know and trust the capability of the founder(s) recruiting you, max out cash and ignore options.

Also, unless you've been especially good at proving your value to people (either through credentialing or having worked with someone directly or with someone they trust), no one is going to come to you with an offer to hop aboard a rocketship. Assume by default that any offer made to you is unfair and skewed to favor the person making it. Negotiate accordingly.

Re: Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?

#199

Post by bitfhacker »

bunderbunder wrote: post #11

Worse is better Or, to put it a bit more optimistically - usable now is better than perfect later. I've found that, if I disappear behind a curtain and spend a long time trying to make something really well-polished and feature rich, that just gives the user a lot of time to build up their expectations, and also to get frustrated by the delay. By the time you ship, they'll be actively looking for ways to find fault.…

> Or, to put it a bit more optimistically - usable now is better than perfect later.

This is the same principle of Minimum Viable Product. In MVP you launch the first version of your product with sufficient features, but not all, to early adopters so that you can get feedback from them.

MVP and the "Build Measure Learn" feedback loop, gives you important tools to leverage your product.

Re: Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?

#200

Post by superasn »

tempotemporary wrote: post #163
superasn wrote: post #137

You don't have to be nice to everyone all the time. It's better to be grumpy, opinionated and even a nay sayer sometimes than to fake smile through everything. Because doing the later can give you physical symptoms like real back pain and migraines (collectively known as TMS) and millions of people suffer from it, get surgeries, medicine yet don't know that their persona is the cause of their physical pains. This is…

Could you elaborate how being nice can cause a physical pain?

It's all there in the amazing book by Dr. John Sarno called the divided mind which I wrote about here (1).

It's the clash between id and the super-ego that causes it and there are thousand (if not more) people who got better from this pain.

If you search google for "TMS pain personality" you will find thousands of articles but this seems like a good start as any (2).

Unfortunately it's not for everyone because you really need to have an open mind (it's okay if you're a skeptical though) to unlearn your pain.

(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17980964

(2) http://www.tmswiki.org/ppd/TMS_Personality_Traits

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