HR is there to protect the company, not you.
I've heard things like "if you have a problem and are unhappy, just go to HR". Nope, I'm not going to rant to them, and I'm certainly not going to talk to our in office mental health professional.
Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?
21–30 of 322 posts
Re: Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?
#22Make things pretty. No amount of hard work and usefulness can amount to a beautiful product. I have strong feelings about Lean Startup who told me to create a MVP, which made me look like an amateur. So, listen to the marketing people and wait to release a beautiful finished product.
Amen. I've shown the exact same application on a dingy thinkpad and a shiny new retina iPad, and had diametrically opposite reactions.
Re: Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?
#23[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?
#24Always make backups. The little bit of time it takes will be a life saver if anything transpires unexpected. Oh and don't deploy on Fridays.
Re: Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?
#25HR is there to protect the company, not you.
I learned this one as well. One week after going to HR with a concern I was fired.
Re: Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?
#26Quantity has a quality all of its own.
Re: Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?
#27How to successfully roll out a product/site.
Released "Version 2" which was an entire newly built system that we worked on for an entire year (we also thought we were "agile" btw). This completely crashed and around 10K users were unable to use the product for almost 2 weeks. We did plenty of things right but we also failed.
Biggest Lessons learned: 1. Release features and changes in manageable incremental chunks 2. Load test, load test, load test - just do it! Yeah, sure, your app worked with your one user when there is 1kb of data in your datastore - what about 5000 users accessing it with 10GB in your data store? 3. Get and use an APM - when it feels like everything is on fire you'll need to know where the fire is coming from 4. One way changes that can't be rolled back are the devil. Take the time needed to make sure you can roll back - manageable incremental changes help with that.
Re: Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?
#28Sadly, after more than 20 years building software, _NEVER_ trust a business person. My faith in humanity had to have me bitten by this the hard way more than once.
+1 every time I say exactly the same. I have an axiom about that.
1. Do not trust “business” guys! 2. If they give you some “sweet” offer, look at the rule No.1
Re: Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?
#29Make things pretty. No amount of hard work and usefulness can amount to a beautiful product. I have strong feelings about Lean Startup who told me to create a MVP, which made me look like an amateur. So, listen to the marketing people and wait to release a beautiful finished product.
... MVP, which made me look like an amateur.
If you're in a domain where aesthetics and "beauty" matter, then your MVP is missing the "V" unless you have, indeed, made the thing beautiful. The Lean Startup approach doesn't tell you not to make things beautiful... it just tells you to make only what you need to validate your hypothesis. If that means making something beautiful, then you make it beautiful.
Re: Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?
#30Documentation is like sex. If it is good, it is good. If it is bad it is good
This is hilarious and 100 percent correct.