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Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

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

#231

Post by kaba0 »

tempie2024 wrote: post #216
mr-wendel wrote: post #187

Caught a senior sysadmin in a small company using a proxy on our infrastructure to hide misc web browsing from oversight. The logs were the give-away. It was typical misc IT/nerd news stuff... the kind of thing a different company culture (which did come later) would actually encourage. I was sure the right thing to do was to report it to the CEO (there wasn't anyone else higher in the hierarchy to consider) for cert…

That is a hard one. Best to report it I think.. but it is not clear cut in general. There would be times when going against your employer by blowing the whistle or covering up is the more moral thing to do. Deciding where that line is not simple and there is no guide.

Why would it be good to report it? Depending on what “infrastructure” stands for here, unless it is something absolutely unwise security-wise, why?

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

#232

Post by mkl »

keepamovin wrote: post #226
stavros wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a false dichotomy. On one end, you have "overarchitects everything so much that the code is soon unmaintainable" and on the other end you have "architects the code so little that the code is soon unmaintainable". Always write the simplest thing you can, but no simpler. Finding that line is where all the art is.

That's not a "false" dichotomy, that's an actual dichotomy: it's a real thing. Reading your comment, even tho you don't say it, I get the feeling you'd be with the rallying cry, "Bikeshedders Assemble!" hahaha! :)

It's a false dichotomy because it falsely implies there are only two options. Better than either are the other options which lie in between.

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

#233

Post by dev-jayson »

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.…

I can totally understand the move fast and break things mentality, but I'd like to stress it's equally important to pay back the occurring tech debts. I am working on a massive spring monolith that's somewhat of a huge pile of spaghetti, and when the higher management decided to enforce code quality in the pipeline, it became a living hell to work on.

I can't even add a logger without having to refactor the whole 2000 line class while writing a whole-ass unit test for it. It's been a full year and I still have to deal with this sort of crap on a weekly basis.

The most ironic part is that most of the devs that cooked the spaghetti are now either in upper management or in the same devOps team that's demanding us to clean the mess up.

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

#234

Post by TimTheTinker »

LVB wrote: post #201

While in Army basic training, my duffel got swapped with another guy's (no idea whose). Back at the barracks, I discovered that they'd snagged some spent shells from the range. Massive no-no. Young, naive me assumed that presenting these to the drill sergeants and explaining the situation would be the correct move. I was severely disciplined as a result. Others were like, "Dude... why didn't you just quietly toss tha…

Naive civilian question here -- If the drill sergeant is your boss in basic training, I don't understand why telling him info you think is important got you into trouble. After all, "talk to your boss if you have a concern" is the #1 piece of advice given to anyone who has a job.

In healthy work environments, the culture is to assume the best about the intentions of others ... sounds like he wasn't doing that at all.

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

#235

Post by [deleted] »

LVB wrote: post #201

While in Army basic training, my duffel got swapped with another guy's (no idea whose). Back at the barracks, I discovered that they'd snagged some spent shells from the range. Massive no-no. Young, naive me assumed that presenting these to the drill sergeants and explaining the situation would be the correct move. I was severely disciplined as a result. Others were like, "Dude... why didn't you just quietly toss tha…

[deleted]

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

#236

Post by doctor_eval »

satvikpendem wrote: post #203
buffalobuffalo wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the most valuable lessons I have learned in software engineering is that you can write entire projects with the express plan of rewriting them if they actually gain traction. If I want to prototype something these days, I will often write code that, while not quite spaghetti, would definitely not pass a proper code review. It's actually kind of fun. Almost like a cheat day on a diet or something.

Unfortunately, that rewrite step often doesn't happen. I can't count the number of times a prototype that was meant to be thrown away was actually put into production because "it's cheaper and faster than rewriting."

I’m working on a prototype now but I deliberately made it run entirely in the browser (indexeddb) to avoid the problem that I might be asked to put it in production!

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

#237

Post by computerdork »

koeng wrote: post #79

I’m learning swing dancing. It’s been humbling. It’s humbling because all my life, I’ve been really good at technology - I specialize in biotechnology and manipulating DNA, but am also fluent in programming (mainly python, go, lua) and am able to build hardware - even helped run a robotics startup for a while. Anything related to technology and science comes easily and naturally to me. This isn’t to brag, but just a…

Am a software engineer who fell into salsa dancing many years ago - originally went to meet women, but found I really enjoyed salsa - yes, agreed partner dancing is very difficult, especially for the lead (as you probably heard, it takes something like 3x the amount of time to become a good lead as it does a good follower). Such a difficult art to master (am a musician and I still found it extremely hard, especially at first).

One thing you may want to try is becoming a master at the beat. You've probably already heard this, but still even so, seems like leads (and followers) don't realize just how truly important it is to taking the next step. Yeah, a good way to practice is to do a very clean and confident basic step to the beat of any song you hear.

And if you've already got this down, more power to you :-)

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

#238

Post by ggm »

Interviewed for a dream job (British Antarctic Survey) in 1982. Failed a 20 line "write pythagoras in Fortran or Pascal" test in front of the selection committee.

I was deeply unsettled by this. Made me realize that sometimes what the interviewer is doing, is making you wake up to your own lack of awareness. I must have been a complete prick in the interview. I shudder to think about it to this day.

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

#239

Post by keepamovin »

mkl wrote: post #232
keepamovin wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a "false" dichotomy, that's an actual dichotomy: it's a real thing. Reading your comment, even tho you don't say it, I get the feeling you'd be with the rallying cry, "Bikeshedders Assemble!" hahaha! :)

It's a false dichotomy because it falsely implies there are only two options. Better than either are the other options which lie in between.

Oh, I see. That's a good point. But I don't think hu3's comment was suggesting there's only two options, just illustrating some possible margins to describe the landscape.

Maybe stavros' was hallucinating that strawman reduction in there, is what I think. Like you don't have to say it's a false dichotomy unless that's the only way you read it. The existence of something between the margins, should be obvious. Anyway, haha! :)

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

#240

Post by spencerchubb »

jjmarr wrote: post #173
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.…

There's a discrepancy that the top comments here say that "some people can produce a ton of value by not caring about code quality" and "I didn't care about code quality and got bit later on". And people discuss that incurring technical debt with bad code can sometimes be worth it and sometimes not be worth it. The logical implication of technical debt having an interest rate (i.e. It costs more to fix something late…

I agree with this analysis. Another important factor is: How likely will this code actually be used and drive business value?

If very likely, then you should invest in making the code high-quality. If unlikely, then you should half-ass the code strategically

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