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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?

#551

Post by starpilot »

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…

> 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.

This is because management is ultimately a job about people, and manager to manager relationships demonstrate one's skill on that axis. I think all of us would rather work with a coworker or boss with middling competence but who is nice to us, rather than a brilliant asshole.

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

#554

Post by throwlaplace »

ISL wrote: post #531

1) There is no DC. We do our scientific work at millihertz frequencies (one cycle every 1000 seconds or so). The age of the universe is ~13.6 billion years, which corresponds to ~10^-18 Hz. Thinking about the zero-frequency limit is a useful crutch, but all things are always changing. Materials creep, the Earth deforms, temperature changes, aging happens. There is no DC. 2) Small forces for long times yield great cha…

> There is no DC.

what does that mean? just because there's ripple doesn't mean it's not DC. DC doesn't mean flat and AC doesn't mean non-flat (AC means periodic).

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

#555

Post by slumdev »

ahuth wrote: post #546
slumdev wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a silly, silly attempt to knock down a point that should be self-evident. Success in life isn't a formal proof. Exercising every day, keeping your weight down, eating a Mediterranean diet, not smoking, having healthy relationships, and sleeping eight hours a night do not guarantee that you'll live to reach retirement age. However , they drastically increase your odds.

It's not that silly. Just making the point that I've met plenty of people without degrees who are absolutely great engineers. And my company somehow comes up with plenty of badly engineered systems, despite being full of people with CS degrees. Is it possible that there's some sort of cognitive bias going on with your and mine strong, opposing feelings on this subject?

I've met people with CS master's degrees who seemed completely useless.

My cognitive bias is that generalizing is more useful than focusing on exceptions.

Studying computer science at a 4-year institution is more likely to produce competent programmers.

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

#556

Post by TallGuyShort »

starpilot wrote: post #525
TallGuyShort wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit like saying everything can be modeled. What do economists, biologists, and traffic engineers increasingly use to do their work? Models. An awful lot of things are actually nail-like for this particular hammer. Applying it to relationships and society feels like a slippery slope. People are still people. But there's definitely cases where the analogy is useful, and maybe even spot-on.

If you take it further, it means that everything is deterministic and there is no free will. I'm not surprised this sentiment is popular on HN.

That's reductio ad absurdum if I've ever heard it. People often follow behavioral patterns, or respond somewhat predictably to various events. That is all.

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

#557

Post by AnimalMuppet »

Wump wrote: post #99

The people you choose to work with is a first-order decision. The ideas, money, technology, or impact of your work are deriviatives of that: https://vishalkapur.com/people-first-decision-making/

Also true of the people you choose to associate with outside of work. But it shows up in character, not in money or work impact.

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

#558

Post by honkycat »

toohotatopic wrote: post #547
Waterluvian wrote: post #137

Life is fleeting. Most of us here are 1/3 or more of the way done. Divest yourself as much as possible from your job. Find other sources of identity. You don't need that fancy car or to buy a boat as much as you need that ejector seat savings account. And when you realise that conditions have evolved to a point where you're not having fun anymore (and they always eventually do), eject yourself and go spend far more t…

Why not fully get invested in your job? You spend the better part of your day working so it's almost futile to divest. Instead of wasting that part of your life, why not make it worthwhile?

Because most jobs are not worth getting invested in.

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

#559

Post by WallStUrinal »

prometheus76 wrote: post #426
roenxi wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can master nearly anything and stand out; boring physical labour is actually one where there are obvious things to be amazing it. It may not earn people a pay raise, but there will be a noticeable and impressive difference between an expert shelf-stacker and someone killing time for money. That being said there are a lot of jobs where I have difficulty imagining what mastery looks like; say in an automated, lo…

When I was a young man, I was working at a children's museum, and one of our guests got sick by the front door. I was dispatched to clean it up. While cleaning, (no customers were around at the time), I flippantly said, "Where's the dignity in this?" An elderly woman who was working as a volunteer at the museum overheard me and said, "The only dignity a job has is the dignity you bring to it."

That elderly woman's name? Alberta Einstein.

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

#560

Post by Waterluvian »

toohotatopic wrote: post #547
Waterluvian wrote: post #137

Life is fleeting. Most of us here are 1/3 or more of the way done. Divest yourself as much as possible from your job. Find other sources of identity. You don't need that fancy car or to buy a boat as much as you need that ejector seat savings account. And when you realise that conditions have evolved to a point where you're not having fun anymore (and they always eventually do), eject yourself and go spend far more t…

Why not fully get invested in your job? You spend the better part of your day working so it's almost futile to divest. Instead of wasting that part of your life, why not make it worthwhile?

This isn't advice, it's what I learned for me. So it may not make any sense for others.

You can and should endeavour to love your job and do it very well. But I discovered that my first job is where all my friends were and was where I exercised my creativity and mentorship skills. That was all great but it meant I lost a lot of identity when I walked away from it.

I have now found non-work outputs for all those things. So if one day my job makes a left turn and it no longer fulfills me creatively or I have to walk away from it, I'm still a whole person.

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