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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?

#551

Post by bombcar »

jpeggtulsa wrote: post #246
malkosta wrote: post #115

When I was working in a queue feature (for example to buy tailor swift ticket), and was proud of my complicated real-time solution using websockets and CRDTs...then a more experienced guy came, rearchitected in a much simpler way using just the DB with long-polling, not real real-time (but who cares), and it ended up simpler to deal with network splits or crashes. Learned the hard way you can never rely on the networ…

One of the earliest projects I took over from a higher level developer was an auction website back around 1998. The site worked like eBay in as far as you could put a maximum bid, and it would automatically bid higher than the last bid up to that point. The problem was, it was all dependent on users being on that page so that the auto-reload http header would fire again and refresh the page. If nobody was on the site…

The number of "web cron" things in tools like Wordpress and friends is insane; I've been bit a number of times by this - if nobody hit the site for a day, none of the crons would fire.

Big website, no problem. Small internet site, big problem.

(Yes, for some cron + wget/curl was whipped out)

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

#552

Post by strikelaserclaw »

wanderingmind wrote: post #257

Meeting less competent people be extremely successful in life compare to the more competent folks. Through my life, I have seen people less curious, less innovative, no passion to learn, not interested in working hard, but are good at gaming the system excel and succeed. They become rich, financially independent, have great success. While people much smarter than me, more curious and innovative fail again and again t…

depends on what society you are from, in America usually people who have a lot of knowledge and are innovative and work hard can succeed. If you come from a corrupt third world country then yea, the only thing that has value is power, nepotism etc...

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

#553

Post by bloomingeek »

conradfr wrote: post #288
bloomingeek wrote: post #225

In 1993 I was interviewed for an operating job in a power plant for a major airline, assigned to their data center. At my current job, I was working in a high rise office building with sixty-six floors. The operating system computer was a JC8520, which was running a version of MS-DOS. All commands had to be typed in correctly or nothing would happen. While operating the plant, several commands had to be entered every…

Very funny. Did you ever bring it up with those people?

I did, the interviewer who told me what Windows was, Dave, told me years later I was hired because, in no particular order: my age (they wanted someone who could give them their monies worth after training (I gave them thirty years.), a former co-worker recommended me based on my experience, After they asked, I told them about my family (they knew I would show up everyday.), I didn't freak out or become agitated when I realized I accidentally embarrassed myself on the Windows question and I promised them I could work well with others. (A kind of weird question at the time that I fully understood after a few months on the job).

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

#554

Post by tomatocracy »

Several years ago, I took my car in to be serviced. When I came to collect it, it was parked at the back of the garage (about 20-30 yards in from the road) amongst other cars the garage had in for servicing or work, with basically a single 1.5-car width lane available to get in and out. I got into my car, and spent about 10 minutes trying (and failing) to do an n-point turn in the very limited space available, in order to exit back on to the road forwards.

Eventually, one of the people who worked there (who had been watching me the whole time, looking very amused) got me to open my window and simply said to me "why didn't you just reverse all the way out like we do?". The ground could have swallowed me up - the thought had literally never occurred to me.

I like to think of this story as a good reminder that sometimes looking at a problem from a different perspective can make all the difference.

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

#555

Post by strikelaserclaw »

codr7 wrote: post #134

Being hired as a 10x ninja coder by a YC-startup that I hope has since aligned their perspective a tiny bit more with reality. Taught me to take a deep breath and start asking questions about expectations rather than falling prey to flattery and delusion.

the feeling that you are the "man" and will hit the jackpot with a startup is a hell of a feeling.

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

#556

Post by bick_nyers »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #407
eru wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Optimising' for simplicity would often be a good idea, though. Optimising for speed of execution only matters some times.

Optimising for simplicity first is almost always the right thing to do. Even if it turns out to be too slow you then have a reference implementation to confirm correctness against. In my experience it's rare to correctly identify the bottleneck in code while writing it.

Depends on your definition of simplicity.

Some view simplicity more as minimizing lines of code, e.g., less moving parts.

I view simplicity more as increasing lines of code, the goal being to make the code very verbose. Sometimes this means more moving parts, but smaller "movement" at each step.

There are other views of simplicity as well.

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

#557

Post by tsunamifury »

Being fired after building a 1 billion dollar/100 million mau product — for no given reason and given minimal severance.

The best I can understand is the executives said “yea we aren’t paying this guys waypoint bonus we can just fire him and take it from here”

I learned no matter what you achieve if you lack table stakes you are worthless.

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

#558

Post by mr-wendel »

avensec wrote: post #473
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…

Thanks for sharing! So, a question in balancing the regret against knowing what you know now. This situation sparked a change in you to recognize how to handle these situations better. Would you make the same mistake again in order to learn the lesson?

Absolutely not. I would hope to learn the lesson some other way.

In hindsight, it equates to kicking someone hard in the groin for laughs. It hurts my foot, them a lot, and it's just a poor way to learn how to earn "respect".

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

#559

Post by johnchristopher »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #495
mhaberl wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so true. I remember one of my interviews that went well in the end. In the middle of the interview, they mentioned using Java and building web apps. At the time, I was a C++ developer with no web development experience. I said: "I never did web development," and their response was, "You do know how to write source code, don't you?" I said: "Of course I do, but..." They cut me off with: "You will pick it up, d…

Maybe they figured knowing C++ was a sign of your general programming aptitude? Also, how right were they?

I have seen a C++ dev. almost brought to tears when trying to fix a CSS issue at a previous job. Then he broke into tears of laughter when I showed him `yarn build:dev` and the tailwind config. and package.json files :D.

Better to laugh about it than cry about it, eh :].

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

#560

Post by bombcar »

sriram_malhar wrote: post #357

My boss and I had written a distributed transaction manager. Of all the components of our product, this was considered the lynchpin of reliable enterprise software. The day came when we had to present it at a very well attended product launch. He and I took turns making different points. Then he announced to the crowd that he had a surprise for me (and turns out, to the entire company), that he had changed the config…

I've had one system I worked on where I had that level of trust in it, and it really was a completely different feel to your usual webshit stuff these days.
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