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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?

#631

Post by mdorazio »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #606

The insane amount of work that goes into QA of consumer electronics. I also now viscerally understand how China has a stranglehold on world manufacture of electronics. The concentration of skill, infrastructure, and related industries in Shenzhen or other Chinese industrial cities is unequaled in the USA. We have utterly given that up to Asia. Back to QA: I learned what "DPPM" means: Defective Parts Per Million. A mo…

For those wondering about this, I recommend some of the electronics factory tour videos on the YouTube channel Strange Parts. Even a small component manufacturer will generally have automated inspection of in-progress items on the line, automated test harnesses for functionality testing, x-ray machines for verifying connections, human QA of a subset of final products for functionality, and human QA of final product aesthetics. An interesting note on this is that it's getting noticeably more automated over time thanks to improvements in computer vision, cameras, and sensors.

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

#632

Post by Pigo »

Waterluvian wrote: post #593
dcarmo wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you consider the time playing Everquest wasted? It was what you wanted to do, you did it and had fun. Now you want to do something else and that's fine.

I _really_ enjoyed the first year of WoW. It was a childhood fantasy come true to explore the world I grew up with. The rest of the years it was just something I knew, a routine I was in, and where my social life was. Looking back, I really wish I walked away much sooner.

Yeah, it's not that I wish I had never played Everquest. It was the amount of time that I played, which I regret now.

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

#633

Post by kqr »

sethammons wrote: post #623
jl6 wrote: post #6

The taxonomy of jobs that most people have in their minds is extremely simple (doctor, lawyer, teacher, builder, engineer, window cleaner, garbage collector, astronaut, ...) and is mostly based on a grade-school understanding of what kind of jobs people do. But the reality is that there are millions of types of jobs, with incredible variety and specialisms, and the real content of a job is rarely captured in a job ti…

I wish that there were better ways to expose all this to high schoolers. Career fairs or guest speakers don't cut it.

Maybe read them I, Pencil or whatever that essay is called?

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

#634

Post by homonculus1 »

jonwinstanley wrote: post #490
polyterative wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate please?

On your own, you only have 1 person's time to trade for money, but once you employ others you have a multiplier.

In other words, you're the sucker if you're not exploiting others.

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

#635

Post by Pigo »

moretai wrote: post #409
Pigo wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this. Our time on this Earth is so short. I used to love video games, but now I'm trying to make up for the time I wasted playing Everquest. There's so many experiences out there waiting to be had.

What are some experiences that you've experienced since stopping Everquest?

I eventually found the right woman, and started a family. But that could have happened anyways.

I'd say it's more that I exercise more now. I discovered that I like woodworking. And I started creating more things myself on the computer. I've deployed a few Android apps to the play store, and I discovered that I like Rust.

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

#636

Post by csours »

sethammons wrote: post #625
csours wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small example: A company develops a software product for a client. The company tests the product, and tests pass! No crashes! It just works. It works for years with no problems. Then you get a flurry of tickets in a pretty short window: the software is crashing! What happened? It passed tests, it worked for years! What changed in the environment? Are disks failing or filling up? No. Is the network failing? No. Is a…

Fantastic story. Reminded me, we've seen similar issues back in the day when we were not monitoring memory usage as well as we should have been. Because we deployed daily or weekly, the services restarted and life was good. After everything was stable, a slow memory leak appeared that took weeks to grow to a point where the service would crash.

We used a paging/alerting product. It was intended to be fired by command line, I guess, so each run was totally cleaned up because the process died.

They added library (DLL) functionality so we could run it from a script. So the script ran and ran and ran and sent alerts, and randomly crashed from time to time.

Why is it crashing? The stand-alone worked fine! Well, they weren't cleaning up their handles, so eventually we get to the process handle count limit and die!

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

#637

Post by president »

kccqzy wrote: post #610
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #606

The insane amount of work that goes into QA of consumer electronics. I also now viscerally understand how China has a stranglehold on world manufacture of electronics. The concentration of skill, infrastructure, and related industries in Shenzhen or other Chinese industrial cities is unequaled in the USA. We have utterly given that up to Asia. Back to QA: I learned what "DPPM" means: Defective Parts Per Million. A mo…

The insane amount of work that goes into just manufacturing. The United States prides itself by having high-value functions like design, while offshoring manufacturing. But manufacturing consumer electronics is no longer simple. We have given up on manufacturing these electronics completely.

> We have given up on manufacturing these electronics completely.

I don't think it was the American people so much as it was the CEOs who were pandering to Wall Street in their quest for ever-increasing shareholder value.

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

#638

Post by reroute1 »

tomp wrote: post #629
mnsc wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And why in the world would (...) people being systems to be optimized rule out treating people with respect, empathy, and kindness. Because seeing people as systems to be optimized is per definition dehumanizing which is an action that is not respectful or empathetic?

I can have empathetic and respectful goals and use systems and optimisation to achieve them. Take sex for example. As a heterosexual man, I’ve no idea what’s intrinsically pleasurable to women. I think that giving sexual pleasure is a respectul, empathetic intention. Given this goal, I can use systematic approach to satisfy it (find pleasure trigger points and apply them).

Where is your systemic approach and optimization in this example? You haven't given any information on the approach other than find pleasure points. That's not using systems and optimization, so no it's not dehumanizing.

If on the other hand you carefully studied adult films, read the kama sutra, and practiced this at every opportunity you might have a systemic approach. And if your partner learned about this I don't think anyone could be called silly for feeling dehumanized by it. This is basically the approach that most people take to some extent, but that doesn't mean you want to advertise how you looked at a huge population and deduced effective methods of sexual pleasure. Of course some men or women may have no problem with this approach, but that is highly dependent on the individual and many people would feel dehumanized by it or uncomfortable with it. Sex is actually a good example because there are often strong personal feelings, even love associated with it.

Again it might be counter-intuitive, like how else are people supposed to figure these things out? But at the same time that fact can be very dehumanizing and seem disrespectful to disclose your "process" if it involved a lot of systematic optimization. Not very lovey dovey.

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

#639

Post by president »

jb1991 wrote: post #142
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…

Definitely agree, and this is even more of a problem in the United States than most other western nations. Work life balance should be a priority for all human beings, and Americans have much to learn to catch up in this area.

Work life balance is a priority for most people but the issue is that everyone is only concerned with their own work life balance, rather than society as a whole. These people work themselves to death and trample on others in order to reward themselves with work life balance later on in life. Then you realize that if only everybody helped each other out and stopped trying to compete with each other, we wouldn't be in this situation. Unfortunately this is how life works and is a classic case of Prisoner's Dilemma [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

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

#640

Post by davidwitt415 »

franze wrote: post #267

Just spent 6 months in London at a hypergrowth Fintech as VP Growth. Learned a damn lot about failure, hiring, the new SaaS workflows, training the next generation and ambition. Summarized it here https://link.medium.com/jJfvmCq2e3 Hope somebody finds it valuable.

Thanks for this, lots of good nuggets of wisdom!
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