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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?

#631

Post by perfectstorm »

at my second job when mobile development was getting popular, there was this engineer who wanted to switch to mobile development and I have been asked to help him during this transition period. as i was the only engineer with mobile expertise I was actually smug about it and I considered myself a superior to this older engineer who had tons of experience building websites but is new to mobile development.

anyways two days or so after onboarding him to mobile, he called me at his desk and asked me why the app wasn't running on his machine/phone. after looking at the error message i told him to change the path to certain settings to match his username/computer name. those were hardcoded to my computer/username. he breathed a sigh of relief after fixing it and told me about environment variables (how you can dynamically get the username so it's not tied to me), the engineer who was sitting next to him who heard the whole conversation laughed at my face. this guy was more mature about it and helped me understand it.

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

#632

Post by brailsafe »

riehwvfbk wrote: post #627
borski wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. You can work on this with techniques and coping mechanisms (and sometimes medication) but it’s a constant struggle.

Yup. And no matter how many techniques, coping mechanisms, organizational systems, medications and meditations there are - there will still be something that will slip through the cracks, that something will be important, and will make people scratch their heads and wonder how it was possible to drop the ball in such a spectacular fashion. Luckily, the long list of coping mechanisms significantly reduces the incidenc…

> there will still be something that will slip through the cracks, that something will be important, and will make people scratch their heads and wonder how it was possible to drop the ball in such a spectacular fashion.

What doesn't help is how many leaks there are in the systems we operate in, that are just overlooked because we've either accepted them as fundamentally important, or because most other people will manage to pull it off despite the systems' inadequacy.

For example, feedback loops and focus time. Companies will design their workspace to be as distracting and dehumanizing as possible, where someone can roll up a chair at any random moment and start asking questions, meetings are scheduled sporadically throughout a day or week and don't have any positive value contribution. We'll use 3 different asynchronous communication systems that everyone needs to attend to all the time, but no integrated notification system between them; I'll miss that Jira comment because I forgot to check Jira, and then that someone responded to my code review because I'm not checking GitHub every 20 mins, and yet I can't focus on my code for longer than an hour because my boss asked me "How's it going" on Slack.

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

#633

Post by borski »

riehwvfbk wrote: post #627
borski wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. You can work on this with techniques and coping mechanisms (and sometimes medication) but it’s a constant struggle.

Yup. And no matter how many techniques, coping mechanisms, organizational systems, medications and meditations there are - there will still be something that will slip through the cracks, that something will be important, and will make people scratch their heads and wonder how it was possible to drop the ball in such a spectacular fashion. Luckily, the long list of coping mechanisms significantly reduces the incidenc…

I quell that anxiety by reminding myself of all the superpowers it gives me. If you haven’t read “ADHD is Awesome,” I recommend it.

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

#634

Post by bee_rider »

lukas099 wrote: post #630
bee_rider wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to learn to dance (hated it). It is a bit of a weird thing though, there as social events where people feel like it is OK to really try and pressure people into dancing. It is really annoying.

It's a pretty important social custom in a lot of cultures. I feel for you as there are times when I really, really don't feel like dancing but also don't want to be the odd one out.

It doesn’t really seem like an important one in US culture anymore, thankfully, so much as one of the few remaining fronts on which it is oddly socially acceptable to pester people.

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

#635

Post by riehwvfbk »

borski wrote: post #633
riehwvfbk wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. And no matter how many techniques, coping mechanisms, organizational systems, medications and meditations there are - there will still be something that will slip through the cracks, that something will be important, and will make people scratch their heads and wonder how it was possible to drop the ball in such a spectacular fashion. Luckily, the long list of coping mechanisms significantly reduces the incidenc…

I quell that anxiety by reminding myself of all the superpowers it gives me. If you haven’t read “ADHD is Awesome,” I recommend it.

I don't know, this line of thinking seems similar to "I am a midget - but look, I never have a problem with legroom on airplanes!" The tiny upside is simply incommesurate with the massive downsides.

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

#636

Post by rcbdev »

robertlagrant wrote: post #478
rcbdev wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not in the U.S. but in Europe, Software Engineering is often a field of engineering where one can get licensed. i.e. in Austria many IT techs and devs are called (at the doctor's office or in formal settings) "Mr. Engineer" ("Herr Ingenieur") if they fulfill some formal criteria and get licensed. A further qualification is becoming a federally certified civil technician for IT (Ziviltechniker or Ingenieurskonsu…

> Software around the world is engineered - it just often isn't in California. A gatekeeping organisation you have to pay to enter the workforce isn't the same as something actually being "engineered".

This "gatekeeping organization" is the federal government. They have you pass an exam to prove that you know about public procurement law and how to plan and oversee a software engineering project before they let you work on public sector contracts, where you have to responsibly handle tax payer funds.

For something like this to work there needs to be a strong and technically competent government that the tax payers trust. This is presumably why it works in Austria and not the USA.

You can enter the workforce as a developer here without being licensed or credentialed at all, it's absolutely no problem (legally speaking) - it's just an obvious sign of a commitment to engineering responsibility and quality.

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

#637

Post by 93po »

4pkjai wrote: post #384

Someone gave me a pack of Indome noodles and I started making them like the soupy instant noodles I had normally eaten. Someone saw me and said "That's not how you make those" as I was about to squeeze the sauce sachets into the hot water with the noodles. I said "I know how to make instant noodles!" and I continued making them. He replied with "Okay then". After I had made them I realised he was right. I also though…

chatgpt tells me the sauce is for coating the noodles, not for mixing in the water. for others who don't know.

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

#638

Post by Loughla »

whalesalad wrote: post #599
Loughla wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait. Did moot start Canvas, the educational platform that many, many, many universities use? That Canvas? That's absolutely hilarious to me. I did not know that.

no this was different, it went defunct 10 years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_Networks

Oooooh okay. That makes way more sense. Thank you.

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

#639

Post by kortilla »

vasco wrote: post #349
kortilla wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“It’s a guy browsing the internet a bit” can be game over from a security perspective. Some machines should never execute code from public web pages, full stop. So it is a philosophical question of why the restrictions were in place in this scenario. If it was “employee productivity”, then sure, who cares. If it was an IRS computer with thousands of people’s tax returns on disk and access to millions more, then repor…

If he was the most senior sysadmin it's already his responsibility to keep things safe anyway, so if you trust him for all the rest of the infra you can trust him for a proxy.

The reason you report is to make the call if he should have had that level of trust in the first place.

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

#640

Post by 93po »

solardev wrote: post #564

I was at the climbing gym this one time, working on a route. There were two copies of it side-by-side, as though for a race – ooh, fun! By this point I'd been climbing occasionally for about a decade and considered myself a beginner plus. I was never very good, being both overweight and lacking strength, but I did spend dozens of hours practicing. My first time trying this route, I got halfway up but missed a jump. A…

> I hope that by the time I die, I can become that good at SOMETHING in my life.

In my mid 30s now, i've transitioned to still having this goal, but instead of it being status or career or money or skill oriented, it's about how i interface with the world. my goal in life is to be kind to myself and others, to lessen suffering for myself and others, and to continuously work on my life in ways that help me attain this goal.

this works really well for me as someone with some historically pretty bad anxiety, self esteem, and ADHD issues. it doesn't require intense focus and study and sitting still for hours. it just requires being introspective, being willing to push through mental discomfort, and swallowing my ego. it also makes the world around me feel like a better place.

of course i'm not perfect at this - my biggest issue is still occasionally being less than perfectly kind when anonymously commenting on the internet sometimes. but i'm working on it :)

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