Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment? • Hacker News Board

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

#651

Post by _boffin_ » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 4:37 AM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #519

_boffin_ wrote: post #25

When I was younger, I had an issue with external vs internal validation. Sadly, it heavily skewed towards external validation. I was on the chunkier side for a lot of my childhood and into high school. Joined wrestling and stayed with it. Lot the weight, grew, and gained muscle. Also started to get a lot of attention from the opposite sex. That, with the external validation issue, leaned into it and just had fun. It…

That last paragraph has helped me many, many times in situations from politics to personal. It's especially easy to be "this person is wrong, why don't they see how wrong they are" and much more useful to be "why is this person looking for this".

> "this person is wrong, why don't they see how wrong they are"

Each person, company, industry, street, city, country, state, country, ..., each thing has their own viewpoint from their own vantage point and will most likely see, interpret, view what's being conveyed differently than the sender.

Each person has their own view and it's valid, i just may not agree with it, but i still want to understand why they think / believe / convey that.

at the same time, i'm obtuse and sometimes forget to look outside myself. :|

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

#652

Post by throwaway2037 » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 4:48 AM UTC

surfingdino wrote: post #320

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 relate. I am now on a small team of half a dozen (2 front, two back, 2 devops). We've been smashing it for the last year, replaced a hodgepodge of systems with a configurable framework and a modular integration layer with third-party systems. As a reward our work the management are bringing in a consultancy we are supposed to train to replace us. That will be a very expensive and inefficient exercise. How do I…

The solution sounds simple: Refuse to train the incoming consultants. You can do this indirectly by quitting before the consultants arrive, or, directly, by telling mgmt that you refuse to train your replacements. Your experience sounds great to sell yourself into a new role with better managers.

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

#653

Post by _boffin_ » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 4:49 AM UTC

ordu wrote: post #449

_boffin_ wrote: post #25

When I was younger, I had an issue with external vs internal validation. Sadly, it heavily skewed towards external validation. I was on the chunkier side for a lot of my childhood and into high school. Joined wrestling and stayed with it. Lot the weight, grew, and gained muscle. Also started to get a lot of attention from the opposite sex. That, with the external validation issue, leaned into it and just had fun. It…

> He gave me a mind shift: instead of thinking how it’s important or exciting to you, try to imagine why the author of it thought it was so exciting, to where they spent their career learning about that subject. That allowed me to completely change how I read and that too has helped me more in the past years than I could imagine. Yeah. I studied psychology and it was the most prominent mind shift for me too. Watching…

> I was a math guy, any statement either true or false

Interesting... for me, a fair amount of decisions are weighted--I can see that damn payoff matrix in my head.

I said it in another comment, "each person has their viewpoint from their own vantage point."

My question to you is, how were you able to make that change? I'm going to presume that it still rears its head time to time and when it does, do you notice it quickly and are able to adapt in the same conversation or is it mostly a reflection and realization you were like that? or am i not even asking the right questions?

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

#654

Post by just-tom » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 5:57 AM UTC

erhaetherth wrote: post #295

just-tom wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I call myself a developer. I'm not that good of a programmer, but quite resourceful as a developer.

I've come to understand the difference between programmer and software engineer, but what's the difference between (software) developer and programmer?

Maybe it's only in my head, but for me, programmers work 99% of the time with code, while developers also spin up servers, cicd pipelines, domain dns stuff, and more stuff that are not strictly source code.

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

#655

Post by asalamander » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 6:05 AM UTC

tomatocracy wrote: post #554

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 ord…

During the winter, I once lost control of my car as I was attempting to brake at a stop sign. My car ended up “stuck” in a plume of snow a couple meters away from the pole. No accident luckily.

I kept turning my steering wheel with my foot on the pedal to try and accelerate my way out but nothing worked. Suddenly, an old guy pulled up behind me in this massive truck and came to the window to ask if I needed help.

I explained to him that I tried everything and that we likely need to call a tow truck company (or use his truck even) to pull my car out.

He then responded, “Did you try reversing your car?”

Started hoping I did get into an accident at that point just to spare myself the embarrassment!

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

#656

Post by jimbobthrowawy » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 6:50 AM UTC

jaydeegee wrote: post #312

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 had a colleague who was old school and loved optimising, everything he reviewed come back with tiny changes that would save fractions of a ms. His nemesis was a guy who was arguably the best coder I have ever worked with. Things come to a head in one meeting and old school said if we did things his way our code would run quicker and the response was legendary 'If we coded like you it'd run quicker because most of t…

The greatest trick Matt Godbolt ever pulled was putting gcc -E on a website. Probably produced more value worldwide than the whole rest of his career.

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

#657

Post by jimbobthrowawy » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 8:14 AM UTC

throw46365 wrote: post #22

lubujackson wrote: post #6

I was in my 20s before I realized even numbered houses are always on one side of the street and odd numbers on the other. Literally no excuse for not figuring that out.

Well, always if there's a street that was put down facing like that. Commonplace in new towns laid down over very large areas. In the UK, oh wow, you will encounter some weird numbering issues. I live on the corner of a street in a very complex, 400 year old area, and I am forever leaning out of the window to shout instructions to utterly bemused couriers.

Ireland dealt with this problem in sledgehammer-fashion back in 2015. Every house gets a unique postal code that resolves to a set of co-ordinates.

Somewhat useful for couriers, since a large number of houses are neither numbered or named, but the post office will know who lives where. I say somewhat, because they will often not use it when it's given.

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

#658

Post by xandrius » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 9:15 AM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #518

beeboobaa3 wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just a rude thing to say. If you all coded like him you wouldn't be having the discussion. The issue is when you have people who do not code with efficiency in mind, and someone who does think about those things reviews the code. Most efficiency gains are probably marginal and not that impactful. So you're probably OK ignoring it. And it's true that bringing such things up during code review and then going bac…

And then you get an in-memory SQL database that is used for cached settings with a text-based SQL query to retrieve every configuration setting (thousands of times during a login) and have a login that takes many seconds to run. Literal example... replaced with a lock-free hashmap, and reduced the blink of an eye in terms of time.

I don't see the problem here: the original dev delivers quickly, the next dev gets to solve an interesting problems and gets to show off how much time they saved.

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

#659

Post by wasteduniverse » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 10:20 AM UTC

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…

[dead]

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

#660

Post by matwood » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 10:52 AM UTC

Loughla wrote: post #594

matwood wrote: post #569

Honestly, it happens regularly in jiu-jitsu (and is one of the reasons I love the sport). I've been training for a number of years, and while I lose to higher belts I typically know what happened. Occasionally I get to roll with people who are world class level (another cool thing about the sport), and they make me feel like it's day 1 all over again. Then they'll give me a few pointers that look completely innocuous…

My oldest needed a self-esteem boost due to some bullying issues when he was 8, so we enrolled him in Jiu Jitsu. We figured it would be a good outlet - away from anyone that he knows, would keep him active, and would teach him to defend himself. He loves it entirely, but is just okay (he's pretty small and still pretty timid). I'm waiting until he turns 16, and in the adult class himself, to start jiu jitsu at the sa…

That's awesome. When I roll with kids I'm always amazed how quickly they learn. Kids and many women also have a unique advantage that their forearms are basically just the bone and make for a pretty great choking tool lol...

It's really great to see adults and their kids at the gym, especially when I've watched them grow up over the years. Only suggestion I would make is for you to start training now. Even if it's just a couple of times/week, 8 years is a lot of training time. My only regret with jits is I didn't start training sooner.

If you have room, you can also buy some mats for the house and practice 1:1 with your kid.