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Don't Assume It's Difficult Until It Is

weblog.jamisbuck.org

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Re: Don't Assume It's Difficult Until It Is

#11

Post by jamis »

bgilroy26 wrote: post #6
eternal_intern wrote: post #3

I feel like this is good advice but presents only one side of the coin. Underestimating how difficult something is, is exactly what leads to ''planning fallacy''. I would rather err on the side of caution and overestimate how difficult something is

The most important time to apply the advice from the article is after you have decided a project is worth your time and before you start planning in earnest. The examples of difficult subject matter the author gives (particularly math) are so intimidating to some people that they miss out on a lot of great stuff because they conclude "I could never do that". I don't think the author wants people to make poor time est…

Thanks for stating it more clearly than I did! You've nailed it. It's always bothered me when people dismiss their ability to learn a thing, because they think some part will be difficult. They really have no idea. Yes, the task as a whole will have difficult parts, but we as individual human beings are far more capable than we give ourselves credit for.

Re: Don't Assume It's Difficult Until It Is

#12

Post by hitekker »

jsharpe wrote: post #10

This reminds me of babies. A lot of people assume that changing diapers or sleep deprivation is the hard part of having a baby. For me, though, the hard part is actually just that babies are kind of boring, and the boringness of having to watch them constantly grinds you down. That definitely wasn't what I was expecting to be hard when considering whether to have a baby. (Fortunately they get more interesting over ti…

I haven't heard yet that babies are boring, but I can imagine it's the grind that is the worst part.

Unrelated:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzvwTyESiR0

Re: Don't Assume It's Difficult Until It Is

#13

Post by TeMPOraL »

jajaBinks wrote: post #5
eternal_intern wrote: post #3

I feel like this is good advice but presents only one side of the coin. Underestimating how difficult something is, is exactly what leads to ''planning fallacy''. I would rather err on the side of caution and overestimate how difficult something is

My take-away was - never estimate confidently without knowing anything about the task. Because the initial assumptions might be very incorrect. Invest maybe 2-5% of the time to start doing something (ie begin learning Korean to realize that it's a phonetic language, and reading is easy within just 1 day). This will allow you to come up with the right estimate. Thoughts?

I have a framework of thinking about learning new things, which I sometimes call the 10-100-10k approach. I wrote about it year ago[0], and the responses helped me refine it.

I think the investing 10 hours in learning a new thing is more than enough to get the initial estimate you describe. Probably even 5 would be enough. That's 10 pomodoros. It's something I'm willing to consider to throw at totally random things to see if they are actually as hard as I think, and if I actually want to learn them.

Most people don't really spend even 15 minutes, to the clock, on things they think are hard to learn - and so underestimate just how much you can progress with as little as few hours, if you actually sit down and do it.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8197334

Re: Don't Assume It's Difficult Until It Is

#14

Post by theoh »

bfaviero wrote: post #8

This is honestly how I felt about shaving with a straight razor. Everyone I spoke to about it was like "you're crazy! you'll cut yourself. At the very least use a safety razor to warm up to something like that." I had a gift card to Art of Shaving, and bought a shavette. Two weeks in, I haven't cut myself once, and I shave faster and better than I ever have.

As a safety razor user of about 7 years now, I regret to report that my experience is that eventually something will go wrong and you'll cut yourself in an annoying way. In my case it took 5+ years. Two weeks with a new technique is ludicrously early to come to a conclusion.

Re: Don't Assume It's Difficult Until It Is

#15

Post by orionblastar »

copperx wrote: post #7
realusername wrote: post #4

The first part resonate a lot with me. I wanted to learn Russian (because why not ?), I intuitively thought the Cyrillic alphabet would be the hardest part of all, like it's another alphabet and you can't read anything right ? Sounds really difficult... Actually it's the easiest part of the language because it's 99% phonetic with some few exceptions, the whole alphabet is in reality quite small and it was actually ea…

> But it's also the same when coding, the hard parts are not always where I expect them to be. As you may know, this also applies to optimizing code. The 'hot' parts of the code are very often things that you don't expect.

The hard part of optimizing code is to find areas were your code is weak at and taking too long to do something.

In my best practices and I learned this from a video by Grace Hopper, is to use less code to do the same thing. Less code takes up less memory and usually runs faster.

Just writing code and then compiling it without any errors doesn't mean it is done. You still have to optimize it and do security checks as well as quality checks. You still have to check for bugs and side effects. You have to use it and think like a user would to see how the user would see it.

Re: Don't Assume It's Difficult Until It Is

#16

Post by Swizec »

hitekker wrote: post #12
jsharpe wrote: post #10

This reminds me of babies. A lot of people assume that changing diapers or sleep deprivation is the hard part of having a baby. For me, though, the hard part is actually just that babies are kind of boring, and the boringness of having to watch them constantly grinds you down. That definitely wasn't what I was expecting to be hard when considering whether to have a baby. (Fortunately they get more interesting over ti…

I haven't heard yet that babies are boring, but I can imagine it's the grind that is the worst part. Unrelated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzvwTyESiR0

My mum has always said that babies are boring. Not uneventful, but boring.

For the first few months all they do is eat shit and sleep. Literally.

Re: Don't Assume It's Difficult Until It Is

#17

Post by colmvp »

jsharpe wrote: post #10

This reminds me of babies. A lot of people assume that changing diapers or sleep deprivation is the hard part of having a baby. For me, though, the hard part is actually just that babies are kind of boring, and the boringness of having to watch them constantly grinds you down. That definitely wasn't what I was expecting to be hard when considering whether to have a baby. (Fortunately they get more interesting over ti…

Sleep deprivation was definitely the most common thing mentioned amongst my friends.

A close second though was definitely the boringness of watching them constantly. My best friend said his showers and time on the toilet are 2 - 3x longer as it's his only respite.

Re: Don't Assume It's Difficult Until It Is

#18

Post by visakanv »

jsharpe wrote: post #10

This reminds me of babies. A lot of people assume that changing diapers or sleep deprivation is the hard part of having a baby. For me, though, the hard part is actually just that babies are kind of boring, and the boringness of having to watch them constantly grinds you down. That definitely wasn't what I was expecting to be hard when considering whether to have a baby. (Fortunately they get more interesting over ti…

The trick I think is to remember that while they don't say or do much, they're listening. So you can talk to them a lot. Tell them you're entire life history. Ask them questions about the meaning of life. Lots of fun to be had, if you're not dying from lack of sleep.

Re: Don't Assume It's Difficult Until It Is

#19

Post by mwfunk »

Swizec wrote: post #16
hitekker wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't heard yet that babies are boring, but I can imagine it's the grind that is the worst part. Unrelated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzvwTyESiR0

My mum has always said that babies are boring. Not uneventful, but boring. For the first few months all they do is eat shit and sleep. Literally.

Shit has no nutritional value- it's just breastfeeding or formula for the first few months.

Re: Don't Assume It's Difficult Until It Is

#20

Post by Splines »

Personally, when troubleshooting software, I've always found that stating assumptions, testing them both for false and true values, and writing the results down, makes for good (albeit sometimes slow) forward progress.

Of course, you get those bugs that occur with seemingly zero difference in your methods, and that's when you need to start thinking creatively...

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