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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?

#31

Post by jaggederest »

People have a tremendously distorted view of reality due to their own biases. Myself definitely included. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair

More concretely in the field of software engineering:

Accurate, precise estimates are more expensive than the actual task itself.

If someone asks you "how long until it is done", the only reasonable answer is just as long as you've already spent, even if you're close to the end of the project. a "three week project" on week 3 will most likely take another 3 weeks, all else being equal.

Nobody has any idea, they're just making it up as they go along.

If you do the math, you're ahead of almost everyone. Most people won't do math to save their own life. Same goes for reading. If you actually read documentation or source code, you're in a very slim minority. Most people just google.

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

#34

Post by jeffshek »

If you can prevent being cynical and take that effort into doing actual work, your skillsets quickly compound. If the job sucks, take your improved skillset elsewhere. But do not sit idly and complain - it does nothing, hurts your career, your colleagues and your life.

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

#35

Post by badtuple »

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…

Not only that, but the incredible depth of pretty much every field. Not every practitioner dives deep, but the masters of any job leave me speechless.

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

#36

Post by enraged_camel »

makach wrote: post #12

Work never ends. No matter how much you get done there will always be more. I see a lot of colleagues burn out because they think their extra effort will be noticed. Most managers appriciate it but do not promote their employees.

I manage a team. The reason I don’t promote or give raises to people who overwork is because I don’t want to encourage behavior that inevitably results in burnout.

What I instead do when people overwork is I give them extra paid time off. Stayed in the office for a couple of extra hours yesterday helping a customer? Great, please make sure to take Friday afternoon off. You had to work extra last week to meet a deadline? Apologies, that was my fault for not managing your workload properly and distributing it better (and also not setting a reasonable deadline). Second, again, please take the equivalent amount of time off.

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

#37

Post by Nursie »

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 fixed my mum's computer a few years back (cleaned up some adware and other stuff that was making it awful to use) and did a bunch of virus scans and cleanup etc. After a while she asked "Is this what you do for a job?"

The conception of what happens inside our industry just isn't present in the wider population, and I imagine we're not unique in that.

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

#38

Post by 2rsf »

cdoxsey wrote: post #26

That almost all software is unreliable and SaaS products only work because there are engineers behind the scenes fixing it all the time. The Wizard of Oz nails it: "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain" https://youtu.be/YWyCCJ6B2WE

That's a big one, and on top of that people don't realize how fast software decays when the man behind the curtain is on his coffee break

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

#39

Post by antupis »

makach wrote: post #17
twblalock wrote: post #9

The people who get the most done are not the smartest, or the most skilled, but the ones who are most familiar with the organization they work in. To outsiders it looks like they end up with compromised solutions, but to insiders it looks like they achieved the impossible.

To me this has always been a management issue. Usually the business willingly allows for this to happen. Consequence is that you build an extreme dependency on this person. Knowledge needs to be built into the organisation through hard work, like documentation, processes and collaboration.

Thing is that when knowledge is built into organisation you lose some agility, so there are definitely some tradeoffs.

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

#40

Post by Nursie »

That people will take a conspiracy and run with it because they'll believe a publicised scare over any number of actual experts.

I saw it with the introduction of EMV (Chip'n'Pin) credit cards in the UK, and again with contactless cards a few years later, and you still see it with Apple/Google pay.

They're not safe, people will steal all your money, you shouldn't have to use your PIN in public, they'll get cloned, I microwave all mine just to be sure. All while ignorant of the real improvements these technologies bring.

I imagine anyone reading this that's ever worked with/around vaccines and vaccinations is thinking "you don't say!" right now...

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