You can always be replaced.
That's why i don't document when i should and keep my replacement cost high. Please i don't need advice on ethics.
Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
111–120 of 757 posts
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#112That money is debt. In a very fundamental, literal and practical sense, debt or credit (i.e. someone owing somebody something valuable) is what money is . The traditional definition of means of unit of measure, means of payment and unit of value describe how money is used , not what it is . Like, knife is a sharp edged tool used to cut things vs knife actually is steel. (This also being my main reason objecting crypt…
I'm not sure I understand you.
Are you saying that all money is borrowed from someone?
What if a friend has $100,000 in the bank of his own money, and he pays me $1,000 to fix his car?
He's not in debt, and neither am I. I'm confused
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#113a huge amount of the items you buy "new" have actually been opened multiple times.
Why would you work for such a company?
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#114Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic.
You don't need math to reverse engineer a system. You just need to pay attention to it. You can say the right words to make a date happy. You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can. You don't need an app or data - your brain is a wonderful data processing machine.
Don't be angry at the people who are benefiting from a system, or at the system itself. Most just end up that way, the same way a river meanders towards the sea, or an electrical current tries to find ground.
Fixing/improving a system often requires deep understanding of it. An action here will cause a response there. People often document it, but few will do a proper design.
If you don't fix a system, few will. Most people are reactive to it and try to live with it as background noise.
If you don't control a system, it will control you. You don't have to change its fundamentals, just move out of the way of harm.
Neatness/order is a way to understand a system. All systems tend to fall to disorder. Disorder is not always a bad thing. Order is very expensive, and only serves as better documentation to those who do not understand it. Very often, excessive order is a symptom of someone who does not understand or control it.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#115Work 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.
"The state of having tasks to be done is alone declared as the greatest of sorrows. When that exists, how do the two, happiness and absence of sorrow, arise?" Tripurarahasyam (from wiki: The Tripura Rahasya (Devanagari: त्रिपुरा रहस्य, Tripurā Rahasya) meaning The Mystery beyond the Trinity, is an ancient literary work in Sanskrit believed to have been narrated by Dattatreya to Parashurama. It is an ancient prime tex…
Can you explain this a bit further and how it applies to this context?
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#116You mean "conspiracy theory".
I'm assuming the job you learned this at wasn't in the English department.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#117You have the power to touch many people—most of whom will never cross your path—even with work that may not seem important. This is an honor and a responsibility, bordering on the sacred.
I like this part of the job. The other side is: everything you use everyday is the product of a lot of design work by many people who mostly cared about their users.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#118I'm a developer like many people here. One thing that people who don't program don't realize is that its a laborious job. It seems like its a fun job with lots of 'hanging out' but its more like 4-5 hours a day / 5 days week looking at a text editor and a terminal trying to focus and not be distracted. At the end of the day, I'm exhausted
You should consider switching or quitting. It should not feel like that.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#119Software is bought based on how big the vendor is, by people who will never use the software.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Having worked filling shelves in a supermarket, I disagree that it applies to every field.
Having worked with filling shelves, that job felt sometimes a lot more complex than my development job nowadays. The store I worked for didn't in general allow anything extra to be stored in the warehouse. This lead to the filling load sometimes having excess products that you had to fit somewhere. I really enjoyed making space by moving and rearranging products on the shelves. The products came in wrapped in big rollers that contained random products so looking at the roller product list and how they were packaged you had a puzzle to find a nice path that visited all the correct shelves. Occasionally you would have campaigns and such where you could be quite creative in setup and arrangement.
It was the job I have been most satisfied with in my working life. However, I did only do it for 8 months for 6 hours a day. Maybe in the long run it gets more boring.
The variety between shelf filling between different store brands and even different stores of the same brand made me really think no two jobs are the same.