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Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
121–130 of 757 posts
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#122Human interactions are way more important for solving technology problems than technology itself.
Software development is more of an art than science. They don't teach you this at Computer Science classes.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#123Work 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.
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Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#124‘Management’ and ‘process’ are mostly based on pseudoscience.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#125I'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
But it is a fun job
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#126Kind of obvious one, but I wish more people knew that — critical thinking. On the one side it helps to avoid bad/stupid things in life: quackery medicine, scammers, bad investments, etc. On the other side it allows to peep deeper into things and see more choices even in ordinary life. After some practice you gain nearly magical ability to peel couple of additional layers from reality and to see non-obvious things eve…
Any Book recommendations ?
I doubt there are books that could teach you critical thinking. It requires to spend lots of time observing and learning stuff, trying out possible solutions and getting meaningful feedback.
Also from my experience it helps when you stop judging people and stuff, labeling things as good or bad, black or white. Just try to understand different points of view and outcomes as they are.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My current workplace. We have one diva who build the vast majority of the system. He is smart and likes algorithms, but doesn't write particularly easy code to follow (he values cleverness over simplicity). Any suggestion that it could be improved is met with a bit of an argument. And he isn't much of a team player compared to the other devs. But he knows the system inside out....
In not the gut you talk about, but... I built many systems and was always a point of failure when it comes to dependency. I still know a lot of code, even when it's years ago. But I never kill an idea that has a better outcome as the current solution has, and if it's possible to implement, we'll do it. That's leadership.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My current workplace. We have one diva who build the vast majority of the system. He is smart and likes algorithms, but doesn't write particularly easy code to follow (he values cleverness over simplicity). Any suggestion that it could be improved is met with a bit of an argument. And he isn't much of a team player compared to the other devs. But he knows the system inside out....
this hits so close to home
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#129How little my personal variance in performance actually matters. The only ones that can tell a good day from a bad day by looking at or listening to (I am an orchestra musician) the result is me. The only time it really matters is for big orchestra solos. I am a much worse programmer than bassoon player, and for programming amount of work put in matters a lot more. I still churn out mostly bad code, but the spectrum…
A corollary is that you can hold a facade much longer than you can function.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t count it as lying unless there is intent behind it. But it is certainly true that many people’s deeply held beliefs are not as true as they think they are, myself included obviously. The more experienced you get, the fewer absolute truths there are.
I think I agree more with the parent than with you, particularly in engineering. Lying in engineering means saying anything that's not true with any certainty. I wouldn't hold it against someone, but I would ask them to think carefully before speaking, to make sure what they said is true, as it can lead meetings to decide the wrong actions if nobody present happens to be able to contradict it. Outside of engineering,…
Lying in engineering means saying anything that's not true with any certainty.
It’s funny because that’s exactly an example of what I mean. Real engineering is about compromises and those are highly subjective. What’s the feature we should work on next? What tools should we use? What’s the priority of this bug? Should we refactor this today or take on more tech debt? Ask 10 people and you will get 10 answers, all of which are just as true as any other. Recognising this comes with experience.