That developers are the only people on earth (possibly with the exception of flight controllers? I just don't know any) who actually understand what time is and what a clock does.
Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
221–230 of 757 posts
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#222Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#223Depends on who ‘other people’ are.
1. Frontend guys, who worked for the internet before, think that users are complete idiots, even if the project automates a coworker’s job which they do manually right now (or less automated). Focus goes on things that are completely irrelevant to the main problem we try to solve. Small changes are a tragedy. Moderate changes are a terror.
Nothing of this is real/important when you give up negotiating, take frontend in your hands and do damn work yourself.
2. Users are very shy or unaware of the fact that their convenience is my duty and you can just message me and ask to move that button, tune the tab order or relayout a form. You have to investigate and monitor their work to get a feedback. I think it comes from the complexity mismatch. If a user asks for a complex feature, it is simple. If they ask for a simple feature, you’re in trouble. Maybe it comes from the false belief that I know better.
3. Bigger competence comes from lesser control.
4. Being a full-time software developer means you’re socially, mentally and willpower-y dead at the evening to some notable extent.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#224Our infrastructures are incredibly fragile, and the world is only holding because no one competent is trying to shut it down.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#225How much feel good and drinking relationships matter in upper management. And on the downside, how little facts weight in when compared to a manager's gut feeling. Enthusiastically presenting a (factually wrong) solution can be a winning strategy. In high school, I thought I was a math genius because all of my solutions were judged as correct. Turns out, I was just a good presenter and nobody made any effort to check…
The bit about math homework reminds me of how I started getting better grades in grad school as immediately after I started doing homework in LaTeX. It’s not that I got any smarter, and I don’t think my work improved significantly as a result of using LaTeX. IMO, it was just that my papers literally looked more convincing when they were typeset like preprints rather than handwritten.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#226Many of the stories we get told and tell ourselves are often orthogonal to reality.
With complicit naïveté it's us then who keep these stories alive so we can cope with the most profound dissonances for all the glorious incentives and self-imagery.
The price we pay for it is still pernicious to the greater environment and to the person "keeping the dream alive".
A more explicit scenario: Neither your bosses nor the investors or most of your colleagues might have drunken the kool-aid for real. The likelihood of you being just a happy yet replaceable cog in a make-believe-machine is very high.
Wear and tear is inverse proportional to cog size.
There is no real risk of burnout at the higher levels of the oligarchy.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#227Being good at your job is rewarded by others shoveling ever more work for you to do.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#228Clean air and clean water make a huge impact on your health.
Purified, high quality fluids make a huge impact on the performance of processes, products and materials - only 1% of what is possible has been achieved technically.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#229Doing always your best for a company never brings joy or sense of fulfillment, if management is bad
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having worked filling shelves in a supermarket, I disagree that it applies to every field.
People can master nearly anything and stand out; boring physical labour is actually one where there are obvious things to be amazing it. It may not earn people a pay raise, but there will be a noticeable and impressive difference between an expert shelf-stacker and someone killing time for money. That being said there are a lot of jobs where I have difficulty imagining what mastery looks like; say in an automated, lo…
I fell in love with driving after that scene in Parasite movie where we takes this very-very smooth turn. I now try to roll my Skoda like it's Mercedes: I stop and start smoothly, I turn wheel so that people don't spoil their imaginative coffee. It makes me feel like I'm guiding a spaceship!