Solving a problem in a technically competent way is easy, once you’re technically competent. What’s really hard is solving the right problem. Lots of systems are very well designed but they solve a problem the user doesn’t have.
Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
331–340 of 757 posts
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#332I'm a resume writer and former recruiter. As a recruiter I was required to 'judge' candidates based on their resume, and didn't spend much time with candidates who had resumes that didn't show what I was looking for.
As a resume writer, my job isn't to judge the candidate, but to make the candidate look as strong as possible on paper.
My work as a resume writer has led me to believe that much of the talk of worker shortages in skilled employment markets is directly related to poor resumes (and not a lack of qualified candidates).
I get a lot more personal satisfaction out of helping people write resumes and coaching them on job search strategy than I did as a recruiter. But my work has also convinced me that there are lots of people out there who are qualified for the jobs they seek, but simply aren't capable of expressing that qualification in writing.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to have a job in the back warehouse of a white goods store. I was moving around fridges all day long. It was a really good job. The best part was I couldn't take any fridges home with me in the evenings. I'd get home and my fridge would be already where it's meant to be. Also no one wanted me to do a fridge moving side project in the evenings.
When I had my pickup truck, friends would ask me for help in moving fridges when moving between rentals. Typical payment was beer and pizza so not too bad.
You weren't paid in beer and pizza options that vested after four years?
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#334Everything 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 ben…
> "You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can." Why do you think so? Given Google Maps has real time information about cars on both routes, I'd think it does a better job of aggregating this data than my intuition.
If you know an area well, you almost always can find at least slight improvements to the Google Maps route. When I know there's a closure or accident, I often look at Google Maps to figure out which way it's recommending and intentionally avoid that route.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that's not true. Money can be either debt-based or non-debt-based. The current government issued money is based on debt. It means that in order to create new money, someone has to be in debt for that amount. I.e. someone has to promise to create value in the future . When more promises are made, the monetary base inflates and money loses value. Money is created at the central bank (public/national debt) and in co…
> No, that's not true. Money can be either debt-based or non-debt-based. Well, you are right in that money _can_ in theory be non debt based. However, currently it is not , and I am quite confident that if you tried to come up with money that is non debt based, first, it would work horribly badly and second, there would emerge almost immediately a debt based money. You see, it is practically impossible to forbid a de…
Debt and credit are useful and necessary tools, I'm not against them. Tether and exchange deposits are obviously not cryptocurrency and I think lots of people understand that. They require trust, which has been breached many times already.
There's a saying: 'not your keys, not your coins'. Cryptocurrency makes it possible to actually own your money when you hold the keys, and it's impossible to take it away from you.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#336Everything 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 ben…
Very well put. What I noticed is that every discipline invents their own lingo to describe the systems in play at the ethos of their discipline and they often manifest as some sort of law, principle or concept. What I'm really curious about learning is to see if there's some sort of overarching discipline that focuses on these sort of systems as a meta and finds improvement points or market opportunities based on a g…
You could take a look at System Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory and especially the works of Niklas Luhmann. It doesn't touch the topic precisely in the way you are thinking about it, but it might give you some concepts and terminology for further development of your ideas.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#337That failure is ok. As a software developer, you are going to receive all the smoke. Whether failure means missing some arbitrary deadline, delivering something that doesn't meet requirements, has bugs, is not extensible, or not delivering at all. Obviously, none of us want any of that to happen, but it's a reality you will face at some point in your career. Your management probably does not care about the myriad of challenges that led to failure and will shift the blame to you to save face for themselves. Doing your best is all you can do. Failure means you are challenging yourself and working outside of your comfort zone, and this is where growth happens. Be honest with yourself, and honest with your team. You can take responsibility for your actions, but there are so many variables which you can't control. From poor planning/management, legacy systems, infrastructure, tooling, unrealistic deadlines/deliverables, funding, initiative, the work of others. These represent systematic issues that have their own inertia, and expecting them to be solved by a single overworked developer is simply asking too much. Learn to recognize when too much is being asked and say something. Recognize all the variables which you can't control. If you have a solution, go ahead and propose one if it is one that you can implement with reasonable confidence, otherwise, leave it to somebody else. Sometimes the hardest thing to learn, is learning what NOT to do.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#338Everything 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 ben…
I would highly recommend reading the book "Finite and Infinite Games" by James Carse
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The degree to which everything runs on this sort of system is kind of horrifying, once you're exposed to enough things like this for that to sink in. So? It clearly works. People want everything to be high quality master craftsman type work but almost nothing is and it almost never matters. People like to think that the auditors are going over the papers with a magnifying glass and that their landscaper is applying…
> It clearly works. Clearly it doesn't and when it does, it's despite this, not because of it. The economic crisis of 2008/9 could have easily been prevented. Misinformation about WMDs led to useless wars. The war on drugs is a huge waste of resources because why? Ticking checkboxes is a big cause of our problems.
Kind of ironically, pulling out 3 anecdotal examples of well-known system failures doesn't make a very high-quality argument that most things being done sloppily most of the time doesn't usually work out fine. The real argument is, that while those 3 things were happening - and the War on Drugs goes back ~100 years - roughly 3 billion other things were also sloppily done, and most of them worked out well enough.
If it didn't work, we would all be starving and dodging lions in a jungle somewhere, instead of writing posts on an internet forum about how a few well-known things were sloppily done, yet didn't really cause that much damage in the great scheme of things.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's a blackpill? Is this a twist on the Matrix's shtick with red and blue pills, but with a black one, signifying that this truth is somehow morbose or dark?
It's the overall uselessness of life, being lied to about rules of society while brutal, cruel natural law is in effect, like people getting ahead by lying, bullying, kissing up, schmoozing, murdering, having sex with etc. and one's competence doesn't matter at all, unless it's for increase in work/punishment. It leads to nihilism, suicides and murders as "nothing really matters" and is quite common in 50+ and lower-…
> and one's competence doesn't matter at all
This is, thankfully, not true. The truth is that you need to have some baseline level of competency to survive in corporate world. Sometimes it's quite low (for scrum masters, business analysts etc.), but still, these people know a lot more about software than say random person from the street outside the building.
The sad part is that, beyond this baseline level of competency, further competency does not help nearly as much as the being good at company politics.