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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?

#361

Post by lotsofpulp »

neilkakkar wrote: post #258
muzani wrote: post #114

Everything 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.

Both Google and Apple Maps are terrible at knowing when not to use local routes to theoretically save less than a minute or two of time.

In reality, you’re wasting brake pads and fuel in stop and go traffic that has far higher variance in travel time than a highway.

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

#362

Post by [deleted] »

have_faith wrote: post #254
muzani wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redpill was a community of 'involuntary celibates', who were bad with women, and reacted to it with women hate, claiming that they were woke and saw women as manipulative. It took off, had a strong number of supporters. Blackpill is a derogatory term for a similar pattern - people who are bad at something and respond by being 'woke' and dismissive. I suppose the classic English term is "sour grapes".

Redpill is a much older concept than recent incel usage. It has been around online as idea of revealing the true nature of something for a long time.

[deleted]

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

#363

Post by ezzzzz »

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.

Sometimes, the people getting the most done, are either doing so based on proficiency (i.e. deep understanding of domain, system, language, stack etc) or are simply adept at finding the shortest path from a(requirements) -> b(code). These are the people I look out for, as essentially the root of tech debt. Hopefully, things like code-review will prevent people like this from pushing code that only they can understand, but that theory often proves false as these folks often out-rank you. Don't be afraid to call BS through any means available. At the very least, you need an explanation/comments/documentation explaining why simplicity was sacrificed.

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

#364

Post by WJW »

pandler wrote: post #322
jaggederest wrote: post #31

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 onl…

> Nobody has any idea, they're just making it up as they go along. Ha! I came here to say this, and I'm glad you share my opinion. I realize that you're speaking specifically about software estimates, so please excuse me while I take your statement out of context and generalize it to most everything that I've experienced working in software. I'm biased in my views on this at this point, but I tend to notice people fa…

I don't think that it's actually true though. There are definitely areas where I don't have to make it up (anymore, at least). As a trivial example, implementing yet another API endpoint for a web form or something is not something where I have to experiment a lot (anymore).

It's also important to realize that in most fields, people are definitely not just making it up as they go along. A dentist or an airline pilot has extensive training, knows what they are doing and why. This is even true when it comes to estimation tasks.

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

#365

Post by dwater »

coffeefirst wrote: post #207
TrackerFF wrote: post #47

(preface: I worked a string of manual labor jobs before and during college) A lot of the (now) coveted trade jobs can seem like a very tempting alternative to crushing college debt and volatile job security, but truth be told, many of these trades are plagued with physical injuries, sudden unemployment, and what not. Furthermore, you deal with A LOT more shady people (employers, customers / clients, suppliers, you na…

Ever notice the people who advocate this are almost all in white collar jobs?

Or people who have just started their careers, with few responsibilities or liabilities, and not those who are near retirement.

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

#366

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

neilkakkar wrote: post #258
muzani wrote: post #114

Everything 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.

Google Maps has tried to route me through closed off bridges in the relatively recent past. I don't have a huge amount of confidence in the validity of its data.

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

#368

Post by prometheus76 »

MiracleUser wrote: post #345
tatar wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Operations Research is related to this. I majored in Information & Systems Engineering which is analogous. The focus is on business, manufacturing, and operational systems and a section of the study is modelling a system and using RNG to simulate chaos / disorder

I work in a fabrication shop and have done some modeling of some of our processes. I think it's more related to Chaos Theory (the underlying patterns and rhythms aren't truly random because they fall within certain ranges, even if they're unpredictable).

What we are selling on the market as a fabrication shop is our ability to absorb variance and to build things that have never been built before (and will never be built again). Our whole business is built around variance. However, variance is not the same as randomness. If I look at the productivity of one worker, it has a certain rhythm and falls within a certain range, and what makes it chaotic is that no matter what scale I look at (worker, team, dept, shop), the variance is consistent.

Just getting into this line of work and trying to make predictions about it has blown apart a lot of the ways I used to look at the world. The systems I study and work with are beautiful because they're chaotic, and just predictable enough to be relatively stable, but unpredictable enough to stay challenging and interesting.

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

#369

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

knightofmars wrote: post #350
fxtentacle wrote: post #146

How 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…

> ...how little facts weight in when compared to a manager's gut feeling. Yes. https://ideas.ted.com/why-do-so-many-incompetent-men-become-...

Why single out managers? This is a quality of pretty much all people including arrogant tech workers who think they are better than everyone else.

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

#370

Post by m_fayer »

How we tend to overvalue and overinvest in reason and undervalue and underinvest in intuition.

Intuition is powerful, mysterious, and a pleasure to wield. But developing and then trusting intuition is anathema to our metric-fixated process-consultant-ridden professional world, so we keep doing things the ugly hard way.

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