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

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381–390 of 757 posts

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

#381
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…

Very well said. All these points resonate well with my experience.

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

#382
post #332

I'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 sh…

Just out of curiosity, what do you considered as poor resumes? I did/do a lot of first round interviews in the hiring process for my company. Most resumes I see tell me nothing about what they did for their jobs, just a bunch of tech stacks, and generic projects (for example: I lead a team of SRE for our company web site with 100K visitors per day). I'm trying to avoid those mistakes when I start looking this year. Cheers!

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

#383

Computers don't work, internet doesn't work, software doesn't work. If something functions flawlessly it's because there existed a group of people who figured out a rock solid setup at one point in time, and another group of people maintaining it actively right now. Many people seeing something that "just works" and it's "free as in beer" demand a similar setup for their own business assuming that creating it require…

'The Dream Machine' by M. Mitchell Waldrop chronicles the trials and tribulations of the people who built the first computers and computer networks. Great read if you want to learn more about how computing and the internet were started!

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

#384
post #26

That almost all software is unreliable and SaaS products only work because there are engineers behind the scenes fixing it all the time. The Wizard of Oz nails it: "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain" https://youtu.be/YWyCCJ6B2WE

On the contrary, my job taught me that desktop software can be extremely reliable and does not actually break all the time. Many of my customers use versions of my app that are a few years old without any troubles. When the user is in control of their environment, software doesn't suddenly break. That's not to say software doesn't have bugs. Only that bugs don't appear suddenly. Most bugs are caused by two things: (1…

I have a slightly different take: Software quality is fairly consistent. But when software changes infrequently, the user can create work-arounds for the broken stuff. When software changes frequently, you don’t have sufficient time to create work-arounds, leaving you frustrated with bugs you can’t deal with.

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

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the reason the world is burning. Instead of running from where you don't see it, run to attack where you do see it. It's better to fail as a good person than to succeed as a charlatan, and a bit of money can't plaster over the faculties of the mind drying up, among that the ability to resist charlatans in other contexts, including the political. "Business sophistry" is simply sophistry, brownnosing your boss…

The forces of chaos certainly seem to be in the ascendant in the West. A British woman makes thousands a month taking her clothes off online and selling her bathwater to perverts etc., yet if I call this out I'm liable to being labelled a dinosaur, misogynistic, hateful, etc. etc. In today's society possessing what were once considered traditional morals is liable to leave one at best socially isolated and at worst d…

There are still girls in churches waiting for a faithful man to lead them to marriage and to a content life in a healthy relationship.

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

#386

Life is fleeting. Most of us here are 1/3 or more of the way done. Divest yourself as much as possible from your job. Find other sources of identity. You don't need that fancy car or to buy a boat as much as you need that ejector seat savings account. And when you realise that conditions have evolved to a point where you're not having fun anymore (and they always eventually do), eject yourself and go spend far more t…

So much this. Our time on this Earth is so short. I used to love video games, but now I'm trying to make up for the time I wasted playing Everquest. There's so many experiences out there waiting to be had.

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

#387
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…

I've thought about this a lot, it's my goto "one day I'll write a book about this". I frame the problem slightly different (heh): Different disciplines, branching out, will (or so says my hypothesis) discover the same topologies, but express them differently due to different scopes (perspective, dimensionality, DSLs [...]). What I'm thinking about is: how can we parametrize the manifestations of these scopes, and, ub…

Consilience sprang to mind for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience_(book)

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

#388
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The forces of chaos certainly seem to be in the ascendant in the West. A British woman makes thousands a month taking her clothes off online and selling her bathwater to perverts etc., yet if I call this out I'm liable to being labelled a dinosaur, misogynistic, hateful, etc. etc. In today's society possessing what were once considered traditional morals is liable to leave one at best socially isolated and at worst d…

Remember when a man of discriminating taste was considered good for society ?

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

#389
post #332

I'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 sh…

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

#390
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your closing is absolutely true as the majority of all of us "fake it till we make it"

This sort of fake it till you make it incorporates passing the hot potato as well. Someone will get left holding it and burn.

logically, the potato will cool down over time, so every next holder will be less likely to burn
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