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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?

#471

Post by gonzo41 »

slumdev wrote: post #449
t3rabytes wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This smells like gatekeeping at it's finest.

If we did a little more gatekeeping and a little less bootcamping, we might have the respect and autonomy afforded to doctors, lawyers, and actual , P.E. engineers. Instead, we're just an annoyingly expensive cost center. What we do isn't easy. We can't pretend that it's easy, that it can be learned in six weeks, or that it's possible to be truly great without earning the foundational knowledge. That pretending hurts…

There are plenty of crap doctors, they just pay more to find out.

And doctors layers and engineers all got titles and accreditation after the fields really pulled their shit together 200 years ago after having buildings fall down, cases fail and people die in surgery for hundreds of years previously.

software is a very new field. it'll be fine. Also no engineer I've met wants to really do front end development for a shopping site. There's a market for people who start out with enthusiasm and a handful of knowledge.

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

#472

Post by CapricornNoble »

jpg_converter wrote: post #442
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…

I agree w you mostly but you extended this form of systemic analysis to "making a date happy" which I think is a fundamental misunderstanding of relationships. To everyone reading this: please don't go around treating other people as systems to be optimized! If you wish to think about relationships as systems, you really need to understand that you are a partial component in social systems and therefore a flawed obse…

"Saying the right words" is one step in "fake it till you make it", when it comes to the practical application of charisma to relationships. And it works. It's why people develop their own personal repertoire of pick-up lines and flirtatious stories that they employ repeatedly.

Re: systems optimization....I've found it often DOES help guys, mostly engineers, to think about their dating attempts as an equation. It puts dating into a conceptual framework that their brains can better understand. Sure, you have incomplete information about the variables and their coefficients, but the variables you CAN control, you can optimize for such that you maximize your chances when interacting with the broadest spectrum of the female population. Once you've made those optimizations, THEN you apply empathy and communication to tweak the remaining variables on a case-by-case basis with each individual.

This explanation goes over better with struggling guys than "I get more women than you because I look like Will Smith and you don't."

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

#473

Post by nestorherre »

pkalinowski wrote: post #458
solveit wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I agree w you mostly but you extended this form of systemic analysis to "making a date happy" which I think is a fundamental misunderstanding of relationships. To everyone reading this: please don't go around treating other people as systems to be optimized! I think people who say this kind of thing have a fundamental misunderstanding of how a certain type of people think. Of course people are systems to be optimiz…

People will straight reject reality if it doesn't fit their worldview. Go tell your wife love is just chemistry. Your words will haunt you for years :)

If that's what you think you should be able to say it. Otherwise one or both of the next things are true: -You married the wrong girl -You need to regain your manhood

On the other hand, you do need to look for a good time and a good way to say it, and that just goes to being empathetic and caring about your partner.

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

#474

Post by TallGuyShort »

mpol wrote: post #461
TallGuyShort wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit like saying everything can be modeled. What do economists, biologists, and traffic engineers increasingly use to do their work? Models. An awful lot of things are actually nail-like for this particular hammer. Applying it to relationships and society feels like a slippery slope. People are still people. But there's definitely cases where the analogy is useful, and maybe even spot-on.

I am almost through the book "Attached" by Amire Levine, on 'advise' from HN last week. It talks about the spectrum "fear/insecure - safe - avoiding" in relationships. It is very systematic in its approach and it opened my eyes to this way of looking. It is about the interactions between people on that spectrum inside a relationship. I look at my past 2 relationships now quite differently. I am mostly safe attached,…

Agreed - good examples. I've never been into the arts much, but I loved a class I took on Shakespeare once, because I found there was a lot of value in those stories for forming these models of relationships. You could identify similar patterns and identify with certain characters and it was very useful for helping articulate otherwise abstract thoughts and feelings. Not only for communication, but for my own thinking as well.

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

#475

Post by sah2ed »

anotheryou wrote: post #262
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…

how do you think about politics and capitalism than? can the system still be simplified enough to grasp it well enough to change it? where would an individual who has grasped it find the power to change anything? capitalism seems super stable for now one of the most sad thoughts I heard: if you try to change the system to the better you might keep it from hitting the wall and actually stabilize it

> how do you think about politics and capitalism than?

> can the system still be simplified enough to grasp it well enough to change it?

As for a systematic understanding of politics, The Dictator’s Handbook is a good introduction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictator%27s_Handbook

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

#476

Post by dnautics »

inductive_magic wrote: post #288
anotheryou wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you think about politics and capitalism than? can the system still be simplified enough to grasp it well enough to change it? where would an individual who has grasped it find the power to change anything? capitalism seems super stable for now one of the most sad thoughts I heard: if you try to change the system to the better you might keep it from hitting the wall and actually stabilize it

No one claimed that every system can be changed; traffic will be traffic. The same applies for the rules of politics [0]. Not sure how you get the idea that "capitalism" is a bad thing, the majority of educated people (and not just Americans) would strongly disagree; there is a reason why all credible attempts at non-market-driven growth failed, see China and Russia. You may look at the struggle in the world and link…

Venezuela did not distribute it's oil wealth among it's people, or if it did so, it did so highly unequally, which, arguably is a natural consequence of state socialism, as predicted by Tucker and Bastiat.

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

#477

Post by tootie »

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…

You're not wrong, but this is the fully cynical point of view. Having good solutions and proven outcomes usually does matter. It's just that giving people confidence in your solution is also very important and can be done regardless of it's actual quality. The confidence game will eventually blow up in your face.

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

#478

Post by zackmorris »

That nearly everything in software development is a waste of time. This will probably end up below the fold, but here are some reasons why:

- Trends force wheel-reinvention and relearning every 3 years, based on ideas from 20, even 50 years ago (or more) that were ignored because the market wasn't there yet. So the more cutting edge you are, then the more you feel out of place and suffer if you're not profiting from your knowledge. Your best work will simply be discarded just 3 years later.

- The profit is in application, not theory. So again, even if you know a better way to do something, most likely you will get reprimanded for it where you work.

- As you acquire more programming knowledge, you eventually reach a point where new hires can't read what you are writing. This comes down to the simple vs easy dichotomy. Again, being an outlier won't help you in a corporate environment, and even if you find a smaller agency that's willing to take a risk on you, their generosity will eventually come to an end and you'll be on your own again.

And the biggest one of all:

- Programming careers usually end by 40. There may come a point where even though the money is good, you don't believe in what you're doing anymore. If you don't make the jump to management, be prepared to start over in another field.

The root causes of all of this are wealth inequality and the underemployment which causes it. This is not the future that academia anticipated. This is a capitalist's dream. So we have a technologically illiterate aristocracy dictating terms to an indentured underclass of gullible loners who will never organize for their own benefit.

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

#480

Post by juped »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #308
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…

Yeah, when we were taught (software) project management with GANTT, I smelled bullshit due to the lack of tolerance of uncertainty in the tool. Thankfully the exam "subverted our expectations" and strongly hinted that "no plan survives contact with the enemy".

"Gantt" is a person's name (Henry Gantt), not an acronym.
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