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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?

#561

Post by kuzimoto »

dcarmo wrote: post #467
Pigo wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why do you consider the time playing Everquest wasted? It was what you wanted to do, you did it and had fun. Now you want to do something else and that's fine.

I think that if you do something for large amounts of time, but doesn't bring you much value then it could be considered wasted. The problem is people probably don't realize it's been wasted until later.

I used to play a lot of video games, and while not all of the time I would consider 'wasted' I definitely could have used some of the time doing something else that would have made my life better today.

There is an opportunity cost to everything you do. Time is the only truly limited resource in life, you should try to use it as wisely as possible. Everyone needs some leisure time, but it shouldn't be the majority of how you spend your life.

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

#562

Post by marcosdumay »

kazagistar wrote: post #507
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…

> If you don't control a system, it will control you I'll go one further, and say the people controlling the system will control you, often to your detriment. You are also part of many systems, and your actions affect others in those systems. And finally, the complexity of all those systems is such that your understanding is always an incomplete model. It's fine t try to change the bad systems with an incomplete mode…

> I'll go one further, and say the people controlling the system will control you

Some times, yes. But as a generalization, you are granting too much agency to people. Most systems simply have nobody controlling them (even powerful people), people are satisfied to just live within them and not do the labrorious task of gaining control.

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

#563

Post by celticmusic »

nkrisc wrote: post #432
celticmusic wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this post is a bit of an oxymoron to me. You say you're great at seeing other perspectives, but then you dehumanize them by calling them stakeholders (a term that is the new "resource"). They're people. Call them people.

They're a specific sort of person in this scenario, literally someone who has a stake in the outcome of the situation I'm describing. Is it dehumanizing to call someone who writes code a "software developer" instead of a "person"? Generally I agree with you and I hate the term "resource" as it's used, but I really don't agree that this is one of those cases. I could have said, "people" but in this instance it would m…

resource is also more specific than people, that doesn't obviate it from being dehumanizing.

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

#566

Post by [deleted] »

Waterluvian wrote: post #137

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…

[deleted]

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

#567

Post by DannyB2 »

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…

> Accurate, precise estimates are more expensive than the actual task itself.

That! That is is.

You CAN get accurate estimates. But the cost of doing so is infeasible for any significant project.

You can break things down into smaller pieces, easier to estimate. But the bigger the overall complexity, the more small pieces you will miss or fail to see. Or fail to see how parts interact. Or fail to recognize how far the influence of some element may reach.

And other reasons estimates turn out wrong.

The difficulty of software estimation was recognized in the 1960's. Again in the 1980s during the microcomputer revolution. And again sometimes more recently. When even the biggest companies, with vast resources, and billions of dollars cannot estimate when their product will be ready, how is a small software team expected to precisely do so. There was a joke of which year Windows 95 would ship in.

At the same time, a business needs some kind of timetable because many other things need to coordinate with the completion of a software project.

Maybe recognize the best you can do is have an idea of how well things are going. As a project gets further along you get a better idea of when it will be complete -- especially when there are lots of unknowns.

When constructing a building, there are lots of knowns. How many square feet. How many walls. Electrical outlets. Plumbing fixtures. Etc, etc. They can give you a very good estimate. It's all things they've done before.

Software is generally things that you've not done before. (or you may suffer the second system effect if it is)

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

#568

Post by Shorel »

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 :)

Life itself is 'just chemistry'.

And I damn love to be alive.

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

#569

Post by uoaei »

jmiskovic wrote: post #441
jstummbillig wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. Seems sound enough. Unless you put forward more specific criticism – and I'd be happy to hear your thoughts – I'll be a poet today.

My criticism can be summarized as "map is not the teritory". The reality is messy. Sure, we can think in terms of feedback loops and interactive modules and it can be helpful sometimes. We just have to be aware we are imposing our puny models onto the infinitely complex beast. The model will break down at some point. Recognizing the correct model and extrapolating from it is not useful unless we know the limit at whi…

At any moment, the employed model used to understand a given situation is local. The model is adaptive in the sense that you only need to concern yourself with what is immediate, and concerns about how the effects might propagate are limited to the interface between the immediate moment and the external ones.

Also, many models can be used simultaneously and overlap in the analysis of a particular situation. It isn't necessary to Have It All Figured Out and keep it all in memory simultaneously, just to have a set of methods to draw quick conclusions. Ensemble methods tend to work best IME.

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

#570

Post by jaggederest »

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'm not actually speaking about software estimates there, I should have used asterisks or something. I mean it even more broadly - most people have no idea what they're doing in any given context, let alone in software with all the complexity. The whole world is just winging it, as a general rule.
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