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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?

#581

Post by davidwitt415 »

exabyte wrote: post #338
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 would highly recommend reading the book "Finite and Infinite Games" by James Carse

I highly agree. I read this book 30 years ago and it sticks with me to this day!

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

#583

Post by starpilot »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #428
celticmusic wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic. This very much screams "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" to me.

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.

> What do economists, biologists, and traffic engineers increasingly use to do their work? Models.

One of my favorite comments from not too long ago was from an Ask HN on biology: The sooner you get used to believing that "I can't prove anything, but we have a pile of mostly not contradictory evidence that suggests that most of the time this idea is a pretty good heuristic and our error bars are reasonable", the better you'll do and the saner you'll remain ... And if you like, I can provide a basically endless stream of papers of the form "we thought X did Y and we knew what X was; it turns out that X actually does Q, it also turns out we don't know why X does anything at all, but when we do X we sometimes get Y so we've been confused for the past 50 years"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21410086

The whole thread is a gold mine of how defined "systems" fail to model biology at a useful level. At some point, a system gets so complex that it's indistinguishable from chaos. Then your toolbox just has instinct, wisdom, whatever you want to call it. But you can't ascribe it to explicit rules, you have to start firing from the hip without exactly knowing why.

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

#584

Post by AnimalMuppet »

slumdev wrote: post #549
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also true that a CS bachelor's is not and never will be equivalent to actual experience working as a software engineer. For example, in school nobody ever taught you what it's like working on a team of 30 on a two-decade old code base with a million lines. You have different kinds of problems due to the scale - problems that school never taught you how to handle.

Imagine approaching that codebase without basic foundational knowledge. What sort of mess would you get into then?

In my entire career (35 years), "foundational knowledge" has been important... maybe twice? Maybe once? Guessing, because I don't actually remember any instances.

(I need to back away from that a bit, because you mentioned SOLID. That's important. The rule of 3 (now 5) is important. I didn't regard them as foundational, though, because I started in 1985, and SOLID wasn't really a thing then, and the rule of 3 wasn't part of the foundations then. Back then, it was big O and structured design. I would agree that now, SOLID is part of the foundations. I didn't learn it that way, though. I learned it 10 or 15 years into my career. And no, that didn't lead me to making messes earlier, because we weren't in an environment where it mattered.)

But even not knowing SOLID won't lead you to making big messes in the kind of environment I was talking about. (It may lead you into little messes.) The big messes come from designing an API badly, naming it badly, creating something that fits badly with the rest of the code base, changing things that you think need changed without understanding what impact that has on all the code that uses it, and so on. Mistakes from SOLID, in contrast, tend to be fairly localized to one module.

Disclaimer: I don't actually have a CS degree. You may regard that as justification for ignoring my opinion on this topic. But I've seen some fresh CS degrees over the years, and I stand by my statement that they aren't very prepared for being software engineers.

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

#585

Post by tombert »

curo wrote: post #485
tombert wrote: post #462

Companies are not your friends, no matter how much they try and pretend they are. When your employer says "we're a family here" or something like that, that's simply untrue. I don't think that the people that say that are "lying" exactly, since "lying" implies intent, and I think most of the time when your manager tells you that they do think it's true. If being a worker at a job were really "family", they wouldn't f…

I agree that some managers may be full of it, but there's the inverse danger of letting mistrust keep you from meaningful workplace bonds. Our current startup might not be a family, but we are like a sports team. We spend most of our lives together, working toward mutual goals. Yes, if there's a persistent under-performer, we'll have to say goodbye, but there's certainly a bond here that makes you want to fight for y…

I apologize if I didn't make it more clear; I'm not saying you shouldn't like your coworkers or manager or anything like that. Obviously you spend eight hours a day with these people, you should probably be with people you like. I'm just saying that you shouldn't treat a job like any more than it actually is; at the end of the day, this is a transaction. I sell my time and experience for some amount of compensation, the company pays me for it, and if they don't like how I do or for whatever reason decide that it's not in their economic interest to keep paying me, will terminate my employment.

I should also make it clear, I'm not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing; it's the agreement we all make when taking a job. It's just not "family".

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

#586

Post by reroute1 »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #574
davnicwil wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't be angry at the people who are benefiting from a system, or at the system itself. Most just end up that way, the same way a river meanders towards the sea This is absolutely brilliant, going to favourite it and steal your quote! The only thing I'd contribute is to also think about the system from your perspective, wherever you've ended up. Zoom out. Think about how you got here. How much of it is truly delibe…

The only type of person who will like this kind of quote is someone disproportionally benefiting from the system in an unfair way. Let me tell you absolutely that if such people exist in the system then the system is flawed, unfair and such a person is indeed exploiting the system. Systems can be made fair or unfair, that is what you must derive from the fact that everything is a system. It is pure stupidity to accep…

> Systems can be made fair or unfair, that is what you must derive from the fact that everything is a system.

Or conversely, as the OP suggested systems end up that way. Not necessarily designed fairly or unfairly, they can become that way over time.

> It is pure stupidity to accept that all systems are unfair. This is not true and is nearly an obscene belief.

Where did anyone say that all systems are unfair? Where did anyone say you should just accept the way they are? Those do seem stupid and I don't see where anyone posited those ideas.

On the other hand it does seem very useful to understand that unfair systems do exist, how and why they came about. And if you have no control or influence over a system, then you need to accept it. Those are all pretty obvious truths and is what the OP highlighted...

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

#588

Post by reroute1 »

CapricornNoble wrote: post #481
mnsc wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And why in the world would (...) people being systems to be optimized rule out treating people with respect, empathy, and kindness. Because seeing people as systems to be optimized is per definition dehumanizing which is an action that is not respectful or empathetic?

Have you ever told a woman, after coitus, how you ran the same Game on them that you've run dozens of times before? Did they get pissed and never talk to you again? I'm going to guess "no", at least neither I nor anyone I know has had that happen. They'll usually just laugh it off / not take it seriously. The empathy and connection has been built successfully, and no amount of ex post facto chastisement about "hey yo…

That's a terrible example and yes many people would be offended by that and not "laught it off", that is highly dependent on the individual and situation. Just because you made a connection doesn't mean you can't destroy it just as easily, by say pointing out the shallow nature of your connection.

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

#589

Post by sbarre »

collyw wrote: post #72
makach wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My current workplace. We have one diva who build the vast majority of the system. He is smart and likes algorithms, but doesn't write particularly easy code to follow (he values cleverness over simplicity). Any suggestion that it could be improved is met with a bit of an argument. And he isn't much of a team player compared to the other devs. But he knows the system inside out....

And one day he leaves..

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

#590

Post by jethro_tell »

Nursie wrote: post #37
jl6 wrote: post #6

The taxonomy of jobs that most people have in their minds is extremely simple (doctor, lawyer, teacher, builder, engineer, window cleaner, garbage collector, astronaut, ...) and is mostly based on a grade-school understanding of what kind of jobs people do. But the reality is that there are millions of types of jobs, with incredible variety and specialisms, and the real content of a job is rarely captured in a job ti…

I fixed my mum's computer a few years back (cleaned up some adware and other stuff that was making it awful to use) and did a bunch of virus scans and cleanup etc. After a while she asked "Is this what you do for a job?" The conception of what happens inside our industry just isn't present in the wider population, and I imagine we're not unique in that.

Yes, this is a thing we see over and over. With all this extra access to learning and advancements in fields, that previous generations didn't have, there's a bit of a gap in truly understanding the complexities of various fields. We see this attitude a lot that kind of assumes anyone who isn't digging ditches is playing dress up, and anyone could put on the outfit and do it.

That's why we have things like anti-vax, and people taking these incredibly simplistic views of complex fields. Assuming that anyone who puts on a lab coat can have the same valid medical understanding as the field that has been learning for hundreds of years and learned how to condense that down into a few years of school and an internship.

It's the same reason older generations think you can just show up on time and move to the top of your field, sure it helps, but catching up to the baseline of knowledge in a lot of fields is a huge gap, you don't just sweep the floor in a factory anymore and learn how to program the robots over serial port. There's a big jump there that didn't used to exist. (though I assume there was a similar gap in the industrial revolution when we started mechanizing work).

People can't even wrap their mind around real automation, they still assume it's going to be mechanization from the industrial revolution with computers. And there's so much else in this industry that people can't even understand that affects them in every day life situations.

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