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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?

#621
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…

For example:

Have you ever thought about how school buses are routed? Every school day, every bus has to pick up some number of children, and then drop them off at a school on time. Ideally, the correct school. Some children have to walk to meet the bus, which must be taken into consideration because you don't want a young child walking close to dangerous areas, and then there are disabled children who need special buses. Deciding who walks, who gets to take a bus, and who in is some special circumstance is a logistical-legal interface which gets quite involved.

Making that all happen isn't just one job, it's multiple, especially taking into account the fact there's software to help which must be made, tested, and deployed, and which users must be trained on.

My point is, to the average person, adult or child, that whole little world collapses down to "school bus driver" and that's it. The companies which make the software I mentioned advertise, sure, but not to individuals, and school districts have no reason to advertise how, precisely, the sausage gets made, so this little world stays mostly hidden, unless the district offers parents branded software so they can track their children to and from school.

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

#622
post #432

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…

The term resource is dehumanizing because it reduces a person to something that exists merely to extract value from. Stakeholder is just a role a person can assume and doesn't really have any negative connotations other than being a bit jargony to some.

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

#623
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 wish that there were better ways to expose all this to high schoolers. Career fairs or guest speakers don't cut it.

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

#624

The insane amount of work that goes into QA of consumer electronics. I also now viscerally understand how China has a stranglehold on world manufacture of electronics. The concentration of skill, infrastructure, and related industries in Shenzhen or other Chinese industrial cities is unequaled in the USA. We have utterly given that up to Asia. Back to QA: I learned what "DPPM" means: Defective Parts Per Million. A mo…

> We have utterly given that up to Asia. It's now obvious to me that recovering this capability in the US would require decades of focused investment and trade policy. The Foxconn debacle in Wisconsin is just that, a debacle. Scott Walker is an even bigger fool than I thought. I've lost hope for the US political class to have the concerted will to enact the required policies and incentives.

On the other hand, the amount of money you can actually make on electronics manufacturing pales in comparison to the money that can be made selling software for those devices. The margins in electronics suck, and this is coming from someone who really enjoys doing electronics design.

It's also worth noting that in a lot of areas the software effort required to make things work well dwarfs the work that goes into the physical hardware, both in terms of money and engineer time. Anyone can spin up a board with some chips but actually doing all the bringup/drivers/DSP/UI requires a ton of skill and effort.

I think it's probably ok to let Asia have this and worry about staying ahead on all the tons of stuff that has to go on top.

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

#625
post #373

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…

A small example: A company develops a software product for a client. The company tests the product, and tests pass! No crashes! It just works. It works for years with no problems. Then you get a flurry of tickets in a pretty short window: the software is crashing! What happened? It passed tests, it worked for years! What changed in the environment? Are disks failing or filling up? No. Is the network failing? No. Is a…

Fantastic story. Reminded me, we've seen similar issues back in the day when we were not monitoring memory usage as well as we should have been. Because we deployed daily or weekly, the services restarted and life was good. After everything was stable, a slow memory leak appeared that took weeks to grow to a point where the service would crash.

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

#626
If you're building a short term project that doesn't require much work go for a smart and lazy co-founder, he will get the work done robustly as fast as possible. On the other hand If you've got a long term project that requires perseverance your ideal co-founder is an average intelligence hard-working dude, he will work hard for long time since he has low opportunity cost.

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

#627
post #327

How important it is to be able to inhabit another person's viewpoint and see things from their perspective. So much time and effort is saved in doing so. Much of my job has become translating and mediating between stakeholders going around in circles, because each one believes their viewpoint represents the entirety of the issue. They can not understand one another because they assume the other understands everything…

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.

A stakeholder is a person with their own agency, responsibility, goals, etc. in a partnership, giving them a leading role.

The funny thing is you are right: the immediate role in a project is just some temporary thing. The next level is understanding them as a principal more broadly-- career goals, org goals, home stuff, and how that fits into them being... a person & stakeholder :)

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

#628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a McDonald's in high school that was adjacent to a major highway so we were always packed. Even now, getting in the flow of programming when everything is going right and I'm making huge progress, that feeling pales in comparison to being in the zone when working drive thru with 8 orders on the screen and each of them is in a different state as you build them as fast as possible as different components ar…

Wow, my mind is blown right now at how well you captured this feeling. I also worked at McDonald's at 15 and it was thrilling to be working a real job for the first time in life, and see the inner workings of a corporation perfected over 50+ years, notwithstanding the terribly bad for you product. I also remember working the order taking window and getting into the flow of quickly finding the items after you master t…

The closest feeling I've found in programming is when I listen to film scores and a crescendo or mood in the music lines up perfectly with some great success in development, like that score was written for that moment in time and you feel a magical cathartic release that is both elevated and extended by the music.

It's amazing, but it's also a bit distracting. Thankfully, as you're coming down off that high the music often comes down too, and it guides your emotions back into a calm flow, ready to build up for the next release.

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

#629
post #463

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…

> 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?

I can have empathetic and respectful goals and use systems and optimisation to achieve them.

Take sex for example. As a heterosexual man, I’ve no idea what’s intrinsically pleasurable to women. I think that giving sexual pleasure is a respectul, empathetic intention. Given this goal, I can use systematic approach to satisfy it (find pleasure trigger points and apply them).

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

#630
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not saying this applies to your example, but the opposite happens too—the new guy comes in with all the answers but not knowing all the battles/design constraints that led to the current situation. It’s frustrating because the team gets to relive every design decision as the new guy brings up all the obvious stuff that surely none of the dummies on the original team thought of (but of course were the original des…

I am pretty sure, that “new guy” does not know all internals. But there some rules like not putting 2 screwdrivers into power outlet... It’s obviously should be done other way.

Running with that example for funsies. Turns out that slamming two screwdrivers into the outlet allowed you to tap the power source 6 inches away from the wall. Normally, this is a bad idea, but the alternative was tearing down the wall to extend the outlet, and the cost of that was too high at the time. The other cheap solution was a power strip, but there was no petty cash and no nearby store. Then several people tied power wires around the new screw driver power extenders (which was going to be a temp solution anyway until you could buy a power strip). Now, these critical power wires can't be disconnected because the attached servers can't go down.

Sometimes things organically grow in bad ways as cost optimizations that maybe (or maybe not) made sense back in the day. If you were to design it again, you obviously would not stick the screw drivers in the wall socket. But that was then, this is now. Instead of complaining about screw drivers, let's get a plan in place to get the mission critical services to be able to switch power sources.

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