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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?

#651

Post by coralreef »

kuzimoto wrote: post #561
dcarmo wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Sometimes you can get caught up in a 'grass is always greener' syndrome. That is, imagining that your life would have been so much better had you done X instead of Y.

Chances are, in an alternate reality, you'd just be stressing about a different set of things.

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

#652

Post by oalae5niMiel7qu »

codingmess wrote: post #265

You know how there are so many shitty technologies - frameworks, programming languages, that are obviously bad, and your chosen tech stack is obviously so much better? With all likelihood, the same thing exists in other areas of work, too. For example medicine. So if you walk into the wrong clinic, they may give you the "PHP treatment", or treat your infection with "NodeJS, running on a Windows 7 server". (I mean not…

To look for brain tumors, most US doctors will use a CT scan, which can cause brain cancer. Meanwhile, MRIs don't cause cancer and can be used to look for everything CT scans can be used for.

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

#653

Post by AceJohnny2 »

AWildC182 wrote: post #624
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 disagree. As an embedded software engineer myself, there's a ton of driver work out there that's hacky, low-quality work coming out of cheap areas... and we still rely on it. The niches for high-value software design related to hardware are shrinking rapidly.

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

#654

Post by fecak »

aynyc wrote: post #382
fecak wrote: 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. C…

Poor resumes don't list any tangible accomplishments or lack the proper context to let the reader even figure out if the accomplishment was useful. If you read a job advertisement, that's a list of responsibilities - a resume should outline responsibilities (especially if the responsibility is critical), but also describe unique accomplishments.

That's the main thing, but there are lots of other factors.

For your example, leading an SRE team for a busy site is a responsibility, and it's useful to know - it seems kinda important. If you actually built the team, established their processes, led changes to some of the processes, implemented new tools, etc. that resulted in increased site reliability, that would be an accomplishment.

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

#655

Post by crimsonalucard »

reroute1 wrote: post #586
crimsonalucard wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

This post seems to imply such unfair systems are emergent in nature. Possibly so. But is the system emergent among a group of human beings who are fully aware of the actions they are taking?

No. That's like saying global warming is an emergent phenomenon of human society.

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

#656

Post by necovek »

pure-awesome wrote: post #94
rjbwork wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound like a great manager/team lead. I think the obsession with 9-5 and whatever else it takes to get the job done is absurd in today's world.

Maybe I misunderstand your comment, but aren't "9-5" and "doing what it takes to get the job done" contradictory? The one is having fixed working hours and, as in the parent comment, compensating with extra leave if those hours are overstepped. The other is working overtime whenever there is extra work that has to get done.

There is always extra work that needs to be done.

If you are looking longer term, avoiding burnout and employee satisfaction will be a net positive. If you are looking short-term (12 months at most, but 3 months is more of a burnout limit), you may benefit from overworking people.

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

#657

Post by bonestamp2 »

The best coworker I ever had taught me this. Anybody can do this. This guy wasn't the person with the highest technical ability in the company, but they were the best at this one thing, and this one thing made them exponentially more successful than people with more technical skill...

Whether your boss or colleagues think you did a good job (or not) is all about expectations. Therefore, the most important part of your success is managing other people's expectations of your work.

That's not to say your work can be shit or that you should sandbag it by setting low expectations, success is simply a matter of defining what success is and then meeting that threshold. Either way, setting those expectations is important and many people don't do it at all. Then they wonder why, regardless of what the data says, some people thought the project was successful and others think otherwise.

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

#659

Post by sevilo »

kazagistar wrote: post #512
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…

I mean if a system is bad and anger helps to change it for the better, then it seems like that's fine. Anger, outrage, etc are all systems as well, that you shouldn't be "angry" at, right? The rejection of the utility of emotion is itself irrational.

I have rarely seen people solve problems or make changes out of anger and outrage. Everyone can be angry because victimhood is easy, but only few who are able to rationalize, understand their goals and understand the resistance they'd need to go through end up taking actions to make changes.

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

#660

Post by reroute1 »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #655
reroute1 wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

This post seems to imply such unfair systems are emergent in nature. Possibly so. But is the system emergent among a group of human beings who are fully aware of the actions they are taking? No. That's like saying global warming is an emergent phenomenon of human society.

Right, it is emergent among a group of human beings who may or may not be aware of the actions they are taking as is the case with global warming. Although nowadays more and more people are aware of what causes global warming and how they contribute.

That also doesn't mean that some people aren't trying to keep the status quo or rig a system. Just that if a system is unfair, that could be something that was not necessarily designed or intended, but happened anyway.

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