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What is interesting about Factorio

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191–200 of 312 posts

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#191
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a very enthusiastic worker most of the time, but I have never been rewarded for improving my own productivity at work. Usually improving my own productivity is because of a certain stubborn and personal distaste for intent that can't be backed by action. I can see why people should improve their productivity at work in the abstract, but I have to admit there isn't much tangible in it for them. They will work 8 ho…

Maybe you've never been extrinsically rewarded, but surely you've derived some kind of intrinsic reward for improving your productivity? A sense of pride or joy? :)

Resentment and contempt for the system that does not reward such self improvement which, by the same virtue, means those who do not self improve are the ones rewarded with not expending the effort to improve. So finding a new job is usually the order of the day.

Doing "just enough" to get paid is the optimal course for the majority of jobs.

Finding jobs that extrinsicly reward continuous improvement is hard, probably because rewarding continuous improvement is hard to do - measuring, expectations, reasonable demands, etc. Are not easy.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#192

> Isn't it amazing that someone could do something for 100 hours and not think about obvious improvements, and not even wonder if they've been setup? I have co-workers like this: people who don't bother to learn the tools of* their trade and waste dozens of minutes every day. Taking the time to master your tools is a COMPOUNDING benefit and, at the risk of sounding inflammatory, is the type of activity that creates "…

I spent most of my life as a techie in complete agreement with you. My best friend and I are "optimizers" - we type fast, we have macros and tools and utilities that make us more productive. As a tech lead and then as a technical manager though... my team members who spend (sometimes endless;) time optimizing their tools and typing fast, are not necessarily more productive than the senior experienced experts who type…

There is a balance to be had between skill acquisition and skill exploitation. Your team members endlessly optimizing are probably not exploiting enough. Their productivity could improve spending less time optimizing endlessly and actually exploiting some of those skills to do real work. Your senior experts who can't type would probably still benefit from learning how to actually type, because it'll be something they can exploit a lot.

I'm 41 now. I still don't mind learning new skills and do it fairly often. But I am getting increasingly crabby about having to learn an entire new skill that I'm not going to clearly be able to exploit enough to make up for learning it, e.g., I get tossed somebody's old project X written in $YESTERDAY'S_FAD_FRAMEWORK and now I have to go learn a dead framework just to see what's going on. I'm not going to get to exploit that enough to make up for the cost of learning it.

When I was younger, I worried more about sampling a lot of things rather than whether I'd get to exploit any given one of them that much. I don't regret it. I think it was the right choice at the time. But as you get older I do think you want to be a bit more selective, if for no other reason than you need to exploit those skills at some point or the acquisition costs are just a waste.

(I'm doing a personal project right now that involves some front-end stuff. I've been doing website development since 1997; clearly JS has changed a lot over the years. I decided to just go with straight JS, rather than spending a lot of time learning a new framework, because I don't anticipate having enough front-end work to do to exploit the time it would take to learn a new JS framework, and while it seems to have stabilized a bit lately (not literally turning over every year anymore), they still seem to be a bit frothy compared to everything else. Meanwhile, modern JS basically has jQuery built in, and template literals can be used to set up an escape-safe client-side template system in about 5 lines of pure JS. So, basically, due to the constraints on this project, I've chosen to learn the handful of things I haven't used (knew about the "fat arrow" syntax and template literals for a while, never had a chance to use them in a detailed way) and then exploit my existing skills, rather than spend a lot of time learning a new framework. Even if I could hypothetically do the actual work faster, learn+use time >> exploit time. And learning more about pure JS has an extremely high probability of being exploitable in the future; even now, learning "React" or one of the other handful of clear winners has only a much lower probability because I could still be dropped onto a project that uses something else.)

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you've never been extrinsically rewarded, but surely you've derived some kind of intrinsic reward for improving your productivity? A sense of pride or joy? :)

Resentment and contempt for the system that does not reward such self improvement which, by the same virtue, means those who do not self improve are the ones rewarded with not expending the effort to improve. So finding a new job is usually the order of the day. Doing "just enough" to get paid is the optimal course for the majority of jobs. Finding jobs that extrinsicly reward continuous improvement is hard, probably…

[deleted]

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that people have finite bandwidth but we are talking about people investing in skills that are useful for the primary function of their job. It’s the first thing to consider if you want to improve your productivity at work.

>useful for the primary function of their job the number of things that affect your job performance are endless and it is arbitrary where you choose to stop improving. not only is it arbitrary where you draw the line, its arbitrary that you chose to optimize your job in the first place. these things are non-self-evident choices based on personal and societal feelings rooted in first-principle thinking about the meani…

This reads to me like someone telling you that you could shave 30 minutes off your commute, and then justifying that you don't have time to look at a map. Plenty of things are very easy to learn with large payoffs; some of which are so basic and so necessary that it is criminally negligible to proceed with such vast incompetence for someone in the trade.

E.g. doctors spending no time to learn about new drugs and prescribing them.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#195

> Isn't it amazing that someone could do something for 100 hours and not think about obvious improvements, and not even wonder if they've been setup? I have co-workers like this: people who don't bother to learn the tools of* their trade and waste dozens of minutes every day. Taking the time to master your tools is a COMPOUNDING benefit and, at the risk of sounding inflammatory, is the type of activity that creates "…

I agree with the sibling comment, that "10x"ness is only weakly related to tool usage. I've done some of my best work in ludicrously awful environments because that was the only feasible as a result of a whole stack of previous tech choices made by other people, usually for valid-looking business reasons.

VS2005 inside an XP VM? To build WinCE 4? In 2015? No sane person would choose that environment today, but it had been a valid choice in the mid-2000s and the hardware was still working, so I rolled up my sleeves and fixed the bugs. Customer was satisfied and we all got paid.

The only person I've ever worked with who could concievably be a 100x engineer did some of his best work on paper. But then he was a heavy-caliber mathematician.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#196

> Isn't it amazing that someone could do something for 100 hours and not think about obvious improvements, and not even wonder if they've been setup? I have co-workers like this: people who don't bother to learn the tools of* their trade and waste dozens of minutes every day. Taking the time to master your tools is a COMPOUNDING benefit and, at the risk of sounding inflammatory, is the type of activity that creates "…

> Taking the time to master your tools is a COMPOUNDING benefit this is problematic, and the problem is made obvious when you take this fact to its natural conclusion. are you juggling credit cards to simultaneously maximize the benefits of opening new cards with promotional offers, limiting your interest rates, and maximizing your credit score? have you investigated the air quality of your working and living spaces?…

When those tools’ lifecycle is 2 years at most fewer people are willing invest the effort to master them and instead learn on a need basis. If there was a guaranteed lifecycle the benefits would indeed compound and pay off handsomely.

For example I worked on an Angular project and invested a bit of time to learn the framework and certain libraries. I completed the project and it was successful, but my new projects aren’t to be done in angular anymore and I can’t apply all this knowledge, at least for the time being. Am I glad I learned this? Sure. But, this theme has repeated so much in my career that I am reluctant to jump onto a new thing. Instead I doubled down on F# and started learning scheme.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a former engineer. Toolmaker to be precise. I just could not get into this game no matter how long I tried. I love making stuff as a hobby, and reading all the good reviews this game had it seemed like a great way to kill a few spare hours. But I just couldn't gell with the game.It just seemed like I was back at work but now not getting paid for my time. For me, Rimworld is where it's at.

I feel the exact same way. It's interesting that you mention Rimworld - I dived into Rimworld when I first got it and came to appreciate the way little things add up in that game and make the simulation more interesting (be it positive or negative). The complicated UI is slowly unraveled and becomes intuitive as you learn the game because there are simple feedback mechanisms for actions that affect your colonists. Ev…

I feel like I didn't get the same satisfaction out of factorio until I turned the difficulty up enough to feel like the bugs were a threat so I could lose. Admittedly I turned it up too high to get that feeling and had to restart with a bit less difficulty. Then I had a reason to build walls/turrets/etc because I couldn't maintain safety without them and planning for mining expansions.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you have a small list of recommended mods for someone like me with ~50 hours in Factorio? Thanks.

I don't know if you finished the game yet, but if you haven't, I suggest that you do so before adding mods, just so you have a good feel for what the vanilla game is like before you start changing stuff... it'll also give you a sense of what you don't like or would want more of, and that'll let you more intelligently pick mods. That said, I'd divide mods in to several types: First, there are convenience mods, which m…

Thanks for this! I haven't played in a while, and have been meaning to get back into it.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Taking the time to master your tools is a COMPOUNDING benefit this is problematic, and the problem is made obvious when you take this fact to its natural conclusion. are you juggling credit cards to simultaneously maximize the benefits of opening new cards with promotional offers, limiting your interest rates, and maximizing your credit score? have you investigated the air quality of your working and living spaces?…

When those tools’ lifecycle is 2 years at most fewer people are willing invest the effort to master them and instead learn on a need basis. If there was a guaranteed lifecycle the benefits would indeed compound and pay off handsomely. For example I worked on an Angular project and invested a bit of time to learn the framework and certain libraries. I completed the project and it was successful, but my new projects ar…

I'd argue that Angular is just a framework and the tool is whatever you use to hammer your angular code together. Your text editor/IDE of choice will probably outlast your use of Angular and therefore OP would be suggesting it is worth the time learning how to maximize your effectiveness with the IDE.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#200
post #165
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think my chances of getting a job might actually go down if I impress them too much with my peerless shortcut knowledge.

Why ?

Ever proven an interviewer wrong or lesser to their face/in front of their peers (even without being crass about it)?

It usually doesn't fare well for you.

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