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Embrace the Grind

jacobian.org

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Re: Embrace the Grind

#81

Post by pilchard123 »

BossingAround wrote: post #7
barbiturique wrote: post #4

That's my tactic to blend-in in a engineering team and gain some respect / credibility. I try to find the most boring, utterly broken part, that nobody wants to touch... and I sink time into it. Once I made it somewhat usable, I document it.

Same here. I like doing things nobody wants to do, especially when I'm new in the team. The problem I've identified is that you're then the go-to person for the task you did in the beginning. Example: You need to figure out how to deploy X. This is poorly documented and nobody knows how to do it. Action: You read the code, understand what needs to be done, deploy it. Then, you document it. Finally, you create fairly…

Never become the guy who can fix the printer.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#82

Post by whimsicalism »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #54
ReactiveJelly wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not gonna disagree but I want to add a couple things. 1. Kids with ADHD probably can't develop executive function as fast or as far as other kids. I'm pretty sure I have it, it explains the repeated performance reports of "You're good when you apply yourself and useless when you don't." Unfortunately I struggle to _choose_ to apply myself. Willpower doesn't seem to come naturally to me, even after 10 years as a p…

ADHD is a difficult topic to discuss on HN. I'll preface this by saying that I'm not doubting your situation, or any other commenter's particular situation. This [section of my] comment is meant to be general: In the context of this mentoring group, we go through phases where almost everyone suspects they have ADHD for various reasons. This is usually triggered by one of two things: Either someone shares an online "D…

IMO any chance of there being a constrained and clearcut definition of ADHD went out the window in affluent communities as soon as they started giving people test extensions if they were diagnosed with it.

I say that as someone who definitely has something neurodivergent going on, as I do not know other people who get excited and have to pace around the house flapping their hands.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#83

Post by legerdemain »

cercatrova wrote: post #60
legerdemain wrote: post #52

OK, so you spend hours and days sealing threes of clubs into tea packets. But how do you make the volunteer pick the three of clubs during the show?

The article links to this Wikipedia page, looks like you can "force" the user to pick a specific card. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forcing_(magic)

That's just trading one word for another! OK, how do you force the audience member to pick a specific card from a deck?

Re: Embrace the Grind

#84

Post by gonehome »

rufius wrote: post #78
jldugger wrote: post #45

> For example, I once joined a team maintaining a system that was drowning in bugs. There were something like two thousand open bug reports. Nothing was tagged, categorized, or prioritized. The team couldn’t agree on which issues to tackle > I spent almost three weeks in that room, and emerged with every bug report reviewed, tagged, categorized, and prioritized. Honestly, this is one of those traps a team can fall in…

Honestly, I’d have approached it differently. Close everything older than 2 weeks. If it’s important/relevant, it will crop back up. If it’s not, then it stays unfixed. This can be really uncomfortable to do. But it’s how I’ve rescued a couple of teams that I’ve led as either an EM or Tech Lead. Put another way - if everything is important or “must fix”, nothing is. So to the author: that seemed like a waste of time.…

The author's tactic gives them a good sense of the project, common requests, and bugs over a long time period.

This context is really valuable when reasoning about the product or determining what's important to prioritize.

The issue with the "declare bankruptcy and important stuff will come back" is that you don't actually solve the underlying ruthless prioritization issue and very quickly end up in the exact same position.

You also irritate people that spent time writing up product issues for potentially important bugs by auto closing them (so many important things may not come back), but the bigger loss is that going through all of them gives you solid product historical context.

For what it's worth, the best PMs I know go through the backlog and understand what they're killing when they approach a project that's currently fucked. I think it has a positive side effect of giving them a lot of credibility too (as well as helping them ramp up).

Re: Embrace the Grind

#85

Post by IncRnd »

dceddia wrote: post #16

This quote stuck out to me: > More trouble than the trick was worth? To you, probably. But not to magicians. It makes me realize how fundamentally different the values are between some fields. The amount of time magicians put into the craft is mind-boggling. I see it also with how movies are made -- to think that sometimes they're spending days or months and tens of thousands of dollars, building sets, waiting for th…

> It makes me realize how fundamentally different the values are between some fields. The amount of time magicians put into the craft is mind-boggling.

Larry Wall was quoted in the article, regarding laziness.

Bill Gates has a famous quote, "I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it."

Neither of those people can be accused of laziness, yet they both embrace it. Laziness in the context of productivity is often misunderstood as not doing things, but it is more aptly the stopping of doing in order to observe, think, and let the answer come to you. Work diligently, but think and simplify first. It seems to me that is also what the magicians do.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#86

Post by narshian »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #72
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #30

When I joined a mentoring program targeted at recent college grads, I expected to be teaching things like interview prep, resume writing, negotiation skills, communication skills, and how to deliver results in a workplace. For about half of the mentees, that's roughly true. However, for the other half much of my mentoring ends up being about time management, following through on commitments, and putting in the effort…

I think being able to sit down and do work is more about removing distractions than improving focus. Also, I'm curious about these statements: > There's a growing perception that traits like work ethic, focus, and motivation are fixed attributes that one is born with (or without) rather than abilities that are developed over time Really? Who believes this and why? > but then turn around and tell me that they're only…

No it’s not. Speaking as someone who specifically has this problem: even eliminating all possible distractions does not do the trick.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#87

Post by legerdemain »

travisjungroth wrote: post #61
legerdemain wrote: post #52

OK, so you spend hours and days sealing threes of clubs into tea packets. But how do you make the volunteer pick the three of clubs during the show?

That's an entire family of tricks called card forces. I used to have a whole routine based on them. Here's a blog post with three of them: https://conjuror.community/best-card-forces/ I had about a 50% hit rate on the natural force. You just fan through the cards and time it so they pick the one you want. Wouldn't work for the tea trick, but works fine if you have a fallback.

Thanks for the link. Of the three techniques mentioned, one (the entire deck is all the same card) obviously doesn't withstand any scrutiny; one (riffle through a deck and skip to your chosen card when they say stop) feels like it'd be too risky for a trick that took days to set up; and one (the "natural" force) says "please pay us to learn the secret."

I don't think the trick that's the show pony of this blog post has been revealed to us.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#88

Post by legerdemain »

wott wrote: post #70
legerdemain wrote: post #52

OK, so you spend hours and days sealing threes of clubs into tea packets. But how do you make the volunteer pick the three of clubs during the show?

He has put in his article a link to the Wikipedia definition of 'Forcing' (and once there, there is a link to a book describing techniques). edit: sorry, I hadn't refreshed and seen the other 2 replies before I replied myself.

I don't understand what you comment contributes to my knowledge. The author says that he will explain a magic trick. He says that step one is to XYZ. He does not say how to XYZ. He instead links to a Wikipedia page that says what XYZ is, but doesn't describe how to XYZ in a way that would work in the magic trick. Instead, it links to a book that might say more about XYZ. I am not about to buy that book.

Do you consider that trick to be sufficiently explained?

Re: Embrace the Grind

#89

Post by ip26 »

bluquark wrote: post #17

My secret weapon for bug diagnosis is that when a regression is reported on a system without an automatic bisect tool, while everyone else is trying to reason about the problem with guesswork and code inspection, I sit down and spend 2 hours just bisecting manually (full sync, rebuild and install of old versions of the software). This provides a guaranteed culprit CL, often one that no one guessed, and also a potenti…

However, every time I reason about the problem & debug it, I gain a little knowledge and do it a little faster next time. Bisecting never really gets faster, aside from maybe writing a script.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#90

Post by PragmaticPulp »

fartcannon wrote: post #66
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ADHD is a difficult topic to discuss on HN. I'll preface this by saying that I'm not doubting your situation, or any other commenter's particular situation. This [section of my] comment is meant to be general: In the context of this mentoring group, we go through phases where almost everyone suspects they have ADHD for various reasons. This is usually triggered by one of two things: Either someone shares an online "D…

Your comment makes me think of when they first designed jet cockpits for pilots. It was expensive to modify the planes, so they designed it to the 'average' person. The result is that no one fit in it. Expectations that other people can perform like you do if they just put their mind to it is so blind to the reality of human experience that it's hard to respond. https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us…

> Expectations that other people can perform like you do if they just put their mind to it is so blind to the reality of human experience that it's hard to respond.

I never claimed that was the case. In fact, I specifically cited examples where no amount of hard work could close the gap to top performers.

I wasn't suggesting that everyone can perform equally if they just work hard enough. The point is that attention, focus, and work ethic are not static traits of an individual. Yes, we pivot around certain biological attributes, but that doesn't mean they're fixed.

We all benefit from putting in the work to improve our attention spans and other learned behaviors, regardless of our starting baseline.

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