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Embrace the Grind

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Re: Embrace the Grind

#251

Post by titanomachy »

charrondev wrote: post #205
titanomachy wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who do this job at large companies are called Staff or Principal engineers. One reason startups might be less likely to have them is that they are extraordinarily expensive.

And you can’t cheap out on the role. It’s also really hard to recognize the right kind of person for this without a somewhat Mature engineering team. The wrong person in this type of role at a smaller company can things back significantly.

Yeah I saw that early in my career at a small company. Smart and charismatic guy in an architect role, impressed technical and non-technical people alike with his knowledge.

Now that I have more experience I realize he was more excited about cargo-culting big tech practices than about making sure our software was well-architected. We wasted so much time enthusiastically implementing his low-impact but technically exciting ideas.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#252

Post by WhateverHappns »

_xnmw wrote: post #219

My personal magic trick is learning to speak almost fluently in a second language (Russian) in about a year. However, when people ask me how I do it, they quickly get turned off when they realize it's just a grind. You need to know about 20,000 words in any language to sound fluent, and there is just no way around brute-force memorization. And if you're serious about learning, you need to keep track of how many words…

> You need to know about 20,000 words in any language to sound fluent

Are you sure about this? AFAIK the use of words in a language isn't distributed evenly, but according to a Pareto distribution. Thus, you can speak _okay_ knowing only ~500 words, I believe. It won't sound perfect but you'll speak and understand pretty decently.

I once wrote a python script which read words from a .txt file full of french words with their english counterparts and then displayed the french word, waiting for you to type your guess. It gave instant feedback which I thought important for learning anything. The file contained the 500 most used french words according to large book surveys.

This was in my last year of school and it saved me during tests where I had to write coherent sentences in french.

Edit: Here it is! Zipf's law is what it's called.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law) and here's an interesting video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE

Re: Embrace the Grind

#253

Post by m_a_g »

I'm a junior SWE and doing maintenance or working with legacy software is a big no for me. I realized this is mainly because I can't see the value these jobs would bring to me so I can't motivate myself.

I wonder, what is the motivation for working with these kinds of systems career-wise?

Re: Embrace the Grind

#254

Post by kakkan »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #198
cbushko wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This resonates with me so much as I was in this position 3 years ago. My boss came to me and said "we want to move from AWS to GCP, using kubernetes and not have it be a mess like we have now" I was new, senior, free from ownership. I chose to stay as a team of 1 so that I wasn't burdened with fires and meetings. It freed me up to put my head down and get the work done. The grind was learning GCP, kubernetes, terrafo…

> we want to move from AWS to GCP Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Why do you think GCP is worse than AWS? I've used GCP and found it quite easy to start with and the managed instances was a breeze to set up and deploy stuff. I've done it for only small businesses and they were happy with the results too and the easy to use console made things easier to navigate. Maybe the trouble with GCP comes with scale?

Re: Embrace the Grind

#255

Post by jonfromsf »

dorkwood wrote: post #213

I experienced this when I first started learning the piano. When I played the first song I had learned for my sister, she was amazed. "Wow, I could never play like that", she said, "my fingers don't work that way". But when I broke down for her exactly how I'd learned it -- by breaking the song down into manageable chunks of just a few notes each, practicing each chunk with each hand separately many times until profi…

A good magician never reveals their tricks.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#256

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

mft_ wrote: post #248
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #121

It's funny. I was talking with the team on a call, yesterday, and one of them was telling me we should hire someone to do "the boring stuff," so I would be free to do "the fun stuff." I said no. I've been shipping (as opposed to "writing") software for over thirty years, and, if there's one thing I've learned, is that "shipping" software is about 60% - 80% "boring" stuff. I can avoid it, if I'm only interested in "ha…

Different strokes for different folks - and a mix of different types is often necessary. I remember the very first time I ever completed (through by work at the time) a psychological profile. (I know such things are mostly discredited, but bear with me). I think it was based around Belbin's team profiles. I came out as a creative, innovative, 'starter' of things - which actually matches me pretty well: I'm excited by…

More or less.

I enjoy research and design. Thinking about architectures is fun.

I enjoy implementation. Writing code is fun. I enjoy doing in-place documentation; especially as I am usually the poor schmuck that has to go back and refactor or fix.

I really like solving problems; whether bugs, or vexing UX/mental model issues. I'm an extremely proficient troubleshooter. My first job was as an RF technician, so I have been solving problems my entire adult life.

I enjoy creating a software infrastructure, for others to build upon; as opposed to "an app." I've written software that lasts decades, though with a vastly different face. That's kind of a cool feeling. Watching someone take my basic undercarriage, and add a hot rod motor and chassis, is wild.

I enjoy creating documentation. I'm pretty prolix. I was trained as an artist, so I can do fairly decent illustrations, as well as prose.

I enjoy creating localizable software. I've been dealing with different cultures my entire life, and love to explore our differences.

I enjoy creating accessible software. I deal -almost daily- with folks that have various types of challenges, and they help me to keep a focus on what's important.

I enjoy pitching the project. Having a product that is in very good shape at pitch time, makes this much easier.

I enjoy releasing a refined, polished project.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#257

Post by Nemrod67 »

louwrentius wrote: post #46

This article may be the most important article on Hacker News you may read this year. The message of this story is obviously beyond just our IT related professions. I really wonder if people do understand what needs to be done but won't. Or that they really don't see a way out of a mess. Are people really wilfully blind to 'obvious' solutions that are boring, labor intensive and terrible to implement? Don't they see…

I think the core of it is indeed values, but in the Real World it's about printing money. If the natural incentives for "Better Things" are replaced with "Get all the moneys, escape any consequences" then we get the current macro-economic incentives in all domains.

I guess it will either devolve into total-vertical-transnational integration (imagine being a citizen of Apple), or we'll have to create a new country "for smart people that wanna do stuff", and that entails a whole lotta hard work and problems.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#258

Post by heymijo »

Anyone ever read The Phoenix Project [0] or The Goal [1]?

The scenario the author described sounds just like the beginning stages from the Phoenix Project (overwhelming amount of tickets, what's the priority, what even are all of these tickets, printing them out to make the work visible).

The concept is Work in Process (WIP). You first need to see it and understand how it moves, or doesn't move throughout the DevOps system.

It seems like there might be a quick, easy read that could truly help OP.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix-pro...

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/113934.The_Goal

Re: Embrace the Grind

#259

Post by pitspotter »

dorkwood wrote: post #213

I experienced this when I first started learning the piano. When I played the first song I had learned for my sister, she was amazed. "Wow, I could never play like that", she said, "my fingers don't work that way". But when I broke down for her exactly how I'd learned it -- by breaking the song down into manageable chunks of just a few notes each, practicing each chunk with each hand separately many times until profi…

Yes, which piece was that btw?

I'm learning Rachmaninoff's Prelude in G minor, probably the hardest piece for me to date. I'm not timing the process but this must have been going on for six months by now. Practice occurs only when I feel like it, as I walk past the keyboard. Sometimes less than 5 minutes per day. Rarely more than 15 minutes.

But it's getting there! If you added it all up, it would be a tremendous amount of work. Doing it to a schedule, or even just filling out a timesheet, would make it too grindy for me to bother with.

So I think When it comes to learning, it's really motivation that is paramount. Not getting bored is a superpower. It's the ability to 'embrace grind' by discovering what's interesting about it.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#260

Post by dan-robertson »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #230
sdenton4 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just had a meeting with some students looking to outsource some dataset validation work. I had them time themselves for a couple hours doing it themselves, and we found that seeing aside am hour a day for a couple weeks will get them through everything... And they'll end up with higher quality data than they'll get from outsourced validation, with a better idea of the pitfalls of the dataset.

Those students are in the wrong career. You can't make good things from data without (metaphorically) getting your hands dirty.

Or maybe they have just learned something—these are students, not seasoned professionals.
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