Embrace the Grind • Hacker News Board

Re: Embrace the Grind

#281

Post by anaerobicover » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 6:25 PM UTC

titanomachy wrote: post #251

charrondev wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exc…

The opposite can be a problem as well: a principal or architect who is stuck in their ways or not up to date on the platform will cause a lot of frustration and waste a lot of time. I've seen this unfortunately a few times: highly experienced and generally knowledgeable engineers who are disdainful of mobile platforms and don't feel they need to learn about the details and limitations of the system before pronouncing on technical designs (This especially applies to iOS for some reason IME).

Re: Embrace the Grind

#282

Post by emodendroket » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 6:39 PM UTC

infinitezest wrote: post #267

emodendroket wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great way to end up being the "expert" in PHP, Rails, frontend dev, and other stuff you actually don't really enjoy doing, and have everyone just keep assigning you those tickets instead of lifting a finger to do it themselves. Ask me how I know.

This has been my experience and it has left me feeling kind of rudderless. I want to do a good job, accomplish things, and build a solid reputation (and hopefully make more money) but it ends up feeling like getting punished for doing well. Of course, it's easy enough to say that hard work is its own reward or that it'll pay off in the long run but it sure doesn't feel that way sometimes.

I know what you mean. It’s hard for me to half-ass things and I hate everyone sitting there with their thumbs up their ass or pretending they’re too stupid to figure something out. All I can say is it try and find a team that’s focused on stuff you want to do and will appreciate your flexibility. Easier said than done.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#283

Post by simonbarker87 » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 6:40 PM UTC

mdip wrote: post #269

simonbarker87 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m that friend for all of my friends and I wonder how I have any friends left from the number of people I’ve had to say “you’re being a pillock, and this is how you fix it” Good to know I’m providing a valuable service

Well, for what it's worth, if you haven't been thanked, you deserve it. I've avoided many mistakes due to my friend's sobering assessment of things and I've done the same--though arguably much less so--for him. At the same time, he serves the opposite purpose, too. He'd build up an idea that he saw value in, which others missed, and would go all-in on it. He frequently referred to the biblical idea that "iron sharpen…

Thanks, one of them has gone from living pay check to pay check and loosing £100 or so a month to putting offers in for his first house after I told him he was “living like a student and needs to buckle down”. we went through his finances and 12 months later he’s nearly a home owner - that’s all the thanks I need

Re: Embrace the Grind

#284

Post by jen20 » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 8:03 PM UTC

kakkan wrote: post #254

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> Why do you think GCP is worse than AWS?

Because the identity model is worse than IAM, and the quota system is insane. The global VPC networking being nicer doesn't make up for this, unfortunately.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#285

Post by dehrmann » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 8:41 PM UTC

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…

Most skills tend to look something like this, where dedication and repetition lead to proficiency. Could be piano, chess, video games, programming...

What are some skills like this that are high-leverage--skills that help with lots of other skills?

Re: Embrace the Grind

#286

Post by jebeng » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 9:20 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #220

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…

I did that when I first came to Silicon Valley. I went to work for a company which operated a large, for its day, mainframe data center. (Not IBM, UNIVAC). Each time the operating system crashed, which it did several times a day, a "panic dump" was produced, a stack of paper about an inch thick, with a summary and stack backtrace at the top, and a full listing of the contents of memory. There were two stacks of these…

Neat. For some reason I find it satisfying to read an example like that where there's actual real tangible work being done with immediate and obvious benefits.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#287

Post by lulzury » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 9:34 PM UTC

jebeng wrote: post #286

Animats wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did that when I first came to Silicon Valley. I went to work for a company which operated a large, for its day, mainframe data center. (Not IBM, UNIVAC). Each time the operating system crashed, which it did several times a day, a "panic dump" was produced, a stack of paper about an inch thick, with a summary and stack backtrace at the top, and a full listing of the contents of memory. There were two stacks of these…

Neat. For some reason I find it satisfying to read an example like that where there's actual real tangible work being done with immediate and obvious benefits.

The weird thing about tackling these seemingly Goliath type problems is that at the start it requires a lot of patience to get going and can be demotivating to see no progress or trickle-slow progress, but once you visibly see that the gears are starting to crank, it is very rewarding.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#288

Post by nullsense » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 9:53 PM UTC

whimsicalism wrote: post #268

nullsense wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone diagnosed with ADHD a year ago now, the GPs description of their life experiences are pretty textbook ADHD. And things like this: "Some times the things we have to do in life aren't immediately enjoyable. It's on us to find ways to make them more enjoyable (e.g. find a sport you like, or take up walking), and some times we just have to do the unenjoyable thing for the sake of progress." Are just insanely t…

If that is enough to be "textbook ADHD" then the definition is even broader than I thought. Being performant when you're focused but having trouble getting there, having difficulty getting basic chores done, etc.? That's just many people in life. Ultimately, I don't really trust the psychology field to determine what is a mental illness and what isn't. It wasn't that long ago that being gay was in the DSM.

The definition is indeed more specific than that. Don't be silly. The part that is incredibly relatable there is 1) life long inability to get your shit together (not just periodic or some of the time), and 2) a deep seated emotional anguish from being berated by people your whole life for not doing what you're supposed to when you're supposed to.

It does terrible things to your health, finances, employment and relationships.

My difficulty with basic chores almost cost me my marriage, and I spent north of 1000 nights in the last 5 years doing the dishes at 2am dead last before going to bed because that was the only circumstance under which I could get myself to do them.

I think most people misunderstand it greatly because their frame is "can't focus" but that's pretty nebulous. A better frame is "having a disastrously shitty batting average on choosing what to direct your attention towards or away from". The chronic understimulation leads to engaging predominantly in things that provide enough stimulation, which often aren't what you're supposed to be doing, and getting locked in that mode because anything else pales in comparison so switching away feels almost painful.

Best metaphor I've come up with to describe the difference is imagine you had to live your whole life with no shoes. Imagine all the surfaces you've ever had to walk across and how that would have been without shoes. You'd be fairly reluctant to make transitions between certain surfaces due to the discomfort. So the routes you take would change. Some routes would lead you to not wind up at your intended destination due to needing to walk on a comfortable enough path. You'd always take longer than other people to get places.

Also it's not a mental illness, it's a neurodevelopmental disorder.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#289

Post by nullsense » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 10:21 PM UTC

beaconstudios wrote: post #249

nullsense wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might, and you might not. The incentives for me to be better are already as strong as they can possibly be. Not to screw up my health worse, not to lose my marriage, not to lose my job, not to make rash financial decisions. The amount of effort I put into this already is just exhausting. I'm glad I recognise these days the times when the car is out of gas and people are telling me "if you just turned the key a li…

At the end of the day, every individual knows themselves better than anybody else does. I'm just relaying that it helped me, even though I was trying really hard to stay afloat and struggling to focus on most aspects of my life, to just practice focusing - working harder wouldn't have done anything because I didn't have the focus to apply to hard work in the first place. I have no idea whether people with ADHD can im…

The flipside being there are people who are, and it doesn't cross their mind that they might be, and they're spinning their wheels consuming productivity porn in the hopes of finally cracking the code.

I do agree with what you're saying btw. I think you can and should try to improve things, no matter which side of the coin you're on. The crux of the issue is that it's very, very important to understand which side you're on because the advice and strategies are fundamentally very different.

I'm not at all worried about the people who think they might be ADHD. They fall into 3 camps. 1) people who suspect they have it and it's a life changing revelation and they seek treatment ASAP, 2) people who suspect they have it for a long time and are right but for some reason or other never do anything about it and 3) people who don't have it, and don't understand it well enough to realise they actually don't have it

Group 1 sorts itself pretty quick. The trouble is realising you're in group 1!!!! This is why from time to time I talk about it here if its mentioned. Once it clicks it's unbelievable. I'm very interested in helping those people as it's pretty life changing.

Group 2 I mourn for. But at least they can recognise what advice and strategies apply and understanding why their life is how it is. Knowing is half the battle.

Group 3 I'm not worried about at all. It can be such a devastating problem that when it clicks and you can finally connect the dots, you sort of know. For this group the dots will be too few and far between though naturally for everyone there will be some and they'll hum and haw about it and mull it over in their mind before forgetting about it altogether. If you genuinely think you have then you must feel as if there is and always has been something quite wrong with your life. Though you may simply identify with the list of symptoms because it's somewhat vague, and just be unsure as to what it really means. If you actually think it could be an answer to solving a problem in your life you will go for an evaluation. If you don't think it's an answer to solving a problem in your life then almost certainly you don't have it and will just forget about it. You may go for an evaluation and it comes back negative but unearthed a different problem at the cause of some real troubles for you, and that's ok, as it's a differential diagnosis for exactly that reason.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#290

Post by majewsky » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 10:27 PM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #119

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…

If the meeting is on a calendar ahead of time it's not really an interruption.

Great idea! Now I just need to get people to schedule their Slack messages a week in advance.