Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985) • Hacker News Board

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#211

Post by yonaguska » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

Netcob wrote: post #124

teraku wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your cognitive workload is too high. There are three forms of cognitive workload: Intrinsic, External and Germane. Intrinsic is things you just *know*. How to write a class in java, how to write a query in SQL, ... External is stuff you only need occasionally, and need to look up every time: How to deploy to X, how to set up CI/CD, ... Germane is context knowledge. Usually referred to as business knowledge. You want…

I tried that, and at first it almost worked. But that scaffolding just kept breaking. TeamCity doesn't want to execute my unit tests since I've upgraded to .Net 5.0, I still don't get how that docker "latest" tag works, my Ubuntu-TeamCity-Agent refuses to acknowledge it's running in Linux and that it has access to docker. After a while I realized I was wasting precious free time. But I agree about the cognitive load.…

I also programming my linear algebra homework assignments, and then nearly failed the class. Didn't really learn it until I had to use it for more interesting combinatorics.

Also adhd, and our coping mechanisms are similar.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#212

Post by ex_amazon_sde » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

Uehreka wrote: post #203

goodpoint wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't want to spend my leisure time fighting with tools, debugging build processes that break all the time, make sense of docker's tagging system Now that CV-driven development is the standard, we are forced to learn new bloated "devops" tools and services every year. This type of knowledge expires very quickly. Also these tools and services do not develop communities: business users drop last-year tools like hot…

People on HN are always deriding the “tech hedonic treadmill”, but I find it interesting that this meme seems to have reached maturity in 2015, and the list of things they point to as “the new trendy thing this year” has been the same ever since: Some combo of Node.js, React, webpack, Docker and Kubernetes. I think this meme was still fairly true then: Node was at risk of splitting into Node.js and IO.js, React was s…

> we are now living in a much more stable time than when these memes were created

Quite the opposite. The cambrian explosion of tools and SaaS is getting faster and the average useful lifetime of anything released today is getting shorter.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#213

Post by zeeshanqureshi » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

"Blocked by Intention" is what the mystics (eastern, sufi, hindu etc.) call this.

John Cleese's book[1] and lecture[2] on creativity also have some thoughts on this.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50719532-creativity

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#214

Post by weehoo » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 5:36 PM UTC

lumost wrote: post #144

goodpoint wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't want to spend my leisure time fighting with tools, debugging build processes that break all the time, make sense of docker's tagging system Now that CV-driven development is the standard, we are forced to learn new bloated "devops" tools and services every year. This type of knowledge expires very quickly. Also these tools and services do not develop communities: business users drop last-year tools like hot…

Sometimes I wonder if modern corporate culture has adopted soviet style newspeak. Why are we immigrating to the new thing? For the same reasons as we migrated to the old thing. Why is the new thing better? Because it’s just so much better.

If you can convince the higher ups that migrating tooling provides business value, you can do something that requires zero insight or creativity for a few months and at the end of it be promoted for organizing a successful migration despite delivering zero measurable business value. The effects of the migration are gonna be second and higher order effects that are impossible to separate from the rest of the business so you can just claim the tooling was the leverage that let the people doing first order work succeed. Being a tool astronaut lets you claim a portion of everyone else in your orgs success without ever taking a professional risk, since your odds of being called out for an ineffectual change are near zero, since there’s no first order signals.

I’m not saying modern tooling is useless; I don’t use ed, cc, and make for my development. But there’s a huge difference between a zero to one tooling effort and an N to N+1 tooling effort. The first one requires figuring out all the implicit/implied/manual parts of the process. The second one is often just turning one set of configuration languages into another.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#215

Post by bstar77 » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

Oras wrote: post #159

swat535 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why the more I think about it, the more I just want to git-push-heroku-goodbye and be done with it. I don't care about setting and maintaining AWS instances, docker containers and jenkins. The older I get, the more I realize how precious my time is and now I have very little patience for anyone or anything that wastes it. This is also why I've basically cut off all social medias from my life (except H…

Hear hear! I wish one day the dev community will understand that its never about the tools and more about the delivery. The customer does not give a monkey if the backend is node, go or PHP. You do not impress anyone by using React, redux, amber, angular ... etc. All people care about is a solution to a problem they have. However, from my experience, this is not a popular opinion among developers.

It's not popular because it's not realistic in most environments. In many cases it's advantageous to use those things you listed because that's what the market can provide talent-wise. I'd rather deal with learning new tech that's well documented than some custom lib that "just works" but no one understands because the architect left years ago. My whole career has been about consistent education, so that doesn't intimidate me. Working on undocumented architectures that I have to make substantial changes to (and not knowing all of the side effects) is what intimidates me.

Turnover is a reality that can't be ignored. New people come in and now have to figure out something that reads like a stream of conscience. It isn't well documented, doesn't follow the latest best practices and doesn't support modern paradigms and uses outdated frameworks/libs, but works great.

The apps I build always take into consideration the talent pool my employer intends to pull from. The reality is that they (usually) can't hire general "technologists" that are proficient at all layers of the stack. If the project is something that only you will ever work on, then you can do whatever you want and this whole conversation is moot.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#216

Post by solipsism » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 5:53 PM UTC

bstar77 wrote: post #215

Oras wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hear hear! I wish one day the dev community will understand that its never about the tools and more about the delivery. The customer does not give a monkey if the backend is node, go or PHP. You do not impress anyone by using React, redux, amber, angular ... etc. All people care about is a solution to a problem they have. However, from my experience, this is not a popular opinion among developers.

It's not popular because it's not realistic in most environments. In many cases it's advantageous to use those things you listed because that's what the market can provide talent-wise. I'd rather deal with learning new tech that's well documented than some custom lib that "just works" but no one understands because the architect left years ago. My whole career has been about consistent education, so that doesn't inti…

it's advantageous to use those things you listed because that's what the market can provide talent-wise

More silliness. Pay developers enough so that they'll stick around. If they stick around, then you don't need to hire for talent in a particular framework or language. You can hire for intelligence, creativity, passion, drive, whatever... and invest in training people when they get there.

Jumping from framework to framework and language to language as the talent pool does is incredibly wasteful.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#217

Post by solipsism » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 5:54 PM UTC

ric2b wrote: post #209

paledot wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why I open my conversational interviews with, "There's an emergency, sales promised a customer a to-do list app yesterday. It's getting shipped out and forgotten, you're doing it on your own, only thing that matters is it's done fast. What do you use?". And then of course I spring the, "Okay, now it's becoming a flagship product. How do you onboard co-workers? How do you pivot to ongoing maintenance? What pr…

That would give me a bad impression as a candidate. It's like you're aware of the issue (sales doesn't give two shits about the capacity of the engineering team) but you want someone that is good at wasting a lot of time efficiently instead of improving communication with the sales team.

And then as a hiring manager I get the impression that this candidate doesn't understand hypotheticals, which is a big red flag. Happily, we will come to mutual agreement on whether you proceed.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#218

Post by nly » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 5:57 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #110

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a sweet spot somewhere between the extreme of not using pre-built tools and drowning in them. I've been following a similar path: automation and testing give me certainty and peace of mind when I'm working on bigger teams, so they should also improve my personal projects, right? Well, the difference is that my personal projects are used only by me in limited ways, and I also don't have to worry that someone…

Every third party tool (or library dependency, by the way) is something that will have to be well understood, maintained and fixed when broken. Which is why I try to avoid them for the most part in my personal and work projects. When someone at work says "Hey, lets just use Xyz package I found online! It does just what we want!" you need to ask: Who fixes it when it causes a problem that stops us from shipping? Who d…

The cost of the alternative : doing it yourself, is also often underestimated.

"It's just a simple JSON parser, we can write our own" is a dismissal that can sink you down a rabbit hole of bugs and future technical debt.

The most important thing about using a third party library is that its easy to replace with another one if it doesn't work out.

Don't let third party data types or dependencies leak out of the module where you use them, for example via an API, and things go a lot smoother

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#219

Post by teraku » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 5:58 PM UTC

justinclift wrote: post #53

teraku wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your cognitive workload is too high. There are three forms of cognitive workload: Intrinsic, External and Germane. Intrinsic is things you just *know*. How to write a class in java, how to write a query in SQL, ... External is stuff you only need occasionally, and need to look up every time: How to deploy to X, how to set up CI/CD, ... Germane is context knowledge. Usually referred to as business knowledge. You want…

> it's best to ... What are you basing this opinion on? :) --- As an aside, the blog in your profile link ( https://teraku.me ) has an invalid HTTPS cert. Seems to be for a different domain.

Moved domains a while ago, but forgot to fix it at HN. Fixed it now

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#220

Post by allenu » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 6:12 PM UTC

Oras wrote: post #159

swat535 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why the more I think about it, the more I just want to git-push-heroku-goodbye and be done with it. I don't care about setting and maintaining AWS instances, docker containers and jenkins. The older I get, the more I realize how precious my time is and now I have very little patience for anyone or anything that wastes it. This is also why I've basically cut off all social medias from my life (except H…

Hear hear! I wish one day the dev community will understand that its never about the tools and more about the delivery. The customer does not give a monkey if the backend is node, go or PHP. You do not impress anyone by using React, redux, amber, angular ... etc. All people care about is a solution to a problem they have. However, from my experience, this is not a popular opinion among developers.

Yup, I agree it's likely not a popular opinion. In my experience, developers love developing frameworks and tools, even when it isn't necessary.

I mean, it's just fun. Developers are biased to do things that make work interesting, even if it's superfluous. We think that coming up with a better framework or tool will save time in the future. I think that often it's just a wash or a net negative since you now have to maintain this tool AND when you first start on creating it, you are sort of naive about what it needs to support, so you open yourself up to a lot of hurt later when clients of your tool come up with more requirements than you envisioned.