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Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech

ruky.me

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Re: Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech

#81

Post by elcritch »

reureu wrote: post #68
faeyanpiraat wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some examples for illegal stuff?

Theranos, uBiome, and Practice Fusion all have well known scandals. I'm aware of other issues at some other health tech startups surrounding misrepresenting their impact on quality of care, building biased algorithms that have a discriminatory impact on care delivery, companies looking at questionable payment models that seem like they'd violate stark laws, straight up medicare fraud, etc. I'll just say that I'm skep…

To be fair I'd take that list and expand it to include the big pharmaceutical companies (see the new Alzheimers drug scandal at the FDA, billions spent on next generation statins that proved ineffective by confusing correlation and causation, etc), to include doctors and surgeons and various surgical practices or novel medical treatments (billions spent on full Meniscectomies that just lead to arthritis after years, pointless heart stints, etc).

True many startups in health are trying scammy payment models, but hospital bills often aren't much better unfortunately.

Personally my life has been positively improved by 23andme when they could still list health research, or by "zany" microbiome/probiotics startups years before the medical establishment caught up. Obviously these fields should be regulated, but properly so without just providing an excuse for regulatory capture for existing players.

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/health/alzheimers-drug-ad... 1: https://www.crossfit.com/health/the-great-statin-scam-time-t... 2: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/12/28/16823266/medical... 3: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/02/when-evid...

Re: Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech

#82

Post by oytis »

As much as I agree that solving (technically) interesting problems is more fulfilling than selling ads using distributed clusters, I think that finding an interesting problem that helps business make money is a non-trivial problem by itself and usually requires a separate person doing it full time. If you have such a person in your team, you are in a great luck

Re: Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech

#83

Post by rukshn »

oytis wrote: post #82

As much as I agree that solving (technically) interesting problems is more fulfilling than selling ads using distributed clusters, I think that finding an interesting problem that helps business make money is a non-trivial problem by itself and usually requires a separate person doing it full time. If you have such a person in your team, you are in a great luck

Yes I totally agree with you. I did not write it in that POV where you work or do hobby coding.

I saw that some comments here has mentioned it as something of a hobby coding pov.

If you find working on selling ads interesting then that’s what you should do. Buy doing that you will create something innovative, and new.

And you might even be able to merge cool tech into it as a result of it.

But don’t learn cool tech just because it’s cool. Do it because you want to solve a problem.

Re: Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech

#84

Post by ie21 »

smt88 wrote: post #27
legerdemain wrote: post #7

Want to work on interesting problems? Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups! Help lawyers crawl out of their low-tech hole! Work on software to revolutionize public classrooms! Why work on interesting tech when you could throw yourself at intractable problems that we never get any closer to solving?

Most people in software seem to create interesting technology that sells ads, so your sarcastic examples sound a lot better to me. I'm currently building a company that is replacing Excel at some of the biggest commercial real estate firms, which is "impossible" by your standards.

Honestly curious, why is it better for them then Excel? What is the value proposition? Thanks.

Re: Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech

#85

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

oytis wrote: post #82

As much as I agree that solving (technically) interesting problems is more fulfilling than selling ads using distributed clusters, I think that finding an interesting problem that helps business make money is a non-trivial problem by itself and usually requires a separate person doing it full time. If you have such a person in your team, you are in a great luck

I agree with you, Emphasis needs to be put on finding an interesting problem to solve in the first place, Finding problems is a hard skill.

I've been running a problem validation for 2 years[1], 1/10 new posts each day is actually a problem and rest are just ideas someone want to build(there's nothing wrong with it per se, But with problems as first class citizen they're not allowed).

And then not everyone who can identify a problem can also have an idea to solve them and that's fine too. It's just the distinction between problems and ideas need to be understood.

[1] https://needgap.com

Re: Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech

#86

Post by eurasiantiger »

Important note: the writer says they started on Java and had trouble grasping OOP concepts. No wonder, because Java is not an object-oriented language—it is a class-oriented language. This is especially apparent from the inheritance mechanisms.

JavaScript, on the other hand, is an object-oriented language down to its prototypal inheritance. There are no classes, only objects and primitives (which can get transparently promoted to objects).

Re: Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech

#87

Post by bumby »

marcosdumay wrote: post #72
hirvi74 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when Einstein claimed ""There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable." Not to be pedantic, but was Einstein incorrect at that time/in the future? Were there any actual indications that nuclear energy would be obtainable at that time? Einstein didn't seem to say, "Obtaining nuclear energy is absolutely impossible, and can never be achieved." All he said was that there is not the…

Ok, so libquote says this was stated at 1934, what is after the discovery of Uranium fission and that it emits neutrons that could start further fissions. The quote is of course completely out of context, and looks a lot like something one throws at annoyingly overeagle people. Also, I imagine the context for saying it only existed because nuclear fission seemed perfectly plausible and just over the horizon. It was t…

>nobody could imagine a Manhattan Project at that time, and it wasn't obvious that it was even possible, but there was a clear possibility.

That’s exactly the point. And yet the Manhattan project was less than a decade away.

Lord Kelvin said his quote in 1895. Deforest said his in 1926. In the myopic timeframe they were all technically correct.*

The GP stated that all those other problems were “obviously” intractable, but whose to say they won’t be solved under some ambitious effort in the next 20 years?

*Aside: All three examples come from the same place in terms of being plausible in the timeframe they were made yet wrong in hindsight. I wonder if people are more fiercely defending the Einstein quote because he’s more revered in popular culture. It’s interesting that his quote is the only one being defended.

Re: Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech

#88

Post by marcosdumay »

bumby wrote: post #87
marcosdumay wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so libquote says this was stated at 1934, what is after the discovery of Uranium fission and that it emits neutrons that could start further fissions. The quote is of course completely out of context, and looks a lot like something one throws at annoyingly overeagle people. Also, I imagine the context for saying it only existed because nuclear fission seemed perfectly plausible and just over the horizon. It was t…

> nobody could imagine a Manhattan Project at that time, and it wasn't obvious that it was even possible, but there was a clear possibility. That’s exactly the point. And yet the Manhattan project was less than a decade away. Lord Kelvin said his quote in 1895. Deforest said his in 1926. In the myopic timeframe they were all technically correct.* The GP stated that all those other problems were “obviously” intractabl…

Oh, your comment is spot on.

I guess my point is only that all those famous quotes probably just meant "shut-up and give me some space, journalist, I have some immediately pressing problems to solve", and probably nobody undesrtood them as anything else at the time too.

Anyway, my favorite of those is the Michelson's famous "physics is complete" one, that basically meant "let me do the experiment first, then we can talk about the results", but is excellent out of context.

Re: Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech

#89

Post by mcguire »

bumby wrote: post #20
mcguire wrote: post #5

There are downsides to this. The early parts of my resume read like a list of major software project disasters of the 1990s. Among other things, I worked on Taligent OS and WorkplaceOS. (Never heard of them? That's my point.) As a result of chasing interesting problems (and a stint as a university sysadmin), my salary history led me to be significantly underpaid for most of my career.

> my salary history led me to be significantly underpaid for most of my career. I feel like this misses the point of the article. The author claims its important to enjoy what you're working on. They make no claims that doing so is a way to maximize your salary. I know tech gets paid well now but that wasn't always the case. Decades ago people went into medicine or law or finance if they wanted to optimize for pay an…

It's hard to enjoy what you are working on after you realize it's going from your fingers straight to the trash.

And then you find yourself junior to someone who was getting 6 figures straight out of programming bootcamp three years ago. (And good luck trying to convince them that their genius idea has never actually worked.)

Re: Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech

#90

Post by mcguire »

dhosek wrote: post #31
space_ghost wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only screenshot [0] I can find of TaligentOS looks remarkably like The BeOS. Did some TaligentOS guys move on to produce the BeOS? [0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D7Gi8GgW0AAoguu.png

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent The whole convoluted story of Taligent and WorkplaceOS is something to behold. It's a pity because the initial promise back in the early 90s was something I was genuinely excited about but alas, it was all promise and no shipping

Quick anecdote: One of IBM's guys got back from Cupertino (Taligent was across the street from Apple) (I worked for IBM in Austin) and had his head in his hands. He kept repeating "they think mice only have one button".
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