Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What to Learn

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 113 posts

Re: What to Learn

#41

Post by codingdave »

borroka wrote: post #39
codingdave wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a martial arts practitioner for a couple decades, and our answer was "add one at a time". You'd learn the entire system at a basic level, and then practice it all enough to figure out which one technique you wanted to be the strength in your personal flavor of the style. So you'd level that one technique up from just being able to do it, to knowing when and how to apply it to many different situations. Once it…

Competition time is 10 years max at the very high level with the usual few exceptions, and sometimes what was working stops to work, either due to injury, changes in weight or power, or competitors "figuring you out". For example, Riner was so physically dominant that as soon as he had the grip, it was flight time. Maybe he had a sasae too, I don't remember. Most players play "opposite" techniques, for example osoto-…

Agreed, completely - I practiced chinese styles, which are far more about lifetime effectiveness and basic defense. It definitely changes the math of how much you can "master" when looking at it as a lifetime practice. It also changes the definition of what it means to "win", because our definition was that you were still strong with working joints in old age.

Re: What to Learn

#42

Post by stonecharioteer »

xyzelement wrote: post #19

I believe the thing we often need to learn is the thing we're afraid of learning. We often (always?) have weaknesses that can/do jeopardize our strength and closing those weaknesses is crucial. The famous Scott Galloway (whom I had as a b-school professor) made this point like this: if you are a great guy, great father, great boss, etc, but once in a while you get violently drunk and hurt people in your life - THAT t…

So I wonder about this a lot. If I have a developer on my team who needs to learn X, or get better at Y, I can always offer that feedback and it is construed as constructive feedback.

But if I tell a developer who can't speak well or communicate lucidly that they need to work on their communication skills, that comes across as offensive.

There was a horrible architect at my previous organization who was universally loathed for his bad communication skills and general lack of empathy. He was a Korean, and his English was abysmal. To him, it felt like something to shrug about. We had to go to HR, multiple times, about his behavior. Nothing much changed because again, they didn't know how to address the core issue, which is he couldn't speak clear English. His lack of empathy became masked with indifference and some of the higher ups (also non native English speakers) supported him saying it was general culture differences. However his lack of communication severely hindered progress and made life difficult.

I once had a colleague who had horrendous body odour and wouldn't wear deodorant. It made working with him really difficult. And he was one of the best developers I've known. I've never told him this because I didn't want to offend him, but stuff like this should also be addressed. Communication, body language, writing skills and general personal skills need to be addressed.

How do you offer feedback in that sense without embarassing them or offending them?

Re: What to Learn

#43

Post by borroka »

xyzelement wrote: post #19

I believe the thing we often need to learn is the thing we're afraid of learning. We often (always?) have weaknesses that can/do jeopardize our strength and closing those weaknesses is crucial. The famous Scott Galloway (whom I had as a b-school professor) made this point like this: if you are a great guy, great father, great boss, etc, but once in a while you get violently drunk and hurt people in your life - THAT t…

That is not a weakness that can be scored on a 0-10 scale (say, I am a 9 Python programmers and a 2 Java programmer, that's an either/or, a "threshold" weakness, or an attractor (of evil!).

Re: What to Learn

#44

Post by borroka »

stonecharioteer wrote: post #42
xyzelement wrote: post #19

I believe the thing we often need to learn is the thing we're afraid of learning. We often (always?) have weaknesses that can/do jeopardize our strength and closing those weaknesses is crucial. The famous Scott Galloway (whom I had as a b-school professor) made this point like this: if you are a great guy, great father, great boss, etc, but once in a while you get violently drunk and hurt people in your life - THAT t…

So I wonder about this a lot. If I have a developer on my team who needs to learn X, or get better at Y, I can always offer that feedback and it is construed as constructive feedback. But if I tell a developer who can't speak well or communicate lucidly that they need to work on their communication skills, that comes across as offensive. There was a horrible architect at my previous organization who was universally l…

One day I saw a colleague-to-be with their bare feet on the the desk, I looked at them and I said, "that's a no". He apologized and we moved on. But I also told the guy sitting next to them, "why didn't you say anything to them?".

Re: What to Learn

#45

Post by b3morales »

xyzelement wrote: post #38
premek wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> solving this thing would make him so much better at all parts of his life. How do you do that?

> How do you do that? Great question. I assume you're asking from the point of view of the person having the challenge rather than someone observing/helping them. There's no easy or painless answer. The reason these deep flaws exist in us is precisely because we have been avoiding dealing with them for some deeply personal and painful reason. But I do think there's a general pattern that I can share from my own exper…

Also worth noting that this process is not easy, and having an objective helper who will help you hold yourself accountable, in the form of a "therapist" of some stripe, is super helpful.

That person can help directly with several of these steps: noticing and characterizing the problem; exploring the unspoken assumptions; and formulating alternatives and plans.

Re: What to Learn

#46

Post by hintymad »

Regarding a few skills, Rota interestingly has similar advice for mathematicians: https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-l...

"5 Every mathematician has only a few tricks

A long time ago an older and well known number theorist made some disparaging remarks about Paul Erdos' work. You admire contributions to mathematics as much as I do, and I felt annoyed when the older mathematician flatly and definitively stated that all of Erdos' work could be reduced to a few tricks which Erdos repeatedly relied on in his proofs. What the number theorist did not realize is that other mathematicians, even the very best, also rely on a few tricks which they use over and over. Take Hilbert. The second volume of Hilbert's collected papers contains Hilbert's papers in invariant theory. I have made a point of reading some of these papers with care. It is sad to note that some of Hilbert's beautiful results have been completely forgotten. But on reading the proofs of Hilbert's striking and deep theorems in invariant theory, it was surprising to verify that Hilbert's proofs relied on the same few tricks. Even Hilbert had only a few tricks!"

Re: What to Learn

#47

Post by hintymad »

I think there's something in the middle. One does not need to learn everything, of course, and it pays to learn many new key concepts. Groundbreaking concepts help us identify new problems and find simple solutions. Another advantage of learning key concepts is that we get to connect all those concepts, and connections beget breakthroughs.

As for what concepts to learn first, I think Feynman's method helps: "You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: 'How did he do it? He must be a genius!'"

Re: What to Learn

#48

Post by xyzelement »

stonecharioteer wrote: post #42
xyzelement wrote: post #19

I believe the thing we often need to learn is the thing we're afraid of learning. We often (always?) have weaknesses that can/do jeopardize our strength and closing those weaknesses is crucial. The famous Scott Galloway (whom I had as a b-school professor) made this point like this: if you are a great guy, great father, great boss, etc, but once in a while you get violently drunk and hurt people in your life - THAT t…

So I wonder about this a lot. If I have a developer on my team who needs to learn X, or get better at Y, I can always offer that feedback and it is construed as constructive feedback. But if I tell a developer who can't speak well or communicate lucidly that they need to work on their communication skills, that comes across as offensive. There was a horrible architect at my previous organization who was universally l…

Great questions/points.

To some extent, "you can lead the horse to water but you can't make him drink." In the case if the terrible architect, your big problem was that he didn't want to change / had his head up his ass / didn't see the problem.

If you are a peer, there's not much you can do in this case. If you're a friend, you can try to persuade him of the negative impact this is having on him: eg "you know how you always struggle to get your ideas implemented? This is because people have a hard time following you, so your good ideas die on the vine. Do you see that and does that bother you?"

If you are his manager, then you can make this more of a performance issue "as an architect, you are expected to clearly communicate solutions and you're not doing that."

At the end of the day there's a meta question. Does your company value people who are introspective and will want to evolve? If the answer is yes, they will screen for that in interviews and have it be part of the company culture (so the terrible architect would either not pass the interview because he didn't come across as self aware or he's be pressured to evolve by the culture where everyone else is trying to do better.) If your company doesn't value these traits then you'll end up with people who don't think their shit thinks and that's hard!

Re: What to Learn

#49

Post by borroka »

groby_b wrote: post #9
WJW wrote: post #2

> ... I would guess that a manager I think of as excellent is at least 99.9%-ile. How to find such a manager is a long discussion that I might turn into another post. Please do! A lot of discussions regarding workplace morale, both here on HN and elsewhere, seem to boil down to "your manager is very good/bad and that explains everything else you mentioned". I tend to agree; having a good manager can make a huge posit…

Detecting managerial quality up-front is a rather hard problem. I believe it's mostly rooted in the fact that anything meaningful you do as a manager plays on a long timescale (months & years), so you can't directly verify. And it's sufficiently fuzzy that in a short conversation, managers can lay down enough smoke screen to make it hard to see flaws. So, what you need is getting some kind of long-term view on that m…

"Are they listening? When you have a conversation with them, are they paying close attention to what you have to say, or are they busy delivering a message? You want listening :)"

- This is common advice anytime one talks about relationships and communication. Listening is a skill, listen 10, talk 1, almost to the point that is difficult to understand who's doing the talking if everybody is getting the same advice of listening. Then you have those, and some HR people came to my mind--just to keep things professional--, who listen and listen and then you realize they just did not (or did not want to) understand.

Now, my question is: if it is common knowledge that listening to your reports is important, along with being pretty cheap and not particularly challenging to do, why so few managers do it? Incompetence or there is an advantage in not listening much?

Re: What to Learn

#50

Post by danuker »

I believe the tradeoff of how specialized to be is dictated by your work opportunities - specialization of labor AKA division of labor [1].

If you can and want to work in a large corporation, you should be able to get a fairly specific job title. This is advantageous because two specialists with advanced but complementary skills outperform two generalists with intermediate but overlapping skills.

Division of labor allows sophistication in processes, which can increase efficiency.

The downside is, the job pool is more limited (both for employers and for employees). You need specific employees/positions.

A startup might not afford such specialization. For instance, if the finances only afford 3 people on payroll, you're not going to find a job working on a 10th of the pipeline, even with 20x efficiency compared to a generalist doing half of the pipeline with 2x efficiency.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour

Post reply on HN