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Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

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Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#121

Post by lanstin »

dougmwne wrote: post #72
rco8786 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The proof is that a good coder spends about 10x as long thinking about it before actually committing any code. This seems antithetical to the post above yours. Or at least how I'm reading it. In bigger tech co's this looks a lot like massive design documents with a dozen reviewers, all giving enormous amounts of time and thought to the idea in the pursuit of "building it right". Design processes that can take weeks…

I would say analysis paralysis: no. Strategic thinking/designing: yes.

Take the time to distill it down to a powerful but small concept.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#123

Post by kqr »

Learn how to lead from any position. You don't need to be promoted to lead.

Do things like teaching and mentoring, build consensus around decisions, involve people in your thought process early, actively seek out feedback on your ideas, alleviate people's concerns, help out where you can, be empathetic, work freely with anyone in the organisation as needed, gather data to support your opinions.

You'll soon be at a hub in the informal "attention network" that truly decides who calls the shots. Handle it with care and use it for good.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#124

Post by npsimons »

exdsq wrote: post #107
warrenm wrote: post #99

You're way too over-focused on tech trivia in your list The biggest force multipliers what a friend described to me as a young teenager as "be an and" - don't just be a programmer, be a programmer and a lawyer Don't just be a welder, be a welder and a baker Don't just be an engineer, be an engineer and a writer Etc You may have heard Scott Adams call it a "talent stack" Same concept Be exposed to as many ideas as pos…

I love this idea. You don’t need to be at the top 1% of a field to do cool innovate stuff, just be good at two or three different fields and see what happens when you combine them. Currently going down this rabbit hole with computational archaeology and having a whale of a time :)

> just be good at two or three different fields and see what happens when you combine them.

"Jack of all trades, master of some." That's been my goal for most of my life.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#125

Post by lanstin »

hknapp wrote: post #23
dijit wrote: post #12

There are few productivity boosters greater than spending time learning the tools you use in and out. This goes for hotkeys in software all the way to quirks about a language.

Not only that, but spend time learning your tools as you use them. If you're like me, reading about a tool for four hours then trying to recall that information while using it is a wasted effort. You have to be continuously learning in increments over weeks, months, and maybe even years. Never stop learning.

Also standing behind people and watching them do stuff is good at showing you things ypu didn't know you didn't know.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#126

Post by breckenedge »

kqr wrote: post #104
replyifuagree wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Which isn't to say that technical knowledge doesn't matter, it truly does. But, the primary problem in the industry right now is that the majority of finished code generated by professionals goes unused. The amount of waste is staggering. Working on the right thing is way more than a 10x multiplier.

And it's not only about features that go unused, but also features that are used but only in support of workflows that improves nobody's life. Or functionality that's used but is a wildly inefficient version of what could have been.

I’m curious about what you’d consider concrete examples of these inefficient solutions? The biggest thing that comes to my mind are SPAs that don’t need to be SPAs.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#127

Post by softwarebeware »

giantg2 wrote: post #88
softwarebeware wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ Chances are, every time you used your credit card, filled a prescription or pumped gasoline, a calculus formula was used to calculate it.” https://study.com/academy/lesson/calculus-in-the-real-world....

Looks like a paywall. Yes, a calculus formula might have been used somewhere in that process, and was used by the finance person and dev. That doesn't mean I, or any other person, needed to know it. As a dev at a financial institution, I've never needed to implement calculus formulas. Most calculations and formulas I've dealt with are algebra and stats. These usually are just a matter of using standard libraries too.…

> Looks like a paywall.

That's odd. It loads up just fine for me with no paywall.

Check this out for more: https://allusesof.com/math/51-amazing-uses-of-calculus-in-re...

The point is that calculus is used to solve all sorts of problems. Sure, you can say "...not in my experience" but that's one experience and not representative. You just happen to a) not work in a realm where Calculus is used and/or b) work within that realm only on problems without Calculus.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#128

Post by irq-1 »

hermannj314 wrote: post #74

Can someone elaborate on how they use reg ex as a productivity boost? Do you use it for text transformation? How do you use it exactly? Do you use it as code itself or as a tool to help you explore/write code? I am a huge fan of Macros, I 100% understand their role in text transformation, but what problem does regex solve? I spend so much time trying to remember the correct syntax, it only ever works for me when solv…

Editing large amounts of data. Notepad++ supports (some) regex find and replace, and I use it often to clean large lists or reformat data.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#129

Post by lanstin »

giantg2 wrote: post #24

"Calculus for solving all sorts of problems." Is this really common? I know I'm not in a top tier job, so maybe they don't give dummies like me the hard problems, but I've never had to use calculus to solve a real world problem.

calculus is irreplaceable for understanding system dynamics. Every meta-stable computer system is an incarnate approximarion of some differential equations relating the different parts of the system and the way changes propagate from here to there. I don't often use numerical methods, but analysis of stability, classification of fixed point types, topological limits to what small changes to the system can do to the behavior do all come into play. The people enforcing backoff for retries, randomization or careful analysis of fatal vs. temp errors, are using those sorts of insights. while you can take ten years of industry experience to get a feel for these flows, you can also take a good DiffEq/Dynamic systems course and start out understanding the possible shapes at the start.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#130

Post by xiphias2 »

rco8786 wrote: post #46
noduerme wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the right answer. The proof is that a good coder spends about 10x as long thinking about it before actually committing any code. In a sentence: Be able to visualize the problem in your head first. The actual code, if it's elegant and succinct, is incidental.

> The proof is that a good coder spends about 10x as long thinking about it before actually committing any code. This seems antithetical to the post above yours. Or at least how I'm reading it. In bigger tech co's this looks a lot like massive design documents with a dozen reviewers, all giving enormous amounts of time and thought to the idea in the pursuit of "building it right". Design processes that can take weeks…

The fact that launching any kind of work in production in a big organization makes it even more important to just focus on tiny changes (sometimes a few lines of code) with huge benefits.

You can have bigger changes as proof of concept first, but select, properly design and launch the most important one.

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