You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)
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Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)
#2Absolutely true.
I do believe most engineers experience this maturing when they get access to leverage in the workplace, such as going from being an individual contributor to a leader or mentor.
Try sales for a while, and you will realise that no customer has a neatly defined problem for you to solve. They have real complex problems, which you may be able to shoehorn your general solution into. But even then, there is always an alternative solution for the customer which may be simpler or cheaper, such as just hiring an intern to do the job your software can do.
Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)
#3Interesting to hear about your perspective.
I’ve always been on the other side of the coin, programming has always been a means to and end, not an end itself.
Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)
#4It's true. Since starting in health tech, the areas of which are sometimes technically interesting, but not in a cutting edge sort of way, I feel a lot more motivated. Three women I know personally have used (and totally loved) the app we made for gestational diabetes, and half the NHS uses it to manage this type of patient, so the total number of people helped just keeps going up.
I think of it as something to put on my "life CV"; it might not be an astounding technical achievement, but I'll remember it and be glad I did it for my whole life.
Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)
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Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)
#6As I just said in another thread, “amateurs talk about effort, professional talk about impact”. Unravelling the puzzle of how impact happens is the hardest problem.
Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)
#7As I just said in another thread, “amateurs talk about effort, professional talk about impact”. Unravelling the puzzle of how impact happens is the hardest problem.
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Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)
#8this whole article reeks of privilege
Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)
#9> In school, if you pick an easy problem instead of a hard one, you lose leverage because your extra problem-solving ability goes to waste. But in real life, you can redirect it to prioritizing which problems to solve, or working more quickly, or building a machine that solves the problems for you.
I'm surprised that for once this kind of perspective is on HN. The world is absolutely full of low hanging fruit problems that need someone smarter than the junk you usually see. Nobody wants naive solutions, overabstraction, or premature optimization. The end user can definitely tell the difference even if they don't know how to say it.
Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)
#10I've always thought that people underestimate the mental acuity needed to find simple truths within complex systems and to use them to achieve useful results.
Especially in academia, many professors, who are wedded to particular models, go so far as to dismiss simplicity without sufficient consideration.
It was not always this way. Among the older philosophers, you can observe a strong affinity for simplicity. Figures like Pythagoras, Newton, Descartes, Archytas, and various Indian philosophers, such as Shankaracharya, strongly favored simplicity.
Even practical statesmen such as Han Fei, Lee Kuan Yew, Chanakya, and others were able to distill simple yet powerful truths from complex situations. This is central to leadership and the effective organization of human activities.
You can observe the same drive for simplicity in great engineering leaders like Rickover and Visveswaraya.
Given more time, I believe I could make a very strong case for the power of an affinity for simplicity and its correlation with greatness in any field of activity.
Simplicity is underrated (in practice).