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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)

#21

Post by voxl »

atomicnature wrote: post #10

I'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. Figure…

How do you not cringe at a comment that so matter-of-factly states that our modern researchers all have this assumed negative propensity that somehow the wisend researchers, thinkers, and leaders of the past did not have.

You must be speaking of personal experience, because otherwise your comment is completely ridiculous. But if you are, you certainly have no personal experience with historical figures. So how can you judge a day-to-day interaction with the greatest hits of someone dead?

Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)

#22

Post by iteria »

robertlagrant wrote: post #4

It'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 o…

Half my career has been in HealthTech. I've found the problem to be interesting just because of the constraints. I've never had to use math and care about big O notation so much as when I needed something to run on these potato computers they had.

Beyond the technical constraints, there's just the domain itself. I've focused my efforts in this domain of just digitizing paper processes. There's so much to know from a regulation standpoint and a quirky middle man chain standpoint.

Some of my proudest accomplishments in my career is just standing anything up that replaces paper even partially. I've been praised many times for just making something that works after so many have failed. None of what I did was technical amazing. A lot of what I did was just doing a lot of reading and talking to people and I'm amazed how many engineers weren't doing that.

Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)

#23

Post by SiempreViernes »

atomicnature wrote: post #17
cableshaft wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Figures like Pythagoras, Newton, Descartes, Archytas, and various Indian philosophers, such as Shankaracharya, strongly favored simplicity. Easy to favor simplicity when the basics in your field hasn't been fully mapped out yet. Much harder to make a name for yourself when pretty much all the low-hanging (i.e. simple) fruit has been claimed already by people in the past. Most people probably feel they don't have mu…

What about Rickover? He was implementing nuclear energy to practical applications. You read Rickover's doing a job ( https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm ), he emphasizes simpler concepts such as responsibility and individual initiative to drive complex technical projects. I've shown these ideas to many so-called well-educated college graduates, and they don't warm up to it. They say "processes" > "individual initiati…

Building the first naval reactors ever seems like the very epitome of working in a immature field?

Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)

#24

Post by atomicnature »

voxl wrote: post #21
atomicnature wrote: post #10

I'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. Figure…

How do you not cringe at a comment that so matter-of-factly states that our modern researchers all have this assumed negative propensity that somehow the wisend researchers, thinkers, and leaders of the past did not have. You must be speaking of personal experience, because otherwise your comment is completely ridiculous. But if you are, you certainly have no personal experience with historical figures. So how can yo…

Top modern researchers/practitioners do seem to value simplicity heavily, but can't say the same for most. The propensity for misuse of abstraction/models/data/theories is pretty high from what I've seen. That's my view. You are free to disagree!

PS: It is always better to rely on older sources for illustrations, because they have lived their life fully and you have documentation of their lives + effects of their efforts. It is not a good idea to rely on living people to illustrate principles.

Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)

#25

Post by Sirenos »

The author says to "work on boring problems" but I think what it really boils down to is knowing why you are solving a problem. Just picking a problem depending on how hard or easy it seems is a research mindset. Of course it doesn't make sense to apply that same mindset to more business-oriented problems (unless the business itself is research)!

Both research and business related problems are interesting. You don't have to swing between two extremes every time you have an epiphany.

Just my two cents. Nice article!

Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)

#26

Post by coldtea »

alkonaut wrote: post #20

I like working on complex problems. But I like making simple solutions. And making those is often hard . So you might say I like hard problems. > I could try to solve an easy problem as quickly as possible The "solve X as quickly as possible" is now the problem. Not just solve X. I And that sounds like a hard (therefore interesting) problem!

If X is an easy problem, solving it "as quickly as possible" would be easy too.

The combination wont magically become a "hard problem", except if we take "as quickly as possible" to mean achieving some optimal solving time, as opposed to just casually meaning "without adding stupid bloat and by doing a KISS solution".

Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)

#27

Post by atomicnature »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #23
atomicnature wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Rickover? He was implementing nuclear energy to practical applications. You read Rickover's doing a job ( https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm ), he emphasizes simpler concepts such as responsibility and individual initiative to drive complex technical projects. I've shown these ideas to many so-called well-educated college graduates, and they don't warm up to it. They say "processes" > "individual initiati…

Building the first naval reactors ever seems like the very epitome of working in a immature field?

The principle of responsibility and individual initiative - applies even today. The challenge is in different form today, there are new immature fields, but that doesn't make having simpler organising concepts outdated.

Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)

#28

Post by dacryn »

coldtea wrote: post #26
alkonaut wrote: post #20

I like working on complex problems. But I like making simple solutions. And making those is often hard . So you might say I like hard problems. > I could try to solve an easy problem as quickly as possible The "solve X as quickly as possible" is now the problem. Not just solve X. I And that sounds like a hard (therefore interesting) problem!

If X is an easy problem, solving it "as quickly as possible" would be easy too. The combination wont magically become a "hard problem", except if we take "as quickly as possible" to mean achieving some optimal solving time, as opposed to just casually meaning "without adding stupid bloat and by doing a KISS solution".

> If X is an easy problem, solving it "as quickly as possible" would be easy too.

Hard disagree with this one.

Summing all numbers from 1 to 100 is easy, summing 1 to a million is also easy, just time consuming. 1+2+3+4....

Coming up with (n*(1+n))/2 is not.

Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)

#29

Post by theclansman »

I'll try to apply this as I've been battling the problem of my job being too easy and never applying what I learnt in school.

There were so many interesting problems and theories in school that you never see as a regular developer, often I think that I have a job that any person could do with a few months of training (does this make me a narcissist? Is the complain here just that my job is unglamorous or is wasting your skills a legit concern?). I guess I haven't matured enough, or maybe I'm not really sold into the impact my company is making.

Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)

#30

Post by sokoloff »

theclansman wrote: post #29

I'll try to apply this as I've been battling the problem of my job being too easy and never applying what I learnt in school. There were so many interesting problems and theories in school that you never see as a regular developer, often I think that I have a job that any person could do with a few months of training (does this make me a narcissist? Is the complain here just that my job is unglamorous or is wasting y…

I also sometimes think most people could train to be an entry-level dev over a summer. Yet that seems demonstrably wrong.

I wonder if it’s similar to how a musician can’t comprehend how I can barely hear a beat.

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