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Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

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Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#51

Post by smeej »

kennu wrote: post #40

Back when cloud computing was mostly for early adopters, I used to work on many customer projects at the same time, or in quick succession, in an architect/developer role. It was great as long as the projects worked out as planned and I could deliver a working system in a few weeks or months and move on to the next project. It was easy to become a little overconfident until I faced unexpected difficulties in some pro…

I've mostly been on the "user" end of buggy internal company code. It's always a scary day when the interns start, because we finally have someone who will have the time to "fix" the bugs in the code--but half of them we have been using off-label as "features" to solve other problems.

Whenever I start at a new company, I make sure to ask not just what breaks the system, but how the system breaks when it breaks. One person's broken pot is another person's cutting tool!

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#53

Post by smeej »

brailsafe wrote: post #36

Idk what my most humbling moment would be, but there's been a few. I've spent the majority of my career looking for wook rather than doing work, and have lost at least 7 jobs in the first 12 years for one reason or another. This is going on the 3rd time I've spent more than a year without working at all in any job. It never gets easier, and each time I get to spend a ton of time reflecting on how things went and what…

I think you need to try working in tiny startups, if any of your skills would make that work. There, gaps in resumes and random ends to employment are expected. Nobody asks about mine, and I end up taking a full year off every 4-5 years whether I want to or not (but I usually do want to).

No, my normie friends don't get it at all, and everyone ALWAYS asks me "how the job search is going" even when I've told them every week for 6 months that I'm not trying to get a job, but trying to hold myself to their norms was a lost cause for me anyway.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#54

Post by jv22222 »

I was asked by a pro. documentary maker (who I met on the plane flying in to London) to get some B role for a G&R concert he was filming (with his spare video camera).

I was given the camera and sent in to the mosh pit to film from that perspective. After the show I gave the camera back to him. He said, "where's the footage?"

I had been "filming" looking through the view finder, but I had forgotten to press record.

Gutted.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#55

Post by mandmandam »

circlefavshape wrote: post #21

Not my own story, but my mother's, told to me on the occasion of my 50th birthday ... My parents met in their early 20s through another couple, Des (flatmate of my father's) and Mary (schoolmate of my mother's). Des had a sore hip, and Mary's mother was a "bonesetter" (a kind of folk healer) so came to the men's flat to see him. "Seeing him" involved Des getting some kind of vigorous massage in the bedroom, and then…

> Dragon’s blood is a plant resin that may help with a variety of health concerns, including skin ulcers and diarrhea.

> Dragon’s blood is a natural plant resin. It’s dark red in color, which is part of what gives dragon’s blood its name.

> The resin is extracted from many different tropical tree species commonly called dragon trees. These may come from the plant groups Croton, Pterocarpus, Daemonorops, or Dracaena.

> The plant resin has been used for thousands of years for distinct purposes. There are records of its use among the ancient Greeks and Romans and in India, China, and the Middle East.

- https://www.healthline.com/health/dragons-blood

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#56

Post by punkspider »

rpgwaiter wrote: post #44

I went from hacky hobbyist programmer to working on core business logic for a startup that eventually the whole company would rely on. I was mostly a one-person team at the company, and I kept a lot of my bad unscalable tendencies from making small fun projects. No formal testing, very little documentation, hundreds of “TODOs”, breaking API changes without really telling anyone, no QA process, no monitoring/reporting…

This hits a little too close to home right now. Only a week ago have I felt that I did a few things to actually make an impact.

And this only because it seems that the CEO noticed I can spin up prototypes to validate ideas before passing them to the actual devs.

I've worked with him for a total of 3 years however, and during that time, most of the time I felt like I was tinkering without making a real difference.

The only time that a bigger project was implemented that I had the lead on felt like a fluke and it was after probably 6 months of working on it.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#57

Post by kzrdude »

fire_lake wrote: post #45
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #42

Being 15 and unable to grasp the concept of an array whilst wishing I could somehow use a variable to escape my at the time a1, a2, … a11 variable naming convention.

A formative experience for me was learning to program and asking a peer “how I do lots of variables but I don’t know which one I need” - I had none of the terms to even ask for what I needed.

That phrasing of the question is not bad at all, just needs an open minded person to answer it

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#59

Post by formerly_proven »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #24

From 2011-2012 was Senior intelligence officer for Anderson Air Force Base, Guam, which is one of the most strategic bases in the United States department of Defense. As SIO you are statutorily responsible for the joint worldwide intelligence, communication system (JWICS), maintenance, security, growth, interruptibility, etc… in addition to managing all Perssec for SCI holders, and maintaining control, security and f…

While it's an interesting story, I don't think this Ask HN was meant as a "what's your greatest weakness" job interview question.
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