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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?

#81

Post by oblib »

I was in my early 20s talking with a friend who was at least twice my age. I was bitching about a guy who'd look at the work I was doing who really didn't know squat about it and start telling me how I should be doing it.

After listening to me for a bit he quietly said "Well, you can learn something from everyone if you focus on that."

I spent a couple days pondering that. At first I tried dismissing it because he wasn't there when the guy I was whining about was blabbering on and on, and he didn't know the guy, but it kept bugging me and after a few more days it occurred to me that if he was right I'd been missing out.

Just a few days later the guy I was whining about came by again and looked at the work I was doing told me he knew a guy who could do most of that for me and it wouldn't cost as much and I could get it done a lot faster. So I went and talked to the guy, and sure enough he could do it, and do it faster and better, and it cost me a lot less.

I ended up making a lot more money on that work, and the company I was doing it for was thrilled with the changes. And since then I've focused what I can learn from others, even those who tend to annoy me.

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

#82

Post by netsharc »

nicbou wrote: post #78

In college, meeting someone that was better than me by every conceivable metric. You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category. Perfect grades, involved in many communities, and generally pleasant to be around. There was no caveat, no excuse. Dude just straight up rocked. I have met more people like that while travelling. I felt badass riding my moto…

But why does it have to be a competition, of thinking "I have to be the best at X, if someone else is better, I feel unworthy.".

I ask rhetorically, that sentence probably describes me more than my impression of you from 3 paragraphs.

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

#83

Post by hu3 »

Learning that some folks can produce so much value with crappy code.

I've seen entire teams burn so much money by overcomplicating projects. Bikesheding about how to implement DDD, Hexagonal Architecture, design patterns, complex queues that would maybe one day be required if the company scaled 1000x, unnecessary eventual consistency that required so much machinery and man hours to keep data integrity under control. Some of these projects were so late in their deadlines that had to be cancelled.

And then I've seen one man projects copy pasting spaghetti code around like there's no tomorrow that had a working system within 1/10th of the budget.

Now I admire those who can just produce value without worrying too much about what's under the hood. Very important mindset for most startups. And a very humbling realization.

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

#84

Post by ungawatkt »

Hitting a semester in college where I just couldn't keep up the way I was used to (A's and B's by default). It was the first time I had to manage my workload and purposefully do a worse job on things (so I had time for everything) to just get C's. It was definitely easier to learn those skills in college than in the workplace.

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

#86

Post by roncesvalles »

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…

Probably more of a humbling moment for the CEO. They just demo'd something without both conferring with the devs and doing a practice-run themselves?

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

#87

Post by borski »

riehwvfbk wrote: post #69
daymanstep wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question and genuinely curious: what is difficult about showing up on time?

Untreated ADHD can make this really really really hard. And the worst part is: nobody will understand because it is not hard for most people, so everyone assumes that being late is a character issue. To understand how hard it is, imagine that you have periodic blackouts during which you completely forget not only that you need to be on time for work, but that work is a thing that exists in this universe. You cannot c…

Precisely. You can work on this with techniques and coping mechanisms (and sometimes medication) but it’s a constant struggle.

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

#88

Post by adrianmonk »

dusted wrote: post #80
stevesearer wrote: post #10

I learned way into my adult life that I could just turn the swivel hook/latch to quickly unwind the cord on a vacuum cleaner. Before that moment I would manually unwind the cord just like I would wind it up. To make it worse, I even remember wondering why the swivel hook was there thinking it was poor design.

Wait what ? I've seen two different "systems", one where you do a quick pull on the cord and it spins back up, and one where there's a "roll up" button on the machine which winds up the cord, but I've never heard of anything you can do to make the unrolling easier ? Video ? Link? What is this magic you talk of ?

> it spins

You're thinking of a vacuum cord that automatically winds onto a spring-loaded reel, commonly seen on canister vacuums.

They're talking about an upright vacuum where you manually wrap the cord around two hooks. One of the hooks can be rotated so that it no longer keeps the cord in place.

Look at the two black hooks in front of the yellow cord in this picture:

https://f.media-amazon.com/images/I/61XbxqH6%2BQL._SP523,128...

Note that the bottom one can be rotated upward. The entire cord can then be removed from the machine in one motion.

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

#89

Post by bicx »

hu3 wrote: post #83

Learning that some folks can produce so much value with crappy code. I've seen entire teams burn so much money by overcomplicating projects. Bikesheding about how to implement DDD, Hexagonal Architecture, design patterns, complex queues that would maybe one day be required if the company scaled 1000x, unnecessary eventual consistency that required so much machinery and man hours to keep data integrity under control.…

My way of planning and writing software shifted a good bit after I went from working at a mid-size tech company to working for myself. Suddenly I cared very much about how long it took to reach a functional product and very little about developing sophisticated architectures.
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