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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?

#361

Post by eru »

erhaetherth wrote: post #300
JohnMakin wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned this lesson when working on very fast paced projects with way fewer developer resources than needed. to ship a feature on time, shortcuts in quality have to be made, but you learn to make the shortcuts in a way that are easier to go back and clean up later. I became very fond of #TODO ‘s.

My manager gave me gruff the other day for adding a TODO that I had no intention of ever doing. TODOs are like a get out of jail free card. Don't want to do something the reviewer is likely going to call out? Just add a TODO.

That's why some people insists on having a name with each TODO, and some even want a name and a date.

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

#363

Post by rcbdev »

icelancer wrote: post #259
projectileboy wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a good friend of mine often says: We work in a field of people who envision themselves as artists, when all that is wanted are painters.

No one wants to be a "programmer." They'd rather be called "engineers." With none of the licensure, mandatory education, and so forth. But the world needs programmers and technicians for most of the work we have to do. I do comparably little "engineering" and the little I have done that qualifies for such a statement I recall. Majority of the work is programming and technician work. Nothing wrong with that.

Maybe not in the U.S. but in Europe, Software Engineering is often a field of engineering where one can get licensed.

i.e. in Austria many IT techs and devs are called (at the doctor's office or in formal settings) "Mr. Engineer" ("Herr Ingenieur") if they fulfill some formal criteria and get licensed. A further qualification is becoming a federally certified civil technician for IT (Ziviltechniker or Ingenieurskonsulent) - also something that public sector contracts sometimes mandate.

Software around the world is engineered - it just often isn't in California.

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

#364

Post by jwilk »

chrisbrauns wrote: post #136
mablopoule wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't remember where I saw this quote, but... "It's okay to half-ass something, when all you need is half an ass". EDIT: Totally agree about the 'important mindest for startup', I had a similar eye-opening experience, working in a startup with 'cowboy' code that was actually quite good, but I had to unlearn a bit of stuff I read as a junior/mid-level developper. It was code that was well-architected, had well-conci…

It was Gary Bernhardt in this talk: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sCZJblyT_XM

More Gary's talks:

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks

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

#366

Post by eru »

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…

I met people like that. I had the pleasure of later overtaking some of them in terms of (some) achievements.

Now I'm sometimes on the other side. At least I talked with some friends that confided that impression they had of me. It feels weird. (Especially because I am also very aware of areas where I absolutely suck. But they just hadn't come up with those friends or co-workers before.)

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

#367

Post by eru »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #199
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…

Being great only matters if you need external validation. I want a life I appreciate. If there’s anything to win it’s the game of having a good time. All of the suffering people impose on themselves, on their children, on their society, to be great and envied is wasted. Be successful as a means to be happy and have excess to share with others.

Eh, some (friendly) competition is fine. Some people enjoy competing and it's (part of) their idea of a good time.

If you don't want to compete, that's also fine.

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

#368

Post by mierz00 »

tempie2024 wrote: post #216
mr-wendel wrote: post #187

Caught a senior sysadmin in a small company using a proxy on our infrastructure to hide misc web browsing from oversight. The logs were the give-away. It was typical misc IT/nerd news stuff... the kind of thing a different company culture (which did come later) would actually encourage. I was sure the right thing to do was to report it to the CEO (there wasn't anyone else higher in the hierarchy to consider) for cert…

That is a hard one. Best to report it I think.. but it is not clear cut in general. There would be times when going against your employer by blowing the whistle or covering up is the more moral thing to do. Deciding where that line is not simple and there is no guide.

Your values are the guide.

If your values are to report someone to win brownie points with your boss, it’s probably time to revisit them.

Another great guide is asking yourself what you’re trying to accomplish.

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

#369

Post by sevnin »

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.…

I have to kind of ask, maybe it's the design comitee that instead produces the sphagetti in that case? They are trying to commit themselves into decisions without much knowledge about the problem they are solving. I understand this is the reality of business and so on but let's not imply that this is good software design. The basic operation of abstraction (as this vague magical thing which creates concepts) is something that has to have something to abstract from. When we do abstraction in a bubble, not informed by the problem - like the design comitee does. What we get is abstractions made from abstractions: foundation less non-sense. Maybe it's this spagetti monster, the rogue coder, the guy that actually tries to solve the problem - the real designer.

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

#370

Post by eru »

wruza wrote: post #318
brrrrrm wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve definitely met people whose stats are juiced. Probably not as good at scrolling tiktok as me tho

Then you see their feed one time and cry cause there’s no way to copy it to your account.

I seem to get way more interesting (and weird..) ads from Google than most of the people I know.

But maybe that's just because Google gives me things I find interesting?

It's stuff like a three story tall Diesel engine for a container ship. I'm not really in the market for that, but I would totally want to be someone who's casually in the market for that.

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