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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?

#411

Post by VBprogrammer »

lyu07282 wrote: post #389
rcbdev wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ingenieurskonsu…

Yet almost every major piece of software or idea started in California and almost nothing noteworthy in the space started in Austria. I think that tells us something about the real value of a piece of paper granting you the right to call yourself an "engineer".

I'm sure there are many things which make this such an unfair comparison that it's not worth making. If there was a firehose of money spraying all over Austria as a result of being the worlds reserve currency I'm sure the shoe would be on the other foot.

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

#412

Post by changexd »

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.

>> I want a life I appreciate. If there’s anything to win it’s the game of having a good time.

Thank you for this, I'm currently getting stuck seeing many people here developing their kickass project and feel like if I am not doing this kind of thing in my free time, I am not a valid engineer, this kind of pressure slowly eats out my passion, perhaps it's okay that I don't feel like doing this at them moment, I still love my job and technology, I just want to do something else in my free time that's all.

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

#413

Post by koliber »

I joined a financial firm that was building a trading system. This was about 15 years ago. The volume was not small.

Their DB model was atrocious. I looked at their wide tables, with tons of columns, not one FK in sight. It was horrible and broke every single rule I've learned in DB design theory, and in practice. It was so bad that I was considering leaving.

Luckily I did not leave. With time, I learned how the system worked. I made assumptions about how they used the DB which were not correct. It was not really used as a relational database. It was used as a journal of transactions that served as a backup to a system that actually held everything in RAM. Everything worked beautifully together. The system was fast and robust.

I learned a lot at that job. Most importantly, I learned not to pass judgement too quickly.

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

#414

Post by INTPenis »

Sooo many. I can't even pick one.

I'll pick the one that did the most damage.

We had a service window to do some sort of migration involving a DB, very late at night. I had been up all day working, short walk, dinner, then around 11pm this service window started.

My eyelids were heavy, I almost fell asleep in the video call. I should have admitted this, we could have re-scheduled.

I ended up doing a bash for loop that dropped every single table in a production database, and this data was sometimes queried by law enforcement so we had a legal requirement to keep it for 6 months.

We could restore a backup but there was data missing, so for 6 months we prayed no one would request the missing date ranges.

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

#415

Post by JR1427 »

massysett wrote: post #111
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…

> You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category. This is literally impossible. A person cannot be Einstein and Picasso at the same time. A person cannot be Steve Jobs and Pope Francis at the same time. We all have limited time in life, and it is only possible to excel in one thing by focusing on it and, as a result, not focusing on something else. Th…

It's fascinating that this topic has riled so many people!

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

#416

Post by bionhoward »

At one time in my life I thought myself crazy by overthinking mathematics, and I began to hallucinate and hear voices and see huge wars happening in front of my eyes off in the distance, it all added up to a delusion Earth was in Hell. (as an atheist/agnostic it pains me to write that) In my insanity I did things I hate having done and wound up in jail. While I was in jail, I wished I had known to ignore the voices and visions, to do nothing, say nothing, just think about it and think about it, and be a “normie.”

The trigger for all of it had something to do with thinking about the opposite word to each word in a sentence. After tinkering with that for a while, my brain started to automatically invert the incoming words. Someone would say, “Good Morning” and my mind would translate it into “Bad Evening” as if everyone was saying the complement of what they actually said. Needless to say, that was a big factor in me believing the whole world had been sucked into Hell. I thought I was being mind controlled.

Another big aspect of it was this idea everything was connected to everything else. Which isn’t necessarily wrong, but in the context of thinking you’re in hell, that turns everything guilty by association in a sense.

I know it was all a delusion, and it was such a complete nightmare and made me the opposite of how I think of myself, not as an intelligent citizen who loves life and STEM, but as a psycho locked naked in solitary for months who thought everyone else was possessed.

Probably wrecked my life, but at least I’m out now and sane and able to enjoy life with family and friends again.

If you or someone you know goes “crazy,” a plan in place in advance could save you/them, because the system is often too slow to help you if you wait until you have a problem, or because you won’t trust the system when you’re crazy, because you think it’s bad somehow when you’re in that mind state.

Thus, my most hard-earned learning is to never take your own mental health and sanity for granted, and have a mental health plan for if you do experience psychosis. Never let insanity drive you to do anything you’ll regret.

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

#417

Post by tgv »

jasonkester wrote: post #275

I lived in Pamplona, Spain for a year, back before my Spanish was particularly good. It was a pretty amazing place, with all its narrow cobbled alleys and small shops. They had a particular style of bread in a few of the shops, kind of a rustic baguette with pointy ends, that I never could find the name of. I'd always have to point and say "that one", which always felt awkward. Worse, my Spanish wasn't yet good enoug…

I remember the first time going to the bakery in Spain on my own. I spoke some Spanish. I was pretty happy with the level I had reached in a short time, and I could definitely say "dos barras de pan integral, por favor". The shop assistent put them on the counter and then said "go mah?" (). That made me realize there was a lot to learn.

() "Algo más?" ("anything else?"), but that's what it sounds like in the local dialect.

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

#418

Post by shafyy »

rcbdev wrote: post #363
icelancer wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ingenieurskonsu…

Here's a story for you: I was born and raised in Switzerland, but I live in Germany now. When I first moved here, I was working as a freelancer and needed to register as a sole entrepreneur (Einzelunternehmen, one of the legal entity forms here).

Now, there are several types of taxes you pay in Germany based on your income. One of them is the income tax, the other is called Gewerbesteuer (maybe best translated as "commmercial tax) - and the Gewerbesteuer can be significant (something like 12% of your income). Many freelancers are exempt from the Gewerbesteuer, and so are software engineers. However, I learned that you only qualify as a software engineer if you have actually studied software engineering or a closely related field. I had studied business administration. I tried to explain to them that I have been working as a software developer for over 10 years, literally doing the same job as somebody who had studied software engineering - to no avail. They woulnd't exempt me from the Gewerbesteuer.

I'm not claiming that I'm an "engineer" or that my computer science fundamentals are as good as somebody who studied computer science, but the tax exemption shouldn't be on some bureaucratic difference like what you studied a decade ago, rather on what kind of job you're doing.

Welcome to Germany!

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

#419

Post by raddan »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #71

I don't know if it was humbling per se, but in the spirit of some of the contributions in the thread, I once knocked over a cup of coffee into the power strip behind my desk, blowing a fuse that blacked out half the office. This was a company where the devs were all on workstations, so generously there was at least a few hundred hours of work that were lost.

I made a much worse mistake once. We wanted to use rsync to snapshot one of our file servers every evening because the tape backups we did took a long time and could only run them weekly. My boss asked me to develop an rsync script.

So I sat at my desk and after reading the man page a bit, I wrote a script and kicked it off as a test. It seemed to be humming along, so I turned my attention to other tasks.

While I was doing that, one of our users came to my desk and said “hey, the file I am working on just disappeared.” I said OK, I’ll be over to look in a minute. A few minutes later, another person came over and said the same thing, and my reply was the same. OK, I said, I’ll come check it out in a minute. When the third person came by, I started getting the nagging suspicion that something I did was the cause. When I looked at the log of my running script, I had a realization that filled me with utter horror. I had gotten the arguments to rsync backwards. Instead pf the source being the file server disk, I used the blank disk, and the target was the file server. Worse, I had used the —delete flag. As a result, rsync was valiantly trying to sync the disks by deleting all the files on the server.

An because the last backup had been a tape backup nearly a week ago, I lost the company nearly a week’s worth of work. After the company president sent our hundred or so employees home for the day “so that IT could fix the problem” she called me into her office. I was sure she was going to fire me. All she said was “you’re not going to make that mistake again?” Yes. That mistake and many others like it. I learned a lot that day.

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

#420

Post by shafyy »

stef25 wrote: post #403
just-tom wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I call myself a developer. I'm not that good of a programmer, but quite resourceful as a developer.

Only reason I sometimes say I'm a programmer is because developer sounds like I work for an NGO

Yeah, developer is much more ambiguous. Could also be a real estate developer, or a business developer (fancy word for "sales").
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