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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?

#431

Post by brazzy »

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.

> Being great only matters if you need external validation.

Humans are social creatures. Seeking external validation is, to a certain degree, normal and healthy.

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

#432

Post by marginalia_nu »

raddan wrote: post #419
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…

> I was sure she was going to fire me

It's a really counter-productive policy to fire people over stuff like this. It breeds a culture where employees hide their mistakes, which can cause a lot more harm than the mistakes themselves. Like repeated negligence, sure, but one-time fuckups, never.

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

#433

Post by Maro »

I've had a full-time job as a Software Engineer (later Data Engineer / Data Science), since I was 23 years old. I've done all sorts of programming, worked in academia, done my own startup (Scalien), worked at medium-sized successful SaaS (Prezi). At Prezi, I was promoted to a Director. I thought I'm the shit.

Then, at age 36, I got a job at Facebook [as in IC]. The first couple of months were the most humbling time in my working life. Before, I always felt I'm in the upper percentiles of whatever group I was part of it. At Facebook, I never felt like that --- I felt like I'm the median. Any problem I've seen in my previous jobs (how to manage large code bases, how to write good code, what does a good ETL system look like, how to be data-driven), I realized that I was at "version 3.0" of that space, but Facebook was on "version 15.0". Whatever I knew to be the best approach, it was evident that the 1000s of smart people who work(ed) there, were well past that stage, they passed that stage 5+ years ago.

Ever since then I always recommend people to interview for Big Tech companies if they get a chance, and do a stint. There's so much to learn from the collective wisdom that 1000s of engineers (and PMs and DSs and..) have accumulated.

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

#435

Post by lukas099 »

itronitron wrote: post #428
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.

To extend that further, most professional painters think of themselves as sanders.

Why?

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

#436

Post by amadeuspagel »

martinald wrote: post #189
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.

Haha, tell me about it. When I was first learning PHP as a teenager I also had similar problems. I did not know about SQL JOINs for at least a couple of years; which meant database querying was... overcomplicated to say the least. The other epiphany I had was when I started to realise HTTP was just a request string getting parsed. Given I had used FTP and web servers like Apache previously for HTML and files, I was c…

> The other epiphany I had was when I started to realise HTTP was just a request string getting parsed.

I've never thought of it like this, but I didn't understand for a long time that a webserver was just a function that run with the request as an argument.

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

#437

Post by donatj »

My company started making absolutely perplexing decisions. We were bifurcating everything, in a way that seemed like was set to double our workload for a lot of things.

It was under the guise of "being more efficient by having fully independently operating departments." I was pretty vocally opposed to the whole thing, complaining to anyone who would listen, right up until it came out that our department had been sold to another company.

They'd been basically duplicating us so they could sell us without interruption.

It's now many years later and I am frankly still embarrassed by what a fuss I made over something when I didn't actually understand what was happening. I really wish one of the higher ups I'd complained to would have just taken me aside and said "there's something going on, it'll make sense when it's done" or something but I understand that they probably couldn't.

I learned that when what your company is doing makes zero sense, there's probably something going on below the surface other than multiple levels of questionable decisions. This has since proven true more than a few times, and I am far less reactionary and far more suspicious.

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

#439

Post by ordu »

bee_rider wrote: post #120
koeng wrote: post #79

I’m learning swing dancing. It’s been humbling. It’s humbling because all my life, I’ve been really good at technology - I specialize in biotechnology and manipulating DNA, but am also fluent in programming (mainly python, go, lua) and am able to build hardware - even helped run a robotics startup for a while. Anything related to technology and science comes easily and naturally to me. This isn’t to brag, but just a…

I tried to learn to dance (hated it). It is a bit of a weird thing though, there as social events where people feel like it is OK to really try and pressure people into dancing. It is really annoying.

Yeah, I hate it. I now can say "no" in such a way, that people immediately stop trying to make me dance, but when I was younger, it was really annoying.

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

#440

Post by lrm242 »

e4325f wrote: post #385
bloomingeek wrote: post #225

In 1993 I was interviewed for an operating job in a power plant for a major airline, assigned to their data center. At my current job, I was working in a high rise office building with sixty-six floors. The operating system computer was a JC8520, which was running a version of MS-DOS. All commands had to be typed in correctly or nothing would happen. While operating the plant, several commands had to be entered every…

I was once asked about Slack, fortunately they were already a colleague

Man I really hope other people get this one, because it is awesome.
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