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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?

#481

Post by underdeserver »

tictacttoe wrote: post #470
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.…

Having heard a variation of this comment many times, I keep waiting for an “aha” moment, where I see the light and abandon my obsession with minimalism and clean code. But at least in science roles it hasn’t happened yet. Rather, I keep seeing instances of bogus scientific conclusions which waste money for years before they are corrected. Being systematic, reproducible, and thorough is difficult, but it’s the only wa…

But that's just the point, for most problems most people have, you don't have to be scientific. If your invariants vary and it breaks 5% of the time that's fine and nothing bad happens.

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

#482

Post by mdavid626 »

dehrmann wrote: post #294
malkosta wrote: post #115

When I was working in a queue feature (for example to buy tailor swift ticket), and was proud of my complicated real-time solution using websockets and CRDTs...then a more experienced guy came, rearchitected in a much simpler way using just the DB with long-polling, not real real-time (but who cares), and it ended up simpler to deal with network splits or crashes. Learned the hard way you can never rely on the networ…

People often forget that you have to poll to handle lost network connections, IP changes, etc., so there isn't always a real-world win to web sockets.

How about reconnecting the websocket from the client?

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

#483

Post by michaelt »

kaba0 wrote: post #231
tempie2024 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would it be good to report it? Depending on what “infrastructure” stands for here, unless it is something absolutely unwise security-wise, why?

When I was young, I thought that being a man of my word meant that, as I'd given my employer my word that I would follow their security policy, I should follow it to the letter - for example, never holding the door open, even for a colleague I'd worked alongside for a long time.

And I thought that petty rulebreaking was a corrosive force, something that would snowball into bigger problems down the road. As a man of honour I would work precisely my contracted hours, never a minute less, I would consider it shameful if someone so much as stole a pen from the office. The rest of the team is heading to the pub at 4pm after a lengthy day of planning meetings? Sorry guys, I don't finish until 5:30pm.

Later in my career I chilled out a lot, and learned that the actual rules are often different (and a lot more nuanced) than the written rules. And that if you've worked with a guy for a decade you can, in fact, hold the door open for him and the sky won't fall down.

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

#484

Post by notepad0x90 »

I thought I could pass the OSCP with only two weeks of study. I could not. I abandoned it for over a year, and took my time (almost 90 days) practicing and doing every lab/challenge, then I passed it and did quite good on it. But that's not all, it turns out the OSCP is pretty entry-level and I had only barely just began my journey :)

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

#485

Post by randomdata »

Buttons840 wrote: post #243
randomdata wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> since it had no unit test But aren't unit tests the half-assed solution? They are a wonderful help if you want to deliver something fast , but if you had more time you'd probably do something else.

It doesn't get said enough that unit-tests are not the ultimate in good code. There's a lot of shitty code with unit-tests, and there's a lot of really good code with no tests.

That's true, but a codebase without unit tests is apt to be deemed poor quality by professionals due to the time factor. Being able to release fast is an important quality of business software. Professionals don't look for perfect artistry, they want to see painter's tape in the right places to get the job done efficiently.

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

#486

Post by jakedata »

Humbling moments were a recurring theme in my first 10 years of employment. I was hired out of college with an Environmental Science degree to run the computer systems of a software startup. I was a computer hobbyist to be sure but had no formal training. My only other qualification was that I was willing to work for almost literal peanuts. I stuck with that company for 5 years because they were willing to let me figure things out on the fly, since that's what everyone else was doing too. I had to teach myself networking, then TCP-IP, frame relay, T1, ISDN and provided both internal and external customer support. I worked with beta versions of Windows NT and MacOS, and even had a close call with AS-400.

When it became clear that the company did not have a bright future I took all my skills over to a local brokerage that had just had an internal IT meltdown. It was like starting all over again on day one of my first job.

My most humbling moment turns out to have been political. At the brokerage I was asked if I wanted to be the IT Manager. I declined because I didn't feel I had the experience. This planted the seeds of my departure 5 years later as the hack they brought into the department felt increasingly threatened by my success and skills. You can't ignore office politics.

The second moment was more of a huge missed opportunity. One of the board members of the startup found out I was leaving and offered me a role at his other company. Honestly I didn't realize at the time what a compliment that actually was. I would have been one of the earliest hires of a major firm that is still going strong decades later. I learned to not conflate "niceness" with business acumen. This person had his own money on the line at our startup and had every right to press people on their success or lack thereof. I just thought he was a jerk at the time.

"Good judgement comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgement."

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

#487

Post by PUSH_AX »

filleduchaos wrote: post #408
PUSH_AX wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s fair to diminish sports because you personally suffered injuries or long term damage, there are only a handful of sports that carry risks of that severity, where most people will probably get hurt after some time. Sitting down all day wrecks everyones body indiscriminately unless they are undoing the damage every day.

How is it diminishing sports to point out that they cause a hell of a lot more wear and tear (and involve a greater risk of injury) than sitting down for eight hours (for any reason) does? And no, unless you are counting things like chess as a sport (and/or conflating exercise with sports ), the vast majority of sports carry incredible risk of both minor and major injury compared to a sedentary lifestyle. Here[0] is…

100% of people who sit down for years will suffer damage that is very difficult to reverse. Unless they are proactive in counteracting.

People don’t talk about soccer in this light because soccer players after retirement don’t have severe hip and glute mobility issues, they can also walk for more than 20 minutes without struggling. Are some of them dinged up? Yes. Some.

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

#488

Post by readenough »

In the early 90's I was visiting an industrial plant that had, in one building, a giant dehumidifier that was necessary for their process. My field work took me to the roof of that building. Unrelated to what I was working on, I saw an air conditioner on the roof whose condensate line had become disconnected. Instead of the condensate flowing through a PVC pipe and into a drain at the edge of the building, the condensate was pooling on the roof in a broad shallow pond. Being a good guy, I tapped the PVC pipe back together the get the water flowing like it should have been.

The next morning I went back into the dehumidifier building and saw that it was raining inside the building. People were moving around in a very agitated state. In a panic, I ran up the stairs to the roof and kicked apart the PVC pipe that I had joined the day before. Water began to stream out, but I got away from there fast and went back downstairs. A few minutes later, a member of the maintenance crew came in. He looked at the rain and immediately dashed upstairs.

He came down a minute later shaking his head. I didn't confess. I only hope that they didn't have enormously expensive damage, but I don't really know. One thing is for sure. I am very cautious about volunteering to help out without first checking with the plant personnel.

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

#489

Post by Jakob »

nlh wrote: post #223
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…

The Internet did this to me for a lot of things -- when I was an island, I used to think I was really good at a lot of things: Table tennis, Tetris, some other video games. And relative to my friends and sometimes even the people a few circles away from them, I was! And then, The Internet. And I discovered that I am absolutely NOT good at table tennis. I am not even CLOSE to good at Tetris. And I am TERRIBLE at every…

Competition has such a beautiful origin of the word "com-" (together) + "petere" (strive):

> to strive alongside another for the attainment of something

Not necessarily in opposition, how it is often interpreted nowadays, but in a shared endeavour to achieve excellence. Pushing each other to be better.

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

#490

Post by djeastm »

satvikpendem wrote: post #203
buffalobuffalo wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the most valuable lessons I have learned in software engineering is that you can write entire projects with the express plan of rewriting them if they actually gain traction. If I want to prototype something these days, I will often write code that, while not quite spaghetti, would definitely not pass a proper code review. It's actually kind of fun. Almost like a cheat day on a diet or something.

Unfortunately, that rewrite step often doesn't happen. I can't count the number of times a prototype that was meant to be thrown away was actually put into production because "it's cheaper and faster than rewriting."

>I can't count the number of times a prototype that was meant to be thrown away was actually put into production because "it's cheaper and faster than rewriting."

Did the business make money, though? I think that's the law of the jungle

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