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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?

#541

Post by damethos »

sevnin wrote: post #369
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 somet…

This comment deserves more upvotes.

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

#542

Post by mvkel »

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.…

This is how all modern software should be made.

Optimizing for 1M concurrent users, paying down tech debt, refactoring, and testing are all things that engineers love to cite that will somehow make everything better. The customer won't feel a single one.

Spotify uses 42 different versions of jquery (among a dozen other libraries) and it's working just fine (with >1M concurrent users).

Even electron! That crap is so heavy, its (lack of) performance is notable. But! Many billion-dollar companies built on its back.

I laughed when an exec at Evernote told me that every year they go to MIT to try to recruit the top 1% of cs grads. What a waste of talent.

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

#543

Post by rseech01 »

The first day I joined a martial arts class was very humbling. I was asked to to spar with a senior. For a good 15 minutes I tried to hit him. I mean I really tried, and to no avail. I distinctly remember thinking how easy it would be to punch the senior, and could not understand why I could not hit him. Between that and doing pushups until failure. I really did not want to go back. I did, and stuck with it, but that really was a reality check for me.

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

#544

Post by whalesalad »

I did a phone interview with Christopher Poole of 4chan fame (moot) when I was a fairly mid-level engineer. This was for his startup, Canvas. One of the interview questions was to explain every detail of what happens after entering an address into your browser and hitting "go". I completely stumbled through my response and was humbled on that phone call. He was polite, but at the same time made me feel like an absolute idiot.

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

#545

Post by bhy »

snipethunder wrote: post #127

I am from China and I always thought I am very good at math, because I can get good grades at national Olympiad level math competitions. After I came to America, I realized that I got good grades in China because I internalized the math concepts by doing large amounts of problem sets and it was actually a very slow learning process. In college mathematics courses, I realized that some of my American classmates can gr…

This is an extremely interesting insight on math education! Thanks so much for sharing this!

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

#546

Post by Closi »

wanderingmind wrote: post #257

Meeting less competent people be extremely successful in life compare to the more competent folks. Through my life, I have seen people less curious, less innovative, no passion to learn, not interested in working hard, but are good at gaming the system excel and succeed. They become rich, financially independent, have great success. While people much smarter than me, more curious and innovative fail again and again t…

Alternatively, the people you perceive as 'less competent' might actually be highly competent in different areas.

People who have made a lot of money from scratch don't actually tend to be incompetent - they tend to be highly competent at whatever they are doing.

There are very few self-made rich lazy people.

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

#547

Post by koala_man »

smeej wrote: post #50
throw46365 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not really dumb, or naïve. It's just not something you had any reason to encounter, and maybe you were off sick if it was mentioned in biology/science lessons. Now consider it this way: the first time you experienced fireflies, you were an adult, and you could bring a fully adult, science-aware, sense of wonder to that experience. I'd count it as a win.

I was thinking "naïve" in the sense of "just not knowing some normal things about the world." It's definitely my, "WAIT--fireflies are REAL??" reaction that makes me laugh after the fact.

A coworker similarly said "WAIT--reindeer are REAL??"

I'm thankful I had maturity to simply say "yes, they're in the deer family, native to Canada and Northern Europe".

They were from China where they probably rarely mention reindeer, and only in the context of Santa Claus.

It's no different from a Westerner rarely hearing about tanukis, and only in the context of trickster spirits in anime and Super Mario Bros 3. How are you supposed to know they're real?

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

#548

Post by BoneHeadCIO »

I was a Cloud Architect who had been working nearly 10 years at a financial institution. When our CIO left, the board had made a poor decision with their replacement. The new CIO was a complete bumblehead not knowing which direction was up.

Eventually an initative came down the chain that we were going to put our on prem datacenter in the cloud. As I had been in the role for so long, I already had multiple strategies on how to accomplish this and save the company over a quarter of a million a year in the process while providing additional DR to mission critical components that they didnt otherwise have.

I presented the strategy to the CIO, who wanted to get a second opinion. Ok- fair. The second opinion was that we had a solid cloud migration plan. CIO wanted a third opinion, then a fourth. All of which said we had accounted for unknown variables and were set to proceed. On his FIFTH opinion, I remember sitting in yet another office going through introductions. This random guy talks about being a cloud Architect for a bank, moving critical apps to the cloud and providing DR.

Bumblehead CIO turns to us and mouths "WOW!". As if that was the most incredable and impressive thing that he has heard in his career. It was at that minute that I realized that not only did he now know what he was doing as CIO, but he couldnt even recognize the milestones that my current team was achieving in regard to cost savings, security, migrations to serverless cloud features, and the solid migration plan I had presented many times to him prior.

What I learned in that moment was a well crafted 15 second introduction is more important than what most people think.

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

#549

Post by pdpi »

jaydeegee wrote: post #312
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 had a colleague who was old school and loved optimising, everything he reviewed come back with tiny changes that would save fractions of a ms. His nemesis was a guy who was arguably the best coder I have ever worked with. Things come to a head in one meeting and old school said if we did things his way our code would run quicker and the response was legendary 'If we coded like you it'd run quicker because most of t…

The problem with optimisation is that you first need to decide what you’re trying to optimise for. Latency? Throughput? Overhead? Correctness? Time to market? Ease of ramping up new hires?

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

#550

Post by bombcar »

Vibgyor5 wrote: post #466
rulalala wrote: post #145

Losing my job in my mid 30s, and changing career trajectories with 2 children. I learned my own limits. And importantly, that we are how we frame ourselves: a loser, a victim, a believer, or someone humbly exceptional. Thanks for asking.

I usually don't comment on HN but needed to ask you: How did your framing work? And can you elaborate "learning my own limits"? It's been 8 years since I graduated. I started working at a Bank in a Management Rotational Program with great manager but dropped it within 4 months because young me dreaded being pigeon-holed at 9-5. I joined a promising startup but... the co-founder unexpectedly passed away. Long story sh…

It can be worthwhile to have two resumes/stories for the same facts:

One is Vibgyor5 the startup wizard who has assisted with multiple early-stage startups and is ready to go again!

The other is Vibgyor5 the corporate 9-5er who by happenstance ended up working at a number of companies that are no longer operational.

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