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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?

#671

Post by timacles »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #273
nlh wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Step 1 is to realize you're almost certainly not going to be the best in all of spacetime at a thing. Step 2 is to realize you don't have to be - you can just be the best in a given bubble, centered on the here and now. Step 3 is getting comfortable realizing you get to choose the size of that bubble, any time you want!

The real step 1 is not trying to be good at anything and just doing it for the enjoyment

Attachment to outcome is very real and hold a lot of people back

For example I started getting really good at chess when I stopped caring how many rating points I lost or won today and completely forgot about ratings altogether

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

#673

Post by nogridbag »

hu3 wrote: post #661
nogridbag wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always find these discussions interesting. I've been working for the same company 10 years. When we built project A, I was surrounded by people who had built the same product for the past 20 years together. As a younger dev, I deferred to them as they were much older and had done this before. You would probably admire them. They pumped out code and delivered immense value. We had no over-engineering because there w…

Interesting. I'd like to think that, most probably, your job exists and is funded because those folks (and you) "got shit done" for the last 20 years. In my experience (around 2 decades also), when it comes to small/medium projects, spending a bit of effort separating business logic from UI/database/server code is wise up to a certain point. If the effort doesn't add too much code and layers of indirection, then fine…

Haha, I read through the beginning of that article which focused on hexagonal. While it was an over-complicated example, it didn't look too bad. But then skipped ahead to your quote. It definitely felt like satire to me! (Or at least I hope it was!).

And that's where a balance is needed. No one seems capable of defining what good architecture is. We have plenty of posts about spaghetti code, architecture astronauts, etc. But there's few comments with success stories, especially about fixing a spaghetti codebase and what that project looks years down the road. And I think that's because the problem is multi-faceted.

It's not "just" a technical problem. From a technical side, it's primarily lots of little patterns that as a whole add up to producing quality code. But there's also the social side, to hiring, reining in devs, enforcing the code patterns and quality, pushing back on business, etc. I can give lots of examples, but this would be a long post. All of these factors ultimately determine the fate of the project, the quality of the code, and whether it becomes spaghetti code or an over-engineered mess.

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

#674

Post by boznz »

throwup238 wrote: post #456
lukas099 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

It’s usually more than 80% of the work. Painting something is really fast with modern sprayers but sanding off the old layer is still a lot of elbow grease, even when you have sand blasters.

A Lot like development then, there is a lot of work before you write your first line of code, however like the original post you can do a simple sand down, no undercoat and have something that lasts a dozen years if you keep on top of it.

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

#675

Post by boznz »

stavros wrote: post #202
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 a false dichotomy. On one end, you have "overarchitects everything so much that the code is soon unmaintainable" and on the other end you have "architects the code so little that the code is soon unmaintainable". Always write the simplest thing you can, but no simpler. Finding that line is where all the art is.

unmaintainable is a weird word used far too much. There are genuine ways it can become unmaintainable of course but the main use I have seen people use it for is "I don't want to understand it and would rather rewrite it"

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

#676

Post by boznz »

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 am one of those people who wrote a production system controlling a million-dollar business fifteen years ago that is now controlling almost a billion-dollar production system today. The auditors are the main reason it is being changed, "single man risk" and "Obsolete software" (Delphi/MySQL) being the two highlights from the Deloits IT team.

The code is not brilliant, it is full of technical debt (as thats what happens when companies grow and change) but is still perfectly maintainable.

I have been watching the herculean effort of three different teams to replace this system, carving off the low hanging fruit to NetSuite and React/Java applications while repeatedly delaying the core system while they agree on standards to use.

I stick around as I am quite close to retirement now and the employees and the company are good to work with and don't deserve me to abandon them. At this point I genuinely want the projects to succeed so I can move on as there are many small companies still out there that I can make a difference in even with my age, single man risk and obsolete software.

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

#677

Post by RAM-bunctious »

beautron wrote: post #305
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…

This rings true to me, perhaps because I struggle with this one. I used to think I was destined for success, because I'm good and creative at many things, and am curious and can teach myself things. But: I expected the system to integrate me . I realize now that, unless you're lucky, it's up to you to integrate yourself into the system. It's a bummer to be underpracticed at this, and to be integrating suspiciously la…

If you ever get involved in hiring people, you realise that there are people slipping through the cracks. I've come across freelancers or underemployed people making a fraction of what their skills should be earning them, and it seems totally arbitrary that they're in such a position. It's lucky - for both sides - when this match happens.

An efficient system would make this integration easy, but I agree, for a lot of people to get anywhere, they have to "insert themselves".

Simultaneously, it's actually quite easy to be oblivious to this -- if you go to school, get good grades, get a graduate job, and do well enough at your job (but remain a normal employee), you'll never have the opportunity to have this realisation.

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

#678

Post by tracker1 »

xandrius wrote: post #658
tracker1 wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then you get an in-memory SQL database that is used for cached settings with a text-based SQL query to retrieve every configuration setting (thousands of times during a login) and have a login that takes many seconds to run. Literal example... replaced with a lock-free hashmap, and reduced the blink of an eye in terms of time.

I don't see the problem here: the original dev delivers quickly, the next dev gets to solve an interesting problems and gets to show off how much time they saved.

They could have used any hashmap or dictionary in the first place... The DB solution was far more complicated.

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

#679

Post by gcarvalho »

tracker1 wrote: post #678
xandrius wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the problem here: the original dev delivers quickly, the next dev gets to solve an interesting problems and gets to show off how much time they saved.

They could have used any hashmap or dictionary in the first place... The DB solution was far more complicated.

Delivering the over-complicated feature and improving the performance of the over-complicated feature both seem to get more praise than shipping the simple version to begin with.

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

#680

Post by FredPret »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #411
lyu07282 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is the mechanism by which being the reserve currency sprays a firehose of money into the US?

Keep in mind that being the major economy also carries costs - the US spends many times as much as other countries on its military and has no realistic path towards spending less.

And either way, their economy has been wildly succesful since the 1800’s.

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