Inspired by PG's tweet - https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1215673204125073408?s=19
Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
1–10 of 757 posts
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#2Physical labor correlates to social status not intelligence.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#3An individual can have an outsized impact while maintaining a low-profile or non-networking approach.
.
.
.
Commodities do not usually exist for the benefit of ultimate producers & consumers. . . .
You can't fix stupid but you can come up with some appropriate workarounds if you put in the effort of long-term repair anyway.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#4Physical labor correlates to social status not intelligence.
Unsure what that means, can you elaborate
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#5The most challenging and important problems to solve in an engineering organisation are rarely technical in nature.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#6The taxonomy of jobs that most people have in their minds is extremely simple (doctor, lawyer, teacher, builder, engineer, window cleaner, garbage collector, astronaut, ...) and is mostly based on a grade-school understanding of what kind of jobs people do.
But the reality is that there are millions of types of jobs, with incredible variety and specialisms, and the real content of a job is rarely captured in a job title.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#7The most challenging and important problems to solve in an engineering organisation are rarely technical in nature.
Holy shit, this.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#8Physical labor correlates to social status not intelligence.
Unsure what that means, can you elaborate
I took it to mean that smart people sometimes have low-status jobs, and conversely people in high-status jobs are not always smart. That's definitely something I have personally experienced given my career has taken me from working as a building labourer and factory worker through to being a C-suite exec, with stops through the trading side of investment banking and Silicon Valley on the way.
It's a huge mistake to look down on and make assumptions about someone just because they have a "bad" job.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#9The people who get the most done are not the smartest, or the most skilled, but the ones who are most familiar with the organization they work in.
To outsiders it looks like they end up with compromised solutions, but to insiders it looks like they achieved the impossible.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#10Everyone lies, all the time. even when they think they're not lying they often are.