Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 424 posts

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#161

Post by replyifuagree »

9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #100
replyifuagree wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Which isn't to say that technical knowledge doesn't matter, it truly does. But, the primary problem in the industry right now is that the majority of finished code generated by professionals goes unused. The amount of waste is staggering. Working on the right thing is way more than a 10x multiplier.

> The amount of waste is staggering. Working on the right thing is way more than a 10x multiplier. How much of that waste would you attribute to 1x programmers and how much would you attribute to 0x managers?

85% in favor of managers being the problem. I pulled that number from the Ford Motor Company turnaround where Deming said management was 85% of the problem.

And I mean, who is responsible for curating those 1x engineers in the first place?

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#164

Post by teknopaul »

Echoing sentiments expressed...

Automation: Coding automation, test automation, devops, Ci, cd; hopefully goes without saying these days, but it wasn't in your list and ought to be x10 at least.

Knowledge Transfer: be x10 while on holiday.

Delegation: for many its harder than learning something new.

There are tricks that make you personally more productive, but the key to overall productivity is effective team work, or all your productivity is x1.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#165

Post by graycat »

warrenm wrote: post #99

You're way too over-focused on tech trivia in your list The biggest force multipliers what a friend described to me as a young teenager as "be an and" - don't just be a programmer, be a programmer and a lawyer Don't just be a welder, be a welder and a baker Don't just be an engineer, be an engineer and a writer Etc You may have heard Scott Adams call it a "talent stack" Same concept Be exposed to as many ideas as pos…

I agree: Computing is terrific stuff, an historic opportunity, but by itself is like an ingot of steel -- needs an application. So, need steel AND something else. So, need computing AND something else. My something else is some pure/applied math that is an advantage in my startup.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#166

Post by AnimalMuppet »

bluGill wrote: post #53
Turing_Machine wrote: post #11

* Don't get too hung up on computational complexity. A lot of times O(n^2) is gonna be perfectly fine. Write it the simple and easy to maintain way first, and only worry about fancy optimizations if it's too slow.

in these days of modern CPUS with cache and branch prediction, O(n^2) often beats O(logn) because your data is tiny compared to the cost of all those cache misses and branch misses the seemingly faster algorithm creates. This doesn't apply when you data is large, but then you need parallel algorithms, and not in memory data (or just punt all your data to the sql server)

Yeah. n = 3 more often than you expect. n far more often than you expect. If you don't work at a FAANG, don't automatically assume that your data and algorithm need to squeeze the last O(logn) possible out of the algorithm.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#167

Post by rco8786 »

noduerme wrote: post #68
hagridaaron91 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about this idea a lot recently. I'm decently new to the big-tech-co space, but it does seem like a huge amount of resourcing goes into design and defense of projects. I wonder what y'all think about someone doing a timeboxed MVP (a sprint or less?) as a way of susing out design, and THEN getting reviewers/etc? Obviously you have to take security into large consideration when doing things like this…

Hell, wait till you find out how much time is wasted in Dev/Ops just changing the tooling every year or two, literally tearing down and rebuilding everything you already have in the name of staving off another couple years of technical debt. It's silly. I'm a bit of a rarity in the modern world (and here in the corporate space that is HN), in that I'm the sole programmer on a bunch of large software projects in produ…

> I'm a bit of a rarity in the modern world

I'll say. It does not sound like you'd be very fun to work with, as a teammate or a stakeholder.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#168

Post by SamReidHughes »

giantg2 wrote: post #24

"Calculus for solving all sorts of problems." Is this really common? I know I'm not in a top tier job, so maybe they don't give dummies like me the hard problems, but I've never had to use calculus to solve a real world problem.

Just for personal investing I've used calculus amidst some basic modeling to estimate probability of getting certain outcomes under certain assumptions and compute an expected value. This is just to sanity-check my thinking, or to see what the market's thinking.

To understand basic financial concepts, like the present value of an annuity, or implied volatility, requires calculus.

In boring software, simple questions like, how often will a workload miss cache, and what optimizes the cost there, can be modeled... if you use calculus.

Also, in the past, I've casually been thrown into a couple of jobs where calculus was directly applicable to the work I was doing.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#169

Post by rco8786 »

cyberge99 wrote: post #66
hagridaaron91 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about this idea a lot recently. I'm decently new to the big-tech-co space, but it does seem like a huge amount of resourcing goes into design and defense of projects. I wonder what y'all think about someone doing a timeboxed MVP (a sprint or less?) as a way of susing out design, and THEN getting reviewers/etc? Obviously you have to take security into large consideration when doing things like this…

A pot of big corps have Hackathon weeks for doing just this. A free-for-all to build something you want and that you think will be helpful to the org from your perspective.

And as soon as those weeks are over everyone goes right back to their previously scheduled work.
Post reply on HN