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You can't tell people anything (2004)

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Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#181

Post by d23 »

teej wrote: post #85
d23 wrote: post #61

I also call this the head nod effect. It's particularly a problem in technical discussions. I've come to the conclusion that 90% of the time 90% of people don't understand what 90% of what's being said. You essentially have to start from a point of already understanding entirely what the person is saying to be able to keep up, unless they're just saying something completely trivial. The glue that keeps the illusion t…

> The beautiful irony is that I simultaneously understand what the author means by this and I find it completely incomprehensible. Well, it's not that bad, but I guess it's just that the concept has morphed into such a complex shape of neurons in my head that doesn't seem to quite fit the words this author is saying, so it doesn't jive quite right. I think I know what they mean, but maybe I don't. You might already k…

I've noticed this linking of physical space and memory many times, and I've heard of this memory palace technique, but I've never given it a shot. Thanks, perhaps I'll try it with some learning I'm doing on the side.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#182

Post by munificent »

memexy wrote: post #98
munificent wrote: post #91

People interpret your words in context of an existing framework of understanding. If I tell you "we're adding a button to the help page", you understand that "button" means "software GUI element" and "help page" means "hypetext page on the world wide web". You do not immediately get out needle and thread and start poking holes in paper. The challenge, then, is telling people that the framework itself is wrong. In ord…

Speaking of VR, do you have a favorite headset? Or have you used one that you thought was good?

I don't. I've never actually tried VR. :)

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#183

Post by lobotryas »

larsnystrom wrote: post #166
deanCommie wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one wants to be the person that stops the speaker every 30 seconds to get clarification on every piece of jargon I have found that one of the best thing about attaining Seniority at work (as an SDE) and the trust associated with it is you don't have to worry about proving yourself to anyone, and can afford to look stupid. I actually learned this from Principal engineers who over and over would start questions wi…

I was fairly recently asked what the point of implementing a web application using React was, and what advantages it would bring over just doing it without a framework/UI library. I couldn't really give a proper answer there, at the spot. But that doesn't mean I don't have an answer, it just means I wasn't prepared for the question. Like, how do I explain why locality is helpful? I'd need to spend some serious effort…

Given what you wrote, to me it sounds like the asker suspected React was the wrong tool for the job. Not every front-end required an all-out framework with its own weighty cd/ci pipeline. It’s possible the scope of the project was just some static HTML backed with a snippet of JS. If you are dead set on using React then you need to be ready defend the technical tool _choice_, not React itself.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#184

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

slfnflctd wrote: post #172
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This reads like sales speak. I am not a sales person. I have been training people as a volunteer for decades. I have never made a dime (in fact, I am usually out-of-pocket by a fair amount). I am not a professional trainer or orator (or even a particularly good one), but I am an experienced one. The people I have trained have faced enormous challenges in life, and are trying to get back up, after having been knocke…

Hey, thanks for whatever you're trying to do out there. I grew up among a bunch of kids with pretty poor prospects, and we all started building invisible barbed wire fences around ourselves from an early age. It takes guts to try to do any improve-the-world work pro bono, and even more so when you're working with people who don't shower you with praise for it. I'm sure that even when you seemed to get nowhere or wors…

Thanks. I’m not exactly tilting at windmills. I’m part of a much larger organization.

I’m also tough as nails. I’ve been doing this for nearly 40 years.

I have, in the aggregate, made significant inroads, but there’s plenty more needs doing, and one of my more important capabilities, is the ability to step aside, and let the next generation take the reins.

I am now actually looking at doing training of software developers. It’s a different venue, but I also have a great deal of experience in that arena.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#185

Post by dkersten »

catalogia wrote: post #180
dkersten wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The hyenas are fundamentally sadistic and difficult to satiate. That's why they're poor - it's what got them banished. Based on what? I’m only basing what I said on the original movie as I never saw any other content. I see the lions portraying them that way, but I see no obvious reasons to believe it’s true from the content of the movie. Maybe I’m misremembering, it’s been a while, but from what I remember they we…

I haven't seen the movie since I was a kid, but don't the hyenas live among the bones of elephants? That gives me the impression of insatiability. They gorged themselves on elephants yet they're still hungry.

Or maybe they were driven out of the fertile food-rich lands by the lions? Why is it presumed that they must be evil, their motivations were only ever shown to be that they were hungry.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#186

Post by deanCommie »

larsnystrom wrote: post #166
deanCommie wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one wants to be the person that stops the speaker every 30 seconds to get clarification on every piece of jargon I have found that one of the best thing about attaining Seniority at work (as an SDE) and the trust associated with it is you don't have to worry about proving yourself to anyone, and can afford to look stupid. I actually learned this from Principal engineers who over and over would start questions wi…

I was fairly recently asked what the point of implementing a web application using React was, and what advantages it would bring over just doing it without a framework/UI library. I couldn't really give a proper answer there, at the spot. But that doesn't mean I don't have an answer, it just means I wasn't prepared for the question. Like, how do I explain why locality is helpful? I'd need to spend some serious effort…

I'm really struggling to empathize with your point here.

I SUSPECT you are expecting that the questionner is going to hold you to an incredibly high and rigorous bar and in fact I don't think that's true. If you say "It will improve our user's perceived client latency" i expect that is sufficient - IF TRUE.

And this is the key. In software everything is a tradeoff. I don't know what the tradeoffs with using React are, but tenerally the industry trend right now is React is worth it. But why? I think it's a fair question to understand that, otherwise you're just cargo culting an architecture without understanding it.

BTW blindly following a trend is itself a choice and a tradeoff. You might not need a deeper answer for using React than "A lot of people use React, so if we use React it'll be easier to hire people to continue to make changes." That's a valid technical decision to use something!

I'm not a frontend engineer, BTW. However I just googled Javascript Locality and React Locality and found basically nothing reasonable except https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45069206/does-data-local...

So I do feel like i'm going to illustrate my point here and ask you "What is locality in this context? Why is it important? Is React the only way to achieve it? What are we choosing as a tradeoff?"

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#187

Post by MaxBarraclough »

gfody wrote: post #80

relevant Ted talk, "don't tell people what you're doing tell them why you're doing it" - https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_insp...

I don't like to be dismissive, but that video is pure fluff.

> whether it's Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright Brothers, they all think, act, and communicate, in the exact same way. And it's the complete opposite to everyone else. All I did was codify it.

I very nearly stopped watching right there. Does this kind of nonsense really appeal to anyone? It strikes me as bordering on insulting.

Wikipedia describes this guy as an 'author and motivational speaker'. He makes a living claiming to have cracked the one weird secret to success, but is not a visionary, a pioneer, or a leader.

It's like someone selling you an investment strategy. If it really worked, they wouldn't be selling it, they'd be busy making millions.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#188

Post by larsnystrom »

deanCommie wrote: post #186
larsnystrom wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was fairly recently asked what the point of implementing a web application using React was, and what advantages it would bring over just doing it without a framework/UI library. I couldn't really give a proper answer there, at the spot. But that doesn't mean I don't have an answer, it just means I wasn't prepared for the question. Like, how do I explain why locality is helpful? I'd need to spend some serious effort…

I'm really struggling to empathize with your point here. I SUSPECT you are expecting that the questionner is going to hold you to an incredibly high and rigorous bar and in fact I don't think that's true. If you say "It will improve our user's perceived client latency" i expect that is sufficient - IF TRUE. And this is the key. In software everything is a tradeoff. I don't know what the tradeoffs with using React are…

I think I did a poor job of explaining the situation I was referring to. My point was I could’ve made a better job explaining a concept, but I just wasn’t prepared for or had the capacity to do so at the spot. Explaining complex things in an ad-hoc fashion with no preparation is hard, is what I’m saying.

Locality is about having the code for one feature in one spot. If you can remove a feature by deleting one piece of code at one place, for example an entire file, then the feature is local to that file. It allows you to make changes and remove features without understanding the entire application. Without it, you have to understand the entire codebase to make any changes, which goes from hard to impossible as the project grows. This is why globals are a pain.

Locality is related to code cohesion and loose coupling.

React encourages locality because you’re only supposed to pass data one way, which gives you a sort of tree structure where you can remove a branch without affecting other branches.

Of course you can mess this up in React as well, React is no silver bullet and you can do it without React.

There is so much to talk about here, but none of that is relevant to the point I’m trying to make, which is:

I should probably have been able to explain all of this to the person asking, but it’s a lot harder to do so verbally with no preparation than it is to write it down like this.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#189

Post by Ductapemaster »

jerf wrote: post #7

I often think of this as "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have", or don't know they have. I think it's one of the major problems in the entire structure of the educational system... it's all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet. Sometimes this is just unavoidable; I'm not sure how to turn geography into a problem you have. (I mean, you can fake it, but people's brains…

"[Education is] all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet" — I experienced this exact thing very acutely in college.

In the first year of my EE degree, I had to jump back a quarter in math to relearn some concepts I just hadn't grasped in high school. This complicated the rigorous schedule laid out for the first two years, as it meant I was no longer taking the prerequisite math classes the quarter before the required EE classes — instead I was taking them concurrently.

Despite the troubles I had with the college of engineer's registration process (I wasn't following their rules), taking the classes concurrently with the EE courses that actually applied that knowledge (for example, taking Electricity and Magnetism at the same time as 3D calculus) was a completely different educational experience! Maybe I was lucky in that the classes were paced similarly, but learning theory in math class and then going the next day to a practical application of that knowledge was an amazing experience.

In my senior year, I worked with the professor I was doing research under to give feedback to the engineering and math departments about my experience, but sadly I don't think anything ever came of it. It's really too bad too — it's a pretty small change to make in the scheduling and I think it would help the people who are more practically minded vs. theoretically minded (builders vs. thinkers). My education was much more tailored to the latter, despite me being squarely the former.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#190

Post by qznc »

Smoosh wrote: post #75
memco wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I often think of this as "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have", or don't know they have. This may be way off in another field, but this is actually frustrating to me as a father in another way: when we watch shows or read books with our child so many of the stories are so far detached from reality as to make me ask, "Why are we asking kids to care about this?" I have particular ire fo…

Similarly, almost all the YA novels involve a transformation from ordinary mortal, perhaps even social outcast, to someone who has superpowers and/or is the special chosen one (and the story is the journey to overcome challenges and believe in yourself). They go way past "everyone is special" into "you're a failure if you don't change the world". Here I am, over 50 and I'm still waiting for my superpowers to kick in.…

Well, superpowers are quite boring if everyone around has them as well. For example, Harry Potters wand is not that impressive compared to a smartphone.
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