Never date anyone crazier than you are.
Be careful of who you work with
21–30 of 39 posts
Re: Be careful of who you work with
#22"always be the worst musician in every band you’re in" -- GOLD! FYI, the continue reading link either shouldn't be on the page, or it should take you to the rest of the article - not sure if I got everything or not.
When I was a TA in college I gave similar advice to my students: If you are the best person in your study group, you are in the wrong study group. Now, the problem is, on a purely meritocratic level, the better study groups do not want to have you because you are slowing them down. You gotta bring something else to the table so they let you in. What that special something is, everybody has to figure that out for hims…
the problem is, on a purely meritocratic level, the better study groups do not want to have you because you are slowing them down. You gotta bring something else to the table so they let you in.
"Do you like your espresso long or short" works for me.
I am NOT joking: Every project in the world has some mundane thing that has to be done but everybody is too busy to do it. Make coffee, write and maintain build scripts, write test cases, documentation, whatever. If everyone on the team is smarter than you, they all would rather be doing something else, and they will value a team member that gives them more time to do it.
Re: Be careful of who you work with
#23"always be the worst musician in every band you’re in" -- GOLD! FYI, the continue reading link either shouldn't be on the page, or it should take you to the rest of the article - not sure if I got everything or not.
The process of learning a musical instrument isn't too different from learning how to program. As a long time musician, I heard the quote a long time ago and it comes to mind frequently.
Taking part in a programming community like those surrounding more academic languages such as Scala, Haskell or J is a challenge a lot like playing in a jazz band with music majors and 60 year old musicians with amazing grace. That's the wonderful thing about being online - you can interact with a nearly limitless variety of social circles. There's always someone with inspiring talent, skills, ideas or enthusiasm to inspire you.
That's one of the reasons HN is so good - this community challenges members to make contributions which are intellectually substantive, unlike Reddit, TechCrunch or other superficially similar sites.
Re: Be careful of who you work with
#24I gave up waiting for the page to load. Better things to do and all that.
Re: Be careful of who you work with
#25"always be the worst musician in every band you’re in" -- GOLD! FYI, the continue reading link either shouldn't be on the page, or it should take you to the rest of the article - not sure if I got everything or not.
I prefer Norvig's advice:
"Be the best programmer on some projects; be the worst on some others."
Re: Be careful of who you work with
#26According to the papers cited about alcoholism and happiness, you are not affected by the behavior of your coworkers. For smokers, they only claim that coworkers influence each others' behavior within small firms, which makes sense because people are more likely to be friends anyway and there is more pressure to smoke socially. Even then, the confidence interval is huge; they claim smoking cessation by a coworker decreases your chances of smoking by 34% but with a 95% CI between 5% and 56%.
I haven't read the papers, and maybe they explain this, but I wonder what happens when more than one of your friends stops smoking; surely they can't decrease your chances of smoking by 34% each.
Re: Be careful of who you work with
#27"If behavior spreads through social networks, then working in a toxic or slow-moving corporate environment is really really bad for you."
1) I think working in a toxic or slow moving corporate environment is really bad for you for reasons much more direct than behaviors moving through a social network
2) Researches demonstrated that certain moods and obesity appear to be correlated in social networks - but they have not demonstrated causation or show that this applies to behaviors and moods in general. The fact that two nodes in a social network are likely to both be obese together only shows that obese people move in the same social circles, and there could be a wide variety of social and economic reasons why that are more directly causative than two people knowing each other.
Not to be a downer, it just seems to me that this article makes an unfounded leap there.
Re: Be careful of who you work with
#28You see this phenomenon in Rock Climbing quite clearly. There are only maybe 30 guys in the world who have climbed routes graded French 9a+ or harder. Of those, more than half are from a tiny region in Spain.
You might think that this is some weird genetic thing going on, but if you go there to investigate you'll notice something strange: your climbing improves. A lot.
Suddenly you're thrown into a world where climbing 8a (a lifetime goal for most dedicated sport climbers) is something that pretty much everybody does, often within only a year or two of starting out. Your concept of what is "hard" changes, and suddenly it doesn't seem so outrageous to get on a route that should be way over your head. It gets in your blood. You train harder. You climb harder. Just because you're there.
It's not a fluke of grading, either. You can take that ability you gained back to your home crag and demonstrate for yourself that it's real by polishing off projects that you'd been working on for years. Then you can watch it fade away over the course of maybe half a year as you slip back into climbing with your old crowd.
Re: Be careful of who you work with
#29"always be the worst musician in every band you’re in" -- GOLD! FYI, the continue reading link either shouldn't be on the page, or it should take you to the rest of the article - not sure if I got everything or not.
I prefer Norvig's advice: "Be the best programmer on some projects; be the worst on some others." http://norvig.com/21-days.html
I have to agree with this. Leading a group of less experienced programmers can be a great experience. I guess it depends on what you're looking for.
Re: Be careful of who you work with
#30Fire clients that are worse than you? Why not just do an amazing job for them?