221–230 of 351 posts
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People also call garbage garbage. Sometimes they're right.
I was just like you until a few months ago, when i got really interested in the technical aspect of DLT. Don’t let the digital currency scam blind you : there are some really really interesting things going on in that field.
> I didn't have to work that hard, and one day I had this realization while sitting in my gray cubicle (I was in a sea of gray cubicles surrounded by gray walls, listening to white noise and all alone): I'm like, “Man I am so tired. I need to go home and take a nap.” I went home, but as soon as I got there I realized, “I'm not tired anymore.” Is there a name for this type of fatigue (or perception thereof)? I'm curio…
Dale Carnegie, in his book "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living", raised a similar point. I won't quote directly, as I read it in Polish; the following is based on my notes: In one the latter chapters, he has a rule about "summoning your own enthusiasm". The primary observation in that part of the chapter was that it's really hard to truly exhaust someone physically, and even harder to exhaust them mentally, if the…
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Is it? To me the situation in question seems like the complete opposite of stressful
Yeah, this sounds like too _little_ stress to me. Imagine a bell curve with stress on the X axis and performance on the Y axis, and there's a sweet spot in the middle where you're getting enough of a kick to motivate you, but not so much that you're drowning.
In my career I think I've spent the majority of time at one extreme or the other. Feast or famine: overworked & stressed or underworked & depressed. When you can hit it just right in the middle, life is truly great. But rarely have I been able to sustain it for more than a couple months at a time. Let me know if you've found the secret :)
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Dale Carnegie, in his book "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living", raised a similar point. I won't quote directly, as I read it in Polish; the following is based on my notes: In one the latter chapters, he has a rule about "summoning your own enthusiasm". The primary observation in that part of the chapter was that it's really hard to truly exhaust someone physically, and even harder to exhaust them mentally, if the…
Love it, thanks for the reference. Things rings true with my experience as well.
> Someone who can do that is ridiculous. Talk about 10x engineers. That's more like 1000x. And it's good, clean code too. Literally no number of median engineers can do that. You can give me a million median engineers and they would never be able to do that. They would just make a huge mess. This is probably one of the most truest thing I've read about our profession. Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak comes to mind, who…
Dave Cutler. The NT/XP/etc. architecture basically stalled as soon as he left and future improvements were incremental. You can tell there wasn't a winer equivalent on the windows 95/98/ME teams
> I didn't have to work that hard, and one day I had this realization while sitting in my gray cubicle (I was in a sea of gray cubicles surrounded by gray walls, listening to white noise and all alone): I'm like, “Man I am so tired. I need to go home and take a nap.” I went home, but as soon as I got there I realized, “I'm not tired anymore.” Is there a name for this type of fatigue (or perception thereof)? I'm curio…
Dale Carnegie, in his book "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living", raised a similar point. I won't quote directly, as I read it in Polish; the following is based on my notes: In one the latter chapters, he has a rule about "summoning your own enthusiasm". The primary observation in that part of the chapter was that it's really hard to truly exhaust someone physically, and even harder to exhaust them mentally, if the…
When I was young, apparently this meant I had ADHD (Throwing this in as a snide comment to expose my opinion of how my primary schooling treated this symptom in children EDIT: I see in a side comment you were concerned about undiagnosed ADD, I'll admit I'm somewhat concerned with _overdiagnosing_ ADD. The medicines I was given gave me ticks that took decades for me to get rid of and altered my mental state in terrible ways, and it meant that instead of inspecting WHY I felt this way, I simply got shoved chock full of pills and then booted/put with other misfits, which just made the focus problem worse. The joke I used to make as a kid was that I only had an attention deficit for things that didn't matter).
I took issue with that, largely because I find the response to be eminently logical, and built coping mechanisms to let me succeed in spite of it, but the underlying driver is still there.
I realize this is such an insubstantive comment, but it's a topic I've tossed around in my head for many many years now, and often haunts me with a "why do you feel such fundamental friction with doing your job like every other professional adult" and hearing others express the same root is somewhat reassuring.
(I realize this is tangential, but if you're _at all_ a hip hop/poem fan, check out 9-5ers Anthem by Aesop Rock. this is one of my "at work coping mechanisms" when I feel this way.)
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It's a strong feature of Attention Deficit Disorder as I understand it. Hyperfocus often comes hand in hand with extreme fatigue and brain fog in the presence of tasks that don't motivate enough, to the point that you can feel it physically. I often get it myself, feeling like I can't physically write another line of code until I move onto one of my own projects, then I'm good to concentrate for another 6 hours. I ha…
I have ADD (diagnosed) and this happens to me every day at work. Around three o'clock in the afternoon I get so sleepy I start to literally fall asleep at my desk, but if I go home I'm immediately refreshed and back to full capacity for another eight hours.
Welp, now that my Imposter Syndrome has returned in full force, any concrete advice on leveling up in engineering skill (other than getting hired at Google circa 1999)? Edit: I now see that Paul coined the "Don't be Evil" slogan[0]. I'm curious what his thoughts on its removal and what that portends for Google today. u/paul? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540
Get hired at any place where good engineering is done, or at a startup where no engineering is really done and you get to make the calls about how engineering is done. Work for 10+ hours a day, and on your free time read about engineering from blogs or books, see conference videos, and go to conferences. After 4 or 5 years of doing this you'll maybe know enough about how "everthing works" and what books says how to d…
Get hired at any place where good engineering is done