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Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

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Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#31

Post by swarnie »

throw46365 wrote: post #22
lubujackson wrote: post #6

I was in my 20s before I realized even numbered houses are always on one side of the street and odd numbers on the other. Literally no excuse for not figuring that out.

Well, always if there's a street that was put down facing like that. Commonplace in new towns laid down over very large areas. In the UK, oh wow, you will encounter some weird numbering issues. I live on the corner of a street in a very complex, 400 year old area, and I am forever leaning out of the window to shout instructions to utterly bemused couriers.

28 being next door to 47 at the end of a cul-de-sac can really mess with people.

Also on older estates where spare green spaces have been used up by additional houses so you end up with 21,23,25,25A, 25B.

The UK can be weird....

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#32

Post by granady »

_boffin_ wrote: post #25

When I was younger, I had an issue with external vs internal validation. Sadly, it heavily skewed towards external validation. I was on the chunkier side for a lot of my childhood and into high school. Joined wrestling and stayed with it. Lot the weight, grew, and gained muscle. Also started to get a lot of attention from the opposite sex. That, with the external validation issue, leaned into it and just had fun. It…

Your final paragraph sums it up nicely. I think a lot of people when they see something educational will just switch off if it doesn't immediately engage a personal interest. Seeing it from the point of view of the author is a great way of putting it. I can explain this to my kids. Ok, Newtonian physics is boring. So let's think about why Newton made such a deal out of it.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#33

Post by Sateeshm »

mtmail wrote: post #14

Took me several days to realize why some cars in the UK have white license plates, some have yellow ones. (They don't: one colour is on the front, one on the back). I no longer call myself a 10x engineers, now it's 9x only (that's a joke, I'm hardly 1x).

In India yellow is commercial and white is non-commercial vehicle

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#35

Post by _boffin_ »

stevesearer wrote: post #10

I learned way into my adult life that I could just turn the swivel hook/latch to quickly unwind the cord on a vacuum cleaner. Before that moment I would manually unwind the cord just like I would wind it up. To make it worse, I even remember wondering why the swivel hook was there thinking it was poor design.

Steve…

What was the moment of realization like?

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#36

Post by brailsafe »

Idk what my most humbling moment would be, but there's been a few.

I've spent the majority of my career looking for wook rather than doing work, and have lost at least 7 jobs in the first 12 years for one reason or another. This is going on the 3rd time I've spent more than a year without working at all in any job. It never gets easier, and each time I get to spend a ton of time reflecting on how things went and what I'm actually good at. It's usually humbling, because so far the list of things I'm good at professionally has only dwindled. Another humbling aspect to this is realizing that most other people don't lose their jobs... like ever, unless it's seasonal or severe economic downturn.

During one of those periods I spent so long unemployed that I literally ran out of money and moved into a car from my relatively nice apartment, and then worked at Starbucks as a barista, which taught me that I can be good enough at speaking with customers, but what I thought were trivial tasks turned out to be almost laughably untenable, like remembering how much syrup goes in Karen's caramel macchiato, or just showing up on time.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#37

Post by qup »

sircastor wrote: post #29
spcebar wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you pull a blind cord to the right it stays up, if you pull it to the left it comes down. My whole life I've just been jiggling and tugging the cord to get it to stay or come down.

For those unfamiliar with this, the cord that raises and lowers the blinds applies friction against a wheel in a slot (when pulled to the left). When the wheel is shifted it holds the cord in place and the blinds and they stay in position. Pulling to the right releases the wheel and the blinds move freely. Incidentally, one of the cords on the blinds in my office is worn, and it dis a poor job of engaging. So one sid…

At my house, all the strings are dry rotting, so any movement of the cord is pretty likely to lower the blinds. Rapidly.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#38

Post by daymanstep »

brailsafe wrote: post #36

Idk what my most humbling moment would be, but there's been a few. I've spent the majority of my career looking for wook rather than doing work, and have lost at least 7 jobs in the first 12 years for one reason or another. This is going on the 3rd time I've spent more than a year without working at all in any job. It never gets easier, and each time I get to spend a ton of time reflecting on how things went and what…

Honest question and genuinely curious: what is difficult about showing up on time?

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#39

Post by qup »

I often learn how to use something well that I've been using my whole life. A ratchet strap was a good example--you can use it without understanding how to use it well. One video (essential craftsman) fixed that for me.

I think the most humbling for me is seeing a real pro use something you use a lot, like a kitchen knife.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#40

Post by kennu »

Back when cloud computing was mostly for early adopters, I used to work on many customer projects at the same time, or in quick succession, in an architect/developer role. It was great as long as the projects worked out as planned and I could deliver a working system in a few weeks or months and move on to the next project. It was easy to become a little overconfident until I faced unexpected difficulties in some projects and the tight schedules started to fall apart.

For instance, I learned that you should never trust what a customer says about reusing their existing code without actually looking at the code first. You can end up having to rewrite the code, and then have a dissatisfied customer, because the new code doesn't have the same problems as the old code and produces different results. It doesn't matter which one is correct, since the old code was already used for years and everything is based on it.

So the humbling experience has been not to become too optimistic and overconfident after some successful projects. You will become the bad guy if you over-promise and can't deliver, even if you feel someone else is actually to blame. Every time you start something new, you have to check for yourself what the requirements and conditions truly are before accepting a deadline. And you can never trust the documentation or description of an existing system without also looking at the actual system.

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