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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?

#341

Post by vasco »

netsharc wrote: post #82
nicbou wrote: post #78

In college, meeting someone that was better than me by every conceivable metric. You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category. Perfect grades, involved in many communities, and generally pleasant to be around. There was no caveat, no excuse. Dude just straight up rocked. I have met more people like that while travelling. I felt badass riding my moto…

But why does it have to be a competition, of thinking "I have to be the best at X, if someone else is better, I feel unworthy.". I ask rhetorically, that sentence probably describes me more than my impression of you from 3 paragraphs.

Everyone has it, it's part of the ego which is part of being human.

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

#342

Post by Sander_Marechal »

satvikpendem wrote: post #203
buffalobuffalo wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the most valuable lessons I have learned in software engineering is that you can write entire projects with the express plan of rewriting them if they actually gain traction. If I want to prototype something these days, I will often write code that, while not quite spaghetti, would definitely not pass a proper code review. It's actually kind of fun. Almost like a cheat day on a diet or something.

Unfortunately, that rewrite step often doesn't happen. I can't count the number of times a prototype that was meant to be thrown away was actually put into production because "it's cheaper and faster than rewriting."

"There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution that works"

I have no idea who said that, but I use it a lot at work when people want to cut corners with the intent to fix it later.

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

#343

Post by nottorp »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #13

When I was about 3 months into my programming career I performed a minor refactor to some code. Unfortunately, the program was difficult to test (no unit tests) and very important, and difficult to verify correctness of output as well. (As in, you can't just look at it and say "yeah that's numbers lgtm"). Also unfortunately the previous author had not been very consistent in their programming style, so there was a lo…

Did that when I was younger, but with my own code :)

There was an if that didn't need brackets when I wrote it. 6 months later it needed more stuff on a branch but i was tired and in a hurry so I didn't notice adding extra lines needs brackets. New code compiled but wasn't part of the if. Turned a 5 minute fix into 2 days.

Of course, all my ifs have had brackets on both sides since then.

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

#344

Post by vasco »

wruza wrote: post #313
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being great only matters if you need external validation. I want a life I appreciate. If there’s anything to win it’s the game of having a good time. All of the suffering people impose on themselves, on their children, on their society, to be great and envied is wasted. Be successful as a means to be happy and have excess to share with others.

This idea doesn’t come early, you have to die few times to get it. I guess that’s how human works, hardwired.

Or read Siddhartha, I guess.

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

#345

Post by rahimnathwani »

I wss doing something in Excel and needed to aggregate some data. I figured there must be some aggregation function. I looked it up and, sure enough, I found DSUM() and DCOUNT().

I spent a few hours finishing my analysis, and then went to someone in the finance team to show them what I had discovered.

They noticed I had many many similar-looking aggregations in a grid, and asked "Why not just use a pivot table?".

My reply: "What's a pivot table?".

Also in the same job I learned the hard way why you should never use OFFSET() if INDEX() will do the job.

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

#346

Post by arank »

It was my second day in NYC as the new incoming student at Columbia University graduate school. My senior with whom I was staying took me for sightseeing. We got into the subway station and my senior went ahead and I got late while purchasing the tickets. I swiped the card at the "turnstile" and waited for it to move up automatically so I can go ahead. After waiting for 2-3 minutes, I thought something must be wrong. My senior came running back to find me and saw me standing near the turnstile helplessly. I told him it's not going up, I swiped already. He told me, you need to PUSH IT to move forward, it doesn't automatically goes up! I guess I had the Delhi experience in mind where the turnstile goes up automatically.

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

#347

Post by liampulles »

Several in my professional life.

I've had my code go into production only to cause big issues, I've severely over-engineered a couple things and have had to redo them totally, I've fucked up a git- stash merge once or twice, and I really got too invested into the whole cloud native thing with creating kubernetes sidecars and the like.

The lesson has generally been to keep things simple, and not try and seek some sort of perfect abstraction or fad library of the times.

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

#348

Post by bitwize »

jonplackett wrote: post #330
bloomingeek wrote: post #225

In 1993 I was interviewed for an operating job in a power plant for a major airline, assigned to their data center. At my current job, I was working in a high rise office building with sixty-six floors. The operating system computer was a JC8520, which was running a version of MS-DOS. All commands had to be typed in correctly or nothing would happen. While operating the plant, several commands had to be entered every…

You must have absolutely nailed the rest of the interview!

It was the early nineties. If you've touched a computer, companies would assume that any skill gap you had you could straightforwardly bridge yourself, on the job.

It wasn't like today where you have to be a perfect cinnamon roll of a candidate who ticks all of HR's required-skill checkboxes before you can move on to the grueling 5-6 rounds of interviews.

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

#349

Post by vasco »

kortilla wrote: post #314
ozr wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a guy browsing the internet a bit. This is not some deep philosophical question. You're just advocating being the type of person we'd all hate to work with.

“It’s a guy browsing the internet a bit” can be game over from a security perspective. Some machines should never execute code from public web pages, full stop. So it is a philosophical question of why the restrictions were in place in this scenario. If it was “employee productivity”, then sure, who cares. If it was an IRS computer with thousands of people’s tax returns on disk and access to millions more, then repor…

If he was the most senior sysadmin it's already his responsibility to keep things safe anyway, so if you trust him for all the rest of the infra you can trust him for a proxy.

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

#350

Post by saboot »

arkh wrote: post #339

First use of cabergoline to treat a prolactinoma: what a small molecule can do to your thought patterns! Suddenly things like willpower or drive feel like it has more to do with your luck at getting the right brain chemistry than any personal effort.

Thank you for this comment. I also had a prolactinoma, but haven't been disciplined about taking my cabergoline .. been stuck in a rut as well. Now I'm motivated to get this sorted with my doctor finally.
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