The most humbling learning experience I have ever had was having a child.
Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
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Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#42Being 15 and unable to grasp the concept of an array whilst wishing I could somehow use a variable to escape my at the time a1, a2, … a11 variable naming convention.
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#43Idk 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?
"Just showing up" can mean dealing with all the daily annoyances.
https://www.inc.com/danny-iny/woody-allen-said-show-up-to-su...
If it's not hard, why can't everyone seem to do it?
I have a friend who's a defense lawyer. He tells me that prison must be the happiest place on earth, given the lengths that people go to just to get a chance of getting in. It's funny and illustrative, just like the Woody Allen quote about showing up.
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#44I went from hacky hobbyist programmer to working on core business logic for a startup that eventually the whole company would rely on. I was mostly a one-person team at the company, and I kept a lot of my bad unscalable tendencies from making small fun projects. No formal testing, very little documentation, hundreds of “TODOs”, breaking API changes without really telling anyone, no QA process, no monitoring/reporting, etc.
It all came to a head when my employer was demoing some software that used my API and none of what they were trying to show worked because of multiple unrelated bugs in my code, causing us to lose this very large client. I somehow kept my position, worked with other departments to formalize QA processes, and started regularly communicating with the API users.
Before I was just making software for nobody with 0 stakes, the reality of having actual people, entire revenue streams dependent on my code being reliable didn’t fully register. At my previous (and only other at the time) employer I was basically a paid seat filler. I spent a lot of work hours making personal projects, it felt like going to work and getting paid to make hobby code.
I’m glad I was able to learn from the experience and it didn’t put me out of work or anything
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#45Being 15 and unable to grasp the concept of an array whilst wishing I could somehow use a variable to escape my at the time a1, a2, … a11 variable naming convention.
A formative experience for me was learning to program and asking a peer “how I do lots of variables but I don’t know which one I need” - I had none of the terms to even ask for what I needed.
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#46Learning that the world doesn't revolve around me, and that other people (and other animals) have rich and complex inner lives worthy of curiosity, dignity, and love (I can't be sure, but it feels like a healthy perspective). I'm in my 40s and this lesson, started in youth, is still sinking in. Having a child, and the commensurate second childhood, is a major impetus.
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#47Always something new... this week its some *nix commands
cat backwards (tac) will display the file in reverse order :)
chown username: with the colon and the group name blank will set the permission to the user's default group.. very useful when you blend windows groups with spaces into an environment and it becomes a pain in the ass to put return characters in
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#48Ah, some of the things in this thread remind me of https://xkcd.com/1053/
I quote this all the time to people. There’s too much, we’re spread too thin. Ignorance shouldn’t be considered a big deal or a huge embarrassment. Not being ready to learn is a problem, but ignorance is sort of the default state now.
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#49Ah, some of the things in this thread remind me of https://xkcd.com/1053/
I quote this all the time to people. There’s too much, we’re spread too thin. Ignorance shouldn’t be considered a big deal or a huge embarrassment. Not being ready to learn is a problem, but ignorance is sort of the default state now.
(I actually scanned the comment thread to look for this comic, I was going to add it but you beat me to it.)
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#50I don't think this was dumb exactly, just naïve. I didn't know fireflies were real until my 20s. I thought they were just a made up thing in storybooks. I was rooming with a girl I barely knew for the summer and was looking out the window while washing dishes. You know how fireflies tend to sync up? Suddenly I see hundreds of tiny yellow lights turn on and then off. On and then off. I yelled for her to come in (at le…
This is not really dumb, or naïve. It's just not something you had any reason to encounter, and maybe you were off sick if it was mentioned in biology/science lessons. Now consider it this way: the first time you experienced fireflies, you were an adult, and you could bring a fully adult, science-aware, sense of wonder to that experience. I'd count it as a win.
I was thinking "naïve" in the sense of "just not knowing some normal things about the world." It's definitely my, "WAIT--fireflies are REAL??" reaction that makes me laugh after the fact.