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Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

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Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#431

Post by prometheus76 »

Kye wrote: post #412
jl6 wrote: post #6

The taxonomy of jobs that most people have in their minds is extremely simple (doctor, lawyer, teacher, builder, engineer, window cleaner, garbage collector, astronaut, ...) and is mostly based on a grade-school understanding of what kind of jobs people do. But the reality is that there are millions of types of jobs, with incredible variety and specialisms, and the real content of a job is rarely captured in a job ti…

I see this any time some fresh tech person claims AI will end music as a career. They think it's as simple as generating some nice melodies. Maybe some harmony, if they even know what that is. They don't consider all the sound design, concept, and personality that goes into making and selling music. You might persuade a computer to generate a set of passable songs for a discerning and skilled musician to choose from…

And I think it would be naive and idealistic to think that the composer/songwriter/musician/performers don't have a roll in selling the music. Do I want to go to a concert where a computer is rolled out on stage and I hear amazing music, or do I want to see a performance with lighting and a performer working the crowd? The performance and the personalities of the performers are as much a part of the musical experience as just hearing sounds in headphones, in my opinion.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#432

Post by nkrisc »

celticmusic wrote: post #425
nkrisc wrote: post #327

How important it is to be able to inhabit another person's viewpoint and see things from their perspective. So much time and effort is saved in doing so. Much of my job has become translating and mediating between stakeholders going around in circles, because each one believes their viewpoint represents the entirety of the issue. They can not understand one another because they assume the other understands everything…

this post is a bit of an oxymoron to me. You say you're great at seeing other perspectives, but then you dehumanize them by calling them stakeholders (a term that is the new "resource"). They're people. Call them people.

They're a specific sort of person in this scenario, literally someone who has a stake in the outcome of the situation I'm describing. Is it dehumanizing to call someone who writes code a "software developer" instead of a "person"?

Generally I agree with you and I hate the term "resource" as it's used, but I really don't agree that this is one of those cases. I could have said, "people" but in this instance it would make what I said less specific.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#433

Post by shantly »

celticmusic wrote: post #416
shantly wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In other words, while I considered what the accountant guy did to be a rather low-effort incomplete job, he did exactly what was expected of him by the bank and what I needed to get my deal done. The degree to which everything runs on this sort of system is kind of horrifying, once you're exposed to enough things like this for that to sink in. Relatedly, I guess my contribution to the broader thread would be: Almos…

I disagree, in the anecdote, the bank knows that it's financials are fine and just needed to tick a box for a silly insurance paper. There are definitely games that get played, but for the most part people are playing it to get around silliness from other parties.

Right—that significant amounts of labor (=human life) go into this kind of waste that everyone involved knows is a joke, and that the non-joke variety is rarely treated much differently, both contribute to what's scary about it.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#434

Post by geggam »

inductive_magic wrote: post #288
anotheryou wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you think about politics and capitalism than? can the system still be simplified enough to grasp it well enough to change it? where would an individual who has grasped it find the power to change anything? capitalism seems super stable for now one of the most sad thoughts I heard: if you try to change the system to the better you might keep it from hitting the wall and actually stabilize it

No one claimed that every system can be changed; traffic will be traffic. The same applies for the rules of politics [0]. Not sure how you get the idea that "capitalism" is a bad thing, the majority of educated people (and not just Americans) would strongly disagree; there is a reason why all credible attempts at non-market-driven growth failed, see China and Russia. You may look at the struggle in the world and link…

It's a cycle. We have to go through the socialism so people see how bad it gets.

People forget people aren't inherently nice when it comes to survival.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#435

Post by t3rabytes »

slumdev wrote: post #396

Some number of years of experience is not and never will be equivalent to a CS bachelor's. I'm done explaining why an undocumented O(n^2) solution that violates most of the SOLID principles is a Bad Thing.

This smells like gatekeeping at it's finest.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#436

Post by muzani »

tatar wrote: post #278
muzani wrote: post #114

Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic. You don't need math to reverse engineer a system. You just need to pay attention to it. You can say the right words to make a date happy. You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can. You don't need an app or data - your brain is a wonderful data processing machine. Don't be angry at the people who are ben…

Very well put. What I noticed is that every discipline invents their own lingo to describe the systems in play at the ethos of their discipline and they often manifest as some sort of law, principle or concept. What I'm really curious about learning is to see if there's some sort of overarching discipline that focuses on these sort of systems as a meta and finds improvement points or market opportunities based on a g…

Games do an excellent job at abstracting it out. Here's a nice thesis on game systems [PDF]: https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/1167817/102082_thesis.pdf

Duhigg's The Power of Habit, and some of his other books also do a good job at applying one principle across many fields.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#437

Post by vorpalhex »

celticmusic wrote: post #411
muzani wrote: post #114

Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic. You don't need math to reverse engineer a system. You just need to pay attention to it. You can say the right words to make a date happy. You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can. You don't need an app or data - your brain is a wonderful data processing machine. Don't be angry at the people who are ben…

> Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic. This very much screams "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" to me.

These are all very traditional system modeling problems...

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#438

Post by bsenftner »

Competence is an illusion. Want to be dismayed and acquire a hopeless outlook for society: take anyone and give them a non-trivial task to perform, such as produce a passport style photo of themselves. Sounds easy-peasy, right? 80% of the general population will not deliver. Oh sure, you'll hear all kinds of colorful reasons why, or why what they give you is "better". The facts hurt: people don't listen, they do what they think they heard, their self-conversation is a convoluted mess, and the fact that we have not destroyed our planet is a miracle.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#439

Post by geggam »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #378
ufmace wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of ironically, pulling out 3 anecdotal examples of well-known system failures doesn't make a very high-quality argument that most things being done sloppily most of the time doesn't usually work out fine. The real argument is, that while those 3 things were happening - and the War on Drugs goes back ~100 years - roughly 3 billion other things were also sloppily done, and most of them worked out well enough. If i…

tpxl and you are using different definitions of "work out fine". Incarceration and systemic discrimination against an entire class of people does not count as "well enough", in my opinion. And it's specious reasoning to conclude that if a society made up of untrustworthy actors committing fraud isn't starving and dodging lions, then it's worked out fined. One can go live in a country with low societal trust to see wh…

Power corrupts. Corruption erodes trust.

How do you put people in power without corruption ?

You give them a tight set of rules to follow and limit their power.... with something like a constitution.

You see how it took a mere 200 years for that to get corrupted ?

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#440

Post by vorpalhex »

eyegor wrote: post #290
pgt wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spend a lot of time making my consulting invoices look good, because it seems to justify my rates and impresses the payroll department, who then pays me sooner.

How do you make an invoice look good? Fancy letter head?

My go to as a freelancer was to buy a nice template (spend $50, it's worth it..) and customize it appropriately. You want something approaching "savvy yet professional" most of the time.
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