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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?

#471

Post by kadkads »

whstl wrote: post #462
shafyy wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a story for you: I was born and raised in Switzerland, but I live in Germany now. When I first moved here, I was working as a freelancer and needed to register as a sole entrepreneur (Einzelunternehmen, one of the legal entity forms here). Now, there are several types of taxes you pay in Germany based on your income. One of them is the income tax, the other is called Gewerbesteuer (maybe best translated as "co…

Bizarrely enough, I always had "Software Engineer" written on all my documents here in Germany: my old Residence Permit, tax documents, contracts, the speedy authorisation from Agentur für Arbeit when I moved here, etc. As far as BRD is concerned, I am a software engineer. But I never really studied software engineering or anything related, only Electric Engineering. But nobody in the government knows that. I don't h…

It doesn't matter so much because with a degree in electric engineering you are allowed to call yourself an Engineer/Ingenieur, and that is the only thing that matters. It is a Ordnungswidrigkeit (administrative offence) if you call yourself an engineer if you don't have a at least 3 year degree from a university or university of applied sciences.

With a degree in computer science you are also allowed to call yourself an engineer in Germany, for anyone reading this and wondering.

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

#472

Post by eru »

yen223 wrote: post #430
eru wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would expect Person A to be better than Person B in every notable category, except for video game skill. Not necessarily. Person A might beat B at video games, too. Just spending time doesn't necessarily make you good at something.

Haha, you might be right. Fitness and stamina are pretty important to get those APMs in.

Or just general intelligence.

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

#473

Post by avensec »

mr-wendel wrote: post #187

Caught a senior sysadmin in a small company using a proxy on our infrastructure to hide misc web browsing from oversight. The logs were the give-away. It was typical misc IT/nerd news stuff... the kind of thing a different company culture (which did come later) would actually encourage. I was sure the right thing to do was to report it to the CEO (there wasn't anyone else higher in the hierarchy to consider) for cert…

Thanks for sharing!

So, a question in balancing the regret against knowing what you know now. This situation sparked a change in you to recognize how to handle these situations better. Would you make the same mistake again in order to learn the lesson?

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

#474

Post by eru »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #407
eru wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Optimising' for simplicity would often be a good idea, though. Optimising for speed of execution only matters some times.

Optimising for simplicity first is almost always the right thing to do. Even if it turns out to be too slow you then have a reference implementation to confirm correctness against. In my experience it's rare to correctly identify the bottleneck in code while writing it.

Oh, I had situations in mind where I can quickly write a simple version.

But sometimes when I really torture my brain I can spend a few days of doing mathematical proofs etc to come up with a even simpler solution.

That extra effort is only sometimes necessary. (But can be lots of fun to develop.)

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

#475

Post by eru »

ayewo wrote: post #427
eru wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Optimising' for simplicity would often be a good idea, though. Optimising for speed of execution only matters some times.

The steps in this witty quote helps puts things in perspective as what anyone should do first when in doubt: "Make it work, make it correct, make it fast".

And the 'fast' can be optional.

But sometimes you already have something that works, is correct and fast, but you still want to simplify: for example, when understanding _why_ that code is correct is too annoyingly complicated to explain and understand.

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

#476

Post by trgn »

beeboobaa3 wrote: post #443
jaydeegee wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a colleague who was old school and loved optimising, everything he reviewed come back with tiny changes that would save fractions of a ms. His nemesis was a guy who was arguably the best coder I have ever worked with. Things come to a head in one meeting and old school said if we did things his way our code would run quicker and the response was legendary 'If we coded like you it'd run quicker because most of t…

That's just a rude thing to say. If you all coded like him you wouldn't be having the discussion. The issue is when you have people who do not code with efficiency in mind, and someone who does think about those things reviews the code. Most efficiency gains are probably marginal and not that impactful. So you're probably OK ignoring it. And it's true that bringing such things up during code review and then going bac…

This is it. People could write the code with a lean footprint the first time around.

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

#477

Post by earnesti »

tictacttoe wrote: post #470
hu3 wrote: post #83

Learning that some folks can produce so much value with crappy code. I've seen entire teams burn so much money by overcomplicating projects. Bikesheding about how to implement DDD, Hexagonal Architecture, design patterns, complex queues that would maybe one day be required if the company scaled 1000x, unnecessary eventual consistency that required so much machinery and man hours to keep data integrity under control.…

Having heard a variation of this comment many times, I keep waiting for an “aha” moment, where I see the light and abandon my obsession with minimalism and clean code. But at least in science roles it hasn’t happened yet. Rather, I keep seeing instances of bogus scientific conclusions which waste money for years before they are corrected. Being systematic, reproducible, and thorough is difficult, but it’s the only wa…

There's so much waste in the world, that it is unbelievable.

However counterintuitively, I have stopped caring about waste, and have been more focused on the value. Waste you can always optimize later if you want to, value creation is the difficult part.

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

#478

Post by robertlagrant »

rcbdev wrote: post #363
icelancer wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one wants to be a "programmer." They'd rather be called "engineers." With none of the licensure, mandatory education, and so forth. But the world needs programmers and technicians for most of the work we have to do. I do comparably little "engineering" and the little I have done that qualifies for such a statement I recall. Majority of the work is programming and technician work. Nothing wrong with that.

Maybe not in the U.S. but in Europe, Software Engineering is often a field of engineering where one can get licensed. i.e. in Austria many IT techs and devs are called (at the doctor's office or in formal settings) "Mr. Engineer" ("Herr Ingenieur") if they fulfill some formal criteria and get licensed. A further qualification is becoming a federally certified civil technician for IT (Ziviltechniker or Ingenieurskonsu…

> Software around the world is engineered - it just often isn't in California.

A gatekeeping organisation you have to pay to enter the workforce isn't the same as something actually being "engineered".

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

#479

Post by nottorp »

ordu wrote: post #453
nottorp wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is the thing I love about emacs, it autoindents everything, so if you got brackets/braces/parenthesis wrong you see something you don't expect. But obligatory braces work too.

Yeah maybe these days the smarter autoindent would prevent incidents like this. But it's too late for me, I'll add braces around 1 line branches till i die :)

Well, not in python...

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

#480

Post by datadrivenangel »

eru wrote: post #361
erhaetherth wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My manager gave me gruff the other day for adding a TODO that I had no intention of ever doing. TODOs are like a get out of jail free card. Don't want to do something the reviewer is likely going to call out? Just add a TODO.

That's why some people insists on having a name with each TODO, and some even want a name and a date.

some TODOs are actually WOULDDOs
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