So, tell us more about window blinds!
Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
501–510 of 704 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#502I learned to lace my shoes correctly at 40+ thanks to a post on HN. I will search for the post tonight.
Please post back.
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#503Wife and I worked with a realtor that did an awful job. We did not read the contract carefully enough, and through some uncovered issue there was not a way we could terminate the agreement. They told us they would terminate for $2k for the work they had done up to that point.
I call this kind of money "tuition."
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#504While in Army basic training, my duffel got swapped with another guy's (no idea whose). Back at the barracks, I discovered that they'd snagged some spent shells from the range. Massive no-no. Young, naive me assumed that presenting these to the drill sergeants and explaining the situation would be the correct move. I was severely disciplined as a result. Others were like, "Dude... why didn't you just quietly toss tha…
Naive civilian question here -- If the drill sergeant is your boss in basic training, I don't understand why telling him info you think is important got you into trouble. After all, "talk to your boss if you have a concern" is the #1 piece of advice given to anyone who has a job. In healthy work environments, the culture is to assume the best about the intentions of others ... sounds like he wasn't doing that at all.
>In healthy work environments
There are healthy work environments in the military. Basic training, however, is not one of them. There are certain things about joining a military, like the prospect of having to be sent to kill other people you've never met or be killed by them, that changes the calculus of what is "healthy" or not.
I remember in basic there were Drill Sergeants you learned that could be reasoned with and those that could not. Your experience depended largely on which DS was on shift when you screwed up.
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
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." Can you explain the difference between 'engineered' software, and the rest? I mean other than being created by someone with an engineering certificate or whatever.
I'm no defender of Degrees as a mark of quality
But, for me it implies that it gets Planned and Worked on formally like other engineering projects, Lists of Requierements, Detailed Propossals, Design documents, BOM's ,Gantt Charts, the whole shebang
The alternative being the ultra lean SV style, where a project is lucky if even the public facing documentation is not at least N-months out of date
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#506I 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.
Reminds me of finding the closest pair of houses in the UK with the same address: https://paulplowman.com/stuff/house-address-twins-proximity/
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#507In 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…
Oh yeah, very much the same.
I'd been interested coding and electronics since I was a young teen, and was very much the guy that everyone approached for such problems - it's easy to get cocky like that. In our first year we had a guy that transferred from econ (to electrical engineering). He had to take night classes to catch up with the math and physics, as he didn't take the required AP classes in HS.
Anyway, the guy was just a machine. He worked incredibly hard - studied 12 hours a day all week, on top of working in the weekends. The guy picked up everything so fast.
Got straight A's, and advanced much faster than the rest of us. We did have some informal internal competition, but this guy was just way up there - no one bothered.
He went on to get a Ph.D. in AI/ML, and got a great FAANG job.
But, there's never a guarantee. I've met similar people - just straight up rock stars, that for whatever reason didn't reach the stars. I can't help but to think "What a shame, talk about wasted talent" - but who am I to judge, they could be perfectly content with life.
Anyway, college is definitely a good place to meet people that are smarter than yourself. If you're the smartest around, you're likely not studying at the right place.
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#508In 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…
I work with Apache Airflow. But lead my sister to believe for a time that I had begun to transition to a career somehow related to HVAC and solving the problems associated with "patchy" airflow in certain places.
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is so true. I remember one of my interviews that went well in the end. In the middle of the interview, they mentioned using Java and building web apps. At the time, I was a C++ developer with no web development experience. I said: "I never did web development," and their response was, "You do know how to write source code, don't you?" I said: "Of course I do, but..." They cut me off with: "You will pick it up, d…
I recall interviews from that era too, where the interviewers didn't fully comprehend the jobs they were hiring for.
"You know how to write source code, don't you?"
Answer: "yes, but I mostly prefer to write fully compiled code directly to disk. Much more efficient".
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#510Learning 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.…
You refactor and abstract later. A key principle absolutely no one observes. You have to let people turn out slop and then let them clean it up.
Instead it's combative code reviews where everything has to enter the code base perfect.
Makes me sick.