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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?

#671

Post by 8bitsrule »

disambiguously wrote: post #492
solveit wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I agree w you mostly but you extended this form of systemic analysis to "making a date happy" which I think is a fundamental misunderstanding of relationships. To everyone reading this: please don't go around treating other people as systems to be optimized! I think people who say this kind of thing have a fundamental misunderstanding of how a certain type of people think. Of course people are systems to be optimiz…

> It's like people who object to love being a chemical reaction. What else could it be possibly be? Did you learn that by study, or did someone tell you that? Where else have you looked for love? You might find “love” contained in the electrical impulses in a computer program. It might be in the words of a screenplay. A complicated mechanical automaton might experience love. You could notice it in a melody, or in the…

somefamousperson (shrug) once said (I roughly paraphrase) that you could be handed a picture, and you could analyze the makeup of every square millimeter of it without ever seeing the picture.

What does it gain? I can never know anyone. After long effort, I've made some progress knowing myself. Yet we manage to have some kinds of relationships. We can enjoy (or suffer) them, but comprehension is a fantasy.

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

#672

Post by hnick »

prometheus76 wrote: post #459
jaggederest wrote: post #31

People have a tremendously distorted view of reality due to their own biases. Myself definitely included. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair More concretely in the field of software engineering: Accurate, precise estimates are more expensive than the actual task itself. If someone asks you "how long until it is done", the onl…

The other problem with estimates of time with regard to certain tasks is the pareto principle. Specifically, if I give it to this developer, it will take two days. If I give it to that developer, it will take two weeks. So, how long will it take?

Problem is, if you always give it to the two-day developer your two-week developer might miss out on chances to improve.

One place I worked just billed the client what we would as the reasonable rate and tracked the rest as training.

I guess pair programming is one approach to get around this, you'd probably consume a week of dev time total in your example but it's better than two.

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

#673

Post by hnick »

jaggederest wrote: post #31

People have a tremendously distorted view of reality due to their own biases. Myself definitely included. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair More concretely in the field of software engineering: Accurate, precise estimates are more expensive than the actual task itself. If someone asks you "how long until it is done", the onl…

I've seen a corollary in my work with legacy system migrations and technical debt.

Often scoping the work and taking so much care to not cause any issues grinds the work to a halt. We could do well with taking a bit more of a risk&fix attitude (after all, leaving it as it is constitutes a BIG risk over an infinite time frame).

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

#674

Post by hnick »

rohitbhats wrote: post #356

1. Look at things in entirety--from end-to-end, when you see the complete picture, it becomes much easier to grasp anything. 2. Research matters A LOT. I remember an incident where my Design lead called us all into a room (about 12 people.) He gave each one of us a chocolate--none were of the same kind. Then, he asked, "how many of you don't like what you got" Couple of us raised our hands. He then said, "go ahead an…

I really like that chocolate story.

I think there's a side lesson there in allowing users to engage in fixing their own issues. Whether it's open source software, Wordpress plugins, a marketplace/platform like eBay, or item trading in an online game. It's powerful and engaging if you can get the balance right.

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

#675

Post by frequentnapper »

that perception is everything. no matter how good you are, but if your work doesn't get noticed by the right people, then your career will suffer. People with good social skills who may be mediocre developers will move up much faster than you, and you will think why is it that you get left behind?

Example: You're a senior supporting your more junior devs whenever they run into trouble, and you hardly get credit for it because the business side doesn't even realize it. All they see is tickets moving.

I've kind of learned this the hard way and even before learning it, I actually luckily took advantage of this without even realizing it in a previous job.

Make sure that the work you're doing is credited to you in front of top brass. But you can't be too overt or braggy about it otherwise it will get annoying to your coworkers and then you will suffer. It seems like an art form almost.

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

#676

Post by hnick »

beefield wrote: post #51

That money is debt. In a very fundamental, literal and practical sense, debt or credit (i.e. someone owing somebody something valuable) is what money is . The traditional definition of means of unit of measure, means of payment and unit of value describe how money is used , not what it is . Like, knife is a sharp edged tool used to cut things vs knife actually is steel. (This also being my main reason objecting crypt…

Have you read Debt: The First 5000 Years?

That's the core concept from that book and I found it really interesting. It tears down the common school example of barter based economies preceding money. In most societies people kept an informal ledger of favours owed in their heads and had a rough idea of commensurate value over time. Direct barter was relatively rare.

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

#678

Post by [deleted] »

csallen wrote: post #161

People have very limited notions of what a business is. At its core, a business is just a project or activity that's capable of sustaining itself financially. That's it. There are no other requirements. There are some super creative businesses out there, with an unimaginable number of possibilities still unexplored. The Internet has made this even more extreme. By connecting everyone on Earth to everyone else, it's m…

[deleted]

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

#679

Post by __initbrian__ »

bykhun wrote: post #230
roenxi wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can master nearly anything and stand out; boring physical labour is actually one where there are obvious things to be amazing it. It may not earn people a pay raise, but there will be a noticeable and impressive difference between an expert shelf-stacker and someone killing time for money. That being said there are a lot of jobs where I have difficulty imagining what mastery looks like; say in an automated, lo…

I fell in love with driving after that scene in Parasite movie where we takes this very-very smooth turn. I now try to roll my Skoda like it's Mercedes: I stop and start smoothly, I turn wheel so that people don't spoil their imaginative coffee. It makes me feel like I'm guiding a spaceship!

Skoda Electric Bus https://www.skoda.cz/en/references/elektrobus-s-rychlodobije...

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

#680

Post by muzani »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #574
davnicwil wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't be angry at the people who are benefiting from a system, or at the system itself. Most just end up that way, the same way a river meanders towards the sea This is absolutely brilliant, going to favourite it and steal your quote! The only thing I'd contribute is to also think about the system from your perspective, wherever you've ended up. Zoom out. Think about how you got here. How much of it is truly delibe…

The only type of person who will like this kind of quote is someone disproportionally benefiting from the system in an unfair way. Let me tell you absolutely that if such people exist in the system then the system is flawed, unfair and such a person is indeed exploiting the system. Systems can be made fair or unfair, that is what you must derive from the fact that everything is a system. It is pure stupidity to accep…

I mean, frequent rain harms some and benefits some. But you wouldn't get angry at the people who benefit from rain. You'd deal with it, get an umbrella, build a roof, change your plans, and so on.

Angry tweets won't dismantle capitalism any more than it would stop the rain. The people who benefit from capitalism didn't invent capitalism. Capitalism might have poverty as a side effect, but the system doesn't need to be dismantled, it needs to be patched.

If there's anything we learn from software engineering, it's that destroying something and rebuilding it completely causes more unexpected bugs. Patches can be messy and ugly, but are often the best solution.

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