Want to work on interesting problems? Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups! Help lawyers crawl out of their low-tech hole! Work on software to revolutionize public classrooms! Why work on interesting tech when you could throw yourself at intractable problems that we never get any closer to solving?
The parent comment does not actually define any specific problem. "Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups!" A problem that needs to be solved is _____________? "Help lawyers crawl out of their low-tech holes!" A problem that needs to be solved is _____________? "Work on software to revolutionise public classrooms!" A problem that needs to be solved is _____________? Let us know when can provide even a…
Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech
71–80 of 97 posts
Re: Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man, I sure am glad Curtis and the Wright brothers didn't take this stance after Lord Kelvin claimed "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible" before they proved him wrong less than 20 years later. Or NASA when Lee Deforest claimed flight to the moon was impossible "regardless of all future advances." Or when Einstein claimed ""There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable.…
> when Einstein claimed ""There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable." Not to be pedantic, but was Einstein incorrect at that time/in the future? Were there any actual indications that nuclear energy would be obtainable at that time? Einstein didn't seem to say, "Obtaining nuclear energy is absolutely impossible, and can never be achieved." All he said was that there is not the…
The quote is of course completely out of context, and looks a lot like something one throws at annoyingly overeagle people. Also, I imagine the context for saying it only existed because nuclear fission seemed perfectly plausible and just over the horizon. It was technically correct, nobody could imagine a Manhattan Project at that time, and it wasn't obvious that it was even possible, but there was a clear possibility.
Re: Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech
#73Want to work on interesting problems? Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups! Help lawyers crawl out of their low-tech hole! Work on software to revolutionize public classrooms! Why work on interesting tech when you could throw yourself at intractable problems that we never get any closer to solving?
Re: Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech
#74Want to work on interesting problems? Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups! Help lawyers crawl out of their low-tech hole! Work on software to revolutionize public classrooms! Why work on interesting tech when you could throw yourself at intractable problems that we never get any closer to solving?
> Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups! Please please please go into these areas with humility. Having worked for health tech companies in SF for a decade, I've seen so many people come from Google/Facebook/Mozilla/Ticketmaster/eBay to healthcare in order to "disrupt" and "fix" it. Their disruption or fixes are many times illegal, impractical, vaporware, or completely ignore industry standards and s…
Re: Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech
#75Want to work on interesting problems? Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups! Help lawyers crawl out of their low-tech hole! Work on software to revolutionize public classrooms! Why work on interesting tech when you could throw yourself at intractable problems that we never get any closer to solving?
I don't think he was necessarily saying that you should sacrifice yourself to your own idea of the pointless "greater noble good".
Build a stamp database, an app to record baseball cards, automatically conjugate latin verbs, make a recipe database that can give you a list of what can be made with a given set of ingredients, make a 3d anatomical viewer based on the BodyPart3D database, make a catalog of open source projects for a given combination of JavaScript technologies, make a periodic table that shows the 3D orbital structure of the atom involved, calculate and visualise knitting patterns, simulate an H-Bomb or global thermonuclear war...
Do it in Golang, write it in Rust or Haskell or PHP, or with a shell script if you have to...
Run it on baremetal, on a VM, in a unikernel, deploy it in a k8s cluster, or nomad, or docker-compose or host it on a microcontroller if that fits...
But for a change focus on the problem and not the tools.
Re: Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech
#76Want to work on interesting problems? Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups! Help lawyers crawl out of their low-tech hole! Work on software to revolutionize public classrooms! Why work on interesting tech when you could throw yourself at intractable problems that we never get any closer to solving?
> Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups! Please please please go into these areas with humility. Having worked for health tech companies in SF for a decade, I've seen so many people come from Google/Facebook/Mozilla/Ticketmaster/eBay to healthcare in order to "disrupt" and "fix" it. Their disruption or fixes are many times illegal, impractical, vaporware, or completely ignore industry standards and s…
Re: Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech
#77Want to work on interesting problems? Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups! Help lawyers crawl out of their low-tech hole! Work on software to revolutionize public classrooms! Why work on interesting tech when you could throw yourself at intractable problems that we never get any closer to solving?
Interesting definition of "interesting" you're using there. I don't think he was necessarily saying that you should sacrifice yourself to your own idea of the pointless "greater noble good". Build a stamp database, an app to record baseball cards, automatically conjugate latin verbs, make a recipe database that can give you a list of what can be made with a given set of ingredients, make a 3d anatomical viewer based…
Re: Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups! Please please please go into these areas with humility. Having worked for health tech companies in SF for a decade, I've seen so many people come from Google/Facebook/Mozilla/Ticketmaster/eBay to healthcare in order to "disrupt" and "fix" it. Their disruption or fixes are many times illegal, impractical, vaporware, or completely ignore industry standards and s…
Can you give some examples for illegal stuff?
Re: Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech
#79Want to work on interesting problems? Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups! Help lawyers crawl out of their low-tech hole! Work on software to revolutionize public classrooms! Why work on interesting tech when you could throw yourself at intractable problems that we never get any closer to solving?
> Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups! Please please please go into these areas with humility. Having worked for health tech companies in SF for a decade, I've seen so many people come from Google/Facebook/Mozilla/Ticketmaster/eBay to healthcare in order to "disrupt" and "fix" it. Their disruption or fixes are many times illegal, impractical, vaporware, or completely ignore industry standards and s…
A good way to approach is to partner with a domain expert to understand the following aspects.
1. Know about various stake holders that make up a business process. Understand each of their incentives. Some actors standout explicitly but some do not, such as regulators.
2. The value add by different player/stake holder in the chain.
3. Location of power centres. No one will explicitly call it out but you will be able to figure it out.
Now pick one stake holder or actor, go deep into their problems, and see how you can make their life easier without disrupting rest of the actors. This latter part is important. If there are three actors (A, B, and C) and your solution is intended to make life easy for "A" but requires B and C to disrupt their workflow without them getting anything in return then it'll be that much difficult for your solution to be adopted.Also, at the end of the day automation is making someone (or part of someone) redundant. Make sure you identify that person and be subtle about your messaging to them.
All of this takes time so in olden days there used to be a role called "system analysts". Their job was to go deep into the problem domain, untangle all the above for you and help you define product. These analysts are typically ex-workers in the same domain so they have seen everything first hand. Given the nature of their job their role is not fungible in that you can't take one person and make them move around to be system analyst in different domains. Somewhere along the way system analyst role disappeared and they were replaced by fungible "product managers". These PMs have a generic set of product development skills such as UX, user retention optimisation etc., But they lack the domain knowledge. And they are expected to be fungible. If a PM changes job once every 3 years into a different domain they can at best do a superficial job.
Of the top of my head here are two examples.
There's this software called Docon (https://docon.co.in) used by small-setup medical doctors and physicians. The value add for doctors is very clear. It saves them time and all the hassle. What is good about Docon is it requires zero actions by the patient or any one else. So Doctors are happy to be using it. It is a nifty little tool to automate key parts of doctors' workflow.
Now let me talk about JIRA. It is mainly targeted towards management and execs. Because, let's face it, they have a genuine problem of not having clear view into project development state. They can't see how their quarterly projects are shaping up at different zoom levels. To that end I would say JIRA does a reasonably good job. Where JIRA fails spectacularly is it requires leaf level works to massively disrupt their workflow. Not only does it require them to use JIRA for daily updates and what not it also forces a way of agile development which comes with its own set of baggages.
Re: Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech
#80Want to work on interesting problems? Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups! Help lawyers crawl out of their low-tech hole! Work on software to revolutionize public classrooms! Why work on interesting tech when you could throw yourself at intractable problems that we never get any closer to solving?
Hippa compliance... Development is a nightmare