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Doing the thing is doing the thing

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Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#71

Post by storystarling »

tibbar wrote: post #59

On the other hand: sometimes doing the thing is itself a bad idea. One reason I continue to insist on design docs and code review is that I'd rather find this out ahead of time rather than deal with the damage afterwards. In the GenAI era, "doing the thing badly without planning" has become so easy that some counterweight is needed.

The happy path is trivial now but I've found the gap between prototype and production is actually wider. You end up spending all your time handling non-determinism and latency issues that simply didn't exist with deterministic code. It seems like the real engineering challenge is just getting the unit economics to work.

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#72

Post by asukachikaru »

dakiol wrote: post #36
munificent wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Planning is doing the planning thing, but it is not doing the battle thing.

And running the marathon is just running the marathon? I disagree. Big part of running the marathon is in the preparation. Weeks after weeks of training and not skipping a single session. The marathon itself is the tip of the iceberg; important but not the whole "thing".

No matter how much preparation and training one does, if they haven’t run the marathon, they haven’t run the marathon.

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#73

Post by llbbdd »

nlawalker wrote: post #69
TheAlchemist wrote: post #9

"Doing it badly is doing the thing." This one works for me, and I've learned it from a post on HN. Whenever I feel stuck or overthink how to do something, just do it first - even with all the flaws that I'm already aware of, and if it feels almost painful to do it so badly. Then improve it a bit, then a bit, then before I know it a clear picture start to emerge... Feels like magic.

My two favorite bits of wisdom in this vein: Dan Harmon's advice on writer's block: https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/5b2w4c/dan_h... > You know how you suck and you know how everything sucks and when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it, because you're an asshole. So that is my advice about getting unblocked. Switch from team "I will one day write something good" to team "I have…

I miss Harmontown dearly. He was always dropping solid-gold wisdom like this in the middle of otherwise borderline-incoherent rants.

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#74

Post by pyrolistical »

mojuba wrote: post #53

> Doing it badly is doing the thing. No it's not. Sometimes (or maybe most of the time) doing it badly means maybe it's not your thing. I used to have a neighbour who liked to play the piano and sing. He was doing it consistently badly and he didn't have anyone to tell him that he should probably stop trying.

Just let people be.

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#75

Post by dzonga »

jgeada wrote: post #61

At a previous company we used to joke that most of management was a "problem admiration society": They'd love to talk about problems, investigate them from all angles, make plans on how to plan to solve the problem, identify who caused it or how to blame for it, quantify how much it costs us or how much money we could make from solving it, everything and anything except actually doing something about it. It was never…

you remove "managers" then simply rate of output goes up.

specially the middle managers i.e engineering managers, senior engineering manager, director of engineering duh duh

there's less coordination to do - to keep managers up to date.

the most functional software orgs out there - don't have managers

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#79

Post by rdsubhas »

The article was great — for solopreneurs.

There are things that humans have to unfortunately do when working as a group of people. That's why we became the alpha predator. Not because we were the strongest ape. That includes:

- Filling in timesheets, quarterly, half yearly cycles, company meetings, team meetings is not doing the thing — as a solopreneur. But not as a member of a group.

- Writing tickets, reviewing PRs is not doing the thing — as a solopreneur.

- Commuting to work and back is not doing the thing — If I'm a solopreneur this doesn't even matter.

- Answering technical questions, analyzing data, attending to bugs is not doing the thing — If I'm a solopreneur especially on a greenfield stuff, I have zero baggage.

- Writing test cases and putting up alerts is not doing the thing — if it's only me judging me, I have nothing to judge.

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#80

Post by direwolf20 »

amarant wrote: post #50
robofanatic wrote: post #23

Ironically people who fall in not doing the thing category of this article are valued more than those who do the thing.

Selling the thing isn't doing the thing, but it pays more! Life is tough like that

Let's all switch to finance.
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