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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?

#731

Post by mywittyname »

coffeefirst wrote: post #207
TrackerFF wrote: post #47

(preface: I worked a string of manual labor jobs before and during college) A lot of the (now) coveted trade jobs can seem like a very tempting alternative to crushing college debt and volatile job security, but truth be told, many of these trades are plagued with physical injuries, sudden unemployment, and what not. Furthermore, you deal with A LOT more shady people (employers, customers / clients, suppliers, you na…

Ever notice the people who advocate this are almost all in white collar jobs?

Or young people just starting out and have only ever worked in a booming market. I worked in construction/sanitation for a family member's business from 15 to 18 summers, then 18 to 20 full time. My dad always stipulated that my job was entirely dependent upon going to night school and keeping my grades up because he did not want me to follow that path in life.

He was only a little older than I am now and was already suffering from physical problems associated with such labor. So he really knew what he was talking about. It was good advice because The Great Recession nearly bankrupted the company.

I also see people that have overinflated ideas of wages in such industries. They often quote average salaries in the range of what the BLS reports as the 90th percentile.

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

#734

Post by bshanks »

An organization that determines its beliefs by voting can have inconsistent beliefs even if each voter has consistent beliefs and votes honestly.

For example, imagine that "(A AND B) logically implies C", and every voter agrees with that statement. Imagine that 1/3 of the voters believe (A, not-B, not-C), 1/3 believes (not-A, B, not-C), and 1/3 believes (A, B, C). If you hold a vote, 2/3s of voters believe A, 2/3s believe B, and 1/3 believes C; so the organization as a whole will hold the contradictory set of beliefs (A, B, not-C).

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

#735

Post by m_fayer »

dragonwriter wrote: post #722
m_fayer wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. I would add: remember that we can all be right. That problem or dysfunction may have 3 root causes, not just 1, and that engineer, lawyer, and BA can stop debating about who diagnosed it right - they all did.

Contradictory viewpoints can't all be right; if there are three different root cause analyses, at least two are wrong, and if there are actually three interacting causes where each identified a single independent root cause, they are all wrong, not all right . Now, they are all possibly approaching the truth from different directions, and need a synthesis of each others views to get to the truth, but that's not the s…

I was thinking of situations where the "causes" can be additive. "Why are we consistently late?" CAN be caused by broken technical processes AND understaffing AND bad product design. Did not intend "root" to be taken that literally.

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

#736

Post by president »

Antoninus wrote: post #96

I'm a developer like many people here. One thing that people who don't program don't realize is that its a laborious job. It seems like its a fun job with lots of 'hanging out' but its more like 4-5 hours a day / 5 days week looking at a text editor and a terminal trying to focus and not be distracted. At the end of the day, I'm exhausted

I have been saying for a while now that "programming" is basically a blue collar job. The vast majority of programming jobs these days are just brainless CRUD duct-tape programming positions that have no need for thought or creativity. Corporations literally just need a monkey that can sit in a chair and churn out code for hours on end.

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

#737

Post by MaxBarraclough »

tristanperry wrote: post #210

Software development is a very young and immature field compared to many fields/industries. I mean, the Hippocratic Oath and _some_ form of organised medicine has been around for 2,500+ years. Modern manufacturing has been around for a few centuries. etc. Yes, they all change and develop - and use software within them to drive some of that change - but many industries are mature and stable. Software is not. 5 years a…

> 5 years ago you would build a frontend website one way, now you'd use a completely different set of tools/technologies. Wait 5 years and it will have completely changed again.

This is certainly true of web front-end work, yes, but that's the most fad-driven area of software development.

Operating systems' kernels are still written in C, though, just like in the 70's. (Well, a different version of the C language, granted.)

> Plus many industries have some form of enforced standards or monitoring, whilst software certainly does not.

Indeed. Only in a very few specific sectors, such as aviation, are there formalised standards.

Incidentally, modern medical ethics are very different from the Hippocratic Oath.

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

#738

Post by AceJohnny2 »

kingkongjaffa wrote: post #718
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #606

The insane amount of work that goes into QA of consumer electronics. I also now viscerally understand how China has a stranglehold on world manufacture of electronics. The concentration of skill, infrastructure, and related industries in Shenzhen or other Chinese industrial cities is unequaled in the USA. We have utterly given that up to Asia. Back to QA: I learned what "DPPM" means: Defective Parts Per Million. A mo…

Mechanical Engineer here: DPPM has been around forever at least since six-sigma and Total Quality Management was touted to improve Japanese manufacturing after WWII. Today it seems the Six-sigma fad is over and everyone is trying to be lean and agile, even in businesses that need fat and slow to management complexity. That physical manufacturing seems like some form of wizardy to people now just shows how containeriz…

Indeed, coming from the software world (as I suspect many HN readers are), concepts obvious to production engineering are novel to me.

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

#739

Post by president »

MockObject wrote: post #664
dengsauve wrote: post #599

I learned at my first web dev job that no one outside the dev/marketing sphere knows just how much of their visit to e-commerce sites is tracked. From technologies like Hotjar that record your mouse movements on a given webpage, to simple IP address logging (who visited this page on our site, from what referrer, etc.), people really have no clue how closely their actions are being monitored. However, as with lots of…

I'll probably lose 20 points of karma for daring to defy consensus, but: I really don't understand the terror around my mouse being tracked as I hover over a page, or around on an commerce site. Why is this supposed to bother me so much? And judging from the ads I'm served, they aren't figuring out very much about me at all. The most that happens is that if a female friend sends me a lingerie link, then I see lingeri…

It's about whose hands this information gets into. When all the data that is being collected on you is combined and cross-referenced with various data sources, you can end up finding all sorts of information about someone like their habits, their lifestyle, medical information, location history, among other things. All this data is sitting out there being sold and brokered to companies or governments who are definitely not using this data in a way that benefits you. Not to mention most of these datasets are not being protected and getting leaked all the time. You may not be a political target or religious dissident where this information can you killed but you are still not benefiting from these data insights being available on the open market. At the very least, you should be able to choose or get paid for this valuable information.

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

#740

Post by president »

thrownaway954 wrote: post #359

"That fake it til you make it" is 99% of what successful people do. Doesn't matter that you don't know what you're doing, no one is the wiser. So NEVER be afraid to take a shot and learn as you go.

In general this works but if enough people do it, society suffers.
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