Mental Model: Difficult Problems vs. Hard Work
benjamincongdon.me
Mental Model: Difficult Problems vs. Hard Work
1–10 of 47 posts
Re: Mental Model: Difficult Problems vs. Hard Work
#2> there are problems that are solvable by throwing a lot of human-hours at it (“Hard Work”), and problems that are not a function of raw work hours, but rather require dealing with ambiguity (“Difficult Problems”)
There's also the 3rd category of the hell of work that is easy, ambigous, but just uses up a ton of mental space to work through that mushy ambiguity. I'd solve difficult problems all day, can stomach doing hard work when its requirements are clear, but god keep me away from the hell of "death by a thousand papercuts" in the marshes of easy-but-mindspace/time-sucking quai-ambiguous problems...
Clarifying ambiguous requirements at least is rewarding when you achieve that clarity and help people understand what they actually need. But there's hellish work that is just unclarifiable before doing this, you just have to crawl to that mud of trivial but not-so-trivial-that-you-can-think-about-something-else-while-doing-them... 100% better to work a garden or serve in bar than that!
Re: Mental Model: Difficult Problems vs. Hard Work
#3I usually refer to this distinction as "tall" vs. "wide" problems. Tall problems require having at least one exceptional or specialized person to solve it, whereas wide problems can be cleared by most generalist problem-solvers. The time required to solve wide problems is simply one of aggregate bandwidth.
Unfortunately, I think society has a ton of people who can solve super tall problems working on super wide problems, because the largest (and most well-funded) organizations have the widest problems. In some cases they have super tall problems too, but past a certain size the lights stay on by solving the wide problems.
Re: Mental Model: Difficult Problems vs. Hard Work
#4Working on difficult problems that is so abstract, I find that
> Strategies that can collapse the higher dimensional Difficult Problem into a lower dimensional form of Hard Work reduce the cognitive costs to solving the problem
make it worse, abstraction leaks everywhere, every level of abstract seems exchangeable, applicable .. while it just doesn't work.
Abstraction is a malware of thought of breaking task down to Hard Work.
Re: Mental Model: Difficult Problems vs. Hard Work
#5I like this distinction, and the bit about converting difficult problems into hard-work.
There's one thing that occurred to me in the context of agile + difficult problems. When I think about my sprints, the vast amount of my time is spend dominated on that one "difficult" problem, which on the surface does not feel difficult. The spirit of agile development is to _try_ to transform difficult problems into hard-work (in the way suggested in the article), but I feel like most people don't try very hard to do that.
We could improve the way we structure our work by allowing ourselves to be more honest about acknowledging this, as well as actually putting in the mental work to figure out if parts of the difficult problem can be converted to "hard work".
Re: Mental Model: Difficult Problems vs. Hard Work
#6What are folks thoughts on changing hard work into difficult problems?
That seems to be the more interesting transformation. And potentially where startups thrive.
What are some cases where you thought you transformed hard work into a difficult problem?
Re: Mental Model: Difficult Problems vs. Hard Work
#7I like this distinction, and the bit about converting difficult problems into hard-work. There's one thing that occurred to me in the context of agile + difficult problems. When I think about my sprints, the vast amount of my time is spend dominated on that one "difficult" problem, which on the surface does not feel difficult. The spirit of agile development is to _try_ to transform difficult problems into hard-work…
I don't think that's the spirit of agile development at all. Agile is about closed loops with fast feedback. It's about communicating quickly and reacting to new information. I don't see it as having much to do with "hard vs. difficult" at all.
Re: Mental Model: Difficult Problems vs. Hard Work
#8What are folks thoughts on changing hard work into difficult problems? That seems to be the more interesting transformation. And potentially where startups thrive. What are some cases where you thought you transformed hard work into a difficult problem?
Or a much more interesting question: what are some examples of hard work that you're laboring through right now?
Most likely folks here may have suggestions on how to convert it to difficult problems :-).
Re: Mental Model: Difficult Problems vs. Hard Work
#9What are folks thoughts on changing hard work into difficult problems? That seems to be the more interesting transformation. And potentially where startups thrive. What are some cases where you thought you transformed hard work into a difficult problem?
That is an excellent point. Creating solutions to hard work by solving a difficult problem is a great land of opportunity.
Something that comes immediately to mind is Hasura. They’ve taken the hard work problem of building CRUD GraphQL APIs and made it almost instant for their users by solving those difficult problems.
Re: Mental Model: Difficult Problems vs. Hard Work
#10[deleted]