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I never got military education, but I have to say I admire how well military personal can respond to problems. Anybody have insights how they get educated and i

by erikb 10y ago

I never got military education, but I have to say I admire how well military personal can respond to problems. Anybody have insights how they get educated and if that could be applied to programming/debugging as well?

stagbeetle 10y ago
I have some insight, but not as much as someone who's actually went through formal training. It's a mindset issue. In the military, a soldier is a tool to get a specific job done. The soldier must understand this and shed away his ego and any ideas he has about his "self." He must understand that he is a cog and his only job is to be the perfect cog. This could be applied to programming to increase efficiency, but I'm certain most programmers (and the HN crowd in general) won't be happy with what's to be expected of them. The success of the mission rests on appointing a competent commander (CEO/Manager/Etc.) that'll make all the final decisions and having soldiers (employees) that can zero-in on doing exactly what the commander tells them to, even at the sacrifice of their comfort. There's a lot of ego and self-identity in the programming world which collides with the very essence of the "military way of doing things."
mter 10y ago
Once an officer hits their unit, they have someone with 5-10x more experience to supervise them for their first 5-10 years. It would be like a new manager getting a senior engineer to work with 7 days a week to help guide their bad ideas. Additionally, your software engineers aren't indentured servants. In the military, you often can't go home until a problem is fixed and if you quit, you go to jail. The military burns through a lot of good people, most get out after their initial term.
- erikb 10y ago
  That doesn't matter, though. What I'm talking about is that you can throw a granade next to a soldier, and he'll still be able to think and make decisions. That means he got trained to not let his amphibian brain take over when under stress. That's in some regards what you need if you want to learn debugging. Don't the stress of the too complex problem stop you from thinking. Go step by step. I bet you can teach that without all the bad associations people have about the military.

by erikb 10y ago

stagbeetle 10y ago

I have some insight, but not as much as someone who's actually went through formal training. It's a mindset issue. In the military, a soldier is a tool to get a specific job done. The soldier must understand this and shed away his ego and any ideas he has about his "self." He must understand that he is a cog and his only job is to be the perfect cog. This could be applied to programming to increase efficiency, but I'm certain most programmers (and the HN crowd in general) won't be happy with what's to be expected of them. The success of the mission rests on appointing a competent commander (CEO/Manager/Etc.) that'll make all the final decisions and having soldiers (employees) that can zero-in on doing exactly what the commander tells them to, even at the sacrifice of their comfort. There's a lot of ego and self-identity in the programming world which collides with the very essence of the "military way of doing things."

mter 10y ago

Once an officer hits their unit, they have someone with 5-10x more experience to supervise them for their first 5-10 years. It would be like a new manager getting a senior engineer to work with 7 days a week to help guide their bad ideas. Additionally, your software engineers aren't indentured servants. In the military, you often can't go home until a problem is fixed and if you quit, you go to jail. The military burns through a lot of good people, most get out after their initial term.

erikb 10y ago
That doesn't matter, though. What I'm talking about is that you can throw a granade next to a soldier, and he'll still be able to think and make decisions. That means he got trained to not let his amphibian brain take over when under stress. That's in some regards what you need if you want to learn debugging. Don't the stress of the too complex problem stop you from thinking. Go step by step. I bet you can teach that without all the bad associations people have about the military.