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

• brudgers 7y ago
  Physical labor correlates to social status not intelligence.
  • Maven911 7y ago
    Unsure what that means, can you elaborate
    • seanhunter 7y ago
      I took it to mean that smart people sometimes have low-status jobs, and conversely people in high-status jobs are not always smart. That's definitely something I have personally experienced given my career has taken me from working as a building labourer and factory worker through to being a C-suite exec, with stops through the trading side of investment banking and Silicon Valley on the way. It's a huge mistake to look down on and make assumptions about someone just because they have a "bad" job.
      • andykx 7y ago
        As the years go by, I find myself craving a job with a physical labor component to it. A friend of mine studied enology (wine making) at Cornell and his job is about 50% business management and 50% wine making. Some days he has to wear a suit to work, other days he comes home in a wine stained smock. It seems like a good balance.
        • KozmoNau7 7y ago
          Some here. 12 years in IT, and I dream of a job where I get to be outside in nature, perhaps forestry. I have friends who work in various construction fields, so I know it can be miserable and cold and dirty and hard on your body, and that people tend to romanticize outdoor jobs. Still, I've never been one to be bothered by cold or reasonable amounts of rain, as long as the appropriate clothing is available.
          • lvturner 7y ago
            12 years in IT here too - now working for an AgriTech After spending a few days bolting heavy steel pipes into place in the scorching sun I realised I quite like the comfort of the office ;-) Though it is fun to go onto the absolute front lines and get your hands dirty and the feeling of satisfaction on completing a physical job can be very high.
        • tonyedgecombe 7y ago
          This is why I always cringe a little when people here say they want to create an app on the side or an open source project. If you spend your work time staring at a screen then it's probably better to find something to do with your hands in your spare time.
        • sebcat 7y ago
          My SO and I recently bought a house with a garden and some trees (pine, spruce, poplar, beech, one apple tree), at the outskirts of a village, close to the woods. Working on the house has so far given me a lot of satisfaction (also some stress and shorter days). Any work we do on the house is work done for us. We can't do everything ourselves. We hired an electrician (a friend) to do some electrical work and got a company to do floor grinding in one of the rooms. Her father helped us oiling the floor, my father helped us when we redid the insulation in a part of the house (still ongoing). We planted some garlic and some raspberries. We're going to plant some strawberries soon (not really the right season, but we got them for free). Working on your own house and garden could be an alternative to a career change if you feel the need to work with your hands.
    • thenewnewguy 7y ago
      Traditional view: Jobs with a high amount of physical labor are low skill, so people with more skills (i.e. intelligence) have jobs with less physical labor. Your parent's opinion: This view is incorrect, people with higher social status, not higher intelligence, receive jobs with less physical labor.
• fuzzfactor 7y ago
  An individual can have an outsized impact while maintaining a low-profile or non-networking approach. . . . Commodities do not usually exist for the benefit of ultimate producers & consumers. . . . You can't fix stupid but you can come up with some appropriate workarounds if you put in the effort of long-term repair anyway.
  • anotheryou 7y ago
    can you elaborate on the first?
• bshanks 7y ago
  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).
• makach 7y ago
  You can always be replaced.
  • jfim 7y ago
    I'd both agree and disagree with that statement. There are people who simply cannot be effectively replaced. That does not mean that the powers that be will not replace them. For example, a startup might have a critical engineer who happens to know how everything works or holds everything together. They can be replaced, although this may have a severe impact on the startup, including the failure of the startup. To your point, even if someone is critical to the success of an organization does not mean that they won't ever be replaced by poor management.
    • goto11 7y ago
      That would not necessarily be poor management though. If a single person is irreplaceable, it is a major risk for any organization.
    • 2rsf 7y ago
      While I agree that "never" is a strong word, we usually over estimate ours and others importance and irreplaceablity. Sometimes replacement of a critical engineer might even do good to a company by forcing them to break the silo.
  • gaspoweredcat 7y ago
    you can but that doesnt mean the company can find an equivalent replacement
    • onion2k 7y ago
      That doesn't matter to the company so long as the work gets done and the customer keeps paying.
  • iamflimflam1 7y ago
    The graveyards are full of indispensable people.
• darkr 7y ago
  The most challenging and important problems to solve in an engineering organisation are rarely technical in nature.
  • cwojno 7y ago
    Holy shit, this.
    • usrme 7y ago
      Let me recommend to you "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams" by Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister (go with the 3rd edition) and "The Mythical Man-Month" by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (go with the anniversary edition). Both books expound the idea that most software projects fail not because lack of technology or innovation, but rather due to the mismanagement of people and a lack of understanding how teams work.
      • 0xabe 7y ago
        Anything specific about the 3rd ed of “Peopleware” as opposed to the 2nd? Thanks
        • usrme 7y ago
          I haven't read the 2nd one, so I should have just said that read the latest that you can. The main contents can feel quite dated for any edition, but there have been updates to fit the times that I'm not sure are in earlier editions than the one I read (i.e. the 3rd edition).
  • Rerarom 7y ago
    I think this has become a cliché here (a true one, however). The interesting question is what sort of jobs contain a lot of challenges that are technical in nature.
    • collyw 7y ago
      The interview process is where the challenges are technical in nature. The only time I have been asked to implement a sort algorithm after university was for interviews.
• jl6 7y ago
  The taxonomy of jobs that most people have in their minds is extremely simple (doctor, lawyer, teacher, builder, engineer, window cleaner, garbage collector, astronaut, ...) and is mostly based on a grade-school understanding of what kind of jobs people do. But the reality is that there are millions of types of jobs, with incredible variety and specialisms, and the real content of a job is rarely captured in a job title.
  • badtuple 7y ago
    Not only that, but the incredible depth of pretty much every field. Not every practitioner dives deep, but the masters of any job leave me speechless.
    • collyw 7y ago
      Having worked filling shelves in a supermarket, I disagree that it applies to every field.
      • jcbrand 7y ago
        I would imagine the depth there is in determining what goes where on the shelf. You as shelf-filler probably didn't get to make this decision though.
        • HenryBemis 7y ago
          There is a "science" behind shelf placement decisions and it has to do with height, location on the aisle, colors, lights, and of course the "fee" that the outlet asks for the premium spots. Someone who just fills shelfs (I've done that for a toystore a few decades ago, for a a couple of months). Depends whether someone gets to just fill the shelf as per plan or has the curiosity to ask "WHY", noticing why X things fly off the shelf why Y things two shelves lower stay there forever. This curiosity builds the critical thinking 'muscle' and can motivate a shelf-filler to switch into marketing (hypothetical scenario has to do with a 17yo working part time and then deciding to studio marketing)(I didn't study marketing) :)
• twblalock 7y ago
  The people who get the most done are not the smartest, or the most skilled, but the ones who are most familiar with the organization they work in. To outsiders it looks like they end up with compromised solutions, but to insiders it looks like they achieved the impossible.
  • makach 7y ago
    To me this has always been a management issue. Usually the business willingly allows for this to happen. Consequence is that you build an extreme dependency on this person. Knowledge needs to be built into the organisation through hard work, like documentation, processes and collaboration.
    • mytailorisrich 7y ago
      Yes the business allows this to happen because it is obviously in the self-interests in the existing employees: everyone tries to build their own little empires and to keep 'invaders' at bay. In some companies, often when there is no growth, that leads to very claustrophobic atmospheres with a core group that has been there for 10+ years and gatekeeps everyone else.
    • antupis 7y ago
      Thing is that when knowledge is built into organisation you lose some agility, so there are definitely some tradeoffs.
    • collyw 7y ago
      My current workplace. We have one diva who build the vast majority of the system. He is smart and likes algorithms, but doesn't write particularly easy code to follow (he values cleverness over simplicity). Any suggestion that it could be improved is met with a bit of an argument. And he isn't much of a team player compared to the other devs. But he knows the system inside out....
      • SeriousM 7y ago
        In not the gut you talk about, but... I built many systems and was always a point of failure when it comes to dependency. I still know a lot of code, even when it's years ago. But I never kill an idea that has a better outcome as the current solution has, and if it's possible to implement, we'll do it. That's leadership.
• senectus1 7y ago
  Everyone lies, all the time. even when they think they're not lying they often are.
  • goatinaboat 7y ago
    I don’t count it as lying unless there is intent behind it. But it is certainly true that many people’s deeply held beliefs are not as true as they think they are, myself included obviously. The more experienced you get, the fewer absolute truths there are.
    • tehwalrus 7y ago
      I think I agree more with the parent than with you, particularly in engineering. Lying in engineering means saying anything that's not true with any certainty. I wouldn't hold it against someone, but I would ask them to think carefully before speaking, to make sure what they said is true, as it can lead meetings to decide the wrong actions if nobody present happens to be able to contradict it. Outside of engineering, all the same outcomes can occur, but proving the truth is much more difficult. And thus, while it may still technically be lying, it is impossible to tell and unfair to call someone on it.
      • clarry 7y ago
        Lying is saying something you know to be not true. Saying something you don't know to be true is just spewing bullshit or practicing a religion.
      • goatinaboat 7y ago
        Lying in engineering means saying anything that's not true with any certainty. It’s funny because that’s exactly an example of what I mean. Real engineering is about compromises and those are highly subjective. What’s the feature we should work on next? What tools should we use? What’s the priority of this bug? Should we refactor this today or take on more tech debt? Ask 10 people and you will get 10 answers, all of which are just as true as any other. Recognising this comes with experience.
• tempsy 7y ago
  Little correlation between effort and reward My biggest payday came from a junior role at a startup I got extremely lucky at
  • tasogare 7y ago
    Probably the most important of the thread. Working smarter > working harder and communicating about your work and its impact is as important (sometimes more) than the work itself.
  • pge 7y ago
    and that luck plays a much bigger role in success than most people think (we prefer to think our success is the result of effort and skill)
• makach 7y ago
  Work never ends. No matter how much you get done there will always be more. I see a lot of colleagues burn out because they think their extra effort will be noticed. Most managers appriciate it but do not promote their employees.
  • asimovfan 7y ago
    "The state of having tasks to be done is alone declared as the greatest of sorrows. When that exists, how do the two, happiness and absence of sorrow, arise?" Tripurarahasyam (from wiki: The Tripura Rahasya (Devanagari: त्रिपुरा रहस्य, Tripurā Rahasya) meaning The Mystery beyond the Trinity, is an ancient literary work in Sanskrit believed to have been narrated by Dattatreya to Parashurama. It is an ancient prime text which is one of the treatises on Advaita school of classical Indian Metaphysics.)
    • TheGallopedHigh 7y ago
      Can you explain this a bit further and how it applies to this context?
      • dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
        Not the parent, but the fragment in question explains how the so-called mundane pleasures give no permanent satisfaction and that one should instead focus on the true meaning of life, which the text defines as the deepest level of consciousness that is present in the three modes of being (being awake, dream, and deep dreamless sleep).
  • DarkWiiPlayer 7y ago
    This can be taken further: There will always be exactly as much work as you can get done. Work isn't about getting things done, but maintaining a consistent throughput.
  • enraged_camel 7y ago
    I manage a team. The reason I don’t promote or give raises to people who overwork is because I don’t want to encourage behavior that inevitably results in burnout. What I instead do when people overwork is I give them extra paid time off. Stayed in the office for a couple of extra hours yesterday helping a customer? Great, please make sure to take Friday afternoon off. You had to work extra last week to meet a deadline? Apologies, that was my fault for not managing your workload properly and distributing it better (and also not setting a reasonable deadline). Second, again, please take the equivalent amount of time off.
• NaOH 7y ago
  You have the power to touch many people—most of whom will never cross your path—even with work that may not seem important. This is an honor and a responsibility, bordering on the sacred.
  • sbergot 7y ago
    I like this part of the job. The other side is: everything you use everyday is the product of a lot of design work by many people who mostly cared about their users.
• tunesmith 7y ago
  The best lesson of programming is humility!
• jmpman 7y ago
  You can burn a bridge with no repercussions. It’s a small industry, but burn that mo-fo down if it’s required to maintain your self esteem. Makes for a good drinking story afterwards, and really, that’s what you want at the end of your career.
  • quickthrower2 7y ago
    Made me chuckle.thanks.
• cdoxsey 7y ago
  That almost all software is unreliable and SaaS products only work because there are engineers behind the scenes fixing it all the time. The Wizard of Oz nails it: "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain" https://youtu.be/YWyCCJ6B2WE https://youtu.be/YWyCCJ6B2WE
  • 2rsf 7y ago
    That's a big one, and on top of that people don't realize how fast software decays when the man behind the curtain is on his coffee break
  • jakobegger 7y ago
    On the contrary, my job taught me that desktop software can be extremely reliable and does not actually break all the time. Many of my customers use versions of my app that are a few years old without any troubles. When the user is in control of their environment, software doesn't suddenly break. That's not to say software doesn't have bugs. Only that bugs don't appear suddenly. Most bugs are caused by two things: (1) Changes to the code that accidentally break unrelated stuff (2) Changes to the environment (eg. OS vendor releases a new version which changes how some API behaves) I think (1) is more common. So I think that the reason why SaaS have problems all the time is that typically devs are changing stuff all the time and accidentally breaking things left and right, not that software is inherently unreliable. And since users can't keep using an old version that works for them, they'll stumble across every bug eventually.
    • collyw 7y ago
      I find a lot of "bugs" are that inconsistent / missing data gets into the system.
    • tonyedgecombe 7y ago
      I do wonder if some of it is down to the platform. It seems to be a weekly occurence that I log onto an application and I'm presented with a blank page. No doubt some trivial JavaScript exception has borked the whole thing.
    • 7y ago
• KozmoNau7 7y ago
  You can get burned out in any kind no matter how great it seemed when you started. People grow and their priorities change. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with the job or your boss or your colleagues or with you. Sometimes you just need a change of scenery and a breath of fresh air, sometimes literally.
  • ipnon 7y ago
    There's some amount of money that's worth a burnout or total meltdown, but I doubt it's less than your salary.
• jaggederest 7y ago
  People have a tremendously distorted view of reality due to their own biases. Myself definitely included. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair More concretely in the field of software engineering: Accurate, precise estimates are more expensive than the actual task itself. If someone asks you "how long until it is done", the only reasonable answer is just as long as you've already spent, even if you're close to the end of the project. a "three week project" on week 3 will most likely take another 3 weeks, all else being equal. Nobody has any idea, they're just making it up as they go along. If you do the math, you're ahead of almost everyone. Most people won't do math to save their own life. Same goes for reading. If you actually read documentation or source code, you're in a very slim minority. Most people just google.
  • TomVDB 7y ago
    However... Inaccurate, optimistic estimates are often a feature. Many projects that turn out to be very valuable in the end would never have been started if the real time to completion had been communicated right from the start.
  • BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Yeah, when we were taught (software) project management with GANTT, I smelled bullshit due to the lack of tolerance of uncertainty in the tool. Thankfully the exam "subverted our expectations" and strongly hinted that "no plan survives contact with the enemy".
    • juped 7y ago
      "Gantt" is a person's name (Henry Gantt), not an acronym.
      • BlueTemplar 7y ago
        Damn, did I miss that or did they forgot to tech that ? Thanks anyway !
  • 7y ago
• awinter-py 7y ago
  definitely write in when you have a problem there are relatively few people writing constructively to companies and while some companies suck bufallo wings, the good ones are good and will use your feedback to make their products better
• turkthrower123 7y ago
  When a company uses the word "family" to describe themselves, run for the hills!
  • godot 7y ago
    This is repeated often on HN, but I feel like it generalizes too much and is not always accurate. My last company specifically had "We're a team, not a family" as a core value. The company and team always had an air of arrogance around everyone and while nothing stood out as a giant red flag, it was never really that comfortable of a place to be in. My current company regularly uses the term family to describe themselves, but the overall vibe feels a lot nicer than my last place and it does not have an overwork culture; it actually has great work life balance. [Edit] It's not a time thing. I was at my last place for 1.5 years. I've been at my current place for 1.5 years now and am happy to stay for long term.
  • woutr_be 7y ago
    If a job description focusses on how "fun" the company is instead of the actual work, it's pretty much a red flag for me.
  • maxk42 7y ago
    Corollary: Any company that holds "retreats" one or more times a year doesn't give two shits about you. They don't respect your personal time, your family, or your life outside of work. Every time I get a job candidate excitedly asking whether our multi-state company holds annual retreats or get-togethers, they're under 30 with no family. It's not a vacation, folks: It's an obligation. One that doesn't respect your life or plans outside of work. If you want a trip, choose a job that gives you plenty of paid vacation time and go wherever you please.
    • C1sc0cat 7y ago
      Depends on the type of company, Worker Coops tend to have retreats - then being co-operator is more of a commitment.
  • _pmf_ 7y ago
• jeffshek 7y ago
  If you can prevent being cynical and take that effort into doing actual work, your skillsets quickly compound. If the job sucks, take your improved skillset elsewhere. But do not sit idly and complain - it does nothing, hurts your career, your colleagues and your life.
  • ipnon 7y ago
    You can think of bad jobs as an opportunity to learn how to be effective in dysfunctional environments.
• Nursie 7y ago
  That people will take a conspiracy and run with it because they'll believe a publicised scare over any number of actual experts. I saw it with the introduction of EMV (Chip'n'Pin) credit cards in the UK, and again with contactless cards a few years later, and you still see it with Apple/Google pay. They're not safe, people will steal all your money, you shouldn't have to use your PIN in public, they'll get cloned, I microwave all mine just to be sure. All while ignorant of the real improvements these technologies bring. I imagine anyone reading this that's ever worked with/around vaccines and vaccinations is thinking "you don't say!" right now...
  • jakobegger 7y ago
    But it seems to me those conspiracies often only affect a small (but vocal) minority of the people. I recall a similar issue when they started to introduce a prescription database in Austria. There was a lot of fearmongering in the media, doctors spreading pamphlets against dangers of surveillance, etc. But when I talked to people about it, nobody really cared about it. People might have read some article in the newspaper, but I don't know anybody who actually bothered to opt out of the system. I think the problem is that journalists like reporting on controversies, so they end up writing a lot about issues that only bother a few people, and if you read the article it looks likes it's a major issue when it's really not.
    • Nursie 7y ago
      Perhaps so, though I've met a few older people who just don't trust contactless payments, even after I've explained that a fingerprint protected phone is more secure than any card they might have used. And with some things it just takes time for that reactionary impulse to wear off. OTOH I brought up vaccines for a reason - sometimes such things don't go away.
• mattnewport 7y ago
  Working in VR, the state of the art is closer to Pong than to the Holodeck or the Matrix. That doesn't mean there aren't useful applications for the technology but we won't see anything that passes for reality in my lifetime, or perhaps ever.
  • shawabawa3 7y ago
    > but we won't see anything that passes for reality in my lifetime, or perhaps ever maybe not that passes for reality, but VR already has a powerful "reality feeling" even with the crappy resolution we have now Get someone to load a VR game and try to walk off a cliff - they'll find it very difficult to do. Even someone that's played a lot of VR will have to override their instincts to not step off.
    • mattnewport 7y ago
      Presence is possible, although my experience is that things like the cliff effect get less potent the more you use VR. You have to be a willing participant though to buy into the alternate reality and agree to play within the rules. True interactivity is what's really lacking and the thing we're furthest from being able to simulate. Reality just has an astounding amount of detail when you can interact with it rather than just look at it. None of this is to say that VR can't be useful, valuable or entertaining (I still work in the field and believe in its potential) but we're nowhere near the Matrix and maybe that's not a bad thing.
  • anotheryou 7y ago
    will it become preferable to normal e.g. gaming though? I really hope for VR semi-realtime street view for when I'm old and brittle.
• Gnarl 7y ago
  How almost no one understands that simply trading your time as units for money is ridiculous.
  • polyterative 7y ago
    Can you elaborate please?
    • jonwinstanley 7y ago
      On your own, you only have 1 person's time to trade for money, but once you employ others you have a multiplier.
      • homonculus1 7y ago
        In other words, you're the sucker if you're not exploiting others.
  • ipnon 7y ago
    An equally terse generalization: You're trading your labor for money. Your time is marginally valuable.
    • Infinitesimus 7y ago
      It's often about time instead labor for those not self-employed though. Time has a universal ceiling for us humans and is the ultimate boundary
  • webew 7y ago
    In nature, everything is free. If you're an engineer here, you'll find something there, too.
  • sumedh 7y ago
    What is your solution go back to a barter system?
• gaspoweredcat 7y ago
  a huge amount of the items you buy "new" have actually been opened multiple times.
  • ta999999171 7y ago
    Why would you work for such a company?
    • gaspoweredcat 7y ago
      they paid me well and i enjoyed what i did so why wouldnt i
• TrackerFF 7y ago
  (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 name it) than you do in white-collar sectors. I say this because for the past few years, I've seen an increase in people advocating for people to choose trade jobs over college-educated jobs, like it's the most obvious and risk-free thing in the world. It's not, and I'd even go as far as arguing that the downsides of trade jobs can be worse than the downsides of a cushy white-collar job.
  • galfarragem 7y ago
    The downside of trades is that most people are there only for the money. From this you can derive the rest.
    • gonzo41 7y ago
      Yep Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and google and the rest of those money hating software companies are just in it for the good of free speech and democracy. :S Trades are OK when you're young. If I'd been a carpenter at 18, i'd be bored of it by 26 and probably be thinking about starting my own company or time to pivot into a new thing. The big downside of trades is they aren't jobs you can do forever.
      • TrackerFF 7y ago
        That's the thing; there are very few ways to go up in those businesses. Either you become a manager or foreman, or go back to school and return as an engineer, project manager, or similar. Or maybe start your own company if you have the papers / certs / connections. Going from a regular skilled worker to those positions can take 10 years, easy. The guys I worked with almost 15 years ago still work in the same company. Still toil away in the same positions as before, while occasionally inquiring me about engineering school or similar. I noticed that as soon as they started getting close to 30, got wife and kids, they started to ask around for better options.
• bjoli 7y ago
  How little my personal variance in performance actually matters. The only ones that can tell a good day from a bad day by looking at or listening to (I am an orchestra musician) the result is me. The only time it really matters is for big orchestra solos. I am a much worse programmer than bassoon player, and for programming amount of work put in matters a lot more. I still churn out mostly bad code, but the spectrum is a lot broader.
  • ipnon 7y ago
    A corollary is that you can hold a facade much longer than you can function.
• beefield 7y ago
  That money is debt. In a very fundamental, literal and practical sense, debt or credit (i.e. someone owing somebody something valuable) is what money is. The traditional definition of means of unit of measure, means of payment and unit of value describe how money is used, not what it is. Like, knife is a sharp edged tool used to cut things vs knife actually is steel. (This also being my main reason objecting cryptocurrencies. Idea of current cryptocurrencies being money is to me very much cargo cultish until there is a proper way to manage credit within the cryptocurrency system.)
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • grecy 7y ago
    I'm not sure I understand you. Are you saying that all money is borrowed from someone? What if a friend has $100,000 in the bank of his own money, and he pays me $1,000 to fix his car? He's not in debt, and neither am I. I'm confused
    • esotericn 7y ago
      Society owes him, otherwise his money would be worthless. You fixing his car is an example of repaying part of that debt.
    • heurisko 7y ago
      The bank is in debt, by $100,000 to your friend, the creditor. Your friend called in $1,000 of that debt to pay you.
    • beefield 7y ago
      First, the "own money" in the bank is not technically his money in the bank, but money the bank has borrowed from your friend. So the bank is in debt to your friend. Now, in order for the bank to be able to be able to pay its debt to your friend one day, bank has assets. I.e. someone has borrowed money from the bank (e.g. mortgage), and those assets can be used/solde to pay your friend if your friend really wants the bank to settle its debts to him. It kind of is turtles all the way down. Someone needs to be in debt for there to exist any money. Money is a really weird kind of bearer note. It just means that if you have money, you are owed some valuable goods by other people. And you are pretty free to choose who pays that debt to you from them who is willing to take that bearer note from you as a payment. Note that debt is also how money is born. Technically everything a bank does when it adds for whatever reason money to your bank account is that it increases your balance in the database and boom, we have new money. Of course, usually banks are not stupid, and in order for them to increase their debt to you, they want something from you in exchange. Typically a promise to pay back a bit more some later day. (As a disclaimer, money is really tricky to think through. So I give no guarantees my thinking is correct, but so far thinking money as a debt has been most useful way for me to understand it.)
• cosmodisk 7y ago
  People ready to pay stupid money for trivial things as long as the message is right. A lot of people don't know how to use Google. Finance companies staffed with tons of mediocre and incompetent people. People do need to be protected from themselves occasionally.
• jensneuse 7y ago
  People with strong opinions usually don't know enough in their field. (Mount stupid) There's no one perfect tool/solution. It's always tradeoffs. People are obsessed promoting their favourite tool/framework etc.. Eventually you realize it's more about the patterns behind them, not the individual solution.
  • collyw 7y ago
    > People are obsessed promoting their favourite tool/framework etc.. Eventually you realize it's more about the patterns behind them, not the individual solution. I do find working with some technologies or languages a lot more pleasant than others. JavaScript based work is always a pain in the arse.
• bobosha 7y ago
  That even the best experts are winging it.
  • marcus_holmes 7y ago
    Came here to say this.
• thefz 7y ago
  Public services such as power plants, aqueducts, waste disposal and garbage collection require a whole lot of money and manpower yet rarely are even noticed. They just "exist" and "work" until they don't.
  • gfxgirl 7y ago
    A similar thing is also true in many situations. On a big team many people had bugs that eventually got discovered by others. I'm sure it won't work but I often think I wish that when that happened the person that wrote the bug was required to drop everything else and fix the bug along with the appropriate test. I know that would have issues. What I find though is there isn't a strong enough incentive IMO to not leaving a trail of wreckage. Move fast and break things sucks for all those who have to clean up after and there's no appreciation for the cleanup. There is only appreciation for the new features. And so, bugs get checked in and it's now someone else's problem. Even fixes get checked in with no test so it will likely break again in the future. In other words even the fixers have no incentive.
• jraedisch 7y ago
  Public budget is a big part of private companies earnings.
  • agsilvio 7y ago
    Interesting. Care to elaborate?
    • iamflimflam1 7y ago
      There is a huge amount of public funding/grants/tax breaks available to small/medium enterprises. I know a lot of companies that would not function without this help.
      • jraedisch 7y ago
        Exactly.
    • petrocrat 7y ago
      It actually extends to the entire economy: The public sector debt is exactly equal to the private sector savings, because they are literally the same entity. Check out MMT Economics for the balance sheet math that demonstrates this.
• timeattack 7y ago
  Kind of obvious one, but I wish more people knew that — critical thinking. On the one side it helps to avoid bad/stupid things in life: quackery medicine, scammers, bad investments, etc. On the other side it allows to peep deeper into things and see more choices even in ordinary life. After some practice you gain nearly magical ability to peel couple of additional layers from reality and to see non-obvious things everywhere.
  • joseph2342 7y ago
    Any Book recommendations ?
    • bump64 7y ago
      I doubt there are books that could teach you critical thinking. It requires to spend lots of time observing and learning stuff, trying out possible solutions and getting meaningful feedback. Also from my experience it helps when you stop judging people and stuff, labeling things as good or bad, black or white. Just try to understand different points of view and outcomes as they are.
    • daliusd 7y ago
      "Thinking, Fast and Slow" might be good here.
    • arethuza 7y ago
      Carl Sagan's excellent The Demon-Haunted World includes a "Baloney detection kit": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World
    • demonshreder 7y ago
      Checkout Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast & Slow - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqXVAo7dVRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqXVAo7dVRU https://paulminors.com/blog/thinking-fast-slow-book-summary-pdf/ https://paulminors.com/blog/thinking-fast-slow-book-summary-...
• keyle 7y ago
  Do great work and charge equally for it.
• d--b 7y ago
  Finance jobs teach you that you should always be ready to "cut your losses". Whatever time/money you invest in anything, you should always re-evaluate your position and see from where you are now if your project is worth pursuing.
  • mathgenius 7y ago
    Conversely, the value you place on some endeavor may be completely unrecognized by everyone else, ie. the market. That does not mean the endeavor is worthless.
• codegladiator 7y ago
  Tools/tech don't fix people issues. Only process issues.
• temporama1 7y ago
  That almost all software is FUCKED.
• Operyl 7y ago
  What you (the customer) think is a painfully obvious and blaring bug is not always that blaring to those that built it. People are really good at finding different bugs when you don't have the tunnel vision from developing it.
• Antoninus 7y ago
  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
  • kissgyorgy 7y ago
    You should consider switching or quitting. It should not feel like that.
  • gdy 7y ago
    But it is a fun job
  • throwaway8291 7y ago
    Related to that: On many people's mental maps, programming seems to be closeby other things like installing a driver, changing configuration and such. That it is an powerful tool for anything that you do with your mind completely escapes the bystanders.
  • muzani 7y ago
    I've done all kinds of jobs. I'd take a 14 hour physical labor job over a 8 hour mental labor job anytime. Mental labor is painful... in the form that stalling the main thread of something is. But that's data entry. Development is much less mental labor, and I'd agree with the 4-5 hours/day assessment. Most people can't actually do this, which is why a lot of people hate math. Math class is dealing with intense focus on a poorly documented thing. Development has little to do with it, but it's the same soft skill.
    • cambalache 7y ago
      I have done all kinds of jobs too, and I will take a programming/middle management job (no matter how soulless) over a 14 h, or even 8, physical job, every single time. Most of the blue-collar workers will tell you the same. Your skin suffers, your knees suffer, your lower-back suffers, honestly I doubt you have done it for a long time, it is people in that category who naively fantasize about how cool is to work 14 h under the sun or in a plant/warehouse/construction site.
• jtolmar 7y ago
  The earth shifts up and down by about a meter twice a day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_tide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_tide
• Wump 7y ago
  The people you choose to work with is a first-order decision. The ideas, money, technology, or impact of your work are deriviatives of that: https://vishalkapur.com/people-first-decision-making/ https://vishalkapur.com/people-first-decision-making/
  • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    Also true of the people you choose to associate with outside of work. But it shows up in character, not in money or work impact.
• undebuggable 7y ago
  Computers don't work, internet doesn't work, software doesn't work. If something functions flawlessly it's because there existed a group of people who figured out a rock solid setup at one point in time, and another group of people maintaining it actively right now. Many people seeing something that "just works" and it's "free as in beer" demand a similar setup for their own business assuming that creating it requires almost zero effort and cost.
  • csours 7y ago
    A small example: A company develops a software product for a client. The company tests the product, and tests pass! No crashes! It just works. It works for years with no problems. Then you get a flurry of tickets in a pretty short window: the software is crashing! What happened? It passed tests, it worked for years! What changed in the environment? Are disks failing or filling up? No. Is the network failing? No. Is another program hogging resources? No. Is it a database maintenance window? No. Well the patch window changed, but smoke tests pass after patching, so it's not patches... Hmm, the patch window went from 2 weeks to 4 weeks. Ok, when did the software actually crash? About 25 days after patching. Is that consistent across sites? ... Yes it is. What happens 25 days after patching??? [Insert scramble to figure out what happens 25 days after patching] Is there anything special about 25 days? Well 2^31/86,400,000 is 24.85 ... Aka Signed Integer/Number of milliseconds in a day So all along there's been 24.85 day fuse in the code, but before the extension of the patch window we just happened to defuse the bomb every time. The supplier never had any reason to run a test for more than a week, so they never saw the crash either. ---- So, yes, software doesn't work. It happens to work right now, on this computer, with this hard drive, with these network settings, with these dependencies, with this database .... etc etc etc.
    • sethammons 7y ago
      Fantastic story. Reminded me, we've seen similar issues back in the day when we were not monitoring memory usage as well as we should have been. Because we deployed daily or weekly, the services restarted and life was good. After everything was stable, a slow memory leak appeared that took weeks to grow to a point where the service would crash.
• glakshman 7y ago
  I learned everything we’ve ever been taught about a job, career, or corporate environment was a lie. Inspirational Quotes is the magical word which boost, encourages when people are in lot of despair. https://www.inspirationalquotes.in/2018/02/amazing-inspirational-quotes.html https://www.inspirationalquotes.in/2018/02/amazing-inspirati...
• cygned 7y ago
  I am of the opinion that the software industry could improve by closer looking at the industry of producing physical goods. I have yet to conduct further research, but if you glance at it; Agile has been an idea since the 1940s over there; factors like longevity, safety, security directly influence quality of the product and its creation process. Also, greatly standardized methodologies, procedures, metrics (think: 6sigma, Lean). The main challenge I see is that software development is not a commodity and cannot be as planned as a physical good. It’s mostly a thought experiment right now and I value any opinion.
  • r0rbit 7y ago
    Ever tried 'The Phoenix Project'? It's a good read that implies this idea
    • cygned 7y ago
      Thanks, will do.
• muzani 7y ago
  Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic. You don't need math to reverse engineer a system. You just need to pay attention to it. You can say the right words to make a date happy. You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can. You don't need an app or data - your brain is a wonderful data processing machine. Don't be angry at the people who are benefiting from a system, or at the system itself. Most just end up that way, the same way a river meanders towards the sea, or an electrical current tries to find ground. Fixing/improving a system often requires deep understanding of it. An action here will cause a response there. People often document it, but few will do a proper design. If you don't fix a system, few will. Most people are reactive to it and try to live with it as background noise. If you don't control a system, it will control you. You don't have to change its fundamentals, just move out of the way of harm. Neatness/order is a way to understand a system. All systems tend to fall to disorder. Disorder is not always a bad thing. Order is very expensive, and only serves as better documentation to those who do not understand it. Very often, excessive order is a symptom of someone who does not understand or control it.
  • subhashp 7y ago
    Wonderful. Thank you for putting it so nicely.
  • jerome-jh 7y ago
    "Order is very expensive, and only serves as better documentation to those who do not understand it. Very often, excessive order is a symptom of someone who does not understand or control it." Pretty good description of my current management. Could also apply to a codebase that has grown organically but would be just prohibitively expensive to rewrite.
  • neilkakkar 7y ago
    > "You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can." Why do you think so? Given Google Maps has real time information about cars on both routes, I'd think it does a better job of aggregating this data than my intuition.
• ta999999171 7y ago
  You mean "conspiracy theory". I'm assuming the job you learned this at wasn't in the English department.
• jgresty 7y ago
  Software is bought based on how big the vendor is, by people who will never use the software.
  • devurand 7y ago
    This is painfully on point where I currently am.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• kissgyorgy 7y ago
  Human interactions are way more important for solving technology problems than technology itself. Software development is more of an art than science. They don't teach you this at Computer Science classes.
• hyko 7y ago
  ‘Management’ and ‘process’ are mostly based on pseudoscience.
• thdrdt 7y ago
  When you are an employee at a job you don't like, but you keep staying because you think you are irreplacable, you worry about your colleagues, or for whatever reason: just leave. The only reason you stay is a feeling of responsibility. But you are not responsible for the company or it's employees. You are responsible for your own life and your family.
  • tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    Being an irreplaceable part in a machine is not only bad for the company but it's also bad for you.
  • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    If you're in that position, it's a management failure. It's their fault, not yours.
• mkolodny 7y ago
  When you talk about about a big company, you're really talking about thousands of individuals. Each with their own goals and values. When a big company does something wrong, often it's just one to five of those thousands of people who did something wrong. Hatred for a big company is very similar to racism. Some of the people who work at a big company may fit the profile you imagine. But many of them don't. Sometimes the large majority.
  • justatdotin 7y ago
    > Hatred for a big company is very similar to racism you win this comment section (and that's not a good thing)
• axegon 7y ago
  That agile-let's-hold-hands-together-and-sing type of development is total and utter crap which doesn't improve the workflow in any way and simply acts as a shield from the management for everyone that loves to slack about and is scared of taking even minor decisions.
• Waterluvian 7y ago
  Life is fleeting. Most of us here are 1/3 or more of the way done. Divest yourself as much as possible from your job. Find other sources of identity. You don't need that fancy car or to buy a boat as much as you need that ejector seat savings account. And when you realise that conditions have evolved to a point where you're not having fun anymore (and they always eventually do), eject yourself and go spend far more time with family, friends and your other sources of identity. Everyone _wildly_ undervalues their time.
  • jb1991 7y ago
    Definitely agree, and this is even more of a problem in the United States than most other western nations. Work life balance should be a priority for all human beings, and Americans have much to learn to catch up in this area.
    • fxtentacle 7y ago
      I agree. Americans get almost religious if you propose to only work a day per week. Much better to claim that the rest of your week was already fully booked, even though in reality you just don't need the additional money.
      • BlueTemplar 7y ago
        Heh, wasn't a 20-hours work week the American ideal of the future?
        • prometheus76 7y ago
          It was the marketing ploy used to sell consumerism and futurism. The reality turned out that now productivity expectations just got higher, rather than everyone getting more free time.
      • ScottFree 7y ago
        > Americans get almost religious if you propose to only work a day per week. That depends on the American. There is no unified American culture anymore, which makes generalities like this almost universally false. Case in point: I've lived in America all my life and nobody I know would object to only working a day a week if they could actually live off that little money.
• beaker52 7y ago
  That people sometimes do shitty things, make mistakes or let me down, and no matter what, if I squint - I can see myself. That I'm not always right, or always better than Joe. And that: I'm not always wrong, and Bob is not always better than me. That we might hit our deadline. And the world will still be there if we don't. That people do things I don't understand, for reasons I will never see or be able to anticipate. And that's simply the way it is. Dark corners are found in, or emerge from all positives. Great things are found in, or emerge from all negatives. Nothing is black and white, despite it's appearance. Everything is wishy-washy gray. What was right yesterday may be wrong tomorrow and vice versa. Or, in summary: things are easier when I'm easier going
  • new2628 7y ago
    Marcus Aurelius and Seneca would like to have a word with you.
  • vasco 7y ago
    In the same vein as this, and shown to me by a dear colleague: http://thecodelesscode.com/contents http://thecodelesscode.com/contents
  • 9diov 7y ago
    Looks like you discovered Taoism on you own
    • coopdis 7y ago
      Such is the way... universally apparent, yet difficult to see.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• fxtentacle 7y ago
  How much feel good and drinking relationships matter in upper management. And on the downside, how little facts weight in when compared to a manager's gut feeling. Enthusiastically presenting a (factually wrong) solution can be a winning strategy. In high school, I thought I was a math genius because all of my solutions were judged as correct. Turns out, I was just a good presenter and nobody made any effort to check my results. Managers in big companies will be happy to buy your product if it helps themselves save face, even if it is a net negative for the company. That's how they end up with so many useless initiatives that get canceled after a year of burning money. Consultants are paid to be a straw man parrot. You tell their coworkers what your contact wants them to hear, so that they can blame it on you if their idea goes wrong. The same source code given to different product and marketing teams can be a 100x difference in revenue. If the sales team is not rich, run. They either cannot sell the product, or they could not sell themselves to get commission. Customer support matters a lot less than people think. A buggy 10-year-old software without support can still sell like candy if it solves a real and valuable business problem.
  • webew 7y ago
    This is what would now be termed a "blackpill".
    • fxtentacle 7y ago
      No, I didn't mean things in that sort of "nothing you can do about the sad truth" way. Instead, I consider this actionable advice. - Spend time hanging out with other guys talking about shared hobbies - When you like your results, make sure people can see your enthusiasm - Help people look good in front of their peers and they will buy - As a contractor, do what the customer wants, not what you like best - Before you spend the time to build something, research that your intended customer can and will buy it - Don't worry if people complain about your stuff. They always do, even if they get rich by using your tools. BTW, googling for Blackpill sure yields odd results: "What Is The Black Pill? A Closer Look Inside The New Red Pill" followed by 2 huge advertisements: "10x your attractiveness to women - Click Here" "Accidental discovery reveals the exact body type women want - Click Here" followed by a full-width picture of 10 naked models barely covered with what looks like a furry blanket.
• austinjp 7y ago
  From a startup perspective: Getting new combinations of stuff to work, even "enterprise" grade stuff, can be a messy horror-show, at least initially. There's no point-and-click, no slick GUI, no whizzy installer. Instead there are bugs, blog posts, mailing lists, snowflake configs, and a fair amount of frustration. If you're lucky and given enough time, you get to understand it, tidy things up, and document it. Development isn't like installing an app on your shiny wafer-thin Mac that "just works". It's complex. If you want to do something new, you can expect complexity.
• austinjp 7y ago
  Everyone expects designers to work for free. Don't be a dick. They can do something you can't. Pay them.
• NohatCoder 7y ago
  Whatever job we think require the very best in the field are often not performed by the very best. You'd think a book on topic X is written by an expert in X, but the truth is that it only takes enough skill to fool the average reader to sell books. TV chefs? Mainly have to be good at talking. People who write libraries, compilers, OS kernels and so forth? All sorts. So never ever assume that someone is an expert just because they do something "expertly".
• lazyjones 7y ago
  Most people pay for mistakes they or their parents made in the first 20-odd years of their lives, for the rest of their lives. That's a lot of unrealized potential...
• alpha_squared 7y ago
  - A vast majority of "cloud security breaches" are just a small setting/toggle that's misconfigured, sometimes intentionally for testing or otherwise, and never corrected until it hits the front page of a news site. - Imposter syndrome can be incredibly crippling. It can affect just about anyone at any senior level. Also, some have no problem taking advantage of that in others. - Appreciation of efficient code/design can be directly correlated with how much runway exists. - I can't say I actually like programming. I like problem-solving, and programming is a neat medium for that, but programming also includes looking and maintaining legacy code. There's often a lack of documentation and things that you expect to take X time will more likely take rand(4) * X time. That rand() can itself be randomly inclusive/exclusive of 4. It can also be another number, you'll just find out when you do.
  • o-__-o 7y ago
    >Also, some have no problem taking advantage of that in others. what do you mean? can you provide an example?
    • alpha_squared 7y ago
      While you may not think you're senior or perform at a certain level, your manager may see otherwise and use/expect that performance while suppressing you from a promotion/raise.
  • nitwit005 7y ago
    The agile/kanban practiced in software is fairly different than the manufacturing variants, even though terms are borrowed.
• csallen 7y ago
  People have very limited notions of what a business is. At its core, a business is just a project or activity that's capable of sustaining itself financially. That's it. There are no other requirements. There are some super creative businesses out there, with an unimaginable number of possibilities still unexplored. The Internet has made this even more extreme. By connecting everyone on Earth to everyone else, it's made extremely specific niche businesses quite viable. If only 3 in 100,000 people are Japanese candy aficionados, then most cities aren't big enough to start a business around that. But on the Internet that business can exist, because 3 out of every 100k in a pool of billions is a LOT of people. TL;DR - Most people are perfectly capable of creating a business that suits them.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• ggm 7y ago
  People are really glued to "I'm right and you're wrong" and evidence has nothing to do with it: core beliefs are really strong. About amazing things! About upgrade policy, or mysql vs postgres, or language choices, you name it: evidence based decisions are really thin on the ground.
• circlefavshape 7y ago
  All the world is a stage Everything you do in work is a performance for an audience. Know your audience (it's probably not your actual customers), and know what they are looking for
• kerrsclyde 7y ago
  Clients only care about getting their job done. Past work portfolio, companies you've worked with, your qualifications - give it 2mins max, then spend the rest of the time talking about their project.
• cyborgx7 7y ago
  This thread is bleak.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• gerhardi 7y ago
  Many of those who probably should know or who give the impression that they know, dont actually know or even want to know how the sausage is made. This can be both a good and a bad thing. "Ignorance is a bliss."
• louisswiss 7y ago
  I teach (technical) founders how to do sales at SalesForFounders.com. What my work has taught me is that... a) some founders are motivated by improving their customers' lives b) some founders are motivated by building the best solution to a problem their customers have c) 'a' founders are more likely to be successful and less likely to give up than 'b' founders
• AmericanChopper 7y ago
  Nobody’s going to force you to learn anything. If you’re comfortable with your existing skill set, you can probably get by on it for a very long time.
• tristanperry 7y ago
  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 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. It's a similar case with software development methodologies, backend approaches/languages (etc), too. Plus many industries have some form of enforced standards or monitoring, whilst software certainly does not.
  • MaxBarraclough 7y ago
    > 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.
• monkin 7y ago
  There's nothing free in the world, even free software isn't really free. Don't waste your time on companies with "we are next unicorn" kind of bullshit. They die quickly. Best money comes from non-tech-savvy average Joe's, and not your "maker" friends or developer tools.
• hyperpallium 7y ago
  https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1215673204125073408?s=19 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1215673204125073408?s=19
• avip 7y ago
  That developers are the only people on earth (possibly with the exception of flight controllers? I just don't know any) who actually understand what time is and what a clock does.
  • BlueTemplar 7y ago
    As someone with a degree in Physics I'm all hears ? This is actually about time zones, isn't it ?
• wruza 7y ago
  Depends on who ‘other people’ are. 1. Frontend guys, who worked for the internet before, think that users are complete idiots, even if the project automates a coworker’s job which they do manually right now (or less automated). Focus goes on things that are completely irrelevant to the main problem we try to solve. Small changes are a tragedy. Moderate changes are a terror. Nothing of this is real/important when you give up negotiating, take frontend in your hands and do damn work yourself. 2. Users are very shy or unaware of the fact that their convenience is my duty and you can just message me and ask to move that button, tune the tab order or relayout a form. You have to investigate and monitor their work to get a feedback. I think it comes from the complexity mismatch. If a user asks for a complex feature, it is simple. If they ask for a simple feature, you’re in trouble. Maybe it comes from the false belief that I know better. 3. Bigger competence comes from lesser control. 4. Being a full-time software developer means you’re socially, mentally and willpower-y dead at the evening to some notable extent.
• brohee 7y ago
  Our infrastructures are incredibly fragile, and the world is only holding because no one competent is trying to shut it down.
• humanstories 7y ago
  Many of the stories we get told and tell ourselves are often orthogonal to reality. With complicit naïveté it's us then who keep these stories alive so we can cope with the most profound dissonances for all the glorious incentives and self-imagery. The price we pay for it is still pernicious to the greater environment and to the person "keeping the dream alive". A more explicit scenario: Neither your bosses nor the investors or most of your colleagues might have drunken the kool-aid for real. The likelihood of you being just a happy yet replaceable cog in a make-believe-machine is very high. Wear and tear is inverse proportional to cog size. There is no real risk of burnout at the higher levels of the oligarchy.
• bostik 7y ago
  Being good at your job is rewarded by others shoveling ever more work for you to do.
  • slx26 7y ago
    oh, and don't even try to bring important issues to light, some people will perceive that as you creating new problems out of nowhere
  • jcadam 7y ago
    ...and never being promoted.
• flybrand 7y ago
  Clean air and clean water make a huge impact on your health. Purified, high quality fluids make a huge impact on the performance of processes, products and materials - only 1% of what is possible has been achieved technically.
• mister_hn 7y ago
  Doing always your best for a company never brings joy or sense of fulfillment, if management is bad
• kstenerud 7y ago
  The most effective team member is the one who amplifies everyone's output. If you can improve a 5 member team's output by 20%, it's the same as if you'd added a 6th member for free. The least appreciated team member is the one who amplifies everyone's output.
  • jcadam 7y ago
    > The least appreciated team member is the one who amplifies everyone's output. I'll never forget the first time I saw a person like this get fired. At a previous job, we had a senior engineer who was an expert in the type of work we were doing who spent most of his day answering questions, helping others, making sure builds were running smoothly, etc. Eventually, he was let go by management because he didn't close as many tickets in the bug database as the other engineers. Big loss to the team.
    • loco5niner 7y ago
      Wow, what a foolish move by management.
  • silveroriole 7y ago
    > it's the same as if you'd added a 6th member for free. Unfortunately usually literally. You did it for free... you ain’t getting paid any of that 6th guy’s salary.
• sillypuddy 7y ago
  People booking doctors appointments spike after new years.
  • anotheryou 7y ago
    why?
    • UserIsUnused 7y ago
      you should always do regular checkups. New years is a good reminder that you haven't got your check-up this year.
• codingmess 7y ago
  You know how there are so many shitty technologies - frameworks, programming languages, that are obviously bad, and your chosen tech stack is obviously so much better? With all likelihood, the same thing exists in other areas of work, too. For example medicine. So if you walk into the wrong clinic, they may give you the "PHP treatment", or treat your infection with "NodeJS, running on a Windows 7 server". (I mean not actual programming languages, but the medical treatment with a similar level of issues and opinions). I find that a scary thought. (Edit: not to bash PHP or JS. I personally like JavaScript and I've heard PHP has gotten a lot better. Just examples for controversial technologies).
  • oalae5niMiel7qu 7y ago
    To look for brain tumors, most US doctors will use a CT scan, which can cause brain cancer. Meanwhile, MRIs don't cause cancer and can be used to look for everything CT scans can be used for.
• franze 7y ago
  Just spent 6 months in London at a hypergrowth Fintech as VP Growth. Learned a damn lot about failure, hiring, the new SaaS workflows, training the next generation and ambition. Summarized it here https://link.medium.com/jJfvmCq2e3 https://link.medium.com/jJfvmCq2e3 Hope somebody finds it valuable.
  • davidwitt415 7y ago
    Thanks for this, lots of good nuggets of wisdom!
• jerome-jh 7y ago
  Work is much easier than studying, much more boring as well.
• gonzus 7y ago
  You will come to forks in your career path more than once. Do not underestimate the importance of choosing what makes you happy. Do not overestimate the benefits of choosing what brings in more money. In short: choose happiness over money, most of the time.
  • jcadam 7y ago
    I thought they were the same thing.
  • jaimex2 7y ago
    Money has diminishing returns. The more you make the more you'll get taxed, the nice things you buy stop bringing joy once they become too easy to acquire has been my experience. Were wired to be happy when surrounded by loving family and a few really good friends.
• CapitalistCartr 7y ago
  The most important part of executive management is building the system, which consusts of hiring, firing, solving problems, and setting policies. There's an old joke: Can you make a better burger than McDonald's? Sure. Can you build a better burger-making system, though? Most executives are incompetent, having little to no training in management. Rather than solving problems, they shift them to employees, vendors, even customers. This is why unions are such a disaster for most execs. The skill of hiring is evident from the top down, be it good or bad. And it will affect an organization for decades after. An organization will come to reflect the leadership, from the top. The people and policies will shape it into the image of its leadership. Mostly that leadership can't see itself reflected in the group.
• networkimprov 7y ago
  People, i.e. you and I, are inherently irrational much of the time; even those with sharp reasoning skills. And we're hardly ever able to see our own irrationality, tho we discern it in others constantly. We're also ingenious; even those with poor reasoning skills can be ingenious. Realizing that you're adrift in an ocean of ingenious, irrational beings will not increase your happiness, so do your best to forget what I told you, and return to pondering how miraculous you are ;-)
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• Symmetry 7y ago
  Building robots has really given me an appreciation of just how awesome my body is.
• gijoeyguerra 7y ago
  Computer programming is more about people than it is about computers.
• bilekas 7y ago
  That I am better than everyone. ;)
• bitanarch 7y ago
  The most important skill for a senior engineer (or, really, any job in a large organization) is... Political skills. What projects / technologies / customers / designs are considered important? Who are the potential allies? Who are potential obstacles? What are their motivations? What is the best plan of action the benefits the group? How to get everyone's alignment? Never hire anyone who's bad at communication. The bottleneck in a large organization is always politics. Whether you can attract skillful engineers to begin with is also a question of communications and politics.
• yonilevy 7y ago
  For many of us, there's no real reason to work full-time, cutting your expenses and working less is great. Also: it's economically irrational how little time we spend optimizing our investments vs. our salary/work-skills (i'm still a sinner).
• cryptica 7y ago
  My work in open source and many different-sized companies (in finance sector and outside) has taught me that there are two categories of people. Those who create value and those who capture value. Most people are on a spectrum but will lean more towards one group or the other but there are people who are more on the extreme ends of the spectrum. - People who are fully focused on capturing value have a tendency to take everything very seriously; they are often pessimistic and will find problems in the smallest things (even trivial aspects of their daily lives) and blow them out of proportion. They don't tolerate external criticism well. They are more likely to have fits of anger. They may have narcisistic tendencies and may lack empathy and are prone to hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance. They tend to focus exclusively on social politics for self-enrichment and don't spend any time thinking about the well-being of society. They believe that personal interest is the only force which drives value creation in society. They see value creators as sheep who need a shepherd to guide them to the right path. They are unable to distinguish value capturing from value creation; to them, they are the same concept. - People who are fully focused on creating value have a tendency to not take anything too seriously; they tend to be optimistic and may shrug off problems altogether, they rarely get angry and they appreciate criticism. They are calm, altruistic and highly self-aware. They believe that altruism is the main force driving value creation in society. They may see value capturers as parasites on the system which exploit value creators to force them towards arbitrary directions which allow value capturers to claim credit and amass profits for themselves. Value creators see a very big difference between value creation and value capturing and their ability to see the difference means less cognitive dissonance, less hypocrisy and more emotional stability. The other thing I learned is that our fiat monetary system benefits value capturers at the expense of value producers. Since fiat was introduced, through natural selection, humans have been getting worse at creating value and better at capturing it. Value capturers are better at figuring out where to place themselves in order to capture all the new fiat money that is constantly entering the system. This is why there are so many monopolies now. We used to have a system which benefited balanced individuals, but the current system benefits extremist value capturers.
  • tome 7y ago
    That's interesting. Personally I match roughly half of your first description and roughly half of your second!
• nmpennypacker 7y ago
  I've learned that small businesses generally have high expectations for relatively small amounts of money. As a result, I stopped doing freelance work unless there is a lot of money involved.
• bitxbit 7y ago
  That 95% of the workforce is there just to collect their checks and they will do everything in their power to protect that privilege.
• nkrisc 7y ago
  How important it is to be able to inhabit another person's viewpoint and see things from their perspective. So much time and effort is saved in doing so. Much of my job has become translating and mediating between stakeholders going around in circles, because each one believes their viewpoint represents the entirety of the issue. They can not understand one another because they assume the other understands everything exactly as they do. The engineer sees the issue as a technical problem, while the BA sees the issue as a process problem. They're both right, but each is only seeing half the issue. Forget what you think you know about someone, shed your own views, listen very closely to what they're saying, and interpret what they're saying not through your own lens, but through theirs. Their viewpoints are formed through their experiences, not yours. It's not easy and you'll get better at it the more you know someone, but there are plenty of shortcuts you can take based on your assumptions about them. Just be sure to update your mental model of them as you learn new information, usually gained by listening to what they're saying.
  • jnty 7y ago
    This was the first thing I thought of when I read this question. So often I find myself and people around me basically assuming that the folks on the other side of the phone are idiots. Well, chances are they're thinking the same. You only need 15 minutes to disagree, but it takes much more time and effort to humbly understand a stranger's worldview and motivations. However, once you do, you're much more likely to deliver something you're both happy with at the end. I think this is a significant part of the value of face-to-face meetings - it's much easier to 'get' someone when you observe and speak to them and their colleagues. At the very least, the connection you get makes it harder to subconsciously write them off as an idiot! Of course, occasionally you come across people who really are very unsuited for the task at hand and end up talking total rubbish. But it's still worth taking the time to be sure - it's probably not as obvious to you as it is to other people, and you'll find yourself having to justify your assessment more often than you expect, particularly to decision-makers.
  • m_fayer 7y ago
    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.
• nkg 7y ago
  In every field, work culture matters as much as knowledge. At some point, knowing the shortcuts or the dos and dont of your job becomes your most distinctive skill.
• fallingfrog 7y ago
  Solving a problem in a technically competent way is easy, once you’re technically competent. What’s really hard is solving the right problem. Lots of systems are very well designed but they solve a problem the user doesn’t have.
• fecak 7y ago
  I'm a resume writer and former recruiter. As a recruiter I was required to 'judge' candidates based on their resume, and didn't spend much time with candidates who had resumes that didn't show what I was looking for. As a resume writer, my job isn't to judge the candidate, but to make the candidate look as strong as possible on paper. My work as a resume writer has led me to believe that much of the talk of worker shortages in skilled employment markets is directly related to poor resumes (and not a lack of qualified candidates). I get a lot more personal satisfaction out of helping people write resumes and coaching them on job search strategy than I did as a recruiter. But my work has also convinced me that there are lots of people out there who are qualified for the jobs they seek, but simply aren't capable of expressing that qualification in writing.
  • aynyc 7y ago
    Just out of curiosity, what do you considered as poor resumes? I did/do a lot of first round interviews in the hiring process for my company. Most resumes I see tell me nothing about what they did for their jobs, just a bunch of tech stacks, and generic projects (for example: I lead a team of SRE for our company web site with 100K visitors per day). I'm trying to avoid those mistakes when I start looking this year. Cheers!
    • fecak 7y ago
      Poor resumes don't list any tangible accomplishments or lack the proper context to let the reader even figure out if the accomplishment was useful. If you read a job advertisement, that's a list of responsibilities - a resume should outline responsibilities (especially if the responsibility is critical), but also describe unique accomplishments. That's the main thing, but there are lots of other factors. For your example, leading an SRE team for a busy site is a responsibility, and it's useful to know - it seems kinda important. If you actually built the team, established their processes, led changes to some of the processes, implemented new tools, etc. that resulted in increased site reliability, that would be an accomplishment.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• ezzzzz 7y ago
  That failure is ok. As a software developer, you are going to receive all the smoke. Whether failure means missing some arbitrary deadline, delivering something that doesn't meet requirements, has bugs, is not extensible, or not delivering at all. Obviously, none of us want any of that to happen, but it's a reality you will face at some point in your career. Your management probably does not care about the myriad of challenges that led to failure and will shift the blame to you to save face for themselves. Doing your best is all you can do. Failure means you are challenging yourself and working outside of your comfort zone, and this is where growth happens. Be honest with yourself, and honest with your team. You can take responsibility for your actions, but there are so many variables which you can't control. From poor planning/management, legacy systems, infrastructure, tooling, unrealistic deadlines/deliverables, funding, initiative, the work of others. These represent systematic issues that have their own inertia, and expecting them to be solved by a single overworked developer is simply asking too much. Learn to recognize when too much is being asked and say something. Recognize all the variables which you can't control. If you have a solution, go ahead and propose one if it is one that you can implement with reasonable confidence, otherwise, leave it to somebody else. Sometimes the hardest thing to learn, is learning what NOT to do.
• calewis 7y ago
  Not everyone works at your pace, and sometimes matching someone else's cadence can be a healthy exercise and an opportunity for growth.
• ng-user 7y ago
  Everyone (a lot of people) thinks their current project is the most important thing at this given moment for their organization.
• ISL 7y ago
  1) There is no DC. We do our scientific work at millihertz frequencies (one cycle every 1000 seconds or so). The age of the universe is ~13.6 billion years, which corresponds to ~10^-18 Hz. Thinking about the zero-frequency limit is a useful crutch, but all things are always changing. Materials creep, the Earth deforms, temperature changes, aging happens. There is no DC. 2) Small forces for long times yield great change We study torques as small as 10^-18 N-m acting on ~100 g objects. A willingness to apply a very weak force for a long time can often yield measurable, often large results.
  • throwlaplace 7y ago
    > There is no DC. what does that mean? just because there's ripple doesn't mean it's not DC. DC doesn't mean flat and AC doesn't mean non-flat (AC means periodic).
    • ISL 7y ago
      DC generally means time-invariant/the zero-frequency limit. Offhand, I can't think of a measured physical quantity (aside from the physical constants, so-far observed to be constant within uncertainties) that has been constant for all time.
      • throwlaplace 7y ago
        but that's like saying there's no such thing as a 1 or 0 (or any number at all). of course. but given enough time/money/effort you can get close to zero frequency right? just add enough smoothing caps and wait right?
• foobarbecue 7y ago
  You are not capable of sensing temperature; only heat transfer.
• duxup 7y ago
  Not being a bother to your boss is more valuable than the quality of work provided you don't seriously suck.
• rdxm 7y ago
  After almost 3 decades in software/systems domain, three things (which admittedly I'm guessing other people have landed at as well): 1) It's almost never about the engineering, and almost always about the people doing the engineering. 2) Actual innovation is exceedingly rare. That vast majority of output in the form of software, services, etc is optimization. 3) We've failed dramatically as a business domain to recognize what is truly valuable and what is actually harmful to the culture and the species.
• GhostKnight 7y ago
  just today I talked with a colleague of mine and told her that you try and do the best work possible and put a lot of effort in it and will be considered shit by others. And, you do a sloppy job with minimum effort and it will be regarded as awesome. Is it luck? Even if you like what you do and are passionate about it, there's just element of chance, though "luck" is never a thing to consider or even mention at meeting and in plans. Common consensus holds it that you you should always "try and do the best work possible and put a lot of effort in it" but that's just not the case since when everything's awesome nothing is awesome and doing something repeatedly is in between shit and awesome. You just gather feedback on what works and try to repeat it and stop doing what has negative feedback (you change according to feedback) smth like that
• rohitbhats 7y ago
  1. Look at things in entirety--from end-to-end, when you see the complete picture, it becomes much easier to grasp anything. 2. Research matters A LOT. I remember an incident where my Design lead called us all into a room (about 12 people.) He gave each one of us a chocolate--none were of the same kind. Then, he asked, "how many of you don't like what you got" Couple of us raised our hands. He then said, "go ahead and exchange it with someone"--people unhappy with their chocolates exchanged. Once everyone was done, He asked the same question again. This time only one person who did not like the chocolate raised their hand. Then he said "Welcome to user research 101" -- The biggest mistake companies make today, is shovelling down what they think is right onto their users, just like I did. Now, when you guys exchanged and got what you wanted it just goes onto show that it's not like you don't like chocolates, it's just that you wanted a different kind. About the one who did not like anything, he asked her why--She said, she doesn't like chocolates; for this he said--well, there also are people, who don't want your product at all! These two have really helped me understand things better.
  • hnick 7y ago
    I really like that chocolate story. I think there's a side lesson there in allowing users to engage in fixing their own issues. Whether it's open source software, Wordpress plugins, a marketplace/platform like eBay, or item trading in an online game. It's powerful and engaging if you can get the balance right.
• auiya 7y ago
  Company representatives and management will outright lie to you about the things they claim the company values. Things like "people come first", "we work hard and play hard", "work/life balance is crucial" and "code maintenance is important". If you want to find out what a company actually values, pay attention to what it incentivizes, and also where it deploys it's leukocytes. Often, people who work for a company assume the company values some concept or principal we shall call "X". In reality, the company doesn't actually value X. Oftentimes the company could not care less about X or even disdains X. But: they value VALUING X! (Go ahead and read that twice). The meta-valuing of things often produces a much different, often opposite result on the ground than the valuing of things - an important distinction.
  • kqr 7y ago
    Also real company values are things that have reasonable opposites, i.e. things that help you make a choice. Ideally, they even make this explicit. Example: We value having fun at work over sense of duty. Or we value good customer experience over high efficiency. In those cases, it's clear that something generally good (sense of duty, high efficiency) is being rejected in favour of something else the company values. Examples of meaningless values are things like "integrity" or "constant improvement" where it's hard to imagine anyone wanting the opposite. Unless you can imagine a competitor picking as a company value "we're committed to maintaining the status quo and never improving" then "constant improvement" is not a good guiding principle for you. It's just common sense! The very worst are the ones that pick opposites and value both. Like "quantity and quality" or more subtly "independence and teamwork", "research and intuition".
• thrownaway954 7y ago
  "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.
  • president 7y ago
    In general this works but if enough people do it, society suffers.
• nadam 7y ago
  I think other people also realize this, but my main learnings as a 45 year old software developer are: That how little college education contributes to success in life. (at least success as I define it). That education became commodity. The real value is in finding the interesting opportunities / ideas / people / networks, the right topics at the right time. That my knowledge and way of thinking is still too 'academical'. (although I am constantly working on this.) That beyond a level big-picture thinking is more important than being good in details, I need to progess in this front a lot. That scratching your own itch is the best startup walidation method: but me as a software developer have mostly developer problems. Creating developer tools is a hard business, but I could not find out a better alternative for myself yet. (I am also a gamer a little bit, but indie games are an even tougher business.) That living in Eastern Europe is bad for your career but the upside is that you can live really well off of a (by western standards) relatively low income.
• rnernento 7y ago
  Do not fear large companies. They are inefficient and not necessarily well guided in their decision making processes.
• m_fayer 7y ago
  How we tend to overvalue and overinvest in reason and undervalue and underinvest in intuition. Intuition is powerful, mysterious, and a pleasure to wield. But developing and then trusting intuition is anathema to our metric-fixated process-consultant-ridden professional world, so we keep doing things the ugly hard way.
  • akeck 7y ago
    My experience from applied math: > Intuition is powerful, mysterious, and a pleasure to wield until it lies to you. Then you have to crack the whip and reign in the horses. So maybe the price of powerful intuition is eternal vigilance...
    • m_fayer 7y ago
      Luckily I think day-to-day corporate dynamics and complex LOB business apps, where I think most of us earn our daily bread, are less likely to confuse our intuitive powers than something like mathematics or physics or philosophy.
• lbriner 7y ago
  "Everybody is a little bit right" I was taught it by a former colleague but it was probably coined by someone else. We often think that if two views do not agree, one must be right and the other wrong when in most cases, every idea is a trade-off and everyone is therefore a little bit right. We might be able to find a middle-ground solution or just accept that our idea isn't always chosen.
  • peteradio 7y ago
    Somehow related: Sometimes the compromise is worse than either extreme.
• lbriner 7y ago
  The fact that a Consultant is paid to "tell you what you already know" does not nullify their value. Don't under-estimate how many times we need an unbiased external view to confirm what we already thought but were too unsure to implement.
• gwbas1c 7y ago
  It's easier to leave people frustrated then help them empathize or adjust their expectations. I can only explain it by example: Some people complain that they have a lot of trouble getting a job in the software field. Other people complain about why it's so hard to hire. The reasons are very difficult to explain, but more importantly: No one wants to know the truth or bring empathy to the discussion! I've had both struggles. (I've struggled to find a job, and I've struggled to hire.) If I try to explain why it's hard to get a job, from the perspective of someone who's hiring, I make people angry. If I try to explain why it's hard to hire, from the perspective of someone who's looking, I make people angry. The simple, non-offensive answer, is that both job candidate and hiring company's expectations are unreasonable. More importantly, though, it's easier to leave people frustrated (in their job search or employee search) than to help them adjust their expectations.
• slumdev 7y ago
  Some number of years of experience is not and never will be equivalent to a CS bachelor's. I'm done explaining why an undocumented O(n^2) solution that violates most of the SOLID principles is a Bad Thing.
  • t3rabytes 7y ago
    This smells like gatekeeping at it's finest.
    • slumdev 7y ago
      If we did a little more gatekeeping and a little less bootcamping, we might have the respect and autonomy afforded to doctors, lawyers, and actual, P.E. engineers. Instead, we're just an annoyingly expensive cost center. What we do isn't easy. We can't pretend that it's easy, that it can be learned in six weeks, or that it's possible to be truly great without earning the foundational knowledge. That pretending hurts all of us.
      • gonzo41 7y ago
        There are plenty of crap doctors, they just pay more to find out. And doctors layers and engineers all got titles and accreditation after the fields really pulled their shit together 200 years ago after having buildings fall down, cases fail and people die in surgery for hundreds of years previously. software is a very new field. it'll be fine. Also no engineer I've met wants to really do front end development for a shopping site. There's a market for people who start out with enthusiasm and a handful of knowledge.
  • ahuth 7y ago
    Is a CS bachelor’s necessary to understand that? Does a CS bachelor’s guarantee that this is understood?
    • slumdev 7y ago
      This is a silly, silly attempt to knock down a point that should be self-evident. Success in life isn't a formal proof. Exercising every day, keeping your weight down, eating a Mediterranean diet, not smoking, having healthy relationships, and sleeping eight hours a night do not guarantee that you'll live to reach retirement age. However, they drastically increase your odds.
• turc1656 7y ago
  First impressions are much, much, much more important than anyone can imagine. You've been told they are important, but you may not realize how true that was. People like to make a decision about a person and it's incredibly difficult to change it once that happens, especially when that impression/decision was also shares among others. If you start a new job and do really well at the onset and everyone thinks highly of you, it's insanely hard to get rid of that even if you were to completely botch something. You could come up with some reason and everyone is likely to assume that reason is true and needs to be addressed rather than the problem having been you. Similarly, digging yourself out of a hole from a bad impression is perhaps even harder. The value of hard work is also understated. Most people do what they need to do and that's it. They also don't really internalize the challenges the company faces. If you take that one, you are far more likely to succeed in your job. It's not just about "hard work" but an entire mind set that most people simply don't have. If you have it, it seriously pays off. Related to the previous point - working a bit longer also really pays off. This is different but related to the previous point. There is definitely a non-linear increase in earnings once your surpass the standard work hours. Spend an extra 5-10 hours a week on your job or side project/business pays off much more. You can either work "smart" or work hard. Technically, you can do both but hardly anyone does. The few that do, however, are absolute rock stars. No one checks anything. Everyone just assumes everyone else is doing their job and doing it properly. Even if checking things is part of someone else's job, it's usually done half-assed. Actually verifying the important stuff (and sometimes the less-important stuff) opens up a world of potential where your business discovers all kinds of missed opportunities, incorrect work, etc. Most people are bad at math. And most people are also financially illiterate. Which by extension makes a huge majority of people really, really terrible at personal finance and financial planning (for themselves or their business). This also applies to a lot of smart and successful people. Every organizational structure that human beings create yields towards tyranny/abuse over time. Doesn't matter what you are talking about - government, business, anything. Over time nearly everything somehow seems to become these oligopolistic style structures where there are a few hugely powerful entities and then everyone else. Related to the previous point, far more things follow the pareto distribution than I could have imagined. In fact it seems to apply to anything that either has any creative aspect to it at all or to non-creative endeavors if they have any sort of scalability to them. There's a small group of people that are so insanely efficient and productive that it's almost impossible to comprehend. For example, I used to work with a guy who was working full time with me and started his own side business which was an online SaaS that he paid someone to create for him after he wrote up all the requirements and he did all the testing. While this was going on he also spent every free second trading cryptocurrencies and made a small fortune doing that. When the product was ready he launched it and manually sought out retail (end consumer) clients one by one via things like Discord chat rooms where he would pump his software that was tailored to individuals. He spoke to literally thousands and thousands of people and convinced them to sign up. Then he had a recurring monthly revenue which dwarfed his (already high) salary so he quit to pursue it. He continued to get clients and now has north of 15,000, most manually acquired. He's working on launching a sister product now. It baffles me how he can even do like half of what he does. In business, managers are very hesitant to grant permission but much more likely to grant forgiveness for not following procedure. So in many cases it is usually better to just do whatever it is you think is best for the business and try to improves things however you can if the rules are (or will) prevent you. The personal boost here is also that your manager also thinks your plate is fully loaded with whatever it is they've already assigned to you. Then you shock them with this big thing you've also been working on and they're shocked you were able to take that on. Win/win. There was more that I had, but I forgot it while writing the rest above. But I suppose that's enough blather from me today.
• winternett 7y ago
  1. In climbing the corporate ladder, don't focus on where you need to ultimately need to land, focus on not overshooting it. 2. Under promise and over deliver, actions are more valuable than words. 3. Sometimes even when you're right, never forget the value of keeping quiet when big egos are busy speaking. 4. Eventually after years of others coming and going, you end up being the smartest one in the room that others look to for answers, then it's your turn to do it all right, instead of being like those you had to fight against during your climb.
• agentultra 7y ago
  Our software wouldn't be as good if our developers didn't meet people who work in the factory and use it. Factory operations still rely heavily on paper. It's reliable, the infrastructure to support it is reliable, and people are willing to deal with inefficiency for reliability. A maintenance manager on the floor doesn't want to be dealing with a crashing app or network connectivity issues while they're filling out a part requisition form or maintenance report. And an operator doesn't want to hit save in the app and see a bunch of red boxes when they have a spill to attend to. However the inefficiency of paper leads to inaccurate results, slow lead times, and altogether missed opportunities. People invariably copy yesterdays form into the new one and get on with their day. Digging up all that paper work and manually entering the data into a spreadsheet can result in more errors in the data. And doing any kind of large-scale analysis on components with maintenance reports involving those components is time consuming and laborious... and doing it across an entire conglomerate is basically impossible this way. We have to make affordances to our interface that take the operating environment and the people interacting with it into account. Reliability is really important. Software isn't the solution to everything. Always have a plan B.
• ghc 7y ago
  Venture Capital doesn't work the way founders and startup employees think it does. 1. A VC's job isn't to "pick" startups like you might pick stocks on the public market. It's almost besides the point, which is why junior associates and analysts get the most face time and source a lot of deals. 2. Venture Capital isn't a meritocracy, it's not fair, and it sure as hell isn't a competition. Most founders realize this after their first go around, but it's worth repeating because too many first time founders get wrapped up in getting funding, as if it's like getting into college or doing well on a test. 3. While angel investors are well advised to try picking potential unicorns or decacorns, VC funds most often don't. The reason the internet thinks this is that the biggest funds spend the most money on PR, because they have the biggest budgets, because management fees scale with fund size. These big funds invest later and need the biggest valuations to make money. There are many models a fund can operate on, and in fact most institutional limited partners will allocate capital to a number of funds with different models and strategies. To be a successful VC, you don't need to pick the next Uber, you need to pick a model, strategy, market focus, or technological thesis that fits within the broader strategy of your LPs and isn't a duplicate of their existing LP allocations. 4. If you invest in a founder, the total percentage of your interactions with them that include startup pitching will trend towards zero. Most experienced VCs will give your formal pitch less weight than the sum of their other interactions with you. The reason formal pitches are so important is because the investment committee (which tends to vote on and discuss investments at length) is mostly made up of people who haven't had much interaction with you. The real goal of a pitch is to not be objectionable to anyone whose opinion matters.
• cheunste 7y ago
  SCADA software is crap to develop on and significantly more painful to build a GUI for and no one can actually find a solution to this. Even if you did, you would have a hell of a time selling that solution.
• jklinger410 7y ago
  Providing a service sucks way more than having a product if you value your work-life balance.
• bsenftner 7y ago
  Competence is an illusion. Want to be dismayed and acquire a hopeless outlook for society: take anyone and give them a non-trivial task to perform, such as produce a passport style photo of themselves. Sounds easy-peasy, right? 80% of the general population will not deliver. Oh sure, you'll hear all kinds of colorful reasons why, or why what they give you is "better". The facts hurt: people don't listen, they do what they think they heard, their self-conversation is a convoluted mess, and the fact that we have not destroyed our planet is a miracle.
• tombert 7y ago
  Companies are not your friends, no matter how much they try and pretend they are. When your employer says "we're a family here" or something like that, that's simply untrue. I don't think that the people that say that are "lying" exactly, since "lying" implies intent, and I think most of the time when your manager tells you that they do think it's true. If being a worker at a job were really "family", they wouldn't fire you off the second you start underperforming, or the second the economy tanks, or the second that they found someone cheaper to replace you; if someone's mother or father did that, you'd rightly think of them as a jerk.
  • curo 7y ago
    I agree that some managers may be full of it, but there's the inverse danger of letting mistrust keep you from meaningful workplace bonds. Our current startup might not be a family, but we are like a sports team. We spend most of our lives together, working toward mutual goals. Yes, if there's a persistent under-performer, we'll have to say goodbye, but there's certainly a bond here that makes you want to fight for your colleague's happiness and sense of meaning.
    • tombert 7y ago
      I apologize if I didn't make it more clear; I'm not saying you shouldn't like your coworkers or manager or anything like that. Obviously you spend eight hours a day with these people, you should probably be with people you like. I'm just saying that you shouldn't treat a job like any more than it actually is; at the end of the day, this is a transaction. I sell my time and experience for some amount of compensation, the company pays me for it, and if they don't like how I do or for whatever reason decide that it's not in their economic interest to keep paying me, will terminate my employment. I should also make it clear, I'm not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing; it's the agreement we all make when taking a job. It's just not "family".
  • pwdisswordfish2 7y ago
    Implying families are never dysfunctional...
• zackmorris 7y ago
  That nearly everything in software development is a waste of time. This will probably end up below the fold, but here are some reasons why: - Trends force wheel-reinvention and relearning every 3 years, based on ideas from 20, even 50 years ago (or more) that were ignored because the market wasn't there yet. So the more cutting edge you are, then the more you feel out of place and suffer if you're not profiting from your knowledge. Your best work will simply be discarded just 3 years later. - The profit is in application, not theory. So again, even if you know a better way to do something, most likely you will get reprimanded for it where you work. - As you acquire more programming knowledge, you eventually reach a point where new hires can't read what you are writing. This comes down to the simple vs easy dichotomy. Again, being an outlier won't help you in a corporate environment, and even if you find a smaller agency that's willing to take a risk on you, their generosity will eventually come to an end and you'll be on your own again. And the biggest one of all: - Programming careers usually end by 40. There may come a point where even though the money is good, you don't believe in what you're doing anymore. If you don't make the jump to management, be prepared to start over in another field. The root causes of all of this are wealth inequality and the underemployment which causes it. This is not the future that academia anticipated. This is a capitalist's dream. So we have a technologically illiterate aristocracy dictating terms to an indentured underclass of gullible loners who will never organize for their own benefit.
• phorkyas82 7y ago
  Every human action and interaction is inherently social. So is coding.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• RocketSyntax 7y ago
  Success is not just the hard work in the things that ultimately succeed. It's more than meets the eye. It's also about the hard work in failures and decisions about things you decide not to do. For example; trying 3 different workarounds to get 1 buggy piece of code to work.
• mncharity 7y ago
  People greatly underestimate how rapidly expertise can become ramshackle as one moves away from the small areas where that expertise is actively exercised and tested. Few would ask a "Doctor" of medieval literature for cancer treatment. But people are surprised by first-tier business school students having middle-school misconceptions about Earth's seasons. Or by first-tier astronomy graduate students pervasively getting wrong a five-year old's "what color is the Sun ball?" (with half-ish of the few exceptions having learned it studying astronomy education, common misconceptions in, rather than from their own, atypically extensive and successful). Or by many first-tier medical school graduate students having no idea how big cells are. Similarly, many people underestimate how badly science education is working. But that's a longer story. But has a speculative corollary, that most everyone is underestimating how awesome science education could be. It's sort of the inverse of the swiss-cheese model of reliable system failure. Holes of success are so unlikely to line up, that the light of understanding currently never makes it very far into the cheese.
• mncolinlee 7y ago
  People are not optimal machines. Instead, they make decisions based upon narratives. An inferior product can win based upon a superior narrative or because it was seen more often and recently than a competitor's product. Generally, a consumer is only looking for one or two features to match their needs. Producing a very simple product with fewer features to match the needs of a key segment is a great way to start building an audience. If people complain about missing features, it's a good sign that they have some interest in using your product.
• thewanisdown 7y ago
  Fortune 500 companies are held together by paperclips, bubblegum, and a whole lot of wishful thinking. Sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally.
• egypturnash 7y ago
  Large numbers of the people who made your corporate-created entertainment are underpaid, overworked, and probably got stiffed on the last few checks when the subcontractor they were working for closed up at the end of the project. They may end up having their work uncredited, as well. Only a tiny percentage of anyone involved will get anything from that corporation's attempt to make money off of every time that content is replayed.
• nitwit005 7y ago
  People have no real idea who the valuable employees are. Occasionally you run into situations where a single person is replaced by multiple people, and then they catch on that the person who left was pretty good.
• RobRivera 7y ago
  I learned to think in terms of incentive structures and risk when communicating. Transmission of an idea that has real implications on a design or project on the roadmap will receive unscientific criticism due to internal office politik. So word choice is as important as superiority in an idea for solving a problem
• itpragmatik 7y ago
  I am grateful to have a job that allows me to have respect and enjoy many luxuries that life has to offer.
• sebringj 7y ago
  There is a ton of work to make abstractions seamless or mundane or taken for granted.
• kagenouta 7y ago
  If you expect to reliably be able to fix something -- especially at scale -- you need to understand how it works. Specifically, you need to understand how it should work, where it's deviating from that, and what you can do to address it.
• deleted 7y ago
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• Scramblejams 7y ago
  If you work in a field where you and your coworkers are not employed as coders, coding is frequently a superpower. When I worked in aerospace as an aircraft structural engineer, I could do a lot of things my coworkers simply could not because I could code. This translated to faster deliveries, happier customers, and good leverage for increasing my comp. So my advice to anybody who wants to get into a not-coding occupation and really distinguish themselves is: Get good at coding.
• projektfu 7y ago
  Good veterinarians (and doctors?) understand a ton more about how the body works than just about everyone else, and yet also know how little they understand.
• l0b0 7y ago
  The amount of work to know anything in meatspace with any certainty is huge. And this is why everyone trusts their favourite anecdotes: the alternative is not getting anything done.
• jb775 7y ago
  That humans are simply animals with highly evolved brains, living in a very complex web of social interaction.
• dengsauve 7y ago
  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 data analysis, their personal information alone means almost nothing. Their data in the aggregate of all visitors' data is valuable for analyzing conversion rates, if and how their banners are working, etc. I can't speak to the ethics of this, nor do I care to. I don't believe it's right to track so much interaction without duly notifying the customer it's happening, but I have very little aside from a sense of common courtesy to back that belief up. The experience has given me a new appreciation for JavaScript blocker extensions, which before I had believed are no longer really needed. It's also given me an insight as to the value of an e-commerce page over a physical store location. For example: Say I go to my local Target. If I'm looking at cameras, and the sales person asks if I need any help, or whatever, and I say no, they go away, and the interaction is over. But lets say I go to their website. Immediately, a personal session with this page is created for me, even though I don't know it. I'm tracked from the home page, to their electronics sections, to the Camera subsection. My movements in figuring out the search filters is being tracked, my mouse movements over the available products is tracked, all adding data to create a "heatmap" of that webpage. Even if I don't buy a thing, I've given them little pieces of information to be used in analyzing their site. My visit will be considered a failure to their marketers, and the data surrounding my failure to buy will be used to retool their site in the hopes of getting people like me next time.
  • bo1024 7y ago
    Thanks for your comments, just want to discuss one piece: > However, as with lots of data analysis, their personal information alone means almost nothing. I think this is not true because of fingerprinting -- sites and services want to track who is the same visitor across multiple visits and locations. In other words, the situation is even worse than you've described because it's not just used in aggregate, but really to track you personally as well.
  • stygiansonic 7y ago
• AceJohnny2 7y ago
  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 modern, large-scale production pipeline measures failure rates at the per-million level. Also, the amount of iterations in developing a product for mass-production. From that perspective, a well-produced thing on Hackaday barely qualifies as a proof-of-concept, from a production perspective.
  • AceJohnny2 7y ago
    > We have utterly given that up to Asia. It's now obvious to me that recovering this capability in the US would require decades of focused investment and trade policy. The Foxconn debacle in Wisconsin is just that, a debacle. Scott Walker is an even bigger fool than I thought. I've lost hope for the US political class to have the concerted will to enact the required policies and incentives.
    • AWildC182 7y ago
      On the other hand, the amount of money you can actually make on electronics manufacturing pales in comparison to the money that can be made selling software for those devices. The margins in electronics suck, and this is coming from someone who really enjoys doing electronics design. It's also worth noting that in a lot of areas the software effort required to make things work well dwarfs the work that goes into the physical hardware, both in terms of money and engineer time. Anyone can spin up a board with some chips but actually doing all the bringup/drivers/DSP/UI requires a ton of skill and effort. I think it's probably ok to let Asia have this and worry about staying ahead on all the tons of stuff that has to go on top.
      • president 7y ago
        > I think it's probably ok to let Asia have this and worry about staying ahead on all the tons of stuff that has to go on top. Why does it have to be mutually exclusive? We should have a strong manufacturing base in addition to being strong in software and "stuff that has to go on top".
• beernutz 7y ago
  That the only thing you can really control is yourself and your reaction to the world. To me, this manifests most in how I "talk" to myself about things. This quote is one that has been on my mind a lot lately. "Let's think of the positives as personal, general, and permanent. Let's think of the negatives as impersonal, specific, and temporary. Let's actually go out of our way to inject these things into our discussions." TLDR: We are what we think.
• jefurii 7y ago
  That work which benefits society goes unrewarded while work that is actively destructive towards our planet and our democracy is very lucrative. That most technical people seem to have no ethics, no morals, no empathy, and no scruples. That corporations are psychopathic parasites which do not have our best interest at heart. That nonprofits can be refuges and forces for good.
• ned7 7y ago
  If you're building a short term project that doesn't require much work go for a smart and lazy co-founder, he will get the work done robustly as fast as possible. On the other hand If you've got a long term project that requires perseverance your ideal co-founder is an average intelligence hard-working dude, he will work hard for long time since he has low opportunity cost.
• bonestamp2 7y ago
  The best coworker I ever had taught me this. Anybody can do this. This guy wasn't the person with the highest technical ability in the company, but they were the best at this one thing, and this one thing made them exponentially more successful than people with more technical skill... Whether your boss or colleagues think you did a good job (or not) is all about expectations. Therefore, the most important part of your success is managing other people's expectations of your work. That's not to say your work can be shit or that you should sandbag it by setting low expectations, success is simply a matter of defining what success is and then meeting that threshold. Either way, setting those expectations is important and many people don't do it at all. Then they wonder why, regardless of what the data says, some people thought the project was successful and others think otherwise.
• rovr138 7y ago
  Date and times are hard. Every job I have I keep finding more ways that make me go crazier.
• 1337biz 7y ago
  That PowerPoint is the backbone that keeps organizations together. It's like drawing books for toddlers. Keeps them busy for hours, everyone knows how to do it, when it's well done they are complimented and have silly talks about what they did.
• frequentnapper 7y ago
  that perception is everything. no matter how good you are, but if your work doesn't get noticed by the right people, then your career will suffer. People with good social skills who may be mediocre developers will move up much faster than you, and you will think why is it that you get left behind? Example: You're a senior supporting your more junior devs whenever they run into trouble, and you hardly get credit for it because the business side doesn't even realize it. All they see is tickets moving. I've kind of learned this the hard way and even before learning it, I actually luckily took advantage of this without even realizing it in a previous job. Make sure that the work you're doing is credited to you in front of top brass. But you can't be too overt or braggy about it otherwise it will get annoying to your coworkers and then you will suffer. It seems like an art form almost.
  • animesh 7y ago
    Once I got an unexpected praise from a customer for some proxy work I did. I was overjoyed and exclaimed something to the lines of "see, that's how is done." A few days later I didn't get the recommendation letter I was supposed to receive by the same customer. There might be other things at play here or maybe he overshot with the praise. I don't know, but ever since, I don't make much of such praise. I just say thank you and move on.
• notacoward 7y ago
  That even in the most technical endeavors, many skills more often associated with the humanities - e.g. writing, speaking, basic psychology - are often the real keys to success.
• egberts1 7y ago
  People will take your idea and make it theirs if you don’t publish them (e-mail should suffice). It’s worse when they move up the corporate ladder on the basis of your idea.
• speedplane 7y ago
  Out of college, I worked at an engineering company and was an extremely fast programmer that built lots of cool things. I was quickly recognized by the leadership, and got an "engineer of the month" award at a company-wide meeting. Despite it being "of the month", they only did this twice a year. I was happy about it, called my mom and told her the news. What I didn't realize is that a large group of senior engineers were not to happy about it. The went through every one of my commits, identified every time I broke a validation, broke the build, or otherwise caused someone else a headache, and then took this information to management without me knowing about it. I'm sure jealousy may have played a factor, but today, I largely think they were correct. I was a cowboy coder fast and loose with my code. When I broke the build, even if was for 10 minutes before I fixed it, I basically stopped a dozen or more engineers from being productive. It took time, but I learned how to be more of a team player. I created my own build environment that would only commit changes if everything passed, and built a far more robust validation system. Quickly I changed from being the biggest cause of bugs, to the biggest reporter of bugs in the company. Finding and reporting bugs in other people's code also did not help my standing. The truth is that any organization is made up of humans, and simply being the most efficient at creating new features, building validation systems, or reporting bugs, is not going to be enough. You have to actually talk to your peers, build a relationship and a mutual respect and trust.
• nottorp 7y ago
  Probably nothing. Things that I didn't realize, yes. But there aren't so many new things to discover under the sun...
• einpoklum 7y ago
  > What has your work taught you that other people don't realize? That my country's supposed worst enemies are actually valued customers for arms and security services. ... and now I don't even feel like calling it "my country" anymore, I use "the state" instead.
• cryptica 7y ago
  You need to choose a cartel and find a good position in that cartel. Find a large community of people who has growing power and influence and try to make yourself relevant in that cartel. Pick a cartel that is growing in influence as opposed to a large one that is stagnating or closed to outsiders. If the cartel is not working for you, maybe it's too late and you need a different cartel. You can still keep some ties to the old cartel if you like aspects of it. I was trying to join the Y Combinator cartel before and met some interesting founders and had interesting opportunities but ultimately I couldn't achieve what I wanted. So I became involved with cryptocurrency, which I think is going to be the next high growth cartel. I found a way to be somewhat relevant in my crypto community so now I'm just pushing and trying to help the cartel gain more power and influence.
• shamanreturns2 7y ago
  polishing a turd is great, the skill gained will be useful to polish silver and gold.
• joddystreet 7y ago
  - Conflicts are resolved by asking questions, not by providing solutions - Salary and coming to work are anti-patterns - People expect perfection from a team, but readily accept mistakes of an individual - Every job is easy, lest one should be held responsible - With every person leaving the company - even after all the documentation, KT and handholding - a large chunk of knowledge leaves the company (or say wisdom); pretty much everybody is irreplaceable - It's extremely hard to get your idea across. If you want your idea to get accepted, sit with one person at a time, before revealing your big idea. People still would not understand it, but they would accept it when discussed, again, in a group - It's easy to work if there is a trust among the team members - If you have KPIs and OKRs in your company, be ready for cross-functional conflicts, the introduction of time-wasting processes, and ultimately erosion of all the trust - giveth number, taketh soul
• lewisjoe 7y ago
  “Smart-work” > “Hard work” is BS. If you want to get things done, train yourself to do focussed work over a period of time. In developer lingo, be in the zone as much as possible. There’s no smart-work or any other shortcut.
• drongoking 7y ago
  - Groupthink is a very real thing, and stronger than most people realize. People in a group will hold and defend beliefs that they would never individually hold, simply because they're (perceived to be) part of the group's beliefs. - Being results-oriented can be detrimental to doing anything useful.
• Kagerjay 7y ago
  Doing standup and communicating effectively. Its made me a better storyteller in my social life. Also understanding shareholders / team leads point of view in the software dev lifecycle
• bshanks 7y ago
  The division of the cerebral cortex into cortical areas is somewhat subjective.
• bshanks 7y ago
  Rational thinking is computationally intractable.
• psion 7y ago
  If you make yourself about the job you do, losing the job doesn't mean you are unworthy. Remember that you are more than the job, and you have no obligation to continue doing it if it upsets you, either.
• triangleman 7y ago
  Hey man, I had a great retort for your self-loathing comment on that climate change thread. And then you went and deleted it!
  • crimsonalucard 7y ago
    I didn't see it. I deleted my comment because it was getting negative karma and I'm hovering on the borderline right now.