11 ms·

Be prolific

328 points by hecticjeff 6y ago

Insanity 6y ago
It's the same with software I imagine, because of several reasons. 1. Writing more code (and being conscious of it) makes you a better engineer. You'll run into more issues that you will fix and, hopefully, remember. 2. If you'd take the art example and say "Paint 20 cubist pieces", and then transfer that to "Write 20 authentication servers", each iteration you'll benefit from what you learned and be able to 'clean up' the code. It's essentially writing 20 PoCs where each PoC improves on the last one. EDIT: Writing more versions also allows you to explore more ideas without fear. If you have to write "one good version" you'll be less prone to exploring 'exotic' ideas. So you'd benefit from that as well.
- polskibus 6y ago
  Ad1. In my opinion it's the variety of problems an engineer has solved that matters. There are plenty of crud developers that are helpless whenever a more complex problem occurs, even though they did hundreds of crud pages in their life.
  - sudhirj 6y ago
    This applies only if they’re learning. Learning devs who do 100s of CRUD pages will have a DSL and metaprogramming toolkit by the time they’re done. Those who don’t learn will do the same thing, like an artist making 100 copies of their own first painting, each copy more faithful than the last. Better to make a 100 versions of the same subject, each one better than the last.
    - polskibus 6y ago
      Many of them don't have a crud toolkit even after 100s of pages done, at least that's what I see.
      - quickthrower2 6y ago
        Sometime the “business” conspires against that though: in fact depending on the business model it might be a threat
  - Insanity 6y ago
    Yup, I tried to convey that in the "being conscious of it" part. I meant to say you have to actively see it as learning / improvement.
- matsemann 6y ago
  One software concept where it's applicable is game programming. Lots of people have their dream/pet project they spend years on tweaking and making all these features for, but the underlying game mechanic just isn't... fun enough, I guess? But making lots of small games (at game jams or so) one can discover great concepts, and then nail those.
  - ozmbie 6y ago
    I’ve worked in the games industry and this is pretty much my advice for people who are interested in it: Just make as many games as you can. Don’t get hung up on some big new MMORPG game you’ve got in your head. Just start by making Pong, then Space Invaders, then Pac-Man. Then make a dozen small prototypes of your own ideas, each time based on what you’ve learned. You get practical development experience but more importantly, you learn that iterating and experimenting is where good ideas come from and where bad ideas are discarded.
alltakendamned 6y ago
While "practice makes perfect" is not a very new idea, it is still nice to be reminded about it from time to time.
- anonytrary 6y ago
  There are a lot of ways to put it, like "no success without failures". He's making the additional point that it's hard to know if you have failed unless you shared your work. I needed to hear it again also.
  - alltakendamned 6y ago
    Indeed. I came across the use of learning in public just recently. It has something.
_Microft 6y ago
I'm reasonably sure that it was a pottery class (or study) in which students/study participants were asked to produce either the best piece they could think of or as many as possible. I think it was actually a study that I read about. It might need some internet sleuthing to find it. I'll try later. I do not think that it is surprising that practice improves skills though (well, except for people with an exceptionally fixed mindset ;). (For today's lucky Ten Thousand, "fixed mindset" refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset#Fixed_and_Growth_Mindset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset#Fixed_and_Growth_Minds... ) (For today's lucky Ten Thousand, "today's lucky Ten Thousand" refers to https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ )
- lqet 6y ago
  Here is an article discussing this: https://medium.com/swlh/the-science-backed-secret-to-rapidly-improving-any-skill-530e573aa546 https://medium.com/swlh/the-science-backed-secret-to-rapidly... > On the first day of the class, the ceramics teacher divided the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the class, he announced, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. > The works of highest quality, the most beautiful and creative designs, were all produced by the group graded for quantity.
  - saberdancer 6y ago
    It's an anecdote which could be completely fabricated, I'd expect it is since the source seems to be a book where it is mentioned as story with no names. If anyone has some kind of study or more concrete example, I'd love to hear about it.
    - ajuc 6y ago
      Unix vs Multix. Plan 9 and GNU Herd vs Linux. Spring vs EJB. Rest vs Soap vs CORBA. C vs Algol. It's easier to do something simple and iterate on it than to do something perfect from the start.
      - 6y ago
herodoturtle 6y ago
A friend of mine is a sculptor. He once said something to me along the lines of "if you want to make the perfect sculpture, don't try to make the perfect sculpture. Instead make lots of sculptures, until you make the perfect sculpture." - which I tend to agree with. His advice had more to do with enjoying the process instead of stressing about the end goal, which I quite liked. In the context of software, I think that being prolific is certainly key, but it also helps to study the masters. I've learnt some pretty cool lessons reading the source code of popular OSS applications for example.
bluetomcat 6y ago
The definition of "creating more" is the elephant in the room. Do you stay focused on one subject, iterating multiple times over the result, in order to achieve incremental improvements? Do you explore a wide breadth of problems, giving you new perspectives on thinking about the problem at hand? Do you churn out mindless crap just for the sake of it? It's a rather fuzzy and abstract philosophical notion and any attempts for an absolute framing of "the one single truth" are flawed.
- fuzzfactor 6y ago
  I can accept those terms and must be as flawed as anybody else. >Do you stay focused on one subject, iterating multiple times over the result, in order to achieve incremental improvements? Yes. >Do you explore a wide breadth of problems, giving you new perspectives on thinking about the problem at hand? Yes. >Do you churn out mindless crap just for the sake of it? No. I just like to churn out mindless crap when it's absolutely required. This is what takes up most of many people's time. You're going to have to churn out some mindless crap anyway, so when you do things for the sake of it try your very best to make it non-mindless for a change. Sometimes the mindless, or the crap, or the stuff for the sake of it can be the glue that binds all efforts in a way that they are always moving forward together though.
ChrisRackauckas 6y ago
When teaching mathematics I like to always mention that the greats like Ramanujan, while it seems like they just knew everything from pure thought, they all actually did a ton of work by hand. Ramanujan in particular is known for his fastidious notebooks calculating thousands of digits numbers like pi. From writing out the calculations for hours and days, he'd come up with simplification formulas and develop new insights. These days, we have a tendency to just look at the formula and go "wow, how the heck did the think of that?" Well, what we would call "busy work". Do the busy work. Do the calculations. Write it all out. Nobody is better than the busy work: it pays off and it's how you learn.
- sriku 6y ago
  Absolutely this! Another way I express this to my colleagues is to consider that Einstein (and others) took fifteen years to develop the relativity theories that did not require any new theoretical or experimental input. All of that is typically taught in a semester's graduate level course today. The "genius" perception hides all the hard work, false turns, recoveries, retries, .. busy work as you put it .. that's behind the core insights and discoveries.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    > Einstein (and others) took fifteen years to develop the relativity theories that did not require any new theoretical or experimental input. Further to that, when Einstein worked in the patent office, it's likely that applications related to railroad time synchronization crossed his desk, inspiring his work on relativity.
    - andrepd 6y ago
      Hardly. Special relativity was a collaborative effort that was underway before Einstein gave his contribution. It was general relativity which was 100% Einstein's idea.
- donquichotte 6y ago
  To improve, busy work is not enough - some kind of quality control is needed to provide feedback, like mentioned in the "Share your Work" paragraph. I have been playing guitar for 28 years and barely improved in the past 15 years - after a teenage burst of disciplined, daily drills with metronome and recording a lot of music, I still regularly doodle and learn new songs, but it is just not enough to give me escape velocity from the current plateau.
tucuman87 6y ago
Meanwhile in academy everyone is complaining on the pressure to publish fast on expense of quality.... Maybe this judging on quantity isn't totally bad?
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  I don't see that it really applies in this way. No-one is suggesting that scientists change the amount of time and effort they spend immersed in their research. If the system of incentives is preventing researchers from promising-but-still-risky lines of research, that's still a problem. If it's steering researchers away from meaningful research that won't produce anything publishable for a while, in favour of uninteresting variations on a common theme that reliably result in publications, that's still a problem too. It also incentivises salami slicing, [0] which may result in scientific busywork. (Disclaimer: I'm not an academic.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
This has always been my own basic approach. I am constantly writing stuff. More importantly, I’m constantly writing different stuff. I write about that here: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-built-for-595f4ae2c284 https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-... The iteration definitely helps me to be a better engineer. Also, pretty much every day, I start off with an issue ahead of me that I’m afraid of, and am not sure how to solve. I often have several problems solved by 7AM.
terse_malvolio 6y ago
In a way I feel like quality vs quantity is a false dichotomy. What's important is deliberate practice, which can be deficient in either. Is it worth doing 100 reps in the gym if they're all with bad form? It's better to solve the same problem in 5 ways or 5 different problems once?
- glouwbug 6y ago
  100 reps with bad form will still make you stronger, so long as you don't injure yourself
shannifin 6y ago
"Quantity leads to quality." The analogy of being graded on quantity in an art class tends to make me imagine I'd just line up a ton of canvases and slop paint on them all at once to be the top of the class, or create pots in only their crudest acceptable form. That is, quantity does not lead to quality by itself. The student must be trying to learn something new with each new piece. Quantity iterates the feedback loop. The student still must be able to identify mistakes or areas where improvement is needed. Doing that means paying attention to quality. So it's not really about ignoring quantity or quality for the sake of the other, but finding a good balance.
- dmos62 6y ago
  That's a really good insight.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  That’s a big driver for process maturity. Mature organizations are constantly iterating their process, not just their product. The obvious issue here, is that the process becomes so important, that people forget about the output; which is really the only thing that customers care about. So balance, is, indeed, critical.
- tsjq 6y ago
  Reminds me of a line attributed to Bruce Lee: "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."
  - weareallcowards 6y ago
    Jackie Chan had a similar attitude toward his films. He once said in an interview: >Whatever you do, do the best you can, because the film lives forever. No, "because that day it was raining and the actor don't have time." >I said, "would you go to every theater and tell the audience?" No! The audience sits in the theater: good movie? Bad movie? That's all. And he practiced what he preached, sometimes going through hundreds of takes to get a stunt just right.
xondono 6y ago
When presented with this kind of “simple advice”, I always like to think the counter examples. Quantity is great, unless you are trying to change a paradigm. Iterative learning gets you trapped in local minima, so be sure to aim for quality once in a while. I would also not take that “experiment” that seriously, because the requirements where obviously different, each class optimized as needed. “Quality” is an abstract concept, and most of the time you are better of saving the time than spending it on “Quality”.
throwawaylolx 6y ago
What's the point of these posts? It's an opinion based on nothing else than a hypothetical anecdote. Is it motivational posts for HN readers--is this what "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" these days?
- terse_malvolio 6y ago
  It feeds the hustle mindset getting you all pumped up so you can be prolific by writing about it, saving it to your bookmarks, sharing to your social media, and assuring yourself that you, too, can be prolific. You're not a total failure! It's a great feeling. It could also be some sort of operation where artificially generated content and comments are put out to try to train an AI further or try to probe reactionary sentiment over specific key issues. But that's as much intellectual gratification I'll self-administer momentarily.
- Dirlewanger 6y ago
  It reads like a parody SV developer blog post.
OliverM 6y ago
How to be prolific: https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2019/01/23/how-to-be-prolific/ https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2019/01/23/how-to-be-prolif...
throw149102 6y ago
I realize this is a silly criticism, but it's strange that the author would write about how it's valuable to make a lot of stuff but then to only write 11 sentences about the topic. It seems like it would be much better way to demonstrate the point if the author wrote 100 pages about producing more work/art/code, without any rhyme or reason or editing. After all, the thesis is "Quantity leads to quality", why not just do that? Of course, I appreciate concise writing and if it were 100 unedited rambling pages it would never be posted on HN or read by anyone. But admitting that seems to be antithetical to the entire point of the blogpost. It just seems like the article doesn't even believe in the idea. It also feels like there wasn't a whole lot of thought put into the post, and I guess that's evidenced by the fact that the art class anecdote doesn't have a source. The blogpost also ignores all of the issues related to being prolific. Imagine a would-be-weightlifter who has awful form, but does a ton of reps. Not only is their exercise near worthless, it could be potentially dangerous. Or in music, where you could accidentally continually practice a bad habit instead of taking the time to find a mentor and learn how to practice correctly. In software, you could potentially produce something that is buggy and insecure by default. If the code were then included as a dependency in larger projects it could be a cause for a security disaster. I think there's more to high-quality work/practice than just doing it more often, even if that ends up being the most important part of getting good at something.
- quickthrower2 6y ago
  I think the subtle point is as long as it’s safe, practicing a lot will make you better than being a beginner trying to be an expert. In the blog analogy he could write 100k words and throw them away. They were for getting good. Then write 200 words for a blog post that gets published. Don’t publish the first 100k. Or poker for example, play 100k hands at tiny stakes before moving up to higher stakes. The weightlifter example is a good point. Some disciplines need education in addition to just practicing.
- iamgopal 6y ago
  Well that page landed on hn first page. thats something. also We do not know how many edit author did for that page to be like that.
- 6y ago
quickthrower2 6y ago
Anecdotal: I’ve been helping people a bit recently on the free code camp forum and I believe in quantity. The more I help the more I learn. Half the time I learn why someone gets stuck, the other half I’m actually wrong and I learn where I got stuck!
appleflaxen 6y ago
There’s a story about an art teacher that split their class in half. They told one half of the students that they’d be graded based on a single piece of work, and the other half that they would be graded on the quantity of work produced. Does anyone know of an actual event where this happened, or is it apocryphal? (I don't disagree with the premise, I'm just curious about its basis)
- joshdance 6y ago
  It is a parable. Not real.
lordnacho 6y ago
Maybe the thing I would add is that you need to have reached a level of competence where you can critique your own work. It's hard to describe it, but in many areas you will find there's a level where you know where you're going wrong, or where you need external help, and generally whether you are on the right path. Before you reach that level you will just fumble around forever. I'm pretty sure I could play a lot of silly piano tunes without getting anywhere, since I have no experience at all in that field.
- mandada 6y ago
  This has been my experience with cooking! There truly is an unfathomable amount of things you can do wrong and you literally could spend your entire life trying something and still suck. It wasn’t until I understood the basics well enough that I could meaningful make progress towards getting better (at cooking but also coding) or even understand what getting better meant. Trying to get better at something by just doing it a lot is like brute forcing RSA encryption: talent, intuition, or inspiration about how to get better acts as a quantum computer speed up. Or to put it more plainly: practice only makes perfect if you know what perfect is.
deleted 6y ago
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kapilkaisare 6y ago
Reminds me of this talk I saw by Ray Bradbury on writing, where he said (I paraphrase): Aim to write one story a week. That gives you 52 stories a year, and I dare you to write 52 bad ones.
- neovive 6y ago
  Writing is a great example of this. It's almost impossible to create a perfect piece of writing on the first attempt; there's always room for improvement. Although, you can publish your first draft and may get the job done, following an iterative process of writing and revising multiple drafts that leads to more polished results.
preommr 6y ago
As opposed to what? Nobody has ever just suddenly become good at something with 0 practice. Usually, there's a strong correlation between time spent on something and expertise. If the discussion is about quality vs. quantity, then this is a strawman. You can make a 100 shallow todo list apps, and they'll all be worse than one you focus on and polish over time. That story about the art class is most likely not true and most likely not applicable to other examples. But maybe part of that polish is experimenting with smaller prototypes. The point is to always use advice like this as a principle and not a singular source of truth.
jedimastert 6y ago
It's funny this should some up, as I'm about 3/4ths through Inktober. The idea is that you make an art piece (traditionally an ink illustration but I've been using water color and the community is surprisingly not super gate-keeping about it) everyday and share it on social media. There's a prompt list the guy who made the idea popular puts out each year that's optional. I've painted more this month than I have the rest of my life combined and I've learned so much. Also self-promotion say what? instagram.com/amtunlimited
gdsdfe 6y ago
great advice, very inspiring ... love it!
- gdsdfe 6y ago
  hmm so HN became very toxic nowadays ... even a comment like this gets downvoted
  - monadgonad 6y ago
    It's because it adds nothing that's not already done by an upvote.
wellpast 6y ago
You need both. If you make a bunch of art but don’t try to make it quality, you’ll grow very little. You need to try hard many times and fail, then you get to mastery and quality.
x87678r 6y ago
Man I'm exhausted, I really hate this do more hype.
bachmeier 6y ago
When a junior colleague tells me a paper has been rejected, I respond that it's good they're getting the rejections out of the way so they can get to the publications. I'm sure they think I'm an idiot, but I'm completely serious. You can't learn what it takes to get a good publication until you've had some rejections. It's all part of the learning process. I think that's the real message here. Be prolific in activities that can teach you something useful. Just pumping out a load of garbage won't help you any more than practicing bad shooting form will make you a good basketball player.
joshdance 6y ago
I hate this parable. There is no art teacher that did this. I wish we could find real examples instead of this fake one.
pietromenna 6y ago
The best teacher out there is a failure, and you only get better when learning new tricks. Let's use quantity of failures as opportunities to learn!
kulshan 6y ago
The down side is your peer community then has to sift through an enormous amount of mediocrity...this idea of quantity leading to quality is beneficial for the creator's development, but as seen say in electronic music today. There is a proliferation of mediocre music in such abundance no one would ever be able to listen to it all. Sure it'll lead to eventual gems as skills increase but will we ever find them in the mountainous waves of creation being churned out in increasing amounts? As far as coding should developers produce more and more code for the public as a learning tool for themselves or wait and develop adequate skills that don't require extra work to fix later?
- dgs_sgd 6y ago
  As a developer there's no penalty to publishing bad code that you wrote to learn something. As you said yourself, mediocrity is largely ignored. You also can't be your own judge in deciding if your work is progressing from mediocre to good, so don't wait to publish until you know your work is "adequate" because you won't know it's adequate until it's been published and judged by the community.
deleted 6y ago
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student2k 6y ago
Quantity leads to permanence, not quality.

328 points by hecticjeff 6y ago

It's the same with software I imagine, because of several reasons. 1. Writing more code (and being conscious of it) makes you a better engineer. You'll run into more issues that you will fix and, hopefully, remember. 2. If you'd take the art example and say "Paint 20 cubist pieces", and then transfer that to "Write 20 authentication servers", each iteration you'll benefit from what you learned and be able to 'clean up' the code. It's essentially writing 20 PoCs where each PoC improves on the last one. EDIT: Writing more versions also allows you to explore more ideas without fear. If you have to write "one good version" you'll be less prone to exploring 'exotic' ideas. So you'd benefit from that as well.

polskibus 6y ago
Ad1. In my opinion it's the variety of problems an engineer has solved that matters. There are plenty of crud developers that are helpless whenever a more complex problem occurs, even though they did hundreds of crud pages in their life.
- sudhirj 6y ago
  This applies only if they’re learning. Learning devs who do 100s of CRUD pages will have a DSL and metaprogramming toolkit by the time they’re done. Those who don’t learn will do the same thing, like an artist making 100 copies of their own first painting, each copy more faithful than the last. Better to make a 100 versions of the same subject, each one better than the last.
  - polskibus 6y ago
    Many of them don't have a crud toolkit even after 100s of pages done, at least that's what I see.
    - quickthrower2 6y ago
      Sometime the “business” conspires against that though: in fact depending on the business model it might be a threat
- Insanity 6y ago
  Yup, I tried to convey that in the "being conscious of it" part. I meant to say you have to actively see it as learning / improvement.
matsemann 6y ago
One software concept where it's applicable is game programming. Lots of people have their dream/pet project they spend years on tweaking and making all these features for, but the underlying game mechanic just isn't... fun enough, I guess? But making lots of small games (at game jams or so) one can discover great concepts, and then nail those.
- ozmbie 6y ago
  I’ve worked in the games industry and this is pretty much my advice for people who are interested in it: Just make as many games as you can. Don’t get hung up on some big new MMORPG game you’ve got in your head. Just start by making Pong, then Space Invaders, then Pac-Man. Then make a dozen small prototypes of your own ideas, each time based on what you’ve learned. You get practical development experience but more importantly, you learn that iterating and experimenting is where good ideas come from and where bad ideas are discarded.

alltakendamned 6y ago

While "practice makes perfect" is not a very new idea, it is still nice to be reminded about it from time to time.

anonytrary 6y ago
There are a lot of ways to put it, like "no success without failures". He's making the additional point that it's hard to know if you have failed unless you shared your work. I needed to hear it again also.
- alltakendamned 6y ago
  Indeed. I came across the use of learning in public just recently. It has something.

_Microft 6y ago

I'm reasonably sure that it was a pottery class (or study) in which students/study participants were asked to produce either the best piece they could think of or as many as possible. I think it was actually a study that I read about. It might need some internet sleuthing to find it. I'll try later. I do not think that it is surprising that practice improves skills though (well, except for people with an exceptionally fixed mindset ;). (For today's lucky Ten Thousand, "fixed mindset" refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset#Fixed_and_Growth_Mindset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset#Fixed_and_Growth_Minds... ) (For today's lucky Ten Thousand, "today's lucky Ten Thousand" refers to https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ )

lqet 6y ago
Here is an article discussing this: https://medium.com/swlh/the-science-backed-secret-to-rapidly-improving-any-skill-530e573aa546 https://medium.com/swlh/the-science-backed-secret-to-rapidly... > On the first day of the class, the ceramics teacher divided the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the class, he announced, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. > The works of highest quality, the most beautiful and creative designs, were all produced by the group graded for quantity.
- saberdancer 6y ago
  It's an anecdote which could be completely fabricated, I'd expect it is since the source seems to be a book where it is mentioned as story with no names. If anyone has some kind of study or more concrete example, I'd love to hear about it.
  - ajuc 6y ago
    Unix vs Multix. Plan 9 and GNU Herd vs Linux. Spring vs EJB. Rest vs Soap vs CORBA. C vs Algol. It's easier to do something simple and iterate on it than to do something perfect from the start.
    - 6y ago

herodoturtle 6y ago

A friend of mine is a sculptor. He once said something to me along the lines of "if you want to make the perfect sculpture, don't try to make the perfect sculpture. Instead make lots of sculptures, until you make the perfect sculpture." - which I tend to agree with. His advice had more to do with enjoying the process instead of stressing about the end goal, which I quite liked. In the context of software, I think that being prolific is certainly key, but it also helps to study the masters. I've learnt some pretty cool lessons reading the source code of popular OSS applications for example.

bluetomcat 6y ago

The definition of "creating more" is the elephant in the room. Do you stay focused on one subject, iterating multiple times over the result, in order to achieve incremental improvements? Do you explore a wide breadth of problems, giving you new perspectives on thinking about the problem at hand? Do you churn out mindless crap just for the sake of it? It's a rather fuzzy and abstract philosophical notion and any attempts for an absolute framing of "the one single truth" are flawed.

fuzzfactor 6y ago
I can accept those terms and must be as flawed as anybody else. >Do you stay focused on one subject, iterating multiple times over the result, in order to achieve incremental improvements? Yes. >Do you explore a wide breadth of problems, giving you new perspectives on thinking about the problem at hand? Yes. >Do you churn out mindless crap just for the sake of it? No. I just like to churn out mindless crap when it's absolutely required. This is what takes up most of many people's time. You're going to have to churn out some mindless crap anyway, so when you do things for the sake of it try your very best to make it non-mindless for a change. Sometimes the mindless, or the crap, or the stuff for the sake of it can be the glue that binds all efforts in a way that they are always moving forward together though.

ChrisRackauckas 6y ago

When teaching mathematics I like to always mention that the greats like Ramanujan, while it seems like they just knew everything from pure thought, they all actually did a ton of work by hand. Ramanujan in particular is known for his fastidious notebooks calculating thousands of digits numbers like pi. From writing out the calculations for hours and days, he'd come up with simplification formulas and develop new insights. These days, we have a tendency to just look at the formula and go "wow, how the heck did the think of that?" Well, what we would call "busy work". Do the busy work. Do the calculations. Write it all out. Nobody is better than the busy work: it pays off and it's how you learn.

sriku 6y ago
Absolutely this! Another way I express this to my colleagues is to consider that Einstein (and others) took fifteen years to develop the relativity theories that did not require any new theoretical or experimental input. All of that is typically taught in a semester's graduate level course today. The "genius" perception hides all the hard work, false turns, recoveries, retries, .. busy work as you put it .. that's behind the core insights and discoveries.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > Einstein (and others) took fifteen years to develop the relativity theories that did not require any new theoretical or experimental input. Further to that, when Einstein worked in the patent office, it's likely that applications related to railroad time synchronization crossed his desk, inspiring his work on relativity.
  - andrepd 6y ago
    Hardly. Special relativity was a collaborative effort that was underway before Einstein gave his contribution. It was general relativity which was 100% Einstein's idea.
donquichotte 6y ago
To improve, busy work is not enough - some kind of quality control is needed to provide feedback, like mentioned in the "Share your Work" paragraph. I have been playing guitar for 28 years and barely improved in the past 15 years - after a teenage burst of disciplined, daily drills with metronome and recording a lot of music, I still regularly doodle and learn new songs, but it is just not enough to give me escape velocity from the current plateau.

tucuman87 6y ago

Meanwhile in academy everyone is complaining on the pressure to publish fast on expense of quality.... Maybe this judging on quantity isn't totally bad?

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
I don't see that it really applies in this way. No-one is suggesting that scientists change the amount of time and effort they spend immersed in their research. If the system of incentives is preventing researchers from promising-but-still-risky lines of research, that's still a problem. If it's steering researchers away from meaningful research that won't produce anything publishable for a while, in favour of uninteresting variations on a common theme that reliably result in publications, that's still a problem too. It also incentivises salami slicing, [0] which may result in scientific busywork. (Disclaimer: I'm not an academic.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

This has always been my own basic approach. I am constantly writing stuff. More importantly, I’m constantly writing different stuff. I write about that here: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-built-for-595f4ae2c284 https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-... The iteration definitely helps me to be a better engineer. Also, pretty much every day, I start off with an issue ahead of me that I’m afraid of, and am not sure how to solve. I often have several problems solved by 7AM.

terse_malvolio 6y ago

In a way I feel like quality vs quantity is a false dichotomy. What's important is deliberate practice, which can be deficient in either. Is it worth doing 100 reps in the gym if they're all with bad form? It's better to solve the same problem in 5 ways or 5 different problems once?

glouwbug 6y ago
100 reps with bad form will still make you stronger, so long as you don't injure yourself

shannifin 6y ago

"Quantity leads to quality." The analogy of being graded on quantity in an art class tends to make me imagine I'd just line up a ton of canvases and slop paint on them all at once to be the top of the class, or create pots in only their crudest acceptable form. That is, quantity does not lead to quality by itself. The student must be trying to learn something new with each new piece. Quantity iterates the feedback loop. The student still must be able to identify mistakes or areas where improvement is needed. Doing that means paying attention to quality. So it's not really about ignoring quantity or quality for the sake of the other, but finding a good balance.

dmos62 6y ago
That's a really good insight.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
That’s a big driver for process maturity. Mature organizations are constantly iterating their process, not just their product. The obvious issue here, is that the process becomes so important, that people forget about the output; which is really the only thing that customers care about. So balance, is, indeed, critical.
tsjq 6y ago
Reminds me of a line attributed to Bruce Lee: "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."
- weareallcowards 6y ago
  Jackie Chan had a similar attitude toward his films. He once said in an interview: >Whatever you do, do the best you can, because the film lives forever. No, "because that day it was raining and the actor don't have time." >I said, "would you go to every theater and tell the audience?" No! The audience sits in the theater: good movie? Bad movie? That's all. And he practiced what he preached, sometimes going through hundreds of takes to get a stunt just right.

xondono 6y ago

When presented with this kind of “simple advice”, I always like to think the counter examples. Quantity is great, unless you are trying to change a paradigm. Iterative learning gets you trapped in local minima, so be sure to aim for quality once in a while. I would also not take that “experiment” that seriously, because the requirements where obviously different, each class optimized as needed. “Quality” is an abstract concept, and most of the time you are better of saving the time than spending it on “Quality”.

throwawaylolx 6y ago

What's the point of these posts? It's an opinion based on nothing else than a hypothetical anecdote. Is it motivational posts for HN readers--is this what "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" these days?

terse_malvolio 6y ago
It feeds the hustle mindset getting you all pumped up so you can be prolific by writing about it, saving it to your bookmarks, sharing to your social media, and assuring yourself that you, too, can be prolific. You're not a total failure! It's a great feeling. It could also be some sort of operation where artificially generated content and comments are put out to try to train an AI further or try to probe reactionary sentiment over specific key issues. But that's as much intellectual gratification I'll self-administer momentarily.
Dirlewanger 6y ago
It reads like a parody SV developer blog post.

OliverM 6y ago

How to be prolific: https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2019/01/23/how-to-be-prolific/ https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2019/01/23/how-to-be-prolif...

throw149102 6y ago

I realize this is a silly criticism, but it's strange that the author would write about how it's valuable to make a lot of stuff but then to only write 11 sentences about the topic. It seems like it would be much better way to demonstrate the point if the author wrote 100 pages about producing more work/art/code, without any rhyme or reason or editing. After all, the thesis is "Quantity leads to quality", why not just do that? Of course, I appreciate concise writing and if it were 100 unedited rambling pages it would never be posted on HN or read by anyone. But admitting that seems to be antithetical to the entire point of the blogpost. It just seems like the article doesn't even believe in the idea. It also feels like there wasn't a whole lot of thought put into the post, and I guess that's evidenced by the fact that the art class anecdote doesn't have a source. The blogpost also ignores all of the issues related to being prolific. Imagine a would-be-weightlifter who has awful form, but does a ton of reps. Not only is their exercise near worthless, it could be potentially dangerous. Or in music, where you could accidentally continually practice a bad habit instead of taking the time to find a mentor and learn how to practice correctly. In software, you could potentially produce something that is buggy and insecure by default. If the code were then included as a dependency in larger projects it could be a cause for a security disaster. I think there's more to high-quality work/practice than just doing it more often, even if that ends up being the most important part of getting good at something.

quickthrower2 6y ago
I think the subtle point is as long as it’s safe, practicing a lot will make you better than being a beginner trying to be an expert. In the blog analogy he could write 100k words and throw them away. They were for getting good. Then write 200 words for a blog post that gets published. Don’t publish the first 100k. Or poker for example, play 100k hands at tiny stakes before moving up to higher stakes. The weightlifter example is a good point. Some disciplines need education in addition to just practicing.
iamgopal 6y ago
Well that page landed on hn first page. thats something. also We do not know how many edit author did for that page to be like that.
6y ago

quickthrower2 6y ago

Anecdotal: I’ve been helping people a bit recently on the free code camp forum and I believe in quantity. The more I help the more I learn. Half the time I learn why someone gets stuck, the other half I’m actually wrong and I learn where I got stuck!

appleflaxen 6y ago

There’s a story about an art teacher that split their class in half. They told one half of the students that they’d be graded based on a single piece of work, and the other half that they would be graded on the quantity of work produced. Does anyone know of an actual event where this happened, or is it apocryphal? (I don't disagree with the premise, I'm just curious about its basis)

joshdance 6y ago
It is a parable. Not real.

lordnacho 6y ago

Maybe the thing I would add is that you need to have reached a level of competence where you can critique your own work. It's hard to describe it, but in many areas you will find there's a level where you know where you're going wrong, or where you need external help, and generally whether you are on the right path. Before you reach that level you will just fumble around forever. I'm pretty sure I could play a lot of silly piano tunes without getting anywhere, since I have no experience at all in that field.

mandada 6y ago
This has been my experience with cooking! There truly is an unfathomable amount of things you can do wrong and you literally could spend your entire life trying something and still suck. It wasn’t until I understood the basics well enough that I could meaningful make progress towards getting better (at cooking but also coding) or even understand what getting better meant. Trying to get better at something by just doing it a lot is like brute forcing RSA encryption: talent, intuition, or inspiration about how to get better acts as a quantum computer speed up. Or to put it more plainly: practice only makes perfect if you know what perfect is.

deleted 6y ago

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kapilkaisare 6y ago

Reminds me of this talk I saw by Ray Bradbury on writing, where he said (I paraphrase): Aim to write one story a week. That gives you 52 stories a year, and I dare you to write 52 bad ones.

neovive 6y ago
Writing is a great example of this. It's almost impossible to create a perfect piece of writing on the first attempt; there's always room for improvement. Although, you can publish your first draft and may get the job done, following an iterative process of writing and revising multiple drafts that leads to more polished results.

preommr 6y ago

As opposed to what? Nobody has ever just suddenly become good at something with 0 practice. Usually, there's a strong correlation between time spent on something and expertise. If the discussion is about quality vs. quantity, then this is a strawman. You can make a 100 shallow todo list apps, and they'll all be worse than one you focus on and polish over time. That story about the art class is most likely not true and most likely not applicable to other examples. But maybe part of that polish is experimenting with smaller prototypes. The point is to always use advice like this as a principle and not a singular source of truth.

jedimastert 6y ago

It's funny this should some up, as I'm about 3/4ths through Inktober. The idea is that you make an art piece (traditionally an ink illustration but I've been using water color and the community is surprisingly not super gate-keeping about it) everyday and share it on social media. There's a prompt list the guy who made the idea popular puts out each year that's optional. I've painted more this month than I have the rest of my life combined and I've learned so much. Also self-promotion say what? instagram.com/amtunlimited

gdsdfe 6y ago

great advice, very inspiring ... love it!

gdsdfe 6y ago
hmm so HN became very toxic nowadays ... even a comment like this gets downvoted
- monadgonad 6y ago
  It's because it adds nothing that's not already done by an upvote.

wellpast 6y ago

You need both. If you make a bunch of art but don’t try to make it quality, you’ll grow very little. You need to try hard many times and fail, then you get to mastery and quality.

x87678r 6y ago

Man I'm exhausted, I really hate this do more hype.

bachmeier 6y ago

When a junior colleague tells me a paper has been rejected, I respond that it's good they're getting the rejections out of the way so they can get to the publications. I'm sure they think I'm an idiot, but I'm completely serious. You can't learn what it takes to get a good publication until you've had some rejections. It's all part of the learning process. I think that's the real message here. Be prolific in activities that can teach you something useful. Just pumping out a load of garbage won't help you any more than practicing bad shooting form will make you a good basketball player.

joshdance 6y ago

I hate this parable. There is no art teacher that did this. I wish we could find real examples instead of this fake one.

pietromenna 6y ago

The best teacher out there is a failure, and you only get better when learning new tricks. Let's use quantity of failures as opportunities to learn!

kulshan 6y ago

The down side is your peer community then has to sift through an enormous amount of mediocrity...this idea of quantity leading to quality is beneficial for the creator's development, but as seen say in electronic music today. There is a proliferation of mediocre music in such abundance no one would ever be able to listen to it all. Sure it'll lead to eventual gems as skills increase but will we ever find them in the mountainous waves of creation being churned out in increasing amounts? As far as coding should developers produce more and more code for the public as a learning tool for themselves or wait and develop adequate skills that don't require extra work to fix later?

dgs_sgd 6y ago
As a developer there's no penalty to publishing bad code that you wrote to learn something. As you said yourself, mediocrity is largely ignored. You also can't be your own judge in deciding if your work is progressing from mediocre to good, so don't wait to publish until you know your work is "adequate" because you won't know it's adequate until it's been published and judged by the community.

deleted 6y ago

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student2k 6y ago

Quantity leads to permanence, not quality.