7 ms·

My “Investment Mindset”

110 points by yarapavan 5y ago

semitones 5y ago
Also known as a "growth mindset". From what I've seen, I believe the majority of HN readers think this way - that most things are learning experiences, and that knowledge is power.
hizxy 5y ago
Reframing coding and design challenges as an investment doesn’t mean that these challenges are not a sunk cost.
- xwdv 5y ago
  You missed his point. It's still worth doing those things as the process of doing them can result in other epiphanies that can lead you to greater opportunities down the line.
  - hizxy 5y ago
    I didn’t miss the point. It’s disingenuous to claim something isn’t a sunk cost by simply hoping it’s not.
    - lhorie 5y ago
      TFA isn't saying it isn't a sunk cost, it's saying it's an investment in addition to being a sunk cost
  - goostavos 5y ago
    Eh... his point is largely making lemonade out of a situation of lemons. It's a healthy mindset for sure, but it's still forcing yourself to look on the bright side of a crummy situation. Interviews test your ability to quickly solve silly problems under stress. This is a muscle you can get better at with training. And, yep, there's a non-zero chance that it make cause an epiphany or insight into something else. However, there's a much higher chance that it does not. Years into my career, my interest in grinding those type of problems just for the purpose of performing during an interview is effectively zero. The thing that I love about CS is how broad it is. There's a great big world of things to dive very deeply into which aren't graph traversal algorithms or solving word problems. Being forced to halt your own personal research, hobbies, or interests because of our current broken interview system is lame even when spun as "I'll think of it as probably useful".
  - alexashka 5y ago
    Right, let me go to the moon because it'll make me a better golf player. Makes sense.
dimmke 5y ago
Getting better at algorithm/data structures has made me a much better programmer. People say "oh I'll never use that" but doing graph and tree problems got me much better at writing pure recursive code. I instinctively know how to write algorithms now that are much more performant. Last night I decided to write a React component that can render formatted JSON in the browser, with collapsing etc...it took me about 4 hours. There's zero chance I would have been able to do that without that experience. I would have just looked for a library to do it. So yeah, I highly recommend it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ornornor 5y ago
  How did you learn these? I tried CTCI but I found it so mind numbingly dry and boring that I couldn’t read it for more than five minutes without falling asleep.
  - bourgoin 5y ago
    Isn't CTCI basically just a workbook? It has ~20 pages of intro and then problems and solutions. So it's not really a book you 'read' anyway, it's one you work through. I think the way you get really good at data structure/algorithms problems is by doing a lot of them and there's no way around that.
    - ornornor 5y ago
      So grinding leetcode in other words?
  - machiaweliczny 5y ago
    Go with "Grokking algorithms" and then with "Algorithms unlocked" to get some intuition. Then I recommend intro about alogirithms design from "Cracking the coding interview". Then i would read "Algorithm design manual". Then if you are interested add CLRS. After that MIT advanced courses and papers. Supplement with solving whole leetcode and you will be a beast.
Jtsummers 5y ago
The author is using "sunk cost" as if it were, strictly, a bad thing. Sunk costs are not fundamentally bad, they're a fact. Your education is a sunk cost, the money has been spent. Your car, your home, everything in your past are sunk costs. Sunk costs become problematic with a particular kind of reasoning: the sunk cost fallacy. In that, you persist in an endeavor (job, relationship, project, whatever) because of the past investment (or primarily because of) even when all other signs indicate you should end it. "I've spent $100,000 on this money pit, I should keep going", only later to go into bankruptcy when the home could've been sold (perhaps for a loss) and a better quality one acquired. What the author seems more interested in is the notion of "opportunity costs". Specifically, what can be done now instead of studying for interviews? Maybe you could do more OT and reap the rewards today of a higher income, at the cost of not qualifying for or getting jobs later due to a lack of preparation (jobs which might offer a higher base salary and obviate the need/desire for OT to supplement the income). Alternatively, studying now could (doesn't always, I've often studied on the job at least within reason) cost you pay because you aren't able to work some hours. Or it could cost you time with friends or partners or whatever. The question is, is it worth the trade off and how long will it take to pay off if it is compared to the alternative activities and whatever they may or may not provide.
mywittyname 5y ago
This is more of the "Wendy's Chili" idea applied to software than any kind of investment mindset. For those unaware, Wendy's (a hamburger chain in the USA) has a policy that cooked hamburgers need to be served within a few minutes of being prepared. This keeps the quality of the burgers up, however, it also causes a lot of waste since burgers need to be prepared ahead of time to really be "fast" food. So the founder of Wendy's decided to refrigerate the unused patties and use them the next day to make chili. Chili wasn't a high margin item, it didn't make sense to make it from fresh hamburger. It was really a way for the company to offset the costs associated with serving hot, fresh burgers. Finding a way to leverage code you've already built but wasted is a great idea. But that's not necessarily a great idea to go about intentionally wasting time in the hopes that you might recoup something back later. Keep focused on making high quality software first and foremost, but if you have some scraps left over from that focus, definitely find a way to make chili from it. Just don't get into the chili business.
lhorie 5y ago
"Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity" - Seneca IMHO, the key point here isn't so much about making the best out of a bad situation, it's that if you just stay cooped up in your comfort zone, the breadth of your preparedness isn't going to be nearly as wide as if you dabbled with things outside of your comfort zone. You don't need to cram interview questions to get into big Bay Area tech companies: I did it without even knowing leetcode was a thing. But I gained similar preparation by working on an open source project. One of my best interviews involved a super in-depth discussion about some algorithm, and it went well because I just happened to have had implemented the thing in my OSS project and I knew from experience the trade-offs of different approaches in gory detail. Regardless, I never thought of that project as a drag. It was always a product of love. Looking from another angle: Had I merely tried to make lemonades out of lemons, I'd certainly have mastered the technical skillsets that I used to use in my first job, but those skills turned out to not be the ones that carried me to where I am today. In fact, in hindsight, I had a lot of misconceptions about what preparation meant (e.g. I was too focused on specific technologies and too narrow-minded in some regards). The one thing that has served me well was the idea of broadening my horizons. You never know which seemingly useless obscurity is going to be a defining part of your journey.
tppiotrowski 5y ago
"Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life." -Steve Jobs
yuy910616 5y ago
I find this largely to be true and a very useful mindset to have, however, personally I've observed two shortcomings: 1. At work, there are some projects that offer higher future value than others. Every task has some hidden future value - but some are higher than others. And predicting their value is, to me, better than random. 2. Eventually, you arrive at resume padding - which is a pretty demotivating and toxic mindset to have.
atlgator 5y ago
Despite the ease of development with modern languages and frameworks, the fundamentals still manage to creep in. Just the other day I was reviewing service code. Instead of letting the data store filter and sort the data with a single data call, the developer was pulling a larger data set and running an algorithm of nested for-loops to filter it in the service layer. I went straight to a Big O analysis of the code. Unfortunately, the developer had no idea what Big O notation was. AITA?
ItsMonkk 5y ago
This article is interesting because I completely agree with the underlying point but completely disagree with the implementation. The specific problems that occur in a programming interview were crafted because when the first developers were working on C code, that is what you needed to know to be able to make a program. As time has passed, our languages no longer have the same data structures and algorithm requirements, but we still ask the same questions because we have cargo-culted the interview. And yet the author is entirely correct. > "Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships." ― Linus Torvalds Knowing data structures is incredibly important. It's just _different_ data structures. We need to stop learning backward looking algorithms and start learning forward looking algorithms and data structures. Likewise, that same anti-sunk cost thinking is correct. John Carmack, for instance, is well known for having gone on "programming retreats"[0]. These are tasks that will not pay-off for his current project, but will allow him to change his thinking over time. The next vacation I am going to go on I am going to attempt to learn microKanren, not because it has any value to my current work, and not because it has value to me getting a new job. I learn microKanren because I expect that I am going to learn something fundamental that the Torvalds quote above is hinting at. If data structures are so important, can we get to no code? [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16518726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16518726
itsmefaz 5y ago
I have an issue with the author calling it an 'investment' mindset. This is what consultants as part of their job. Taking their underlying assets (skills, network) and providing services to customers seeking these skillsets. Calling it an investment mindset misses the actual point, that is most people when they talk about investment are mostly referring to things like - real estate, the stock market where they don't have to spend significant time doing that activity. One of the things I'm interested in knowing, is this something the author is doing full-time or is he does to support his other full-time activity? Some data about the revenue the author is making would be helpful.

110 points by yarapavan 5y ago

Also known as a "growth mindset". From what I've seen, I believe the majority of HN readers think this way - that most things are learning experiences, and that knowledge is power.

hizxy 5y ago

Reframing coding and design challenges as an investment doesn’t mean that these challenges are not a sunk cost.

xwdv 5y ago
You missed his point. It's still worth doing those things as the process of doing them can result in other epiphanies that can lead you to greater opportunities down the line.
- hizxy 5y ago
  I didn’t miss the point. It’s disingenuous to claim something isn’t a sunk cost by simply hoping it’s not.
  - lhorie 5y ago
    TFA isn't saying it isn't a sunk cost, it's saying it's an investment in addition to being a sunk cost
- goostavos 5y ago
  Eh... his point is largely making lemonade out of a situation of lemons. It's a healthy mindset for sure, but it's still forcing yourself to look on the bright side of a crummy situation. Interviews test your ability to quickly solve silly problems under stress. This is a muscle you can get better at with training. And, yep, there's a non-zero chance that it make cause an epiphany or insight into something else. However, there's a much higher chance that it does not. Years into my career, my interest in grinding those type of problems just for the purpose of performing during an interview is effectively zero. The thing that I love about CS is how broad it is. There's a great big world of things to dive very deeply into which aren't graph traversal algorithms or solving word problems. Being forced to halt your own personal research, hobbies, or interests because of our current broken interview system is lame even when spun as "I'll think of it as probably useful".
- alexashka 5y ago
  Right, let me go to the moon because it'll make me a better golf player. Makes sense.

dimmke 5y ago

Getting better at algorithm/data structures has made me a much better programmer. People say "oh I'll never use that" but doing graph and tree problems got me much better at writing pure recursive code. I instinctively know how to write algorithms now that are much more performant. Last night I decided to write a React component that can render formatted JSON in the browser, with collapsing etc...it took me about 4 hours. There's zero chance I would have been able to do that without that experience. I would have just looked for a library to do it. So yeah, I highly recommend it.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ornornor 5y ago
How did you learn these? I tried CTCI but I found it so mind numbingly dry and boring that I couldn’t read it for more than five minutes without falling asleep.
- bourgoin 5y ago
  Isn't CTCI basically just a workbook? It has ~20 pages of intro and then problems and solutions. So it's not really a book you 'read' anyway, it's one you work through. I think the way you get really good at data structure/algorithms problems is by doing a lot of them and there's no way around that.
  - ornornor 5y ago
    So grinding leetcode in other words?
- machiaweliczny 5y ago
  Go with "Grokking algorithms" and then with "Algorithms unlocked" to get some intuition. Then I recommend intro about alogirithms design from "Cracking the coding interview". Then i would read "Algorithm design manual". Then if you are interested add CLRS. After that MIT advanced courses and papers. Supplement with solving whole leetcode and you will be a beast.

Jtsummers 5y ago

The author is using "sunk cost" as if it were, strictly, a bad thing. Sunk costs are not fundamentally bad, they're a fact. Your education is a sunk cost, the money has been spent. Your car, your home, everything in your past are sunk costs. Sunk costs become problematic with a particular kind of reasoning: the sunk cost fallacy. In that, you persist in an endeavor (job, relationship, project, whatever) because of the past investment (or primarily because of) even when all other signs indicate you should end it. "I've spent $100,000 on this money pit, I should keep going", only later to go into bankruptcy when the home could've been sold (perhaps for a loss) and a better quality one acquired. What the author seems more interested in is the notion of "opportunity costs". Specifically, what can be done now instead of studying for interviews? Maybe you could do more OT and reap the rewards today of a higher income, at the cost of not qualifying for or getting jobs later due to a lack of preparation (jobs which might offer a higher base salary and obviate the need/desire for OT to supplement the income). Alternatively, studying now could (doesn't always, I've often studied on the job at least within reason) cost you pay because you aren't able to work some hours. Or it could cost you time with friends or partners or whatever. The question is, is it worth the trade off and how long will it take to pay off if it is compared to the alternative activities and whatever they may or may not provide.

mywittyname 5y ago

This is more of the "Wendy's Chili" idea applied to software than any kind of investment mindset. For those unaware, Wendy's (a hamburger chain in the USA) has a policy that cooked hamburgers need to be served within a few minutes of being prepared. This keeps the quality of the burgers up, however, it also causes a lot of waste since burgers need to be prepared ahead of time to really be "fast" food. So the founder of Wendy's decided to refrigerate the unused patties and use them the next day to make chili. Chili wasn't a high margin item, it didn't make sense to make it from fresh hamburger. It was really a way for the company to offset the costs associated with serving hot, fresh burgers. Finding a way to leverage code you've already built but wasted is a great idea. But that's not necessarily a great idea to go about intentionally wasting time in the hopes that you might recoup something back later. Keep focused on making high quality software first and foremost, but if you have some scraps left over from that focus, definitely find a way to make chili from it. Just don't get into the chili business.

lhorie 5y ago

"Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity" - Seneca IMHO, the key point here isn't so much about making the best out of a bad situation, it's that if you just stay cooped up in your comfort zone, the breadth of your preparedness isn't going to be nearly as wide as if you dabbled with things outside of your comfort zone. You don't need to cram interview questions to get into big Bay Area tech companies: I did it without even knowing leetcode was a thing. But I gained similar preparation by working on an open source project. One of my best interviews involved a super in-depth discussion about some algorithm, and it went well because I just happened to have had implemented the thing in my OSS project and I knew from experience the trade-offs of different approaches in gory detail. Regardless, I never thought of that project as a drag. It was always a product of love. Looking from another angle: Had I merely tried to make lemonades out of lemons, I'd certainly have mastered the technical skillsets that I used to use in my first job, but those skills turned out to not be the ones that carried me to where I am today. In fact, in hindsight, I had a lot of misconceptions about what preparation meant (e.g. I was too focused on specific technologies and too narrow-minded in some regards). The one thing that has served me well was the idea of broadening my horizons. You never know which seemingly useless obscurity is going to be a defining part of your journey.

tppiotrowski 5y ago

"Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life." -Steve Jobs

yuy910616 5y ago

I find this largely to be true and a very useful mindset to have, however, personally I've observed two shortcomings: 1. At work, there are some projects that offer higher future value than others. Every task has some hidden future value - but some are higher than others. And predicting their value is, to me, better than random. 2. Eventually, you arrive at resume padding - which is a pretty demotivating and toxic mindset to have.

atlgator 5y ago

Despite the ease of development with modern languages and frameworks, the fundamentals still manage to creep in. Just the other day I was reviewing service code. Instead of letting the data store filter and sort the data with a single data call, the developer was pulling a larger data set and running an algorithm of nested for-loops to filter it in the service layer. I went straight to a Big O analysis of the code. Unfortunately, the developer had no idea what Big O notation was. AITA?

ItsMonkk 5y ago

This article is interesting because I completely agree with the underlying point but completely disagree with the implementation. The specific problems that occur in a programming interview were crafted because when the first developers were working on C code, that is what you needed to know to be able to make a program. As time has passed, our languages no longer have the same data structures and algorithm requirements, but we still ask the same questions because we have cargo-culted the interview. And yet the author is entirely correct. > "Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships." ― Linus Torvalds Knowing data structures is incredibly important. It's just _different_ data structures. We need to stop learning backward looking algorithms and start learning forward looking algorithms and data structures. Likewise, that same anti-sunk cost thinking is correct. John Carmack, for instance, is well known for having gone on "programming retreats"[0]. These are tasks that will not pay-off for his current project, but will allow him to change his thinking over time. The next vacation I am going to go on I am going to attempt to learn microKanren, not because it has any value to my current work, and not because it has value to me getting a new job. I learn microKanren because I expect that I am going to learn something fundamental that the Torvalds quote above is hinting at. If data structures are so important, can we get to no code? [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16518726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16518726

itsmefaz 5y ago

I have an issue with the author calling it an 'investment' mindset. This is what consultants as part of their job. Taking their underlying assets (skills, network) and providing services to customers seeking these skillsets. Calling it an investment mindset misses the actual point, that is most people when they talk about investment are mostly referring to things like - real estate, the stock market where they don't have to spend significant time doing that activity. One of the things I'm interested in knowing, is this something the author is doing full-time or is he does to support his other full-time activity? Some data about the revenue the author is making would be helpful.