13 ms·

You don’t need to work on hard problems (2020)

415 points by _ttg 5y ago

nivenkos 5y ago
But I think the reason that isn't boring is because you have autonomy and, in this case literally, ownership. Being stuck writing boring SQL reports or struggling with open-ended problems so someone else makes more money isn't such a great proposition.
- tr33house 5y ago
  I agree. Ownership is underrated. Perhaps one of the biggest incentives out there
  - john_yaya 5y ago
    Thank you for saying this. I’m currently an engineering manager at a “fun” and “interesting” company in SV, and I absolutely hate it. It took me a while to figure out why - but in retrospect, it’s pretty obvious. Writing Jira epics and doing code reviews for someone else’s vision is, for me at least, deeply unfulfilling, no matter how ambitious that vision is.
    - gugagore 5y ago
      I'm assuming you have some ownership in the form of stock, and I'm wondering how that factors into it. Can you imagine a vision that would be easier to get behind, even if it originated with someone else?
      - john_yaya 5y ago
        I do have some RSUs, but no real way of knowing how much they’ll be worth, if anything. I don’t get to see a cap table, nor am I privy to the investors’ term sheet to know what their overhang is. Stock options used to be an enticing form of ownership, now it’s a crapshoot: you’re gambling that you won’t get screwed. But all of that is beside the point. When I (and presumably the original poster) are talking about ownership, we mean the sense of originating and creating the thing we’re building, not just owning the material benefit from it.
        apercu 5y ago
        "Stock options used to be an enticing form of ownership, now it’s a crapshoot: you’re gambling that you won’t get screwed." I've had options and equity and RSU's and all sorts of things. Even diluted but still owned 11% of a company when I exited. In 25 years of tech and startups I have probably received about $30k total in compensation related to equity. Odds are you will be screwed.
        fossuser 5y ago
        Not sure if you’re not in the Bay Area, but for a counter point many (maybe most?) of friends I know have had large payoffs (though not always with options, sometimes RSUs) - it does require some risk taking (holding onto them longer, not just immediately liquidating them, sometimes exercising options and floating that cost/tax until exit). These payoffs range between 500k and $20M for people I know well with more clustered in the 500k-2M range. Higher level people I don’t know super well easily clear 50M+, this isn’t just one company exit event either *. Equity should not be underrated. * FB, Snap, Google (RSUs), Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Tesla etc.
        apercu 5y ago
        You are listing companies that in several cases have been around for decades. I was really thinking about the startups I have been involved with. I have never worked for a FAANG and have never had desire to. Also, the odds of 95% of HN readers actually getting a half a million dollar payout are probably extremely low. My guess is most will have my experience. If you like working at Facebook you also don't have to give up compensation for equity, so you will get a decent salary, not give up market value comp for equity and then never be made whole. :) I value equity a lot. Where I work I have 100% of the equity.
        john_yaya 5y ago
        Thanks again for sharing your experience and perspectives on all this. It’s emboldening me to go indie and start my own company rather than chase the mirage of stock options.
      - zippergz 5y ago
        At any sufficiently large company, the connection between my work and the stock price is loose at best. If you're an executive, it might be more direct. But in the public companies I have been an employee of, I have never felt a shred of motivation from this stock-based "ownership" in the sense of a true belief that doing better work will make that stock be worth more. In the aggregate, yes, but individually, no.
    - Guid_NewGuid 5y ago
      This is what inspired me to write this: https://d22qefpbdavdoz.cloudfront.net/#let-me-work https://d22qefpbdavdoz.cloudfront.net/#let-me-work We're working the wrong way across the industry, developers are being cut-off from the processes they are instrumental in. None of it makes any sense and it's soul destroying.
      - nivenkos 5y ago
        I agree with this completely. It goes both ways too, like companies that try to keep business analysts and strategists completely separate from the database and data generation specifics.
  - sdevonoes 5y ago
    > Ownership is underrated You meant perhaps overrated? At least in my experience so far in the tech industry, in all the companies I have worked for they always praise "ownership" as in: "as an engineer you own a product from conception to development to deployment to maintenance"... but they never talk about money. There is nothing like "If the company goes well and since you own part of it, here you have a bonus!" Nop, at least in Western Europe is not like that. You behave as if you must own the company, but you get no benefits at all; so basically: work more for the same money.
    - rhn_mk1 5y ago
      I think your observation confirms that it's underrated. The people who don't talk about money use a weird notion of ownership where it means responsibility, but doesn't seem to mean benefits. Marx is turning in his grave. Ownership that OP means is about having the agency to be part of the whole picture: responsibilities, work, challenges, and results.
      - kthejoker2 5y ago
        I just read Arnold Schwarzenegger's essay in The Atlantic (full disclosure: 110% agree) ... A thing that stood out, when Arnie spoke out against people using "freedom" as justification for not getting a vaccine or wearing a mask, he said > Many people told me that the Constitution gives them rights, but not responsibilities. They feel no duty to protect their fellow citizens. I see a direct link betwen the decline of capitalist equity and civic responsibility. As you say, there are no benefits, and therefore no agency. The generations Arnie holds up as exemplars of civic virtue also had higher tax rates, stronger unions, and a much heartier social safety net.
  - WJW 5y ago
    Perhaps, if it is actual ownership and not the fake modern ownership that gives you the downsides but not the upsides. Whenever I hear that term I get reminded of the discussion from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550975: > Jordanpomeroy on Nov 16, 2019 > I find ownership to be motivating. Good leaders inspire me to own results, but also empower me to own the “how”. When I do not own the method of obtaining success, I do not feel like I truly am responsible for success. The truth is, with more complex work, good leaders realize they’re at the mercy of those that do the work, because of the complexity only the people actually doing the work have complete understanding of the system. Therefore, the best card to play is to be very clear about the desired outcome, including the whole strategy and context behind it, and hope the team owns it all. > paulriddle on Nov 16, 2019 [–] > It's funny how carefully you're stepping around financially rewarding people who do the work. It's like you know your status does not allow you to own the money generated, so you're settling for owning the results, the process, the method, the responsibility, the all. You are weak. A bit harsh towards the end perhaps, but paulriddle does make a valid point on actual vs fake ownership.
  - chubot 5y ago
    Paul Graham has an essay somewhere where he describes Robert Morris (creator of the Morris worm, kernel hacker, professor at MIT) as the FreeBSD sys admin for ViaWeb :) That is, probably the "most overqualified" sys admin in the world, because he was owning the whole problem. ---- The OP's post is related to the motivation for my work on https://www.oilshell.org/ https://www.oilshell.org/ -- I found that shell solves important problems quickly and effectively. In contrast, in 1999, in college, I worked an an autonomous underwater vehicle project that didn't work very well. In 2021, I still think that autonomous vehicles don't work very well. I also have a Erdos number of 3 due to a 2016 publication on deep learning, but that was mostly due to shell scripts as well. The publication has thousands of citations but I'm unsure if it will ever be useful. The author of Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud bravely stated that publications from the same group (Google Brain), with common co-authors, are bullshit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27331807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27331807
- geoduck14 5y ago
  >Being stuck writing boring SQL reports or struggling with open-ended problems I REALLY like SQL amd open ended problems. But sometimes I don't like work because work gets in the way of my SQL and BI stuff
- LordHumungous 5y ago
  My favorite project in recent years was a little python service that I owned end to end. The rest of the company deployed into this god awful monolith but my service ran on a little forgotten AWS account where I had full control. Eventually they got around to eliminating that account, and I was out.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I enjoy doing pedestrian stuff; really, really well. Most of my work is open-source, as I don't really do anything particularly innovative or patent-worthy. Most of the value in my work is how I do it. I work carefully, document the living bejeezus out of my work, test like crazy, and spend a lot of time "polishing the fenders." This is something that anyone can do. It just takes patience, discipline, and care. I'm weird. I enjoy the end results enough to take the time to do the job well. It's been my experience that the way I work is deeply unpopular. Some people actually seem to get offended, when I discuss how I work. Go figure.
- RHSeeger 5y ago
  This is what I focus on. I found a new way to do something (that is relatively common with my work) in a way that made it easier later to maintain the work that was done. It made my day.
- toto444 5y ago
  I have been thinking a lot on a problem with the idea to find a tech solution that could help solving it. The more I was thinking about it the more I realized that what I think is the the best way to solve the problem does not involve any tech at all. That's how I started working a a static website. I have been working on it for a few years now. I have realised my strength is that I can work on a problem for a very long time. My website solves a lot of very tiny problems one by one. Nothing impressive when you look at them individually. However after solving hundreds of them a big picture starts emerging. When I was younger I wanted to solve very hard problems. I have let that idea go and have no regret about it.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    > and have no regret about it. A worthy life goal. I feel that way, myself.
- mathattack 5y ago
  Your kind of work is absolutely necessary for commercial software to run. You’d get crucified in an internal IT department where funding is entirely driven by new features, and 80% done usually has to be good enough.
vishnugupta 5y ago
A good corollary: http://boringtechnology.club/ http://boringtechnology.club/
the_only_law 5y ago
I don’t want to work on hard things, I want to work on interesting things, which may or may not be hard.
- fatnoah 5y ago
  > I want to work on interesting things, which may or may not be hard This was my first thought as well. I want to be able to do something that I find interesting or rewarding. Those things exist across the entire easy to hard spectrum.
caseyross 5y ago
"Any run-of-the-mill engineer can design something which is elegant. A good engineer designs systems to be efficient. A great engineer designs them to be effective." - from Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
gambler 5y ago
>School is a closed-world domain—you are solving crisply-defined puzzles Bingo. When people from US tech culture say "hard problems" they really mean "hard puzzles". A lot of those people are very proud of their puzzle-solving skills acquired at school (what Edward De Bono calls vertical thinking), while being absolutely awful at dealing with ill-defined open problems (lateral thinking). Instead of counteracting this tendency in some way most Silicon Valley companies actually amplify the problem by running puzzle interviews and structuring their work around glorified paperclip maximization. This is why so many systems we have to use today are extremely complex, highly optimized for some specific criteria, but ultimately designed like shit.
- lixtra 5y ago
  I don’t see it so strict. You can put vertical and lateral thinkers together in a team and get the best of both worlds, i.e. solve the puzzles that matter and provide a sane system that actually works.
- daveslash 5y ago
  This really hit me this morning, and the timing couldn't be better. We took on a CompSci intern from an Ivy League for the summer. Tomorrow's his last day. When he first came on, I was really trepidatious; I couldn't put my finger on why, but this blog post sums it up perfectly. We're doing important work, but it's not "hard puzzles". It's "hard" work, but we work with boring technology and solve boring technical problems ~ I was worried about how this go over with the intern from the Ivy Leagues. Day one we're tearing down hardware with vice grips because the guy with the hex-drivers is out and splicing wires. Tomorrow's his last day, and he seemed to really enjoy it, but I think he enjoyed it because it was not "just another hard puzzle" - he was given "ultra-vague end goal", had to "prioritize many different sub-problems", and "probably don’t even know what all the dimensions are, let alone which are the most important". Much different from all of his academia... I'm glad he enjoyed it, and I feel good having provided a valuable experience for a talented budding CompSci engineer.
- ctvo 5y ago
  I was with you until the end. > Instead of counteracting this tendency in some way most Silicon Valley companies actually amplify the problem by running puzzle interviews and structuring their work around glorified paperclip maximization. This is why so many systems we have to use today are extremely complex, highly optimized for some specific criteria, but ultimately designed like shit. That's quite a jump. There are multitudes of interacting systems that cause complexity in software, from time constraints, to company structure, to incorrectly mapping the domain, to sometimes incompetency. Companies that don't hire and reward the behavior you outline have just as complex systems. Maybe there's something else there?
pjmlp 5y ago
I rather work in solving customer problems, regardless of complexity, even if it is a two lines bash script. The satisfaction of actually having an impact on someone's live and work.
li2uR3ce 5y ago
> A solution’s performance has many different dimensions (speed, reliability, usability, repeatability, cost, …)—you probably don’t even know what all the dimensions are, let alone which are the most important. The "hard problem" is finding the balance. Don't be a UI developer that lets beauty eclipse speed, reliability, usability, repeatability, cost--every. last. fucking. time. The author is on to something in that academia's "one dimensional" evaluation shouldn't be used in the real world.
Zababa 5y ago
Following on this, are there websites that lists non-profits that needs software engineers, especially for volunteering? Or is you best bet to find a local place and go ask? If anyone has experience volunteering with software, I'd love to hear your experience. I wish I could put my Excel skills to good use.
unixhero 5y ago
I believe he was following his urge to solve hard problems by engineering a solution to them, instead of applying technology leadership. Engineering is worth its weight in gold, but not everywhere, everytime.
toss1 5y ago
>>...you’ll end up looking for trickier and trickier puzzles that you can get an A+ on. >> The real world is the polar opposite. You’ll have some ultra-vague end goal, like “help people in sub-Saharan Africa solve their money problems,” based on which you’ll need to prioritize many different sub-problems. A solution’s performance has many different dimensions (speed, reliability, usability, repeatability, cost, …)—you probably don’t even know what all the dimensions are, let alone which are the most important. The range of plausible outcomes covers orders of magnitude and the ceiling is saving billions of lives. The habits you learn by working on problem sets won’t help you here. The latter sounds like the very definition of a "Hard Problem". Not a single tricky puzzle, but a labyrinth of pseudo-randomly interdependent sub-problems, each of which looks easy, and the optimization goals map onto multiple independent dimensions (physical, commercial, political...). So, yes, "hard technical problems", are a really minor subset of the truly hard problems in the world. Endless fun to be had
AussieWog93 5y ago
I would also add, from experience, that it's easy to make a lot of money solving relatively easy/un-sexy problems. If stoners or idiots can do it and earn a living, a skilled engineer can make a small fortune.
kiliantics 5y ago
Instead of the "hard problems" of writing numerical integral routines in quantitative finance, the author chooses to try doing something for less fortunate people in poorer countries. I'd argue the latter is far more difficult! Mathematical problems, while maybe complex, are usually well defined, whereas social problems are never straightforward. The author even admits that the app ended up being more helpful to bad actors than to the intended benefactors. If the claim in this piece is "you don't need to work on technical problems, you need to work on social problems" then I could agree. I believe there is pretty much an ethical imperative, for anyone with the freedom of choice in their work, to choose to work on social problems of poverty, climate change, etc. But these are far from being easy problems!
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jollybean 5y ago
Trying to stop fraud on a platform meant for migrants is absolutely a 'hard problem'. Just trying to get the app out there for people to use is a 'hard problem'. So it's mostly definitely 'hard' , just no in the bounded way puzzles are presented in classrooms. Where I find it gets bad is in technical conditions wherein people are used to competing on these terms aka 'who is the smartest'. If find people end up arguing over the wrong things, and of course 'bike shedding'. If the problem is framed in terms of outcomes, then it's harder bike-shed or wax philosophic because those activities are more or less exposed as having less relevance.
raman162 5y ago
As someone who is still trying to grow technically, this was a good reminder that at the end of the day we put our effort towards solving problems that matter.
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tingletech 5y ago
so, use boring tech to work on hard "real world" problems
gfodor 5y ago
A common thing I've run into is people working on very, very toxic things for society, like human behavior modification (ad) systems, who get up every morning excited and enthusiastic about it because the technical challenges keep them interested. I generally avoid hiring people like this, who often will state openly they don't care very much about the application of their work, but "just want to solve hard problems."
- dabfiend19 5y ago
  why does a person's interest in the application of their work serve as a signal for if you should hire them? I mean maybe for someone in a product role, but how is it relevant to hiring an individual contributor? not hiring someone just because of their internal philosophies feels like gate keeping to me. if someone is a cynic and realizes most start ups arent out there "making the world a better place"... doesn't really have any bearing on their potential output.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    It is gate keeping. That's the point. I don't want to work with people who feel like it's reasonable to be unaware or agnostic to the effect their work is going to have on actual people. I don't believe in the meme that someone's role ought to dictate if they need to consider the consequences of their creative efforts on other human beings. I have a lot more respect for people who consider these things, and just have different opinions than I about what they consider worthy applications, than those who just consider it unnecessary to think about these things. We have an obligation, if we are going to call ourselves "engineers", to consider what we are working on from an ethical perspective.
    - SubuSS 5y ago
      I think there is a bit of goal most moving happening here: - you started with ad systems as example of evil: they patently aren’t. They are more of a result of the deeper cause - folks don’t want to pay for things if possible. So now the bill gets moved to a different table, that’s all. All the humanitarian efforts (if any) are standing on the shoulders of the money generated from ads - if someone says ‘I just want to solve hard problems’ - it is quite a leap from there to assuming they don’t care about social problems. May be they don’t feel empowered/qualified to tackle the big social questions and are just trying to make a living and possibly be productive doing so. Or they don’t want to tackle a social conversation in a workplace setting. I am very wary of the forcing that’s happening of making everyone involved in social/philosophical questions whether they like it or not. A lot of people just want to make it through the day/build expertise in something and make it through their life. They’d prefer to pay taxes and let other entities / experts deal with those. This doesn’t mean apathy, it just means a lack of time and ability. I think that’s worth respecting.
dehrmann 5y ago
Hard technical problems are rarely the hard part of my job. People, ambiguity, and direction are where the real challenges are.
kirillzubovsky 5y ago
This is the best and worst advice all in one. It is the best because it is true. At least from what I've seen, there countless amazing engineers stuck doing really hard problems for little return, while their rather lousy counterparts razzle-dazzle the world with hand-waving; no brains necessary. If you can find an important problem that won't bore you to tears and solve it, it's definitely more important in the short term. That said, without brilliant engineers working on hard problems and occasionally inventing really great new things, we wouldn't get far in life. So if you can forgo the fame and the riches, there is a lot of sense in working on hard/interesting problems. Someone's got to. Personally I think picking a problem that fits your is more important than picking an outcome. The outcome won't make you happy, but the journey around the right problem will. I think.
ajot 5y ago
This resonates a lot with the classic Richard Feynman's letter about "which problems to solve" http://genius.cat-v.org/richard-feynman/writtings/letters/problems http://genius.cat-v.org/richard-feynman/writtings/letters/pr...
xchip 5y ago
\o/ Please give all the hard problems to me! :)
andyxor 5y ago
the only thing worse than working for an "A+ on a hard problem" is competing on a hard problem in a crowded space. Mandatory "You and Your Research" by Richard Hamming: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
LordHumungous 5y ago
Easy problems are hard if you've never done them before. As a new grad, you can learn a lot at a "boring" job.
dcolkitt 5y ago
One reason that a lot of very intellectual people express a skepticism of capitalism is because so often you see very successful who aren't very bright. It's typical to see a small-to-medium business owner worth $20 million, who's maybe above average intelligence, but nowhere near the brain power of say a physics PhD who's grinding out postdocs at $45k/year. I think one reason for that is because the market price system already does a lot of the intellectual heavy lifting. In many cases the market gives you very transparent signals about relative cost and scarcity of resources. For a typical entrepreneur, it's often just about putting in the hustle, grit, and risk tolerance to convert low-priced inputs into high-priced outputs. For example, I can pretty clearly identify that my area needs a car wash. A lot of homes were built in this zip code recently, and there's no car wash to service a new, large market. The car wash business model is pretty easy to project. With a tiny bit of research I can easily figure out prices, wages, rents, etc. Opening and running a successful car wash would not be a hard intellectual problem. What it would be is a hard pain-in-the-ass problem. The challenge of owning a car wash isn't solving differential equations. It's waking up to an emergency call at 6 am that your bathroom's flooding, and half your staff called out sick because they're hung over.
- newbie2020 5y ago
  That in my opinion is the great thing about capitalism. Someone with average intelligence but an insane work ethic can make it big. I see this completely the other way. And one thing I’ve learned as I’ve grown older is that my patience runs thin these days. That means I’m willing to pay big bucks for people to handle pain-in-the-ass problems for me. Conversely, I don’t know what I’d do with a paper on theoretical physics other than use the back side as scratch paper
- Rioghasarig 5y ago
  I don't see anything wrong with this situation. People who exhibit profit-seeking behavior (entrepreneurs) can make much more money than people don't exhibit profit-seeking behavior (PhD students). That sounds like a reasonable system to me.
  - tehjoker 5y ago
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Forge36 5y ago
There's pride in doing the easy things well. With enough of the easy stuff automated to minimal intervention, time can be spent on the important problems
brundolf 5y ago
One of the most rewarding projects I've ever worked on was a catalogue website for a local music shop. It paid what I now make salaried in about two weeks, but in the years since I've heard back on multiple occasions how much easier it made the lives of these lovely people running this lovely little store. They didn't even have a CMS before; they made pages manually, via a WYSIWYG from the 90s, for each of their hundreds of instruments. And since COVID, more than half their business comes through this site. It's made a night-and-day difference for them. I think the over-engineering problem described by the author comes down to the fact that most of the work that most of us do is deeply empty. We don't impact lives in meaningful ways, at least not directly and/or for the better. You really need both of those to feel a sense of personal impact. So we look for other forms of reward instead- we create puzzles for ourselves to solve. It's hard to find work in our field that's directly impactful at all, much less that pays anywhere near what we'd make otherwise. Software companies that aren't eating the world can't afford to pay salaries that cover a comfortable cost-of-living in SF or Seattle or Austin, where many of us have put down roots already. And (my impression is that) they hardly exist at all outside of those hubs. I don't know what the answer is.
Toine 5y ago
That's how you tend to get better business ideas aswell
shadytrees 5y ago
> School is a closed-world domain—you are solving crisply-defined puzzles (multiply these two numbers, implement this algorithm, write a book report by this rubric), your solution is evaluated on one dimension (letter grade), and the performance ceiling (an A+) is low. The only form of progression is to take harder courses. If you try to maximize your rewards under this reward function, you’ll end up looking for trickier and trickier puzzles that you can get an A+ on. > The real world is the polar opposite. Terry Tao makes much the same point in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXJ-zpJeY3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXJ-zpJeY3E
posharma 5y ago
There are at least 5 problems with doing pedestrian stuff in a corporate setup. Of course, this is part subjective, part circumstantial. (1) Low pay. (2) If you mess up you get penalized more severely. If you mess up a hard problem you get the benefit of doubt, but if you do well you get great rewards. Doing well on boring problems doesn't earn you any special rewards. (3) Consistently doing pedestrian stuff makes you feel dumb in the scrum (esp. when others are tackling hard problems). (4) You're first on the chopping block since you're not the "core". (5) Your growth, both professionally and personally, will be shunted.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  The trick might be to work on problems that others consider hard but you don't. Or, alternatively, problems that might not be hard, but deliver valuable business value to people who value business value.
jxramos 5y ago
Real world, 2016—Wave’s new second-biggest problem is that we have outgrown Quickbooks. Wow, I'm curious does anyone know what kind of scale that tool operates at and where its limitations arise from?
paganel 5y ago
> or find the easiest problem whose solution would be useful (like identifying Kenyan names), Not sure if that would have been possible for the OP but maybe he/she could have tried to match the incoming names to a known-database of Kenyan names, like a Kenyan phone-book or something? I had a similar problem to solve in one of my personal projects when I wanted to put on a map the buildings nationalised just after WW2 by the communist regime from my country, buildings which belonged to Jewish citizens. I had a big list of nationalised buildings with a name attached to each of them, I needed to know if that name was Jewish or not. In order to do that I just matched that list of names to the list of names from Yad Vashem [1], list which contains only Jewish names. [1] https://www.yadvashem.org/ https://www.yadvashem.org/
jxramos 5y ago
Here's a great complimentary nugget of wisdom Elon Musk shared on the tour he gave of Starbase recently that intersects with a closely related concept. 17:29 Possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize the thing that should not exist. And say, well, why would you do that? Well, everyone has been trained in high school and college that you gotta answer the question, convergent logic. So you can't tell a professor, "your question is dumb", or you will get a bad grade. You have to answer the question. So everyone is basically, without knowing it, they got like mental straight jacket on that is they'll work on optimizing the thing that should simply not exist. https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=1049 https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=1049
qualudeheart 5y ago
Working on hard problems will soon be the only thing to provide my life meaning, as all trivial labor becomes automated. There will exist a window between the automation of all trivial labor, and the eclipse of human intelligence by artifical intelligence, such that within this window meaningful work will remain possible. I intend to try to contribute to hard problems within that time frame. All else is a meaningless waste of time.
villasv 5y ago
Somewhat related but kinda in the other direction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27988260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27988260
dang 5y ago
Discussed at the time: You don't need to work on hard problems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398118 - Feb 2020 (43 comments)
a_square_peg 5y ago
"Solve problems that matter" is how I might describe it - maybe they are hard problems, maybe not. The propensity to enjoy working on hard problems can also lead them to make any assigned problem harder than it needs to be. I regard software developer who likes 'coding' with somewhat similar suspicion that I would have with a dentist who likes pulling teeth out.
caffeine 5y ago
Hard problems seem to crop up whenever you get far enough along doing something. At some point you’re not a beginner any more, you’ve reached the bleeding edge of whatever your domain is, and hard problems just start presenting themselves and you have to solve them to progress. So I agree with TFA that there is no need to go explicitly looking for them .. just do something well enough and keep progressing for a long time, and the hard problems will come to you. (A canonical example of this might be something like Facebook .. most CS undergrads could easily write the first version of FB, while years later it takes many, many CS PhDs to keep building what FB is now) A corollary is that if you just start on day one with the hardest problem you can think of, solving it is probably not very useful (there are exceptions). The more useful hard problems to solve come up when you’re trying to accomplish something else.
inadequatespace 5y ago
Explains why people do stuff like Math PhDs assuming they'll continue to be rewarded by society for this sort of thing before finishing, and then face the grim reality that no one* really cares unless it makes them money. *Except in truly exceptional circumstances that are too rare to consider.

415 points by _ttg 5y ago

But I think the reason that isn't boring is because you have autonomy and, in this case literally, ownership. Being stuck writing boring SQL reports or struggling with open-ended problems so someone else makes more money isn't such a great proposition.

tr33house 5y ago
I agree. Ownership is underrated. Perhaps one of the biggest incentives out there
- john_yaya 5y ago
  Thank you for saying this. I’m currently an engineering manager at a “fun” and “interesting” company in SV, and I absolutely hate it. It took me a while to figure out why - but in retrospect, it’s pretty obvious. Writing Jira epics and doing code reviews for someone else’s vision is, for me at least, deeply unfulfilling, no matter how ambitious that vision is.
  - gugagore 5y ago
    I'm assuming you have some ownership in the form of stock, and I'm wondering how that factors into it. Can you imagine a vision that would be easier to get behind, even if it originated with someone else?
    - john_yaya 5y ago
      I do have some RSUs, but no real way of knowing how much they’ll be worth, if anything. I don’t get to see a cap table, nor am I privy to the investors’ term sheet to know what their overhang is. Stock options used to be an enticing form of ownership, now it’s a crapshoot: you’re gambling that you won’t get screwed. But all of that is beside the point. When I (and presumably the original poster) are talking about ownership, we mean the sense of originating and creating the thing we’re building, not just owning the material benefit from it.
      - apercu 5y ago
        "Stock options used to be an enticing form of ownership, now it’s a crapshoot: you’re gambling that you won’t get screwed." I've had options and equity and RSU's and all sorts of things. Even diluted but still owned 11% of a company when I exited. In 25 years of tech and startups I have probably received about $30k total in compensation related to equity. Odds are you will be screwed.
        fossuser 5y ago
        Not sure if you’re not in the Bay Area, but for a counter point many (maybe most?) of friends I know have had large payoffs (though not always with options, sometimes RSUs) - it does require some risk taking (holding onto them longer, not just immediately liquidating them, sometimes exercising options and floating that cost/tax until exit). These payoffs range between 500k and $20M for people I know well with more clustered in the 500k-2M range. Higher level people I don’t know super well easily clear 50M+, this isn’t just one company exit event either *. Equity should not be underrated. * FB, Snap, Google (RSUs), Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Tesla etc.
        apercu 5y ago
        You are listing companies that in several cases have been around for decades. I was really thinking about the startups I have been involved with. I have never worked for a FAANG and have never had desire to. Also, the odds of 95% of HN readers actually getting a half a million dollar payout are probably extremely low. My guess is most will have my experience. If you like working at Facebook you also don't have to give up compensation for equity, so you will get a decent salary, not give up market value comp for equity and then never be made whole. :) I value equity a lot. Where I work I have 100% of the equity.
        john_yaya 5y ago
        Thanks again for sharing your experience and perspectives on all this. It’s emboldening me to go indie and start my own company rather than chase the mirage of stock options.
    - zippergz 5y ago
      At any sufficiently large company, the connection between my work and the stock price is loose at best. If you're an executive, it might be more direct. But in the public companies I have been an employee of, I have never felt a shred of motivation from this stock-based "ownership" in the sense of a true belief that doing better work will make that stock be worth more. In the aggregate, yes, but individually, no.
  - Guid_NewGuid 5y ago
    This is what inspired me to write this: https://d22qefpbdavdoz.cloudfront.net/#let-me-work https://d22qefpbdavdoz.cloudfront.net/#let-me-work We're working the wrong way across the industry, developers are being cut-off from the processes they are instrumental in. None of it makes any sense and it's soul destroying.
    - nivenkos 5y ago
      I agree with this completely. It goes both ways too, like companies that try to keep business analysts and strategists completely separate from the database and data generation specifics.
- sdevonoes 5y ago
  > Ownership is underrated You meant perhaps overrated? At least in my experience so far in the tech industry, in all the companies I have worked for they always praise "ownership" as in: "as an engineer you own a product from conception to development to deployment to maintenance"... but they never talk about money. There is nothing like "If the company goes well and since you own part of it, here you have a bonus!" Nop, at least in Western Europe is not like that. You behave as if you must own the company, but you get no benefits at all; so basically: work more for the same money.
  - rhn_mk1 5y ago
    I think your observation confirms that it's underrated. The people who don't talk about money use a weird notion of ownership where it means responsibility, but doesn't seem to mean benefits. Marx is turning in his grave. Ownership that OP means is about having the agency to be part of the whole picture: responsibilities, work, challenges, and results.
    - kthejoker2 5y ago
      I just read Arnold Schwarzenegger's essay in The Atlantic (full disclosure: 110% agree) ... A thing that stood out, when Arnie spoke out against people using "freedom" as justification for not getting a vaccine or wearing a mask, he said > Many people told me that the Constitution gives them rights, but not responsibilities. They feel no duty to protect their fellow citizens. I see a direct link betwen the decline of capitalist equity and civic responsibility. As you say, there are no benefits, and therefore no agency. The generations Arnie holds up as exemplars of civic virtue also had higher tax rates, stronger unions, and a much heartier social safety net.
- WJW 5y ago
  Perhaps, if it is actual ownership and not the fake modern ownership that gives you the downsides but not the upsides. Whenever I hear that term I get reminded of the discussion from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550975: > Jordanpomeroy on Nov 16, 2019 > I find ownership to be motivating. Good leaders inspire me to own results, but also empower me to own the “how”. When I do not own the method of obtaining success, I do not feel like I truly am responsible for success. The truth is, with more complex work, good leaders realize they’re at the mercy of those that do the work, because of the complexity only the people actually doing the work have complete understanding of the system. Therefore, the best card to play is to be very clear about the desired outcome, including the whole strategy and context behind it, and hope the team owns it all. > paulriddle on Nov 16, 2019 [–] > It's funny how carefully you're stepping around financially rewarding people who do the work. It's like you know your status does not allow you to own the money generated, so you're settling for owning the results, the process, the method, the responsibility, the all. You are weak. A bit harsh towards the end perhaps, but paulriddle does make a valid point on actual vs fake ownership.
- chubot 5y ago
  Paul Graham has an essay somewhere where he describes Robert Morris (creator of the Morris worm, kernel hacker, professor at MIT) as the FreeBSD sys admin for ViaWeb :) That is, probably the "most overqualified" sys admin in the world, because he was owning the whole problem. ---- The OP's post is related to the motivation for my work on https://www.oilshell.org/ https://www.oilshell.org/ -- I found that shell solves important problems quickly and effectively. In contrast, in 1999, in college, I worked an an autonomous underwater vehicle project that didn't work very well. In 2021, I still think that autonomous vehicles don't work very well. I also have a Erdos number of 3 due to a 2016 publication on deep learning, but that was mostly due to shell scripts as well. The publication has thousands of citations but I'm unsure if it will ever be useful. The author of Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud bravely stated that publications from the same group (Google Brain), with common co-authors, are bullshit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27331807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27331807
geoduck14 5y ago
>Being stuck writing boring SQL reports or struggling with open-ended problems I REALLY like SQL amd open ended problems. But sometimes I don't like work because work gets in the way of my SQL and BI stuff
LordHumungous 5y ago
My favorite project in recent years was a little python service that I owned end to end. The rest of the company deployed into this god awful monolith but my service ran on a little forgotten AWS account where I had full control. Eventually they got around to eliminating that account, and I was out.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I enjoy doing pedestrian stuff; really, really well. Most of my work is open-source, as I don't really do anything particularly innovative or patent-worthy. Most of the value in my work is how I do it. I work carefully, document the living bejeezus out of my work, test like crazy, and spend a lot of time "polishing the fenders." This is something that anyone can do. It just takes patience, discipline, and care. I'm weird. I enjoy the end results enough to take the time to do the job well. It's been my experience that the way I work is deeply unpopular. Some people actually seem to get offended, when I discuss how I work. Go figure.

RHSeeger 5y ago
This is what I focus on. I found a new way to do something (that is relatively common with my work) in a way that made it easier later to maintain the work that was done. It made my day.
toto444 5y ago
I have been thinking a lot on a problem with the idea to find a tech solution that could help solving it. The more I was thinking about it the more I realized that what I think is the the best way to solve the problem does not involve any tech at all. That's how I started working a a static website. I have been working on it for a few years now. I have realised my strength is that I can work on a problem for a very long time. My website solves a lot of very tiny problems one by one. Nothing impressive when you look at them individually. However after solving hundreds of them a big picture starts emerging. When I was younger I wanted to solve very hard problems. I have let that idea go and have no regret about it.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  > and have no regret about it. A worthy life goal. I feel that way, myself.
mathattack 5y ago
Your kind of work is absolutely necessary for commercial software to run. You’d get crucified in an internal IT department where funding is entirely driven by new features, and 80% done usually has to be good enough.

vishnugupta 5y ago

A good corollary: http://boringtechnology.club/ http://boringtechnology.club/

the_only_law 5y ago

I don’t want to work on hard things, I want to work on interesting things, which may or may not be hard.

fatnoah 5y ago
> I want to work on interesting things, which may or may not be hard This was my first thought as well. I want to be able to do something that I find interesting or rewarding. Those things exist across the entire easy to hard spectrum.

caseyross 5y ago

"Any run-of-the-mill engineer can design something which is elegant. A good engineer designs systems to be efficient. A great engineer designs them to be effective." - from Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design

gambler 5y ago

>School is a closed-world domain—you are solving crisply-defined puzzles Bingo. When people from US tech culture say "hard problems" they really mean "hard puzzles". A lot of those people are very proud of their puzzle-solving skills acquired at school (what Edward De Bono calls vertical thinking), while being absolutely awful at dealing with ill-defined open problems (lateral thinking). Instead of counteracting this tendency in some way most Silicon Valley companies actually amplify the problem by running puzzle interviews and structuring their work around glorified paperclip maximization. This is why so many systems we have to use today are extremely complex, highly optimized for some specific criteria, but ultimately designed like shit.

lixtra 5y ago
I don’t see it so strict. You can put vertical and lateral thinkers together in a team and get the best of both worlds, i.e. solve the puzzles that matter and provide a sane system that actually works.
daveslash 5y ago
This really hit me this morning, and the timing couldn't be better. We took on a CompSci intern from an Ivy League for the summer. Tomorrow's his last day. When he first came on, I was really trepidatious; I couldn't put my finger on why, but this blog post sums it up perfectly. We're doing important work, but it's not "hard puzzles". It's "hard" work, but we work with boring technology and solve boring technical problems ~ I was worried about how this go over with the intern from the Ivy Leagues. Day one we're tearing down hardware with vice grips because the guy with the hex-drivers is out and splicing wires. Tomorrow's his last day, and he seemed to really enjoy it, but I think he enjoyed it because it was not "just another hard puzzle" - he was given "ultra-vague end goal", had to "prioritize many different sub-problems", and "probably don’t even know what all the dimensions are, let alone which are the most important". Much different from all of his academia... I'm glad he enjoyed it, and I feel good having provided a valuable experience for a talented budding CompSci engineer.
ctvo 5y ago
I was with you until the end. > Instead of counteracting this tendency in some way most Silicon Valley companies actually amplify the problem by running puzzle interviews and structuring their work around glorified paperclip maximization. This is why so many systems we have to use today are extremely complex, highly optimized for some specific criteria, but ultimately designed like shit. That's quite a jump. There are multitudes of interacting systems that cause complexity in software, from time constraints, to company structure, to incorrectly mapping the domain, to sometimes incompetency. Companies that don't hire and reward the behavior you outline have just as complex systems. Maybe there's something else there?

pjmlp 5y ago

I rather work in solving customer problems, regardless of complexity, even if it is a two lines bash script. The satisfaction of actually having an impact on someone's live and work.

li2uR3ce 5y ago

> A solution’s performance has many different dimensions (speed, reliability, usability, repeatability, cost, …)—you probably don’t even know what all the dimensions are, let alone which are the most important. The "hard problem" is finding the balance. Don't be a UI developer that lets beauty eclipse speed, reliability, usability, repeatability, cost--every. last. fucking. time. The author is on to something in that academia's "one dimensional" evaluation shouldn't be used in the real world.

Zababa 5y ago

Following on this, are there websites that lists non-profits that needs software engineers, especially for volunteering? Or is you best bet to find a local place and go ask? If anyone has experience volunteering with software, I'd love to hear your experience. I wish I could put my Excel skills to good use.

unixhero 5y ago

I believe he was following his urge to solve hard problems by engineering a solution to them, instead of applying technology leadership. Engineering is worth its weight in gold, but not everywhere, everytime.

toss1 5y ago

>>...you’ll end up looking for trickier and trickier puzzles that you can get an A+ on. >> The real world is the polar opposite. You’ll have some ultra-vague end goal, like “help people in sub-Saharan Africa solve their money problems,” based on which you’ll need to prioritize many different sub-problems. A solution’s performance has many different dimensions (speed, reliability, usability, repeatability, cost, …)—you probably don’t even know what all the dimensions are, let alone which are the most important. The range of plausible outcomes covers orders of magnitude and the ceiling is saving billions of lives. The habits you learn by working on problem sets won’t help you here. The latter sounds like the very definition of a "Hard Problem". Not a single tricky puzzle, but a labyrinth of pseudo-randomly interdependent sub-problems, each of which looks easy, and the optimization goals map onto multiple independent dimensions (physical, commercial, political...). So, yes, "hard technical problems", are a really minor subset of the truly hard problems in the world. Endless fun to be had

AussieWog93 5y ago

I would also add, from experience, that it's easy to make a lot of money solving relatively easy/un-sexy problems. If stoners or idiots can do it and earn a living, a skilled engineer can make a small fortune.

kiliantics 5y ago

Instead of the "hard problems" of writing numerical integral routines in quantitative finance, the author chooses to try doing something for less fortunate people in poorer countries. I'd argue the latter is far more difficult! Mathematical problems, while maybe complex, are usually well defined, whereas social problems are never straightforward. The author even admits that the app ended up being more helpful to bad actors than to the intended benefactors. If the claim in this piece is "you don't need to work on technical problems, you need to work on social problems" then I could agree. I believe there is pretty much an ethical imperative, for anyone with the freedom of choice in their work, to choose to work on social problems of poverty, climate change, etc. But these are far from being easy problems!

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jollybean 5y ago

Trying to stop fraud on a platform meant for migrants is absolutely a 'hard problem'. Just trying to get the app out there for people to use is a 'hard problem'. So it's mostly definitely 'hard' , just no in the bounded way puzzles are presented in classrooms. Where I find it gets bad is in technical conditions wherein people are used to competing on these terms aka 'who is the smartest'. If find people end up arguing over the wrong things, and of course 'bike shedding'. If the problem is framed in terms of outcomes, then it's harder bike-shed or wax philosophic because those activities are more or less exposed as having less relevance.

raman162 5y ago

As someone who is still trying to grow technically, this was a good reminder that at the end of the day we put our effort towards solving problems that matter.

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tingletech 5y ago

so, use boring tech to work on hard "real world" problems

gfodor 5y ago

A common thing I've run into is people working on very, very toxic things for society, like human behavior modification (ad) systems, who get up every morning excited and enthusiastic about it because the technical challenges keep them interested. I generally avoid hiring people like this, who often will state openly they don't care very much about the application of their work, but "just want to solve hard problems."

dabfiend19 5y ago
why does a person's interest in the application of their work serve as a signal for if you should hire them? I mean maybe for someone in a product role, but how is it relevant to hiring an individual contributor? not hiring someone just because of their internal philosophies feels like gate keeping to me. if someone is a cynic and realizes most start ups arent out there "making the world a better place"... doesn't really have any bearing on their potential output.
- gfodor 5y ago
  It is gate keeping. That's the point. I don't want to work with people who feel like it's reasonable to be unaware or agnostic to the effect their work is going to have on actual people. I don't believe in the meme that someone's role ought to dictate if they need to consider the consequences of their creative efforts on other human beings. I have a lot more respect for people who consider these things, and just have different opinions than I about what they consider worthy applications, than those who just consider it unnecessary to think about these things. We have an obligation, if we are going to call ourselves "engineers", to consider what we are working on from an ethical perspective.
  - SubuSS 5y ago
    I think there is a bit of goal most moving happening here: - you started with ad systems as example of evil: they patently aren’t. They are more of a result of the deeper cause - folks don’t want to pay for things if possible. So now the bill gets moved to a different table, that’s all. All the humanitarian efforts (if any) are standing on the shoulders of the money generated from ads - if someone says ‘I just want to solve hard problems’ - it is quite a leap from there to assuming they don’t care about social problems. May be they don’t feel empowered/qualified to tackle the big social questions and are just trying to make a living and possibly be productive doing so. Or they don’t want to tackle a social conversation in a workplace setting. I am very wary of the forcing that’s happening of making everyone involved in social/philosophical questions whether they like it or not. A lot of people just want to make it through the day/build expertise in something and make it through their life. They’d prefer to pay taxes and let other entities / experts deal with those. This doesn’t mean apathy, it just means a lack of time and ability. I think that’s worth respecting.

dehrmann 5y ago

Hard technical problems are rarely the hard part of my job. People, ambiguity, and direction are where the real challenges are.

kirillzubovsky 5y ago

This is the best and worst advice all in one. It is the best because it is true. At least from what I've seen, there countless amazing engineers stuck doing really hard problems for little return, while their rather lousy counterparts razzle-dazzle the world with hand-waving; no brains necessary. If you can find an important problem that won't bore you to tears and solve it, it's definitely more important in the short term. That said, without brilliant engineers working on hard problems and occasionally inventing really great new things, we wouldn't get far in life. So if you can forgo the fame and the riches, there is a lot of sense in working on hard/interesting problems. Someone's got to. Personally I think picking a problem that fits your is more important than picking an outcome. The outcome won't make you happy, but the journey around the right problem will. I think.

ajot 5y ago

This resonates a lot with the classic Richard Feynman's letter about "which problems to solve" http://genius.cat-v.org/richard-feynman/writtings/letters/problems http://genius.cat-v.org/richard-feynman/writtings/letters/pr...

xchip 5y ago

\o/ Please give all the hard problems to me! :)

andyxor 5y ago

the only thing worse than working for an "A+ on a hard problem" is competing on a hard problem in a crowded space. Mandatory "You and Your Research" by Richard Hamming: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

LordHumungous 5y ago

Easy problems are hard if you've never done them before. As a new grad, you can learn a lot at a "boring" job.

dcolkitt 5y ago

One reason that a lot of very intellectual people express a skepticism of capitalism is because so often you see very successful who aren't very bright. It's typical to see a small-to-medium business owner worth $20 million, who's maybe above average intelligence, but nowhere near the brain power of say a physics PhD who's grinding out postdocs at $45k/year. I think one reason for that is because the market price system already does a lot of the intellectual heavy lifting. In many cases the market gives you very transparent signals about relative cost and scarcity of resources. For a typical entrepreneur, it's often just about putting in the hustle, grit, and risk tolerance to convert low-priced inputs into high-priced outputs. For example, I can pretty clearly identify that my area needs a car wash. A lot of homes were built in this zip code recently, and there's no car wash to service a new, large market. The car wash business model is pretty easy to project. With a tiny bit of research I can easily figure out prices, wages, rents, etc. Opening and running a successful car wash would not be a hard intellectual problem. What it would be is a hard pain-in-the-ass problem. The challenge of owning a car wash isn't solving differential equations. It's waking up to an emergency call at 6 am that your bathroom's flooding, and half your staff called out sick because they're hung over.

newbie2020 5y ago
That in my opinion is the great thing about capitalism. Someone with average intelligence but an insane work ethic can make it big. I see this completely the other way. And one thing I’ve learned as I’ve grown older is that my patience runs thin these days. That means I’m willing to pay big bucks for people to handle pain-in-the-ass problems for me. Conversely, I don’t know what I’d do with a paper on theoretical physics other than use the back side as scratch paper
Rioghasarig 5y ago
I don't see anything wrong with this situation. People who exhibit profit-seeking behavior (entrepreneurs) can make much more money than people don't exhibit profit-seeking behavior (PhD students). That sounds like a reasonable system to me.
- tehjoker 5y ago

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Forge36 5y ago

There's pride in doing the easy things well. With enough of the easy stuff automated to minimal intervention, time can be spent on the important problems

brundolf 5y ago

One of the most rewarding projects I've ever worked on was a catalogue website for a local music shop. It paid what I now make salaried in about two weeks, but in the years since I've heard back on multiple occasions how much easier it made the lives of these lovely people running this lovely little store. They didn't even have a CMS before; they made pages manually, via a WYSIWYG from the 90s, for each of their hundreds of instruments. And since COVID, more than half their business comes through this site. It's made a night-and-day difference for them. I think the over-engineering problem described by the author comes down to the fact that most of the work that most of us do is deeply empty. We don't impact lives in meaningful ways, at least not directly and/or for the better. You really need both of those to feel a sense of personal impact. So we look for other forms of reward instead- we create puzzles for ourselves to solve. It's hard to find work in our field that's directly impactful at all, much less that pays anywhere near what we'd make otherwise. Software companies that aren't eating the world can't afford to pay salaries that cover a comfortable cost-of-living in SF or Seattle or Austin, where many of us have put down roots already. And (my impression is that) they hardly exist at all outside of those hubs. I don't know what the answer is.

Toine 5y ago

That's how you tend to get better business ideas aswell

shadytrees 5y ago

> School is a closed-world domain—you are solving crisply-defined puzzles (multiply these two numbers, implement this algorithm, write a book report by this rubric), your solution is evaluated on one dimension (letter grade), and the performance ceiling (an A+) is low. The only form of progression is to take harder courses. If you try to maximize your rewards under this reward function, you’ll end up looking for trickier and trickier puzzles that you can get an A+ on. > The real world is the polar opposite. Terry Tao makes much the same point in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXJ-zpJeY3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXJ-zpJeY3E

posharma 5y ago

There are at least 5 problems with doing pedestrian stuff in a corporate setup. Of course, this is part subjective, part circumstantial. (1) Low pay. (2) If you mess up you get penalized more severely. If you mess up a hard problem you get the benefit of doubt, but if you do well you get great rewards. Doing well on boring problems doesn't earn you any special rewards. (3) Consistently doing pedestrian stuff makes you feel dumb in the scrum (esp. when others are tackling hard problems). (4) You're first on the chopping block since you're not the "core". (5) Your growth, both professionally and personally, will be shunted.

formerly_proven 5y ago
The trick might be to work on problems that others consider hard but you don't. Or, alternatively, problems that might not be hard, but deliver valuable business value to people who value business value.

jxramos 5y ago

Real world, 2016—Wave’s new second-biggest problem is that we have outgrown Quickbooks. Wow, I'm curious does anyone know what kind of scale that tool operates at and where its limitations arise from?

paganel 5y ago

> or find the easiest problem whose solution would be useful (like identifying Kenyan names), Not sure if that would have been possible for the OP but maybe he/she could have tried to match the incoming names to a known-database of Kenyan names, like a Kenyan phone-book or something? I had a similar problem to solve in one of my personal projects when I wanted to put on a map the buildings nationalised just after WW2 by the communist regime from my country, buildings which belonged to Jewish citizens. I had a big list of nationalised buildings with a name attached to each of them, I needed to know if that name was Jewish or not. In order to do that I just matched that list of names to the list of names from Yad Vashem [1], list which contains only Jewish names. [1] https://www.yadvashem.org/ https://www.yadvashem.org/

jxramos 5y ago

Here's a great complimentary nugget of wisdom Elon Musk shared on the tour he gave of Starbase recently that intersects with a closely related concept. 17:29 Possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize the thing that should not exist. And say, well, why would you do that? Well, everyone has been trained in high school and college that you gotta answer the question, convergent logic. So you can't tell a professor, "your question is dumb", or you will get a bad grade. You have to answer the question. So everyone is basically, without knowing it, they got like mental straight jacket on that is they'll work on optimizing the thing that should simply not exist. https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=1049 https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=1049

qualudeheart 5y ago

Working on hard problems will soon be the only thing to provide my life meaning, as all trivial labor becomes automated. There will exist a window between the automation of all trivial labor, and the eclipse of human intelligence by artifical intelligence, such that within this window meaningful work will remain possible. I intend to try to contribute to hard problems within that time frame. All else is a meaningless waste of time.

villasv 5y ago

Somewhat related but kinda in the other direction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27988260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27988260

dang 5y ago

Discussed at the time: You don't need to work on hard problems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398118 - Feb 2020 (43 comments)

a_square_peg 5y ago

"Solve problems that matter" is how I might describe it - maybe they are hard problems, maybe not. The propensity to enjoy working on hard problems can also lead them to make any assigned problem harder than it needs to be. I regard software developer who likes 'coding' with somewhat similar suspicion that I would have with a dentist who likes pulling teeth out.

caffeine 5y ago

Hard problems seem to crop up whenever you get far enough along doing something. At some point you’re not a beginner any more, you’ve reached the bleeding edge of whatever your domain is, and hard problems just start presenting themselves and you have to solve them to progress. So I agree with TFA that there is no need to go explicitly looking for them .. just do something well enough and keep progressing for a long time, and the hard problems will come to you. (A canonical example of this might be something like Facebook .. most CS undergrads could easily write the first version of FB, while years later it takes many, many CS PhDs to keep building what FB is now) A corollary is that if you just start on day one with the hardest problem you can think of, solving it is probably not very useful (there are exceptions). The more useful hard problems to solve come up when you’re trying to accomplish something else.

inadequatespace 5y ago

Explains why people do stuff like Math PhDs assuming they'll continue to be rewarded by society for this sort of thing before finishing, and then face the grim reality that no one* really cares unless it makes them money. *Except in truly exceptional circumstances that are too rare to consider.