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And yet, in my career, I've noticed the rewards are increasing for being the person who is willing to focus on one thing for a long time (for several weeks, or
by lkrubner 4y ago
And yet, in my career, I've noticed the rewards are increasing for being the person who is willing to focus on one thing for a long time (for several weeks, or months). For instance, I've never been the kind of software developer who could write obviously clever code. But I have written code that was admired and praised, and sometimes seen as the salvation of the company I was working for -- but not because I'm especially skilled as a software developer, but only because I was willing to think about specific problems, deeply, for longer than anyone else at the company. In 2012/2013, to the extent that I helped re-invent the tech stack at Timeout.com, it was because I was willing to spend weeks thinking about exactly why we'd reached the limits of what we could do with various cache strategies, and then what would come next. I then introduced the idea of "an architecture of small apps" which was the phrase I used because the phrase "microservices" didn't really become widespread until Martin Fowler wrote his essay about it at the very end of of 2013. Likewise, I now work as the principal software architect at Futurestay.com, and my main contribution has been my willingness to spend weeks thinking about the flaws in the old database schema, and what we needed to do to streamline our data model and overcome the tech debt that built up over the 7 years before I was hired. We live in a world where there are large economic rewards for the kinds of people who are willing to think about one thing, deeply, for weeks and weeks or even months and months, until finally understanding a problem better than anyone else.
I have to hope some young people eventually escape the attention-sucking technologies that try to sabotage their concentration, and eventually discover the satisfactions of thinking about complex problems, continuously, for months and months and months.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rablackburn 4y agoA very similar experience here (although not to quite the same level of success!). Even for simpler problems the ability to just sit with it for a few hours/days dramatically increases your ability to write quality solutions. Good code isn’t the most difficult or complex CS algorithms. It comes from thinking about the problem until you understand it so well that the code is almost self-evident. Of course, once you’ve thought things through so much it seems trivial to you - which I blame for the annoying verbal tick we all tend to get when explaining things where we say “Basically it’s…”, or “it’s really quite simple…” The real fun starts when you get to the problems that _do_ need weeks of thinking, and multiple prototypes to validate your theories. That’s when you start to feel like the “science” in “computer science” might not be misnomer :)
- lkrubner 4y ago"which I blame for the annoying verbal tick we all tend to get when explaining things where we say “Basically it’s…”, or “it’s really quite simple…”" Very true. I notice this in books on advanced deep-dives on graph theory, queue theory or neural nets, where the writers use the word "obviously" about things that are obviously not obvious.
- sanroot99 4y agoI can relate ,i had experienced this , after thinking for long time , solution just clicks , it's about intricate details
- imiric 4y agohttps://wiki.c2.com/?FeynmanAlgorithm https://wiki.c2.com/?FeynmanAlgorithm
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y agoyep. Another post of mine in this thread is pointing out that the less people do of this type of work, the more valuable it becomes because the work is necessary. Things are cyclical, and as it becomes obvious that sort of work has become more valuable, more people will start doing it.