4 ms·

I think this is true for engineers as well! I enjoy getting to know the "theme" of my favorite coworkers over the years. There was: * The fellow who always loo

by tibbar 11mo ago

I think this is true for engineers as well! I enjoy getting to know the "theme" of my favorite coworkers over the years. There was: * The fellow who always looked for the simplest hack possible. Give him the most annoying problem, he'd pause, go Wait a minute! and redefine it to have a very easy solution. He typed very slowly, but it didn't really matter. * The one who truly loved code itself. He would climb mountains to find the most elegant, idiomatic way to express any program. Used the very best practices for testing, libraries, all that. He typed very fast. * The former physicist who spent all his time reading obscure mailing lists on his favorite topics. His level of understanding of problems in his domains of interest was incredible. I could go on and on! It's such a fun taxonomy to collect. All of these friends were marvelous at solving their particular flavor of problem. As for myself, I like to think that my "trick" is to spend a long time poking at the structure of a problem. Eventually the solution I was looking for doesn't matter anymore, but the tools I developed along the way are pretty useful to everyone!

tibbar 11mo ago
Here are a few more. * The (brilliant) infrastructure engineer who described his modus operandi as 'I read stuff on Reddit and then try it out.' This engineer is now worth, as a conservative estimate, in the neighborhood of $50 million. So maybe more of us should be doing that. * Another infrastructure engineer, also very effective, who made a habit of booking an external training session (sometimes a series, weekly) for how to set up and integrate every piece of technology we used. * An engineer (this one is quite famous, and we have only interacted professionally a few times) who simply wrote the best comments in the world. Every method was adorned with a miniature essay exploring the problem to be solved, the tradeoffs, the performance, the bits left undone. I think about those comments quite often. As an addendum, though, I will say that the best engineers overall all shared a trait - they kept trying things until they got something working. That alone will take you pretty far.
- malux85 11mo ago
  “The most successful people have failed more times than you have tried”
  - tibbar 11mo ago
    Yes. I like to think that all of the people above could have solved most of the same problems, albeit in wonderfully different styles, but what really guaranteed success was a commitment to just keep at it. Edit to add: Still, the styles matter a lot! For one thing, they greatly influence which problems each person is interested in. Also, the style you solve problems with colors what your final output looks like, which is perhaps more obvious in engineering than in mathematics.
  - psychoslave 11mo ago
    Success is relative. If the goal is to never fail, never try is the best strategy. Also the most sure path to finish in the 1% wealthiest is to start in its network. When the game is set to make 99% of players considered as losers in its own terms, the best strategy to have fun at scale is to not care about the highlighted goal. Keep awareness of how rules actually apply, take shortcuts if it feels safe and preferable, always respect human dignity even when nasty players try to make a dirty move agaisnt you, don't let the lowering bare of hate infect one more player.
    - malux85 11mo ago
      >Success is relative. If the goal is to never fail, never try is the best strategy. This is dangerously not true, if you never try, then you are guaranteed to fail to live up to your potential, which is one of the greatest failures of all.
      - psychoslave 11mo ago
        Sorry if it wasn't clear and explicit enough, but this wasn't meant to be an advise to not try anything. Just an extrem example of what it might be logically concluded when starting from unsound grounds. Never fail is not a sound goal. That said living up to our potential is not very much better per se. Or at least it seems far too vague to be aptly considered. What forces are going to define what it is to tap relevantly in our potential?
        10mo ago
philipov 11mo ago
For me, it's tracing code/pipelines to figure out how a result was produced, typically in the context of that result being wrong somehow. Go To Definition is the most useful function in any editor. I'm always surprised by how frequently colleagues don't think to do this and are left helpless.
- tibbar 11mo ago
  This reminds me of my further theory that everyone needs one 'heavy' and one 'light' technique. The 'light' technique is something that often works well as a heuristic and can be an effective unit of iteration. The 'heavy' technique is something that you can fall back on in difficult cases, something that can reliably solve hard problems, even if it's slow. Sometimes the heavy technique is: just ask someone else. ;)
  - TeMPOraL 11mo ago
    > Sometimes the heavy technique is: just ask someone else. ;) For a lot of people I know, this is the light technique!
    - javawizard 11mo ago
      You jest, but that's how my sister gets through life, and it's always fascinated me. She's incredibly intelligent, but more importantly she's a phenomenal social networker. She always has someone to call to ask about any question or solve any problem that comes up in life, and she's great at connecting these people with each other when they have problems of their own - so they all want to help her with whatever she needs, just to gain access to a pool of people they themselves can talk to. What do you do with a skillset like that? I honestly don't know - something in leadership, probably, something where finding the right people and setting them to work is the most important skill of the job.
      - TeMPOraL 11mo ago
        That wasn't in jest. I worked in a place where this was a norm. Nothing was properly documented, instead everyone would just ask and answer questions on chats; somehow, this actually kept velocity high. Found it really hard to adjust to that. I'm the kind of person that prefers to research things on my own, find hard references and understand context. But there, this was the wrong approach.
huflungdung 11mo ago
[dead]

by tibbar 11mo ago

tibbar 11mo ago

Here are a few more. * The (brilliant) infrastructure engineer who described his modus operandi as 'I read stuff on Reddit and then try it out.' This engineer is now worth, as a conservative estimate, in the neighborhood of $50 million. So maybe more of us should be doing that. * Another infrastructure engineer, also very effective, who made a habit of booking an external training session (sometimes a series, weekly) for how to set up and integrate every piece of technology we used. * An engineer (this one is quite famous, and we have only interacted professionally a few times) who simply wrote the best comments in the world. Every method was adorned with a miniature essay exploring the problem to be solved, the tradeoffs, the performance, the bits left undone. I think about those comments quite often. As an addendum, though, I will say that the best engineers overall all shared a trait - they kept trying things until they got something working. That alone will take you pretty far.

malux85 11mo ago
“The most successful people have failed more times than you have tried”
- tibbar 11mo ago
  Yes. I like to think that all of the people above could have solved most of the same problems, albeit in wonderfully different styles, but what really guaranteed success was a commitment to just keep at it. Edit to add: Still, the styles matter a lot! For one thing, they greatly influence which problems each person is interested in. Also, the style you solve problems with colors what your final output looks like, which is perhaps more obvious in engineering than in mathematics.
- psychoslave 11mo ago
  Success is relative. If the goal is to never fail, never try is the best strategy. Also the most sure path to finish in the 1% wealthiest is to start in its network. When the game is set to make 99% of players considered as losers in its own terms, the best strategy to have fun at scale is to not care about the highlighted goal. Keep awareness of how rules actually apply, take shortcuts if it feels safe and preferable, always respect human dignity even when nasty players try to make a dirty move agaisnt you, don't let the lowering bare of hate infect one more player.
  - malux85 11mo ago
    >Success is relative. If the goal is to never fail, never try is the best strategy. This is dangerously not true, if you never try, then you are guaranteed to fail to live up to your potential, which is one of the greatest failures of all.
    - psychoslave 11mo ago
      Sorry if it wasn't clear and explicit enough, but this wasn't meant to be an advise to not try anything. Just an extrem example of what it might be logically concluded when starting from unsound grounds. Never fail is not a sound goal. That said living up to our potential is not very much better per se. Or at least it seems far too vague to be aptly considered. What forces are going to define what it is to tap relevantly in our potential?
      - 10mo ago

philipov 11mo ago

For me, it's tracing code/pipelines to figure out how a result was produced, typically in the context of that result being wrong somehow. Go To Definition is the most useful function in any editor. I'm always surprised by how frequently colleagues don't think to do this and are left helpless.

tibbar 11mo ago
This reminds me of my further theory that everyone needs one 'heavy' and one 'light' technique. The 'light' technique is something that often works well as a heuristic and can be an effective unit of iteration. The 'heavy' technique is something that you can fall back on in difficult cases, something that can reliably solve hard problems, even if it's slow. Sometimes the heavy technique is: just ask someone else. ;)
- TeMPOraL 11mo ago
  > Sometimes the heavy technique is: just ask someone else. ;) For a lot of people I know, this is the light technique!
  - javawizard 11mo ago
    You jest, but that's how my sister gets through life, and it's always fascinated me. She's incredibly intelligent, but more importantly she's a phenomenal social networker. She always has someone to call to ask about any question or solve any problem that comes up in life, and she's great at connecting these people with each other when they have problems of their own - so they all want to help her with whatever she needs, just to gain access to a pool of people they themselves can talk to. What do you do with a skillset like that? I honestly don't know - something in leadership, probably, something where finding the right people and setting them to work is the most important skill of the job.
    - TeMPOraL 11mo ago
      That wasn't in jest. I worked in a place where this was a norm. Nothing was properly documented, instead everyone would just ask and answer questions on chats; somehow, this actually kept velocity high. Found it really hard to adjust to that. I'm the kind of person that prefers to research things on my own, find hard references and understand context. But there, this was the wrong approach.

huflungdung 11mo ago

[dead]