3 ms·
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 he
by 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 agoYou 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 agoThat 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.
- golem14 11mo agofor those, llms are a godsend
- ant6n 11mo agoFor me the heavy technique is integer linear programming. I’m not a software developer anymore.
- jcmorrow 11mo agoI have both felt and seen this at work and I would add to this the meta-technique of binary search. Once it is added to your light and heavy technique you can solve what seems intractable at first glance faster than many people can even orient to the problem.
- philipov 11mo agoA related meta-technique is "starting at both ends and meeting in the middle". It's kind of like the inverse of binary search in some sense, isn't it?