[HN Gopher] Embrace the Grind
___________________________________________________________________
Embrace the Grind
Author : karl42
Score : 1040 points
Date : 2021-04-09 06:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (jacobian.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (jacobian.org)
| hobofan wrote:
| Going into off-topic: It's kind of funny that in the "Anatomy of
| a Scene" for "The Accountant" that is linked in the article they
| explain that for making the scene, they didn't have Ben Affleck
| write all the hand writing himself, but instead took a
| handwriting sample and used that to make a full wallpaper from it
| digitally.
|
| So they did exactly the opposite of embracing the grind and just
| simulated it.
| ttiurani wrote:
| This article is very on point and every team benefits
| tremendously from people who do just spend the time and sleigh
| the monsters.
|
| In a bigger team, a big second reason why these kinds of very
| uncomfortable tasks aren't done is that they also often don't
| produce immediate business value. You then have double
| resistance: the PO wants features from you and grinding is
| boring.
|
| The people who first get to a position where they _can_ spend the
| time and then _do_ spend the time (instead of doing the even more
| fun tasks), are worth their weight in gold.
| tome wrote:
| > sleigh the monsters
|
| I love this image
| morty_s wrote:
| > You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money
| and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be
| willing to invest.
|
| Ah, this is so good. I think you could swap "trick" for "talent"
| and this would read just as true.
| KerryJones wrote:
| Ooh, good call. I've had so many people tell me that I'm so
| talented in various areas that I was previously very
| _untalented_ (such as swing dancing). It was confusing to me
| for many years until I realized that the hundreds of hours I
| agonized over fundamentals paid off in ways that people thought
| I was inherently _talented_.
| hashkb wrote:
| And the difference is what? If I have no "talent" on guitar but
| I practice for thousands of hours until I can "trick" you into
| thinking you're listening to Hendrix...
| hiisukun wrote:
| Read it anyway and agree that someone taking care of a task that
| requires technical understanding, but is in itself repetitive and
| time consuming is often a critical part of some business process.
| Many times I've witnessed such issues grow over time, slowly and
| surely reaching the stage mentioned in the piece.
|
| Every time, people up the chain have been aware but haven't
| acted, when usually the solution is (unavoidably) making the time
| and space available for a capable person to do it, and having
| then be incentivised/rewarded enough to proceed.
|
| Off topic: I was hoping based on the title for an unusually
| technical skateboarding article.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Absolutely. I go through pain stalling detail to automate my
| laptop via Ansible. Spent many many weekends wasting time on
| small details that most people would not even bother to think
| about let alone burn hours working on it... but now, I have an
| environment that I can appreciate as magic. Although in the only
| person who sees the reveal, I'm happy that I get to be my own
| magician
| igammarays wrote:
| My personal magic trick is learning to speak almost fluently in a
| second language (Russian) in about a year. However, when people
| ask me how I do it, they quickly get turned off when they realize
| it's just a grind. You need to know about 20,000 words in any
| language to sound fluent, and there is just no way around brute-
| force memorization. And if you're serious about learning, you
| need to keep track of how many words you know, and add new words
| every day, and have a system for review (Anki). Although
| memorization alone won't teach you a language, it is a necessary
| but not a sufficient condition. In the beginning it is poring
| through grammar books and practicing basic concepts until they
| become second-nature. During the intermediate stages it is taking
| thousands of native-spoken complete long sentences with audio and
| building Anki card decks and memorizing them. Yup, memorizing
| complete sentences with audio. For advanced stages it is
| laboriously poring over classical literature (Dostoevsky) while
| having a repertoire of academic dictionaries on hand, manually
| recording every new word and brute-forcing every sentence, until
| one day the language opens up to you like magic.
| WhateverHappns wrote:
| > You need to know about 20,000 words in any language to sound
| fluent
|
| Are you sure about this? AFAIK the use of words in a language
| isn't distributed evenly, but according to a Pareto
| distribution. Thus, you can speak _okay_ knowing only ~500
| words, I believe. It won't sound perfect but you'll speak and
| understand pretty decently.
|
| I once wrote a python script which read words from a .txt file
| full of french words with their english counterparts and then
| displayed the french word, waiting for you to type your guess.
| It gave instant feedback which I thought important for learning
| anything. The file contained the 500 most used french words
| according to large book surveys.
|
| This was in my last year of school and it saved me during tests
| where I had to write coherent sentences in french.
|
| Edit: Here it is! Zipf's law is what it's
| called.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law) and here's
| an interesting video about it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE
| ramdsc wrote:
| I would argue this is predicated on others not knowing your doing
| on the days leading to the delivery of the result.
|
| This is fine for a magic trick, but I think the work example may
| be more difficult to realise if there is accountability. It'd be
| magic if you can deliver an extraordinary value per time unit
| spent.
|
| I also think there is challenge and beauty in completing
| something which you consider tedious. There is opportunity for
| exercising self-restraint and speed of delivery.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I have to wonder what magicians think of the 80/20 rule. The
| trick probably needs all 100% and the grind it takes to get
| there.
| im3w1l wrote:
| The 80/20 rule gets interesting when there is competition in
| the mix. Why should I see an 80% good magician who spent 20% of
| the time, when I can see the 100% one? Spending 20% of the time
| thus gets you ~0% of the money.
|
| The same actually goes for tech too, but here the answer is
| often that the 100% product isn't on the market yet, and by the
| time it is finished the need for it no longer exists.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Here's a tip: if you can put a number on some part of your grind,
| and you have some colleagues who are competitive, with each other
| or with the metric itself (i.e. "can't stop, the warning count is
| not ZERO!!1!) then you can get help grinding.
|
| I joined a team with 2000 compiler warnings, then set up CI. The
| "compiled, but with warnings" orange box stayed orange, even as I
| started killing warnings a few at a time. Then I put a "grep warn
| | wc" in the CI and another colleague got into the game and drove
| the warning count to zero a few days later.
|
| I immediately checked in -Werr and we never had a compiler
| warning problem again.
|
| Grind, but have a plan to stop grinding.
| 5cott0 wrote:
| Everybody's other favorite German word: "sitzfleisch".
| didibus wrote:
| Maybe this is a naive question, but why couldn't you just pick a
| bug at random, fix it, and move to the next? You said eventually
| you worked through all issues in about a year of time. How did
| having the issues prioritized from the get go really mattered, if
| you ended up closing them all anyways?
|
| If I had to guess, the magic trick was simply investing in
| tackling all the bugs one after another for a year until they're
| all closed out. Maybe you needed to triage them all to convince
| people to invest in doing this?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| My guess is that the noise of new bug reports was
| incapacitating the team. You can't fix anything if each few
| minutes somebody comes to complain about a new problem.
|
| But with the bugs organized he could filter the repeated
| reports and let people work. As a bonus, he could direct people
| into solving the largest troublemakers first too, so things get
| quieter faster.
| paxys wrote:
| The effort to impact ratio is wildly different among bugs in a
| large backlog. Sometimes a 10-minute single line change will
| produce a massive benefit for all users. Other times a
| developer can slog on a bug for weeks only to realize that no
| one cares about the fix anymore. You want to start tackling the
| ones in the first category before spending time on the second.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| It's a good question. i.e. if it takes a year to fix all bugs
| then why does order matter?
|
| The factor he did not mention is that there are unnamed people
| who see certain bugs and when they see those bugs, they judge
| the quality of the software to be poor.
|
| Thus, for human reasons you must fix certain bugs first because
| it makes certain people feel that the software quality is not
| poor.
|
| OR because certain bugs prevent the system actually doing what
| it is meant to do .... thus the bugs that result in the system
| failing to serve its purpose must be done first.
| rabidrat wrote:
| Human psychology is a thing. If you point a team at a growing
| pile of bugs that no one has wrapped their head around, then
| the team will feel demoralized, overwhelmed, and unmotivated.
| But if someone does wrangle the bug list and produce a plan
| and strategy for tackling them, then there is hope and
| mission and maybe you can even get buyin from management for
| more resources--maybe not headcount, but even just easing the
| roadmap for a year in pursuit of Quality.
|
| The difference between "nobody has gone through this entire
| list" and "somebody has gone through this entire list" is
| huge.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Partly, yeah.
|
| If priority isn't clear, you spend hours on a bug, realize it's
| minor, realize the fix is difficult...and extrapolate that to
| the remainder of them. Morale sucks.
|
| If someone can stomach sorting through them, then at least you
| know you're working on the most important bug at any given
| time.
| thrower123 wrote:
| Quite often what happens in these cases is that people get
| paralyzed looking at the list of open things, and rather than
| just digging in and doing something to chip away at the pile,
| there are meetings and discussions and noise which generates a
| lot of heat and sound and stress, but doesn't actually make any
| positive progress towards resolving the issues.
|
| An meanwhile things keep getting thrown on the pile.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| It might be investing in tackling it, but I would guess that,
| more than that, it's that _one person_ was tasked with doing
| it.
|
| The problem with tedious grind work is, if it's a communal
| responsibility, then everyone will just sit around waiting for
| someone else to take care of it.
| mplewis wrote:
| Some bugs are more important to fix than others. If you rank
| each bug by effort and impact, you want to fix the high-impact,
| low-effort bugs first, and the low-impact, high-effort bugs
| last (if ever).
| barbiturique wrote:
| That's my tactic to blend-in in a engineering team and gain some
| respect / credibility. I try to find the most boring, utterly
| broken part, that nobody wants to touch... and I sink time into
| it.
|
| Once I made it somewhat usable, I document it.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think in some ways this strategy, which I also employ, is
| rejecting the grind, rather than embracing it.
|
| Generally I have coworkers who embrace the grind - One group
| happily show up to do some mind numbingly manual and error
| prone process, even going beyond apologizing into _protecting_
| it. That 's one form of job security, but it leeches talent
| from the company. The other group abhors it and will try to do
| literally anything else to avoid going through it, including
| making all new things that turn out to be almost as bad (and
| never quite managing to get rid of the original).
|
| Going through the grind a couple times and making sure that
| nobody else has to go through it ever again is acknowledging
| the grind, and then doing something about it.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| Important distinction you're making.
|
| For me the litmus test is documentation.
|
| Make a active effort to at least explain in plain English was
| the grind is and what it's is purpose, then having a stab at
| documenting the steps.
|
| It's never a one time thing. Most likely you need to do it a
| few time manually. You won't get all the steps right, and
| automating it will likely be a tall order; otherwise it would
| be done already.
|
| But like you said I encounter groups of engineers that
| transform the grind into a cottage industry. They don't
| publish their knowledge, they are the expert on it and one of
| the few group that can execute on those story. It's
| depressing.
|
| And you demasked me: by making it better and more documented
| I want to kill the grind. Or at least offload it to another
| group. ( BA, users, OPS running grind.sh )
| mdpye wrote:
| I hadn't realised it til now, but I do the same. It's a really
| great way to get started, because it tends to coincide with not
| having yet gained a broad range of responsibilities pulling you
| in different directions. You become a domain expert in
| something (which was probably lacking across the team) and
| peers appreciate it.
|
| After they've seen that, you organically start getting invited
| to all kinds of more interesting projects and discussions.
| hinkley wrote:
| One of my 'secrets of my success' moments was realizing that
| one of the grind areas I reject has to do with the all of the
| processes of building the application. You stare at that
| stuff long enough and you might not know how the application
| does what it does, but you have a pretty good idea of _where_
| it does them.
|
| And inasmuch as you've also improved the testing situation,
| you've also created a system that allows you to iterate
| faster, which you are intimately familiar with, allowing you
| to poke at the system in a way that provides you feedback on
| your hypotheses. Meaning you can learn about the rest of the
| system on your own schedule instead of being hand-fed bits of
| tribal knowledge (which often turns out to no longer be
| entirely correct anyway).
| piva00 wrote:
| I don't like to chime in with "seconding" on HN but I had the
| same eureka moment about it. I have definitely always behaved
| like that and it was just a natural and organic way to start
| in any team or job.
|
| I got a bit shocked because I realised this behaviour
| repeated this past year when I changed jobs. I became a
| domain expert in an obscure part of the codebase and have
| been documenting it and sharing the knowledge for a while
| now.
| russellendicott wrote:
| This strategy is common in any skilled labor trade. For
| example, joining a carpentry team the first thing you have to
| do is tote lumber to earn respect.
| BossingAround wrote:
| Same here. I like doing things nobody wants to do, especially
| when I'm new in the team.
|
| The problem I've identified is that you're then the go-to
| person for the task you did in the beginning.
|
| Example: You need to figure out how to deploy X. This is poorly
| documented and nobody knows how to do it.
|
| Action: You read the code, understand what needs to be done,
| deploy it. Then, you document it. Finally, you create fairly
| basic but working automation for future deployment.
|
| Result: Every time there's a need for redeploy, even when the
| code/procedure hasn't changed, you're the person the team
| immediately asks to do it. After all, you've automated it,
| shouldn't take too long, right?
| mdpye wrote:
| It happens at first. But point to the docs you wrote.
| Politely, but firmly, every time. People actually prefer
| being empowered to do it themselves, so they will pick it up,
| it just not our default when we're unsure.
| Too wrote:
| Except redeploying is something that always must be done
| last minute in a hurry because the last version deployed
| has a bug that will explode any moment and launch-demo is
| approaching, so managements blood hounds are pushing for
| someone who really knows how to do it to make sure it's
| done swift and proper!
|
| 15 minutes earlier corporate sent out an email about their
| values and how important knowledge sharing is! Right after
| deployment is done the work on documenting or automating
| the process is put at the bottom of the backlog since it's
| highly unlikely we have to do this in a such a rush again!
|
| Make sure you have some kind of handover agreement in
| writing that you can point to when this happens. It sucks
| to be the "i told you so" guy but in situations like this
| you really need to protect your own back and as you say be
| very firm on not doing the job next time.
| kache_ wrote:
| Pair with someone else and have them do it, and be explicit
| about your intention to share the knowledge.
| pilchard123 wrote:
| Never become the guy who can fix the printer.
| trentnix wrote:
| Good stuff.
|
| I've found that, as a manager, forcing the grind is also a
| useful tactic to get a new team member involved. Assign a
| challenging task that addresses a shared pain point and that
| requires some measure of tedium and lots of effort.
|
| Not only will the completed work result in a new team member
| being accepted and respected (as you've experienced), the new
| team member will also develop a sense of value and ownership in
| the project. The faster new team members get through that
| period where they feel like an outsider to where they feel like
| they are contributing value, the better.
| chrchang523 wrote:
| Alternate framing: be prepared to "Do Things that Don't Scale"
| (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html ) when your organization is small.
| gkop wrote:
| Not a fan of pg, but his schlep essay is a better alternate
| framing of this article (if my reading comprehension is
| accurate...): http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html
| chrchang523 wrote:
| I had forgotten that the schlep essay was distinct.
| Interesting that they don't refer to each other.
| leeoniya wrote:
| ah yes, his own submarine topic ;)
|
| http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
| KerryJones wrote:
| Out of curiosity, why not a fan of PG?
| [deleted]
| WindyLakeReturn wrote:
| Unlike many comments here, this doesn't resonate with me. Grinds
| have always had some part that benefits from automation. Rarely
| can the whole thing be automated in any reasonable timeframe, but
| individuals parts can easily be. Often the magic is that those
| around me don't even realize that you can partially automate it
| so they end up thinking I did it all by hand.
|
| There is a trap in over thinking the automation. Sometimes the
| partially manual solution takes an hour full while automation
| takes 8. But I'm failing to think of a time in my career where a
| grind was repetitive and fully manual but not improved by some
| trick of automation. Notepad++, regex, and your language of
| choice builds a very powerful set of automation for virtual
| problems. For the enhanced suite, toss in a library to get data
| to and from excel and access and another to navigate and scrape
| HTML pages.
| tarunkotia wrote:
| Few months ago I posted on HN asking the same thing. The author
| addresses it pretty well with a good example.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25010373
| longformworks wrote:
| That was an enjoyable read and a gentle reminder to avoid the
| shiny tools and just get to work. Thanks for sharing.
| courtf wrote:
| The real magic behind that bug triage anecdote isn't the tedious
| work it took to get there, it's that a year later anyone noticed,
| gave a shit, or gave credit where it was due. In 9/10
| organizations, such outcomes never materialize because no one is
| working for the common good, nor cares about silly little things
| like old bugs. Often there simply isn't time. You are instead
| being yanked from meeting to meeting, thrashing from one poorly
| defined management prerogative to another, because no one outside
| the code base has any understanding of what it actually takes to
| build a stable product nor do they really care.
| MacroChip wrote:
| Every time I hear about the "Three virtues", I always think
| "Well, there's 'laziness' and there's _laziness_ ". I know when I
| or someone else is being 'lazy' or _lazy_. Same thing for the
| other virtues. This is why we appreciate those who embrace the
| grind.
| anm89 wrote:
| I thought this was from jacobin.com and I was very confused
| eecc wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Here I am, looking at a Salesforce integration to Dynamo.
|
| Several attempts at elegance thwarted by the trashyness of the
| AWS libraries. The Salesforce data-model a pile of hundreds of
| ad-hoc fields.
|
| I wrote the most Java1.4 code I ever wrote, copy-pasted the
| hundreds of fields into a spreadsheet and am slogging through the
| list picking what to keep and what to ignore.
|
| It will get done by pure force of labor, and the customer will be
| disappointed by "what took you so long"
|
| Sigh
| posharma wrote:
| This is such an amazing and inspiring article. Thanks for writing
| and sharing.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| When I joined a mentoring program targeted at recent college
| grads, I expected to be teaching things like interview prep,
| resume writing, negotiation skills, communication skills, and how
| to deliver results in a workplace.
|
| For about half of the mentees, that's roughly true. However, for
| the other half much of my mentoring ends up being about time
| management, following through on commitments, and putting in the
| effort required to get a job done. A surprising number of young
| people are graduating college without ever having had to _work_
| any job. It 's particularly difficult for talented coders who
| breezed through easy CS programs until they land in a work
| environment where tasks are challenging, expectations are high,
| and the only way to get things done is to sit down and put in the
| effort.
|
| One of the best skills anyone can learn is how to sit down,
| focus, and get work done. In my experience, it's increasing
| challenging to convince young people that this is an acquired
| skill that they can practice and develop. There's a growing
| perception that traits like work ethic, focus, and motivation are
| fixed attributes that one is born with (or without) rather than
| abilities that are developed over time. It's frustrating to watch
| some mentees map out meticulous diet and exercise programs to
| improve their physical strength, but then turn around and tell me
| that they're only capable of coding for 2 hours per day as a sort
| of fixed upper limit. Like everything, the ability to work and
| focus can be developed over time with practice and dedication.
| It's worth it.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| I'm not gonna disagree but I want to add a couple things.
|
| 1. Kids with ADHD probably can't develop executive function as
| fast or as far as other kids. I'm pretty sure I have it, it
| explains the repeated performance reports of "You're good when
| you apply yourself and useless when you don't." Unfortunately I
| struggle to _choose_ to apply myself.
|
| Willpower doesn't seem to come naturally to me, even after 10
| years as a professional programmer. Adderall didn't help - I
| had to take it in the morning, after breakfast. So I was still
| late for work, because eating breakfast is not something I'm
| good at, and I couldn't start my day until I had finished
| breakfast. Then after work the stimulants wore off and I felt
| like shit and reverted to my normal do-what-i-want executive
| function. But it made me feel normal without caffeine.
|
| So I quit the Adderall and just cutting caffeinated soda with
| non-caff every morning, as though I was lowering my dose on a
| prescription. So far it's working. I still never clean my room,
| which is status quo for the last 20 years, and work is still
| pretty easy. The phrase "idiot savant" comes to mind. All I
| want is for people to stop thinking that I'm doing this on
| purpose. I don't enjoy constantly feeling like a moron and
| being behind on simple household chores despite making decent
| money at a job that is considered (by other people) to be
| difficult.
|
| And that might even be the case for the kids with detailed
| exercise programs. I don't exercise at all because it's not my
| interest. I program, because it is my interest. Kinda like how
| autistic people can't choose their special interests. I pity
| the kids whose interest is exercise but are trying to force
| themselves through a CS program into a career track they can't
| possibly do.
|
| Dr. Russell Barkely goes into some detail in a 3-hour talk
| about ADHD here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSfCdBBqNXY If
| anyone thinks I don't have ADHD because I sat through a 3-hour
| talk about psychology, maybe they need to watch it, too.
|
| "There's a growing perception that traits like work ethic,
| focus, and motivation are fixed attributes that one is born
| with (or without) rather than abilities that are developed over
| time."
|
| What if they are, though? What if it's like height, where
| genetics sets a range and environment picks a point in that
| range? If I had starved as a child, I would be shorter than I
| am now. But if I had eaten more, I would not be taller. I'm
| about the same height as my parents are.
|
| There's a hypothesis that the current age of mass distraction
| (TV, phones, Internet, etc.) doesn't _cause_ ADHD, but it does
| _aggravate_ it. I don't know if the studies bear it out, but I
| really want this to be true. What if it's something that's
| latent in the human genome, and the fact that we can profit off
| of exploiting it nowadays just brought it to the surface? In
| early centuries, if I had nothing to do but my work, maybe I
| would find it easy to just "accept boredom" and do my work
| anyway.
|
| 2. I'm not sure how many employers would have hired me in
| college. I get the sense that unskilled labor just isn't worth
| much anymore, and pushing kids to get more education is kicking
| the can down the road since, as you pointed out, nobody wants
| to hire an adult with zero work experience whether they're 18,
| 22, or even 30.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _All I want is for people to stop thinking that I 'm doing
| this on purpose._
|
| Somewhat jokingly: maybe you _should_ start doing it on
| purpose, and call it "prioritizing what matters." If you can
| afford to hire someone to clean, do that.
|
| But seriously, this sentence really resonated with me. When I
| was in my teens and early 20s, a lot of things I couldn't
| change were being labeled as intentional laziness or
| sometimes drug abuse (I was in reality coding all night
| because highschool sucked, and never even touched so much as
| alcohol until my late 20s).
| mwlp wrote:
| Consider looking into a prescription for Jornay. It's taken
| at night and kicks in ~10 hours later, and will normally last
| me the entire work day. I've tried just about everything,
| using Ritalin for the longest, and I've found Jornay to be
| the least intrusive when it comes to my attitude, diet and
| work.
| developer93 wrote:
| I always had problems sticking to anything, I'd get
| enthusiastic for a month or two and then I'd get bored. Never
| could tidy my room etc. Not saying I've anything as severe as
| adhd but I had trouble with self discipline. At the start of
| the year I decided to try to develop a good habit, any habit,
| to persuade myself I could do it. I decided to exercise. I
| spent the first 6 weeks just with the principal of do 1
| situp, or whatever. Something I could do without any effort,
| at home, to remove any excuse not to do it. I made a tick on
| the calendar the days I did it so I could see my progress, I
| praised myself for completion, and I made it the only
| priority. Don't worry about tidying or eating healthy or
| whatever, just do that situp every day. After about 6 weeks I
| was getting out of bed and immediately doing the situp
| without thinking, I started a proper routine like 10 minutes,
| still easy. It'll be 3 months next week, so I'm hoping it's
| actually stuck. When I get to 6 months I want to start adding
| something like filling the dishwasher before bed. I'm 37 and
| this is the first time in my life I can say I've been able to
| do something I'm not obligated to do and don't want to do for
| a long period.
| mattm wrote:
| There's a book called "Tiny Habits" which goes into this
| more.
|
| I've also tried to use this when building my own habits and
| it's been fairly successful. When most people want to start
| something they get all excited about it and jump in with
| both feet. And then they burnout and stop. It's the New
| Years Resolution gym effect. After New Years, gyms are full
| of people who set a goal to exercise 5 days per week. After
| 3 weeks the gym is back to normal as all those people burnt
| out and realized they couldn't keep it up.
|
| The brain needs time to adjust to change. I'll start out
| with something really simple like exercising one day per
| week for 15 minutes. Then after a few weeks when it starts
| to feel routine, I'll add another day and wait a few weeks.
| Eventually I find that I reach this equilibrium point where
| the time I'm putting in is enough and it's easy to maintain
| that habit.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| ADHD is a difficult topic to discuss on HN. I'll preface this
| by saying that I'm not doubting your situation, or any other
| commenter's particular situation. This [section of my]
| comment is meant to be general:
|
| In the context of this mentoring group, we go through phases
| where almost _everyone_ suspects they have ADHD for various
| reasons. This is usually triggered by one of two things:
| Either someone shares an online "Do you have ADHD quiz?"
| that is sponsored by Takeda or another ADHD medication
| manufacturer, or a front-page Reddit infographic
| misrepresents ADHD as something like "Do you some times
| forget people's names? Maybe you have ADHD!"
|
| The reality is that ADHD is very challenging for those that
| have it, but the pop-culture definition of ADHD has become so
| vague that people who _don 't_ have ADHD are increasingly
| convinced that common life experiences are symptoms of ADHD.
|
| Focusing is hard. Studying is hard. The Grind is hard. It's
| normal to struggle to focus, but it's even more of a struggle
| for those with ADHD. However, having to work to focus for
| extended periods of time, in and of itself, is not an ADHD
| symptom, it's just life. ADHD is a much more severe
| impediment.
|
| (Again, not referring to the parent comment): Anyone curious
| should avoid self-diagnosis and seek a trusted professional.
| Ideally not a family doctor who simply writes prescriptions
| on request, but someone who can recommend self-guided therapy
| programs and combination treatment. Adderall isn't all it's
| made out to be, especially after the initial motivating
| effects wear off and you're left with the realities of long-
| term stimulant use, which are nowhere near as exciting as the
| first few doses.
|
| > What if they are, though? What if it's like height, where
| genetics sets a range and environment picks a point in that
| range? If I had starved as a child, I would be shorter than I
| am now. But if I had eaten more, I would not be taller. I'm
| about the same height as my parents are.
|
| Genetics and upbringing may set a baseline for focus and
| motivation, but those traits are demonstrably not set in
| stone. Contrary to your example, diet _does_ have a
| significant influence on height, but it 's not the sole
| determinant.
|
| Height isn't a good example, though. Consider something like
| running capacity. Some people are naturally more athletic
| than others, but barring severe disorders, everyone can
| develop more running capacity through training. Someone who
| gives up and never tries to increase their capacity may not
| believe this, but it's true. An average person can't simply
| work their way up to competing with Olympic sprinters blessed
| with perfect genetics, but they can significantly increase
| their running capacity from baseline by putting in the work.
|
| Likewise, attention is a learned skill. Some have more
| baseline attention span than others, but it _can_ be
| increased through training and practice. ADHD modulates this,
| but it doesn 't prevent practice from helping. If anything,
| people with ADHD need to invest more effort into training
| their attention spans than those without.
|
| > Willpower doesn't seem to come naturally to me, even after
| 10 years as a professional programmer. Adderall didn't help
|
| Adderall and other stimulants don't provide willpower,
| contrary to popular belief. Only people without tolerance
| will experience a temporary motivation boost from stimulants.
| This effect diminishes as tolerance sets in, which is one of
| several reasons why drugs like Adderall aren't successful for
| treating disorders like depression.
|
| Willpower is another learned skill. Expecting it to come
| naturally won't work forever. You have to learn to embrace
| the grind, do the work, and power through the urges to give
| up and do something easier if you want to get anywhere.
|
| > I don't exercise at all because it's not my interest.
|
| The reality is that the things we need to do aren't always
| going to line up with the things we like to do. You're lucky
| that you have a natural interest in programming, but you
| can't expect every necessary activity to have a natural
| interest behind it. Some amount of physical activity is
| essentially required for a healthy existence. You may not be
| interested in it, but that doesn't exempt you from requiring
| it and it certainly doesn't mean you won't benefit from it.
|
| Some times the things we have to do in life aren't
| immediately enjoyable. It's on us to find ways to make them
| more enjoyable (e.g. find a sport you like, or take up
| walking), and some times we just have to do the unenjoyable
| thing for the sake of progress.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Well, I guess that like many things, it's a spectrum, and
| mental health professionals just had to put the limit
| _somewhere_ ?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| IMO any chance of there being a constrained and clearcut
| definition of ADHD went out the window in affluent
| communities as soon as they started giving people test
| extensions if they were diagnosed with it.
|
| I say that as someone who definitely has something
| neurodivergent going on, as I do not know other people who
| get excited and have to pace around the house flapping
| their hands.
| fartcannon wrote:
| Your comment makes me think of when they first designed jet
| cockpits for pilots. It was expensive to modify the planes,
| so they designed it to the 'average' person.
|
| The result is that no one fit in it.
|
| Expectations that other people can perform like you do if
| they just put their mind to it is so blind to the reality
| of human experience that it's hard to respond.
|
| https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-
| air-...
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Expectations that other people can perform like you do
| if they just put their mind to it is so blind to the
| reality of human experience that it's hard to respond.
|
| I never claimed that was the case. In fact, I
| specifically cited examples where no amount of hard work
| could close the gap to top performers.
|
| I wasn't suggesting that everyone can perform equally if
| they just work hard enough. The point is that attention,
| focus, and work ethic are not static traits of an
| individual. Yes, we pivot around certain biological
| attributes, but that doesn't mean they're fixed.
|
| We all benefit from putting in the work to improve our
| attention spans and other learned behaviors, regardless
| of our starting baseline.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| It's also a mistake to think that people are static. We
| can improve ourselves through the expenditure of effort.
| The reality is like the parent said: there are limits to
| everybody's abilities, but you'll probably have to work
| hard as hell to reach yours (not targeting you
| personally, the general case "you"). If you believe that
| your present abilities are all you'll ever have then
| you're wasting what could be tremendous potential out of
| false self imposed limitations.
| fartcannon wrote:
| Who said anything about not improving, the parent comment
| believes the ADHD sufferer is simply not working hard
| enough.
|
| He's trying to show him where his bootstraps are.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| People who are currently struggling can fall into a self
| limiting mindset. I can attest to that from personal
| experience. I don't have ADHD, but I can imagine that
| having it might make you believe that you couldn't
| improve your attention at all. The reality is that you
| might just be able to, even though it would probably much
| harder than for the general population - in the same way
| that an underweight person would find it harder to build
| muscle than someone of average build.
|
| From my perspective it's a positive message, not finger
| wagging at the impaired.
| nullsense wrote:
| On the contrary, one of the biggest sources of suffering
| in an ADHDers life is constantly being pounded with this
| very message your entire life despite trying your
| absolute best.
|
| When the vast, vast majority of people are capable of a
| baseline far above yours, they hold you to their
| standards mercilessly.
|
| The number of times I've been reduced to tears by this
| conversation. I'm telling you. This is by far the worst
| part of it all.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I'm familiar with the experience - not directly from
| ADHD, but from my own issues. Trying desperately to keep
| on top of things, running as fast as you can just to stay
| in the same place. I'm not saying that "ADHD is easy,
| just don't be lazy lol", but that you may still be able
| to do a little better than yesterday if you practice the
| right skills. I'm in no position to hold someone with
| ADHD to baseline standards, but I would encourage anyone
| to just try to be a little better than yesterday, every
| day.
|
| There's also an awful lot of people, as the parent said,
| who don't have ADHD but still struggle with {focus,
| attention, willpower} from just not having used it. Those
| people should definitely be trying to focus harder and
| shouldn't be led down the path of "focus is
| innate/unchangeable".
| nullsense wrote:
| You might, and you might not.
|
| The incentives for me to be better are already as strong
| as they can possibly be. Not to screw up my health worse,
| not to lose my marriage, not to lose my job, not to make
| rash financial decisions. The amount of effort I put into
| this already is just exhausting.
|
| I'm glad I recognise these days the times when the car is
| out of gas and people are telling me "if you just turned
| the key a little harder, maybe the car would turn on" and
| ignore them.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| At the end of the day, every individual knows themselves
| better than anybody else does. I'm just relaying that it
| helped me, even though I was trying really hard to stay
| afloat and struggling to focus on most aspects of my
| life, to just practice focusing - working harder wouldn't
| have done anything because I didn't have the focus to
| apply to hard work in the first place. I have no idea
| whether people with ADHD can improve their focus, but
| there's people out there who think they might be because
| they can't focus but aren't, and don't realise that focus
| is a skill you can practice.
| nullsense wrote:
| The flipside being there are people who are, and it
| doesn't cross their mind that they might be, and they're
| spinning their wheels consuming productivity porn in the
| hopes of finally cracking the code.
|
| I do agree with what you're saying btw. I think you can
| and should try to improve things, no matter which side of
| the coin you're on. The crux of the issue is that it's
| very, very important to understand which side you're on
| because the advice and strategies are fundamentally very
| different.
|
| I'm not at all worried about the people who think they
| might be ADHD. They fall into 3 camps. 1) people who
| suspect they have it and it's a life changing revelation
| and they seek treatment ASAP, 2) people who suspect they
| have it for a long time and are right but for some reason
| or other never do anything about it and 3) people who
| don't have it, and don't understand it well enough to
| realise they actually don't have it
|
| Group 1 sorts itself pretty quick. The trouble is
| realising you're in group 1!!!! This is why from time to
| time I talk about it here if its mentioned. Once it
| clicks it's unbelievable. I'm very interested in helping
| those people as it's pretty life changing.
|
| Group 2 I mourn for. But at least they can recognise what
| advice and strategies apply and understanding why their
| life is how it is. Knowing is half the battle.
|
| Group 3 I'm not worried about at all. It can be such a
| devastating problem that when it clicks and you can
| finally connect the dots, you sort of know. For this
| group the dots will be too few and far between though
| naturally for everyone there will be some and they'll hum
| and haw about it and mull it over in their mind before
| forgetting about it altogether. If you genuinely think
| you have then you must feel as if there is and always has
| been something quite wrong with your life. Though you may
| simply identify with the list of symptoms because it's
| somewhat vague, and just be unsure as to what it really
| means. If you actually think it could be an answer to
| solving a problem in your life you will go for an
| evaluation. If you don't think it's an answer to solving
| a problem in your life then almost certainly you don't
| have it and will just forget about it. You may go for an
| evaluation and it comes back negative but unearthed a
| different problem at the cause of some real troubles for
| you, and that's ok, as it's a differential diagnosis for
| exactly that reason.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| As someone who suffers from ADHD, the simplicity of this
| comment really cuts to the heart of it for me: many words
| are written by PragmaticPup tiptoeing around what is
| essentially a directive to "work harder".
|
| Unless you're living with ADHD, you really have no
| business handing out such directives. I was a hardcore
| meditator for _years_ , arguably the crucible of mind
| training -- spent months of silent, directed attention in
| monasteries -- and despite blowing open the doors to some
| peak states, complete equanimity with all phenomena, and
| insight into some of the fundamental mechanics of desire
| and resistance, I was unable to hold any kind of job at
| all before I bit the bullet and medicated.
|
| The decades of suffering I experienced because everyone
| around me was pushing this toxic narrative that ADHD was
| overdiagnosed and most likely a schema of my own failures
| could have been avoided if my parents just took a hard
| look at me and took me to a psychiatrist.
|
| Armchair psychiatrists of Hacker News: please stop this
| irresponsible and dangerous public criticism of your
| interpretation of mental illness or the state of
| psychiatry.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| You said "This comment is meant to be general." and then
| quoted and replied to things the commenter shared about
| themselves.
| nullsense wrote:
| As someone diagnosed with ADHD a year ago now, the GPs
| description of their life experiences are pretty textbook
| ADHD.
|
| And things like this:
|
| "Some times the things we have to do in life aren't
| immediately enjoyable. It's on us to find ways to make them
| more enjoyable (e.g. find a sport you like, or take up
| walking), and some times we just have to do the unenjoyable
| thing for the sake of progress."
|
| Are just insanely tone deaf things people without ADHD wind
| up saying to ADHDers because they have the capacity to do
| those things and haven't experienced not having the
| capacity to do them.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| If that is enough to be "textbook ADHD" then the
| definition is even broader than I thought. Being
| performant when you're focused but having trouble getting
| there, having difficulty getting basic chores done, etc.?
| That's just many people in life.
|
| Ultimately, I don't really trust the psychology field to
| determine what is a mental illness and what isn't. It
| wasn't that long ago that being gay was in the DSM.
| nullsense wrote:
| The definition is indeed more specific than that. Don't
| be silly. The part that is incredibly relatable there is
| 1) life long inability to get your shit together (not
| just periodic or some of the time), and 2) a deep seated
| emotional anguish from being berated by people your whole
| life for not doing what you're supposed to when you're
| supposed to.
|
| It does terrible things to your health, finances,
| employment and relationships.
|
| My difficulty with basic chores almost cost me my
| marriage, and I spent north of 1000 nights in the last 5
| years doing the dishes at 2am dead last before going to
| bed because that was the only circumstance under which I
| could get myself to do them.
|
| I think most people misunderstand it greatly because
| their frame is "can't focus" but that's pretty nebulous.
| A better frame is "having a disastrously shitty batting
| average on choosing what to direct your attention towards
| or away from". The chronic understimulation leads to
| engaging predominantly in things that provide enough
| stimulation, which often aren't what you're supposed to
| be doing, and getting locked in that mode because
| anything else pales in comparison so switching away feels
| almost painful.
|
| Best metaphor I've come up with to describe the
| difference is imagine you had to live your whole life
| with no shoes. Imagine all the surfaces you've ever had
| to walk across and how that would have been without
| shoes. You'd be fairly reluctant to make transitions
| between certain surfaces due to the discomfort. So the
| routes you take would change. Some routes would lead you
| to not wind up at your intended destination due to
| needing to walk on a comfortable enough path. You'd
| always take longer than other people to get places.
|
| Also it's not a mental illness, it's a neurodevelopmental
| disorder.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I think being able to sit down and do work is more about
| removing distractions than improving focus.
|
| Also, I'm curious about these statements:
|
| > _There 's a growing perception that traits like work ethic,
| focus, and motivation are fixed attributes that one is born
| with (or without) rather than abilities that are developed over
| time_
|
| Really? Who believes this and why?
|
| > _but then turn around and tell me that they 're only capable
| of coding for 2 hours per day as a sort of fixed upper limit_
|
| Do they give you a reason? This seems pretty odd.
| closeparen wrote:
| Experience? When I find that I have been focusing for many
| hours on a complex task, it is usually something I slipped
| into effortlessly, even accidentally. The whole experience is
| pleasant. On the other hand I have tried on many occasions to
| force this when it wasn't forthcoming, and on top of being
| extremely uncomfortable, it's never worked.
|
| I don't think I'm completely helpless about it - factors such
| as sleep, exercise, environment, schedule fragmentation, etc.
| do seem to be involved, and I can influence those. But it
| doesn't respond to force of will in the moment.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I think this is pretty different to stating that you can't
| code for more than 2 hours.
|
| I don't think anyone can instantly snap into being
| productive on command, all the time.
| narshian wrote:
| No it's not. Speaking as someone who specifically has this
| problem: even eliminating all possible distractions does not
| do the trick.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Which problem exactly? Not being able to sit down and code
| for more than 2 hours?
| Jakobeha wrote:
| It could be that he isn't productive. I have this
| problem, where if I sit and code for too long I end up
| just wasting time debugging or writing useless code.
|
| Maybe I'm just another uneducated recent college grad,
| but I really don't see how you can work 7+ hours a day
| and actually be productive. Doing different kinds of work
| or taking frequent breaks, possibly. But not just sitting
| and staring at your computer for 7 hours.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| > _but I really don 't see how you can work 7+ hours a
| day and actually be productive. Doing different kinds of
| work or taking frequent breaks, possibly. But not just
| sitting and staring at your computer for 7 hours_
|
| Ironically the only way I can be productive for that long
| is to do the opposite of what you're describing. Focus on
| a single problem or piece of work, take minimal breaks
| and sit at my computer for most of the day.
|
| I've only ever done this for bursts of time before though
| (And never for a company, too many distractions), because
| how can you be spending so much time building without
| thinking? It has to be a large, well defined problem. But
| that doesn't really exist unless you're just copying
| something or you've already put in the work to define it.
|
| In saying that, I don't think 2 hours is really long
| enough to make much progress on something. That would
| only leave me with about an hour of productive time.
|
| Btw, if you're a recent college grad I'm probably around
| the same age as you.
| Vedor wrote:
| Disclaimer: I'm not an IT guy nor I work for an IT
| company.
|
| There is a third option. You are working and staring at
| the screen for the whole day, even without breaks, but
| you can't actually focus on a single problem or piece of
| work, because the manager keeps distracting you.
|
| I work for a small company, and as a consequence, I have
| a quite wide area of responsibilities.
|
| I can't really focus on the bigger tasks (like creating
| user's manual for the new company product) when I'm
| supposed to drop everything if there are any unanswered
| emails from the client.
|
| And learning midday that "Hey, man, the newsletters have
| to be ready today! And the website content needs to be
| updated before you send the newsletters!" is a very
| likely possibility, too.
| JoeyJoJoJr wrote:
| If I am working in an open plan office, on a multi-person
| codebase, with a half built back-end, 7 hours of coding
| is gonna be hard work.
|
| Conversely, if I have full ownership over the codebase,
| built from scratch, 7+ hours will fly by. However, there
| generally always comes a point where it becomes hard work
| again.
| titanomachy wrote:
| It might be sustainable for some people, but not for
| me... the only time I put in those kind of hours of
| focused effort is in a FAANG interview loop, and that
| takes so much out of me that I lie down and stare at the
| ceiling until bedtime :)
| narshian wrote:
| >Which problem exactly? Not being able to sit down and
| code for more than 2 hours?
|
| Yes.
| howtowin wrote:
| Where can I join / look into such an initiative? I'd love to
| give back to those following us, just as many before us did.
| titanomachy wrote:
| This resonates with me deeply. I can barely get work done most
| of the time. My "solution" is to leave a company before people
| get too frustrated with me. Changing companies frequently nets
| me better pay and more promotions than my harder-working peers,
| but I haven't felt fulfilled by work in a long time.
|
| What do you tell these mentees? What would you tell someone a
| bit further along in their career who still has the same
| problems?
|
| Please pm me if you are open to a chat.
|
| titanomachy.hn [at] pm.me
| chmod600 wrote:
| I have a similar problem. What's weird for me is that I feel
| totally useless and undisciplined, but when I look back, I
| actually do accomplish important things. But if you watched
| me day to day, it is obvious I'm wasting a ton of time. Not
| just on work, but on myself as well.
|
| I don't mean "wasting" like relaxing and maybe sorting out a
| problem in my subconscious. I mean _wasting_.
|
| I seem to be doing better recently. What I do is focus on
| doing _something_. Whatever I _will_ do _right now_ that is
| remotely productive, that 's what I do. It might be
| refactoring code, or drafting a proposal, or reading a book,
| or doing push ups, or using the debugger to explore something
| I need to understand, or playing with some new tech I enjoy
| learning. Pick up _any_ tiny task and just do it.
|
| It ends up mixing personal and work stuff, which is not
| great. But at least, at the end of the day, I did something.
| And slowly I will try to control my focus better to get
| particular things done.
| swsieber wrote:
| This hits home for me.
|
| I'm also fairly certain I have ADHD.
|
| And moving jobs terrifies me because I do pretty well in my
| current job, and my current job is a good long term one due
| to the freedom (and somewhat paradoxically some
| restrictions... it works out really well) it gives me.
| percentcer wrote:
| Sounds like ADHD, speak to your doctor
| mdip wrote:
| > what would you tell someone a bit further along in their
| career who still has the same problems?
|
| If it's been going on for a while but you are otherwise
| successful at the work you're doing, the best advice I can
| give you is to ask a trusted third-party (friend[0],
| therapist/mentor that you've worked with for a while) and ask
| them "why, do you think, I have these problems?" Obviously,
| this has to be someone who won't pull punches, who will tell
| you the honest truth and you have to be willing to accept it
| as "just a problem to be solved" rather than allowing it to
| demoralize you. And they _might_ be wrong, too, but more
| often than not there 's something to whatever it is they
| spill.
|
| If it's a relatively new thing, you might be going through a
| little burnout. I've been there a few times.
|
| The first time it happened to me, I almost "fell out of it"
| by accident. My day job was in a bit of a lull at the time
| and I just decided one day that I'd had it with a lacking
| feature in Visual Studio and decided to sit down and figure
| out how to write an add-on shortly after waking up on
| Saturday. I ended up completing a really basic version that
| day -- enough that I knew I could do the rest of it, which I
| continued to work on for about a month until I released it.
|
| I did this all during a handful of free evening hours during
| the week, but I checked my download counts regularly and was
| giddy every time they went up. I can't tell you when the
| burn-out ended -- probably that following Tuesday -- but any
| time I start to feel that way, again, I look at what I'm
| working on that I'm really excited about and I often find
| that there's nothing there. So I look for something new,
| usually not day-job related, with the goal of it being "far
| enough outside of my wheelhouse as to require a decent amount
| of new learning" and "not terribly difficult to do once that
| learning is over" because if I can't quickly get to a working
| "something" on a project like this before I close the IDE,
| I'm unlikely to revisit it. Ideally, that new learning leads
| to some new things to work on at the day job, too.
|
| [0] Friends are often not the best unless you have a friend
| who is not afraid to insult you/the "hard truths". I've had a
| very close friend for most of my adult life that has been
| willing to say "You're being stupid/evil/what-have-you" when
| it was necessary.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| I'm that friend for all of my friends and I wonder how I
| have any friends left from the number of people I've had to
| say "you're being a pillock, and this is how you fix it"
|
| Good to know I'm providing a valuable service
| mdip wrote:
| Well, for what it's worth, if you haven't been thanked,
| you deserve it.
|
| I've avoided _many_ mistakes due to my friend 's sobering
| assessment of things and I've done the same--though
| arguably much less so--for him.
|
| At the same time, he serves the opposite purpose, too.
| He'd build up an idea that he saw value in, which others
| missed, and would go all-in on it. He frequently referred
| to the biblical idea that "iron sharpens iron". It's not
| really the way people operate, but if you're willing to
| sign on, it'll change your life. :)
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Thanks, one of them has gone from living pay check to pay
| check and loosing PS100 or so a month to putting offers
| in for his first house after I told him he was "living
| like a student and needs to buckle down". we went through
| his finances and 12 months later he's nearly a home owner
| - that's all the thanks I need
| monkeycantype wrote:
| I was waiting for the Marxist analysis.
|
| (Ruin the gag by expaining it, I doubled back at the end and only
| the saw Jacobian not equal Jacobin : https://jacobinmag.com/ )
| titzer wrote:
| This is such a great article. It's the same reason I wrote an
| assembler, from scratch, by hand, and now I'm writing a fast
| interpreter in it. Nobody thinks this is a particularly fun
| thing. :)
| legerdemain wrote:
| OK, so you spend hours and days sealing threes of clubs into tea
| packets. But how do you make the volunteer pick the three of
| clubs during the show?
| cambalache wrote:
| Forget the three of clubs, how you stop the volunteer from
| picking a second packet to check for the most obvious solution?
| You have to be incredible dumb to not check it.
| cercatrova wrote:
| The article links to this Wikipedia page, looks like you can
| "force" the user to pick a specific card.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forcing_(magic)
| legerdemain wrote:
| That's just trading one word for another! OK, how do you
| _force_ the audience member to pick a specific card from a
| deck?
| peteretep wrote:
| Two very easy ones that I've never had fail in practice:
|
| 1. Get them to tell you to stop as you flip through the
| cards vertically, and then sleight the card from the bottom
| of the deck instead.
|
| 2. A simple counting trick like this
| https://youtu.be/ekPbMhJGYmc
| blandflakes wrote:
| I have to ask - did you read the (quite short) link?
|
| > An example of equivocation can be as follows: A performer
| deals two cards on a table and ask a spectator to select
| one. If the spectator chooses the card on the left, the
| performer will hand the card to the spectator. If they pick
| the card on the right, the performer will take that card as
| his own and have the other card be the spectator's. In
| either case, the spectator receives the intended card.
|
| Or maybe you're asking more precisely exactly which forcing
| mechanism would be used, for the trick in TFA?
| travisjungroth wrote:
| That's an entire family of tricks called card forces. I used to
| have a whole routine based on them. Here's a blog post with
| three of them: https://conjuror.community/best-card-forces/
|
| I had about a 50% hit rate on the natural force. You just fan
| through the cards and time it so they pick the one you want.
| Wouldn't work for the tea trick, but works fine if you have a
| fallback.
| legerdemain wrote:
| Thanks for the link. Of the three techniques mentioned, one
| (the entire deck is all the same card) obviously doesn't
| withstand any scrutiny; one (riffle through a deck and skip
| to your chosen card when they say stop) feels like it'd be
| too risky for a trick that took days to set up; and one (the
| "natural" force) says "please pay us to learn the secret."
|
| I don't think the trick that's the show pony of this blog
| post has been revealed to us.
| scpedicini wrote:
| Without divulging details, a riffle force has zero risk and
| can be easily mastered in a day.
|
| The exact mechanics of a force are the point of the post.
| Also given your handle, I honestly can't tell if you're
| trolling or not.
| Uhhrrr wrote:
| The too-risky one is another part of the trick where the
| magician is putting in a ridiculous amount of time, in that
| case practicing in front of a mirror.
|
| Or maybe indeed the magician doesn't use any of those.
| Another aspect of magic I've read in profiles of Ricky Jay
| and Teller is that they hunt down and pore over old magic
| books, looking for less-common techniques and setups to
| adapt.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| But still, Penn and Teller often used a rifle-stop force.
| I think it's because when a trick is explained by a
| force, you've given up on impressing magicians.
| emodendroket wrote:
| People use card tricks like these in poker games where real
| money is being bet and there's a good chance of physical
| violence if people catch you. What makes you think they
| can't get it good enough for a parlor trick?
| wott wrote:
| He has put in his article a link to the Wikipedia definition of
| 'Forcing' (and once there, there is a link to a book describing
| techniques).
|
| edit: sorry, I hadn't refreshed and seen the other 2 replies
| before I replied myself.
| legerdemain wrote:
| I don't understand what you comment contributes to my
| knowledge. The author says that he will explain a magic
| trick. He says that step one is to XYZ. He does not say how
| to XYZ. He instead links to a Wikipedia page that says what
| XYZ is, but doesn't describe how to XYZ in a way that would
| work in the magic trick. Instead, it links to a book that
| _might_ say more about XYZ. I am not about to buy that book.
|
| Do you consider that trick to be sufficiently explained?
| alanbernstein wrote:
| I came here with the same question. I couldn't help asking
| it, but we've both missed the point: "which I've further
| simplified here for clarity". The details of the magic
| trick aren't relevant, the analogy is about _the grind_ ,
| not the one little deceptive detail about the trick, which
| could be sleight of hand, suggestion, etc.
| legerdemain wrote:
| Yup, and I see what the author is doing there. That's
| great, whatever. But if he is illustrating his point by
| trying to explain a magic trick, and even including a
| "spoiler warning," I want him to actually explain the
| magic trick. Otherwise, it's a kind of a comical piece of
| rhetoric. "Some jobs are like this magic trick I'm about
| to explain. First, you do something cool that seems like
| magic. Now you see, magic and work share an element of
| extreme tedium!"
| ilaksh wrote:
| I want to apply this grinding idea to hard technical challenges
| that could take many months or even years. For example, neural
| networks applications. My understanding is that the principles
| were around for years but the idea was largely dismissed because
| of poor practical performance. But by grinding, they worked out
| things about how to initialize and activate etc. that made it
| work.
| dorkwood wrote:
| I experienced this when I first started learning the piano. When
| I played the first song I had learned for my sister, she was
| amazed. "Wow, I could never play like that", she said, "my
| fingers don't work that way". But when I broke down for her
| exactly how I'd learned it -- by breaking the song down into
| manageable chunks of just a few notes each, practicing each chunk
| with each hand separately many times until proficiency was
| reached, stringing the chunks together until I could play the
| whole song separately on each hand, and then bringing both hands
| together and repeating the entire process all over again -- her
| amazement turned to a look of disappointment. It was a mix of
| both realizing that her brother wasn't actually a genius, and a
| sort of mild disgust that I'd dedicated so much time to this
| activity.
| [deleted]
| pitspotter wrote:
| Yes, which piece was that btw?
|
| I'm learning Rachmaninoff's Prelude in G minor, probably the
| hardest piece for me to date. I'm not timing the process but
| this must have been going on for six months by now. Practice
| occurs only when I feel like it, as I walk past the keyboard.
| Sometimes less than 5 minutes per day. Rarely more than 15
| minutes.
|
| But it's getting there! If you added it all up, it would be a
| tremendous amount of work. Doing it to a schedule, or even just
| filling out a timesheet, would make it too grindy for me to
| bother with.
|
| So I think When it comes to learning, it's really _motivation_
| that is paramount. Not getting bored is a superpower. It 's the
| ability to 'embrace grind' by discovering what's interesting
| about it.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Most skills tend to look something like this, where dedication
| and repetition lead to proficiency. Could be piano, chess,
| video games, programming...
|
| What are some skills like this that are high-leverage--skills
| that help with lots of other skills?
| jonfromsf wrote:
| A good magician never reveals their tricks.
| williamdclt wrote:
| Very well put down, I learnt an "intermediate-level" piano
| piece just like that (a very jazzy "fly me to the moon"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW3w8kV-Xmo) without having
| ever played piano (I do play another instrument, which helps).
| It took weeks and weeks of grind, note-by-note, repeating
| hundreds of times to get your finger to synchronise and
| memorise, but you get there! Great to show off, people think
| you're a fairly good pianist, but I can play almost literally
| nothing else haha :)
| brailsafe wrote:
| Totally agreed. Sometimes, just putting in the labour is a great
| way to get it done. I wasted a ton of time last night thinking
| about how I'd write a scraper to download my bank statements from
| my damn bank that uses .net postbacks, which may lead to
| something, but ultimately I just took my damn ritalin and
| manually clicked and waited for each one. (then wrote a bash
| script to rename them all with regex and sed :))
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| It's funny. I was talking with the team on a call, yesterday, and
| one of them was telling me we should hire someone to do "the
| boring stuff," so I would be free to do "the fun stuff."
|
| I said no. I've been _shipping_ (as opposed to "writing")
| software for over thirty years, and, if there's one thing I've
| learned, is that "shipping" software is about 60% - 80% "boring"
| stuff. I can avoid it, if I'm only interested in "having fun,"
| but if I want to "ship" my work, I need to power through the
| grind. I also don't believe it's stuff I'm comfortable entrusting
| to others. When I'm at the car wash, I inevitably see someone
| driving a car -often not the fanciest ones- through the wash,
| because they don't trust the attendants. I guess I'm that guy.
|
| I really enjoy knowing that my work is out there, in the wild,
| and not just in a pitch demo. I consider it a craft, and I love
| to _finish_ projects. That means that I need to take the time to
| break out the 2000-grit sandpaper.
|
| That makes it a lot less of a "grind," to me.
|
| But that's just me. YMMV.
| mft_ wrote:
| Different strokes for different folks - and a mix of different
| types is often necessary.
|
| I remember the very first time I ever completed (through by
| work at the time) a psychological profile. (I know such things
| are mostly discredited, but bear with me). I think it was based
| around Belbin's team profiles.
|
| I came out as a creative, innovative, 'starter' of things -
| which actually matches me pretty well: I'm excited by solutions
| and new ideas, but I often don't complete personal (and
| sometimes professional!) projects 100% - I've lost interest and
| moved onto the next shiny thing by then. (Professionally, I'm
| best with a complimentary team around me.)
|
| A colleague who I got on well with but also often found
| frustrating, came out as a 'completer finisher'. Which again
| aligned well with my observation of her and her own testimony
| of where she drew her gratification from, and also explained
| why I sometimes found her frustrating: because we were total
| opposites in this regard.
|
| ---
|
| Anyway... maybe the situation you describe on your team is
| explained somewhat by this? You both want to work on aspects of
| a project that you find gratifying - _but you derive
| gratification from different aspects?_
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| More or less.
|
| I enjoy research and design. Thinking about architectures is
| fun.
|
| I enjoy implementation. Writing code is fun. I enjoy doing
| in-place documentation; especially as _I_ am usually the poor
| schmuck that has to go back and refactor or fix.
|
| I _really like_ solving problems; whether bugs, or vexing UX
| /mental model issues. I'm an extremely proficient
| troubleshooter. My first job was as an RF technician, so I
| have been solving problems my entire adult life.
|
| I enjoy creating a software _infrastructure_ , for others to
| build upon; as opposed to "an app." I've written software
| that lasts _decades_ , though with a vastly different face.
| That's kind of a cool feeling. Watching someone take my basic
| undercarriage, and add a hot rod motor and chassis, is wild.
|
| I enjoy creating documentation. I'm pretty prolix. I was
| trained as an artist, so I can do fairly decent
| illustrations, as well as prose.
|
| I enjoy creating _localizable_ software. I 've been dealing
| with different cultures my entire life, and love to explore
| our differences.
|
| I enjoy creating _accessible_ software. I deal -almost daily-
| with folks that have various types of challenges, and they
| help me to keep a focus on what 's important.
|
| I enjoy pitching the project. Having a product that is in
| very good shape at pitch time, makes this _much_ easier.
|
| I enjoy releasing a refined, polished project.
| draw_down wrote:
| The big question is, what's the reward? Magicians need to do
| tricks to eat. But what's the incentive to pulling off the
| impossible, as opposed to being a workaday employee, at the
| employer where the impossible was pulled off?
|
| I don't mean to imply there is no incentive, I'm saying - what is
| it? If it's there and it justifies the effort, great. If not, you
| might as well be doing magic tricks at a party.
|
| Now, some people like to be the fun guy at a party who can pull a
| quarter from behind your ear. If that's a fitting reward for you,
| then great! For me, that, or being able to write a blog post such
| as this one, would be a bit thin to justify it.
| ecnahc515 wrote:
| This reminds me of a blog post by Steve Klabnik (on the community
| team of Rust currently) about how he went through the Ruby on
| Rails backlog once similarly. It's a good read:
| https://steveklabnik.com/writing/how-to-be-an-open-source-ga...
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Thanks! I'm glad you like it; at the time I didn't think it was
| a big deal but it's probably one of the most widely-read things
| I've written... (Tiny nit: I am not on the community team. I am
| on the core team though.)
| analog31 wrote:
| Any sufficiently unpleasant task is indistinguishable from magic?
| mettamage wrote:
| I embrace best tool for the job. Sometimes it's code, sometimes
| manual grind or sometimes something else.
|
| One time I had to fix a bug that was estimated at 40 hours and
| consisted of getting Python 2 type coercion in Python 3 (IMO a
| silly idea).
|
| The users of this program were 5. Instead what I did: I taught
| them about strings and ints and how to cast (it was some template
| language they used). I added an answer with some examples to the
| FAQ.
|
| It took me an hour. The previous programmer on this project never
| considered manual solutions.
| macando wrote:
| _The only "trick" is that this preparation seems so boring, so
| impossibly tedious, that when we see the effect we can't imagine
| that anyone would do something so tedious just for this simple
| effect_.
|
| Even magicians who know many tricks will still enjoy the show and
| appreciate the effort.
|
| _Prestige_ is a great movie about this very topic.
| godot wrote:
| I can really relate to this. Countless times I've run into tasks
| that are even only minor grinds (some tedious work that maybe
| takes 30 minutes to an hour to do), and countless engineers I've
| worked with will just complain, avoid, or just plain be unwilling
| to do them. They'll indulge in discussing why things are wrong
| this way, what architecture should be like etc. And countless
| times, I'll just get through the minor grind and do the thing.
| Many of these engineers are smarter and more knowledgeable than I
| am, but when the time comes for performance reviews, promotions,
| these grinds really count. It's exactly as the author describe
| it, these grinds look like magic to the audience (management);
| because they are impactful to the business. Having said that, of
| course it's no excuse to create or perpetuate poor engineering or
| architecture by grinding. It's a balance.
| heymijo wrote:
| Anyone ever read The Phoenix Project [0] or The Goal [1]?
|
| The scenario the author described sounds just like the beginning
| stages from the Phoenix Project (overwhelming amount of tickets,
| what's the priority, what even are all of these tickets, printing
| them out to make the work visible).
|
| The concept is Work in Process (WIP). You first need to see it
| and understand how it moves, or doesn't move throughout the
| DevOps system.
|
| It seems like there might be a quick, easy read that could truly
| help OP.
|
| [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix-
| pro...
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/113934.The_Goal
| fighterpilot wrote:
| The same advice applies to data science. The menial grunt work of
| checking data quality etc is some of the most important and often
| overlooked for the neater work.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Yup. My digging into the data this week made a discovery that
| we'd been measuring our outcomes incorrectly for six months.
| That simple discovery is worth incredible amounts of money to
| the company, but because it's not an ML model, many people
| perceive it as low-importance work.
|
| Mind you, all those people will be gone from the industry after
| winter comes, so I only have to deal with this until then.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| Thanks, I enjoyed that.
|
| I'd like to think this applies to a lot of professionals work,
| putting crazy amounts of effort in for a simple outcome, that
| just works.
|
| except the outcome is not as exciting as watching loads of
| cockroaches
| BossingAround wrote:
| > putting crazy amounts of effort in for a simple outcome, that
| just works
|
| There's a fine line though. You want to put in the effort into
| a task where it makes sense, like in the article.
|
| Personally, I see a lot of effort put into tasks where the
| person is comfortable with the effort, because they know they
| can do the task manually, the old way, and "don't have time for
| anything else".
| Zelphyr wrote:
| I just finished reading Arnold Schwarzenegger's autobiography and
| one thing he says frequently is, "reps, reps, reps, reps!". He
| obviously got his physical gains through many reps but he also
| says he would never film a stunt scene without rehearsing it at
| least 10 times.
|
| This made me think of something I read about John Resig. He had
| created somewhere around 75 open source projects before jQuery.
| Reps, reps, reps indeed.
| zuhayeer wrote:
| Having now hand-curated and updated 100s of level mappings for
| different companies by using a combination of research, leveling
| rubrics, and crowdsourced submissions on Levels.fyi, this article
| speaks to me
| m_a_g wrote:
| I'm a junior SWE and doing maintenance or working with legacy
| software is a big no for me. I realized this is mainly because I
| can't see the value these jobs would bring to me so I can't
| motivate myself.
|
| I wonder, what is the motivation for working with these kinds of
| systems career-wise?
| DocTomoe wrote:
| I'm a senior developer, and that would be a major red flag for
| me, which I would remember during our annual feedback time.
|
| Your statement is indicative of a junior who is unwilling to
| learn about the system and to do grunt work, which directly
| translates to due diligence and bug avoidance once it's feature
| implementation time.
|
| Do not underestimate the value in working in legacy code for
| learning how to do things, how to do them better, and how
| sometimes not following the hip technology fad or the more
| academic approach is the right thing to do.
| Too wrote:
| Working with a big legacy code base is an infinite source of
| teaching and knowledge, especially around system architecture;
| what works, what doesn't work, how the craziest workarounds can
| make something impossible possible, how APIs with the best
| intention got abused over time, value of tests and where to
| test, how to read code rather than just write code, and so on.
| Simply it gives you wisdom, rather than you reinventing the
| wheel to find things out along the way.
|
| I wouldn't want to do it forever but for a junior to try it out
| at least once is an important life lesson.
| empiko wrote:
| Something similar can be said of writing survey paper in
| academia. Nobody wants to go through 150 papers about some
| godforsaken topic, but the one guy that goes through it is
| immediately considered to be a top notch expert.
| dwighttk wrote:
| I assumed this was from https://www.jacobinmag.com and expected
| something quite different
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Glad I wasn't the only one!
| zacharycohn wrote:
| I know the author and yes, he gets this a lot...
| mds wrote:
| Reminds me of this Penn and Teller trick with a similar method
| but the opposite effect -- see
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnEGedfTrzc (skip to 2 minutes
| in). Freely think of any card, then miraculously reveal the card
| in an improbable location. It's "easy", just hide all 52 cards
| and memorize where they're hidden.
| bumbada wrote:
| I had a different experience solving similar problems.
|
| When I started working in Spain as an engineer I solved problems
| like that in the article, very hard, requiring people with very
| high technical skills. Companies creating big problems because
| short term mentality made the bluff to accumulate until emergency
| came.
|
| There was an important distinction with the protestant-puritan
| mentality of the US. After doing all the hard work and saving the
| company I was paid in peanuts and more work, filling all my time
| and making my life miserable.
|
| Emergencies bring enormous social pressure over you, you overwork
| and it is painful. They called you because "short term" mentality
| but solving the problem always takes more time that what they
| demand you take. It must be done for yesterday.
|
| The big bucks were given to the people that took the bad
| decisions in the first place at the top. I went to Asia and the
| culture was even worse, albeit this time I was benefiting from
| that.
|
| Then I discovered places in the world where hard work was
| rewarded. It is a very small part of the world. Most of the world
| does not work the way the Silicon Valley does, and even there
| socialism is coming to those places too.
|
| So I won't recommend that you work harder unless you are rewarded
| from it, that is your culture rewards you for that or you have
| your own business and work gives you an advantage.
|
| I would recommend the opposite, simplify your life so you need to
| work less, make other people(delegate) or specially machines do
| the hard work for you.
|
| Do not embrace toxic relationships. Let companies in eternal
| emergency mode burn and die, and work for(or create) those that
| do the right thing.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| What toxic relationships?
|
| This is about fixing issues where spending two hours doing
| boring work (manually bisecting) can be better than spending
| two hours thinking about the problem without necessarily
| reaching a solution.
|
| Nothing about underpaid overwork, just to do The Boring Thing.
|
| I'm also trying hard, and failing, to understand why you're
| talking about socialism.
| orangegreen wrote:
| This is really what it takes to make a quality product. It's not
| only being able to focus long enough to get the job done, but
| also having co-workers that also value quality and focus. I get
| so annoyed with co-workers who don't value quality. Everything
| has to be done yesterday, quick and dirty, with little to no care
| involved. And for what? To move on to upper management's other
| random idea that probably isn't great?
|
| I desperately wish there was more of an emphasis on the
| simplicity of quality work in America. That doesn't mean spend
| years and years making something no one wants. That means making
| a product that is simple, effective, and elegant. Unfortunately,
| simplicity is actually harder to figure out than complexity.
| Adding is easier than subtracting.
|
| I think of software as art. And sometimes it takes an
| excruciating amount of time and effort to pay attention to the
| details, stomp out the bugs, and create that beautiful work of
| art. There are plenty of companies that do value quality, focus,
| and attention to detail. But far too often, it's about making a
| quick buck rather than thinking long term about making software
| that will last years on end.
| JoeyJoJoJr wrote:
| I find there is a general assumption that quality means things
| will be more expansive, and take longer. To the contrary, I
| have often times found that a quality driven approach
| ultimately gets you to the goal faster and cheaper. However
| there are strong incentives to get 'something' working as
| quickly as possible at the expense of quality. That then sets
| expectations of the standards of quality that persist.
| dceddia wrote:
| This quote stuck out to me:
|
| > More trouble than the trick was worth? To you, probably. But
| not to magicians.
|
| It makes me realize how fundamentally different the values are
| between some fields. The amount of time magicians put into the
| craft is mind-boggling.
|
| I see it also with how movies are made -- to think that sometimes
| they're spending days or months and tens of thousands of dollars,
| building sets, waiting for the right weather or lighting, braving
| subzero temperatures, or whatever it might be, just to get a
| single shot that might be on screen for a few seconds.
|
| Maybe a similar sort of thing with software would be spending
| time on animations -- the result is a cool flourish, but it lasts
| 0.15 seconds and it took 3 days to get it just right, and it's
| impossible to _quantify_ how worthwhile it was beyond a gut
| feeling. Even still, that 's not even in the same ballpark in
| terms of time or effort.
| munchbunny wrote:
| I don't think it's that software engineers don't value it. I
| think we all understand, to some degree, that building
| resilient, simple software that solves the problem thoroughly
| requires incredible investment into carefully thinking through
| the problem and constant upkeep. It's just that we don't want
| to believe it because getting from 80% to 100% requires boring
| grind that we'd rather spend building something new and
| exciting, or because getting from 80% to 100% requires time we
| could spend building 80% of something else we want to sell.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| By the time you grind to get that 100% perfect solution, the
| number of requirements the business has put on you in your
| backlog has extended well beyond what you can keep up with.
| It's not like software engineers are the only actors in a
| software system. They are reactive to the needs of product
| development who are reactive to the needs of customers. You
| have to balance your limited development resources against a
| constantly changing set of requirements.
|
| So you make trade-offs.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| I was gonna say that!
|
| curl and ffmpeg are definitely commendable "100%" FOSS
| projects, but they aren't chasing new features. HTTP3 is
| big, but it's not like curl had to break HTTP 1.1
| compatibility to add it. AV1 is big, but it's not like
| MPEG1 will ever change. Both projects deal in protocols,
| which means most of their requirements are literally set in
| stone, or silicon.
|
| Whereas youtube-dl is constantly breaking _only_ because
| YouTube is constantly breaking, probably on purpose to
| thwart youtube-dl.
|
| Why spend the other 80% of my time adding armor plating and
| documentation to a feature that will either be gone or half
| rewritten next week?
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Yeah agreed. There's a big difference between the base
| layer utilities and the application layer interfaces.
| bentcorner wrote:
| Personally I don't like facing the work to take something
| from 80-100% - I envision the potential work and I can see it
| laid before me, extending beyond the horizon. And sometimes
| that work doesn't even lead to a certain success.
|
| I realize that more often than not it would likely lead to
| improvements and a better state of the world. But it can feel
| overwhelming at times. Whereas working on a shinier smaller
| thing brings feelings of gratification that much easier and
| faster.
| 0xFACEFEED wrote:
| For me it's that 1) most people won't even care and 2)
| someone is going to ruin it anyway, eventually.
|
| I've observed a cognitive dissonance that I can't quite put
| my finger on. You'll work with (and for) people who have an
| extreme admiration for Apple products because of the
| attention to detail and quality. And yet they are perfectly
| fine churning out terrible technology products in order to
| make a buck. Often times just little attention to detail can
| make a huge difference; you don't need to be a zealot about
| it.
|
| Loosely related: I've found that I've made the most money
| while working with bad teams on terrible technology products.
| And I've made the least money working with great teams on
| great products. I really hate that.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| I suspect a lot of the noticeable difference between Apple
| products and the normal stuff that most other companies
| churn out _is the zealotry_. Steve Jobs was notorious for
| being zealous about the small details. Tim Cook was
| notorious for his very high standards for operations,
| expecting even minor operations problems to be fixed very
| quickly and very thoroughly. Other companies do pay a
| little attention to detail, if you 're observant you can
| see small details everywhere [1]. Apple is known for
| zealously taking it to the next level.
|
| My point is that I think you _do_ need to be kind of a
| zealot about it to be comparable to Apple. Most companies
| and employees aren 't prepared to be zealots about it,
| which isn't that surprising to me because it's a lot of
| pressure and effort. One might admire how efficient Amazon
| is at retail compared to everyone else without admiring the
| sweatshop-style labor evidently needed to achieve it.
|
| [1] aside: there's a fun Twitter feed for this kind of
| stuff https://twitter.com/littlebigdetail?lang=en
| mathgladiator wrote:
| The key word is marginal. Sadly, software tends to align
| against art as pushing boundaries is marginal for the return of
| investment.
|
| I can provide an example. I'm writing a programming language,
| database, and platform to power board games. http://www.adama-
| lang.org/
|
| Most of my personal investments are marginal to most businesses
| (or deeply incompatible). If was going to run this as an
| enterprise, then this would be a death sentence. However, my
| hope is that when I get this thing moving, then I can ship
| games quickly with exceptional and redefining reliability.
|
| The only reason I can pursue this as an art is that I'm close
| to retirement.
| akiselev wrote:
| _> Maybe a similar sort of thing with software would be
| spending time on animations -- the result is a cool flourish,
| but it lasts 0.15 seconds and it took 3 days to get it just
| right, and it 's impossible to quantify how worthwhile it was
| beyond a gut feeling. Even still, that's not even in the same
| ballpark in terms of time or effort._
|
| The difference is that movies are all or nothing productions in
| an industry set up for a waterfall process with directors who
| exert creative control. Everything from dealflow to billing to
| the unions are set up to support the industry's unique
| requirements. They do the same kind of budget triage as
| software companies do, but they emphasize the creative aspect
| far more relative to tech since they're competing over form not
| function.
|
| The nearest creative equivalent would probably be Jobs-era
| Apple but I think the best analog would be NASA, whose missions
| are dictated by scientific and exploratory goals outside of
| their control. Except instead of an artistic direction, they
| have to contend with physics that dictates they spend extreme
| resources on seemingly trivial details like what tape or
| writing implement works best in zero-g.
| olivertaylor wrote:
| > they emphasize the creative aspect far more relative to
| tech since they're competing over form not function
|
| Yes and no. There are a lot of "make it fit in the box"
| requirements when making a movie. The unions mandate a
| certain make up of the crew, and a certain size, the stage
| rental costs are a certain amount, there are various laws and
| corporate budgets to take into account; all that adds up to a
| certain number of shots you can do in a day, which adds up to
| a dollar amount, and ALL THOSE THINGS cascade down to
| enabling only certain creative things. The difference between
| a brilliant director and a ok one is not the beauty of their
| art, it's their ability to pull-off something incredible in
| the middle of all that machinery. In a way, it's WORKING that
| machinery in your favor.
|
| So while, yes, the industry is set up to support a creative
| endeavor, that industry runs on a template that makes certain
| things possible and certain things very difficult. But
| brilliant producers and directors find ways around it.
| akiselev wrote:
| >* So while, yes, the industry is set up to support a
| creative endeavor, that industry runs on a template that
| makes certain things possible and certain things very
| difficult. But brilliant producers and directors find ways
| around it.*
|
| Totally agree, and IME that's par for the course for any
| creative endeavor that becomes profitable but
| unpredictable, whether its cinema, music, or software
| engineering. I meant more that the final product is judged
| on aesthetic qualities more so than in software, so the
| industry naturally allows for more creative expression at
| the highest levels of decision making.
| rcurry wrote:
| I wanted to be a professional magician when I was younger, and
| there's a single-handed cut that I learned from Daryl Easton
| (at a seminar he gave at some Holiday Inn). It took me a month
| or two of solid practice to get it down, but over thirty years
| later I can just pick up a deck of cards and flip that cut out
| like it was nothing. I was saddened to learn that he had
| committed suicide a while back. Every time I do that flourish
| playing cards with people or whatever I just remember that time
| when one of the world's best magicians hung out with me for a
| few minutes after his seminar just to make sure I had it down.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The movie thing is a good example. I remind my kids that some
| of these movies cost $1,000,000/minute to make. That might be
| what they make in their lifetime, so it is about that many
| hours of work per minute (a life's work).
| mwcampbell wrote:
| When you put it that way, that's obscenely expensive. Maybe
| we should be steering kids toward entertainment that we can
| create as well as consume because it's not absurdly
| expensive.
| spdionis wrote:
| It does get kind of ironic if you realize that streaming is
| getting more and more popular. I guess that's a much more
| cost effective form of entertainment?
| Gravityloss wrote:
| TV became digital and the amount of channels exploded. Yet
| the amount of eyeballs watching advertisement didn't. So
| the money spent per TV program minute went down. Enter
| reality TV.
| cma wrote:
| Top billed actors may inflate that, unless you consider that
| they then spend the money on gardeners and stuff and consider
| them part of the crew.
| david422 wrote:
| One of my favorite magicians: Derren Brown
|
| He does a coin flip trick where he flips a fair coin 10 times
| in a row and gets heads every time.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzYLHOX50Bc
|
| The amount of time and effort he puts into this and other
| illusions is very large.
| phpnode wrote:
| I used to be a big fan of Derren Brown when I was younger,
| and I do still like a lot of his work, but he readily admits
| to deceiving the audience, and the deception includes the
| explanations he gives for his techniques. The video you
| linked to was part of a longer show (The System) which gives
| an explanation for how this trick was done - he says they
| kept filming take after take, for 9hrs, until they finally
| got ten heads in a row.
|
| I think that kind of brute force approach would have been
| excessively boring to him, and it's much more likely that he
| switched to a gimmicked coin to get the ten heads in a row,
| then filmed a few shots of throwing tails for the
| "explanation".
| piyh wrote:
| He wrote Tricks of the Mind and that was a great book. One
| piece that has stuck with me for ~15 years now is the 20
| word series that I can recite forward or backward after
| spending 5 minutes visualizing them in a "linked list". For
| example, telephone - sausage - monkey. Vividly imagine
| dialing a payphone with a sausage. Next up, sausage monkey.
| Vividly, using all your senses imagine a monkey flinging
| sausages to the point of absurdity where he's swimming
| through sausages.
|
| You just created a mental linked list that you can traverse
| from either direction, and that you'll remember for as long
| as you want to. Push it to the extremes, build up your
| method of loci to arbitrary lengths, build your memory
| palaces and become Hannibal Lecter.
| thr0w__4w4y wrote:
| I've done the exact same trick in my mind to remember a
| sequence -- the "linked list" linking A to B, B to C,
| etc. It just seemed natural to me, I didn't read it
| anywhere. If you have the "head pointer", you're probably
| golden.
|
| When I told a colleague about this years ago, he said
| that my approach seemed so much more complicated and/or
| difficult than his approach (IIRC it's called the Memory
| Palace?) of building a castle/cathedral / museum in your
| mind, and as you walk through it, you see a banana on the
| left, and then a monkey a little further down the hall,
| then a trombone on the right, etc. For me, that technique
| simply doesn't work, as much as I try.
| phpnode wrote:
| The book covers both techniques (though not in great
| detail), Memory Palaces are another term for Method of
| Loci[0] - in my experience it is actually much better and
| faster, but requires habitually revisiting rooms in order
| to remind yourself of their contents (this is as quick as
| mentally walking through a door into a room and glancing
| around it from left to right). This is easy and fast but
| it's also easy to forget to do it and then the contents
| do start to fade. I use the layout of the first house I
| owned as my "palace", so it's a real place but no longer
| somewhere I actually go to in real life which helps avoid
| confusion.
|
| The linked list idea works well and arguably lasts
| longer, but it's also much more time consuming to "set
| up" (for me at least), and suffers from O(N) time
| complexity just like a real linked list (i wonder if it
| would be possible to construct a mental skip-list!) and
| if I forget a single association then the whole remainder
| of the list is forgotten.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
| caseysoftware wrote:
| > _Maybe a similar sort of thing with software would be
| spending time on animations_
|
| A few years ago, I was running a meetup in Austin and a local
| game studio offered a couple of their people as speakers.
| Intrigued, I asked about their projects, specializations, etc
| and learned about fabric animation.
|
| That's when I learned that the Sony studio for DC Universe
| Online had a "fabric guy" who animated Superman and Batman's
| capes.
| IncRnd wrote:
| > It makes me realize how fundamentally different the values
| are between some fields. The amount of time magicians put into
| the craft is mind-boggling.
|
| Larry Wall was quoted in the article, regarding laziness.
|
| Bill Gates has a famous quote, "I choose a lazy person to do a
| hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do
| it."
|
| Neither of those people can be accused of laziness, yet they
| both embrace it. Laziness in the context of productivity is
| often misunderstood as not doing things, but it is more aptly
| the stopping of doing in order to observe, think, and let the
| answer come to you. Work diligently, but think and simplify
| first. It seems to me that is also what the magicians do.
| grayclhn wrote:
| They both use the word "lazy" to make their quotes memorable.
| But that's it. They're not actually describing real life
| laziness.
| matchagaucho wrote:
| tl;dr _" If you're too big to do the small stuff, then you're too
| small to do the big stuff"_
| datavirtue wrote:
| One of the best pieces of advice I ever learned was to volunteer
| for the jobs no one else wants to do. Shitiest job imaginable
| rears its head? Jump up and wave your hand like a happy idiot.
| Managers' sigh of relief. Who can compete with that?
| emodendroket wrote:
| This is a great way to end up being the "expert" in PHP, Rails,
| frontend dev, and other stuff you actually don't really enjoy
| doing, and have everyone just keep assigning you those tickets
| instead of lifting a finger to do it themselves. Ask me how I
| know.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Hmmm....it landed me as the tech lead for all of IT and
| development.
| fctorial wrote:
| Survivorship bias?
| datavirtue wrote:
| Yes. But it is common advice from CEO s and it fits with
| what my grandmother used to tell me: the boss gets all
| the shit jobs.
| emodendroket wrote:
| CEOs are not exactly a disinterested party here, are
| they?
| emodendroket wrote:
| Well, glad it worked out for you, but I am not the first
| person to find that doing too good a job at undesirable
| tasks means everyone thinks of you when they want them
| done.
| infinitezest wrote:
| This has been my experience and it has left me feeling kind
| of rudderless. I want to do a good job, accomplish things,
| and build a solid reputation (and hopefully make more money)
| but it ends up feeling like getting punished for doing well.
|
| Of course, it's easy enough to say that hard work is its own
| reward or that it'll pay off in the long run but it sure
| doesn't feel that way sometimes.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I know what you mean. It's hard for me to half-ass things
| and I hate everyone sitting there with their thumbs up
| their ass or pretending they're too stupid to figure
| something out. All I can say is it try and find a team
| that's focused on stuff you want to do and will appreciate
| your flexibility. Easier said than done.
| bluquark wrote:
| My secret weapon for bug diagnosis is that when a regression is
| reported on a system without an automatic bisect tool, while
| everyone else is trying to reason about the problem with
| guesswork and code inspection, I sit down and spend 2 hours just
| bisecting manually (full sync, rebuild and install of old
| versions of the software). This provides a guaranteed culprit CL,
| often one that no one guessed, and also a potential bug assignee
| who's an expert on the problem in question (the author of that
| patch).
|
| It's "one weird trick" to get bugs stuck in limbo for weeks
| suddenly making fast progress towards a fix, and all it takes is
| a willingness to do something so tedious and mindless that no
| other engineer volunteers to do it.
| ip26 wrote:
| However, every time I reason about the problem & debug it, I
| gain a little knowledge and do it a little faster next time.
| Bisecting never really gets faster, aside from maybe writing a
| script.
| [deleted]
| aidos wrote:
| That approach works well for regressions. I've used it myself
| to track down a bug in chrome and, as you say, having no idea
| how to fix it, I could direct it to the author via the bug
| tracker. In my case it was fixed within a couple of days. And
| obviously bisecting chrome is a slow process, but it only took
| a couple of hours.
|
| I find that most bugs don't fall into that class, and for the
| most part, just sitting and picturing the paths back from the
| bug is enough to work out what's going on. If you're less
| familiar with the code you'll want it in front of you to trace
| your way back. In general you can narrow the search space
| pretty quickly.
| munchbunny wrote:
| Definitely agree with that.
|
| My own personal experience with difficult bugs is that there is
| no substitute for taking the time to understand the problem
| domain, the systems involved, and the code itself. Getting to
| that point takes significant investment though, and I tend to
| trust engineers who are willing to do that much more than
| engineers who don't.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > without an automatic bisect tool
|
| At that scale, reading through the commit messages is often
| enough to narrow it down to a few suspects.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Heh, my answer is that I just refuse to build or work on
| systems where bugs aren't always super obvious. If the system
| gets too complex, I bisect the system.
|
| I think I've infuriated many colleagues with this attitude, and
| I'm sure there's at least half of the people here who would
| similarly be angry working with someone like that.
|
| Honestly, I'm not very good at writing software, I just tend to
| be similar to the author -- I grind more than I out-think most
| of my problems, and it results in a deliverable that solves it,
| usually, which ends up being enough to move on with.
| arpyzo wrote:
| It's interesting that while this often produces stunning results,
| it usually doesn't lead to pay increases and promotions.
| kache_ wrote:
| Doing a good job is important. Pay increases and promotions are
| obtained through way of leverage, but doing a good job and
| building a strong reputation pays dividends in the future.
| ptudan wrote:
| Yep, learning to optimize for visibility is one of the things
| every corporate worker should do.
|
| It's unfortunate, but the main way to actually see your
| compensation and respect increase.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > it usually doesn't lead to pay increases and promotions
|
| Individual companies may or may not reward the grind over the
| course of a few years. Companies that don't tend to bleed
| employees.
|
| These things do pay off over the course of a career, though.
| The Grind builds skills, builds reputation, and builds an
| ability to get work done when it matters. The company may not
| recognize the value of this, but your peers will. Your peers
| will form your future network as everyone diffuses into
| different companies.
|
| It's a mistake when someone scales back their own effort and
| learning simply because they don't expect an immediate monetary
| reward. We're all building careers and networks over the course
| of decades. Don't let a lack of pay increases at a single
| company alter hamper the trajectory of your entire career.
|
| And if you find yourself stuck at a company that isn't
| rewarding these things, move on. Some other company will gladly
| reward you for the accumulated experience. It only goes to
| waste if you stay put at companies that don't reciprocate.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > Companies that don't tend to bleed employees.
|
| Are there any companies that don't bleed employees? Amazon
| bleeds employees. Google bleeds employees. Every company I
| have ever worked for bleeds employees.
|
| The only organizations I know where people regularly have 10
| year stints are government agencies. Everywhere else 2-3
| years.
| jldugger wrote:
| > For example, I once joined a team maintaining a system that was
| drowning in bugs. There were something like two thousand open bug
| reports. Nothing was tagged, categorized, or prioritized. The
| team couldn't agree on which issues to tackle > I spent almost
| three weeks in that room, and emerged with every bug report
| reviewed, tagged, categorized, and prioritized.
|
| Honestly, this is one of those traps a team can fall into, where
| nobody feels empowered to ignore the rest of the business for 3
| weeks to put the bell on the cat. The only person without
| deliverables and due dates is the new hire. And it takes a
| special kind of new hire to have the expertise to parachute in,
| recognize that work needs to be done, and then do it with little
| supervision.
|
| But he's right in general, that you can get some surprising
| things done by just putting in the time and focus. Which is why
| it's so utterly toxic that corporate America runs on an interrupt
| driven system, with meetings sprinkled carelessly across engineer
| calendars.
| [deleted]
| habitue wrote:
| One of the most important things I think Kanban[1] emphasizes
| is that once you eliminate unnecessary bottlenecks, you're left
| with unavoidable bottlenecks, and this naturally means there
| will be slack. Explicitly expecting slack time is super useful
| to allow developers at all levels of seniority to do surprising
| and necessary things like this that would otherwise never be
| scheduled.
|
| [1] not the project board shape, but the original process it's
| named after where you set a hard cap on work in progress in
| each stage to find out where bottlenecks are.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I think the reason people don't like Kanban is there are a
| bunch of tasks that suck to get stuff over the line and
| without the "deadline" there's little incentive to help with
| them instead of just pulling something else off the backlog.
| habitue wrote:
| Take this with a grain of salt, because I haven't done
| Kanban personally, but I think the theory is that if you
| hard cap work in progress, and everyone is sitting around
| on their hands, it puts a lot of pressure to eliminate
| bottlenecks to progress.
| Daynil wrote:
| I feel like by far the biggest impediment to my productivity is
| the knowledge that I have a meeting any time in the next two
| hours. Unfortunately, that's usually the case.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| Mark Ruffalo dramatised the lawyer who did exactly this in Dark
| Waters to foil DuPont. Thanks to this grind, we know what
| DuPont did to pristine West Virginia waterways with Teflon
| toxic waste.
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=yBGi3SzxkKk
| Animats wrote:
| I did that when I first came to Silicon Valley. I went to work
| for a company which operated a large, for its day, mainframe
| data center. (Not IBM, UNIVAC). Each time the operating system
| crashed, which it did several times a day, a "panic dump" was
| produced, a stack of paper about an inch thick, with a summary
| and stack backtrace at the top, and a full listing of the
| contents of memory.
|
| There were two stacks of these, six feet high, waiting for me.
|
| It took me most of a year to work through the pile, finding out
| why the crash had occurred, by tracking pointers through memory
| with pencil and colored marker and comparing this with paper
| listings of the operating system. Then I'd code a fix for that
| problem, test it (usually around 2 AM when I could take over a
| mainframe), and nervously put it into production on one
| mainframe. Slowly, the piles of crash dumps got shorter and the
| mean time to failure went from hours to weeks.
|
| There were very few meetings, and nobody interfered. They were
| just happy to see the crash dump pile shrink and the uptime
| increase.
|
| After a few years of this, by which time the systems would stay
| up for months, I got a job in R&D at another company and got
| out of maintenance programming and into theory.
| peterb wrote:
| Respect!
| jebeng wrote:
| Neat. For some reason I find it satisfying to read an example
| like that where there's actual real tangible work being done
| with immediate and obvious benefits.
| lulzury wrote:
| The weird thing about tackling these seemingly Goliath type
| problems is that at the start it requires a lot of patience
| to get going and can be demotivating to see no progress or
| trickle-slow progress, but once you visibly see that the
| gears are starting to crank, it is very rewarding.
| pbourke wrote:
| > Which is why it's so utterly toxic that corporate America
| runs on an interrupt driven system, with meetings sprinkled
| carelessly across engineer calendars.
|
| I agree with this statement and your other points. I've noticed
| a more insidious variant of this behavior: the expectation of
| interruptions. Some groups have such frequent priority shifts
| and/or a culture of fire fighting or door knocking such that
| even with a relatively open schedule, one is dissuaded from
| engaging in longer stretches of work for fear of having it all
| go to waste when the next meteor strike arrives.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I think you can blame "agile thinking" for that and the
| general laziness in product planning which is so typical of
| the last 10 years.
|
| We went from recognising that requirements may change after
| planning to zero planning and telling developers what's the
| next priority for the day, day by day.
|
| This lack of planning and product definition is also what
| drives the lack of documentation, which is another big
| problem in 2021.
|
| I don't expect going back to waterfall but also not what's
| going on nowadays. Hopefully we'll bounce back in the middle
| at some point.
| marsven_422 wrote:
| What you describe is the traditional project managers
| failure to understand that there role is no longer to draw
| gant charts but to facilitate the creation and ongoing work
| with the product backlog.
|
| This is a separate higher level of abstraction backlog
| where the possible work for the next 1-X sprints are
| planned and defined ready for the team take "tickets" into
| their backlog.
| kown7 wrote:
| It's my pet theory that we have to go back 50 years and do
| waterfall right.
|
| See http://bawiki.com/wiki/Waterfall.html
| heterodoxxed wrote:
| I don't understand why software architect isn't a position
| in any of the new startup culture tech businesses. The
| advantage of having an older, very wise and very
| experienced engineer whose job it is to document, plan and
| understand all the moving parts of your project would have
| been invaluable instead of expecting all the engineers who
| are stressed about hitting deadlines and chasing down
| memory leaks to do that work on top of their daily
| requirements.
| titanomachy wrote:
| The people who do this job at large companies are called
| Staff or Principal engineers. One reason startups might
| be less likely to have them is that they are
| extraordinarily expensive.
| charrondev wrote:
| And you can't cheap out on the role. It's also really
| hard to recognize the right kind of person for this
| without a somewhat Mature engineering team.
|
| The wrong person in this type of role at a smaller
| company can things back significantly.
| titanomachy wrote:
| Yeah I saw that early in my career at a small company.
| Smart and charismatic guy in an architect role, impressed
| technical and non-technical people alike with his
| knowledge.
|
| Now that I have more experience I realize he was more
| excited about cargo-culting big tech practices than about
| making sure our software was well-architected. We wasted
| so much time enthusiastically implementing his low-impact
| but technically exciting ideas.
| anaerobicover wrote:
| The opposite can be a problem as well: a principal or
| architect who is stuck in their ways or not up to date on
| the platform will cause a lot of frustration and waste a
| lot of time. I've seen this unfortunately a few times:
| highly experienced and generally knowledgeable engineers
| who are disdainful of mobile platforms and don't feel
| they need to learn about the details and limitations of
| the system before pronouncing on technical designs (This
| especially applies to iOS for some reason IME).
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Yeah, there's one principal DS at my company, and he's a
| net negative. I'm honestly amazed that they have hired
| him and kept him (which speaks to deeper issues with the
| company, unfortunately).
|
| A bad principal/staff person has around the same level of
| impact as a bad manager/director, except it tends to
| cause more technical badness than social badness.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > The advantage of having an older, very wise and very
| experienced engineer whose job it is to document, plan
| and understand all the moving parts of your project
|
| The problem being. People don't want to hear that it's
| going to take them a while to get from 0 to 100%. They'd
| rather hear they can get from 0 to 99% in a day, then
| spend a month slogging through that last percent.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| That's because software architecture like that requires
| knowing what you want, planning, patience, and such. The
| "thought leaders" of the business are jittering in all
| directions, busy _pivoting_ , imagineering, and generally
| behaving like any other particle undergoing Brownian
| motion. Holding course to something specific would
| require ... well, it's just not going to happen.
| edoceo wrote:
| We do: we've identified this is the most important bug;
| work it till its "done" so we can't task-shift that work
| till its done. No daily (or less) priority shift.
| dnautics wrote:
| I agree but I wouldn't call it toxic, rather "foolish".
| nullsense wrote:
| "meteor strike" what a brilliant way to put it. Been struck
| by a few of those in my time.
| milesvp wrote:
| I've experienced this professionally. It's super
| debilitating. At some point, the only thing that you are
| willing to spend energy on is preventing the last fire you're
| exhausted from just fighting from happening again. I don't
| know what I'd have done if I didn't have good support from my
| manager at the time. He cleared a lot of expectations of
| other deliverables out of the way, so I could stabilize the
| infrastructure. Now, I know enough to work the politics to
| give myself room to do this work, but junior me couldn't have
| done it alone without cracking.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I tend to be verbose in tracking bugs, but poor in tagging,
| categorizing, and prioritizing them.
|
| Ultimately, I've found the important bugs prioritize themselves
| no matter how sloppy your system is. The rest of the bugs are
| simply there to (1) provide context, reference (2) serve as
| fallback if product work tends to lag.
| emodendroket wrote:
| If the meeting is on a calendar ahead of time it's not really
| an interruption.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| It's an interruption from the task you were working on. Being
| planned or on a calendar means it's not an 'unplanned
| interruption', however, anything that takes you away from
| what you're doing is, by definition, an interruption.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| In some ways it's worse because you will start anticipating
| the meeting before it starts.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I don't know how you work, but my schedule of meeting, work,
| meeting, work definitely feels like the meetings are
| interruptions.
|
| Especially since they don't add any value, but that's
| arguably a different problem.
| nullsense wrote:
| Certainly feels like one when I know the context switch is
| coming and it's scheduled in such a mid morning or mid
| afternoon slot that the time either side of it isn't long
| enough to do deep work, particularly when the rest of the
| team will interrupt me ad hoc to get unblocked on their work.
| If there were no meeting I can deal with their interruptions
| and context switch back to my work and get a long enough
| stretch to concentrate. With frequent meetings in certain
| timeslots I get virtually nothing done some weeks.
|
| It likely affects some people more than others depending on
| the demands placed on you.
|
| Think I'm going request meetings never fall mid morning or
| mid afternoon.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Personally my least favorite time for a meeting is one that
| interrupts my usual lunch. They should put you on trial at
| the Hague for scheduling a meeting from 11:00-1:00.
| nullsense wrote:
| Yeah I don't want lunch interrupted either. But from
| 11:00 to 12:00. Or preferably 11:30 to 12:00. Or even 4pm
| to 5pm.
| majewsky wrote:
| Great idea! Now I just need to get people to schedule their
| Slack messages a week in advance.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If the meeting is on a calendar ahead of time it's not
| really an interruption.
|
| Knowing about it doesn't make it interrupt flow any less,
| unless you just avoid the kind of work that would require
| flow around it, which still imposes the same kind of
| productivity impact on intellectual "making" workers. [0]
|
| [0] related: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
| emodendroket wrote:
| I don't know about you guys, but I can't really keep a
| sustained bust going for 8 hours anyway. Even if I had no
| meetings at all, I have to stop for the restroom, tea,
| food, or even just to give my body a break.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| IME, non-intellectual breaks don't break flow the same
| way as meetings where you need to use, but shift,
| intellectual focus. Bathroom, short-walk, and
| coffee/tea/snack breaks, aside from filling important
| bodily functions that don't get filled by meetings,
| provide a pause that seems somewhat akin to a rest
| between sets in physical exercise.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Just had a meeting with some students looking to outsource some
| dataset validation work. I had them time themselves for a
| couple hours doing it themselves, and we found that seeing
| aside am hour a day for a couple weeks will get them through
| everything... And they'll end up with higher quality data than
| they'll get from outsourced validation, with a better idea of
| the pitfalls of the dataset.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Those students are in the wrong career. You can't make good
| things from data without (metaphorically) getting your hands
| dirty.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Or maybe they have just learned something--these are
| students, not seasoned professionals.
| outime wrote:
| >Which is why it's so utterly toxic that corporate America runs
| on an interrupt driven system, with meetings sprinkled
| carelessly across engineer calendars.
|
| As a person who's worked in both american and european big
| companies... I can tell it's not an american illness only and I
| have heard the same from asian friends. Best I got was one or
| two meeting-free days (at least on paper, in reality these
| would be ignored as well). I just got used to these things.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I did an internal transfer and took over from a team that I
| think had been in this state for some time-- it was really the
| ideal scenario because in many ways I _wasn 't_ having to ramp
| on everything the way a true new hire would, but I still had
| the clean slate and clean calendar to immediately get a bunch
| of stale systems upgraded, processes cleaned up, start into
| writing some documentation, research new tools to deploy, etc.
| Very invigorating and a lot of progress possible in a short
| period of time.
| morty_s wrote:
| > it takes a special kind of new hire
|
| Yeah, it does. I've had a good amount of experience doing this.
| You need to have tact and a kind of humbleness that can be
| difficult to maintain (tbh, it was for me at least). In my most
| recent experience with this, many of the bugs were unknown.
| During my ramp up, I read through nearly all of the code I'd be
| working on and got a good sense of what needed to be done, but
| the code changes were the easy part. The issue that required
| more work IMO was navigating the social waters as a new hire.
|
| I found that you can use being a new hire to your advantage, eg
| "hey I was reading through this piece of code and I had a
| question about XYZ."
|
| Sometimes I've felt certain bugs are, for one reason or
| another, difficult to discuss. One thing I've done in cases
| like this is to refactor a bit of code in a way that makes a
| subtle bug painfully obvious; then in review, where the
| reviewers were the original author and reviewer, it's easier
| for them to see the bug and say "this looks weird," to which I
| respond "ah, yeah, this seems like a bug, I'll fix this."
|
| The rough part of this is that you can get so good at being the
| fixer that this becomes all you (ie. maybe you're not working
| on new features, etc) which can suck. The bright side is that
| you can strengthen the team---everyone gets a chance to
| build/rebuild context and mental models, design docs can be
| updated, and the teams foundation gets stronger as a result. Of
| course, ymmv.
|
| As a new hire, I find it important to build trust and
| relationships.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| The best advice I was given (when I was a new hire, by my
| manager) was something along the lines of "You're smart, and
| you aren't burdened by tradition or seniority. If you see
| something that looks weird or confusing, ask about it! No one
| will hold it against you, and your point of view may keep us
| from committing to something more complex than it needs to
| be."
|
| I've tried to keep that level of intentional naivete.
| ErrantX wrote:
| intentional naivete is such a great way to put it,
| definitely going to use that going forward :)
| maroonblazer wrote:
| >The rough part of this is that you can get so good at being
| the fixer that this becomes all you (ie. maybe you're not
| working on new features, etc) which can suck.
|
| This is where a good manager makes a difference. They're also
| interested in your professional development. They should
| recognize the valuable work you're doing, have you train
| new(er) hires and move you into more senior positions, more
| interesting work, or both, whichever you prefer.
| cbushko wrote:
| This resonates with me so much as I was in this position 3
| years ago.
|
| My boss came to me and said "we want to move from AWS to GCP,
| using kubernetes and not have it be a mess like we have now"
|
| I was new, senior, free from ownership. I chose to stay as a
| team of 1 so that I wasn't burdened with fires and meetings.
| It freed me up to put my head down and get the work done.
|
| The grind was learning GCP, kubernetes, terraform, the
| platform/product, gathering requirements from several teams
| and mentoring people that would pop into the project as their
| time allowed.
|
| I won't lie as learning new things was great. The project was
| partially greenfield as it was a platform migration and not a
| product rewrite. There were a lot of constraints & debt to
| deal with.
|
| Maybe the new employee churn is one of the reasons that most
| startups get so much done... the new people are not burdened
| by ownership and being the subject matter experts. They are
| free to do things, good or bad. :)
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > we want to move from AWS to GCP
|
| Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
| kakkan wrote:
| Why do you think GCP is worse than AWS? I've used GCP and
| found it quite easy to start with and the managed
| instances was a breeze to set up and deploy stuff. I've
| done it for only small businesses and they were happy
| with the results too and the easy to use console made
| things easier to navigate. Maybe the trouble with GCP
| comes with scale?
| jen20 wrote:
| > Why do you think GCP is worse than AWS?
|
| Because the identity model is worse than IAM, and the
| quota system is insane. The global VPC networking being
| nicer doesn't make up for this, unfortunately.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| I'm strictly against all "cloud" lock-in, but if you're
| going down that path despite all caveats, then using the
| #1 cloud provider makes more sense than a third-place
| competitor from a company that's best known for not
| having customer service.
| kelp wrote:
| I recently worked at a single digit billion dollar
| valuation SaaS provider and we had to run everything on
| AWS, GCP and Azure, to be where the customers were.
|
| Total cloud spend was in 2 digit millions per year.
|
| Many hundreds of k8s clusters, all using each providers
| k8s managed service.
|
| My general high level take is this:
|
| * AWS
|
| Products mostly work quite well. Their UX is terrible and
| very inconsistent between products. But things mostly
| work, and their support is generally excellent,
| especially when you have a TAM (Technical Account
| Manager) who you can reach out to at any time. They will
| help you navigate any support issues, and ensure you get
| a quick resolution. But AWS stuff is generally very
| complex, overly complex in my opinion.
|
| Also at scale API rate limits just kill you, and AWS
| continues to struggle to provide any real visibility into
| API rate limits. I'm told that large services internal to
| AWS have to work around this by building their own
| caching layer in front of any control plane APIs. Also
| the api limits are at the account boundary, so you have
| to start doing account sharding.
|
| GCP:
|
| Has better UX, more consistent experience. Much better
| visibility into limits and things like that. You still
| probably end up having to do project sharding at scale to
| work around limits. We continued to run into a lot of
| issues with GCPs load balancers blackholing traffic, and
| it was never really resolved. I think their support is
| generally worse than AWS. I've had substantially worse
| support experiences with GCP than AWS at 2 companies now.
| Mostly support not being particularly useful, and not
| resolving the issue. As a customer it feels like Google
| has struggled to adapt their culture to the needs of real
| enterprise customers. AWS has this much more figured out.
| But my GCP account teams have always been quite good.
|
| Azure: The worst of all 3. Lots and lots of issues with
| their k8s service, low limits on the number of nodes you
| could deploy. k8s 1.18 supposedly fixed a lot. But their
| answer was always just that you have to upgrade. Their
| support engineers were frequently gave us actively bad
| advice that would have resulted in full customer outages
| if we'd followed it. The engineers on my team fortunately
| didn't listen and instead figured out how to fix issues
| themselves. Also frequently ran into various limits and
| you need to start thinking about subscription sharding.
|
| Of the 3, I personally prefer using and interacting with
| GCP. But their support or is still certainly worse than
| AWS. That said, I always felt bad for our TAMs at AWS. It
| felt like a non-stop job where you had too be available
| at all hours to deal with unhappy customers. They usually
| gave us fantastic support, but I wonder at what personal
| cost.
| hyperpape wrote:
| Interruptions are definitely harmful, but if you look at what
| he did, he could have done it in spite of meetings. What would
| be bad would be starting it and being told (implicitly or
| explicitly) not to finish it.
|
| Better to have meetings than to have what you're doing
| cancelled several weeks in.
| djmetzle wrote:
| Truth! Deep work and focus is difficult, expensive with
| continuous meetings and notifications. So the OP is extra
| right! Cutting through the noise looks like magic now.
| zebraflask wrote:
| I can both see the value in that approach and, having run
| across things like this situation before, I can also see an
| unaddressed question in this post (already brought up by the
| replies, but worth repeating): how is that scenario not a
| fundamental failure of management, or some kind of
| dysfunctional organizational dynamic, to not prevent that kind
| of thing from happening in the first place?
|
| Bug reports aren't exactly sui generis, they don't just
| mysteriously appear.
| lolthishuman wrote:
| Imagine how the kernel and operating system feels...
| vmladenov wrote:
| I just recently walked past a hotel advertisement display
| that had blue-screened, so not well
| aspaceman wrote:
| > And it takes a special kind of new hire to have the expertise
| to parachute in, recognize that work needs to be done, and then
| do it with little supervision.
|
| About 6 months into a job I realized this was what I needed to
| do and totally cracked. Didn't know the questions to ask or the
| way to learn what I needed to so I burnt out quick and quit. My
| fault for sure, but there was a ton of pressure to identify
| issues and fix them because senior people were "just too busy".
| cgriswald wrote:
| I had the opposite problem. I took to it like a duck to water
| and then was told to stop because I had "better things to
| do." When I asked what they suggested things I had already
| done. I become so bored it really affected my work ethic. I
| didn't like that and eventually quit.
| rufius wrote:
| Honestly, I'd have approached it differently.
|
| Close everything older than 2 weeks. If it's
| important/relevant, it will crop back up. If it's not, then it
| stays unfixed.
|
| This can be really uncomfortable to do. But it's how I've
| rescued a couple of teams that I've led as either an EM or Tech
| Lead.
|
| Put another way - if everything is important or "must fix",
| nothing is.
|
| So to the author: that seemed like a waste of time. I would not
| have done it because I'm not convinced the outcome would have
| been meaningfully different from my tactic.
| sneak wrote:
| > _Close everything older than 2 weeks. If it's important
| /relevant, it will crop back up. If it's not, then it stays
| unfixed._
|
| This seems like a great idea: technical debt bankruptcy.
|
| In reality, you're throwing away hugely valuable data that
| people spent real time and effort producing for you.
|
| See also: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
| nitrogen wrote:
| Note: you'll probably want to copy/paste that URL instead
| of clicking it, because unless something has changed (e.g.
| browsers not sending referrers), JWZ had/has a Referrer
| rule that will show something...else for anyone coming from
| HN.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=t
| r...
| boring_twenties wrote:
| Thanks, I'd forgotten all about that, and also why jwz's
| domain was resolving to 127.0.0.X on my system.
| sneak wrote:
| That's half the fun of legitimate opportunities to link
| jwz's content. :D
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| We're doing it in my current company and we lose a lot of
| valuable data. On top of this, other teams are not encouraged
| opening a bug anymore because no-one will fix it.
|
| It's great for individual contributors who don't care about
| understanding the product and are probably going to be in
| another team in 3 months.
|
| In a previous job I did what the author did and it helped
| building an understanding of the project and with knowing at
| any time the list of the top X things we had to fix.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I've found a happy medium is to have a garbage collection
| section of the backlog. You'll probably never touch it, but
| having the data can be important.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Well, infuriating when you're a client of teams who use this
| strategy, but it is certainly effective.
| fossuser wrote:
| The author's tactic gives them a good sense of the project,
| common requests, and bugs over a long time period.
|
| This context is really valuable when reasoning about the
| product or determining what's important to prioritize.
|
| The issue with the "declare bankruptcy and important stuff
| will come back" is that you don't actually solve the
| underlying ruthless prioritization issue and very quickly end
| up in the exact same position.
|
| You also irritate people that spent time writing up product
| issues for potentially important bugs by auto closing them
| (so many important things may not come back), but the bigger
| loss is that going through all of them gives you solid
| product historical context.
|
| For what it's worth, the best PMs I know go through the
| backlog and understand what they're killing when they
| approach a project that's currently fucked. I think it has a
| positive side effect of giving them a lot of credibility too
| (as well as helping them ramp up).
| rufius wrote:
| I can see it cut both ways.
|
| I won't argue that my way is the only correct way because
| I'm certain it's not.
|
| Something I didn't make clear in the very brief description
| I gave was that, yes, capturing context of what was there
| is important.
|
| That said - the two projects I worked in where we did this
| were filled with bad bugs (a separate and problematic
| issue).
|
| Nothing really replaces spending time with users. That's
| what I tend to opt for - figuring out what sucks in their
| experience and iterate on that.
| spurgu wrote:
| Yeah if you're deleting bugs older than 2 weeks then
| they're just gonna resurface and you're gonna have to
| classify them _later_ , in an ongoing process lasting
| however many weeks. Might as well instead grab the bull by
| the horns and get the beast tamed right here and now.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Yeah if you're deleting bugs older than 2 weeks then
| they're just gonna resurface
|
| I mean, maybe not--you might lose the users impacted by
| the bug. Which from a company PoV is probably a loss, but
| depending on how broken incentives are may not be for the
| dev team.
| EmptyMoon wrote:
| I have to agree. There is nothing more demotivating for me
| than documenting a bug thoroughly, only to have it returned
| to me two months later as part of a bulk 'we didn't get to
| this in time' cleanup.
|
| Issues for those teams usually 'best effort' isolation
| going forward, which compounds the issue.
| greggman3 wrote:
| And yet this is what several open source projects do,
| including VSCode. They've even automated the process. If
| there's no action on a bug for X amount of time it's
| auto-closed.
| Too wrote:
| Possibly worse is those small bugs that would just take a
| few hours to fix but never get prioritized, yet they
| still get pulled up for discussion week after week during
| whole team grooming-meetings. "what is this bug again?"
| Accumulating a total of more admin-time than solution
| time.
| pixl97 wrote:
| A bug left alone long enough grows from an child bug to
| an adult bug. You're still caring, feeding, and
| maintaining that bug the entire time.
| mrec wrote:
| I think the oldest bug I've raised that's still open is
| this Webkit one from 2008 [1]. It still gets plaintive
| comments from various people every few years. A few more
| and it'll be going off to college.
|
| [1] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22261
| edoceo wrote:
| > We are fixing in Blink (c2103)
| mrec wrote:
| That's no help for Safari. Personally I haven't needed to
| care about Safari in half a decade, but presumably others
| still do.
| glennpratt wrote:
| Ahh, the infuriation of seeing the issue you worked hard to
| document, closed by summarily by somebody that didn't even
| try to understand.
|
| And of course that person didn't close their pet project or
| the features they promised.
|
| It's slightly soothed when it's realized one of your
| summarily closed bugs could have prevented the next incident
| or major customer loss.
| awillen wrote:
| Really well written and so true... I think that far too often,
| people get intimidated by the size/scope/hairiness of a problem
| and try to reduce their intimidation by breaking it down.
|
| Particularly if it's a one-off problem, you're often far better
| just doing something. Anything. Whatever comes to mind first.
| Just take some sort of step.
|
| You may find that the problem isn't as hairy as you thought, and
| in fact just by continuing to do stuff, you solve it pretty
| quickly. When that's not the case, doing stuff often leads you to
| the kind of understanding that allows you to put in place a good
| plan, where just starting with planning forces you to make a
| bunch of incorrect assumptions that you then have to fix when
| actually implementing the plan you worked so hard on.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "People said I did the impossible, but that's wrong: I merely did
| something so boring that nobody else had been willing to do it."
|
| Well, for some people it is indeed impossible to keep on working
| on boring tasks regulary without going crazy or dying inside.
|
| I feel like this. And I was proven right on quite some times - to
| not do an endless work of stupidity - and instead find a clever
| way around to automate and save on it.
|
| Famous example would be the young Gauss, whose teacher gave them
| the task of adding all the numbers from 1 to 100, expecting them
| to be busy for a while. And Gauss just did (n+1)*n/2=5050 and was
| done.
|
| The problem is just, that very often there is no magic bullet
| like this and the work remains just dull work (like in the
| article) - and then you can just loose by searching for the magic
| solution, while avoiding the actual work.
|
| Organisational it makes sense, to have enough people capable of
| reliable doing dull work - and smart (but lazy) people who come
| up with clever tricks to save the dull workers at least some
| grinding.
| beigeoak wrote:
| It's not necessary that these two approaches can't coexist. In
| my experience, you HAVE to put in the slog to gain deep
| knowledge which lets you do these "clever tricks".
|
| https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1311343418422046721
| mdip wrote:
| Love it.
|
| I've written at length about my Dad's adventures as an
| entrepreneur, but I remember that one statement made over card
| group[0] about my Dad's company and my Dad that really stuck with
| me.
|
| The backstory is that Dad bought into a business he was working
| for. After several years of success, the majority shareholder
| decided to retire and sold the business, taking a deal that was
| highly favorable to him and violating contractual agreements in
| place with the other shareholders[1]. The end result was my Dad
| was out of a job at a company he worked hard to build _and he did
| the legal things right to avoid getting here in the first place._
| The parts of that whole process that weren 't blood-boiling
| infuriating were probably devastating, and I know he lost many
| night's sleep.
|
| The old company was being purchased by its direct competitor,
| which was a much bigger outfit, already. Now it would have the
| manufacturing and (some of) the staff of the old business since
| OtherCorp[2] decided to keep the old place running. My Dad _did_
| get a payout; he probably could have taken that, done all of the
| investing he did over the years, and ended up retiring in the
| same position he 's in now, but he didn't.
|
| It wasn't that "all of this happened and so he buckled down and
| _worked harder_ ". He _always_ worked hard. The Poker game
| comment was made shortly after my Dad had decided to open up a
| competing business, talking about his success at the previous
| one. And he was about to embark on taking on that competitor and
| his previous business as a completely new outfit running on a
| shiny bank loan.
|
| The table was talking about my Dad setting up the new business
| and a neighbor friend's Dad folded and said: "Hah! They're
| FUCKED[3]! They didn't buy _anything_. They don 't know that (old
| company) _is_ Russ (my Dad)! Ford /GM/Chrysler don't want to work
| with (old company), they want to work with Russ". Then (mind you,
| probably a few beers in), he went on about story after story of
| my Dad's various rabbits he's pulled out of hats. The stories
| were _insane_ --I've got comments written in the past about my
| Dad concluding a 24-hour workday (as part of a series over a few
| weeks, I think) with a drive down to a plant in another state to
| ensure parts arrived when promised, only to be given sympathy by
| the plant manager -- my Dad wasn't in his usual suit, he had on
| what he wore doing manual labor. The plant manager took a shot at
| "the jerk/prick/asshole" who's forcing him to drive all night, to
| which my Dad said something along the lines of "I sure am", I'm
| sure, but I doubt he took offense. At crunch times, my Dad was
| more than "the guy working back in the shop with everyone else",
| he was the guy doing the _worst_ /most _painful_ job. Assuming
| skill level wasn 't a factor, if a job involved risk, it was his.
| Now, I'm not saying he was a _saint_. My Dad did not manage the
| people, and my high-school friends (who all got jobs in the back
| in the summer due to near limitless amounts of overtime) used to
| tell me some hilarious stories about him blowing his top
| screaming at them for this or that thing[4].
|
| As I grew up and learned more of the story, I learned of the
| struggles the new company had getting these large automotive
| companies to be willing to work with such a small shop. At the
| end of the day, it was my Dad's willingness to take whatever job
| was given to them, do it better than anyone else and further
| prove that "that (old company) _was_ my Dad, new company _is_ my
| Dad ".
|
| Consequently, my understanding is that the lawsuits involved
| ended in my Dad's favor, but the lawyers were the only ones who
| profited. My Mom and Dad occasionally argued over the lawsuit. My
| Dad knew before they filed it that they'd never see a dime and
| would likely spend money. Nobody thought my Dad was holding out
| hope for a payout -- he was clear about it from the beginning
| that it was the principal of the matter. And when he won, I was
| moved out, but I don't recall being invited to any parties or
| even hearing about it except in passing. I'm sure it was
| _important_ , but the thing that I _did_ hear about was when he
| was able to purchase OldCorp back from the competitor about a
| decade later.
|
| What was left of his old company's staff was let go and the
| business was wound down shortly after that. My Dad's business is
| still around. He's (pretty much) retired; still has the same
| stake in the company, though they're always entertaining offers
| to sell. He's had many offers, but none of them came with strong
| guarantees for the existing staff -- a lot of whom were there day
| #1 -- and he won't do that to them, they are great people. I
| think part of it is having a taste of that, himself, when his
| last company/job disappeared out from under him. Part of it is
| not wanting to sell the company knowing it's just going to become
| "a customer list" at a larger company. It won't be the next
| Google, but I bet he'd love it if it outlived him. I'm sure there
| are several other reasons, but I know he deeply valued how much
| his staff was willing to give to his company and that would have
| been enough.
|
| [0] Mom/Dad played Pinochle and Euchre (Michigan thing) with a
| large group of couples, Dad played Poker.
|
| [1] If that sounds really vague it's because I was pretty young
| when this happened, this is not an area I have any expertise in
| and I've never been sat down and told the entire story from start
| to finish, so I'm putting together pieces of that memory. But I
| lived through it as a kid so it's pretty vivid. :)
|
| [2] Not their real name if that's not clear!
|
| [3] Sorry about that -- I try to keep it clean, but that word
| wasn't said in my house very often, so when 12-13 year old me
| heard my friend's Dad use it to praise my Dad, it stuck with me.
| There are times that censoring the profanity loses the effect.
|
| [4] A buddy of mine insisted that my Dad went into the back
| yelling at them for being behind on something, throwing F-bombs
| left and right. I spent a few minutes confirming he was talking
| about my Dad. Growing up, I think I heard him use it four times
| and Mom twice. When I went to work at a smaller shop in my teens
| (and every one thereafter in my life), I realize that's not all
| that surprising ... and that my buddy was also, probably,
| exaggerating. My Dad was a pilot for a _long_ time and is well
| known for his cool head; he 'd generally swore/yelled at "things"
| not people (other than the Lions, perhaps, but that's more
| yelling at the TV).
| beders wrote:
| This is so true for every bug tracking system I ever encountered
| in any company.
|
| We called it the P3 graveyard.
|
| And there's always that lingering feeling that there are few
| nuggets hidden in there that would resolve the majority of them.
| farrarstan wrote:
| Ive simplified it but it still requires me to tell you about a
| lot of tea? Dont fukken hoist me! Stop!
| louwrentius wrote:
| This article may be the most important article on Hacker News you
| may read this year.
|
| The message of this story is obviously beyond just our IT related
| professions.
|
| I really wonder if people do understand what needs to be done but
| won't. Or that they really don't see a way out of a mess.
|
| Are people really wilfully blind to 'obvious' solutions that are
| boring, labor intensive and terrible to implement? Don't they see
| the even worse alternative?
|
| This is in the end probably not about smarts or insight.
|
| This is about something more fundamental: values.
| Nemrod67 wrote:
| I think the core of it is indeed values, but in the Real World
| it's about printing money. If the natural incentives for
| "Better Things" are replaced with "Get all the moneys, escape
| any consequences" then we get the current macro-economic
| incentives in all domains.
|
| I guess it will either devolve into total-vertical-
| transnational integration (imagine being a citizen of Apple),
| or we'll have to create a new country "for smart people that
| wanna do stuff", and that entails a whole lotta hard work and
| problems.
| pm90 wrote:
| Its often more complicated than that.
|
| I worked on a team that interfaced directly with the semi-
| technical "Customer Account Managers" who did the technical
| setup for customers on our system. The system itself was pretty
| old, written by people who no longer worked at the company.
| There are often a number of things that are wrong with the
| system or don't scale, and every week there is a new issue that
| would bring down the system.
|
| Without the right manager/PM, other teams would constantly
| blame my team for fucking up. But every time we tried to work
| on things that would improve system behavior, a new feature
| would take priority, or some other thing would blow up
| requiring the entire teams focus to fix it.
|
| So even though we wanted to fix things, we were in this state
| where we couldn't put out fires long enough to fix the
| fundamental problems with the system.
| maverickJ wrote:
| What a fascinating story.
|
| I think of success as having infinite patience for doing a few
| boring things repeatedly.
|
| Some other parts are having a higher mission to embrace the
| grind;Some call this purpose.
|
| Something else I have observed by studying other engineers is the
| theme of not depending on your technical skills alone. One needs
| to market/show their work to the right audience, own equity in
| businesses/business.
|
| "As a technical person in your career, you must not rely on your
| technical brilliance or rest on your laurels. You must acquire
| some financial education. There is a tendency for technical
| people to think that they are the best; That they will always be
| on top; That will be always be creative; That their inventions
| won't be usurped quickly by newer inventions. However, history
| says otherwise. Life was quite unpleasant to Tesla; He died alone
| and poor depending on handouts from former associates. A tragic
| end for one the most creative minds of the early twentieth
| century."
|
| https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/dont-hinge-your-care...
| pugworthy wrote:
| What he describes isn't grind, it's taking care of a big mess.
|
| Grind is management/company/etc. that says you have to work
| weekends and late all the time because there's more money to be
| made that way.
|
| Grind is doing that epic job of organizing and triaging the bugs,
| then your company doesn't give you a bonus and you're expected to
| do it all the time.
|
| Doing the right thing is what he did.
|
| I just hope his company did the right thing back.
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