[HN Gopher] My "Investment Mindset"
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My "Investment Mindset"
Author : yarapavan
Score : 69 points
Date : 2021-06-24 15:33 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.pragmaticengineer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.pragmaticengineer.com)
| Jtsummers wrote:
| The author is using "sunk cost" as if it were, strictly, a bad
| thing. Sunk costs are not fundamentally bad, they're a fact. Your
| education is a sunk cost, the money has been spent. Your car,
| your home, everything in your past are sunk costs. Sunk costs
| become problematic with a particular kind of reasoning: the sunk
| cost fallacy.
|
| In that, you persist in an endeavor (job, relationship, project,
| whatever) _because_ of the past investment (or primarily because
| of) even when all other signs indicate you should end it. "I've
| spent $100,000 on this money pit, I should keep going", only
| later to go into bankruptcy when the home could've been sold
| (perhaps for a loss) and a better quality one acquired.
|
| What the author seems more interested in is the notion of
| "opportunity costs". Specifically, what can be done _now_ instead
| of studying for interviews? Maybe you could do more OT and reap
| the rewards today of a higher income, at the cost of not
| qualifying for or getting jobs later due to a lack of preparation
| (jobs which might offer a higher base salary and obviate the need
| /desire for OT to supplement the income). Alternatively, studying
| now could (doesn't always, I've often studied on the job at least
| within reason) cost you pay because you aren't able to work some
| hours. Or it could cost you time with friends or partners or
| whatever.
|
| The question is, is it worth the trade off and how long will it
| take to pay off if it is compared to the alternative activities
| and whatever they may or may not provide.
| mywittyname wrote:
| This is more of the "Wendy's Chili" idea applied to software than
| any kind of investment mindset.
|
| For those unaware, Wendy's (a hamburger chain in the USA) has a
| policy that cooked hamburgers need to be served within a few
| minutes of being prepared. This keeps the quality of the burgers
| up, however, it also causes a lot of waste since burgers need to
| be prepared ahead of time to really be "fast" food. So the
| founder of Wendy's decided to refrigerate the unused patties and
| use them the next day to make chili.
|
| Chili wasn't a high margin item, it didn't make sense to make it
| from fresh hamburger. It was really a way for the company to
| offset the costs associated with serving hot, fresh burgers.
|
| Finding a way to leverage code you've already built but wasted is
| a great idea. But that's not necessarily a great idea to go about
| intentionally wasting time in the hopes that you might recoup
| something back later. Keep focused on making high quality
| software first and foremost, but if you have some scraps left
| over from that focus, definitely find a way to make chili from
| it. Just don't get into the chili business.
| yuy910616 wrote:
| I find this largely to be true and a very useful mindset to have,
| however, personally I've observed two shortcomings:
|
| 1. At work, there are some projects that offer higher future
| value than others. Every task has some hidden future value - but
| some are higher than others. And predicting their value is, to
| me, better than random.
|
| 2. Eventually, you arrive at resume padding - which is a pretty
| demotivating and toxic mindset to have.
| dimmke wrote:
| Getting better at algorithm/data structures has made me a much
| better programmer. People say "oh I'll never use that" but doing
| graph and tree problems got me much better at writing pure
| recursive code. I instinctively know how to write algorithms now
| that are much more performant.
|
| Last night I decided to write a React component that can render
| formatted JSON in the browser, with collapsing etc...it took me
| about 4 hours. There's zero chance I would have been able to do
| that without that experience. I would have just looked for a
| library to do it.
|
| So yeah, I highly recommend it.
| [deleted]
| hizxy wrote:
| Reframing coding and design challenges as an investment doesn't
| mean that these challenges are not a sunk cost.
| xwdv wrote:
| You missed his point. It's still worth doing those things as
| the process of doing them can result in other epiphanies that
| can lead you to greater opportunities down the line.
| goostavos wrote:
| Eh... his point is largely making lemonade out of a situation
| of lemons. It's a healthy mindset for sure, but it's still
| forcing yourself to look on the bright side of a crummy
| situation.
|
| Interviews test your ability to quickly solve silly problems
| under stress. This is a muscle you can get better at with
| training. And, yep, there's a non-zero chance that it make
| cause an epiphany or insight into something else. However,
| there's a much higher chance that it does not. Years into my
| career, my interest in grinding those type of problems just
| for the purpose of performing during an interview is
| effectively zero.
|
| The thing that I love about CS is how broad it is. There's a
| great big world of things to dive very deeply into which
| aren't graph traversal algorithms or solving word problems.
| Being forced to halt your own personal research, hobbies, or
| interests because of our current broken interview system is
| lame even when spun as "I'll think of it as probably useful".
| hizxy wrote:
| I didn't miss the point. It's disingenuous to claim something
| isn't a sunk cost by simply hoping it's not.
| lhorie wrote:
| TFA isn't saying it isn't a sunk cost, it's saying it's an
| investment in addition to being a sunk cost
| alexashka wrote:
| Right, let me go to the moon because it'll make me a better
| golf player.
|
| Makes sense.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| " _Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can
| only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the
| dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in
| something -- your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This
| approach has never let me down, and it has made all the
| difference in my life._ " -Steve Jobs
| semitones wrote:
| Also known as a "growth mindset". From what I've seen, I believe
| the majority of HN readers think this way - that most things are
| learning experiences, and that knowledge is power.
| lhorie wrote:
| "Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity" -
| Seneca
|
| IMHO, the key point here isn't so much about making the best out
| of a bad situation, it's that if you just stay cooped up in your
| comfort zone, the breadth of your preparedness isn't going to be
| nearly as wide as if you dabbled with things outside of your
| comfort zone.
|
| You don't need to cram interview questions to get into big Bay
| Area tech companies: I did it without even knowing leetcode was a
| thing. But I gained similar preparation by working on an open
| source project. One of my best interviews involved a super in-
| depth discussion about some algorithm, and it went well because I
| just happened to have had implemented the thing in my OSS project
| and I knew from experience the trade-offs of different approaches
| in gory detail. Regardless, I never thought of that project as a
| drag. It was always a product of love.
|
| Looking from another angle: Had I merely tried to make lemonades
| out of lemons, I'd certainly have mastered the technical
| skillsets that I used to use in my first job, but those skills
| turned out to not be the ones that carried me to where I am
| today. In fact, in hindsight, I had a lot of misconceptions about
| what preparation meant (e.g. I was too focused on specific
| technologies and too narrow-minded in some regards). The one
| thing that has served me well was the idea of broadening my
| horizons. You never know which seemingly useless obscurity is
| going to be a defining part of your journey.
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