[HN Gopher] You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)
___________________________________________________________________
You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)
Author : _ttg
Score : 354 points
Date : 2021-08-17 07:00 UTC (16 hours ago)
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| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _You don 't need to work on hard problems_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398118 - Feb 2020 (43
| comments)
| dcolkitt wrote:
| One reason that a lot of very intellectual people express a
| skepticism of capitalism is because so often you see very
| successful who aren't very bright. It's typical to see a small-
| to-medium business owner worth $20 million, who's maybe above
| average intelligence, but nowhere near the brain power of say a
| physics PhD who's grinding out postdocs at $45k/year.
|
| I think one reason for that is because the market price system
| already does a lot of the intellectual heavy lifting. In many
| cases the market gives you very transparent signals about
| relative cost and scarcity of resources. For a typical
| entrepreneur, it's often just about putting in the hustle, grit,
| and risk tolerance to convert low-priced inputs into high-priced
| outputs.
|
| For example, I can pretty clearly identify that my area needs a
| car wash. A lot of homes were built in this zip code recently,
| and there's no car wash to service a new, large market. The car
| wash business model is pretty easy to project. With a tiny bit of
| research I can easily figure out prices, wages, rents, etc.
|
| Opening and running a successful car wash would not be a hard
| _intellectual_ problem. What it would be is a hard pain-in-the-
| ass problem. The challenge of owning a car wash isn 't solving
| differential equations. It's waking up to an emergency call at 6
| am that your bathroom's flooding, and half your staff called out
| sick because they're hung over.
| Rioghasarig wrote:
| I don't see anything wrong with this situation. People who
| exhibit profit-seeking behavior (entrepreneurs) can make much
| more money than people don't exhibit profit-seeking behavior
| (PhD students). That sounds like a reasonable system to me.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Why would we want to give more money to the people that
| simply want more money? Aren't those the worst people to give
| more money and power to?
| drran wrote:
| When you will need to wash a car, hire a PhD. It's your
| money.
| newbie2020 wrote:
| That in my opinion is the great thing about capitalism. Someone
| with average intelligence but an insane work ethic can make it
| big. I see this completely the other way.
|
| And one thing I've learned as I've grown older is that my
| patience runs thin these days. That means I'm willing to pay
| big bucks for people to handle pain-in-the-ass problems for me.
| Conversely, I don't know what I'd do with a paper on
| theoretical physics other than use the back side as scratch
| paper
| paganel wrote:
| > or find the easiest problem whose solution would be useful
| (like identifying Kenyan names),
|
| Not sure if that would have been possible for the OP but maybe
| he/she could have tried to match the incoming names to a known-
| database of Kenyan names, like a Kenyan phone-book or something?
|
| I had a similar problem to solve in one of my personal projects
| when I wanted to put on a map the buildings nationalised just
| after WW2 by the communist regime from my country, buildings
| which belonged to Jewish citizens. I had a big list of
| nationalised buildings with a name attached to each of them, I
| needed to know if that name was Jewish or not. In order to do
| that I just matched that list of names to the list of names from
| Yad Vashem [1], list which contains only Jewish names.
|
| [1] https://www.yadvashem.org/
| ajot wrote:
| This resonates a lot with the classic Richard Feynman's letter
| about "which problems to solve"
|
| http://genius.cat-v.org/richard-feynman/writtings/letters/pr...
| caseyross wrote:
| "Any run-of-the-mill engineer can design something which is
| elegant. A good engineer designs systems to be efficient. A great
| engineer designs them to be effective."
|
| - from Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
| brundolf wrote:
| One of the most rewarding projects I've ever worked on was a
| catalogue website for a local music shop. It paid what I now make
| salaried in about two weeks, but in the years since I've heard
| back on multiple occasions how much easier it made the lives of
| these lovely people running this lovely little store. They didn't
| even have a CMS before; they made pages manually, via a WYSIWYG
| from the 90s, for each of their hundreds of instruments. And
| since COVID, more than half their business comes through this
| site. It's made a night-and-day difference for them.
|
| I think the over-engineering problem described by the author
| comes down to the fact that most of the work that most of us do
| is deeply empty. We don't impact lives in meaningful ways, at
| least not directly and/or for the better. You really need both of
| those to feel a sense of personal impact. So we look for other
| forms of reward instead- we create puzzles for ourselves to
| solve.
|
| It's hard to find work in our field that's directly impactful at
| all, much less that pays anywhere near what we'd make otherwise.
| Software companies that aren't eating the world can't afford to
| pay salaries that cover a comfortable cost-of-living in SF or
| Seattle or Austin, where many of us have put down roots already.
| And (my impression is that) they hardly exist at all outside of
| those hubs.
|
| I don't know what the answer is.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I would also add, from experience, that it's easy to make a lot
| of money solving relatively easy/un-sexy problems.
|
| If stoners or idiots can do it and earn a living, a skilled
| engineer can make a small fortune.
| gambler wrote:
| _> School is a closed-world domain--you are solving crisply-
| defined puzzles_
|
| Bingo. When people from US tech culture say "hard problems" they
| really mean "hard puzzles". A lot of those people are very proud
| of their puzzle-solving skills acquired at school (what Edward De
| Bono calls vertical thinking), while being absolutely awful at
| dealing with ill-defined open problems (lateral thinking).
| Instead of counteracting this tendency in some way most Silicon
| Valley companies actually amplify the problem by running puzzle
| interviews and structuring their work around glorified paperclip
| maximization. This is why so many systems we have to use today
| are extremely complex, highly optimized for some specific
| criteria, but ultimately designed like shit.
| ctvo wrote:
| I was with you until the end.
|
| > Instead of counteracting this tendency in some way most
| Silicon Valley companies actually amplify the problem by
| running puzzle interviews and structuring their work around
| glorified paperclip maximization. This is why so many systems
| we have to use today are extremely complex, highly optimized
| for some specific criteria, but ultimately designed like shit.
|
| That's quite a jump. There are multitudes of interacting
| systems that cause complexity in software, from time
| constraints, to company structure, to incorrectly mapping the
| domain, to sometimes incompetency. Companies that don't hire
| and reward the behavior you outline have just as complex
| systems. Maybe there's something else there?
| daveslash wrote:
| This really hit me this morning, and the timing couldn't be
| better. We took on a CompSci intern from an Ivy League for the
| summer. Tomorrow's his last day. When he first came on, I was
| really trepidatious; I couldn't put my finger on why, but this
| blog post sums it up perfectly. We're doing important work, but
| it's not "hard puzzles". It's "hard" work, but we work with
| boring technology and solve boring technical problems ~ I was
| worried about how this go over with the intern from the Ivy
| Leagues. Day one we're tearing down hardware with vice grips
| because the guy with the hex-drivers is out and splicing wires.
| Tomorrow's his last day, and he seemed to really enjoy it, but
| I think he enjoyed it because it was not _" just another hard
| puzzle"_ - he was given _" ultra-vague end goal"_, had to _"
| prioritize many different sub-problems"_, and _" probably don't
| even know what all the dimensions are, let alone which are the
| most important"_. Much different from all of his academia...
| I'm glad he enjoyed it, and I feel good having provided a
| valuable experience for a talented budding CompSci engineer.
| lixtra wrote:
| I don't see it so strict. You can put vertical and lateral
| thinkers together in a team and get the best of both worlds,
| i.e. solve the puzzles that matter and provide a sane system
| that actually works.
| shadytrees wrote:
| > School is a closed-world domain--you are solving crisply-
| defined puzzles (multiply these two numbers, implement this
| algorithm, write a book report by this rubric), your solution is
| evaluated on one dimension (letter grade), and the performance
| ceiling (an A+) is low. The only form of progression is to take
| harder courses. If you try to maximize your rewards under this
| reward function, you'll end up looking for trickier and trickier
| puzzles that you can get an A+ on.
|
| > The real world is the polar opposite.
|
| Terry Tao makes much the same point in this video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXJ-zpJeY3E
| unixhero wrote:
| I believe he was following his urge to solve hard problems by
| _engineering_ a solution to them, instead of applying technology
| leadership. Engineering is worth its weight in gold, but not
| everywhere, everytime.
| nivenkos wrote:
| But I think the reason that isn't boring is because you have
| autonomy and, in this case literally, ownership.
|
| Being stuck writing boring SQL reports or struggling with open-
| ended problems so _someone else_ makes more money isn 't such a
| great proposition.
| tr33house wrote:
| I agree. Ownership is underrated. Perhaps one of the biggest
| incentives out there
| WJW wrote:
| Perhaps, if it is actual ownership and not the fake modern
| ownership that gives you the downsides but not the upsides.
| Whenever I hear that term I get reminded of the discussion
| from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550975:
|
| > Jordanpomeroy on Nov 16, 2019
|
| > I find ownership to be motivating. Good leaders inspire me
| to own results, but also empower me to own the "how". When I
| do not own the method of obtaining success, I do not feel
| like I truly am responsible for success. The truth is, with
| more complex work, good leaders realize they're at the mercy
| of those that do the work, because of the complexity only the
| people actually doing the work have complete understanding of
| the system. Therefore, the best card to play is to be very
| clear about the desired outcome, including the whole strategy
| and context behind it, and hope the team owns it all.
|
| > paulriddle on Nov 16, 2019 [-]
|
| > It's funny how carefully you're stepping around financially
| rewarding people who do the work. It's like you know your
| status does not allow you to own the money generated, so
| you're settling for owning the results, the process, the
| method, the responsibility, the all. You are weak.
|
| A bit harsh towards the end perhaps, but paulriddle does make
| a valid point on actual vs fake ownership.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| > Ownership is underrated
|
| You meant perhaps overrated? At least in my experience so far
| in the tech industry, in all the companies I have worked for
| they always praise "ownership" as in: "as an engineer you own
| a product from conception to development to deployment to
| maintenance"... but they never talk about money. There is
| nothing like "If the company goes well and since you own part
| of it, here you have a bonus!" Nop, at least in Western
| Europe is not like that. You behave as if you must own the
| company, but you get no benefits at all; so basically: work
| more for the same money.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| I think your observation confirms that it's underrated. The
| people who don't talk about money use a weird notion of
| ownership where it means responsibility, but doesn't seem
| to mean benefits.
|
| Marx is turning in his grave.
|
| Ownership that OP means is about having the agency to be
| part of the whole picture: responsibilities, work,
| challenges, and results.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| I just read Arnold Schwarzenegger's essay in The Atlantic
| (full disclosure: 110% agree) ...
|
| A thing that stood out, when Arnie spoke out against
| people using "freedom" as justification for not getting a
| vaccine or wearing a mask, he said
|
| > Many people told me that the Constitution gives them
| rights, but not responsibilities. They feel no duty to
| protect their fellow citizens.
|
| I see a direct link betwen the decline of capitalist
| equity and civic responsibility. As you say, there are no
| benefits, and therefore no agency.
|
| The generations Arnie holds up as exemplars of civic
| virtue also had higher tax rates, stronger unions, and a
| much heartier social safety net.
| chubot wrote:
| Paul Graham has an essay somewhere where he describes Robert
| Morris (creator of the Morris worm, kernel hacker, professor
| at MIT) as the FreeBSD sys admin for ViaWeb :) That is,
| probably the "most overqualified" sys admin in the world,
| because he was owning the whole problem.
|
| ----
|
| The OP's post is related to the motivation for my work on
| https://www.oilshell.org/ -- I found that shell solves
| important problems quickly and effectively.
|
| In contrast, in 1999, in college, I worked an an autonomous
| underwater vehicle project that didn't work very well. In
| 2021, I still think that autonomous vehicles don't work very
| well.
|
| I also have a Erdos number of 3 due to a 2016 publication on
| deep learning, but that was mostly due to shell scripts as
| well. The publication has thousands of citations but I'm
| unsure if it will ever be useful.
|
| The author of _Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud_
| bravely stated that publications from the same group (Google
| Brain), with common co-authors, are bullshit:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27331807
| john_yaya wrote:
| Thank you for saying this. I'm currently an engineering
| manager at a "fun" and "interesting" company in SV, and I
| absolutely hate it. It took me a while to figure out why -
| but in retrospect, it's pretty obvious. Writing Jira epics
| and doing code reviews for someone else's vision is, for me
| at least, deeply unfulfilling, no matter how ambitious that
| vision is.
| Guid_NewGuid wrote:
| This is what inspired me to write this:
| https://d22qefpbdavdoz.cloudfront.net/#let-me-work
|
| We're working the wrong way across the industry, developers
| are being cut-off from the processes they are instrumental
| in. None of it makes any sense and it's soul destroying.
| nivenkos wrote:
| I agree with this completely.
|
| It goes both ways too, like companies that try to keep
| business analysts and strategists completely separate
| from the database and data generation specifics.
| gugagore wrote:
| I'm assuming you have some ownership in the form of stock,
| and I'm wondering how that factors into it.
|
| Can you imagine a vision that would be easier to get
| behind, even if it originated with someone else?
| john_yaya wrote:
| I do have some RSUs, but no real way of knowing how much
| they'll be worth, if anything. I don't get to see a cap
| table, nor am I privy to the investors' term sheet to
| know what their overhang is.
|
| Stock options used to be an enticing form of ownership,
| now it's a crapshoot: you're gambling that you won't get
| screwed.
|
| But all of that is beside the point. When I (and
| presumably the original poster) are talking about
| ownership, we mean the sense of originating and creating
| the thing we're building, not just owning the material
| benefit from it.
| apercu wrote:
| "Stock options used to be an enticing form of ownership,
| now it's a crapshoot: you're gambling that you won't get
| screwed."
|
| I've had options and equity and RSU's and all sorts of
| things. Even diluted but still owned 11% of a company
| when I exited.
|
| In 25 years of tech and startups I have probably received
| about $30k total in compensation related to equity.
|
| Odds are you will be screwed.
| fossuser wrote:
| Not sure if you're not in the Bay Area, but for a counter
| point many (maybe most?) of friends I know have had large
| payoffs (though not always with options, sometimes RSUs)
| - it does require some risk taking (holding onto them
| longer, not just immediately liquidating them, sometimes
| exercising options and floating that cost/tax until
| exit).
|
| These payoffs range between 500k and $20M for people I
| know well with more clustered in the 500k-2M range.
| Higher level people I don't know super well easily clear
| 50M+, this isn't just one company exit event either *.
|
| Equity should not be underrated.
|
| * FB, Snap, Google (RSUs), Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Tesla etc.
| mvp wrote:
| Ownership is one thing. If the company believes in a
| cause and everybody in the company is truly working
| towards that cause, it may be equally, if not more,
| fulfilling. Does your company work on a problem or cause
| that you believe in?
| MagicWishMonkey wrote:
| Options have always been a crapshoot with the odds
| heavily stacked against you.
| zippergz wrote:
| At any sufficiently large company, the connection between
| my work and the stock price is loose at best. If you're
| an executive, it might be more direct. But in the public
| companies I have been an employee of, I have never felt a
| shred of motivation from this stock-based "ownership" in
| the sense of a true belief that doing better work will
| make that stock be worth more. In the aggregate, yes, but
| individually, no.
| LordHumungous wrote:
| My favorite project in recent years was a little python service
| that I owned end to end. The rest of the company deployed into
| this god awful monolith but my service ran on a little
| forgotten AWS account where I had full control. Eventually they
| got around to eliminating that account, and I was out.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >Being stuck writing boring SQL reports or struggling with
| open-ended problems
|
| I REALLY like SQL amd open ended problems. But sometimes I
| don't like work because work gets in the way of my SQL and BI
| stuff
| pjmlp wrote:
| I rather work in solving customer problems, regardless of
| complexity, even if it is a two lines bash script.
|
| The satisfaction of actually having an impact on someone's live
| and work.
| tingletech wrote:
| so, use boring tech to work on hard "real world" problems
| Forge36 wrote:
| There's pride in doing the easy things well. With enough of the
| easy stuff automated to minimal intervention, time can be spent
| on the important problems
| raman162 wrote:
| As someone who is still trying to grow technically, this was a
| good reminder that at the end of the day we _put our effort
| towards solving problems that matter_.
| li2uR3ce wrote:
| > A solution's performance has many different dimensions (speed,
| reliability, usability, repeatability, cost, ...)--you probably
| don't even know what all the dimensions are, let alone which are
| the most important.
|
| The "hard problem" is finding the balance. Don't be a UI
| developer that lets beauty eclipse speed, reliability, usability,
| repeatability, cost--every. last. fucking. time.
|
| The author is on to something in that academia's "one
| dimensional" evaluation shouldn't be used in the real world.
| jxramos wrote:
| Here's a great complimentary nugget of wisdom Elon Musk shared on
| the tour he gave of Starbase recently that intersects with a
| closely related concept.
|
| 17:29 Possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to
| optimize the thing that should not exist. And say, well, why
| would you do that? Well, everyone has been trained in high school
| and college that you gotta answer the question, convergent logic.
| So you can't tell a professor, "your question is dumb", or you
| will get a bad grade. You have to answer the question. So
| everyone is basically, without knowing it, they got like mental
| straight jacket on that is they'll work on optimizing the thing
| that should simply not exist. https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=1049
| [deleted]
| a_square_peg wrote:
| "Solve problems that matter" is how I might describe it - maybe
| they are hard problems, maybe not.
|
| The propensity to enjoy working on hard problems can also lead
| them to make any assigned problem harder than it needs to be. I
| regard software developer who likes 'coding' with somewhat
| similar suspicion that I would have with a dentist who likes
| pulling teeth out.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| A good corollary: http://boringtechnology.club/
| [deleted]
| xchip wrote:
| \o/ Please give all the hard problems to me! :)
| andyxor wrote:
| the only thing worse than working for an "A+ on a hard problem"
| is competing on a hard problem in a crowded space.
|
| Mandatory "You and Your Research" by Richard Hamming:
| https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
| posharma wrote:
| There are at least 5 problems with doing pedestrian stuff in a
| corporate setup. Of course, this is part subjective, part
| circumstantial.
|
| (1) Low pay.
|
| (2) If you mess up you get penalized more severely. If you mess
| up a hard problem you get the benefit of doubt, but if you do
| well you get great rewards. Doing well on boring problems doesn't
| earn you any special rewards.
|
| (3) Consistently doing pedestrian stuff makes you feel dumb in
| the scrum (esp. when others are tackling hard problems).
|
| (4) You're first on the chopping block since you're not the
| "core".
|
| (5) Your growth, both professionally and personally, will be
| shunted.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| The trick might be to work on problems that others consider
| hard but you don't. Or, alternatively, problems that might not
| be hard, but deliver valuable business value to people who
| value business value.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Working on hard problems will soon be the only thing to provide
| my life meaning, as all trivial labor becomes automated.
|
| There will exist a window between the automation of all trivial
| labor, and the eclipse of human intelligence by artifical
| intelligence, such that within this window meaningful work will
| remain possible.
|
| I intend to try to contribute to hard problems within that time
| frame.
|
| All else is a meaningless waste of time.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I enjoy doing pedestrian stuff; really, really well.
|
| Most of my work is open-source, as I don't really do anything
| particularly innovative or patent-worthy.
|
| Most of the value in my work is _how_ I do it.
|
| I work carefully, document the living bejeezus out of my work,
| test like crazy, and spend a lot of time "polishing the fenders."
|
| This is something that anyone can do. It just takes patience,
| discipline, and care.
|
| I'm weird. I enjoy the end results enough to take the time to do
| the job well.
|
| It's been my experience that the way I work is deeply unpopular.
| Some people actually seem to get offended, when I discuss how I
| work.
|
| Go figure.
| tsian2 wrote:
| I like to intentionally go after the small bugs which other
| people have put off because they seem to be relatively high-
| effort. I like the idea that I can focus on something that's
| bothering some people (occasionally and indefinitely) and make
| it never bother anyone again.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| This is what I focus on. I found a new way to do something
| (that is relatively common with my work) in a way that made it
| easier later to maintain the work that was done. It made my
| day.
| toto444 wrote:
| I have been thinking a lot on a problem with the idea to find a
| tech solution that could help solving it. The more I was
| thinking about it the more I realized that what I think is the
| the best way to solve the problem does not involve any tech at
| all.
|
| That's how I started working a a static website. I have been
| working on it for a few years now. I have realised my strength
| is that I can work on a problem for a very long time. My
| website solves a lot of very tiny problems one by one. Nothing
| impressive when you look at them individually. However after
| solving hundreds of them a big picture starts emerging.
|
| When I was younger I wanted to solve very hard problems. I have
| let that idea go and have no regret about it.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> and have no regret about it._
|
| A worthy life goal. I feel that way, myself.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > I enjoy doing pedestrian stuff
|
| I'm working right now on writing a shell script to exhaustively
| test a particular use case, because actually exhaustively
| testing it would (probably) take longer than writing the
| script. I'm doing this knowing full well that the next time
| this comes up two years from now, I'm probably not going to
| remember where I put this script, so I'll probably have to re-
| create it, but that's ok - because writing "boring" shell
| scripts is actually something I enjoy.
| ryanianian wrote:
| Put the script in a comment at the top of the code. It looks
| kinda funny and people tend to dislike that kind of thing in
| pull-requests, but I always just ask them to hold their
| breath and pretend the script isn't there. If the script
| isn't still useful the next time that code has meaningful
| change then remove it. I've never seen such scripts get
| removed - in fact they tend to evolve as the code they
| test/generate/modify does.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Alternatively put it in a test scripts directory and put a
| comment linking to it in the header of the file (or readme
| if it's multiple files).
| erichahn wrote:
| Why not as its own file in the directory of the source
| code? Or in another directory...
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Depending on the details of what you mean by your description
| of how you work, you'd either be a godsend to a startup or a
| nightmare. It's kind of funny how it could still be either!
|
| I personally have gone in the opposite direction, where I spend
| most of my time making sure I'm not going to cause irreversible
| damage, and then just letting the not-critical bugs into the
| wild, because I'd rather ship a flawed product now and get
| feedback on it from actual users, than wait to ship a product
| until it's "perfect" and get no feedback until then.
|
| But I respect the hell out of what you're describing here,
| because for every one of me, there needs to be one of you. The
| trick, in my experience, is getting you and I to work happily
| together. It's _very_ difficult, but when it works, it 's
| wonderful for both of us.
|
| I just wrote a "guiding principle" for my dev team that reads:
|
| "As long as a risk doesn't have catastrophic (irreversible)
| harm severity (consequences), it may be worth allowing the risk
| to actualize before attempting to mitigate or eliminate it."
|
| I'm guessing you'd hate that? Any way I could make it
| marginally more tolerable?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I suspect that this comment might answer your question
| (Godsend or Nightmare -probably both. Old Testament Godsend):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28211073
| mattarm wrote:
| I'm much like you, especially in personal projects. In a
| personal project that I plan to stay with long term there is no
| way I want to be chasing my own bugs all the time.
|
| At work, I've found I work best with fast moving get-it-done
| types. They push me to accept imperfect work, and I've learned
| to see the value in that. I polish the imperfect stuff, and
| signal to the team when a "boring" quality improvement really
| could reap benefits.
| mathattack wrote:
| Your kind of work is absolutely necessary for commercial
| software to run. You'd get crucified in an internal IT
| department where funding is entirely driven by new features,
| and 80% done usually has to be good enough.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| What I think is funny, is that developers get the most
| advanced tools out there (IDE, repl, debuggers, etc), for
| free. But deliver junk, blaming "the user"
|
| The same is true for resource requirements and performance.
| People complain about their OS (windows, macos, sometimes
| linux or some VM), and that it takes 1 whole minute to boot,
| while some projects take a couple of minutes to start.
| detaro wrote:
| Heh, on the other hand it's also not uncommon to see
| complaints that developers refuse to pay for good tools,
| despite knowing first-hand that good software is hard to
| make.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Currently my PC takes several minutes to boot, however I
| know the exact cause. I wonder how much boot time could be
| reduced by tuning settings, including not to start a lot if
| crap.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| My host OS takes about a second or two to boot and my VM OS
| takes about 5 seconds.
|
| A whole minute would drive me insane. We should not be
| waiting this long for computers to turn on.
| gilbetron wrote:
| One of the easiest periods in my career is when I was in charge
| (with one other coworker) with modifying a certain capability
| in a large, distributed "web application" (it was a for a DDOS
| detection/mitigation appliance and associated web UI). Every
| time it needed modification, there was around 50-75 code
| locations that had to be tediously updated. When I first
| encountered it, I had created a document outline all the
| locations and the pitfalls around modifying them, along with
| tests to verify them. I performed the process a couple of dozen
| times over the 2 years. It was trivially easy, easily tracked,
| and I was always given plenty of time to get it right (good
| managers). I've never had a project manager happier with me
| because my estimates were always spot on (it's the type of work
| that is easy to estimate after the first 2 or 3 times you do
| it), and management understood exactly what I was doing, and no
| one else wanted to do it.
|
| I have since found that people still really don't want to do
| that work, are grateful when I will do it, and (except for one
| instance) management recognizes it as important, slow, tedious
| work. The only issue I have is that it gets boring, and so 80%
| of the effort goes into motivating myself to get it done ;)
| tenaciousDaniel wrote:
| So I've seen both sides of the "unpopularity" issue. On the one
| hand, the other comments about pushing too fast for new
| features are valid.
|
| On the other hand, it _very much_ depends on the developer in
| question. I 'd say roughly 50% of the devs who claim to be in
| your category are, in fact, wasting dev cycles on pedantic
| things that have no impact on the end user. As an example, I
| had one developer take 6 months to build a (relatively simple)
| top nav for a web app. This shouldn't have taken more than 1-2
| weeks, even with a careful eye for detail.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> I had one developer take 6 months to build a (relatively
| simple) top nav for a web app. This shouldn 't have taken
| more than 1-2 weeks, even with a careful eye for detail._
|
| Oh, you mean "bikeshedding."
|
| Here's an example of the difference between basic quality,
| and High Quality:
|
| If you look at most of the repos for SPM modules in my
| portfolio[0], you'll see that the vast majority have test
| harnesses. I prefer using test harnesses[1].
|
| These test harnesses tend to be pretty damn robust apps. Many
| are "ready for app store" robust. A lot of folks would just
| publish them, "as is." I've been writing apps for a very long
| time. I'm pretty good at this.
|
| I can write a fairly decent test harness, with full app
| capabilities, in less than a day. If I take the time to
| localize it, maybe add a day or so.
|
| Here's an example of some test harnesses[2]. Note that there
| are four of them. These represent the four different target
| environments for Apple (iOS/iPadOS, WatchOS, TVOS, and
| MacOS). I'll probably need to fork iOS and iPadOS, in the
| future, but we're not there, yet. A single codebase is still
| good for both (But I hope that SwiftUI makes supporting
| multiple platforms easier. We'll see...).
|
| They test a Bluetooth framework[3].
|
| It probably took me around a week or so, to write each one.
| They are pretty damn good. I deliberately went "over the
| top," with them, because I like to exemplify what I consider
| halfway decent Quality coding practices. I think they are all
| "App Store ready."
|
| I decided to actually go ahead, and create a set of apps,
| based on these[4], [5], [6]. Here's the codebase for those
| apps[7].
|
| I spent well over a month, on each, _after merging over the
| test harness codebases_ , to make them ready for the App
| Store. Lots of UX testing, removing code that only applied to
| testing, and adding "friendlier" user interface. I didn't do
| much "eye candy," like animations. If I did that, then I
| probably would have spent another month on each. Animations
| tend to bring ... _interesting_ ... bugs. I 'm going through
| that, right now, with the app currently under development.
|
| I'm working on an app that I started about a year ago.
| Actually, I started it over ten years ago, if you include the
| two servers that I wrote, upon which it depends.
|
| One of the reasons that it has taken so long, is that I have
| truncated months of work, and tossed them in the garbage,
| because they were not the proper way to go. I have an
| "evolutionary design" process[8], that means this can happen.
| I plan for it. I've probably shitcanned three months' of
| work.
|
| Another thing that I do, is have an "always beta" approach to
| Quality. I maintain the product at "incomplete, but ship
| Quality" status for as much of the project as possible. In
| fact, I've been sharing it with the team, using TestFlight
| External Testing, since Oct 3, 2020 at 7:47 AM (I got that
| from the TestFlight metadata). The initial Git checkin of the
| project was Sept. 4.
|
| That means that the app has been stable and robust enough for
| user testing, and approval for basic App Store release
| (TestFlight External Testing is a more relaxed standard, but
| try pushing out a crasher, and see how far that goes).
|
| I add localization support, accessibility, Dark Mode support,
| leak testing, etc., at every turn. It's very useful, because
| I can solicit immediate feedback from non-tech team members.
| It also means that the "basics" for App Store release are
| constantly being tested and validated.
|
| Even more useful, if we want to ask for money, it's dam easy.
| We just loop the person we're begging from, into the
| TestFlight External Tester pool, and they can run the app
| without a Marketing chaperone, or sacrifices to the demo
| gods. We can also get valuable feedback from them.
|
| It's really, really nice, and it has been, for many months.
|
| I feel like we are now at a "starting point." Even though it
| has been a fully-functioning, release-ready app for the last
| couple of months, it still needs the "MVP treatment," where
| the testing pool is expanded, and we start applying it to "in
| the wild" scenarios. We've kept it to a small user pool, so
| far.
|
| Lots of companies use their customers as guinea pigs for the
| first several releases; usually by shoving baling-wire-and-
| duct-tape junk down their throats (and making them pay for
| it), before hitting their stride. It's a deliberate strategy.
| Some months ago, I read a post, here, by a founder, declaring
| that _" if you don't get physically sick at the quality of
| the code in your MVP, then you are spending too much time on
| code quality."_
|
| Basically, deliberately write garbage, and force it on your
| users. This has the _very significant_ disadvantage of
| establishing a foundation of sand. Everyone always _plans_ to
| "go back and do it right," but that never actually happens.
| That "physically sickening" MVP is the product for _life_.
|
| One of the reasons that I took on this project, was the
| founder is a friend of mine. He is running it as an NPO
| (501c3), and putting his own money into it. He doesn't really
| have much of it, to begin with. Also, more alarmingly, he
| didn't actually have a particularly good idea of what,
| _exactly_ , he wanted the app to be. That's a recipe for
| disaster.
|
| He asked me to help him vet some development shops he was
| approaching, to realize his vision.
|
| It was eye-opening. He got a number of _ridiculous_ quotes. I
| know what is necessary for this type of project (not small).
| For example, when one said that they 'll deliver a full
| multi-server, multi-client app for MVP in three months
| (firm), upon getting a vague, hand-wavy requirements spec, it
| was hard for me to keep a straight face. The most honest one,
| was one that quoted a valid price (six figures, and minimum
| six months), then basically said "come back when you know
| what you want." I respected that one.
|
| After a few of these, I just got disgusted, and said "Screw
| this. I'll do it." I've been developing it for free, as a
| native iOS/iPadOS app. We have refined the specification and
| mission, as the app has progressed. Having a high-quality,
| ship-ready prototype, goes a _long_ way towards developing a
| good app.
|
| He has to pinch himself.
|
| [0] https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall
|
| [1] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/testing-harness-
| vs-u...
|
| [2] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_BlueThoth/tree/
| mas...
|
| [3] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_BlueThoth
|
| [4] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blue-van-clef-for-
| mobile/id151... (iOS -Includes Watch app)
|
| [5] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blue-van-clef/id1529005127
| (Mac)
|
| [6] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blue-van-clef-for-
| tv/id1529181... (TV)
|
| [7] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/BlueVanClef
|
| [8] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/evolutionary-
| design-...
| lytefm wrote:
| > "if you don't get physically sick at the quality of the
| code in your MVP, then you are spending too much time on
| code quality."
|
| While exaggerated, I'd definitely agree. If you don't quite
| know yet where exactly your company will pivot to in the
| next year or whether the company will still exist, it
| doesn't make sense to optimize for code quality - but for
| product-market fit instead.
|
| > Everyone always plans to "go back and do it right," but
| that never actually happens. That "physically sickening"
| MVP is the product for life.
|
| After having raised an 8 M Series A and hiring some more
| developers and UX experts, we're currently rewriting most
| of our app code. It's not an automatism that the bad code
| gets built on for eternity.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Or you could hire people who do it right, the first time.
|
| Take a look at my work. Feel free to browse the commit
| logs, and see how fast I write it. I "put it all out
| there."
|
| It's quite possible to do very high-quality work, in very
| little time.
|
| Just maybe not from folks just out of code bootcamp.
|
| And...just to make it clear. I'm not looking for work. My
| dance card is _very_ full, with the work I 'm doing for
| free.
| gilbetron wrote:
| I've developed different red flags over the decades, and
| while I don't doubt you've encountered developers that are
| really slow, one of my red flags is the time estimate of "1-2
| weeks". That's the off-the-cuff estimate that people give
| when they have no idea how long something will take. "A week
| or two" is "I can't imagine it would take very long, but my
| imagination isn't very good" ;)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| A classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLcjUmBncZ8
| drdec wrote:
| Before it became a video game, Fortnight was a popular
| facetious codename for projects at my employer.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Well sir, you would be my ideal colleague.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I don't want to work on hard things, I want to work on
| interesting things, which may or may not be hard.
| fatnoah wrote:
| > I want to work on interesting things, which may or may not be
| hard
|
| This was my first thought as well. I want to be able to do
| something that I find interesting or rewarding. Those things
| exist across the entire easy to hard spectrum.
| caffeine wrote:
| Hard problems seem to crop up whenever you get far enough along
| doing something. At some point you're not a beginner any more,
| you've reached the bleeding edge of whatever your domain is, and
| hard problems just start presenting themselves and you have to
| solve them to progress.
|
| So I agree with TFA that there is no need to go explicitly
| looking for them .. just do something well enough and keep
| progressing for a long time, and the hard problems will come to
| you.
|
| (A canonical example of this might be something like Facebook ..
| most CS undergrads could easily write the first version of FB,
| while years later it takes many, many CS PhDs to keep building
| what FB is now)
|
| A corollary is that if you just start on day one with the hardest
| problem you can think of, solving it is probably not very useful
| (there are exceptions). The more useful hard problems to solve
| come up when you're trying to accomplish something else.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Hard technical problems are rarely the hard part of my job.
| People, ambiguity, and direction are where the real challenges
| are.
| jollybean wrote:
| Trying to stop fraud on a platform meant for migrants is
| absolutely a 'hard problem'.
|
| Just trying to get the app out there for people to use is a 'hard
| problem'.
|
| So it's mostly definitely 'hard' , just no in the bounded way
| puzzles are presented in classrooms.
|
| Where I find it gets bad is in technical conditions wherein
| people are used to competing on these terms aka 'who is the
| smartest'. If find people end up arguing over the wrong things,
| and of course 'bike shedding'.
|
| If the problem is framed in terms of outcomes, then it's harder
| bike-shed or wax philosophic because those activities are more or
| less exposed as having less relevance.
| kirillzubovsky wrote:
| This is the best and worst advice all in one.
|
| It is the best because it is true. At least from what I've seen,
| there countless amazing engineers stuck doing really hard
| problems for little return, while their rather lousy counterparts
| razzle-dazzle the world with hand-waving; no brains necessary. If
| you can find an important problem that won't bore you to tears
| and solve it, it's definitely more important in the short term.
|
| That said, without brilliant engineers working on hard problems
| and occasionally inventing really great new things, we wouldn't
| get far in life. So if you can forgo the fame and the riches,
| there is a lot of sense in working on hard/interesting problems.
| Someone's got to.
|
| Personally I think picking a problem that fits your is more
| important than picking an outcome. The outcome won't make you
| happy, but the journey around the right problem will. I think.
| LordHumungous wrote:
| Easy problems are hard if you've never done them before. As a new
| grad, you can learn a lot at a "boring" job.
| Toine wrote:
| That's how you tend to get better business ideas aswell
| jxramos wrote:
| Real world, 2016--Wave's new second-biggest problem is that we
| have outgrown Quickbooks.
|
| Wow, I'm curious does anyone know what kind of scale that tool
| operates at and where its limitations arise from?
| kiliantics wrote:
| Instead of the "hard problems" of writing numerical integral
| routines in quantitative finance, the author chooses to try doing
| something for less fortunate people in poorer countries. I'd
| argue the latter is far more difficult! Mathematical problems,
| while maybe complex, are usually well defined, whereas social
| problems are never straightforward. The author even admits that
| the app ended up being more helpful to bad actors than to the
| intended benefactors.
|
| If the claim in this piece is "you don't need to work on
| technical problems, you need to work on social problems" then I
| could agree. I believe there is pretty much an ethical
| imperative, for anyone with the freedom of choice in their work,
| to choose to work on social problems of poverty, climate change,
| etc. But these are far from being easy problems!
| toss1 wrote:
| >>...you'll end up looking for trickier and trickier puzzles that
| you can get an A+ on.
|
| >> The real world is the polar opposite. You'll have some ultra-
| vague end goal, like "help people in sub-Saharan Africa solve
| their money problems," based on which you'll need to prioritize
| many different sub-problems. A solution's performance has many
| different dimensions (speed, reliability, usability,
| repeatability, cost, ...)--you probably don't even know what all
| the dimensions are, let alone which are the most important. The
| range of plausible outcomes covers orders of magnitude and the
| ceiling is saving billions of lives. The habits you learn by
| working on problem sets won't help you here.
|
| The latter sounds like the very definition of a "Hard Problem".
| Not a single tricky puzzle, but a labyrinth of pseudo-randomly
| interdependent sub-problems, each of which looks easy, and the
| optimization goals map onto multiple independent dimensions
| (physical, commercial, political...).
|
| So, yes, "hard technical problems", are a really minor subset of
| the truly hard problems in the world.
|
| Endless fun to be had
| Zababa wrote:
| Following on this, are there websites that lists non-profits that
| needs software engineers, especially for volunteering? Or is you
| best bet to find a local place and go ask? If anyone has
| experience volunteering with software, I'd love to hear your
| experience. I wish I could put my Excel skills to good use.
| gfodor wrote:
| A common thing I've run into is people working on very, very
| toxic things for society, like human behavior modification (ad)
| systems, who get up every morning excited and enthusiastic about
| it because the technical challenges keep them interested. I
| generally avoid hiring people like this, who often will state
| openly they don't care very much about the application of their
| work, but "just want to solve hard problems."
| iainctduncan wrote:
| So true. I recently found out an old acquaintance is now using
| his phd to do facial recognition for facebook. OMFG, not for
| all the money in the world....
|
| Conversely I had another friend who switched out of his phd
| when he discovered every red cent of funding was somehow coming
| from the race to build killer robots. Props to you Henrik, if
| you ever read this!
| [deleted]
| gammarator wrote:
| Arguably (see the book "Disciplined Minds") this outcome is one
| of the functional aims of STEM higher education. The exam
| structure selects for and thus identifies students willing to
| focus on technical problems divorced from ethical context.
| vmception wrote:
| the cognitive dissonance is strong in this one
| arbuge wrote:
| > very, very toxic things for society, like human behavior
| modification (ad) systems
|
| I'm curious... since all advertising has the goal of modifying
| human behavior by definition (from the state of not buying your
| product/service, to buying it), would you consider all
| advertising to be toxic by your criterion?
|
| And if not, where do you draw the line exactly?
| burnished wrote:
| This seems like a kind of simple 'gotcha' question, right?
| Drawing an imaginary line and asking some one pick a point
| where it magically changes, when it doesn't work like that.
|
| Some advertising is done as product discovery. You make
| something good, you want people to know about it. Some
| advertising is done to convince you to purchase regardless of
| its value proposition using psychological tricks. Or, since
| they were talking more generally about manipulating human
| behaviors, we can include 'dark patterns'.
| Thiez wrote:
| The gotcha question goes back a long time. See "Loki's
| Wager".
| gfodor wrote:
| I don't draw any lines. That's generally not necessary.
| However, there are some systems that are clearly on one side
| of the line where I would consider it unethical to work on
| them.
|
| The point isn't that I expect others to agree with me on
| this, but simply that I expect them to _think_ about this and
| form opinions about it.
| jmfldn wrote:
| I agree. I think it partly comes down to the extent to which
| they are apathetic about this though vs being actively aware of
| the wrong they feel they are doing. If somebody works on
| something that they personally believe is toxic and bad for
| society, I would be concerned about that person's level of
| alienation and what else that might mean about them as a worker
| and a person I have to work with. However, I'd be interested to
| know how many people are truly in this category. Are these
| engineers, enthusiasticly solving hard problems on some
| nefarious product, genuinely against what they're doing? Maybe
| most of them are simply apathetic about that part of it. That's
| not great either of course and it seems like an immature and
| selfish attitude at the very least. Of course, I would caveat
| this by saying that we don't all have the luxury of finding
| companies that align with our values and its probably a "first
| world problem". I'm very much aiming this at skilled software
| engineers, especially those in the major cities of wealthy
| countries, who can probably pick and choose a fair bit.
|
| Personally, I don't want to work with people who don't care
| about the end goal for practical reasons as much as anything
| else. For the sorts of companies I've worked for at least, they
| make sub-standard contributions. I work on a very product-
| centric engineering team in a complex domain where not knowing
| the domain well will seriously hamper your ability to plan,
| refine and execute on features and bug fixes. Sure, we have a
| product manager but we still need that deep knowledge and
| you're probably only going to obtain that by being into the
| product and fairly engaged with it and the company's mission.
| dabfiend19 wrote:
| why does a person's interest in the application of their work
| serve as a signal for if you should hire them? I mean maybe for
| someone in a product role, but how is it relevant to hiring an
| individual contributor?
|
| not hiring someone just because of their internal philosophies
| feels like gate keeping to me.
|
| if someone is a cynic and realizes most start ups arent out
| there "making the world a better place"... doesn't really have
| any bearing on their potential output.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Holy Christ, Are you seriously asking why ethics and concern
| for how the systems you design interact with end users and
| targets of those systems might be a worthy consideration?
|
| Let me give you a concrete example:
|
| Imagine you are an software engineer tasked with working on a
| facial recognition system to help police identify known
| criminals to help find suspects near the time and location of
| a crime. It observes nearby people and assigns a probability
| to them being a known criminal. Police department demands 80%
| accuracy for the product.
|
| You design such a system using some blackbox facial
| recognition AI, and you get the following results:
|
| Overall 78% accuracy with:
|
| 6.5% False Positive rate 31% False negative rate
|
| Not too bad, you tweak some things, hit your 80% accuracy
| without messing with the false positives too badly, and you
| meet the specification provided by the client. Mission
| accomplished and you're ready to ship right? Makes the
| company money? No problems?
|
| Cool. Except, because you didn't really care that much about
| how the technology you deployed would be used or the ethics
| surrounding its use, you failed to consider the right
| performance targets despite what your client asked for and
| your system is nearly 100% racist.
|
| What happened?
|
| You trained on equal numbers of prison mugshots, and mugshot
| like photos of people with no criminal records. You failed to
| consider that black people are over represented in the US
| prison system. (38% of prisoners but 13% of US population)
| Your classifier just learned to label someone a likely
| criminal if they were black and essentially no other
| criteria.
|
| Yet, the actual likelihood the people identified by the
| system as "criminals" in fact have a criminal history is at
| most somewhere ~33% despite the fact your system labels it as
| 80% likely. Worse, even if we have a hypothetical situation
| where blacks and non-blacks are represented in their average
| proportions, there's a near equal number of black and non-
| black people with criminal histories in the vicinity of the
| crime! Worse still, since people tend to be more segregated
| than that, when blacks are in even more of a minority there
| will be more non-blacks with criminal histories around. When
| blacks make up a greater proportion, the likelihood of being
| falsely accused goes up even more.
|
| And FYI... such systems with similar flaws have actually been
| built and deployed in the past. How do you think that plays
| on trust in the company and the technology in general in the
| long run? Considering end-use ethics brings value.
| gfodor wrote:
| It is gate keeping. That's the point. I don't want to work
| with people who feel like it's reasonable to be unaware or
| agnostic to the effect their work is going to have on actual
| people. I don't believe in the meme that someone's role ought
| to dictate if they need to consider the consequences of their
| creative efforts on other human beings.
|
| I have a lot more respect for people who consider these
| things, and just have different opinions than I about what
| they consider worthy applications, than those who just
| consider it unnecessary to think about these things. We have
| an obligation, if we are going to call ourselves "engineers",
| to consider what we are working on from an ethical
| perspective.
| SubuSS wrote:
| I think there is a bit of goal most moving happening here:
|
| - you started with ad systems as example of evil: they
| patently aren't. They are more of a result of the deeper
| cause - folks don't want to pay for things if possible. So
| now the bill gets moved to a different table, that's all.
| All the humanitarian efforts (if any) are standing on the
| shoulders of the money generated from ads
|
| - if someone says 'I just want to solve hard problems' - it
| is quite a leap from there to assuming they don't care
| about social problems. May be they don't feel
| empowered/qualified to tackle the big social questions and
| are just trying to make a living and possibly be productive
| doing so. Or they don't want to tackle a social
| conversation in a workplace setting.
|
| I am very wary of the forcing that's happening of making
| everyone involved in social/philosophical questions whether
| they like it or not. A lot of people just want to make it
| through the day/build expertise in something and make it
| through their life. They'd prefer to pay taxes and let
| other entities / experts deal with those. This doesn't mean
| apathy, it just means a lack of time and ability. I think
| that's worth respecting.
| Rioghasarig wrote:
| > goal post moving
|
| You're being silly. The guy is explaining his
| perspective. He's explaining what he believes and why he
| believes it. He's not writing a thesis or constructing
| some logical argument. This isn't a debate. Applying the
| term "goal post moving" to this makes absolutely no
| sense.
|
| I just feel like you're taking a confrontational approach
| rather than just trying to understand his position.
| Nothing he says is inherently contradictory.
| SubuSS wrote:
| Lol isn't it odd you consider the defense confrontational
| while the op started with calling a bunch of folks
| morally challenged?
|
| Fwiw - I don't work on ad systems. I was just stating my
| opinion about how borderline ethical considerations from
| misuse are pervading engineering and science today. What
| about intent?
| burnished wrote:
| Its ineluctable. If you are an engineer, your work has a
| moral and ethical axis that inseparable from the rest.
| This is what our professional societies believe, it is
| what you are taught in school, it is in many ways no more
| than taking responsibility for your actions.
|
| What you are describing is apathy. You don't get to stand
| apart from the work that you do because it is hard.
| SubuSS wrote:
| I see two issues with that way of thinking:
|
| - morality and ethics are a gradient and are fluidly
| getting defined as we evolve. Are you still immoral or
| apathetic if you use electricity generated from coal? Or
| are you saying we are all apathetic but this is the one
| instance you want to stake your argument on?
|
| - almost all systems get misused over time: are all those
| makers apathetic? What about the intent of the hustlers
| using such systems?
| gfodor wrote:
| I never said all ad systems are evil, yet you are saying
| no ad systems are evil.
|
| I never said that if someone doesn't care about the
| purpose of their work, they don't care about social
| problems.
|
| If you're going to turn this into a debate, at least try
| not tearing down strawmen.
|
| The point of my post wasn't to make strong claims about
| ad systems being universally evil. It's just like, my
| opinion man, that some are. The point was to state that I
| do not want to work with people who, knowingly, do their
| work in an ethical vacuum, focused entirely on the
| technical problems at hand.
| SubuSS wrote:
| No you didn't call them evil: you just called them
|
| >Very, very toxic things for society, like human behavior
| modification (ad) systems
|
| You didn't say those points about people's intents, you
| just said you won't hire them / won't work with them.
|
| Sorry for paraphrasing. My argument stands.
|
| Yes you're allowed to have whatever opinions you want to
| hold. But here you're proclaiming it in a public space
| where it can definitely be construed as judgmental.
|
| Finally you call my arguments as fighting a straw man and
| yet you construct one yourself: 'folks who work in an
| ethical vacuum'. My whole point is that's probably a very
| minuscule amount of folks and something you are refining
| as a true Scotsman from your previous generic statements.
| My whole response is around how most folks do consider it
| but file it under fair use expectations and move on - so
| it is not a fair opinion. That's all.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| Warren Buffet has a great quote on this topic. He says he
| hires on three criteria: Intelligence, energy, and character.
| He adds, "Those first two will kill you if you don't have the
| last one. If someone's immoral you want them to be dumb and
| lazy".
|
| Being a high performer is not a positive when someone's
| looking to take advantage of you.
| [deleted]
| villasv wrote:
| Somewhat related but kinda in the other direction:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27988260
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