[HN Gopher] Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech
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Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech
Author : rukshn
Score : 90 points
Date : 2021-09-10 14:39 UTC (8 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (ruky.me)
| aslkdjflkajsdf wrote:
| I do both. Shall I be ostracized?
| notJim wrote:
| Shun! Shun!
|
| Just kidding. We all want to know what you're working on.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| ... but if you can't work on an interesting problem (where you
| get a cut of the revenue to solve it) then please, make sure to
| work on the best possible tech stack, ie, the one the company you
| want to jump ship to already uses.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| The author makes it sound as if "interesting" tech only exists
| for the sake of being interesting, but interesting tech
| _becomes_ interesting because it (purports to be) a better way
| of solving problems than whatever the old way was. I 'm old
| enough to have worked on Cobol at one point, and Cobol is
| "boring" but it's also bad, because it was designed around the
| constraints that existed at the time it was created (as was
| Java). If you're interested in something that doesn't seem like
| a step forward in usefulness, I wonder why you'd actually be
| interested in it to begin with.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| > I'm old enough to have worked on Cobol at one point
|
| So, how much money would 'they' have to offer you to go back
| to working on Cobol.
|
| they meaning a hypothetical company that says they can't find
| any Cobol programmers.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| COBOL is an ok language.
|
| The problem is that you'd be updating very old programs,
| handling money to the cent, and dealing with systems that
| likely have had multiple hardware and OS migrations over
| the decades.
| jonahx wrote:
| > but interesting tech becomes interesting because it
| (purports to be) a better way of solving problems than
| whatever the old way was.
|
| You would think so, but this is wrong for the same reason
| that "the most popular product is probably the best product"
| is wrong.
|
| Quality doesn't determine who wins. It's _a_ factor but not
| _the_ factor. In the case of programming languages in
| particular, tribalism, new-and-shiny syndrome, and marketing
| are all probably more important.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| Well, "most popular" is an objective category, whereas
| "interesting" is not, so it's really up to the individual
| to determine what is and isn't interesting.
| jonahx wrote:
| > so it's really up to the individual to determine what
| is and isn't interesting.
|
| True. The claim I'm making is that what people think is
| "interesting" is usually (ofc not always) determined by
| the factors I mentioned, rather than being informed by
| deep experience with and knowledge of the relevant "prior
| art".
|
| That is, the new framework or database seems
| "interesting" to you (the general you) because there are
| so many articles on HN about it, everyone is talking
| about, Facebook is using it, etc. Not because you are
| familiar with similar databases in this space, have
| specific complaints about them based on experience, and
| know that this new database has specific features
| purporting to address them, etc.
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| That's my thought every time someone creates yet-another HN
| reader. Sure, you were interested mostly in the stack you're
| learning. But there are endless opportunities with similar scope
| where you might end up creating something actually useful.
|
| For inspiration, Wikipedia is rich reservoir of repetitive tasks
| to fix minor issues that would be easier with a task-specific GUI
| for review.
| one_off_comment wrote:
| In my experience, it's fun to work on interesting problems and
| it's fun to work with interesting tech. But it quickly becomes
| overwhelming if you try to do both at the same time.
| smt88 wrote:
| The thing is that interesting problems are never just tech
| problems. That's why they still exist. There's still a massive,
| complex human side to those problems.
| mcguire wrote:
| There are downsides to this. The early parts of my resume read
| like a list of major software project disasters of the 1990s.
| Among other things, I worked on Taligent OS and WorkplaceOS.
| (Never heard of them? That's my point.)
|
| As a result of chasing interesting problems (and a stint as a
| university sysadmin), my salary history led me to be
| significantly underpaid for most of my career.
| als0 wrote:
| For anyone else wondering
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_OS
| andai wrote:
| > Workplace OS is IBM's ultimate operating system prototype
| of the 1990s. It is the product of an exploratory research
| program in 1991 which yielded a design called the Grand
| Unifying Theory of Systems (GUTS), proposing to unify the
| world's systems as generalized personalities cohabitating
| concurrently upon a universally sophisticated platform of
| object-oriented frameworks upon one microkernel.
|
| > With protracted development spanning four years and $2
| billion (or 0.6% of IBM's revenue for that period), the
| project suffered development hell characterized by empire
| building, feature creep, and the second-system effect.
| space_ghost wrote:
| The only screenshot [0] I can find of TaligentOS looks
| _remarkably_ like The BeOS. Did some TaligentOS guys move on to
| produce the BeOS?
|
| [0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D7Gi8GgW0AAoguu.png
| dhosek wrote:
| Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent
|
| The whole convoluted story of Taligent and WorkplaceOS is
| something to behold.
|
| It's a pity because the initial promise back in the early 90s
| was something I was genuinely excited about but alas, it was
| all promise and no shipping
| bumby wrote:
| > _my salary history led me to be significantly underpaid for
| most of my career._
|
| I feel like this misses the point of the article. The author
| claims its important to enjoy what you're working on. They make
| no claims that doing so is a way to maximize your salary.
|
| I know tech gets paid well now but that wasn't always the case.
| Decades ago people went into medicine or law or finance if they
| wanted to optimize for pay and prestige. Only relatively
| recently has tech joined that list.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "I picked up the project because I was genuinely interested in
| it, and because it was extremely challenging."
|
| I pickied the OS as a project because Im generally interested in
| it. Its challenging. I had to learn Bourne shell and C, and a bit
| of assembly.
|
| I am genuinely interested in the OS because I use it everyday to
| help solve problems.
| legerdemain wrote:
| Want to work on interesting problems? Build software for doctors'
| offices and medical groups! Help lawyers crawl out of their low-
| tech hole! Work on software to revolutionize public classrooms!
| Why work on interesting tech when you could throw yourself at
| intractable problems that we never get any closer to solving?
| treeman79 wrote:
| Hippa compliance...
|
| Development is a nightmare
| reureu wrote:
| > Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups!
|
| Please please please go into these areas with humility. Having
| worked for health tech companies in SF for a decade, I've seen
| so many people come from
| Google/Facebook/Mozilla/Ticketmaster/eBay to healthcare in
| order to "disrupt" and "fix" it. Their disruption or fixes are
| many times illegal, impractical, vaporware, or completely
| ignore industry standards and so can't speak the same language
| as all the other tools in the ecosystem. It generally doesn't
| end well if you don't deeply partner with stakeholders and
| domain experts.
| bloodyplonker22 wrote:
| I heard some woman with a fake deep voice is on trial now.
| reureu wrote:
| I haven't been following that situation, I'm too focused on
| getting my insurance company to pay to sequence my poop.
| bob1029 wrote:
| We're doing this kind of thing in banking right now. Would like
| to attack medical and insurance next.
| pasabagi wrote:
| I think with lawyers, the problem is basically GUIs. Because
| most computer users, even very high-skilled computer users like
| lawyers, are used to consuming software in the form of GUIs,
| you tend to get these kind of all-encompassing WYSIWYG programs
| like Word, with mysterious internals, and an endless labyrinth
| of useful tricks that lawyers tend to know, which are in one
| way amazing, but in another way essentially limited by the
| imaginations of the programmers, because they're monolithic and
| basically inflexible.
|
| This is basically an education / culture problem. I'm sure in
| two hundred years, people will recognize that 'sort' or 'uniq'
| is really elemental functionality like a saw or a hammer, and
| baking it all into one giant saw-hammer-sanding machine that's
| really only good for making tables, and occasionally eats your
| cat, is just not the way to go. Until that point, I don't think
| that some plucky new startup is going to magic away all the
| problems. I mean, obviously there are some crazy low-hanging
| fruit out there, but the fundamental issue starts with how
| people are using computers in the first place.
| andrepd wrote:
| The problem is that advertising or finance companies can outbid
| public classrooms and students 10000:1. It's the sad reality:
| in the current system finding ever more sophisticated ways to
| get people to buy more crap is very profitable, helping
| underprivileged students succeed is not.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| And many times, better solution is not to use software at all.
| People don't need to leave Excel or Wordpress at all. I don't
| even think using paper is a problem. They have pros and cons.
| "solution looking for problems" is actually accurate,
| ironically.
| smt88 wrote:
| Most people in software seem to create interesting technology
| that sells ads, so your sarcastic examples sound a lot better
| to me.
|
| I'm currently building a company that is replacing Excel at
| some of the biggest commercial real estate firms, which is
| "impossible" by your standards.
| nickjj wrote:
| Indeed, there's lots of great problems to solve in this space.
|
| If anyone is interested I recorded a 90 minute podcast with a
| lead developer + ops engineer who created a custom electronic
| medical record system for an Ophthalmology clinic (eye care).
|
| It's at: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/99-a-custom-
| electron...
|
| We talked all about using Rails to help consolidate 9 separate
| 3rd party solutions into a monolithic server rendered Rails app
| that the clinic uses internally to manage all of their
| patients. We also chatted about transitioning from Elastic
| Beanstalk to self managed EC2 instances to using Kubernetes
| with EKS.
| bumby wrote:
| Man, I sure am glad Curtis and the Wright brothers didn't take
| this stance after Lord Kelvin claimed "Heavier-than-air flying
| machines are impossible" before they proved him wrong less than
| 20 years later.
|
| Or NASA when Lee Deforest claimed flight to the moon was
| impossible "regardless of all future advances."
|
| Or when Einstein claimed ""There is not the slightest
| indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable."
|
| Etc. etc.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| > when Einstein claimed ""There is not the slightest
| indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable."
|
| Not to be pedantic, but was Einstein incorrect at that
| time/in the future? Were there any actual indications that
| nuclear energy would be obtainable at that time?
|
| Einstein didn't seem to say, "Obtaining nuclear energy is
| absolutely impossible, and can never be achieved." All he
| said was that there is not the _slightest indication_.
|
| I am sorry if this comes off as being semantical, but I just
| want to make sure I am not misinterpreting you or what
| Einstein said.
|
| As for the other points, yes. Those were great examples.
| bumby wrote:
| I guess it's hard to tell without over-parsing his words,
| but you bring up an important distinction.
|
| It may be fair to read it as a scientist essentially saying
| "we have no evidence it's possible." But as I read it, the
| addition of "ever" came across as saying he thought it was
| an unsolvable problem rather than one that had yet to come
| upon a solution.
| smoldesu wrote:
| The Wright brothers didn't get off the ground by gluing wings
| to their arms, and Einstein didn't discover the theory of
| relativity in his study of alchemy. Entertaining silly or
| stupid ideas is risky, and for every Wright brother there's
| another 100 failed entrepreneurs who lost everything trying
| to make that dream a reality.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I was talking to my physio today (doing fine thanks for
| asking), and she was fed up about having to prove that a client
| had not paid her - manually matching payments into her bank
| account with appointments etc. It wasted an hour of her time or
| more.
|
| Now the heart of that is 5 lines of python. It could be written
| by anyone after a days "starting from zero" coding experience.
|
| But actually solving that in real world is a mess of just
| trying to access the data - it's _her_ data and she only wants
| to see _her_ bits. But the level of effort is ridiculous.
|
| Anyway my point is that solving problems like software for
| doctor's offices is not the point - that's just building
| another silo. A doctor who has (secure) access to a _industry
| wide common open data layer_ can do all the work to run their
| office themselves.
|
| In short we are trying to solve the wrong problem - usually
| because proprietary _code_ is not a profitable as proprietary
| _data_
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| > usually because proprietary code is not a[s] profitable as
| proprietary data
|
| Bingo. This is why Google et al. would never sell your data;
| they just keep it for themselves and merely sell to
| advertisers the ability to precisely target you ("pick a
| demographic down to the shampoo brand and we can target your
| ads to it"). But those advertisers (or anyone else) will
| never see a single iota of your data. It's simply too
| valuable.
| endisneigh wrote:
| What a defeatist mindset lol
| caymanjim wrote:
| These things are fairly orthogonal. There are interesting
| problems, there's interesting tech. Sometimes interesting
| problems require interesting tech to solve, but not usually.
| Often boring problems are best-solved with interesting tech, but
| they can optionally be solved with boring tech. In my experience,
| solving interesting problems with boring tech is far more
| frustrating and unfulfilling than solving boring problems with
| interesting tech. But again, they're pretty orthogonal.
|
| There are a tremendous number of jobs using interesting tech to
| solve boring problems. This is really the bread-and-butter of
| most tech careers. You might be selling widgets or building
| another social network or something that is mind-numbingly boring
| and unfulfilling, but if you're into the tech, you might still
| enjoy your day-to-day. That's certainly been the bulk of my
| career. I've also worked on solving interesting problems using
| boring tech, and while it was nice to see the results at the end,
| the path leading there wasn't as fun.
|
| If you're lucky enough to land both, that's great. I've worked on
| interesting problems with both interesting and boring tech (NASA
| projects), except it didn't pay well. I've worked on boring
| problems with interesting tech (fintech) and that both paid well
| and was actually more challenging and more fun. And I've worked
| on a whole lot of boring problems with boring tech (countless
| ecommerce web projects).
|
| At the end of the day, if I can't have both, interesting tech is
| probably more important to me, because that's what I spend almost
| all my time dealing with, and I'm still a hacker at heart and
| appreciate the tech in itself. It does leave me feeling, most of
| the time, like my work has no meaning, but I can find meaning in
| other endeavors. There aren't enough interesting problems that
| also pay the bills to go 'round, so most of the time I just want
| my day-to-day to be engaging.
| gampleman wrote:
| As someone who has spent their entire career working on
| interesting problems using boring technology, and now work on an
| interesting problem using interesting technology, I can only
| recommend the latter.
| bumby wrote:
| Can you elaborate on how/why you came to that conclusion?
| gampleman wrote:
| Even interesting jobs involve a fair amount of rote work,
| doing it using tech you enjoy working with makes that go a
| lot easier.
| gkop wrote:
| Counterpoint: http://boringtechnology.club/
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think many people are "interested" in novelty.
|
| https://www.lehmiller.com/blog/2017/4/28/why-we-crave-sexual...
|
| There is "interesting", "novel" and "not understood" which are
| related but not the same thing.
|
| In projects I think one should budget novelty. If you understand
| the domain (understand the problem) then it is not so risky to
| use a framework, languages, etc. that you don't understand.
|
| If you are unfamiliar with everything, however, you have a tough
| slope to climb. Sometimes you have to do it. To work with ISO
| Common Logic you almost certainly have to use Haskell. If you
| want to code for Arduino you're going to have to work with C or a
| similar low-level language. But if you can have a choice at all
| you don't want to use new tools for a new problem.
| erokar wrote:
| The author doesn't say who or how what about the project was
| interesting, just that it was interesting and that it made him
| endure Java. My experience is the opposite. I don't care so much
| what I'm making, as long as it's not something making the world a
| worse place. I care about what technology and methods I can use
| to do whatever. That is interesting to me from a craft point of
| view.
| vgel wrote:
| I'm getting tired of this take. There's such as thing as
| programming for the joy of programming. You can love a clever
| algorithm with no "business value". Code can be beautiful and fun
| to write without being useful, or optimally-useful-per-unit-of-
| time-invested.
| kazinator wrote:
| Work on iteresting1 X, not interesting2 Y!
|
| -----
|
| 1. to me, not necessarily you.
|
| 2. to you, not me.
| finiteseries wrote:
| You're pretty much in agreement with the article from my POV.
|
| "Work on interesting ideas, or ideas that you are genuinely
| interested in" is the bolded message.
|
| Spending time painstakingly beautifying your impl of a clever
| algorithm or, like the author, homegrowing the 8000th iteration
| of a PM tool with kanban functionality instead of working with
| k8s/cassandra/<tech> just to have worked with it.
|
| Kinda feel like we all end up doing this naturally most of the
| time after a few years or so, and they've just decided to write
| it down tbh.
| [deleted]
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