[HN Gopher] How to find your blind spots
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How to find your blind spots
Author : zeptonaut22
Score : 95 points
Date : 2023-01-30 12:01 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zeptonaut.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zeptonaut.com)
| projectramo wrote:
| The issue I have here is that it's not clear how to identify the
| mini games to improve.
|
| This is an article of where blind spots might be but not about
| how to find them.
|
| One of the suggestions is to find a coach -- for instance online
| videos (not exactly a live coach) -- but if you don't know the
| mini games you should want to improve , how do you know which
| coach/video to invest in?
| zeptonaut22 wrote:
| Ah - if you feel this way, then I probably wasn't on the nose
| enough with this specific point. I was trying to balance a few
| points (i.e. IMO most people focus too much on marginal
| improvements in skills that got them to where they are) and not
| enough on building awareness of what completely new skills they
| need to build.
|
| Generally, my suggestion is "weasel your way into coaching from
| people who are both much better than you at the thing and can
| break down their approach". Neither is sufficient on its own.
| In my experience, 1:1 coaches can be incredibly hard to find in
| some domains (esp. professional ones) and it seems like most
| people find them once they're already showing great promise at
| something, which means that they're not at the bottom of the
| bell curve. That means the onus is mostly on you to get to the
| middle. To do that, look for people who have found more success
| than you at the skill and are great at explaining their thought
| processes: podcasts and YouTube channels are invaluable for
| this.
|
| Like most good advice (IMO), this is something that seems
| obvious but is rarely practiced.
| hanoz wrote:
| Thought this was going to be about how to find your actual blind
| spots, which for anyone who doesn't know is draw two dots on a
| plain background, a couple of inches apart, look at the right dot
| with your left eye, or vice versa, keeping the other eye closed.
| Move closer until the other dot disappears. Still amazes me every
| time.
| zeptonaut22 wrote:
| Welp, I now consider this required reading alongside the post.
| Thanks for sharing!
| now__what wrote:
| Opposite to the author, I've fixated on just a few hobbies which
| have captured my interest for many years (drawing and Japanese-
| English translation being the big two). In regards to my hobbies,
| this assessment is extremely accurate! Had never thought of
| things in terms of "minigames," but when I do make appreciable
| progress, it's because I've given myself a new minigame to crush.
| Unfortunately, I haven't cracked the mentor puzzle either, though
| I'm sure it would help enormously.
| tetha wrote:
| I was about to comment too. I'm noticing this very strongly
| e.g. in my early endeavors in music (2-3 years into the bass, 6
| month seriously into the guitar after getting the neck aligned)
|
| It sounds trivial, but if you can't solidly and reliably count
| up to fourths and eights - and weird patterns of fourths and
| eights across 2 - 3 bars - 16ths and triplets would be almost
| impossible to to right. And this is very similar to the "Added
| minigames" - you just add "and" in between the fourths and "ti"
| between the ands, no biggie right?
|
| And speed is very similar. Hence the recommendation - learn a
| motive in a song until you can play it cleanly and slowly, and
| then speed up. Just going fast will usually end up being
| frustrating and bringing in bad habits.
|
| And interestingly, while you can't transfer that much about
| playing well from a bass guitar to a guitar, you can transfer
| quite a bit of information about incorrect play and it's
| causes. The causes might have different rates of occurring -
| it's much easier to accidentally mute a guitar string and much
| easier to not fret bass strings precisely enough resulting in a
| messy buzz for example. But it's very recognizable.
| zeptonaut22 wrote:
| My jealousy is tangible. I always _want_ to be great at just a
| few things... but those few things happen to change too often
| for that to ever happen.
|
| (Software engineering and running are probably the ones I've
| sustained for the longest, though kids haven't helped with the
| latter.)
| mym1990 wrote:
| Have some of this as well, what helps me is picking up
| tangential hobbies where some skills may carry over(or vice
| versa). I would say tennis is my main hobby, and recently I
| have started playing a little bit of pickleball and
| racquetball to get variety. The skills and tactics for tennis
| are pretty different from the other two, but having things
| like hand eye coordination and footwork carry over are a big
| plus! Conversely I picked up 3d printing last year with the
| intent of learning to 3d model, and I felt like a pretty big
| noob trying to figure it out. At the end I just resorted to
| printing what others had already modeled haha.
| zeptonaut22 wrote:
| Totally makes sense! Plus, you can look pretty cool when
| you're actually decent right away at something. Pickleball
| is a blast.
| now__what wrote:
| That jealousy goes both ways. I often wish I was one of those
| people who can share stories about their adventures into many
| interests, or who can relate to a wide range of people
| because of their variety of experiences. Going deep can be
| very isolating. Unless my conversation partner happens to
| have some overlap with my limited interests, I'm at a loss.
| Too many conversations end with the other person staring at
| me like I came from another planet :(
| jackallis wrote:
| as good as this advice is, there in lies crux of human nature.
| Once one succeds in a task, it provides validation of the method
| followed, hence no need to "go back" and move on to next taks. At
| least this is what i have seen ohter people do and so have i. i
| guess this is what seperates good performer vs mediocore ones.
| dirtybirdnj wrote:
| I really like this post thank you for sharing. It led me to your
| other post on management lessons from your toddler and I'm
| really, really digging your ideas and style.
| zeptonaut22 wrote:
| Thanks - I'm glad you enjoyed them! Toddlers are cruel
| teachers.
| peterhalburt33 wrote:
| Wish I had time for a longer comment, but this advice rings very
| true for me. Reflecting back on grad school and the transition to
| professional life, you have to realize that your role changes
| every couple of years and that the things that got you to one
| stage won't get you to the next. Many people end up stuck in a
| local maximum (lacking vision) which partly explains the Peter
| principle.
| the_cat_kittles wrote:
| i think the point about adding minigames vs refining the ones you
| have is very good. ive noticed that with music performance,
| sometimes its a little counterintuitive though- often a minigame
| can itself be refined into a few mini-minigames, and that really
| helps things. its such a constrained discipline i think sometimes
| its all about making whats already "easy" easier.
| zeptonaut22 wrote:
| This post comes from the experience of several brutal multi-year
| engineering projects at Google that, in retrospect, I wonder "why
| didn't anyone criticize the idiotic decisions that I was
| making?!".
|
| Along the way, I was making "good software engineering" decisions
| but very poor product decisions: specifically, the biggest risk
| to the project wasn't that the code was poor but rather that no
| one would want the thing that I had set out to build. I find that
| unless you're diligent about incremental validation, time on
| engineering projects is usually wasted on the scale of years by
| creating a beautiful castle that no one wants to live in.
|
| I now see that my project was a lot more like a little startup:
| by finding resources about how to make a startup go, I could have
| saved a lot of trouble. By taking this path, you still end up
| with a lot of waste (rewriting fast, poor versions of features to
| be better), but you're able to course correct earlier and have a
| lot better chance at the overall project being a success.
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| In my experience, this startup mentality works well not only
| for corporate projects / products, but also for orienting a
| team inside the organisation.
|
| Accepting that any team is actually a tiny business of its own
| helps to quickly orient around key stakeholders, get reality
| check that you actually contribute anything to the org, and cut
| down unnecessary activities. Importantly, all the startup tools
| like CustDev[0] techniques, Lean Canvas[1] and many applicable
| others are already there, built and tested by startup community
| over the years.
|
| 0 - The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick is a good entry point
| https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone-...
|
| 1 - https://medium.com/@steve_mullen/an-introduction-to-lean-
| can...
| preommr wrote:
| > the biggest risk to the project wasn't that the code was poor
| but rather that no one would want the thing that I had set out
| to build.
|
| Except for deliberately bad ideas, this is almost never true.
| There's always at least one other person that would find value
| in something someone is putting effort into building.
|
| What people actually mean to say is that the cost is higher
| than any realistic plans to monetize a project. A project where
| someone could make 30-40k per year in a country with a low cost
| of living would be a complete success for an individual where
| they get complete autonomy, job security, good work life
| balance, working remotely. But that same project would be a
| complete disaster for Google where that employee alone costs
| 4-5x in pure cash let alone stocks.
| projectramo wrote:
| If that's what prompted this I can see why you recommend
| videos. It's the #1 recommendation for any startup advice
| source.
|
| But ... you must have come across it before. What made you not
| pursue it? ie why was it a blind spot?
| zeptonaut22 wrote:
| Basically, I mistakenly thought "I'm working at Google, not a
| startup: this advice isn't relevant to me".
|
| What I didn't realize was that the startup world has lots and
| lots of info for figuring out how to build new things that
| matter while minimizing waste. Beyond senior SWE at most
| FAANG companies, you have to start thinking about how much
| your work matters as opposed to just how complex of projects
| you're able to handle. It was the "...that matter" suffix
| that really blindsided me, and I focused too much on
| "becoming a better SWE" through better coding, more
| interviews, etc. instead of building up the entirely new
| skillsets of things like customer discovery, soliciting
| customer feedback, etc.
| jfengel wrote:
| From my experience, people probably did criticize those
| decisions, and you had excellent answers to them.
|
| It's really hard to know if the dog will eat the dog food until
| the dog food is ready to be served. You can try to extrapolate
| from early tests, but they'll seem promising, and you'll
| attribute hesitations to problems that aren't fixed yet.
|
| It'll all be obvious in retrospect, but no amount of criticism
| at the time will help you distinguish between a doomed project
| and the next Facebook. All of that self-help stuff telling you
| do dare bold dreams or whatever covers up the fact that the
| vast majority of them fail, and you only hear from the bias of
| the survivors.
|
| All I can offer you is this: Google has the resources to
| survive many failed projects, because the one that doesn't
| earns it plenty of money. That doesn't help at startups: only
| the VCs have the scale to survive 9 failures for the big
| success. But you, the project manager and employee, got paid
| for a few years building stuff... and you can consider
| yourselves part of the overall enterprise that produced one
| success.
| uoaei wrote:
| > I now see that my project was a lot more like a little
| startup: by finding resources about how to make a startup go, I
| could have saved a lot of trouble.
|
| Google advertises the workplace to their employees explicitly
| as: 10.000 startups under one roof. I think that kind of
| structure was always the intention. It sounds like your
| managers/leaders didn't have a good way to convey those kinds
| of values.
| majormajor wrote:
| From the ex-Google-in-the-last-five-years people I've talked
| to, it's very hard to truly operate that way when you have
| Google resources at your disposal. And the hardest-to-
| account-for of those resources is the credibility and
| marketing, since it's the furthest away from what engineers
| do day to day.
|
| For every project that we see that Google shuts down
| recently, we probably wouldn't have even heard about them if
| they were truly operating like a startup with startup
| resources. The projects were never good enough to get
| traction organically without that initial Google-name-bump or
| bundling when it was released publicly. Would any of their
| messaging apps in the past half decade had ever made a dent
| in the first place outside of the Google umbrella? Would
| anyone have tried to do Stadia independently (Quibi says
| "maybe" but in that case the massive capital gamble and poor
| return was much more obvious as a standalone enterprise, so
| it got abandoned much _more_ quickly, even)?
|
| If you take "I'll have the chance to get this in front of
| customers" [because Google] for granted, it's very easy to
| get lost in a sea of "try to make it the perfect version of
| itself" instead of "what is the differentiator and unique
| need this is addressing?"
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