[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
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Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
I've worked on large products for large and small companies and
written tens of thousands of lines of code across my career,
solving complex, abstract, challenging technical problems in a
variety of languages on a variety of platforms, sometimes under
difficult conditions. I have often been a resource for my friends
and co-workers when they have programming or technical questions.
I only recently learned how to correctly raise and lower window
blinds--I had been doing it wrong my entire life. It was maybe the
dumbest I have ever felt, and was a humbling reminder of how much I
don't know about how much I don't know. Have you had similar
experiences?
Author : spcebar
Score : 71 points
Date : 2024-06-02 16:43 UTC (6 hours ago)
| h2odragon wrote:
| I took a mauser .25 pocket pistol apart.
|
| one of these: https://sportsmansvintagepress.com/read-
| free/mauser-rifles-p...
|
| Eventually got it together again, but it required assistance from
| my uncle who had given it to me. He laughed long and hard when i
| described the predicament, then said "yup, that one got me too".
| He also rebuilt Mercedes diesels as a hobby, so he was full of
| entertaining critiques of German engineering.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| What was the difficulty in re-assembling it?
| h2odragon wrote:
| as i recall, understanding the design fully enough to get the
| springs and tetchy parts back together. Which goes where.
|
| This was pre-internet so articles like that one weren't
| available to me. There may have been some trick to keeping
| springs where they were supposed to be as it reassembled too.
| huesatbri wrote:
| What did you do wrong and why was it dumb? What's the correct
| way?
| spcebar wrote:
| If you pull a blind cord to the right it stays up, if you pull
| it to the left it comes down. My whole life I've just been
| jiggling and tugging the cord to get it to stay or come down.
| king_phil wrote:
| Definitely not in the German speaking countries, we have
| different blinds. You pull a cord down for the blinds to go
| up, and vice versa. Then the cord is tied to a hook or
| button.
| frickinLasers wrote:
| Your windows open differently too. Instead of angling
| inward/outward along either of two axes, ours usually just
| slide up-down or left-right, remaining firmly attached to
| the window sill.
| deaddodo wrote:
| No offense, but HN and Reddit are both American created,
| operated, and primarily trafficked sites. It's not unusual
| to assume an American audience.
|
| If OP came out assuming a Nairobi design that wasn't used
| anywhere else, or if they went to the heise.de forums and
| posted the above; now _that_ would be odd /call-out worthy.
| sircastor wrote:
| For those unfamiliar with this, the cord that raises and
| lowers the blinds applies friction against a wheel in a slot
| (when pulled to the left). When the wheel is shifted it holds
| the cord in place and the blinds and they stay in position.
| Pulling to the right releases the wheel and the blinds move
| freely.
|
| Incidentally, one of the cords on the blinds in my office is
| worn, and it dis a poor job of engaging. So one side will
| latch the others will not.
| qup wrote:
| At my house, all the strings are dry rotting, so any
| movement of the cord is pretty likely to lower the blinds.
| Rapidly.
| lubujackson wrote:
| I was in my 20s before I realized even numbered houses are always
| on one side of the street and odd numbers on the other. Literally
| no excuse for not figuring that out.
| techsupporter wrote:
| One of those life experience moments:
|
| I "knew" this and a had a really good friend who did not. Both
| of us grew up in the same area, and we met in school, so you'd
| expect we should agree on this, right?
|
| While "arguing" about it one day, it turns out the suburb
| they'd grown up in had several private subdivisions where the
| builders could do whatever they wanted. Houses were numbered
| sequentially following one direction of the private street,
| then the other. So the house nearest the entrance of the
| subdivision would be "100 Maple Street" and across the street
| would be "143 Maple Street".
|
| Because they'd grown up mainly going to other friends' houses
| in the private subdivisions, my house address was the odd one
| and theirs were normal to them.
| throw46365 wrote:
| Well, always if there's a street that was put down facing like
| that. Commonplace in new towns laid down over very large areas.
|
| In the UK, oh wow, you will encounter some weird numbering
| issues. I live on the corner of a street in a very complex, 400
| year old area, and I am forever leaning out of the window to
| shout instructions to utterly bemused couriers.
| swarnie wrote:
| 28 being next door to 47 at the end of a cul-de-sac can
| really mess with people.
|
| Also on older estates where spare green spaces have been used
| up by additional houses so you end up with 21,23,25,25A, 25B.
|
| The UK can be weird....
| ajb wrote:
| There's a gap in one of the streets where I lived, which is
| where the houses were bombed during WWII and the council
| decided to put in a park instead. Missing numbers don't
| normally cause any confusion, except that I had a beggar
| come round once or twice claiming to be a neighbour with an
| emergency - and they gave one of the numbers that didn't
| exist.
| throw46365 wrote:
| Right.
|
| And if you live in some regularly redeveloped bit of a town
| that grew in the Georgian era you can end up with clusters
| of houses that have almost no discernible pattern left
| over; I live in such a house. The naming around here is
| astonishingly complex, such that if I explain it too much I
| would identify where I live.
|
| (I have three physical neighbours -- that is, I share walls
| with them. And we are on three different roads, legally
| speaking)
|
| The plus side is that as you get to know the couriers who
| you've helped, you begin to understand that your packages
| will never go missing. There is an Amazon driver who smiles
| from ear-to-ear when he delivers for me, and I even get
| good service from Evri.
|
| I move soon, and since I'm the only person here who works
| from home who has a clear view of where all the delivery
| drivers get out of their vehicles wearing a confused look,
| I expect parcel delivery accuracy to drop for my neighbours
| when I'm gone.
| gota wrote:
| I learned the numbering rule (in Brazil) at school - but have
| friends who didn't know it far into adulthood.
|
| The rule, ~if I remember correctly (and matches my experience)~
| confirmed by Googling is:
|
| 1) distance in meters from the beginning of the street to the
| start of the terrain where the building is in;
|
| 2)rounded to even number on the lefthand side and to odd number
| on the righthand side of the street/road
|
| I guess knowing the rule isn useful so you know if you are at
| Soandso st. 200 and yout destination is Soandso st. 2200 thats
| a 2km walk there
| perihelions wrote:
| I took my Thinkpad to a repair shop because its charging port was
| damaged. A very stoic human pointed out to me it has *two*
| identical ones, USB-C type, right next to each other.
| blindfolded_go wrote:
| Haha, I have done this too! Glad I am not alone.
| stevesearer wrote:
| I learned way into my adult life that I could just turn the
| swivel hook/latch to quickly unwind the cord on a vacuum cleaner.
|
| Before that moment I would manually unwind the cord just like I
| would wind it up. To make it worse, I even remember wondering why
| the swivel hook was there thinking it was poor design.
| _boffin_ wrote:
| Steve...
|
| What was the moment of realization like?
| swamp_donkey wrote:
| TIL
| t-3 wrote:
| You're not alone.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Before that moment I would manually unwind the cord just
| like I would wind it up._
|
| As you should. Otherwise the cable gets twisted a few dozen
| times every time the vacuum cleaner is used.
| RedNifre wrote:
| You are rolling up your cables the wrong way if you run into
| that problem. Here's the right way:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeLrxXUbq0g
| function_seven wrote:
| I figure-eighted the cord onto those hooks to avoid that. Or
| alternated "over" and "under" with each pass around the
| hooks.
|
| EDIT: When I say "over" and "under" above, I'm referring to
| the technique RedNifre linked to in the sibling comment.
| dusted wrote:
| Wait what ?
|
| I've seen two different "systems", one where you do a quick
| pull on the cord and it spins back up, and one where there's a
| "roll up" button on the machine which winds up the cord, but
| I've never heard of anything you can do to make the unrolling
| easier ? Video ? Link? What is this magic you talk of ?
| adrianmonk wrote:
| > _it spins_
|
| You're thinking of a vacuum cord that automatically winds
| onto a spring-loaded reel, commonly seen on canister vacuums.
|
| They're talking about an upright vacuum where you manually
| wrap the cord around two hooks. One of the hooks can be
| rotated so that it no longer keeps the cord in place.
|
| Look at the two black hooks in front of the yellow cord in
| this picture:
|
| https://f.media-
| amazon.com/images/I/61XbxqH6%2BQL._SP523,128...
|
| Note that the bottom one can be rotated upward. The entire
| cord can then be removed from the machine in one motion.
| smeej wrote:
| I don't think this was dumb exactly, just naive. I didn't know
| fireflies were real until my 20s. I thought they were just a made
| up thing in storybooks.
|
| I was rooming with a girl I barely knew for the summer and was
| looking out the window while washing dishes. You know how
| fireflies tend to sync up? Suddenly I see hundreds of tiny yellow
| lights turn on and then off. On and then off.
|
| I yelled for her to come in (at least to my credit I was more
| fascinated than afraid!), and she ended up dumbfounded that I had
| never seen fireflies before!
| throw46365 wrote:
| This is not really dumb, or naive.
|
| It's just not something you had any reason to encounter, and
| maybe you were off sick if it was mentioned in biology/science
| lessons.
|
| Now consider it this way: the first time you experienced
| fireflies, you were an adult, and you could bring a fully
| adult, science-aware, sense of wonder to that experience.
|
| I'd count it as a win.
| smeej wrote:
| I was thinking "naive" in the sense of "just not knowing some
| normal things about the world." It's definitely my, "WAIT--
| fireflies are REAL??" reaction that makes me laugh after the
| fact.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Hey, you were one of the ten thousand that day
| https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ten_thousand.png !
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| When I was about 3 months into my programming career I performed
| a minor refactor to some code.
|
| Unfortunately, the program was difficult to test (no unit tests)
| and very important, and difficult to verify correctness of output
| as well. (As in, you can't just look at it and say "yeah that's
| numbers lgtm").
|
| Also unfortunately the previous author had not been very
| consistent in their programming style, so there was a lot of
| syntactic noise (some single line if statements used braces, some
| omitted them, etc)
|
| Also unfortunately in my prior rewrite work in this, I had
| grafted the old UI onto my new backend to save time, but not
| brought the rigor there up to snuff (it's UI code, I had thought.
| It's well enough to have tests covering the business logic for
| now.)
|
| Well anyway when I had rearranged some code, I hadn't realized
| there had been an extremely large block right underneath an if
| statement that wasn't using brackets, and I had accidentally
| split it into a few statements. N-1 of which were naturally now
| outside of the if statement.
|
| The end result being that a bunch of code would run and the "is
| dirty" state worked fine, but if you clicked save on a "clean"
| state with no edits, it would blank the fields in the DB but not
| in the UI.
|
| It didn't end up having any actual impact because we caught it in
| time, but god damn did it teach me something about "real"
| programming. I'm not sure exactly what all it taught me, but I
| think about that a lot as I do random other things now 8 years
| and 3 companies later.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> I 'm not sure exactly what all it taught me_
|
| Time to get into woodworking!
| mtmail wrote:
| Took me several days to realize why some cars in the UK have
| white license plates, some have yellow ones. (They don't: one
| colour is on the front, one on the back). I no longer call myself
| a 10x engineers, now it's 9x only (that's a joke, I'm hardly 1x).
| cenamus wrote:
| Glad I wasn't the only one
| Sateeshm wrote:
| In India yellow is commercial and white is non-commercial
| vehicle
| ohnoitsahuman wrote:
| Had an employee poach on of my customers. And had another do the
| same ten years later.
|
| I apparently have trouble learning life lessons.
| fragmede wrote:
| Two over 10 years doesn't seem like that much, but I guess even
| one is too many. What do you see as your life lesson here
| though?
| circlefavshape wrote:
| Not my own story, but my mother's, told to me on the occasion of
| my 50th birthday ...
|
| My parents met in their early 20s through another couple, Des
| (flatmate of my father's) and Mary (schoolmate of my mother's).
| Des had a sore hip, and Mary's mother was a "bonesetter" (a kind
| of folk healer) so came to the men's flat to see him. "Seeing
| him" involved Des getting some kind of vigorous massage in the
| bedroom, and then being slathered with red ointment, while my
| mother and Mary sat in the other room listening to him moan in
| pain
|
| When the ordeal was over my mother, making conversation, asked
| Mary's mother what was in the ointment. One of the ingredients
| mentioned was "dragon's blood"
|
| My mother went home to the apartment she shared with some of her
| siblings, and related the story to them. "Dragon's blood??" said
| her brother
|
| ... "and that", says my mother, "was when I found out that
| dragons don't exist"
| mandmandam wrote:
| > Dragon's blood is a plant resin that may help with a variety
| of health concerns, including skin ulcers and diarrhea.
|
| > Dragon's blood is a natural plant resin. It's dark red in
| color, which is part of what gives dragon's blood its name.
|
| > The resin is extracted from many different tropical tree
| species commonly called dragon trees. These may come from the
| plant groups Croton, Pterocarpus, Daemonorops, or Dracaena.
|
| > The plant resin has been used for thousands of years for
| distinct purposes. There are records of its use among the
| ancient Greeks and Romans and in India, China, and the Middle
| East.
|
| - https://www.healthline.com/health/dragons-blood
| leipert wrote:
| Ah, some of the things in this thread remind me of
| https://xkcd.com/1053/
| granady wrote:
| Pff that comic is old news
| jeremiahbuckley wrote:
| I quote this all the time to people. There's too much, we're
| spread too thin. Ignorance shouldn't be considered a big deal
| or a huge embarrassment. Not being ready to learn is a problem,
| but ignorance is sort of the default state now.
| jeremiahbuckley wrote:
| (I actually scanned the comment thread to look for this
| comic, I was going to add it but you beat me to it.)
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| From 2011-2012 was Senior intelligence officer for Anderson Air
| Force Base, Guam, which is one of the most strategic bases in the
| United States department of Defense.
|
| As SIO you are statutorily responsible for the joint worldwide
| intelligence, communication system (JWICS), maintenance,
| security, growth, interruptibility, etc... in addition to
| managing all Perssec for SCI holders, and maintaining control,
| security and for CNWDI as well as ACCM.
|
| I was fresh home after a deployment to Iraq and thrown right into
| dealing with the Yp-Do crisis in SK and the Japanese Tsunami and
| Fukushima fallout that we had to provide HA/DR support for.
|
| I was 28 years old with a one year old at home.
|
| As part of maintaining security, I would regularly get inspected
| as you would expect for any manner of things. There is a special
| security team that lives at the defense intelligence agency
| primarily but also they have them for NSA and other
| organizations, that would do white hat penetration tests on
| secure information facilities, like all the ones that I was
| responsible for (I had a half dozen physical locations to
| manage).
|
| One of these tests was during a large scale exercise. Two
| civilians who had perfect credentials, were trying to access our
| primary headquarters SCIF. At the time I think I was managing a
| top-secret briefing preparation and so I delegated access
| control, and interrogation of these two people to another
| Lieutenant, as well as the actual special security officer who
| was an E6.
|
| They had previously tried to penetrate all of the other places on
| base, but failed.
|
| The process for getting access to a SCIF if you are not housed
| there is that that you send a visit request from your home
| security office to the visiting security office which will then
| transfer clearance details so that you can understand what access
| levels to give these people.
|
| About a month before their visit, there was a new guidance
| released saying that all visit requests had to have a digital
| requst in 100% of cases whereas are previously you could just
| print out your details and bring them with you, The special
| security officer would then look them up in a system (I won't
| name), and then it's up to the security office whether they give
| you access or not.
|
| My Special Security officer and my lieutenant came to me and said
| they have everything that they need per the requirements that we
| were operating under, and that they were comfortable giving them
| access to a terminal where they could do what they needed to do.
|
| I said "that's perfectly fine however LT I want you to sit behind
| them basically and make sure they don't walk off or do anything
| more than I'm giving them access to."
|
| So for like 30 minutes, we had two people in our SCIF who logged
| onto JWICS, we're being actively monitored and were able to send
| an email and then logged off and left.
|
| The next week, my commander asked me to go to a meeting and the
| penetration team briefed to the whole base how they got into all
| these places including my SCIF and one other facility
|
| The good thing was, we were basically written up with flying
| colors, and this was the hardest possible test that they were
| able to get through and so everybody was generally happy with us.
|
| This was really just one of those things where it was a specific
| detail that we were not up-to-date with but didn't have any major
| defense in depth risks.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| While it's an interesting story, I don't think this Ask HN was
| meant as a "what's your greatest weakness" job interview
| question.
| stevejb wrote:
| Why this comment? This was a really interesting anecdote
| about how complicated situations in life can be.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Hey if you consider that my greatest weakness then I'm doing
| great!
| _boffin_ wrote:
| When I was younger, I had an issue with external vs internal
| validation. Sadly, it heavily skewed towards external validation.
| I was on the chunkier side for a lot of my childhood and into
| high school. Joined wrestling and stayed with it. Lot the weight,
| grew, and gained muscle. Also started to get a lot of attention
| from the opposite sex. That, with the external validation issue,
| leaned into it and just had fun. It became something that I just
| did.
|
| I had been a personal trainer for awhile when I got a new client.
| An eighty something professor who taught Dante's Inferno,
| Italian, collected degrees, and was actively pursuing some field
| in psychology (forget what one).
|
| For about 6 months, we'd work out on Saturday mornings and he'd
| always ask of my adventures since we last saw each other. I'd
| regale him and that was that.
|
| One morning after going though it all, he asked, "what else is
| there?" or something. Whatever it was, it stopped me in my
| tracks. I couldn't answer. That question hit me harder than a
| freight train.
|
| At that moment, I realized there was a massive issue with myself.
| I wanted a change, but a) didn't know what to change, b) how to
| change, 3) how to feel about myself. We continued to work on him
| and his goals, which was to bench 135 safely. He got to his goal.
| ;). He also helped me to get to mine, which was to focus more on
| internal validation and be happy with self.
|
| I was able to shift from heavily skewed external validation to
| external validation probably being now around 20%-30% and the
| rest being internal.
|
| Because of him, I was able to embrace myself and lean into the
| information seeking snd knowledge gaining person I am today and
| get to a level that someone with my academic background should
| not be at.
|
| A quote that I came up with many years ago that explains all of
| this and the transformation I had, "you're not going to change
| until the pain of change is less than the pain of staying the
| same."
|
| One other one too. From him, the professor. I have severe adhd
| and can read the same sentence 50 time and not remember what I
| just read, if it's not something I'm highly interested in. I came
| to him and told him that it's so damn boring and it's just a
| fight to sit there and attempt to read it.
|
| He gave me a mind shift: instead of thinking how it's important
| or exciting to you, try to imagine why the author of it thought
| it was so exciting, to where they spent their career learning
| about that subject. That allowed me to completely change how I
| read and that too has helped me more in the past years than I
| could imagine.
| granady wrote:
| Your final paragraph sums it up nicely. I think a lot of people
| when they see something educational will just switch off if it
| doesn't immediately engage a personal interest. Seeing it from
| the point of view of the author is a great way of putting it. I
| can explain this to my kids. Ok, Newtonian physics is boring.
| So let's think about why Newton made such a deal out of it.
| fifilura wrote:
| Oh, external validation vs internal validation has certainly
| been a humbling experience for me too.
|
| So humbling I could compare it with a train crash. Sadly
| possibly over-compensating for it now, but I don't want to go
| back to the external validation spiral.
|
| Amd thank you for sharing, and putting into words what I didn't
| manage.
| stagger87 wrote:
| It's always humbling to think I know a topic pretty well only to
| meet a true expert on the topic. It makes me think about how much
| time I spent learning it to not really feel like I know it at
| all, and makes me second guess my learning process. I can think
| of several times in my career/life where this has happened.
|
| Also related, learning something, only to find out later that
| your understanding of something was incorrect, or made incorrect
| assumptions. Always humbling.
| Turboblack wrote:
| In the mid-2000s, I got excited about creating a company that
| deals with web design. Now I wouldn't risk doing this, knowing
| all the pitfalls. the more you know, the more you doubt
| brudgers wrote:
| Happens so often to me it's no longer humbling.
|
| Though of course I do some things well I've been doing most
| things poorly all my life. That's what learning as an adult feels
| like.
|
| Good luck.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Idk what my most humbling moment would be, but there's been a
| few.
|
| I've spent the majority of my career looking for wook rather than
| doing work, and have lost at least 7 jobs in the first 12 years
| for one reason or another. This is going on the 3rd time I've
| spent more than a year without working at all in any job. It
| never gets easier, and each time I get to spend a ton of time
| reflecting on how things went and what I'm actually good at. It's
| usually humbling, because so far the list of things I'm good at
| professionally has only dwindled. Another humbling aspect to this
| is realizing that most other people don't lose their jobs... like
| ever, unless it's seasonal or severe economic downturn.
|
| During one of those periods I spent so long unemployed that I
| literally ran out of money and moved into a car from my
| relatively nice apartment, and then worked at Starbucks as a
| barista, which taught me that I can be good enough at speaking
| with customers, but what I thought were trivial tasks turned out
| to be almost laughably untenable, like remembering how much syrup
| goes in Karen's caramel macchiato, or just showing up on time.
| daymanstep wrote:
| Honest question and genuinely curious: what is difficult about
| showing up on time?
| drewcoo wrote:
| "Just showing up" can mean dealing with all the daily
| annoyances.
|
| https://www.inc.com/danny-iny/woody-allen-said-show-up-to-
| su...
|
| If it's not hard, why can't everyone seem to do it?
|
| I have a friend who's a defense lawyer. He tells me that
| prison must be the happiest place on earth, given the lengths
| that people go to just to get a chance of getting in. It's
| funny and illustrative, just like the Woody Allen quote about
| showing up.
| riehwvfbk wrote:
| Untreated ADHD can make this really really really hard. And
| the worst part is: nobody will understand because it is not
| hard for most people, so everyone assumes that being late is
| a character issue.
|
| To understand how hard it is, imagine that you have periodic
| blackouts during which you completely forget not only that
| you need to be on time for work, but that work is a thing
| that exists in this universe. You cannot control when one of
| these blackouts will hit, you just get to deal with the
| fallout.
| borski wrote:
| Precisely. You can work on this with techniques and coping
| mechanisms (and sometimes medication) but it's a constant
| struggle.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| We should make it a social expectation that you can show up
| any time +-1 hour from the official start time of your
| office job. That way, "I'm ready half an hour early: I
| could catch the earlier train" becomes an actual thing, and
| you don't have to kill time for half an hour and risk
| missing two trains in a row.
| smeej wrote:
| I think you need to try working in tiny startups, if any of
| your skills would make that work. There, gaps in resumes and
| random ends to employment are expected. Nobody asks about mine,
| and I end up taking a full year off every 4-5 years whether I
| want to or not (but I usually do want to).
|
| No, my normie friends don't get it at all, and everyone ALWAYS
| asks me "how the job search is going" even when I've told them
| every week for 6 months that I'm not trying to get a job, but
| trying to hold myself to their norms was a lost cause for me
| anyway.
| qup wrote:
| I often learn how to use something well that I've been using my
| whole life. A ratchet strap was a good example--you can use it
| without understanding how to use it well. One video (essential
| craftsman) fixed that for me.
|
| I think the most humbling for me is seeing a real pro use
| something you use a lot, like a kitchen knife.
| kennu wrote:
| Back when cloud computing was mostly for early adopters, I used
| to work on many customer projects at the same time, or in quick
| succession, in an architect/developer role. It was great as long
| as the projects worked out as planned and I could deliver a
| working system in a few weeks or months and move on to the next
| project. It was easy to become a little overconfident until I
| faced unexpected difficulties in some projects and the tight
| schedules started to fall apart.
|
| For instance, I learned that you should never trust what a
| customer says about reusing their existing code without actually
| looking at the code first. You can end up having to rewrite the
| code, and then have a dissatisfied customer, because the new code
| doesn't have the same problems as the old code and produces
| different results. It doesn't matter which one is correct, since
| the old code was already used for years and everything is based
| on it.
|
| So the humbling experience has been not to become too optimistic
| and overconfident after some successful projects. You will become
| the bad guy if you over-promise and can't deliver, even if you
| feel someone else is actually to blame. Every time you start
| something new, you have to check for yourself what the
| requirements and conditions truly are before accepting a
| deadline. And you can never trust the documentation or
| description of an existing system without also looking at the
| actual system.
| smeej wrote:
| I've mostly been on the "user" end of buggy internal company
| code. It's always a scary day when the interns start, because
| we finally have someone who will have the time to "fix" the
| bugs in the code--but half of them we have been using off-label
| as "features" to solve other problems.
|
| Whenever I start at a new company, I make sure to ask not just
| _what_ breaks the system, but _how_ the system breaks when it
| breaks. One person 's broken pot is another person's cutting
| tool!
| llmblockchain wrote:
| The most humbling learning experience I have ever had was having
| a child.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Being 15 and unable to grasp the concept of an array whilst
| wishing I could somehow use a variable to escape my at the time
| a1, a2, ... a11 variable naming convention.
| fire_lake wrote:
| A formative experience for me was learning to program and
| asking a peer "how I do lots of variables but I don't know
| which one I need" - I had none of the terms to even ask for
| what I needed.
| kzrdude wrote:
| That phrasing of the question is not bad at all, just needs
| an open minded person to answer it
| rpgwaiter wrote:
| I went from hacky hobbyist programmer to working on core business
| logic for a startup that eventually the whole company would rely
| on. I was mostly a one-person team at the company, and I kept a
| lot of my bad unscalable tendencies from making small fun
| projects. No formal testing, very little documentation, hundreds
| of "TODOs", breaking API changes without really telling anyone,
| no QA process, no monitoring/reporting, etc.
|
| It all came to a head when my employer was demoing some software
| that used my API and none of what they were trying to show worked
| because of multiple unrelated bugs in my code, causing us to lose
| this very large client. I somehow kept my position, worked with
| other departments to formalize QA processes, and started
| regularly communicating with the API users.
|
| Before I was just making software for nobody with 0 stakes, the
| reality of having actual people, entire revenue streams dependent
| on my code being reliable didn't fully register. At my previous
| (and only other at the time) employer I was basically a paid seat
| filler. I spent a lot of work hours making personal projects, it
| felt like going to work and getting paid to make hobby code.
|
| I'm glad I was able to learn from the experience and it didn't
| put me out of work or anything
| punkspider wrote:
| This hits a little too close to home right now. Only a week ago
| have I felt that I did a few things to actually make an impact.
|
| And this only because it seems that the CEO noticed I can spin
| up prototypes to validate ideas before passing them to the
| actual devs.
|
| I've worked with him for a total of 3 years however, and during
| that time, most of the time I felt like I was tinkering without
| making a real difference.
|
| The only time that a bigger project was implemented that I had
| the lead on felt like a fluke and it was after probably 6
| months of working on it.
| fifilura wrote:
| Would the code have been there and the demo have happened if
| you had done everything by the book?
| rpgwaiter wrote:
| That's hard to say, probably not. The buildup of unscalable
| code and subtle bugs was partially a result of moving fast
| and adding new features before the previous featured were
| fully baked.
|
| Some of the new processes did slow dev time a bit, but not
| all of them. They had QA people that checked over all other
| production code, my code just somehow flew under the radar
| since I didn't have direct customer interaction (was an
| API/library)
| roncesvalles wrote:
| Probably more of a humbling moment for the CEO. They just
| demo'd something without both conferring with the devs and
| doing a practice-run themselves?
| lostlogin wrote:
| The sledge hammer to the cyber truck. Given that everyone
| knows that demos have a nasty habit of going wrong, what kind
| of madman tries something without testing it first?
| meristohm wrote:
| Learning that the world doesn't revolve around me, and that other
| people (and other animals) have rich and complex inner lives
| worthy of curiosity, dignity, and love (I can't be sure, but it
| feels like a healthy perspective). I'm in my 40s and this lesson,
| started in youth, is still sinking in. Having a child, and the
| commensurate second childhood, is a major impetus.
| shmoe wrote:
| Always something new... this week its some *nix commands
|
| cat backwards (tac) will display the file in reverse order :)
|
| chown username: with the colon and the group name blank will set
| the permission to the user's default group.. very useful when you
| blend windows groups with spaces into an environment and it
| becomes a pain in the ass to put return characters in
| tcsenpai wrote:
| I worked as a sysadmin for a whole year before learning
| tab->autocomplete in linux
| jv22222 wrote:
| I was asked by a pro. documentary maker (who I met on the plane
| flying in to London) to get some B role for a G&R concert he was
| filming (with his spare video camera).
|
| I was given the camera and sent in to the mosh pit to film from
| that perspective. After the show I gave the camera back to him.
| He said, "where's the footage?"
|
| I had been "filming" looking through the view finder, but I had
| forgotten to press record.
|
| Gutted.
| fifilura wrote:
| G&R = Guns N'Roses
| spuz wrote:
| If it makes you feel better, I have occasionally handed friends
| my DSLR and asked them to record something for me. You can do
| this either by pressing the red record button or full press the
| shutter button. Well my friend spent 15 minutes only half-
| pressing the shutter button and recording nothing. Now I know
| to make sure to tell people how to start and stop the recording
| and how to check if it is actually rolling or not. I consider
| that _my_ humbling learning moment.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Realizing how much work I had to do on my own shit. This is a
| gradual process because most people can't handle knowing the full
| extent of it initially.
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| cd / (intending to cd ~)
|
| rm -rf *
|
| Yep; I actually did it. By mistake, as a junior in a CS research
| lab.
| zamalek wrote:
| I contributed System.HashCode to .Net Core. I was overzealous
| with inlining hints to make it go fast. jkotas popped his head
| into the PR and noted the 2MB of machine code _per generic type
| parameter._ The bigger problem was that I knew better, and
| preached better at the time, but had my head too deep in the
| weeds. I 'm better at occasionally popping my head out of the
| weeds nowadays to make sure I don't have tunnel vision in a daft
| direction.
| becquerel wrote:
| Just wanna say thanks for contributing to the platform that is
| currently paying my wages.
| borkinlarbin wrote:
| Seeing software systems that are barely held together by
| shoestrings and Dixie cups that make millions of dollars a day.
| Very flaky and kludgey, and I think to myself I could build
| something better than this, but still have yet to do so.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I don't know if it was humbling per se, but in the spirit of some
| of the contributions in the thread, I once knocked over a cup of
| coffee into the power strip behind my desk, blowing a fuse that
| blacked out half the office.
|
| This was a company where the devs were all on workstations, so
| generously there was at least a few hundred hours of work that
| were lost.
| nicbou wrote:
| In college, meeting someone that was better than me by every
| conceivable metric. You'd think that he beat me at one thing by
| neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every
| category. Perfect grades, involved in many communities, and
| generally pleasant to be around. There was no caveat, no excuse.
| Dude just straight up rocked.
|
| I have met more people like that while travelling. I felt badass
| riding my motorcycle super far, but wherever I went, there was a
| greater badass riding along. Some of these travellers were on
| much longer journeys, on much smaller budgets, on a much worse
| bikes, riding offroad all the way, camping every night. Some were
| on bicycles, going around the world under their own power. I was
| just a rich tourist with a great bike who slept in hotels.
|
| In a way, meeting those people was liberating. I will never be a
| world champion at anything, so I might as well play for the love
| of the sport.
| netsharc wrote:
| But why does it have to be a competition, of thinking "I have
| to be the best at X, if someone else is better, I feel
| unworthy.".
|
| I ask rhetorically, that sentence probably describes me more
| than my impression of you from 3 paragraphs.
| massysett wrote:
| > You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting
| another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category.
|
| This is literally impossible. A person cannot be Einstein and
| Picasso at the same time. A person cannot be Steve Jobs and
| Pope Francis at the same time. We all have limited time in
| life, and it is only possible to excel in one thing by focusing
| on it and, as a result, not focusing on something else.
| koeng wrote:
| I'm learning swing dancing. It's been humbling.
|
| It's humbling because all my life, I've been really good at
| technology - I specialize in biotechnology and manipulating DNA,
| but am also fluent in programming (mainly python, go, lua) and am
| able to build hardware - even helped run a robotics startup for a
| while. Anything related to technology and science comes easily
| and naturally to me. This isn't to brag, but just a fact that
| learning things has mostly been something I do way, way faster
| than my peers.
|
| But I've never danced before, or done anything that required that
| particular skill set - then realizing I'm real bad at it. Seeing
| all my peers learn faster and be better, with the same amount of
| study and practice time, and really trying my hardest and just
| not being good at it. I'm really thankful for this experience!
| And I really enjoy dancing, and will definitely keep doing it!
| oblib wrote:
| I was in my early 20s talking with a friend who was at least
| twice my age. I was bitching about a guy who'd look at the work I
| was doing who really didn't know squat about it and start telling
| me how I should be doing it.
|
| After listening to me for a bit he quietly said "Well, you can
| learn something from everyone if you focus on that."
|
| I spent a couple days pondering that. At first I tried dismissing
| it because he wasn't there when the guy I was whining about was
| blabbering on and on, and he didn't know the guy, but it kept
| bugging me and after a few more days it occurred to me that if he
| was right I'd been missing out.
|
| Just a few days later the guy I was whining about came by again
| and looked at the work I was doing told me he knew a guy who
| could do most of that for me and it wouldn't cost as much and I
| could get it done a lot faster. So I went and talked to the guy,
| and sure enough he could do it, and do it faster and better, and
| it cost me a lot less.
|
| I ended up making a lot more money on that work, and the company
| I was doing it for was thrilled with the changes. And since then
| I've focused what I can learn from others, even those who tend to
| annoy me.
| lostlogin wrote:
| The other part of this is that someone can be right, and an
| arsehole.
| hu3 wrote:
| Learning that some folks can produce so much value with crappy
| code.
|
| I've seen entire teams burn so much money by overcomplicating
| projects. Bikesheding about how to implement DDD, Hexagonal
| Architecture, design patterns, complex queues that would maybe
| one day be required if the company scaled 1000x, unnecessary
| eventual consistency that required so much machinery and man
| hours to keep data integrity under control. Some of these
| projects were so late in their deadlines that had to be
| cancelled.
|
| And then I've seen one man projects copy pasting spaghetti code
| around like there's no tomorrow that had a working system within
| 1/10th of the budget.
|
| Now I admire those who can just produce value without worrying
| too much about what's under the hood. Very important mindset for
| most startups. And a very humbling realization.
| bicx wrote:
| My way of planning and writing software shifted a good bit
| after I went from working at a mid-size tech company to working
| for myself. Suddenly I cared very much about how long it took
| to reach a functional product and very little about developing
| sophisticated architectures.
| spoiler wrote:
| Like with all things in life, one need to find balance within
| the two extremes you posted.
|
| There's overcomplicated, there's too basic, and then there's
| simple.
|
| I think it's fine adding just enough complexity and abstraction
| to make something malleable and manageable in the future
| mablopoule wrote:
| I don't remember where I saw this quote, but... "It's okay to
| half-ass something, when all you need is half an ass".
|
| EDIT: Totally agree about the 'important mindest for startup',
| I had a similar eye-opening experience, working in a startup
| with 'cowboy' code that was actually quite good, but I had to
| unlearn a bit of stuff I read as a junior/mid-level developper.
|
| It was code that was well-architected, had well-concieved data
| structure, and had business value, but every "professional"
| coder would deem bad-quality, since it had no unit test, did
| some stuff unconventionally, and probably would have many
| linter warning.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Most scenarios only warrant fractional assing. Also this
| philosophy provides the opportunity to say "ok guys, this
| time... we have to whole ass this one," which is always fun.
| bch wrote:
| So hard to resolve this in my head - unless it's understood
| there's a "detonate" button attached to the code, that it might
| escape, or worse, that it gets passed on or sold(!!) is a
| chilling thought.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I think the other replies miss an important part of your
| comment:
|
| _Some of these projects were so late in their deadlines that
| had to be canceled_
|
| Speed is really important a lot more often than devs like to
| acknowledge when a company is small and fighting for its life
| to get revenue, let alone become profitable, and the code debt
| is often worth it. Fixing the code debt itself doesn't need to
| be any more thorough than necessary either.
| ungawatkt wrote:
| Hitting a semester in college where I just couldn't keep up the
| way I was used to (A's and B's by default). It was the first time
| I had to manage my workload and purposefully do a worse job on
| things (so I had time for everything) to just get C's. It was
| definitely easier to learn those skills in college than in the
| workplace.
| orena wrote:
| Page. 57 in Real Analysis, definition of a limit...
|
| First time in my life that I did not understand something on the
| spot (actually took me a few months to (REALLY) understand it).
| moribvndvs wrote:
| I just learned that Wolfenstein 3D is actually (wait for it) the
| third game in the franchise. Nothing gets by me!
| ckrapu wrote:
| In my first digital design class, my physics professor (who I
| took 6 classes with and respect very much) took a look at my
| breadboard computer with no consistent color coding for groups of
| wires and overall bad layout. He said it was bad and that I
| should start over from scratch in front of the whole class.
| ein0p wrote:
| Meeting a couple of people with eidetic memory in college, and
| then again meeting a few real world geniuses at a research lab I
| worked at. At that point I realized that "it's not the brains
| that got me to where I am". Ironically I'm more successful than
| both eidetic memory dudes and most of the geniuses. But I'd
| frankly trade all my success for better memory. What they lacked
| was tenacity. I have that in spades.
| mahoro wrote:
| As a teenager, I discovered disassemblers/debuggers and became
| very enthusiastic about hacking and patching things. I reset the
| trial period counter on a few shareware apps, and the next
| "victim" that caught my eyes was encrypted RAR SFX archive. I
| thought it would be the perfect target.
|
| I spent ~20 hours trying to find a routine that compares the
| entered password with the correct one. That humbling moment I
| realised there was no such routine, and moreover, most of
| disassembled code is just garbage.
|
| [*] this is an encrypted archive combined with extractor in one
| .exe file.
| steven_noble wrote:
| Mostly politics, where I have learned to stop predicting anything
| that can't be directly seen -- especially the future. For
| example: 1. Trump wins. I firmly predicted the opposite. To be
| fair, most polls predicted the same. But the lesson is to be less
| certain about the future. 2. No chemical weapon found in Iraq. I
| firmly predicted the opposite. To be fair, when that event
| unfolded, it was not that long since the world had last seen Iraq
| actually use chemical weapons against Kurdish insurgents. But the
| lesson is to be less certain about anything that can't be
| directly seen.
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