[HN Gopher] Embrace the Grind
___________________________________________________________________
Embrace the Grind
Author : karl42
Score : 348 points
Date : 2021-04-09 06:29 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jacobian.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (jacobian.org)
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I have to wonder what magicians think of the 80/20 rule. The
| trick probably needs all 100% and the grind it takes to get
| there.
| 5cott0 wrote:
| Everybody's other favorite German word: "sitzfleisch".
| didibus wrote:
| Maybe this is a naive question, but why couldn't you just pick a
| bug at random, fix it, and move to the next? You said eventually
| you worked through all issues in about a year of time. How did
| having the issues prioritized from the get go really mattered, if
| you ended up closing them all anyways?
|
| If I had to guess, the magic trick was simply investing in
| tackling all the bugs one after another for a year until they're
| all closed out. Maybe you needed to triage them all to convince
| people to invest in doing this?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| My guess is that the noise of new bug reports was
| incapacitating the team. You can't fix anything if each few
| minutes somebody comes to complain about a new problem.
|
| But with the bugs organized he could filter the repeated
| reports and let people work. As a bonus, he could direct people
| into solving the largest troublemakers first too, so things get
| quieter faster.
| paxys wrote:
| The effort to impact ratio is wildly different among bugs in a
| large backlog. Sometimes a 10-minute single line change will
| produce a massive benefit for all users. Other times a
| developer can slog on a bug for weeks only to realize that no
| one cares about the fix anymore. You want to start tackling the
| ones in the first category before spending time on the second.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| It's a good question. i.e. if it takes a year to fix all bugs
| then why does order matter?
|
| The factor he did not mention is that there are unnamed people
| who see certain bugs and when they see those bugs, they judge
| the quality of the software to be poor.
|
| Thus, for human reasons you must fix certain bugs first because
| it makes certain people feel that the software quality is not
| poor.
|
| OR because certain bugs prevent the system actually doing what
| it is meant to do .... thus the bugs that result in the system
| failing to serve its purpose must be done first.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Partly, yeah.
|
| If priority isn't clear, you spend hours on a bug, realize it's
| minor, realize the fix is difficult...and extrapolate that to
| the remainder of them. Morale sucks.
|
| If someone can stomach sorting through them, then at least you
| know you're working on the most important bug at any given
| time.
| thrower123 wrote:
| Quite often what happens in these cases is that people get
| paralyzed looking at the list of open things, and rather than
| just digging in and doing something to chip away at the pile,
| there are meetings and discussions and noise which generates a
| lot of heat and sound and stress, but doesn't actually make any
| positive progress towards resolving the issues.
|
| An meanwhile things keep getting thrown on the pile.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| It might be investing in tackling it, but I would guess that,
| more than that, it's that _one person_ was tasked with doing
| it.
|
| The problem with tedious grind work is, if it's a communal
| responsibility, then everyone will just sit around waiting for
| someone else to take care of it.
| barbiturique wrote:
| That's my tactic to blend-in in a engineering team and gain some
| respect / credibility. I try to find the most boring, utterly
| broken part, that nobody wants to touch... and I sink time into
| it.
|
| Once I made it somewhat usable, I document it.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think in some ways this strategy, which I also employ, is
| rejecting the grind, rather than embracing it.
|
| Generally I have coworkers who embrace the grind - One group
| happily show up to do some mind numbingly manual and error
| prone process, even going beyond apologizing into _protecting_
| it. That 's one form of job security, but it leeches talent
| from the company. The other group abhors it and will try to do
| literally anything else to avoid going through it, including
| making all new things that turn out to be almost as bad (and
| never quite managing to get rid of the original).
|
| Going through the grind a couple times and making sure that
| nobody else has to go through it ever again is acknowledging
| the grind, and then doing something about it.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| Important distinction you're making.
|
| For me the litmus test is documentation.
|
| Make a active effort to at least explain in plain English was
| the grind is and what it's is purpose, then having a stab at
| documenting the steps.
|
| It's never a one time thing. Most likely you need to do it a
| few time manually. You won't get all the steps right, and
| automating it will likely be a tall order; otherwise it would
| be done already.
|
| But like you said I encounter groups of engineers that
| transform the grind into a cottage industry. They don't
| publish their knowledge, they are the expert on it and one of
| the few group that can execute on those story. It's
| depressing.
|
| And you demasked me: by making it better and more documented
| I want to kill the grind. Or at least offload it to another
| group. ( BA, users, OPS running grind.sh )
| mdpye wrote:
| I hadn't realised it til now, but I do the same. It's a really
| great way to get started, because it tends to coincide with not
| having yet gained a broad range of responsibilities pulling you
| in different directions. You become a domain expert in
| something (which was probably lacking across the team) and
| peers appreciate it.
|
| After they've seen that, you organically start getting invited
| to all kinds of more interesting projects and discussions.
| hinkley wrote:
| One of my 'secrets of my success' moments was realizing that
| one of the grind areas I reject has to do with the all of the
| processes of building the application. You stare at that
| stuff long enough and you might not know how the application
| does what it does, but you have a pretty good idea of _where_
| it does them.
|
| And inasmuch as you've also improved the testing situation,
| you've also created a system that allows you to iterate
| faster, which you are intimately familiar with, allowing you
| to poke at the system in a way that provides you feedback on
| your hypotheses. Meaning you can learn about the rest of the
| system on your own schedule instead of being hand-fed bits of
| tribal knowledge (which often turns out to no longer be
| entirely correct anyway).
| piva00 wrote:
| I don't like to chime in with "seconding" on HN but I had the
| same eureka moment about it. I have definitely always behaved
| like that and it was just a natural and organic way to start
| in any team or job.
|
| I got a bit shocked because I realised this behaviour
| repeated this past year when I changed jobs. I became a
| domain expert in an obscure part of the codebase and have
| been documenting it and sharing the knowledge for a while
| now.
| BossingAround wrote:
| Same here. I like doing things nobody wants to do, especially
| when I'm new in the team.
|
| The problem I've identified is that you're then the go-to
| person for the task you did in the beginning.
|
| Example: You need to figure out how to deploy X. This is poorly
| documented and nobody knows how to do it.
|
| Action: You read the code, understand what needs to be done,
| deploy it. Then, you document it. Finally, you create fairly
| basic but working automation for future deployment.
|
| Result: Every time there's a need for redeploy, even when the
| code/procedure hasn't changed, you're the person the team
| immediately asks to do it. After all, you've automated it,
| shouldn't take too long, right?
| mdpye wrote:
| It happens at first. But point to the docs you wrote.
| Politely, but firmly, every time. People actually prefer
| being empowered to do it themselves, so they will pick it up,
| it just not our default when we're unsure.
| kache_ wrote:
| Pair with someone else and have them do it, and be explicit
| about your intention to share the knowledge.
| pilchard123 wrote:
| Never become the guy who can fix the printer.
| trentnix wrote:
| Good stuff.
|
| I've found that, as a manager, forcing the grind is also a
| useful tactic to get a new team member involved. Assign a
| challenging task that addresses a shared pain point and that
| requires some measure of tedium and lots of effort.
|
| Not only will the completed work result in a new team member
| being accepted and respected (as you've experienced), the new
| team member will also develop a sense of value and ownership in
| the project. The faster new team members get through that
| period where they feel like an outsider to where they feel like
| they are contributing value, the better.
| chrchang523 wrote:
| Alternate framing: be prepared to "Do Things that Don't Scale"
| (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html ) when your organization is small.
| gkop wrote:
| Not a fan of pg, but his schlep essay is a better alternate
| framing of this article (if my reading comprehension is
| accurate...): http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html
| chrchang523 wrote:
| I had forgotten that the schlep essay was distinct.
| Interesting that they don't refer to each other.
| WindyLakeReturn wrote:
| Unlike many comments here, this doesn't resonate with me. Grinds
| have always had some part that benefits from automation. Rarely
| can the whole thing be automated in any reasonable timeframe, but
| individuals parts can easily be. Often the magic is that those
| around me don't even realize that you can partially automate it
| so they end up thinking I did it all by hand.
|
| There is a trap in over thinking the automation. Sometimes the
| partially manual solution takes an hour full while automation
| takes 8. But I'm failing to think of a time in my career where a
| grind was repetitive and fully manual but not improved by some
| trick of automation. Notepad++, regex, and your language of
| choice builds a very powerful set of automation for virtual
| problems. For the enhanced suite, toss in a library to get data
| to and from excel and access and another to navigate and scrape
| HTML pages.
| tarunkotia wrote:
| Few months ago I posted on HN asking the same thing. The author
| addresses it pretty well with a good example.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25010373
| longformworks wrote:
| That was an enjoyable read and a gentle reminder to avoid the
| shiny tools and just get to work. Thanks for sharing.
| courtf wrote:
| The real magic behind that bug triage anecdote isn't the tedious
| work it took to get there, it's that a year later anyone noticed,
| gave a shit, or gave credit where it was due. In 9/10
| organizations, such outcomes never materialize because no one is
| working for the common good, nor cares about silly little things
| like old bugs. Often there simply isn't time. You are instead
| being yanked from meeting to meeting, thrashing from one poorly
| defined management prerogative to another, because no one outside
| the code base has any understanding of what it actually takes to
| build a stable product nor do they really care.
| MacroChip wrote:
| Every time I hear about the "Three virtues", I always think
| "Well, there's 'laziness' and there's _laziness_ ". I know when I
| or someone else is being 'lazy' or _lazy_. Same thing for the
| other virtues. This is why we appreciate those who embrace the
| grind.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| When I joined a mentoring program targeted at recent college
| grads, I expected to be teaching things like interview prep,
| resume writing, negotiation skills, communication skills, and how
| to deliver results in a workplace.
|
| For about half of the mentees, that's roughly true. However, for
| the other half much of my mentoring ends up being about time
| management, following through on commitments, and putting in the
| effort required to get a job done. A surprising number of young
| people are graduating college without ever having had to _work_
| any job. It 's particularly difficult for talented coders who
| breezed through easy CS programs until they land in a work
| environment where tasks are challenging, expectations are high,
| and the only way to get things done is to sit down and put in the
| effort.
|
| One of the best skills anyone can learn is how to sit down,
| focus, and get work done. In my experience, it's increasing
| challenging to convince young people that this is an acquired
| skill that they can practice and develop. There's a growing
| perception that traits like work ethic, focus, and motivation are
| fixed attributes that one is born with (or without) rather than
| abilities that are developed over time. It's frustrating to watch
| some mentees map out meticulous diet and exercise programs to
| improve their physical strength, but then turn around and tell me
| that they're only capable of coding for 2 hours per day as a sort
| of fixed upper limit. Like everything, the ability to work and
| focus can be developed over time with practice and dedication.
| It's worth it.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| I'm not gonna disagree but I want to add a couple things.
|
| 1. Kids with ADHD probably can't develop executive function as
| fast or as far as other kids. I'm pretty sure I have it, it
| explains the repeated performance reports of "You're good when
| you apply yourself and useless when you don't." Unfortunately I
| struggle to _choose_ to apply myself.
|
| Willpower doesn't seem to come naturally to me, even after 10
| years as a professional programmer. Adderall didn't help - I
| had to take it in the morning, after breakfast. So I was still
| late for work, because eating breakfast is not something I'm
| good at, and I couldn't start my day until I had finished
| breakfast. Then after work the stimulants wore off and I felt
| like shit and reverted to my normal do-what-i-want executive
| function. But it made me feel normal without caffeine.
|
| So I quit the Adderall and just cutting caffeinated soda with
| non-caff every morning, as though I was lowering my dose on a
| prescription. So far it's working. I still never clean my room,
| which is status quo for the last 20 years, and work is still
| pretty easy. The phrase "idiot savant" comes to mind. All I
| want is for people to stop thinking that I'm doing this on
| purpose. I don't enjoy constantly feeling like a moron and
| being behind on simple household chores despite making decent
| money at a job that is considered (by other people) to be
| difficult.
|
| And that might even be the case for the kids with detailed
| exercise programs. I don't exercise at all because it's not my
| interest. I program, because it is my interest. Kinda like how
| autistic people can't choose their special interests. I pity
| the kids whose interest is exercise but are trying to force
| themselves through a CS program into a career track they can't
| possibly do.
|
| Dr. Russell Barkely goes into some detail in a 3-hour talk
| about ADHD here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSfCdBBqNXY If
| anyone thinks I don't have ADHD because I sat through a 3-hour
| talk about psychology, maybe they need to watch it, too.
|
| "There's a growing perception that traits like work ethic,
| focus, and motivation are fixed attributes that one is born
| with (or without) rather than abilities that are developed over
| time."
|
| What if they are, though? What if it's like height, where
| genetics sets a range and environment picks a point in that
| range? If I had starved as a child, I would be shorter than I
| am now. But if I had eaten more, I would not be taller. I'm
| about the same height as my parents are.
|
| There's a hypothesis that the current age of mass distraction
| (TV, phones, Internet, etc.) doesn't _cause_ ADHD, but it does
| _aggravate_ it. I don't know if the studies bear it out, but I
| really want this to be true. What if it's something that's
| latent in the human genome, and the fact that we can profit off
| of exploiting it nowadays just brought it to the surface? In
| early centuries, if I had nothing to do but my work, maybe I
| would find it easy to just "accept boredom" and do my work
| anyway.
|
| 2. I'm not sure how many employers would have hired me in
| college. I get the sense that unskilled labor just isn't worth
| much anymore, and pushing kids to get more education is kicking
| the can down the road since, as you pointed out, nobody wants
| to hire an adult with zero work experience whether they're 18,
| 22, or even 30.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| ADHD is a difficult topic to discuss on HN. I'll preface this
| by saying that I'm not doubting your situation, or any other
| commenter's particular situation. This [section of my]
| comment is meant to be general:
|
| In the context of this mentoring group, we go through phases
| where almost _everyone_ suspects they have ADHD for various
| reasons. This is usually triggered by one of two things:
| Either someone shares an online "Do you have ADHD quiz?"
| that is sponsored by Takeda or another ADHD medication
| manufacturer, or a front-page Reddit infographic
| misrepresents ADHD as something like "Do you some times
| forget people's names? Maybe you have ADHD!"
|
| The reality is that ADHD is very challenging for those that
| have it, but the pop-culture definition of ADHD has become so
| vague that people who _don 't_ have ADHD are increasingly
| convinced that common life experiences are symptoms of ADHD.
|
| Focusing is hard. Studying is hard. The Grind is hard. It's
| normal to struggle to focus, but it's even more of a struggle
| for those with ADHD. However, having to work to focus for
| extended periods of time, in and of itself, is not an ADHD
| symptom, it's just life. ADHD is a much more severe
| impediment.
|
| (Again, not referring to the parent comment): Anyone curious
| should avoid self-diagnosis and seek a trusted professional.
| Ideally not a family doctor who simply writes prescriptions
| on request, but someone who can recommend self-guided therapy
| programs and combination treatment. Adderall isn't all it's
| made out to be, especially after the initial motivating
| effects wear off and you're left with the realities of long-
| term stimulant use, which are nowhere near as exciting as the
| first few doses.
|
| > What if they are, though? What if it's like height, where
| genetics sets a range and environment picks a point in that
| range? If I had starved as a child, I would be shorter than I
| am now. But if I had eaten more, I would not be taller. I'm
| about the same height as my parents are.
|
| Genetics and upbringing may set a baseline for focus and
| motivation, but those traits are demonstrably not set in
| stone. Contrary to your example, diet _does_ have a
| significant influence on height, but it 's not the sole
| determinant.
|
| Height isn't a good example, though. Consider something like
| running capacity. Some people are naturally more athletic
| than others, but barring severe disorders, everyone can
| develop more running capacity through training. Someone who
| gives up and never tries to increase their capacity may not
| believe this, but it's true. An average person can't simply
| work their way up to competing with Olympic sprinters blessed
| with perfect genetics, but they can significantly increase
| their running capacity from baseline by putting in the work.
|
| Likewise, attention is a learned skill. Some have more
| baseline attention span than others, but it _can_ be
| increased through training and practice. ADHD modulates this,
| but it doesn 't prevent practice from helping. If anything,
| people with ADHD need to invest more effort into training
| their attention spans than those without.
|
| > Willpower doesn't seem to come naturally to me, even after
| 10 years as a professional programmer. Adderall didn't help
|
| Adderall and other stimulants don't provide willpower,
| contrary to popular belief. Only people without tolerance
| will experience a temporary motivation boost from stimulants.
| This effect diminishes as tolerance sets in, which is one of
| several reasons why drugs like Adderall aren't successful for
| treating disorders like depression.
|
| Willpower is another learned skill. Expecting it to come
| naturally won't work forever. You have to learn to embrace
| the grind, do the work, and power through the urges to give
| up and do something easier if you want to get anywhere.
|
| > I don't exercise at all because it's not my interest.
|
| The reality is that the things we need to do aren't always
| going to line up with the things we like to do. You're lucky
| that you have a natural interest in programming, but you
| can't expect every necessary activity to have a natural
| interest behind it. Some amount of physical activity is
| essentially required for a healthy existence. You may not be
| interested in it, but that doesn't exempt you from requiring
| it and it certainly doesn't mean you won't benefit from it.
|
| Some times the things we have to do in life aren't
| immediately enjoyable. It's on us to find ways to make them
| more enjoyable (e.g. find a sport you like, or take up
| walking), and some times we just have to do the unenjoyable
| thing for the sake of progress.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| IMO any chance of there being a constrained and clearcut
| definition of ADHD went out the window in affluent
| communities as soon as they started giving people test
| extensions if they were diagnosed with it.
|
| I say that as someone who definitely has something
| neurodivergent going on, as I do not know other people who
| get excited and have to pace around the house flapping
| their hands.
| fartcannon wrote:
| Your comment makes me think of when they first designed jet
| cockpits for pilots. It was expensive to modify the planes,
| so they designed it to the 'average' person.
|
| The result is that no one fit in it.
|
| Expectations that other people can perform like you do if
| they just put their mind to it is so blind to the reality
| of human experience that it's hard to respond.
|
| https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-
| air-...
| beaconstudios wrote:
| It's also a mistake to think that people are static. We
| can improve ourselves through the expenditure of effort.
| The reality is like the parent said: there are limits to
| everybody's abilities, but you'll probably have to work
| hard as hell to reach yours (not targeting you
| personally, the general case "you"). If you believe that
| your present abilities are all you'll ever have then
| you're wasting what could be tremendous potential out of
| false self imposed limitations.
| fartcannon wrote:
| Who said anything about not improving, the parent comment
| believes the ADHD sufferer is simply not working hard
| enough.
|
| He's trying to show him where his bootstraps are.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| People who are currently struggling can fall into a self
| limiting mindset. I can attest to that from personal
| experience. I don't have ADHD, but I can imagine that
| having it might make you believe that you couldn't
| improve your attention at all. The reality is that you
| might just be able to, even though it would probably much
| harder than for the general population - in the same way
| that an underweight person would find it harder to build
| muscle than someone of average build.
|
| From my perspective it's a positive message, not finger
| wagging at the impaired.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| You said "This comment is meant to be general." and then
| quoted and replied to things the commenter shared about
| themselves.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I think being able to sit down and do work is more about
| removing distractions than improving focus.
|
| Also, I'm curious about these statements:
|
| > _There 's a growing perception that traits like work ethic,
| focus, and motivation are fixed attributes that one is born
| with (or without) rather than abilities that are developed over
| time_
|
| Really? Who believes this and why?
|
| > _but then turn around and tell me that they 're only capable
| of coding for 2 hours per day as a sort of fixed upper limit_
|
| Do they give you a reason? This seems pretty odd.
| narshian wrote:
| No it's not. Speaking as someone who specifically has this
| problem: even eliminating all possible distractions does not
| do the trick.
| titzer wrote:
| This is such a great article. It's the same reason I wrote an
| assembler, from scratch, by hand, and now I'm writing a fast
| interpreter in it. Nobody thinks this is a particularly fun
| thing. :)
| legerdemain wrote:
| OK, so you spend hours and days sealing threes of clubs into tea
| packets. But how do you make the volunteer pick the three of
| clubs during the show?
| cercatrova wrote:
| The article links to this Wikipedia page, looks like you can
| "force" the user to pick a specific card.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forcing_(magic)
| legerdemain wrote:
| That's just trading one word for another! OK, how do you
| _force_ the audience member to pick a specific card from a
| deck?
| travisjungroth wrote:
| That's an entire family of tricks called card forces. I used to
| have a whole routine based on them. Here's a blog post with
| three of them: https://conjuror.community/best-card-forces/
|
| I had about a 50% hit rate on the natural force. You just fan
| through the cards and time it so they pick the one you want.
| Wouldn't work for the tea trick, but works fine if you have a
| fallback.
| legerdemain wrote:
| Thanks for the link. Of the three techniques mentioned, one
| (the entire deck is all the same card) obviously doesn't
| withstand any scrutiny; one (riffle through a deck and skip
| to your chosen card when they say stop) feels like it'd be
| too risky for a trick that took days to set up; and one (the
| "natural" force) says "please pay us to learn the secret."
|
| I don't think the trick that's the show pony of this blog
| post has been revealed to us.
| wott wrote:
| He has put in his article a link to the Wikipedia definition of
| 'Forcing' (and once there, there is a link to a book describing
| techniques).
|
| edit: sorry, I hadn't refreshed and seen the other 2 replies
| before I replied myself.
| legerdemain wrote:
| I don't understand what you comment contributes to my
| knowledge. The author says that he will explain a magic
| trick. He says that step one is to XYZ. He does not say how
| to XYZ. He instead links to a Wikipedia page that says what
| XYZ is, but doesn't describe how to XYZ in a way that would
| work in the magic trick. Instead, it links to a book that
| _might_ say more about XYZ. I am not about to buy that book.
|
| Do you consider that trick to be sufficiently explained?
| draw_down wrote:
| The big question is, what's the reward? Magicians need to do
| tricks to eat. But what's the incentive to pulling off the
| impossible, as opposed to being a workaday employee, at the
| employer where the impossible was pulled off?
|
| I don't mean to imply there is no incentive, I'm saying - what is
| it? If it's there and it justifies the effort, great. If not, you
| might as well be doing magic tricks at a party.
|
| Now, some people like to be the fun guy at a party who can pull a
| quarter from behind your ear. If that's a fitting reward for you,
| then great! For me, that, or being able to write a blog post such
| as this one, would be a bit thin to justify it.
| macando wrote:
| _The only "trick" is that this preparation seems so boring, so
| impossibly tedious, that when we see the effect we can't imagine
| that anyone would do something so tedious just for this simple
| effect_.
|
| Even magicians who know many tricks will still enjoy the show and
| appreciate the effort.
|
| _Prestige_ is a great movie about this very topic.
| godot wrote:
| I can really relate to this. Countless times I've run into tasks
| that are even only minor grinds (some tedious work that maybe
| takes 30 minutes to an hour to do), and countless engineers I've
| worked with will just complain, avoid, or just plain be unwilling
| to do them. They'll indulge in discussing why things are wrong
| this way, what architecture should be like etc. And countless
| times, I'll just get through the minor grind and do the thing.
| Many of these engineers are smarter and more knowledgeable than I
| am, but when the time comes for performance reviews, promotions,
| these grinds really count. It's exactly as the author describe
| it, these grinds look like magic to the audience (management);
| because they are impactful to the business. Having said that, of
| course it's no excuse to create or perpetuate poor engineering or
| architecture by grinding. It's a balance.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| Thanks, I enjoyed that.
|
| I'd like to think this applies to a lot of professionals work,
| putting crazy amounts of effort in for a simple outcome, that
| just works.
|
| except the outcome is not as exciting as watching loads of
| cockroaches
| BossingAround wrote:
| > putting crazy amounts of effort in for a simple outcome, that
| just works
|
| There's a fine line though. You want to put in the effort into
| a task where it makes sense, like in the article.
|
| Personally, I see a lot of effort put into tasks where the
| person is comfortable with the effort, because they know they
| can do the task manually, the old way, and "don't have time for
| anything else".
| empiko wrote:
| Something similar can be said of writing survey paper in
| academia. Nobody wants to go through 150 papers about some
| godforsaken topic, but the one guy that goes through it is
| immediately considered to be a top notch expert.
| dceddia wrote:
| This quote stuck out to me:
|
| > More trouble than the trick was worth? To you, probably. But
| not to magicians.
|
| It makes me realize how fundamentally different the values are
| between some fields. The amount of time magicians put into the
| craft is mind-boggling.
|
| I see it also with how movies are made -- to think that sometimes
| they're spending days or months and tens of thousands of dollars,
| building sets, waiting for the right weather or lighting, braving
| subzero temperatures, or whatever it might be, just to get a
| single shot that might be on screen for a few seconds.
|
| Maybe a similar sort of thing with software would be spending
| time on animations -- the result is a cool flourish, but it lasts
| 0.15 seconds and it took 3 days to get it just right, and it's
| impossible to _quantify_ how worthwhile it was beyond a gut
| feeling. Even still, that 's not even in the same ballpark in
| terms of time or effort.
| munchbunny wrote:
| I don't think it's that software engineers don't value it. I
| think we all understand, to some degree, that building
| resilient, simple software that solves the problem thoroughly
| requires incredible investment into carefully thinking through
| the problem and constant upkeep. It's just that we don't want
| to believe it because getting from 80% to 100% requires boring
| grind that we'd rather spend building something new and
| exciting, or because getting from 80% to 100% requires time we
| could spend building 80% of something else we want to sell.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| By the time you grind to get that 100% perfect solution, the
| number of requirements the business has put on you in your
| backlog has extended well beyond what you can keep up with.
| It's not like software engineers are the only actors in a
| software system. They are reactive to the needs of product
| development who are reactive to the needs of customers. You
| have to balance your limited development resources against a
| constantly changing set of requirements.
|
| So you make trade-offs.
| bentcorner wrote:
| Personally I don't like facing the work to take something
| from 80-100% - I envision the potential work and I can see it
| laid before me, extending beyond the horizon. And sometimes
| that work doesn't even lead to a certain success.
|
| I realize that more often than not it would likely lead to
| improvements and a better state of the world. But it can feel
| overwhelming at times. Whereas working on a shinier smaller
| thing brings feelings of gratification that much easier and
| faster.
| 0xFACEFEED wrote:
| For me it's that 1) most people won't even care and 2)
| someone is going to ruin it anyway, eventually.
|
| I've observed a cognitive dissonance that I can't quite put
| my finger on. You'll work with (and for) people who have an
| extreme admiration for Apple products because of the
| attention to detail and quality. And yet they are perfectly
| fine churning out terrible technology products in order to
| make a buck. Often times just little attention to detail can
| make a huge difference; you don't need to be a zealot about
| it.
|
| Loosely related: I've found that I've made the most money
| while working with bad teams on terrible technology products.
| And I've made the least money working with great teams on
| great products. I really hate that.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| The key word is marginal. Sadly, software tends to align
| against art as pushing boundaries is marginal for the return of
| investment.
|
| I can provide an example. I'm writing a programming language,
| database, and platform to power board games. http://www.adama-
| lang.org/
|
| Most of my personal investments are marginal to most businesses
| (or deeply incompatible). If was going to run this as an
| enterprise, then this would be a death sentence. However, my
| hope is that when I get this thing moving, then I can ship
| games quickly with exceptional and redefining reliability.
|
| The only reason I can pursue this as an art is that I'm close
| to retirement.
| akiselev wrote:
| _> Maybe a similar sort of thing with software would be
| spending time on animations -- the result is a cool flourish,
| but it lasts 0.15 seconds and it took 3 days to get it just
| right, and it 's impossible to quantify how worthwhile it was
| beyond a gut feeling. Even still, that's not even in the same
| ballpark in terms of time or effort._
|
| The difference is that movies are all or nothing productions in
| an industry set up for a waterfall process with directors who
| exert creative control. Everything from dealflow to billing to
| the unions are set up to support the industry's unique
| requirements. They do the same kind of budget triage as
| software companies do, but they emphasize the creative aspect
| far more relative to tech since they're competing over form not
| function.
|
| The nearest creative equivalent would probably be Jobs-era
| Apple but I think the best analog would be NASA, whose missions
| are dictated by scientific and exploratory goals outside of
| their control. Except instead of an artistic direction, they
| have to contend with physics that dictates they spend extreme
| resources on seemingly trivial details like what tape or
| writing implement works best in zero-g.
| olivertaylor wrote:
| > they emphasize the creative aspect far more relative to
| tech since they're competing over form not function
|
| Yes and no. There are a lot of "make it fit in the box"
| requirements when making a movie. The unions mandate a
| certain make up of the crew, and a certain size, the stage
| rental costs are a certain amount, there are various laws and
| corporate budgets to take into account; all that adds up to a
| certain number of shots you can do in a day, which adds up to
| a dollar amount, and ALL THOSE THINGS cascade down to
| enabling only certain creative things. The difference between
| a brilliant director and a ok one is not the beauty of their
| art, it's their ability to pull-off something incredible in
| the middle of all that machinery. In a way, it's WORKING that
| machinery in your favor.
|
| So while, yes, the industry is set up to support a creative
| endeavor, that industry runs on a template that makes certain
| things possible and certain things very difficult. But
| brilliant producers and directors find ways around it.
| akiselev wrote:
| >* So while, yes, the industry is set up to support a
| creative endeavor, that industry runs on a template that
| makes certain things possible and certain things very
| difficult. But brilliant producers and directors find ways
| around it.*
|
| Totally agree, and IME that's par for the course for any
| creative endeavor that becomes profitable but
| unpredictable, whether its cinema, music, or software
| engineering. I meant more that the final product is judged
| on aesthetic qualities more so than in software, so the
| industry naturally allows for more creative expression at
| the highest levels of decision making.
| rcurry wrote:
| I wanted to be a professional magician when I was younger, and
| there's a single-handed cut that I learned from Daryl Easton
| (at a seminar he gave at some Holiday Inn). It took me a month
| or two of solid practice to get it down, but over thirty years
| later I can just pick up a deck of cards and flip that cut out
| like it was nothing. I was saddened to learn that he had
| committed suicide a while back. Every time I do that flourish
| playing cards with people or whatever I just remember that time
| when one of the world's best magicians hung out with me for a
| few minutes after his seminar just to make sure I had it down.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The movie thing is a good example. I remind my kids that some
| of these movies cost $1,000,000/minute to make. That might be
| what they make in their lifetime, so it is about that many
| hours of work per minute (a life's work).
| mwcampbell wrote:
| When you put it that way, that's obscenely expensive. Maybe
| we should be steering kids toward entertainment that we can
| create as well as consume because it's not absurdly
| expensive.
| david422 wrote:
| One of my favorite magicians: Derren Brown
|
| He does a coin flip trick where he flips a fair coin 10 times
| in a row and gets heads every time.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzYLHOX50Bc
|
| The amount of time and effort he puts into this and other
| illusions is very large.
| phpnode wrote:
| I used to be a big fan of Derren Brown when I was younger,
| and I do still like a lot of his work, but he readily admits
| to deceiving the audience, and the deception includes the
| explanations he gives for his techniques. The video you
| linked to was part of a longer show (The System) which gives
| an explanation for how this trick was done - he says they
| kept filming take after take, for 9hrs, until they finally
| got ten heads in a row.
|
| I think that kind of brute force approach would have been
| excessively boring to him, and it's much more likely that he
| switched to a gimmicked coin to get the ten heads in a row,
| then filmed a few shots of throwing tails for the
| "explanation".
| IncRnd wrote:
| > It makes me realize how fundamentally different the values
| are between some fields. The amount of time magicians put into
| the craft is mind-boggling.
|
| Larry Wall was quoted in the article, regarding laziness.
|
| Bill Gates has a famous quote, "I choose a lazy person to do a
| hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do
| it."
|
| Neither of those people can be accused of laziness, yet they
| both embrace it. Laziness in the context of productivity is
| often misunderstood as not doing things, but it is more aptly
| the stopping of doing in order to observe, think, and let the
| answer come to you. Work diligently, but think and simplify
| first. It seems to me that is also what the magicians do.
| bluquark wrote:
| My secret weapon for bug diagnosis is that when a regression is
| reported on a system without an automatic bisect tool, while
| everyone else is trying to reason about the problem with
| guesswork and code inspection, I sit down and spend 2 hours just
| bisecting manually (full sync, rebuild and install of old
| versions of the software). This provides a guaranteed culprit CL,
| often one that no one guessed, and also a potential bug assignee
| who's an expert on the problem in question (the author of that
| patch).
|
| It's "one weird trick" to get bugs stuck in limbo for weeks
| suddenly making fast progress towards a fix, and all it takes is
| a willingness to do something so tedious and mindless that no
| other engineer volunteers to do it.
| ip26 wrote:
| However, every time I reason about the problem & debug it, I
| gain a little knowledge and do it a little faster next time.
| Bisecting never really gets faster, aside from maybe writing a
| script.
| aidos wrote:
| That approach works well for regressions. I've used it myself
| to track down a bug in chrome and, as you say, having no idea
| how to fix it, I could direct it to the author via the bug
| tracker. In my case it was fixed within a couple of days. And
| obviously bisecting chrome is a slow process, but it only took
| a couple of hours.
|
| I find that most bugs don't fall into that class, and for the
| most part, just sitting and picturing the paths back from the
| bug is enough to work out what's going on. If you're less
| familiar with the code you'll want it in front of you to trace
| your way back. In general you can narrow the search space
| pretty quickly.
| munchbunny wrote:
| Definitely agree with that.
|
| My own personal experience with difficult bugs is that there is
| no substitute for taking the time to understand the problem
| domain, the systems involved, and the code itself. Getting to
| that point takes significant investment though, and I tend to
| trust engineers who are willing to do that much more than
| engineers who don't.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Heh, my answer is that I just refuse to build or work on
| systems where bugs aren't always super obvious. If the system
| gets too complex, I bisect the system.
|
| I think I've infuriated many colleagues with this attitude, and
| I'm sure there's at least half of the people here who would
| similarly be angry working with someone like that.
|
| Honestly, I'm not very good at writing software, I just tend to
| be similar to the author -- I grind more than I out-think most
| of my problems, and it results in a deliverable that solves it,
| usually, which ends up being enough to move on with.
| arpyzo wrote:
| It's interesting that while this often produces stunning results,
| it usually doesn't lead to pay increases and promotions.
| kache_ wrote:
| Doing a good job is important. Pay increases and promotions are
| obtained through way of leverage, but doing a good job and
| building a strong reputation pays dividends in the future.
| ptudan wrote:
| Yep, learning to optimize for visibility is one of the things
| every corporate worker should do.
|
| It's unfortunate, but the main way to actually see your
| compensation and respect increase.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > it usually doesn't lead to pay increases and promotions
|
| Individual companies may or may not reward the grind over the
| course of a few years. Companies that don't tend to bleed
| employees.
|
| These things do pay off over the course of a career, though.
| The Grind builds skills, builds reputation, and builds an
| ability to get work done when it matters. The company may not
| recognize the value of this, but your peers will. Your peers
| will form your future network as everyone diffuses into
| different companies.
|
| It's a mistake when someone scales back their own effort and
| learning simply because they don't expect an immediate monetary
| reward. We're all building careers and networks over the course
| of decades. Don't let a lack of pay increases at a single
| company alter hamper the trajectory of your entire career.
|
| And if you find yourself stuck at a company that isn't
| rewarding these things, move on. Some other company will gladly
| reward you for the accumulated experience. It only goes to
| waste if you stay put at companies that don't reciprocate.
| jldugger wrote:
| > For example, I once joined a team maintaining a system that was
| drowning in bugs. There were something like two thousand open bug
| reports. Nothing was tagged, categorized, or prioritized. The
| team couldn't agree on which issues to tackle > I spent almost
| three weeks in that room, and emerged with every bug report
| reviewed, tagged, categorized, and prioritized.
|
| Honestly, this is one of those traps a team can fall into, where
| nobody feels empowered to ignore the rest of the business for 3
| weeks to put the bell on the cat. The only person without
| deliverables and due dates is the new hire. And it takes a
| special kind of new hire to have the expertise to parachute in,
| recognize that work needs to be done, and then do it with little
| supervision.
|
| But he's right in general, that you can get some surprising
| things done by just putting in the time and focus. Which is why
| it's so utterly toxic that corporate America runs on an interrupt
| driven system, with meetings sprinkled carelessly across engineer
| calendars.
| habitue wrote:
| One of the most important things I think Kanban[1] emphasizes
| is that once you eliminate unnecessary bottlenecks, you're left
| with unavoidable bottlenecks, and this naturally means there
| will be slack. Explicitly expecting slack time is super useful
| to allow developers at all levels of seniority to do surprising
| and necessary things like this that would otherwise never be
| scheduled.
|
| [1] not the project board shape, but the original process it's
| named after where you set a hard cap on work in progress in
| each stage to find out where bottlenecks are.
| pbourke wrote:
| > Which is why it's so utterly toxic that corporate America
| runs on an interrupt driven system, with meetings sprinkled
| carelessly across engineer calendars.
|
| I agree with this statement and your other points. I've noticed
| a more insidious variant of this behavior: the expectation of
| interruptions. Some groups have such frequent priority shifts
| and/or a culture of fire fighting or door knocking such that
| even with a relatively open schedule, one is dissuaded from
| engaging in longer stretches of work for fear of having it all
| go to waste when the next meteor strike arrives.
| hyperpape wrote:
| Interruptions are definitely harmful, but if you look at what
| he did, he could have done it in spite of meetings. What would
| be bad would be starting it and being told (implicitly or
| explicitly) not to finish it.
|
| Better to have meetings than to have what you're doing
| cancelled several weeks in.
| aspaceman wrote:
| > And it takes a special kind of new hire to have the expertise
| to parachute in, recognize that work needs to be done, and then
| do it with little supervision.
|
| About 6 months into a job I realized this was what I needed to
| do and totally cracked. Didn't know the questions to ask or the
| way to learn what I needed to so I burnt out quick and quit. My
| fault for sure, but there was a ton of pressure to identify
| issues and fix them because senior people were "just too busy".
| rufius wrote:
| Honestly, I'd have approached it differently.
|
| Close everything older than 2 weeks. If it's
| important/relevant, it will crop back up. If it's not, then it
| stays unfixed.
|
| This can be really uncomfortable to do. But it's how I've
| rescued a couple of teams that I've led as either an EM or Tech
| Lead.
|
| Put another way - if everything is important or "must fix",
| nothing is.
|
| So to the author: that seemed like a waste of time. I would not
| have done it because I'm not convinced the outcome would have
| been meaningfully different from my tactic.
| fossuser wrote:
| The author's tactic gives them a good sense of the project,
| common requests, and bugs over a long time period.
|
| This context is really valuable when reasoning about the
| product or determining what's important to prioritize.
|
| The issue with the "declare bankruptcy and important stuff
| will come back" is that you don't actually solve the
| underlying ruthless prioritization issue and very quickly end
| up in the exact same position.
|
| You also irritate people that spent time writing up product
| issues for potentially important bugs by auto closing them
| (so many important things may not come back), but the bigger
| loss is that going through all of them gives you solid
| product historical context.
|
| For what it's worth, the best PMs I know go through the
| backlog and understand what they're killing when they
| approach a project that's currently fucked. I think it has a
| positive side effect of giving them a lot of credibility too
| (as well as helping them ramp up).
| awillen wrote:
| Really well written and so true... I think that far too often,
| people get intimidated by the size/scope/hairiness of a problem
| and try to reduce their intimidation by breaking it down.
|
| Particularly if it's a one-off problem, you're often far better
| just doing something. Anything. Whatever comes to mind first.
| Just take some sort of step.
|
| You may find that the problem isn't as hairy as you thought, and
| in fact just by continuing to do stuff, you solve it pretty
| quickly. When that's not the case, doing stuff often leads you to
| the kind of understanding that allows you to put in place a good
| plan, where just starting with planning forces you to make a
| bunch of incorrect assumptions that you then have to fix when
| actually implementing the plan you worked so hard on.
| beders wrote:
| This is so true for every bug tracking system I ever encountered
| in any company.
|
| We called it the P3 graveyard.
|
| And there's always that lingering feeling that there are few
| nuggets hidden in there that would resolve the majority of them.
| louwrentius wrote:
| This article may be the most important article on Hacker News you
| may read this year.
|
| The message of this story is obviously beyond just our IT related
| professions.
|
| I really wonder if people do understand what needs to be done but
| won't. Or that they really don't see a way out of a mess.
|
| Are people really wilfully blind to 'obvious' solutions that are
| boring, labor intensive and terrible to implement? Don't they see
| the even worse alternative?
|
| This is in the end probably not about smarts or insight.
|
| This is about something more fundamental: values.
| maverickJ wrote:
| What a fascinating story.
|
| I think of success as having infinite patience for doing a few
| boring things repeatedly.
|
| Some other parts are having a higher mission to embrace the
| grind;Some call this purpose.
|
| Something else I have observed by studying other engineers is the
| theme of not depending on your technical skills alone. One needs
| to market/show their work to the right audience, own equity in
| businesses/business.
|
| "As a technical person in your career, you must not rely on your
| technical brilliance or rest on your laurels. You must acquire
| some financial education. There is a tendency for technical
| people to think that they are the best; That they will always be
| on top; That will be always be creative; That their inventions
| won't be usurped quickly by newer inventions. However, history
| says otherwise. Life was quite unpleasant to Tesla; He died alone
| and poor depending on handouts from former associates. A tragic
| end for one the most creative minds of the early twentieth
| century."
|
| https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/dont-hinge-your-care...
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