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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

"If your work is not hard, you’re not doing great work." - that sums up German mentality :D

There's a tendency to avoid the "boring" problems this way though. I find that a bit in myself and others when it comes to software dev. A lot of problems in software are of the boring kind. Establish convention and reinventing the wheel rather than applying machine learning and coming up with brilliant algorithms.

By avoiding or skipping over the boring problems i think you tend to miss a lot of the bottlenecks for actually making something valuable.

But boring problems -are- hard problems. I find very little is 'hard' in the sense of being difficult but ultimately overcomeable. Most things are either impossible (but can be fun to think about), or rather simple but requiring a lot of time (learning a new thing), or easy and quick (which we do and don't think about), or easy but long, and thus boring. And it's these latter that are, to me, 'hardest', because they're the ones I, and basically every one of my colleagues, least want to do. But as you say, they also can be some of the most valuable.

You mention machine learning and brilliant algorithms? Did you clean your data? Did you refine the parameters to the algorithm? Did you try different algorithms and compare? Machine learning is -boring-. Like, the things it enables are exciting, once it's working it's exciting, but the process is boring as hell. And I find that aspect every bit as 'hard' as understanding the underlying math.

I think it's a bit more nuanced - it's a question of reward. If you know there is hard+boring problem that needs to be done, the reward pops up immediately - the problem doesn't look great on CV, so it's a net negative for your future employeability comparing to (shallow) "fun" problems; is completion of such a hard task going to be accompanied by significant equity or bonus and can you trust manager/CEO promises about it (99% you can't), or at best you can hope for a pat on the back and not being kicked out of the company once the "boring" part is finished and is making money for the owners that don't want to share anything with you? These things happen way too often in our business...

But people enjoy different things, surely some might find a task you deem as boring to be enjoyable?

I like that quote, but to be honest, being a German myself something I hate about other Germans is that they always are very limited in their head and scared of disruptive innovation. Germans are good at incremental but not at disruptive innovation.

This is true almost everywhere. What's truly astonishing is that there actually exists a place on earth with cultural norms that encourage disruption rather than try to suppress it. I don't think people really appreciate how historically rare that is.

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