Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

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I always love it when you have worked on something for months and someone new comes by and says "Why don't you just X?".

It's worse when they are right though. I wish I could say that had not happened to me.

Is that from other experts with a very close understanding of the specifics, or random people online?

What I find is you start with several viable approaches, pick one and go down the path enough to figure out the downsides. At which point you need to decide to backtrack or keep going. That’s the hard part not simply coming up with a seemingly simple solution.

Not "random people online", but I've got a few friends I think of as "terrifyingly smart", and one of their common characteristics is how they've all, in areas of expertise I've been investigating/researching/working in for weeks or months and which they have barely a passing interest in, quite obviously thought about a problem I'm describing and thought through a bunch of the obvious options, categorised them, and made conclusions about which avenues are workable and which should be discarded, and come up with either a workable solution or options I'd not even considered yet - all just in the course of a conversation over coffee...

(Somewhat frighteningly, two of those people are doing that at Facebook right now...)

> Is that from other experts with a very close understanding of the specifics, or random people online?

These groups are not mutually exclusive, membership can only be assigned by a domain expert and is finally irrelevant if the other is right.

Constraints define good decisions. A new team member making a viable suggestion is very different from a random person tossing out a wild ass guess that happens to be right. The difference is the random commentator has no real way to judge how viable something is, and thus is simply tossing out ideas.

This can be right when things change over time and people still operate under their initial assumptions. Times change constrains change but on some teams assumptions and choices are not revisited.

I am fine with that. In most cases they aren't though. Or they don't understand the whole environment.

My experience is about 50/50, both with my own mistakes and with others.

Generally when one is very close to the problem, one sees the environment as immutable. Because, well you spent very many hours building that environment, for very good reasons. And your complex solution "has to" work within the constraints of that complex environment.

Whereas, the "mind of a child" that doesn't grok the environment, also doesn't have a fixed notion of it. This is anecdotal of course, but maybe half the time what I see happen is that it's easier/better to change the environment and this can only be seen with fresh eyes.

It's not the spoon that bends, and it's not you that bends around the spoon. There is no spoon.

Had someone do that this morning. They ran across a problem that has been the focus of a multi-year effort involving dozens of people. Fixing the problem is a big part of the literal #1 priority for the company.

Anyway, he hit an example of the issue, and wanted to just put in a bug ticket to one team, and didn't understand why that was not useful or necessary.

My analogy is that it's like showing up at NASA in 1965, and wanting to submit a ticket that says "Your rockets can't actually go to the moon. Fix rocket so that it can go to the moon."

The best part is when your project is running late or having issues, and the non-technical manager plans a meeting with all the other dead-weight people. "Explain the problem to us, and since we know absolutely nothing about it, our stupid questions might give you new insights". Facepalm.

Exactly. "Let's all take a step back" or "I'd like to challenge that". Makes you sound insightful while knowing nothing.

I found that I now distrust a lot of articles as people tend to get the things in my field blatantly wrong all the time.

Things are complicated and rarely as simple as they seem.

On the other hand, I've worked on things for hours before for someone to glance at the problem and solve it. Always a humbling experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

I never knew there was a name for this, but I feel like everyone has come across this feeling at some point in their life.

I for one love this type of question, and was the one asking it as I started out. 10-20% of the time, the asker has a valid suggestion. The rest of the time, the explanation as for why it will not work or is not a good idea fosters a better understanding for the asker, and reinforcement brush up for the answerer.

I always appreciate those comments. Sometimes they include something obvious I never thought of.

Yeah, it shows someone is trying to understand the problem. I mean, sure, most often the response is, "because that would require data that does not yet exist when the decision must be made," or, "there are legitimate circumstances where that would be the exact wrong response," but it does get you thinking.

It is less appreciated when people phrase things in a condescending manner, though.

They are right more often than you’d expect. Irrational escalation, loss aversion, confirmation bias, etc play their part everywhere causing senseless projects to be pushed to completion.

> They are right more often than you’d expect.

When the "they" is at least another expert in the same field and not a total stranger completely ignorant of pretty much every relevant detail, and the "you'd expect" part starts at a baseline of nearly 0% for people walking in out of the street unfamiliar with the specific problem at hand, then yes, "they" are right more often than I'd "expect."

In this case, possibly years

HN is the worst for it. Especially when it comes to tech stacks.

If you use anything other than non-SPA, Go, PostgreSQL then it's over engineered and doomed to fail.

Tech is the worst. Fetishizing disruption leads to neophytes thinking they're breaking new ground when they're just re-discovering long dismissed ideas.

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