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Comment by 3JPLW | Hacker News Reader

Cache/archive/mirror: https://archive.is/jrQ4n#selection-727.0-731.211

In short:

> What is the Second Sock Syndrome?

> SSS usually refers to the inability to produce complete pairs of socks. Knitting the first sock usually goes quickly. But the second one seems to drag on, never gets completed or even cast on in the first place.

It's entirely a knitting blog, but surely this was posted here as it's a problem I know I face in all sorts of domains, including programming. Once the interesting part is figured out, finishing the project is the tough part.

View on HN

It seems similar in name only to Second System Effect, from Fred Brooks.

The challenge for your second sock is to accurately repeat your process of the first one. The challenge of the second system--where you reimplement something from scratch maybe--is to keep the scope limited but you are trying to depart from the mistakes of the first one.

https://adamo.wordpress.com/2019/02/03/the-second-system-eff...

Yeah, but maybe you should be making a second system instead of a second sock.

Being creative and innovative have their downsides. Most of them find it impossible to do repetitive tasks.

Doing repetitive/ tasks is excruciating unless I am doing it for something I care about (i.e. a start up idea or project of my own). If I know I'm doing something for "the man" or something I don't have equity in it gets really bad.

Your summary - and, importantly, the title here on HN - skips the important part: 'and How to Fight It'

As such, I was going to skip the article. Fortunately, I saw mumblemumble's comment below

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22407569

I find the solution is to use my half-finished product, or let someone else use it. The problems they, or I, run into tell me what to complete, or what to add, or to just start over and do it again.

Any time I have doubts about how to finish, what that really means is I need more feedback and take a completely fresh look at my priorities.

This is valid for team paradigms— building a successful team requires understanding what is interesting to each candidate member and building the group where most product engineering falls under the different members’ ‘interesting’ slices

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