Comment by null_object | Hacker News Reader

Comment by null_object | Hacker News Reader

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>I keep reading from this author and it always struck me as a very capable technical person, but as an awful person to work with

I have to agree. I’ve always assumed that everyone else knows who this person is, and that she’s some sort of FAANG superstar, but each time I read these pieces, I see someone exhibiting entitlement and always looking for external blame.

I read this particular post thinking about the very first task I was given after switching from an advertising career (making Flash sites with ActionScript) to a software-service company, where I needed to construct industry-grade tools with Js.

My new tech boss gave me the task of building a dashboard that would hook into a secure database and display real-time stats using D3 to track things like number of online users and response latency. This was unlike anything I’d built before, and starting with zero knowledge I had a working dashboard about a month later.

In other words, not rocket-science, and not beyond the capabilities of anyone with even a small amount of frontend/backend experience to build themselves - or in this case spec properly so that another team could understand what was needed, and be able to build it quickly.

Stories (which is the medium used) about how things went right without effort are boring. Which leaves two stories - things that went right that had a lot of effort, and things that went wrong.

In the case of things going right with a lot of effort, there’s the case where things went right because of that effort. If you write stories about those, you can be accused of being self-aggrandizing - but they do give people practical options to consider in similar situations.

In the case of things going wrong, there’s the case where you tried to correct things, but were not successful. There’s value in exploring what you could do better - but that’s not a story. The story is the people and archetypes and systems and so forth. In that case, you can be accused of seeking to blame others.

The other stories could be where you did something wrong (but which at the time seemed like they were good and necessary), but despite that the outcome was successful, or because of that, the outcome was unsuccessful. If you’ve read enough of the back catalog, these do exist.

I like that these are presented as stories, and that they are representative of situations people will recognize and also find themselves in. If you’ve seen them, it’s validating that others perceive the challenges the same. If you haven’t, you’re forewarned about things that may come up.

I guess the hard part here was to split the work into these small independent chunks, that a single person can work on, and that in the end all chunks can then be joined or replaced. That is where companies rise or fall.

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