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Comment by scrotiemcboogs | Hacker News Reader

> We’ve been to the fucking moon y’all, we can figure out a way to halve our Series-A-sized support queue.

Favorite quote from the article.

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I think the concept of dirty work is important but isn't always as fruitful of a pursuit as the author makes it seem. There are plenty of cases of dirty work success stories, but there are just as many stories of automated runbooks that never end up being used or documentation never read.

What's important is to understand high signal dirty work. Listen for what is truly causing pain within a team or across teams and begin to pull on that thread. Talk to the stakeholders. Understand the ins and outs of the problem. Then go down the rabbit hole of getting hands dirty.

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Counterargument by Jerry Seinfeld about thirty years ago:

""" We never should have landed a man on the moon. It's a mistake. Now everything is compared to that one accomplishment. Now we go, "I can't believe they can land a man on the moon, and taste my coffee!" I think we all would've been a lot happier if we hadn't landed a man on the moon. We'd go: "They can't make a prescription bottle top open easily? I'm not surprised they couldn't land man on the moon. Things make perfect sense to me now." Neil Armstrong should've said, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for every whining, complaining S.O.B. on the face of the Earth." """

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0697684/characters/nm0000632

If we can land a man on the moon but can't do X, maybe X is the harder problem.

The thing is landing a man on the moon took dedicating a few percent GDP of the most advanced nation in the world for a decade and scientists poached from the next n countries after the war: perhaps your X isn’t actually the harder problem.

Perhaps X just doesn't have enough geopolitical relevance to fund it with ridiculous amounts of taxpayer money.

If a problem that ought to be simple is actually hard, it's very likely that it's because whoever's making decisions doesn't want to pay for it.

Simple example: queues. It's a mathematically solvable problem but someone somewhere will think that hiring enough people to provide perfect service is too expensive and they're better off making people wait in line instead.

On the other hand, we refer to really difficult problems requiring widespread coordination as being "moonshots".

That's true. Many problems seem simple, but are fundamentally insoluble. For example, crime rates will never be zero.

You're not being creative enough. Crime rate on the moon is currently 0%.

I think you'll find that's not true either. If you accept littering as a crime, multiple items have been left on the moon.

Sounds like an X-Y problem to me.

> Understand the ins and outs of the problem. Then go down the rabbit hole of getting hands dirty.

Yes, I think this nuance is somewhat lacking from the article. Do not sign up for every on-call shift or only do QA work all day. That's how you can become "that person," and you'll just watch your team expect that from you.

If you're early in your career, my suggestion is do different kinds of dirty work, switch it up as much as possible. Get a feel for as many as different things as possible. Then you'll be better prepared to leverage that knowledge, and you'll know when it's worth going down that rabbit hole.

> If you're early in your career, my suggestion is do different kinds of dirty work, switch it up as much as possible.

Spot on. This is massively important. Not only will you build a better picture of systems as a whole, but you'll also discover what is interesting and not interesting to you. Finding that out early on is invaluable.

> We’ve been to the fucking moon y’all, we can figure out a way to halve our Series-A-sized support queue.

Who's 'we', kemosabe? I guarantee none of the overpaid yaml jockeys at my adtech firm have ever been involved in anything that flew to the moon.

Speaking of human ingenuinty. I do concede that not everyone is a rocket scientist, though..

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