> Best compliment so far. In my professional circles it might even be kind of boring or let's say, logically evident, to a lot of very experienced or intelligent people.

I mean I'm reading it to myself and the words make sense. Do you mean something else, like you personally can't imagine such a professional circle existing?

A lot of ratings-attracted people really are under the impression that a) third-party ratings are super helpful/crucial, and b) you can get some improved-objectivity from subjective feedback in the right circumstances. But you have to kind of shape the circumstances (rules/mods)

There's also the fact that a lot of commenters and posters are clearly coming from another zone, so to speak. They are feeling bad, and want others to feel bad, and so on.

So, you can get these really peculiar / odd rules & moderation frameworks in similar cases. Which make sense in context.

But yeah, it'd be interesting to know about the history or rationale.

This is FAR from given. Super far. I'm sorry to say that you may have to study psychology to understand why in a way that makes you go "holy sh*".

But I get the general reasons for the uncertainty, they are usually about "please welcome your exciting new replacement" concerns. Which _can_ be a thing in some cases, already have been, and so on.

> Are there even any field in software engineering/development where the core knowledge has remained true over the course of years?

Not to be disagreeable, but the core principles are generally always reliable (true|belief|etc I don't really go there with principles in tech especially) even if aspects have changed. It's still really applicable in sign painting which I do myself sometimes as a hobby. And then it's pretty wild but the same principles translate exactly into digital signage.

> Apparently, no one pays for someone who knows only the fundamentals.

No, BUT it's not a dichotomy:

- Know the fundamentals only

OR

- Know the specific new hot practicals

...it's way more than that. You can still lean to the fundamentals side and get paid well! Part of doing that involves really interesting stuff, which can be described as "developing my/the new fundamentals." (Adding the "my" part because it also can just be scoped to what you need to know to be effective at your job, it doesn't have to be discovery of some universal fundamental, and you will get recognized more easily for focusing on $JOB's details anyway)

A lot of people enjoy this part of their career in tech, and it helps them find a relatively peaceful psych-interface through which to be more OK with the ADHD-style new & changey particulars stuff.

Also sometimes it's a matter of social interface. It may be a matter of describing yourself so that people understand what you're good at, and making sure not to focus on describing what you don't like, or hate, in your career.

> Another example is AI is like a rat race going in circles and trying to catch up with the latest ideas.

This is a good example of what I'm talking about. If you can just dissect your experience a little further, you might find that it can divide up into e.g. "stuff I personally think and like about AI" and "what everybody else does and thinks with it (rat race)".

If you keep working on the former, you can eventually build some really cool community bridges and in ANY case, you'll still probably be way ahead of the people who want to pay you to interface with AI for them! Their fear of tech will never really end. Find those people. Tell them you get AI. Or whatever excites you. Get a job, get paid, enjoy.

Just some ideas & good luck.

This is interesting because it brings time scopes to mind. Sometimes you see a significant mean-reversion happening on one timeline, let's say a five-year-resolution timeline. Meanwhile the decades-scoped timeline is far from over, in terms of the principle no longer applying.

So, I wonder if we might be about to enter a period of relative volatility with regard to this principle. It would make some sense looking at some of the other relatively impressive progress we are seeing in computing as a whole.

...does every language, applied as if only to solve problems in a direct and rational way, with many successes, and with nuanced interpretation of outside critique metabolized over years and years, eventually lead to this Bourne Identity-style outcome???

("Do you get the headaches?")

Fascinating! I would LOVE to see that done well. (QoL PTSD adding the "well" in there for me. Haha)

Best compliment so far. In my professional circles it might even be kind of boring or let's say, logically evident, to a lot of very experienced or intelligent people.

Corporate, eh, I mean I'm sure some stereotypical evil corporate people from a '90s movie would act as if they totally love it & get why ads are amazing...in that sense it might be pretty on the nose...

But these days I think the old adbusters take is kind of out of touch...anti-ad by itself isn't really nuanced enough for tractability in public discourse these days.

The comments are all hand-written, no LLM etc. Let's say artisanal, organic, ok I'll stop there

Nope, it was not.

But you know that this hand-wave-specifics-and-accuse-of-ChatGPT-use is a thing, right? _That_ is what I call not having any insight.

Or both, one client was a government appointee who came from an executive position in publishing, she knew she couldn't take the same style into a much less private organization. Turns out she brought her new understanding and style back into private life & business.

If you realize you don't really have to be blunt & jerky, even playing the critic archetype isn't so necessary, and it's more like a habit maybe, it turns out that this realization often opens new life opportunities and mental pathways...

Hmm, that doesn't ring true here, I've coached a lot of execs and the ones you described are often getting the coaching for the very reason that they are too direct! The consequences for that are varied and definitely real.

And again, you can be very direct and also sensitive, gentle, etc. So it's not like there aren't any options for putting things out there in an effective way.

> The other thing that happens at the executive level is you stop getting direct feedback at all, so when someone spends the time to give you some direct feedback it is a gift to be treasured

This would seem to be a pretty logical self-reinforcing loop on its own, but again, I have to say that in practice it would be quite an exception. There are many, many different mechanisms through which executives receive feedback.

The exceptions who aren't getting feedback, even in those cases, are the execs who are too direct. Why? Because the same people are often effectively deaf to feedback.

And so, they tell professional consultants and coaches that they'd like to learn to be _more_ sensitive to feedback. Their training is nearly the exact reverse of what a lot of people think execs want or need.

These kinds of execs often explain that they'd prefer to be able to pick up even the subtleties, in a way that a) helps them do their job more competently and b) protects them from even more critique, which is what some of the most direct people out there fear more than anything.

So, I have a hard time buying this as a general principle, let alone some given attribute of just doin' business. If any given person or commentator is experiencing those issues themselves, it's far more likely, in my professional experience, that they share the same blind spot that other over-direct people have.

Unfortunately, I think my node/graph dopamine pathways have been forever altered by node/graph QoL[1] issues that, while native to, and applicable to, every node/graph design system, almost never seem to be addressed before they become gigantic workflow speedbumps. And when they are addressed, they are still, in 2023, treated as awesome new features.

I think an applicable comparison might be e.g. a programming environment which locks you into its own text editor, and while initially excited by the language features, you soon find that the text editor doesn't support copy/paste, let alone duplicate-line, or any other fancy stuff that's really no longer fancy.

Still, I'd be interested to learn about other similar languages, in the case that FMJ might no longer be under development...

1. https://info.e-onsoftware.com/vue/new_features (just an example in there)

You can be direct, gentle, and helpful at the same time. Just takes a little creativity...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37190149

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Just how "AND" are we talking here...one needs to know this to determine how well certain state machinery is working overseas, thanks in advance