> Don’t meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He’s a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he’s making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Ha yup - I've felt this one before :D

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kqr 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

As a child and adolescent I always imagined that something would click when I became an adult and I would become good at things and understand the world. That never happened, and then I realised it never happens for anyone. We're all just large children walking around figuring things out. Some of us figure things out faster, some of us stop trying to figure things out, but we're all just as clueless in the grand scheme of things. It's a miracle and a testament to our perseverance and ambition that things still work as well as they do.

On the other hand, I've contacted several of my heroes (not been able to meet as many of them in person) and that's always been an exhilerating, formative experience. I strongly recommend it if you can think of a good reason. (I have a list of heroes I have yet to reach out to because I haven't yet encountered an interesting enough problem to offer them. Several of them unfortunately have an actuarial deadline not too far into the future.)

	▲	pfannkuchen 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Could this be from adults not being honest to children when they don’t know something? I’ve personally seen this happen a lot. Many adults try to save face about not knowing things with other adults, let alone with children. So it might be a cultural issue that could be fixed.
	▲	wlonkly 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This reminds me of this comic[1], which also works well for things such as MANAGE MENT or PARENT HOOD or FOUNDER SHIP. [1] https://eelhips.tumblr.com/post/7035963689/early-life-crisis

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steveBK123 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I once worked with someone well renowned in my circles who gave talks, ran a blog, was cited/edited other peoples books.

His code did not match the hype, to say the least. His SDLC even less so.

There is probably an ego associated with being renowned that doesn't align with team-based work. He likened basic things like code reviews or PRs to being brought before The Hague and that the rest of the team was a bunch of bureaucrats.

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chrneu 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

everyone is guessing

some are just a bit better at guessing

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atoav 4 days ago | parent [-]

I am not sure which profession they are in (software development?), but no. Not everybody is guessing. If they were you would have half of the buildings and bridges collapsing and the other half on fire by bad electrical wiring.

You can legitly learn how to do things properly and people who learnt to do that do the polar opposite of guessing. It is just that the world of software development has yet to be made liable for their results in the same way as civil or electrical engineers. So in software development many are just guessing because guessing wrong won't ruin their life.

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JohnMakin 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Software "engineering" also differs in the way from more formal engineering in that there are very rarely absolutes, there's often many different correct ways to solve a problem, each possessing their own pros and cons. So, it could feel like "guessing" choosing a certain approach over another, but more senior people usually have an intuition brought from experience which one will work better and be more informed of the tradeoffs, so it looks a lot less like guessing.

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atoav 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yet when we talk about controlling trains, airplanes, freight ships, medical devices, nuclear power plants and space stuff we suddenly know how to do it?

There is software engineering and it is known how to do things that absolutely must not fail. It is just thst these standard are not commonly deployed if nobody forces you to deploy them. And why would you? Costs money and a software error is widely treated like divine intervention.

	▲	JohnMakin 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		There is a big difference between knowing something must not fail, and how to make it so it will not fail. The latter is where opinions and approaches often differ, in ways that more formal engineering does not. I'm very wary of anyone in tech/software eng that says "this is the only right way to do this." I'm aware those attitudes exist everywhere.

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Neikius 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I once found a very interesting definition of engineering. It is about making something that just barely does the job. Doing it better costs more usually and doing it worse costs lives.

Not much different in software. There is always many ways of solving problems and that is typical of any engineering. Contrary to sciences.

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rowanG077 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean that is the case as well for other engineering principles. There is not just one way to design a working and steady bridge.

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dranudin 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

They are guessing much more than computer scientists would think, typically . A structural engineer does not know: the peak wind force, what the ground under the bridge is really made of, what the actual tensile strength at the weakest piece of material is, what the exact force on the screws were at time of fastening (and after), etc... Heck, they don't even know if euler bernoulli beam theory is actually right about the existence of a neutral axis..They just take their best guesses, add generous safety factors and have the bridge inspected regularly ..

	▲	speff 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		You have abstractions and models for those things. I was formally trained as an EE, so I'm just guessing at how structural engineers do it. I would expect someone building a bridge to keep the average/peak winds into consideration - and then feed it to CAD or whatever modeling software they use to design the structure. They don't need to know the exact force a screw was tightened with - they do need to give the specs of what range they should be tightened to. Again - considered in CAD. They don't need to know that theory is right - they just need to know it's not wrong to an unacceptable degree. I'm sure there's some guessing, but a lot of these things are actually factored in.

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dcchuck 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Hot Take: best $5k you've ever spent.

Imagine living your whole life thinking you couldn't do it?

I'm not saying it's fun. Just saying it may be a good thing.