<story><title>Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?</title><text>I&amp;#x27;ve worked on large products for large and small companies and written tens of thousands of lines of code across my career, solving complex, abstract, challenging technical problems in a variety of languages on a variety of platforms, sometimes under difficult conditions. I have often been a resource for my friends and co-workers when they have programming or technical questions.&lt;p&gt;I only recently learned how to correctly raise and lower window blinds--I had been doing it wrong my entire life. It was maybe the dumbest I have ever felt, and was a humbling reminder of how much I don&amp;#x27;t know about how much I don&amp;#x27;t know.&lt;p&gt;Have you had similar experiences?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>projectileboy</author><text>As a good friend of mine often says: We work in a field of people who envision themselves as artists, when all that is wanted are painters.</text></item><item><author>hu3</author><text>Learning that some folks can produce so much value with crappy code.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve seen entire teams burn so much money by overcomplicating projects. Bikesheding about how to implement DDD, Hexagonal Architecture, design patterns, complex queues that would maybe one day be required if the company scaled 1000x, unnecessary eventual consistency that required so much machinery and man hours to keep data integrity under control. Some of these projects were so late in their deadlines that had to be cancelled.&lt;p&gt;And then I&amp;#x27;ve seen one man projects copy pasting spaghetti code around like there&amp;#x27;s no tomorrow that had a working system within 1&amp;#x2F;10th of the budget.&lt;p&gt;Now I admire those who can just produce value without worrying too much about what&amp;#x27;s under the hood. Very important mindset for most startups. And a very humbling realization.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>icelancer</author><text>No one wants to be a &amp;quot;programmer.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;d rather be called &amp;quot;engineers.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;With none of the licensure, mandatory education, and so forth. But the world needs programmers and technicians for most of the work we have to do. I do comparably little &amp;quot;engineering&amp;quot; and the little I have done that qualifies for such a statement I recall. Majority of the work is programming and technician work. Nothing wrong with that.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?</title><text>I&amp;#x27;ve worked on large products for large and small companies and written tens of thousands of lines of code across my career, solving complex, abstract, challenging technical problems in a variety of languages on a variety of platforms, sometimes under difficult conditions. I have often been a resource for my friends and co-workers when they have programming or technical questions.&lt;p&gt;I only recently learned how to correctly raise and lower window blinds--I had been doing it wrong my entire life. It was maybe the dumbest I have ever felt, and was a humbling reminder of how much I don&amp;#x27;t know about how much I don&amp;#x27;t know.&lt;p&gt;Have you had similar experiences?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>projectileboy</author><text>As a good friend of mine often says: We work in a field of people who envision themselves as artists, when all that is wanted are painters.</text></item><item><author>hu3</author><text>Learning that some folks can produce so much value with crappy code.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve seen entire teams burn so much money by overcomplicating projects. Bikesheding about how to implement DDD, Hexagonal Architecture, design patterns, complex queues that would maybe one day be required if the company scaled 1000x, unnecessary eventual consistency that required so much machinery and man hours to keep data integrity under control. Some of these projects were so late in their deadlines that had to be cancelled.&lt;p&gt;And then I&amp;#x27;ve seen one man projects copy pasting spaghetti code around like there&amp;#x27;s no tomorrow that had a working system within 1&amp;#x2F;10th of the budget.&lt;p&gt;Now I admire those who can just produce value without worrying too much about what&amp;#x27;s under the hood. Very important mindset for most startups. And a very humbling realization.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gradschoolfail</author><text>Some of the best are in fact also painters.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;paulgraham.com&amp;#x2F;hackpaint.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;paulgraham.com&amp;#x2F;hackpaint.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>