<story><title>You don’t need to work on hard problems (2020)</title><url>https://www.benkuhn.net/hard/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ChrisMarshallNY</author><text>I enjoy doing pedestrian stuff; really, really well.&lt;p&gt;Most of my work is open-source, as I don&amp;#x27;t really do anything particularly innovative or patent-worthy.&lt;p&gt;Most of the value in my work is &lt;i&gt;how&lt;/i&gt; I do it.&lt;p&gt;I work carefully, document the living bejeezus out of my work, test like crazy, and spend a lot of time &amp;quot;polishing the fenders.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;This is something that anyone can do. It just takes patience, discipline, and care.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m weird. I enjoy the end results enough to take the time to do the job well.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s been my experience that the way I work is deeply unpopular. Some people actually seem to get offended, when I discuss how I work.&lt;p&gt;Go figure.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gilbetron</author><text>One of the easiest periods in my career is when I was in charge (with one other coworker) with modifying a certain capability in a large, distributed &amp;quot;web application&amp;quot; (it was a for a DDOS detection&amp;#x2F;mitigation appliance and associated web UI). Every time it needed modification, there was around 50-75 code locations that had to be tediously updated. When I first encountered it, I had created a document outline all the locations and the pitfalls around modifying them, along with tests to verify them. I performed the process a couple of dozen times over the 2 years. It was trivially easy, easily tracked, and I was always given plenty of time to get it right (good managers). I&amp;#x27;ve never had a project manager happier with me because my estimates were always spot on (it&amp;#x27;s the type of work that is easy to estimate after the first 2 or 3 times you do it), and management understood exactly what I was doing, and no one else wanted to do it.&lt;p&gt;I have since found that people still really don&amp;#x27;t want to do that work, are grateful when I will do it, and (except for one instance) management recognizes it as important, slow, tedious work. The only issue I have is that it gets boring, and so 80% of the effort goes into motivating myself to get it done ;)</text></comment>
<story><title>You don’t need to work on hard problems (2020)</title><url>https://www.benkuhn.net/hard/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ChrisMarshallNY</author><text>I enjoy doing pedestrian stuff; really, really well.&lt;p&gt;Most of my work is open-source, as I don&amp;#x27;t really do anything particularly innovative or patent-worthy.&lt;p&gt;Most of the value in my work is &lt;i&gt;how&lt;/i&gt; I do it.&lt;p&gt;I work carefully, document the living bejeezus out of my work, test like crazy, and spend a lot of time &amp;quot;polishing the fenders.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;This is something that anyone can do. It just takes patience, discipline, and care.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m weird. I enjoy the end results enough to take the time to do the job well.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s been my experience that the way I work is deeply unpopular. Some people actually seem to get offended, when I discuss how I work.&lt;p&gt;Go figure.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toto444</author><text>I have been thinking a lot on a problem with the idea to find a tech solution that could help solving it. The more I was thinking about it the more I realized that what I think is the the best way to solve the problem does not involve any tech at all.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s how I started working a a static website. I have been working on it for a few years now. I have realised my strength is that I can work on a problem for a very long time. My website solves a lot of very tiny problems one by one.  Nothing impressive when you look at them individually. However after solving hundreds of them a big picture starts emerging.&lt;p&gt;When I was younger I wanted to solve very hard problems. I have let that idea go and have no regret about it.</text></comment>