alt Hacker NewsThis first 3 hit me very hard,
1. The best engineers are obsessed with solving user problems.
I think this problem is rooted in early education: students learn languages, frameworks, and tools first without understanding what problems they actually solve. Once engineers have experience building a few products for users, they begin to understand what matters to the user.
2. Being right is cheap. Getting to right together is the real work.
- Sadly most of the arguments are won by either someone in power or experience. Right decisions are made with consensus. You build consensus during creative process and leverage power and experience during crisis.
3. Bias towards action. Ship. You can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank one.
- Every decision is a risk management. The smart people convert higher risk into lower risk. Most people struggle here to take the risk because of the fear of failing and just waste time arguing, debating and winning over each other.
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The problem with point 3 is that once you start with a bad draft and everyone starts working on it you're kind of locked in to its trajectory, even when it'd be a lot better if you were to do it another way. You can't start from scratch even if you're feasibly within the window to do so, because now the work has started.
Thinking back, there really should be some lessions that send students off to solve user problems after having learned a programming language, where there is a much easier solution without having to program something. Some refinement sessions that teach them how to understand the problems.