Hacker News Reader

The toughest parts of my software career have been managing relationships with my peers & working on my own attitude. For too long time I thought I could code my way out of any problem and/or win any argument with the technically more correct solution. I was super wrong. No amount of knowledge about how to write a weight balanced binary tree prepares one for the day to day grind of working with actual people.

View on HN

And even when it's "computer stuff" you find out that there aren't that many n^2 problems to solve, and you'll recall every n^3 problem you fix because they almost never happen.

Mostly what you deal with is architectural problems. And when it comes time to fix slow code, the problem won't be O(n^2) code but a mountain of code where the constant factor C is somewhere between log(n) and sqrt(n).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com