Comment by THENATHE | Hacker News Reader

Comment by THENATHE | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it is wrong of me to say it like this, but it seems like there is a trichotomy in the world of working people.

You have people like you, that will voluntarily study their hearts out to find the textbook or proper way to solve things,

You have people that seemingly don’t care, but learn by doing, making mistakes, learning holistically

And then you have the workers that just don’t care and wanna be done with their 9 to 5 at 8 and 4.

You’re going to get a wildly skewed sample looking at HN or Reddit, because, by and large, most people here are the first type.

But as someone that is throughly the second type, I don’t give a flying fuck about VonNeumann and mutexes and race whatever because attaching a word doesn’t do anything to help me understand the problem and the solution. I didn’t spend years reading about theory, I spent years looking at logging software, memorizing errors, and looking at data. I have no doubt that I could look at a server with an issue and eventually figure out the nuance of and solve the issue without ever having heard of any of the proper names.

I promise you I am not trying to be rude or condescending when I type all this, but the honest answer of it is true: some people aren’t academics, and any attempt to give them knowledge in the form of “book smarts” and higher level reading is gonna blow up in your face.

> 9 to 5 at 8 and 4.

Hey we're WFH now, its 10->4 with a few hour long breaks inbetween.

Downvote because it doesn't really have anything to do with what he is asking.

You claim that someone who does the job is valuable, nobody disagrees.

He asks; where can I find good explanations of concepts that I've found useful throughout my career and I want to pass on to my juniors?

See how this justifies a downvote?

The statement is that if he cannot verbally pass that information on and have them get interested/excited, no amount of documenting and cataloging that info is going to make them suddenly want to read it. No level of explanation is going to be helpful to them when they don’t care enough to listen/read.

And I claimed nothing about “someone who does the job is valuable”. My claim was that there are, generally speaking, three types of workers and the vast majority of workers are unlike OP, in the sense that they probably don’t care in the slightest because they are 9-5 workers or someone who would rather learn themselves.

You are ascribing an extreme personality to these people while criticizing the other extreme and I'm saying that the most reasonable thing is somewhere in the middle; just help the man with what he intends to do.

I’m trying to stop him from wasting his time. If he wants to make a repository to help the world at large, that is a fantastic idea because there is someone who will read it. But if he wants to do this specifically with regards to passing on information to his juniors, he should just actually train/teach them. If they are receptive to the info they will ask questions. If they aren’t, no amount of cataloguing will change that. That was my whole point. The dude is clearly looking for a project and is barking up a tree that is gonna make him feel useless.

Okay, that is a fair take, in the end it will depend on the student what kind of teaching methodology will work best but it is indeed unlikely that they will gain more from him trying to write a book than him sitting down with them.

Maybe with that as a baseline understanding the next interpretation of his question becomes: where can I find others in a similar predicament so that we can collaborate on building the book (as I gain experience coaching these juniors and need support network when I am flummoxed)?

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