I work at a lab associated with R1 university that has Nobel laureate output so I feel like I have some knowledge in this area:
1. They exist. However, writing a piece of software is not the same thing as supporting them, especially when it comes to dealing with core HR system. This is where SaaSs and similar platform offers lot of appeal.
2. Also difficult because everyone has different needs and at some point certain features get prioritized over others. I support a platform that was built in house before I was born. The guy who wrote it is no longer with us and it is cludgy. Any product decisions evolve years of committee meetings before any decision gets made (by which the it may be incorrect or not relevant.)
Every single time I worked for a company that said let’s hiring an engineering team to build a software that is already solved by a market offering, it has never gone well. The in house product never had the same capabilities or had the same sheen.
3. Can’t answer this one other than digitization efforts.
For transparency, a single software engineer budget is $670K+.
> For transparency, a single software engineer budget is $670K+.
Are you saying that the costs to employ a single software engineer is $670K+? If you mean something else then nvm.
Otherwise that's a ridiculous number to use unless you are specifically talking about places with the highest cost of living in the country where a mid-level dev starts at over $200K.
I am saying that. Salary + taxes + insurance + retirement + other benefits + support cost is around 670k. Salary eats up like 160k of that budget, though.
I wonder if this is an actual Hyatt owned and managed property or is it a hotel brand associated with Hyatt. I also wonder what category of hotel it is.
Before we call it enshittification of the Hyatt brand as a whole, I am kinda curious for more details.
I would be very surprised if this happened on places like the Andaz or Park Hyatt but would not be surprised if it was like at a House or Place.
The author cites examples such as Linus and Margaret, but IIRC they studied CS and/or math as part of their educational upbringing... so I feel like they're almost counter examples of what the author is arguing for.
It seems like the author is really championing the "self-tinkering engineer" as the outperforming engineer.
> The author cites examples such as Linus and Margaret, but IIRC they studied CS and/or math as part of their educational upbringing...
What is studying if not self-teaching? But, semantics aside, Linus, at least, was programming long before he attended university, and his claim to fame was built early in his time at university. It is true that he "studied CS", but that came later. He is unquestionably self-taught in the area for which he is best known.
I suppose I could be more charitable but I feel like title doesn't really match with the message of the blog. Otherwise I thoroughly enjoyed this feel-good story about persistence and micro-improvements. Most of us mortals aren't talented at everything and diligent practice is required for most of us to get better.
Yeah, somewhat relatedly… I think the real lesson (at least if you grew up near the coast) is that everything is hard for somebody. I can’t really think of a kayak as an easy-to-flip craft, but that doesn’t really matter for this person’s journey.
An extreme example, but: I used to watch this channel from a guy that built canoes and kayaks in both modern and traditional styles. He says in some videos that the traditional hunting kayaks are incredibly unstable and uncomfortable to use, because that instability granted them superior agility for hunting.
Have you read The Starship and The Canoe? Interesting book to goes into a good bit of detail about hunting craft (made from animal skin). Book said that they practiced 10 different was to turn a flipped one back over.
I haven't, but I've read "Birchbark Canoe" by David Gidmark. He's written some technical canoe-making books, but this one was the story about how he came to live in Northern Quebec amongst the Algonquin and learned how to make birch bark canoes from William Commanda, with whom he had a fairly turbulent relationship. I saw it in a big library one day and uncharacteristically actually managed to read the whole thing, it was very good!
Huh, neat. Unfortunately that site doesn’t seem to play videos correctly on my system. What do they use the agility for? Traditional hunting, so I imagine… a bow or something, maybe they need to turn quickly to help aim?
No idea, iOS + Safari + Firefox Focus + the built-in Apple blockers. The video seemed to randomly freeze when not in full screen, but it would exit full screen when I tried to hop around in the video. I bet there’s an easy fix but I’m not a big video guy anyway.
Something about how they shared the link encoded a preference for the desktop version of YouTube, but since you’re on iOS, I have stripped all of that off their link:
Sit ins are definitely easy to flip, but sit on tops aren't. Especially thin ones. They probably went for the thin, fast one instead of the wide, slow one while being naive to the implications.
kayaks are muchj tipier than canoes but shouldn't be flipping if you're just sitting in them, unless these are highly specialized racing kayaks, which are tougher to navigate.
Interesting! I never felt like I was going to flip a sit-in kayak, but I don’t even remember the first time I went in one really, it is a fuzzy early childhood memory.
Canoes, I’ve been in canoes that are destined to flip whether I want them to or not (although they were overloaded, or may have had some traitors aboard).
That's funny, because I grew up canoeing and have never on my own flipped one - other people in the boat doing dumb stuff, of course, or trying something silly in white water (maybe that counts as "on my own"?), sure - but I feel totally stable and comfortable in a canoe. Kayaks, though? Man, they're trying bite me! I've never felt like even the most stable beginner-friendly of kayaks wasn't trying to throw me off it.
I think the difference is stroke technique? I'm sure I'm instinctively trying to paddle a kayak like I would a canoe, and they don't like that. If I had more opportunity I'd get someone to teach me proper kayak stroke shapes, and then they'd probably feel more friendly.
The thing is a lot of what looks like a natural talent from the outside is also just learning on the inside. I won my provinces swimming competition without ever having swum in a competition before against swimmers who were all in a club. Reason: I grew up near a lake and was there every day during my whole childhood.
The thing is that people with "talent" are often just people who did what you're trying to do for fun their whole lifes. So talent then is just code for: "had a natural preference for doing it and both the means and time to do it".
Reminds me of when you introduce somebody to PIU/DDR for the first time. Everyone gets self-conscious for a few minutes until they realize that nobody cares.
Yeah, maybe the original message sort of got lost along the way. I think there is still some truth in the post when applied to the title.
I think one of the most important things I ever learned is that hard things take time. There is an obvious relationship between the effort required and the size of the undertaking, but also the worthiness of the effort. In other words: rarely, if ever, can you build great things in a short amount of time or with little effort.
And that's where this post makes sense: to build something great or to solve something hard, you have to show up every day and chip away at the problem, piece by piece. The progress will be slow and nearly invisible to you as you experience it, and is usually only clear in hindsight after a year or two (or more), when you can look back and see all that's changed -- hopefully for the better -- since you started.
I think it's more than just "hard things take time". The key sentence for me is this one:
> Kayaking taught me to be okay with repeatedly looking dumb in public.
I had the same thing when I first started running, in my early 50s. I'm sure I looked absolutely ridiculous. (I'm fairly sure I still do, I just stopped caring.) When I first started I would go out around 6am, partly because it was cooler but mostly so I wouldn't be seen. I've chatted to other runners who were the same, even keeping it secret from their family.
Getting over that has been a very positive change, and a generally-applicable one. I've just started blogging publicly, which would historically have triggered the same kind of looking-like-an-idiot phobias.
There was a post (maybe saw it here, maybe on Reddit) about sucking in public being a kind of moat for all sorts of interesting things. Crossing it gets you to places you otherwise couldn't go.
People can be easily overwhelmed by simple challenges. At some point everyone experiences this and we learn to overcome bigger challenges through life.
Another point that might apply is that OP probably has a high center of gravity which can make kayaking really challenging. They should probably clarify this.
This is not surprising to me a graduate of a school with a similar profile to Duke. The student body is composed of highly wealthy domestic students but also insanely wealthy international student body.
Insanely wealthy international student seems to be a pretty common component of the competitive STEM universities.
I vividly recall every fall the crazy number of wrecks by fresh students after "Daddy gave me a Maserati" with no idea how to drive it -- always asian. And then in the spring a couple of the poorest international students would commit suicide when they flunked out and all their families savings back home were forfeit on the tuition.
I'm a middle class American and I admit to leaving behind decent furniture (a bed, etc) just because I was busy with finals and had a hard deadline to be somewhere else for an internship or a job.
Didn't have time to juggle craigslist no-shows and stuff. Wasn't worth the $150.
When you say IPv6 isn't hard, do you mean implementing v6-only network stack isn't hard or understanding IPv6 isn't hard? Depending on which layer one lives on, I feel like the lack of networking effect makes supporting v6 difficult. Github is still isn't on v6 and some load balancers will prefer the v4 address over v6, etc...
1. They exist. However, writing a piece of software is not the same thing as supporting them, especially when it comes to dealing with core HR system. This is where SaaSs and similar platform offers lot of appeal.
2. Also difficult because everyone has different needs and at some point certain features get prioritized over others. I support a platform that was built in house before I was born. The guy who wrote it is no longer with us and it is cludgy. Any product decisions evolve years of committee meetings before any decision gets made (by which the it may be incorrect or not relevant.)
Every single time I worked for a company that said let’s hiring an engineering team to build a software that is already solved by a market offering, it has never gone well. The in house product never had the same capabilities or had the same sheen.
3. Can’t answer this one other than digitization efforts.
For transparency, a single software engineer budget is $670K+.
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