Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

Learning that some folks can produce so much value with crappy code.

I've seen entire teams burn so much money by overcomplicating projects. Bikesheding about how to implement DDD, Hexagonal Architecture, design patterns, complex queues that would maybe one day be required if the company scaled 1000x, unnecessary eventual consistency that required so much machinery and man hours to keep data integrity under control. Some of these projects were so late in their deadlines that had to be cancelled.

And then I've seen one man projects copy pasting spaghetti code around like there's no tomorrow that had a working system within 1/10th of the budget.

Now I admire those who can just produce value without worrying too much about what's under the hood. Very important mindset for most startups. And a very humbling realization.

In college, meeting someone that was better than me by every conceivable metric. You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category. Perfect grades, involved in many communities, and generally pleasant to be around. There was no caveat, no excuse. Dude just straight up rocked.

I have met more people like that while travelling. I felt badass riding my motorcycle super far, but wherever I went, there was a greater badass riding along. Some of these travellers were on much longer journeys, on much smaller budgets, on a much worse bikes, riding offroad all the way, camping every night. Some were on bicycles, going around the world under their own power. I was just a rich tourist with a great bike who slept in hotels.

In a way, meeting those people was liberating. I will never be a world champion at anything, so I might as well play for the love of the sport.

In 1993 I was interviewed for an operating job in a power plant for a major airline, assigned to their data center. At my current job, I was working in a high rise office building with sixty-six floors.

The operating system computer was a JC8520, which was running a version of MS-DOS. All commands had to be typed in correctly or nothing would happen. While operating the plant, several commands had to be entered every shift, since the owners didn't purchase a very automated package.

In the interview for the data center job, I was asked if I had any experience with Windows. I didn't understand the question because I wasn't aware they were talking about a computer operating system! So, I replied at the office building I worked in there were outside contractors who cleaned the windows.

After my reply all seven of the interviewers were all grinning and I was aware I said something they weren't looking for. One of the men politely told me Windows was a computer operating system. My reply was, "Oh, I see."

When I returned home I told my wife what happened and we shouldn't get our hopes up. To my utter shock, a week later I was offered the job, which I took and after some training, learned something I didn't know before.

Caught a senior sysadmin in a small company using a proxy on our infrastructure to hide misc web browsing from oversight. The logs were the give-away. It was typical misc IT/nerd news stuff... the kind of thing a different company culture (which did come later) would actually encourage.

I was sure the right thing to do was to report it to the CEO (there wasn't anyone else higher in the hierarchy to consider) for certain chastisement and correction. I was commended and the sysadmin got a browbeating.

I definitely did right by the policies in place. However, not too long after I realized there was certainly a better way to handle it and my behavior had more to do with scoring points than doing the right thing.

This was also someone who went out of their way to mentor younger employees and help kindle a passion for this line of work. I was a major beneficiary of this, so I look back upon that incident with nothing but regret.

I learned way into my adult life that I could just turn the swivel hook/latch to quickly unwind the cord on a vacuum cleaner.

Before that moment I would manually unwind the cord just like I would wind it up. To make it worse, I even remember wondering why the swivel hook was there thinking it was poor design.

Idk what my most humbling moment would be, but there's been a few.

I've spent the majority of my career looking for wook rather than doing work, and have lost at least 7 jobs in the first 12 years for one reason or another. This is going on the 3rd time I've spent more than a year without working at all in any job. It never gets easier, and each time I get to spend a ton of time reflecting on how things went and what I'm actually good at. It's usually humbling, because so far the list of things I'm good at professionally has only dwindled. Another humbling aspect to this is realizing that most other people don't lose their jobs... like ever, unless it's seasonal or severe economic downturn.

During one of those periods I spent so long unemployed that I literally ran out of money and moved into a car from my relatively nice apartment, and then worked at Starbucks as a barista, which taught me that I can be good enough at speaking with customers, but what I thought were trivial tasks turned out to be almost laughably untenable, like remembering how much syrup goes in Karen's caramel macchiato, or just showing up on time.

I was in my 20s before I realized even numbered houses are always on one side of the street and odd numbers on the other. Literally no excuse for not figuring that out.

What did you do wrong and why was it dumb? What’s the correct way?

From 2011-2012 was Senior intelligence officer for Anderson Air Force Base, Guam, which is one of the most strategic bases in the United States department of Defense.

As SIO you are statutorily responsible for the joint worldwide intelligence, communication system (JWICS), maintenance, security, growth, interruptibility, etc… in addition to managing all Perssec for SCI holders, and maintaining control, security and for CNWDI as well as ACCM.

I was fresh home after a deployment to Iraq and thrown right into dealing with the Yp-Do crisis in SK and the Japanese Tsunami and Fukushima fallout that we had to provide HA/DR support for.

I was 28 years old with a one year old at home.

As part of maintaining security, I would regularly get inspected as you would expect for any manner of things. There is a special security team that lives at the defense intelligence agency primarily but also they have them for NSA and other organizations, that would do white hat penetration tests on secure information facilities, like all the ones that I was responsible for (I had a half dozen physical locations to manage).

One of these tests was during a large scale exercise. Two civilians who had perfect credentials, were trying to access our primary headquarters SCIF. At the time I think I was managing a top-secret briefing preparation and so I delegated access control, and interrogation of these two people to another Lieutenant, as well as the actual special security officer who was an E6.

They had previously tried to penetrate all of the other places on base, but failed.

The process for getting access to a SCIF if you are not housed there is that that you send a visit request from your home security office to the visiting security office which will then transfer clearance details so that you can understand what access levels to give these people.

About a month before their visit, there was a new guidance released saying that all visit requests had to have a digital requst in 100% of cases whereas are previously you could just print out your details and bring them with you, The special security officer would then look them up in a system (I won’t name), and then it’s up to the security office whether they give you access or not.

My Special Security officer and my lieutenant came to me and said they have everything that they need per the requirements that we were operating under, and that they were comfortable giving them access to a terminal where they could do what they needed to do.

I said “that’s perfectly fine however LT I want you to sit behind them basically and make sure they don’t walk off or do anything more than I’m giving them access to.”

So for like 30 minutes, we had two people in our SCIF who logged onto JWICS, we’re being actively monitored and were able to send an email and then logged off and left.

The next week, my commander asked me to go to a meeting and the penetration team briefed to the whole base how they got into all these places including my SCIF and one other facility

The good thing was, we were basically written up with flying colors, and this was the hardest possible test that they were able to get through and so everybody was generally happy with us.

This was really just one of those things where it was a specific detail that we were not up-to-date with but didn’t have any major defense in depth risks.

Ah, some of the things in this thread remind me of https://xkcd.com/1053/

Like many other people who should know better, I tried my hand at day-trading. I bought some course by someone who in hindsight I'm certain made more money off selling courses than they ever did off of day-trading. I got my account setup, had enough funds to allow me to trade short timeframes (I forget what this was called but there is a rule where you need X amount of money before you can do more than Y trades in Z timeframe) and was excited to trade short and long equities. I had some success and some failure with fees effectively eating my profits. I used to do my scans at night to know what I was planning to look at upon market open where there tends to be a lot of volatility and (I'm sure if you knew what you were doing; I didn't) opportunity. One morning I was certain that Boeing was going to plummet so I shorted a very small number of shares and was glued to the screen. I placed my market order, it hit, then Boeing immediately ripped upwards. Now, if you've traded you know that the difference between going long and going short is that going long you can lose everything you invested, going short you can lose everything you own. For about 3 seconds - my heart pounds when I think about this - I hemorrhaged money. I was down a couple thousand dollars before I could hit the key to cover the short at a huge loss (thinking back I know I had a stop loss but am not sure why it didn't trigger. Presumably it was a limit order and the price jumped the bid pre- and post- spike; I don't know). Right as I went to cover the stock dropped back down, as quickly as it shot up, and I ended up making maybe $500 on the trade. My last ever trade. I withdrew my funds and closed my brokerage account immediately thereafter.

There were so many learnings it's hard to know which is the most important, but I know that I am not cut out to day trade, I know that shorting is a fools game for (most?) non-institutional investors, I know that if it sounds too good to be true ("day trading will make you rich!") then it is and I know that even people of regular intelligence (I'd be average give or take) can do really stupid things. Never again. Never again!

I consider myself fairly literate and a decent communicator.

Until recently I pronounced ‘segue’ how it is spelled. No one ever corrected me.

I shudder to think about the meetings where I pronounced it incorrectly.

I went from hacky hobbyist programmer to working on core business logic for a startup that eventually the whole company would rely on. I was mostly a one-person team at the company, and I kept a lot of my bad unscalable tendencies from making small fun projects. No formal testing, very little documentation, hundreds of “TODOs”, breaking API changes without really telling anyone, no QA process, no monitoring/reporting, etc.

It all came to a head when my employer was demoing some software that used my API and none of what they were trying to show worked because of multiple unrelated bugs in my code, causing us to lose this very large client. I somehow kept my position, worked with other departments to formalize QA processes, and started regularly communicating with the API users.

Before I was just making software for nobody with 0 stakes, the reality of having actual people, entire revenue streams dependent on my code being reliable didn’t fully register. At my previous (and only other at the time) employer I was basically a paid seat filler. I spent a lot of work hours making personal projects, it felt like going to work and getting paid to make hobby code.

I’m glad I was able to learn from the experience and it didn’t put me out of work or anything

I took my Thinkpad to a repair shop because its charging port was damaged. A very stoic human pointed out to me it has *two* identical ones, USB-C type, right next to each other.

I’m learning swing dancing. It’s been humbling.

It’s humbling because all my life, I’ve been really good at technology - I specialize in biotechnology and manipulating DNA, but am also fluent in programming (mainly python, go, lua) and am able to build hardware - even helped run a robotics startup for a while. Anything related to technology and science comes easily and naturally to me. This isn’t to brag, but just a fact that learning things has mostly been something I do way, way faster than my peers.

But I’ve never danced before, or done anything that required that particular skill set - then realizing I’m real bad at it. Seeing all my peers learn faster and be better, with the same amount of study and practice time, and really trying my hardest and just not being good at it. I’m really thankful for this experience! And I really enjoy dancing, and will definitely keep doing it!

I have been living for 12 years in Canada in an apartment with a baseboard heater. Came an unusually cold winter -- for Vancouver at least -- and I have acknowledged the heater just can't cope with this much cold. Old windows, not much insulation, the works. I bought three three 1500W ceramic heaters and AWG 12 extension cords and it was OK.

Then a visitor told me the baseboard heater had a cover which you could remove. How was I supposed to know?? https://i.imgur.com/Gncty0s.jpeg see that long hole in it? Well, the cover was always on it and it got painted over and I had no idea it can be removed. I grew up in Europe, behind the Iron Curtain actually, childhood heaters in prefabricated buildings were like this https://i.imgur.com/8KMuAKO.jpeg but even more modern ones were on the wall https://i.imgur.com/s6NWHDM.jpeg and I never before had a baseboard heater.

There are things you expect to be problematic with immigration. This was certainly was not one. Another was finding a laundry basket when I came over. Not really an online thing, not then, not in Canada at least. So I asked someone in the elevator. That was weird.

Past immigration shopping, surprisingly, even in 2024 is a problem. I just moved back to Europe after more than 15 years. Now I can't find a travel size and packaged lemon juice anywhere. Not in Malta where I live (not a surprise) but neither in the UK either (WTF). https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/shop/search?&searchTerm=lemon%... https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/SearchResults/lemon%20ju... this and Amazon UK has an appropriate size https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07W1KGCZJ but it's a weak cover, it will spill if it gets jostled in the backpack. I am drawing a total blank: https://geizhals.eu/?fs=zitronensaft+100ml&hloc=at&hloc=de&h... In North America I could get https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BZSUWPY but now that I live within ferry distance of Sicily, I can't? Nothing for succo limone 100ml site:it either. scratches head

While in Army basic training, my duffel got swapped with another guy's (no idea whose). Back at the barracks, I discovered that they'd snagged some spent shells from the range. Massive no-no. Young, naive me assumed that presenting these to the drill sergeants and explaining the situation would be the correct move. I was severely disciplined as a result. Others were like, "Dude... why didn't you just quietly toss that shit in the trash?!?" It was a big wake-up call for how poorly I could gauge people (e.g. the sgts), adapting to the situation, etc.

Meeting less competent people be extremely successful in life compare to the more competent folks. Through my life, I have seen people less curious, less innovative, no passion to learn, not interested in working hard, but are good at gaming the system excel and succeed. They become rich, financially independent, have great success. While people much smarter than me, more curious and innovative fail again and again to make a dent just because they had a late start, poor network, wrong time and place etc.

It made me realise that success is not because of what you are capable of. To, most extent its about how you fit into the system and work it to your favor.

So, while I'm still curious and interested to learn (why else to visit HN), I have stopped feeling bitter about my efforts not providing the returns. Its just the way world works.

When I was working in a queue feature (for example to buy tailor swift ticket), and was proud of my complicated real-time solution using websockets and CRDTs...then a more experienced guy came, rearchitected in a much simpler way using just the DB with long-polling, not real real-time (but who cares), and it ended up simpler to deal with network splits or crashes. Learned the hard way you can never rely on the network if you require consistency, and it's also often simpler code-wise.

I lived in Pamplona, Spain for a year, back before my Spanish was particularly good. It was a pretty amazing place, with all its narrow cobbled alleys and small shops.

They had a particular style of bread in a few of the shops, kind of a rustic baguette with pointy ends, that I never could find the name of. I'd always have to point and say "that one", which always felt awkward. Worse, my Spanish wasn't yet good enough to even ask what it was called in a way they'd understand.

So imagine my good fortune one morning when I pointed at it in my favorite bread shop and the man picked it up and said "Pan de Ayer".

Pan de Ayer! Finally, I had a name for it. "Ayer!", I said with a big grin. I love Ayer bread. It's my favorite. Please give me a bar of Pan de Ayer.

The man did seem a bit taken aback by my enthusiasm for this particular style of bread, as did the other customer in the shop. But he rang me up after ensuring that it was in fact what I wanted. I held it up, made some yummy noises, said one more "Ayer", and walked out.

I made it maybe 50 yards up the road before I remembered where I'd heard that word.

We lived there another 9 months, and I don't think I ever went back to that shop.

When I was about 3 months into my programming career I performed a minor refactor to some code.

Unfortunately, the program was difficult to test (no unit tests) and very important, and difficult to verify correctness of output as well. (As in, you can't just look at it and say "yeah that's numbers lgtm").

Also unfortunately the previous author had not been very consistent in their programming style, so there was a lot of syntactic noise (some single line if statements used braces, some omitted them, etc)

Also unfortunately in my prior rewrite work in this, I had grafted the old UI onto my new backend to save time, but not brought the rigor there up to snuff (it's UI code, I had thought. It's well enough to have tests covering the business logic for now.)

Well anyway when I had rearranged some code, I hadn't realized there had been an extremely large block right underneath an if statement that wasn't using brackets, and I had accidentally split it into a few statements. N-1 of which were naturally now outside of the if statement.

The end result being that a bunch of code would run and the "is dirty" state worked fine, but if you clicked save on a "clean" state with no edits, it would blank the fields in the DB but not in the UI.

It didn't end up having any actual impact because we caught it in time, but god damn did it teach me something about "real" programming. I'm not sure exactly what all it taught me, but I think about that a lot as I do random other things now 8 years and 3 companies later.

When I was younger, I had an issue with external vs internal validation. Sadly, it heavily skewed towards external validation. I was on the chunkier side for a lot of my childhood and into high school. Joined wrestling and stayed with it. Lot the weight, grew, and gained muscle. Also started to get a lot of attention from the opposite sex. That, with the external validation issue, leaned into it and just had fun. It became something that I just did.

I had been a personal trainer for awhile when I got a new client. An eighty something professor who taught Dante’s Inferno, Italian, collected degrees, and was actively pursuing some field in psychology (forget what one).

For about 6 months, we’d work out on Saturday mornings and he’d always ask of my adventures since we last saw each other. I’d regale him and that was that.

One morning after going though it all, he asked, “what else is there?” or something. Whatever it was, it stopped me in my tracks. I couldn’t answer. That question hit me harder than a freight train.

At that moment, I realized there was a massive issue with myself. I wanted a change, but a) didn’t know what to change, b) how to change, 3) how to feel about myself. We continued to work on him and his goals, which was to bench 135 safely. He got to his goal. ;). He also helped me to get to mine, which was to focus more on internal validation and be happy with self.

I was able to shift from heavily skewed external validation to external validation probably being now around 20%-30% and the rest being internal.

Because of him, I was able to embrace myself and lean into the information seeking snd knowledge gaining person I am today and get to a level that someone with my academic background should not be at.

A quote that I came up with many years ago that explains all of this and the transformation I had, “you’re not going to change until the pain of change is less than the pain of staying the same.”

One other one too. From him, the professor. I have severe adhd and can read the same sentence 50 time and not remember what I just read, if it’s not something I’m highly interested in. I came to him and told him that it’s so damn boring and it’s just a fight to sit there and attempt to read it.

He gave me a mind shift: instead of thinking how it’s important or exciting to you, try to imagine why the author of it thought it was so exciting, to where they spent their career learning about that subject. That allowed me to completely change how I read and that too has helped me more in the past years than I could imagine.

I don't think this was dumb exactly, just naïve. I didn't know fireflies were real until my 20s. I thought they were just a made up thing in storybooks.

I was rooming with a girl I barely knew for the summer and was looking out the window while washing dishes. You know how fireflies tend to sync up? Suddenly I see hundreds of tiny yellow lights turn on and then off. On and then off.

I yelled for her to come in (at least to my credit I was more fascinated than afraid!), and she ended up dumbfounded that I had never seen fireflies before!

I was asked by a pro. documentary maker (who I met on the plane flying in to London) to get some B role for a G&R concert he was filming (with his spare video camera).

I was given the camera and sent in to the mosh pit to film from that perspective. After the show I gave the camera back to him. He said, "where's the footage?"

I had been "filming" looking through the view finder, but I had forgotten to press record.

Gutted.

Being 15 and unable to grasp the concept of an array whilst wishing I could somehow use a variable to escape my at the time a1, a2, … a11 variable naming convention.

I am from China and I always thought I am very good at math, because I can get good grades at national Olympiad level math competitions. After I came to America, I realized that I got good grades in China because I internalized the math concepts by doing large amounts of problem sets and it was actually a very slow learning process. In college mathematics courses, I realized that some of my American classmates can grasp new concepts and mental models ways faster than me, without doing much problem sets. We have just been learning math in very different ways.

Losing my job in my mid 30s, and changing career trajectories with 2 children.

I learned my own limits. And importantly, that we are how we frame ourselves: a loser, a victim, a believer, or someone humbly exceptional. Thanks for asking.

1. Seeing my boss just completely side step an issue, where his switch was sending vlan tags to his carrier causing the carrier to shut down the port, by purchasing a switch that didnt support vlan tagging. I died on the inside but lesson about end user troubleshooting learned.

2. Being able to break into a 24 hour data centre because the data centres building management just didnt give a shit. Turns out they had fired all their staff and were leaving the DC empty until they liquidated. We managed to get our kit and bail. But like physical security provided by a third party is ephemeral.

3. I used to lock my bike to my tool shelf. A thief came along and used my hacksaw from my toolshelf to break my bike lock and steal my bike. Thieves will use anything available, not just what I want them to use.

4. Had 2 console windows open. First to a Junos device on my desk. Second to a Junos core router. I reloaded one, and didnt realise I had reloaded the wrong one until we lost an entire state. Multitasking invites risk.

5. Customer had a huge failure. Kept insisting they would rebuild completely, but would routinely beg for just one more dodgy workaround just to keep them going. They never rebuilt. That network is perma fucked. Customer promises are worthless.

6. Much like 5. Customer got bought out by a larger firm. Began to raise new deployments by escalating to the after hours noc, pretending that new deployments were actually failed existing sites. We asked them to stop and they never did. If theres a large enough financial interest customers will just ignore contract and good practice to make the payday.

I was in my early 20s talking with a friend who was at least twice my age. I was bitching about a guy who'd look at the work I was doing who really didn't know squat about it and start telling me how I should be doing it.

After listening to me for a bit he quietly said "Well, you can learn something from everyone if you focus on that."

I spent a couple days pondering that. At first I tried dismissing it because he wasn't there when the guy I was whining about was blabbering on and on, and he didn't know the guy, but it kept bugging me and after a few more days it occurred to me that if he was right I'd been missing out.

Just a few days later the guy I was whining about came by again and looked at the work I was doing told me he knew a guy who could do most of that for me and it wouldn't cost as much and I could get it done a lot faster. So I went and talked to the guy, and sure enough he could do it, and do it faster and better, and it cost me a lot less.

I ended up making a lot more money on that work, and the company I was doing it for was thrilled with the changes. And since then I've focused what I can learn from others, even those who tend to annoy me.

Took me several days to realize why some cars in the UK have white license plates, some have yellow ones. (They don't: one colour is on the front, one on the back). I no longer call myself a 10x engineers, now it's 9x only (that's a joke, I'm hardly 1x).

I learned to lace my shoes correctly at 40+ thanks to a post on HN. I will search for the post tonight.

I took a mauser .25 pocket pistol apart.

one of these: https://sportsmansvintagepress.com/read-free/mauser-rifles-p...

Eventually got it together again, but it required assistance from my uncle who had given it to me. He laughed long and hard when i described the predicament, then said "yup, that one got me too". He also rebuilt Mercedes diesels as a hobby, so he was full of entertaining critiques of German engineering.

Only a few years back did I fully realize pickles and cucumbers are the same vegetable.

I contributed System.HashCode to .Net Core. I was overzealous with inlining hints to make it go fast. jkotas popped his head into the PR and noted the 2MB of machine code per generic type parameter. The bigger problem was that I knew better, and preached better at the time, but had my head too deep in the weeds. I'm better at occasionally popping my head out of the weeds nowadays to make sure I don't have tunnel vision in a daft direction.

I did a phone interview with Christopher Poole of 4chan fame (moot) when I was a fairly mid-level engineer. This was for his startup, Canvas. One of the interview questions was to explain every detail of what happens after entering an address into your browser and hitting "go". I completely stumbled through my response and was humbled on that phone call. He was polite, but at the same time made me feel like an absolute idiot.

This might be a different response, but I think about this a lot. From my earliest memories, I have loved technology and especially software development. I got involved in a very large low-tech industry early on and I now have the golden handcuffs on. I've kept up with development, even finished my CS degree. I held on to the idea that I would hold the title of a real "software engineer" one day, instead of solo-ing internal tools.

Until I actually had the chance to. I have somehow gotten to a spot where I make what a senior dev does, and realized my responsibility as a father and putting "food on the table" trumps my "legacy," or at least for now. It's a boring, large-org gig without a solid definition of what I actually do. But when forced to reflect, I have it really good. Maybe one day I may go for it again.

I often learn how to use something well that I've been using my whole life. A ratchet strap was a good example--you can use it without understanding how to use it well. One video (essential craftsman) fixed that for me.

I think the most humbling for me is seeing a real pro use something you use a lot, like a kitchen knife.

Learning that the world doesn't revolve around me, and that other people (and other animals) have rich and complex inner lives worthy of curiosity, dignity, and love (I can't be sure, but it feels like a healthy perspective). I'm in my 40s and this lesson, started in youth, is still sinking in. Having a child, and the commensurate second childhood, is a major impetus.

I don't know if it was humbling per se, but in the spirit of some of the contributions in the thread, I once knocked over a cup of coffee into the power strip behind my desk, blowing a fuse that blacked out half the office.

This was a company where the devs were all on workstations, so generously there was at least a few hundred hours of work that were lost.

Not my own story, but my mother's, told to me on the occasion of my 50th birthday ...

My parents met in their early 20s through another couple, Des (flatmate of my father's) and Mary (schoolmate of my mother's). Des had a sore hip, and Mary's mother was a "bonesetter" (a kind of folk healer) so came to the men's flat to see him. "Seeing him" involved Des getting some kind of vigorous massage in the bedroom, and then being slathered with red ointment, while my mother and Mary sat in the other room listening to him moan in pain

When the ordeal was over my mother, making conversation, asked Mary's mother what was in the ointment. One of the ingredients mentioned was "dragon's blood"

My mother went home to the apartment she shared with some of her siblings, and related the story to them. "Dragon's blood??" said her brother

... "and that", says my mother, "was when I found out that dragons don't exist"

It was my second day in NYC as the new incoming student at Columbia University graduate school. My senior with whom I was staying took me for sightseeing. We got into the subway station and my senior went ahead and I got late while purchasing the tickets. I swiped the card at the "turnstile" and waited for it to move up automatically so I can go ahead. After waiting for 2-3 minutes, I thought something must be wrong. My senior came running back to find me and saw me standing near the turnstile helplessly. I told him it's not going up, I swiped already. He told me, you need to PUSH IT to move forward, it doesn't automatically goes up! I guess I had the Delhi experience in mind where the turnstile goes up automatically.

I was a full-time mom and military wife when my kids were little. We moved into a 2 bedroom, 50 year old duplex at a new duty station and there was a low-ceiling basement that was mostly consumed by a giant boiler but there was one low-ceiling room down there and we made it a playroom because our two kids were sharing a really tiny bedroom.

So we set up a TV down there and it's a rental so we don't want to drill holes anywhere and I'm talking to my 8 year old about going to the store, buying like 100 feet of cable and running it the long way around the outer wall of the room etc. when he says "What about the hole (in the wall, directly behind the TV and the other side is the stairs)?"

To be fair, he spent time in that room and the opening in the cement block wall or whatever was full of insulation, so it wasn't obvious, but man did I feel stupid for a minute.

And then very relieved because we already owned a long enough cable to set it up through the hole in the wall. The 100 foot cable would have been a bit of a financial burden and going to buy it and then run it the long way around would have eaten the rest of my day and this was resolved in minutes because I always encouraged my kids to ask questions and didn't treat them like that was "disrespecting my authority" or something.

In 1994 my boss asked me how long a set of changes would take in an existing billing application. I took a day to look at the code and I said 6-8 weeks.

He said we (me with his guidance) could do it in a week, maybe two. I adamantly disagreed.

We proceeded to spend about 3 days writing a detailed document on the logic required. Once he was satisfied, he asked me to take a final look at the code and revise my estimate.

I was shocked and came back and said “a few days.”

It was all done and tested in less than two weeks.

That’s when I learned how to read code and how pseudo logic can speed up software development.

Using Unix (AIX) AWK and ksh scripts I had written to process a ton of source code to simplify the code. Only I used pipes. And large files were writing back to themselves while the head was still being read. End result was quite a lot of the larger programs were mangled. Had to restore from backup and some of my best teamies lost 2 weeks of work. And I looked like an idiot for not understanding pipes.

It's a longer story, but the gist is that one night I got a call saying some code I'd written wasn’t working properly, and they wanted me to come and fix it. When I tried to refuse, I was told they would send someone to break down my door and drag me, kicking and screaming, to fix it. The threat was very real. This was an important lesson for me: you should always be ready to take responsibility for what you write.

That in the US, and if you are driving around a neighborhood, the size/tallness of the trees tell how old the neighborhood is (without really looking into any ads in an online portal)

I worked as a sysadmin for a whole year before learning tab->autocomplete in linux

Yes. I was with two friends in Quetico at a cabin. Temps of -20 below at night. Wood stove, no electricity no running water. We cross country skied over frozen lakes to the cabin. It was a log cabin and the logs were colder than ice cubes and stayed that way over the ten days we were there. In the center was a pot belly wood stove. A foot away from it, the temp was 50. Ten feet away it was 20. Cold.

There was a wood cooking stove and a second older wood cooking stove. We decide to start using the second wood cooking stove for more heat. There was one problem, the stove would smoke. My friend climbed on the roof and cleared the snow away, and we tried to seal leaks but it kept smoking.

One day I came back from drilling a hole in the ice to get water - through 24 inches of ice. I noticed something funny.

When I opened the door, the old wood cook stove stopped smoking. When I closed the door the stove started smoking. I stood there trying to understand. Opening and closing the door over and over. Open the door, no smoke. Close the door, smoke. I started to wonder why it would stop smoking and then it hit me.

The cabin was on fire. When the door was open it got enough air to burst into flame. No smoke. When the door was closed it smoked. I still remember standing there opening and closing the door. Over and over. What an idiot. But I learned something.

We looked underneath the cook stove. The reason there was a newer one wood stove became clear. The firebox on the old stove had rusted through. So coals from the wood were falling through the rusted out part onto the wood floor. We got a fire extinguisher and sprayed it. Then got piles of snow and packed it under there too.

That old adage "where there's smoke there's fire". Not quite accurate.

Mostly politics, where I have learned to stop predicting anything that can't be directly seen -- especially the future. For example: 1. Trump wins. I firmly predicted the opposite. To be fair, most polls predicted the same. But the lesson is to be less certain about the future. 2. No chemical weapon found in Iraq. I firmly predicted the opposite. To be fair, when that event unfolded, it was not that long since the world had last seen Iraq actually use chemical weapons against Kurdish insurgents. But the lesson is to be less certain about anything that can't be directly seen.

My boss and I had written a distributed transaction manager. Of all the components of our product, this was considered the lynchpin of reliable enterprise software.

The day came when we had to present it at a very well attended product launch. He and I took turns making different points. Then he announced to the crowd that he had a surprise for me (and turns out, to the entire company), that he had changed the configuration to write the transaction log to a removable drive. Then, in the middle of the demo he proceeded to pop the drive. Our careful demo script had got Putin'd. I went numb, our marketing manager nearly had a coronary.

He then announced that if it were indeed enterprise quality, the system should recover once the disk is put back in again. It freakin' did; the system worked!! He got a laugh out of the crowd that if it survives a demo it would survive failures in production, esp. when one goes off-script. He said that we had spent months and months in careful design and implementation and we have no business writing the word 'reliable' in our marketing literature if we didn't believe it in our core. The crowd lapped it up.

It was a huge humbling and learning moment for me. Although I was the primary implementor of that system, I didn't nearly have enough faith in it as he did. In one instant, I realized all the practices he'd been drilling into our team from the first day, the insistence on creating elaborate mock frameworks to induce faults, embracing the idea that if something could go wrong, it will. I realized that if you are surprised that the system works, you haven't reflected on that doubt enough. He would light up like a child when we encountered a real bug, and he'd follow it up with a session of reflection on why it escaped our attention in the first place. That session would result in a raft of new tests.

Rest in peace, Ed Felt, my friend, mentor and guide. Taken too soon (United flight 91, alas).

I was at the climbing gym this one time, working on a route. There were two copies of it side-by-side, as though for a race – ooh, fun! By this point I'd been climbing occasionally for about a decade and considered myself a beginner plus. I was never very good, being both overweight and lacking strength, but I did spend dozens of hours practicing.

My first time trying this route, I got halfway up but missed a jump. After a few more tries, I got past that part but got stuck further up, not having enough skill and strength to finish. Each attempt took me probably 5-7 minutes, and altogether I was on that route for about half an hour.

Then this thirteen year-old girl walked up and tied in next to me. She surveyed the route and checked her harness. Then, in one practiced motion, she leapt off the ground, reached for a hold above her head with one hand, and slapped the route timer start button with the other. I didn't even know there was a timer, so I was watching it curiously. It stopped at 8 second something. I was confused. I looked up, but she was already being lowered. I wondered to myself, wait, did she get pulled up by the auto-belay...? How does that work...?

Then she did it again. This time I watched. She flew up the course, jumping from hold to hold faster than I could even think, and beat her previous time by a few tenths of a second. It was like this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktxxI_IPXjA) (that's not her, but similar route... maybe even the same route? not sure if it's a standard).

Despite a decade of climbing (mix of gym and outdoors, usually in small towns), it was my first time seeing a speed climber. I didn't even know that was a thing. Moreover, I didn't know the human body could even move that fast. Granted, I was never very fit, but I don't think I realized until that moment just how much fitter another person could actually be. In less than 10 seconds she easily finished what I couldn't do even in 400+ seconds – even though I'd been climbing longer than she'd been alive, lol.

It was humbling, astonishing, inspiring, and comedic to me all at once. It was very much one of those "wtf have I been doing with my whole life" moments. I'd always been the kind of person who was OK at a lot of things, never very good at any one thing, and to bear witness to such raw ability was... beautiful, if a bit discouraging, lol. I hope that by the time I die, I can become that good at SOMETHING in my life.

Oh, the day I lost 15% of my net worth because of a single bet/investment. This was after a period of months during which I had already lost perhaps 30% of my TNW (Total Net Worth).

It hurted so much. Soo much. I felt dumb. Unlucky. That the world was unjust.

I proceeded to analyze why I did that investment, and if it was a bad or good idea. It was indeed - I didn't know enough about that investment, and I realized I was essentially gambling.

By the way, in my view, most people that invest in crypto these days are engaging in a form of gambling; or in a Ponzi scheme where they try to be on top of the pyramid. (if you disagree, there is no need to downvote me - just comment on why you disagree).

I realized then that the hardest thing to make, or keep, money, is discipline. Greed and FOMO are your enemies. The best lessons are the ones where you pay a high price. No pain, no gain, applied to investment.

Falling out of favor with ceo/cofounders/ex. Those moments were a punch to the face.

Had an employee poach on of my customers. And had another do the same ten years later.

I apparently have trouble learning life lessons.

Honestly, it happens regularly in jiu-jitsu (and is one of the reasons I love the sport). I've been training for a number of years, and while I lose to higher belts I typically know what happened. Occasionally I get to roll with people who are world class level (another cool thing about the sport), and they make me feel like it's day 1 all over again. Then they'll give me a few pointers that look completely innocuous and it'll change my entire game.

Back when cloud computing was mostly for early adopters, I used to work on many customer projects at the same time, or in quick succession, in an architect/developer role. It was great as long as the projects worked out as planned and I could deliver a working system in a few weeks or months and move on to the next project. It was easy to become a little overconfident until I faced unexpected difficulties in some projects and the tight schedules started to fall apart.

For instance, I learned that you should never trust what a customer says about reusing their existing code without actually looking at the code first. You can end up having to rewrite the code, and then have a dissatisfied customer, because the new code doesn't have the same problems as the old code and produces different results. It doesn't matter which one is correct, since the old code was already used for years and everything is based on it.

So the humbling experience has been not to become too optimistic and overconfident after some successful projects. You will become the bad guy if you over-promise and can't deliver, even if you feel someone else is actually to blame. Every time you start something new, you have to check for yourself what the requirements and conditions truly are before accepting a deadline. And you can never trust the documentation or description of an existing system without also looking at the actual system.

At provincial grade school, I was top of most classes with very little effort. It made me lazy. But in higher education I finally met people who were significantly more capable than me (at least in my chosen specialism). I had to raise my game, and it still wasn’t enough to be top again. In postgraduate study, I met one person who I swear had superhuman powers. I check in on him occasionally to see what he’s become president of.

Throughout my working career I’ve spotted this pattern time and time again: the jobs where everybody thinks you’re great are the ones where you’re learning the least.

My company started making absolutely perplexing decisions. We were bifurcating everything, in a way that seemed like was set to double our workload for a lot of things.

It was under the guise of "being more efficient by having fully independently operating departments." I was pretty vocally opposed to the whole thing, complaining to anyone who would listen, right up until it came out that our department had been sold to another company.

They'd been basically duplicating us so they could sell us without interruption.

It's now many years later and I am frankly still embarrassed by what a fuss I made over something when I didn't actually understand what was happening. I really wish one of the higher ups I'd complained to would have just taken me aside and said "there's something going on, it'll make sense when it's done" or something but I understand that they probably couldn't.

I learned that when what your company is doing makes zero sense, there's probably something going on below the surface other than multiple levels of questionable decisions. This has since proven true more than a few times, and I am far less reactionary and far more suspicious.

Being hired as a 10x ninja coder by a YC-startup that I hope has since aligned their perspective a tiny bit more with reality.

Taught me to take a deep breath and start asking questions about expectations rather than falling prey to flattery and delusion.

First use of cabergoline to treat a prolactinoma: what a small molecule can do to your thought patterns! Suddenly things like willpower or drive feel like it has more to do with your luck at getting the right brain chemistry than any personal effort.

When the mechanic asked me to open the hood of the car and I didn't know how to do it.

Lesson learned: when a user says he can't start your appplication, never, ever think it's because he's dumb.

Hitting a semester in college where I just couldn't keep up the way I was used to (A's and B's by default). It was the first time I had to manage my workload and purposefully do a worse job on things (so I had time for everything) to just get C's. It was definitely easier to learn those skills in college than in the workplace.

Being fired after building a 1 billion dollar/100 million mau product — for no given reason and given minimal severance.

The best I can understand is the executives said “yea we aren’t paying this guys waypoint bonus we can just fire him and take it from here”

I learned no matter what you achieve if you lack table stakes you are worthless.

Several years ago, I took my car in to be serviced. When I came to collect it, it was parked at the back of the garage (about 20-30 yards in from the road) amongst other cars the garage had in for servicing or work, with basically a single 1.5-car width lane available to get in and out. I got into my car, and spent about 10 minutes trying (and failing) to do an n-point turn in the very limited space available, in order to exit back on to the road forwards.

Eventually, one of the people who worked there (who had been watching me the whole time, looking very amused) got me to open my window and simply said to me "why didn't you just reverse all the way out like we do?". The ground could have swallowed me up - the thought had literally never occurred to me.

I like to think of this story as a good reminder that sometimes looking at a problem from a different perspective can make all the difference.

I am from South east asia, and the learning moment I got from a high-school kid who took the order at Chic-fil-A. He taught me that burgers and sandwiches are made of beef and chicken respectively.

Easily, this Ted Talk!

How to tie your shoes https://www.ted.com/talks/terry_moore_how_to_tie_your_shoes?...

I had randomly had shoes untie all my life. I had to teach myself to tie them consistently the same direction.

I can't believe I was never taught this, much less learned it on my own.

Early 90s, I had to teach a class to psych undergrads, and I got neural networks. The book had already been decided: Rumelhart and Mclelland's PDP. There was software, we had a computer lab, everything was set.

For the first class, I had prepared a bit of an overview, starting with the perceptron, and then showed Minksy and Papert's proof that it could only learn a linearly separable membership function. So I had these formulas on the blackboard, ending with something like "for every delta > 0 there's an epsilon such that ..." etc. Then before the break, I ask if anybody has questions. One person raises their hand and says: What's a vector?

That was a bit of shock. I had completely not understood the knowledge level of my students. Not that I ever became a good teacher, but that was an eye-opener.

Learning how LaTeX is pronounced.

I only recently learned how to correctly raise and lower window blinds--I had been doing it wrong my entire life.

I am curious now. How did you do it wrong, and how is it done correctly?

Getting into Haskell because I was bored and assumed doing Haskell would be far more interesting. And that code would be much better written in Haskell, almost perfect because it is math based.

Haskell is amazingly interesting but very hard. There are few companies using it and the one that did in my city got taken over and usual management shenanigans. I didn’t get a job with them.

Haskell meet ups went over my head and I couldn’t keep up. Didn’t have the time to play catch up with the talented people in this scene.

Realized writing software is an artform, no language necessary makes it better and more fun. Appreciate the common languages more like C# Python and Go.

Haskell has great ideas but there is value in designed language with language features over making everything in the higher type systems.

So in short humbled into realizing what makes good software is more than using clever languages.

When it finally dawned on me that taking no risk is the biggest risk of all. I was "afraid" to get into the stock market when I started my career in 2009....I didn't change my tune until about 6 months ago. I missed out on life changing gains.

I used to think the United States took the idea of inalienable rights seriously. I've since learned that "missionaries get eaten by cannibals."

The quote above was kindly used by the founder of an organization to explain why he couldn't help me expose the injustice I experienced after I was arrested for trying to use a valid court order to free my friend from unlawful confinement in a local hospital's emergency room.

Later my defense attorney explained to me that my accuser was the state's largest non-Walmart employer, and that it was much easier for my trial judge to rule against me than against a retired drug cop employed by a billion-dollar "nonprofit" that pays its employees quite well.

In 2022 Dr. Palmer published a book [0] about the 80+ years of scientific research establishing that I was correct to protest my friend's tranquilization with defective prescription drugs. Nonetheless people are still being sacrificed to the mental health industry's obsolete degenerative interventions.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40487118

I had written a simple Clients -> Orders -> Invocies - Payment collection managing software for my company in 1998. It is still being used in 2024! I am humbled every time I see our team using it.

It's always humbling to think I know a topic pretty well only to meet a true expert on the topic. It makes me think about how much time I spent learning it to not really feel like I know it at all, and makes me second guess my learning process. I can think of several times in my career/life where this has happened.

Also related, learning something, only to find out later that your understanding of something was incorrect, or made incorrect assumptions. Always humbling.

Always something new... this week its some *nix commands

cat backwards (tac) will display the file in reverse order :)

chown username: with the colon and the group name blank will set the permission to the user's default group.. very useful when you blend windows groups with spaces into an environment and it becomes a pain in the ass to put return characters in

The first day I joined a martial arts class was very humbling. I was asked to to spar with a senior. For a good 15 minutes I tried to hit him. I mean I really tried, and to no avail. I distinctly remember thinking how easy it would be to punch the senior, and could not understand why I could not hit him. Between that and doing pushups until failure. I really did not want to go back. I did, and stuck with it, but that really was a reality check for me.

I've worked for some fairly large tech companies, building products customers more or less want. About 6 years ago, I convinced myself that I just need to build something, anything, and customers will come flowing in immediately.

So I scraped job boards and built my own that would "only" cost users $199 to post a job ad.

What I learned here is that your implementation is meaningless to the user if you're not delivering the value they came for. In this case, I wanted to take a technologically inferior product, make it extremely efficient, scalable and "blazing fast", and pocket pure profit from running a serverless job board (effectively free to run for the first million visits a month).

In total, the job board logged 761 sessions for 661 users in 2018.

One of many failures on my way to builing OnlineOrNot.

Learning the guitar.

I spend my professional life learning every day, and usually pick up technical subjects quickly.

The learning process for the guitar and music theory has shown me that you can't learn everything in the same way, different skills require different approaches to learning. Fascinating, frustrating, humbling experience.

I only recently learned how to correctly raise and lower window blinds

I don't think anyone should be expected to intuitively understand engineering inventions. Double so, since they are covered with pretty plastic trim that hides the insides.

Most humbling learning moment: Read some books, science and philosophy, figured out a bunch of beliefs I had were probably wrong. Then I did a real world check, found out my original beliefs WERE wrong. Now I'm a realist.

In the early 90's I was visiting an industrial plant that had, in one building, a giant dehumidifier that was necessary for their process. My field work took me to the roof of that building. Unrelated to what I was working on, I saw an air conditioner on the roof whose condensate line had become disconnected. Instead of the condensate flowing through a PVC pipe and into a drain at the edge of the building, the condensate was pooling on the roof in a broad shallow pond. Being a good guy, I tapped the PVC pipe back together the get the water flowing like it should have been.

The next morning I went back into the dehumidifier building and saw that it was raining inside the building. People were moving around in a very agitated state. In a panic, I ran up the stairs to the roof and kicked apart the PVC pipe that I had joined the day before. Water began to stream out, but I got away from there fast and went back downstairs. A few minutes later, a member of the maintenance crew came in. He looked at the rain and immediately dashed upstairs.

He came down a minute later shaking his head. I didn't confess. I only hope that they didn't have enormously expensive damage, but I don't really know. One thing is for sure. I am very cautious about volunteering to help out without first checking with the plant personnel.

First encounter with Monty Hall problem. My roommate in college told me about it, and I was absolutely unable to see how it could be anything other than a 50/50 chance for the remaining two doors.

It took me actually drawing out a grid of the possible scenarios to see and accept that he was correct.

I wss doing something in Excel and needed to aggregate some data. I figured there must be some aggregation function. I looked it up and, sure enough, I found DSUM() and DCOUNT().

I spent a few hours finishing my analysis, and then went to someone in the finance team to show them what I had discovered.

They noticed I had many many similar-looking aggregations in a grid, and asked "Why not just use a pivot table?".

My reply: "What's a pivot table?".

Also in the same job I learned the hard way why you should never use OFFSET() if INDEX() will do the job.

If you haven't had a 'humbling' moment, I recommend you read about Euler. He really was the master of us all :)

Finding out at age 44 that I am autistic.

Suddenly my whole life made sense, I understood that there are well-known and documented reasons for why I am the way I am, and that I'm not alone in my experiences.

maybe related, but everything I do for the first time, I will do incorrectly at least in part. Even down to things like opening a new type of jar, taking public transit in a new city, making a big purchase, etc. I don't know if it's just me, or says something about my intelligence or not.

Learning about auto-walk in an MMO after weeks of holding the up arrow key.

Page. 57 in Real Analysis, definition of a limit...

First time in my life that I did not understand something on the spot (actually took me a few months to (REALLY) understand it).

I went from helping build the community at deviantart to building a film company that won emmys to helping build digitalocean and somewhere along the way became a practicing alcoholic. I then proceeded to: have my fiancée leave me because I was an insufferable human, lose my startup because I was an incompetent human, and lose my health because I was an out of control human, in the span of 3/4 months.

That was very humbling. So was getting sober.

I used to believe I was a very very smart guy, now I'm content knowing I'm comfortably average!! :D

I just learned that Wolfenstein 3D is actually (wait for it) the third game in the franchise. Nothing gets by me!

I have to go back to around 1992 or so for this one ... not that I don't have plenty of newer humbling learning moments, but this is the one I tend to think of as the most obvious "how did I do all of these things without knowing something so basic."

Background: I was in the 7th grade, hosting a BBS and wanted to simultaneously host two different BBSes behind the same modem (and both with a working FIDO feed). I can't remember specifically why, but it had something to do with how one of the two BBS systems detected if it should ingest messages or if it should return a user session. I believe I was handling that detection manually but still had to have the BBS setup in such a way that it would look for a specific exit code from FIDO and if it saw "0" (which was what it always saw in this configuration), it never provided a user session in response.

Let's start with the first problem. I had a non-working understanding of what an exit code actually was. This was all-together weird. I'm in 7th grade, but I'm taking AP Computer Science at the High School. I mean, I think by then I could actually make Wing Commander start or some equally heroic juggling of HIMEM statements with the various TSRs. I was writing actual software in Borland Turbo Pascal 4, compiled to an executable file, every one of which returned an exit code. I'm fairly certain the last statement of many of my programs was something along the lines of "RETURN 0;" if memory serves. I had even processed command-line arguments at this point!

In what easily made me look like the 7th-grader that I was, I called another programmer I had met on a local BBS (after 10:00 PM, no internet, long distance was expensive) who was writing a BBS application in "C" ... and asked him if he had any time that week to write me a quick program which took, as a parameter, any number 0-255 and exited with that exit code. You can't imagine how thankful I was when he was uploading the program to my second node before we had finished talking.

You can't imagine how stupid I felt when I found the seven hundred other ways this could be done, including with a BATCH file, that I had just never had any real reason, up to that point, to properly connect with the words "exit code" (it was an ERRORLEVEL, you could set it directly (?) in DOS).

Realizing how much work I had to do on my own shit. This is a gradual process because most people can’t handle knowing the full extent of it initially.

Before I understood recursion, to solve Hanoi towers I looked back at the earlier positions of the output buffer

As a teenager, I discovered disassemblers/debuggers and became very enthusiastic about hacking and patching things. I reset the trial period counter on a few shareware apps, and the next "victim" that caught my eyes was encrypted RAR SFX archive. I thought it would be the perfect target.

I spent ~20 hours trying to find a routine that compares the entered password with the correct one. That humbling moment I realised there was no such routine, and moreover, most of disassembled code is just garbage.

[*] this is an encrypted archive combined with extractor in one .exe file.

Moving to China and learning Mandarin. Trying to express myself in a foreign language has easily been the most intellectually humbling experience of my life.

The most humbling learning experience I have ever had was having a child.

Several in my professional life.

I've had my code go into production only to cause big issues, I've severely over-engineered a couple things and have had to redo them totally, I've fucked up a git- stash merge once or twice, and I really got too invested into the whole cloud native thing with creating kubernetes sidecars and the like.

The lesson has generally been to keep things simple, and not try and seek some sort of perfect abstraction or fad library of the times.

Watching a video of a chimpanzee eating a banana at the zoo a few years ago and I realized I was peeling bananas wrong my whole life. Would you have them open with a knife or a key on the stem side. It turns out there’s a better method. You just pinched the end and then peel it.

I joined a financial firm that was building a trading system. This was about 15 years ago. The volume was not small.

Their DB model was atrocious. I looked at their wide tables, with tons of columns, not one FK in sight. It was horrible and broke every single rule I've learned in DB design theory, and in practice. It was so bad that I was considering leaving.

Luckily I did not leave. With time, I learned how the system worked. I made assumptions about how they used the DB which were not correct. It was not really used as a relational database. It was used as a journal of transactions that served as a backup to a system that actually held everything in RAM. Everything worked beautifully together. The system was fast and robust.

I learned a lot at that job. Most importantly, I learned not to pass judgement too quickly.

My most humbling moment was when I realized that I'm not a genius. It's that almost everyone else is dumb.

... Just kidding!

Actually, I've been humbled to realize that people who may be really dumb in one area can be really smart in another area and that there isn't one kind of intelligence.

I think even being good at sports is itself a form of intelligence. Being able to manipulate others politically or to draw/paint well or to ask the right questions, etc... It's rare to find people who are equally good at everything. I'm actually a pretty good all-rounder so I never understood how it's possible to be good at something and not good at other things. Surely people can apply the same reasoning skills to all these different endeavors! I thought. Wrong. For a lot of people (not me obviously), their intelligence is intuitive (subconscious) so they can't really repurpose it towards other tasks.

Intuition can be a very powerful tool. I'm kind of envious of people who have really excellent domain intuition. They come up with answers with such speed and ease, it's almost like muscle memory. Whereas my mind has to always work hard to get the same result. If I can do something, I can 100% explain it down to every detail. None of it is subconscious for me.

I think Jeff Bezos said something along those lines when discussing why he didn't pursue a PhD in Physics. He understood that Physics wasn't intuitive for him as it was for the smartest guy at his university.

Sophomore year of high school, riding the bus to school, I realized I was weak, too weak to stand up for what I knew what right, but didn't because of peer pressure. I hated myself for it; the realization fuucked me up for weeks.

During my sophomore year, a girl moved into my neighborhood. She was from Vietnam, presumably part of some refugee relocation program. She seemed nice, and she was very pretty, but in St. Louis County (Missouri) during the early 80's, she stood out. A lot. None of the kids in the neighborhood, including myself, had ever met an Asian person before - just Bruce Lee movies, that was it. Also, there was still bitterness left-over from the Vietnam War. But like I said, she seemed nice. Heck, I kinda had a crush on her. Anyway, one day riding the bus to school, a couple of dudes starting yelling racial insults at her - you know the word I'm talking about. And they were throwing stuff at her, pretending they were bombs, like dropping bombs from an airplane. This went on for a few minutes, and no one did anything about it. People just laughed, including the bus driver. I was sitting close to her and I could see it affected her, like she wanted to start crying, but she was holding it in. I wanted to do something. I wanted to stand up to the instigators and tell them to knock it off. I knew these guys; we all grew up together. I knew I should do something. But I didn't. My body - everything, was frozen. I did nothing.

Afterwords, I initially told myself that I wasn't one of the instigators, I didn't actively participate, so I shouldn't feel bad. But I quickly came to realize that was bullshiit. It actually made me feel worse. I just sat there. I knew it was wrong. But I did nothing.

I moved to California just a few weeks after this incident, so I don't know what ever happened to the girl. I hope she went on to live a happy, successful life. If so, it had nothing to do with me, because I was too weak to help her when she needed it.

Anyway, that realization - that I was a weak person, provoked a lot of self-reflection. It's one of my most vivid memories, and I hope it made me a better person. But, even if I did become a better person from it, it still haunts me that a poor girl had to suffer just so I could, maybe, become a better person.

Wife and I worked with a realtor that did an awful job. We did not read the contract carefully enough, and through some uncovered issue there was not a way we could terminate the agreement. They told us they would terminate for $2k for the work they had done up to that point.

I call this kind of money "tuition."

When I started my own startup, my role shifted from a front-end developer to a founder. I needed to pay attention to everything, not just how to abstract components.

This reminds me of my experience in developing "Felo Search", which was truly crazy. In the past year, I hardly dared to think about projects related to general search engines. Such experiences are common, just like when you achieve success in the field of technology, people will also encounter unfamiliar things or situations in life and learn new knowledge and skills from them.

This kind of experience can be seen as a part of growth, no matter how experienced we are in a certain field, we will always encounter new challenges that require learning, I wish you good luck!

Humbling moments were a recurring theme in my first 10 years of employment. I was hired out of college with an Environmental Science degree to run the computer systems of a software startup. I was a computer hobbyist to be sure but had no formal training. My only other qualification was that I was willing to work for almost literal peanuts. I stuck with that company for 5 years because they were willing to let me figure things out on the fly, since that's what everyone else was doing too. I had to teach myself networking, then TCP-IP, frame relay, T1, ISDN and provided both internal and external customer support. I worked with beta versions of Windows NT and MacOS, and even had a close call with AS-400.

When it became clear that the company did not have a bright future I took all my skills over to a local brokerage that had just had an internal IT meltdown. It was like starting all over again on day one of my first job.

My most humbling moment turns out to have been political. At the brokerage I was asked if I wanted to be the IT Manager. I declined because I didn't feel I had the experience. This planted the seeds of my departure 5 years later as the hack they brought into the department felt increasingly threatened by my success and skills. You can't ignore office politics.

The second moment was more of a huge missed opportunity. One of the board members of the startup found out I was leaving and offered me a role at his other company. Honestly I didn't realize at the time what a compliment that actually was. I would have been one of the earliest hires of a major firm that is still going strong decades later. I learned to not conflate "niceness" with business acumen. This person had his own money on the line at our startup and had every right to press people on their success or lack thereof. I just thought he was a jerk at the time.

"Good judgement comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgement."

I've been humbled since my childhood by many/most peers at school, and it continues till this day. Memorizing stuff was a nightmare, just repeating it many times eventually worked but it required significant tenacity. I felt I had some mild brain fog or similar. For some reason remembered numbers and dates very well, so at least history classes worked OK for me. Remembering names when introducing was and still is completely impossible. One of reasons I've never considered medical or law universities (plus very hard to get into). Archaic eastern European school system focused on raising obedient drones just memorizing stuff didn't help. It (+parents) taught me patience, tons of it, otherwise I would not finish even secondary school. Smart folks have it sometimes too easy early in life and lack mental resilience for hardships that is in all cases required later in life. Not sure if this puts me on some tiny low number on autistic spectrum or similar, never explored that but this forum gives me ideas. Always had emotions under control, all big decisions were rational first, emotional second (but when I want I let emotions free, but only those intense and positive ones), never understood why so many folks around me do stupid stuff they later regretted.

It continues till this day - a new framework is harder to learn, some advanced concepts are harder to grasp than everybody around me, older code is sometimes like somebody else's.

Yet, contrary to expectations of many including my parents, I wasn't afraid to move countries and was very open to new experiences positive or negative, seeked higher compensation which ended up me being put together with some smart capable folks, and eventually after decade and a half ended up in Switzerland, integrating banking packages for banks here. Salary from first 100% perm job I had went up maybe 30x (cost are sky high too especially with small kids but I still love the overall package of living here).

Bought a house for my parents who would otherwise spent rest of their lives in crammed little block apartment. Got into various intense and cca extreme sports like paragliding, climbing, alpinism, ski touring, diving etc where mistakes are paid dearly and strong focus and relatively high skill is a must. Backpacking in places like India for months taught me a lot about life and myself.

Don't want this to sound like a humblebrag, in contrary, I still feel very much subpar to most colleagues and folks here (and I can sometimes still see my mental deficiencies), rather to give folks who feel stupid and worthless all the time when growing up a glance that it can all end up much better. Just keep challenging yourself and don't be afraid of the change or some mild hardships especially when young and without too many responsibilities, stay away from 'comfort zone' as far and for as long as possible. Don't do stupid basic mistakes like getting addicted to stuff that will then destroy you, life goes fast, and don't get married / get kids with folks who don't have properly good heart for the lack of better words, you know when you meet them and observe a bit. Some of much smarter and capable folks got stuck in some weird (mental) place or job and when meeting them after 2 decades I clearly surpassed them in almost every aspect of life, although life ain't no race for me in any aspect.

* I learned Scheme after Perl and JavaScript. I strongly advise that this is the wrong order. One should learn C (or C++, if you must), then an assembler, then a Lisp, then everything else. There’s no point trying to be prescriptive about the rest, but trust me on those three; however you got started - and I got started with BBC BASIC, Acorn BCPL, 6502, and Modula-2, if you can believe it - however it goes, make sure C, assembler and Lisps are in your toolbox, you acquire super powers of mechanical sympathy for the remainder of your career. NB: for the purposes of this recommendation, JavaScript is not a Lisp (Lou Reed once called it “Lisp in drag”)

* I kicked Bono in the shin at a Pearl Jam concert a couple of decades ago and never apologised. Still feel bad about it.

i'm always getting humbled, but most recently, i read the intro to an important academic book in the field that i studied in undergrad and i realized that didn't know much in the field, and don't fully understand the book's argument.

or whenever i plant trees or vegetables and they die or get a pest.

i dont know, im quite dumb so everything i do is difficult and humbling

Interviewed for a dream job (British Antarctic Survey) in 1982. Failed a 20 line "write pythagoras in Fortran or Pascal" test in front of the selection committee.

I was deeply unsettled by this. Made me realize that sometimes what the interviewer is doing, is making you wake up to your own lack of awareness. I must have been a complete prick in the interview. I shudder to think about it to this day.

Relearning something I already knew because I forgot I already knew it.

Which you figure out just as the final lesson or exercise is drawing to a close :\

It doesn't bother me since I don't always hesitate to re-invent the wheel either, and when I do go forward I always come up with something in addition to the same old thing I was working on.

When life gives you lemons, make cheesecake.

I was hired into a company as product manager. And I struggled. As the company grew from 200 people to 700 in 6 months it was basically a mixture of Mad Max Thunderdome for tickets and products with a mix in of Darwin, Scrum, Story Points and Venture Project and Matrix Organisation.

One of my colleagues, a small, silent, kinda shy guy did get all his tickets done and all his projects done in time.

I did not know how he did it.

During one lunch, he told me. He always offered to write the meeting minutes of each meeting. Every time, all the time. Did not matter if it was his meeting or if he was just invited.

He knew the company was chaos. I knew the company was chaos. Everyone knew the company was chaos. He put order to the chaos. His order.

Saving money for a govt department that produced books used in navigation.

I offered to do it in Postscript to save a lot of money in typesetting costs.

Result looked fantastic; off to the printers it went.

Few weeks later, a customer noticed that an entry in August was incorrect. The entire run had to be pulped and re-run using the usual printers services.

Good thing someone checked; the wrong information could have had dire consequences.

Meeting a couple of people with eidetic memory in college, and then again meeting a few real world geniuses at a research lab I worked at. At that point I realized that “it’s not the brains that got me to where I am”. Ironically I’m more successful than both eidetic memory dudes and most of the geniuses. But I’d frankly trade all my success for better memory. What they lacked was tenacity. I have that in spades.

So, tell us more about window blinds!

You can tell from a distance whether a ball valve is open or closed. The handle will be in line with (parallel to) the pipe when it's open. I learned this from dad recently.

Er. The fact that I don’t realize that there could be a wrong way to lower and raise window blinds tells me that I may be doing it wrong too! Would you mind sharing what you did wrongly?

For my part: I think I learnt at age 35 the difference between sneezing and coughing. Duh!

When I was flagged for sharing a report citing my financial investment prospect - https://gigainfotechnologies.com/hire-indian-digital-marketi...

I recently started building VR apps for VR headsets with Kotlin/Android after five years as a front-end/full-stack engineer. It has been humbling and scary, but I'm learning and loving it. The switch was motivated by several reasons typical to FAANG companies.

In my first digital design class, my physics professor (who I took 6 classes with and respect very much) took a look at my breadboard computer with no consistent color coding for groups of wires and overall bad layout. He said it was bad and that I should start over from scratch in front of the whole class.

Happens so often to me it’s no longer humbling.

Though of course I do some things well I’ve been doing most things poorly all my life. That’s what learning as an adult feels like.

Good luck.

Seeing software systems that are barely held together by shoestrings and Dixie cups that make millions of dollars a day. Very flaky and kludgey, and I think to myself I could build something better than this, but still have yet to do so.

Here's a recent X post I wrote entitled "What I learned about startup founders from being the worst pilot in the AirWing."

At the age of 25, I was sent straight from my F/A-18 training squadron to a forward deployed squadron aboard the USS Nimitz.

The fastest way to build a reputation as the New Guy is safe and predictable carrier landings. The fastest way to be put on notice is to suck behind the boat.

Within 2 weeks, I was solidly in the latter category. I struggled deeply, especially with night landings.

At first, I kept catching the “one-wire,” meaning I was too low when crossing the back of the ship.

Then, in later flights, to compensate, I started “boltering” a lot – meaning I’d put on too much power at the end, fly too high, and miss all the wires completely. Then I’d have to circle around for another attempt.

There was one night where I went around 5 times before finally catching a wire and landing. I expended so much fuel in doing so I had to hit the airborne tanker to refuel about halfway through.

I was ranked 98 out of 99 pilots in the AirWing after my first six weeks.

I was on notice. Whenever I came in to land, all the senior aviators aboard the ship nervously watched to see what would happen.

Then the bottom fell out. One night I landed the first time – but caught another one-wire. Over the common carrier frequency came the Voice of God. This was incredibly rare – the carrier CO never interrupted carrier ops.

“Son, I can’t have you landing like that aboard my ship.”

I was petrified – and what little confidence I had was destroyed. As I taxied off the landing area and was waiting for the plane to be chained to the deck, in the pitch black, I let my guard down and accidentally released the brakes. I almost ran over the plane captain – and was only saved because my back-seater screamed “brakes!” to me.

When I returned to the ready room, I got reamed out by my squadron CO. I was benched.

Those were the two longest days of my Navy career. I didn’t know if I would cut it. I saw no way out.

Then the skipper sent me back up. I was terrified – but he knew the only way to get confidence back was to Do the Hard Thing.

Again and again. And again.

Eventually, I figured it out. I was never better than middle of the pack in landing grades – but I was safe and predictable. I also found other areas to excel in, like air-to-air tactics.

This dark period in my life gave me a deep understanding of grit and resilience.

In conversations with founders, I now know what to look for in how people respond to challenging situations. How one responds in dark moments – and which people believed in them enough to give them another shot.

I also now have a desire to seek out the hard moments to walk beside high potential folks who hit the inevitable roadblocks in life.

It’s in the those moments where thought partnership matters most – and where being there matters most.

Do Hard Things. Keep moving forward.

You will figure this out.

At one time in my life I thought myself crazy by overthinking mathematics, and I began to hallucinate and hear voices and see huge wars happening in front of my eyes off in the distance, it all added up to a delusion Earth was in Hell. (as an atheist/agnostic it pains me to write that) In my insanity I did things I hate having done and wound up in jail. While I was in jail, I wished I had known to ignore the voices and visions, to do nothing, say nothing, just think about it and think about it, and be a “normie.”

The trigger for all of it had something to do with thinking about the opposite word to each word in a sentence. After tinkering with that for a while, my brain started to automatically invert the incoming words. Someone would say, “Good Morning” and my mind would translate it into “Bad Evening” as if everyone was saying the complement of what they actually said. Needless to say, that was a big factor in me believing the whole world had been sucked into Hell. I thought I was being mind controlled.

Another big aspect of it was this idea everything was connected to everything else. Which isn’t necessarily wrong, but in the context of thinking you’re in hell, that turns everything guilty by association in a sense.

I know it was all a delusion, and it was such a complete nightmare and made me the opposite of how I think of myself, not as an intelligent citizen who loves life and STEM, but as a psycho locked naked in solitary for months who thought everyone else was possessed.

Probably wrecked my life, but at least I’m out now and sane and able to enjoy life with family and friends again.

If you or someone you know goes “crazy,” a plan in place in advance could save you/them, because the system is often too slow to help you if you wait until you have a problem, or because you won’t trust the system when you’re crazy, because you think it’s bad somehow when you’re in that mind state.

Thus, my most hard-earned learning is to never take your own mental health and sanity for granted, and have a mental health plan for if you do experience psychosis. Never let insanity drive you to do anything you’ll regret.

I've had a few humble pie experiences:

When I was young I set myself on a path to become a professional string musician. I practiced relentlessly and sat section lead and first chair in about 4 different school and local orchestras. I was relatively well known as the studious musician kid and there were some hopes that I was "going to go all the way".

Then I had a rough tryout for a regional orchestra, made it, but sat second to last in the section. Sitting last place was another player from my school who was decidedly "middling" in his skills. I was absolutely shattered. But then came to realize most of the players ranked higher than me were objectively better. I also realized that there was physically no way that I could add more practice time and we didn't have the resources to hire better private coaches. I simply didn't have the talent to "go pro".

I realized then that my dreams were never going to happen and I ended up spending several years in limbo before ending up in technology.

I'm actually happy I didn't end up in music, because now I get to putz around and make a few songs a year as a fun and fulfilling hobby, instead of being decades in, making next to nothing and trying to fill in the gaps with second jobs and private lessons. I also went on a few short tours and really disliked playing the same music over and over again.

Tech has been more interesting and I've had opportunities to have very large impacts in a few places that have given me immense satisfaction instead.

Meeting people who remember my name and not remembering theirs.

When I started programming, I looked for a job, and the interviewer asked me which design patterns I knew. I immediately replied that I did programming, not design. I then quickly realized how much I had to learn, and my potential knowledge expanded like the Big Bang.

The more you learn, the less you know.

Learning Haskell.

A friend of mine had been gracious enough to lend their time and expertise to teach me TLA+ to help me solve a problem I'd been wrestling with. When we'd have lunch together they'd tell me about their work and how they were using Haskell. At the time I was skeptical that Haskell was a practical language for building software outside of academia.

I had realized I was regurgitating opinions from other people that I'd heard about Haskell. When interrogated I couldn't come up with good reasons for my opinions. I didn't want to continue embarrassing myself. I decided to learn enough of the language to form my own opinions.

And I've been programming in it as much as I could ever since.

my ego is pretty detached from the reasoning and learning side of the house. for the ego i start with first principles, where i put myself pretty squarely in the blithering idiot column.

when it comes to reasoning and learning, when i'm wrong it tends to be kind of a weirdly joyful moment, maybe to be able to think of the growth from when i was young and less excited to make mistakes.

A while back I came across this self-directed question:

"How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?"

(from Jerry Colonna, according to The Internet).

For me, it has been a sporadic but powerful concept that often sits me on my ass, especially when I find myself feeling ungrateful or put upon.

I was already very familiar with Stoicism which has similar lessons. So not only did I discover that I was responsible for my own situation, I also had the humbling realization that I hadn't actually grasped the lessons I thought I had.

In the mid-2000s, I got excited about creating a company that deals with web design. Now I wouldn’t risk doing this, knowing all the pitfalls. the more you know, the more you doubt

I've been humbled many times, but often in the context where I do not have anything to lose.

When I was a musician, I'd met people that were infinitely more talented and hard-working than me. When I was in college, I'd met people that were just better than me in everything.

But I'd say that my first "real" humbling came when something critical I made at work stopped working. Suddenly I'm the one responsible for a xxx million dollar system not being operational, and all the people that are dependent on it.

Every time I see some major apps / sites being down, I get flashbacks, and feel the immense stress some people are going through.

I posted a version of this story once before, but it bears repeating.

I was working at Tymshare, maintaining the assembler and linker for the PDP-10 or the Sigma 7 (I don't quite remember which).

The linker had a bad habit of leaving unused memory uninitialized. Every time you linked a program, the binary would be different. Functionally the same, but they wouldn't compare byte for byte. So my manager asked me to make sure the linker zeroed out all unused memory.

After linking a program, the linker printed a message something like this:

  8412 bytes used
   439 bytes free

The linker was a mess of spaghetti assembly code, and it was a real pain to find and fix all of the places where it failed to clear memory.

My manager knew what a hassle this task was, and he was a chill dude. So just for fun I added a temporary message meant for his eyes only:

  8412 bytes used
   439 bytes free and it's pretty fucking clean

Unfortunately my manager wasn't the first to see the message. His manager was giving a demo to a customer, and they were the first ones to see the message. Oops.

I've had a full-time job as a Software Engineer (later Data Engineer / Data Science), since I was 23 years old. I've done all sorts of programming, worked in academia, done my own startup (Scalien), worked at medium-sized successful SaaS (Prezi). At Prezi, I was promoted to a Director. I thought I'm the shit.

Then, at age 36, I got a job at Facebook [as in IC]. The first couple of months were the most humbling time in my working life. Before, I always felt I'm in the upper percentiles of whatever group I was part of it. At Facebook, I never felt like that --- I felt like I'm the median. Any problem I've seen in my previous jobs (how to manage large code bases, how to write good code, what does a good ETL system look like, how to be data-driven), I realized that I was at "version 3.0" of that space, but Facebook was on "version 15.0". Whatever I knew to be the best approach, it was evident that the 1000s of smart people who work(ed) there, were well past that stage, they passed that stage 5+ years ago.

Ever since then I always recommend people to interview for Big Tech companies if they get a chance, and do a stint. There's so much to learn from the collective wisdom that 1000s of engineers (and PMs and DSs and..) have accumulated.

Sooo many. I can't even pick one.

I'll pick the one that did the most damage.

We had a service window to do some sort of migration involving a DB, very late at night. I had been up all day working, short walk, dinner, then around 11pm this service window started.

My eyelids were heavy, I almost fell asleep in the video call. I should have admitted this, we could have re-scheduled.

I ended up doing a bash for loop that dropped every single table in a production database, and this data was sometimes queried by law enforcement so we had a legal requirement to keep it for 6 months.

We could restore a backup but there was data missing, so for 6 months we prayed no one would request the missing date ranges.

Probably more social - seeing real deep poverty. Rattled me more than I care to admit

cd / (intending to cd ~)

rm -rf *

Yep; I actually did it. By mistake, as a junior in a CS research lab.

I was a Cloud Architect who had been working nearly 10 years at a financial institution. When our CIO left, the board had made a poor decision with their replacement. The new CIO was a complete bumblehead not knowing which direction was up.

Eventually an initative came down the chain that we were going to put our on prem datacenter in the cloud. As I had been in the role for so long, I already had multiple strategies on how to accomplish this and save the company over a quarter of a million a year in the process while providing additional DR to mission critical components that they didnt otherwise have.

I presented the strategy to the CIO, who wanted to get a second opinion. Ok- fair. The second opinion was that we had a solid cloud migration plan. CIO wanted a third opinion, then a fourth. All of which said we had accounted for unknown variables and were set to proceed. On his FIFTH opinion, I remember sitting in yet another office going through introductions. This random guy talks about being a cloud Architect for a bank, moving critical apps to the cloud and providing DR.

Bumblehead CIO turns to us and mouths "WOW!". As if that was the most incredable and impressive thing that he has heard in his career. It was at that minute that I realized that not only did he now know what he was doing as CIO, but he couldnt even recognize the milestones that my current team was achieving in regard to cost savings, security, migrations to serverless cloud features, and the solid migration plan I had presented many times to him prior.

What I learned in that moment was a well crafted 15 second introduction is more important than what most people think.

Someone gave me a pack of Indome noodles and I started making them like the soupy instant noodles I had normally eaten. Someone saw me and said "That's not how you make those" as I was about to squeeze the sauce sachets into the hot water with the noodles.

I said "I know how to make instant noodles!" and I continued making them. He replied with "Okay then".

After I had made them I realised he was right. I also thought it was cool that he just let me be wrong. In his position I would have pestered the other guy into doing in the right way.

I learnt a few lessons:

1. How to make Indome noodles 2. I'm not always right 3. It's okay to let other people be wrong.