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by hinkley
1214 days ago
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I have mentioned before that I worked as a bike mechanic in college. I came into it able to do my own repairs, and even build a few wheels. But there's a difference between being able to complete a task and being able to complete a task for money. I had to get a lot faster than I would have been at my own workbench, and even then I wasn't really fast enough to be the 'typical college student working in a bike shop'. What I was was thorough when I needed to be, so they put me on fixing returned repairs (nobody wants a customer to come back for a third time) and on Hail Mary wheel repairs, because I knew a few tricks that only the most senior folks knew, but the hourly rates didn't math out. What I've learned from years of rubbing elbows with other skilled labor is that there's nothing special about bikes or software. It's all the same sort of problem all over. Intellectually understanding a problem is not knowing it in your bones. It's not acting on reflex and intuition without having to exhaust yourself thinking about what to do next. |
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I spent a few years cleaning hotel rooms and, in hindsight, I did some of the best programming work of my life during that time. In part because I would find insights into a problem by analogizing it to cleaning hotel rooms (many of the fundamental problems are the same, just in a different context), and in part because cleaning rooms is mostly automatic, physical, mindless work and it bought me 8-10 hours a day where I could just think about whatever I was working on at home. That taught me the value of letting your mind "wander" into solutions when you can't reason into one.