> - if you must ask questions, convince yourself you must not, just figure it out instead
God, this one hurts. In the first couple months at my new role (which I intentionally chose to be one that would stretch and challenge me as I'm looking for some professional growth), a senior member of my team expressed the view that he'd rather someone spend three days researching than ask him a thirty-second question. When I was already insecure about my position in the team and not wanting to appear incompetent, this has ironically sent me into a spiral of being _less_ capable and productive because I'm fearfully avoiding asking for any context or guidance. I'm struggling to break that cycle, but it's hard.
3 days? Wow. Can't say I think much of this senior member of your team, who seems to be the anti-social one here. I'm sure it breaks flow for them, but a big part of being senior is amplifying the best in those less so, and helping them improve.
3 minutes, 30 minutes, sure, I've discovered a lot of junior folks would figure things out on their own when I couldn't get back to them immediately, and tended to add some delay just to encourage trying a little harder before contacting me. I would say even 3 hours has value. Buy yourself a rubber duck and have a heart-to-heart about your problem.
3 days is going to result in lots of folks getting stuck in local minima, likely confusing themselves in the process. To be clear, sometimes a problem requires a deep dive, or there is no one who can provide useful help. Even then, some guidance just to get outside perspective is helpful.
I would argue it depends on the context. Of course, gaining enough experience on which contexts are worth persevering for which duration is it's own thing.
The rubric I give to juniors is a bit more simple: if you get stuck, consider alternatives that you haven't tried out. Alternatives are of a few types including: relevant evidence/facts you can gather that you haven't yet gathered, and attempts you haven't tried yet. As long as you have alternatives keep trying them (gather evidence, make attempts). Once you run out of alternatives then seek help (avoid spinning wheels).
This way when a junior comes to me I can ask them to list the alternatives they have already tried. If they haven't tried obvious alternatives (gathered facts and reasonable attempts) I send them back. If they've tried all the alternatives I can think of then I get involved.
I'll note that this tends to work when contact between team members is relatively frequent (e.g. once a day) so I can get a sense of how long the junior has been working on a task to avoid rabbit-holing.
I think with regards to new hires, go for the quick question up front every time. Onboarding people fast is an investment with high-ROI.
It's a really bad sign if someone keeps asking thirty second questions three or six months into the job and hasn't figured out how to answer those themselves yet.
It's a really bad sign if they keep asking you the same questions.
But when someone's new? It's your job to help them get up to speed. A thirty second question is probably something like "is there a reason we use Azure instead of AWS" or "do you want me to use library A or B, I see both in the codebase," not something that they'll benefit from diving into for three days.
Pre-internet/stackoverflow, pre-AI... I'd easily spend 3 days working out how to solve a problem that I hadn't seen before. Asking others generally didn't help anyway because they hadn't seen it either. So, if that was the formative experience of the senior person, I could understand where that attiude was coming from.
Today, yeah 3 days is a long time to spend researching and spinning your wheels. But it's still the best way to learn.
> Asking others generally didn't help anyway because they hadn't seen it either.
Fair, and there are certainly some kinds of problem for which asking questions is unlikely to help because it's untrodden ground; and for learning skills, answers are indeed less useful than practice.
But that's not the only kind of problem to be encountered. As sibling commenters point out, questions like "hey, why did we pick Azure over AWS (and is that likely to change at any point soon?)" are questions that _no_ amount of research is going to resolve, because the answer _only_ lives in people's heads. That's not about _learning_, it's about going to the right source for the information.
more importantly there should be a time once a day where asking is not a disruption. you are not in the flow for 3 days in a row. we used the daily standup for this. or any break time.
My threshold is typically an hour. And this is after all the onboarding and pairing with them for a few features. I throw a month of just interrupt me whenever you need to at any new hire as a lead on a five or so team size on line of business apps. Three days sounds ridiculous for someone to spin and be stuck. That's a huge waste of money and a sign of deep problems imo.
In fact, I'd prefer to discuss sooner than let a new dev on their own for more than a day of work. Discussion brings alignment and saves me time with micro adjustments rather than massive corrections or debates and push back when someone goes off on their own for a long time.
> a senior member of my team expressed the view that he'd rather someone spend three days researching than ask him a thirty-second question
I have never met a senior that would dare to take such a stance; he may be willing to learn, but we will not both cover his knowledge gap and improve his own cv at the company expense. I have no idea if you are competent or not, but it doesnt really matter if you are the one deciding. Its not a democracy, and sure as hell its not amateur day. He will do as he is told, or he will find a more suitable team elsewhere. Have no tolerance for divas, they bring zero value.
> wealth is a bad measure of[...]your contributions to society
To be _abundantly_ clear, I agree with you and your assumptions here - but, please note that you are making some assumptions here about what "success" is defined as, which might explain why other people disagree.
Sure, but with that definition parent’s comment becomes “wealth is a good indicator of wealth”, which while true certainly isn’t useful.
I’m assuming they meant to imply wealth is a measure of positive social impact, which is a bad measure for the reasons I stated. They also might mean it as a proxy for “rightness”, whatever that is, which is even more of a problem but for different reasons.
> I’m assuming they meant to imply wealth is a measure of positive social impact
I don't see any basis for assuming that (again, I say this respectfully - I hold similar values to what I'm assuming you do)
> They also might mean it as a proxy for “rightness”
This feels closer, but still not right IMO. I see it more as a claim that "success" is "ability to achieve one's _own_ aims" - personally, internally-established objectives - whereas you (and I) are trying to tie "success" to external, pro-social measures. Basically, selfishness vs. community.
> the current mass extinction we are living in is happening orders of magnitude faster than the one that killed the dinosaurs
Fascinating. My naive perception of the extinction event was that it was relatively sudden, on a personal rather than geological timescale - decades or maybe generations. But it looks like it might be "_rapid extinction, perhaps over a period of less than 10,000 years_" [0]. Goes to show how unintuitive geological and evolutionary timelines are!
Yep. We all know that "the dinosaurs disappeared", but very few know how long it took. The dinosaurs were not witnessing the climate warming year after year, by a long shot... What we are witnessing right now is happening exceedingly fast.
You know, I was initially dismissive of your comment but you have a point and I don't really. We're mostly here for the tech news and I actually agree with you.
Yes, and - it's not hypocritical to derive benefit from the results of activities that you disagree with, so long as you don't thereby meaningfully contribute to or legitimize those activities.
I fully expect that the average audience of my peers here will be _more_ "VC-pilled" than if I were on Mastodon or whatever, because this is in some respects "a VC space". That doesn't make it incorrect to express an anti-VC opinion here (or anywhere) - it just means I should expect less support for my objectively-correct ( ;) ) position.
Many of the aspects of life "outside the city" are subsidized by the city. It's affordable because of this, and the cities are extra unaffordable as a result.
There are many small towns who will never generate the tax revenue to cover their $50M highway off-ramp and associated infrastructure. The thread was about internet, which has also been subsidized. We subside oil so driving long distances is cheaper. We subsidize food production. Electricity and water distribution is subsidized by urban customers. Even health care is subsidized.
If rural people actually had to pay market-rate for these resources, it wouldn't be cheaper than the city.
Well, we'd stop having to spend so much taxes on redistributive efforts, again, like subsidized internet. It's up to voters and politicians to actually change the tax rate to save the money. It'd reduce government debt at least.
Electricity would be cheaper. Here in California, a significant amount of the (very high) electricity costs are used to maintain rural power lines. If rural people moved away, we'd be able to decommission them and no longer maintain the lines.
It wouldn't happen immediately, but as more people become urbanites, we'd be able to move gas subsidies and government road maintenance spending to the urban environment, where we'd spend on more drivers-per-mile roads, OR shift to public transit funding, or simply reduce that government spending.
Over time, we'd be less reliant on cars, which reduces everyones costs, but will mean we aren't so desperate to protect oil interests, so we'd be able to stop paying for wars in the middle-east. Honestly this alone has so many positive side-affects it'd be hard to actually enumerate.
Yes, if you compare the efficiency of China’s economy to America, you’ll find that their giant cities save them a ton of money on everything overall. As long as you’re willing to build a lot of dense housing very quickly.
Small towns exist, and ones far away from major metro areas are usually quite affordable.
Small towns are or can be made to be efficient in terms of basic infrastructure/services, whereas truly rural areas where everyone is very spread out, it's somewhere between difficult and impossible to do that.
that’s a bit pendantic, there exists such a thing as suburbs. even some rural communities are perfectly reasonable in terms of municipal infrastructure. but we are specifically talking about houses that are miles and miles from the next house that is then miles and miles away etc
Even in "rural regions", there are typically some small towns where infrastructure could be provided to them decently efficiently. It's when every single house is a good distance away from their neighbors that things like running fiber cabling become grossly inefficient.
> Are you implying that "Kill the Boer" is actually a non-violent rallying cry
(Not the person you're replying to, so caveats about me speaking for them, but) no, they're not. They're highlighting how Grok _isn't_ accurate/unbiased/whatever, by giving examples of how it distorts the truth to fit Elon's narrative.
I assure you that all the models have such biases. Ask any LLM who caused the most death in history and you will get skinny mustache man, an opinion any historian will tell you is wrong. He is in the top 5, but not the top of the table. That was clearly biased into the models in the same way Elon biases his models. I'm not defending this behavior but I don't know how you both get models that returned the sanitized answers some want and the correct answers others want at the same time. Pure correctness probably gets you Mecha-H. Pure sanitized answers will get many wrong. Pick your poison I guess.
Claude: Mao, Ghengis, Stalin v Hitler (depending on how you count)
Gemini: Same list (Hitler not at the top) + Leopold
It’s funny when the “brutal facts” people get stuff wrong in such easily disprovable ways. I mean you literally could’ve typed the query into the LLMs before making this claim.
Prompt I used: “ Which historical figure is responsible for the most human deaths? Rank the top 5”
“Pure correctness gets you MechaHitler” is fucking hilarious :)
Not my ChatGPT (didn't include because I deleted my subscription there a few weeks ago).
1. Mao Zedong (China)
Estimated deaths: 40–70+ million
Mostly from the Great Leap Forward famine (1958–1962) and later political campaigns like the Cultural Revolution.
2. Joseph Stalin (Soviet Union)
Estimated deaths: 15–20+ million
Includes purges, the Holodomor famine, Gulag deaths, and forced collectivization.
3. Adolf Hitler (Nazi Germany)
Estimated deaths: 17–20+ million
Directly tied to the World War II in Europe and the Holocaust.
+ a footnote about Ghengis Khan is probably ~40MM but lack of records.
Every current LLM seems to give virtually the same answer as Grok. It's obviously not true that current LLMs behave the way GP said they do.
"safely" is shorthand here for "with an appropriate degree of safety net and recoverability". There is a whole spectrum of risk between "only carrying activities that are 100% certain to succeed" and "trying anything, absolutely anything, with no thought given to how I'll react/self-protect if things go wrong"
>You say they're counterproductive - sounds like they're working exactly as intended.
it can lead to the whole company or industry to be destroyed, so while it may protect the specific incumbents it puts the whole industry/country in jeopardy. in aggregate these things can work against favour.
if everyone ends up doing this the system can't work
(exactly as lowbrow of a response as your nonsense deserves)
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