January 4, 2017 at 9:47 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item What Do You Have Against a Little Hard Work?
January 5, 2017 at 2:04 am
I had a University professor who encouraged what he called Efficient Laziness. As a computer graphics lecturer he showed us an extremely long equation for a light illumination model then showed us an equivalent alternative, but much shorter, one. He said that in current displays using the latter over the former could not be seen by the vast majority of people so for performance purposes using the alternative was an example of Efficient Laziness. He then stipulated that not handing in work can never be called Efficient Laziness.
What is something hard that I have been putting off doing? After a life event covering most of 2014-2015, and not doing all of it each year for almost two decades, I have got piles and bags of paperwork that needs filing away so if it is ever needed I can find specific items. This will take me probably up to 80 hours which isn't a lot of time but always seems to be a lower priority than everything else. Trouble is that it gnaws away at me and clogs up my work area. I managed to do about 10 hours of it in December, however, I would love to say by Christmas 2017 the issue no longer exists.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
January 5, 2017 at 2:41 am
A triathlon? Respect...
My goal is to run 365km this year. That doesn't sound like much to a pro but if you come to think of it: I may not be able to run every week (illness, holidays, family matters, I've had surgery more than once, age :)).
Good advice says to set realistic goals. I think this one's realistic for me. It mostly depends on your personal situation.
Good luck to everyone in achieving your goal!
January 5, 2017 at 3:11 am
Gary Varga (1/5/2017)
What is something hard that I have been putting off doing? After a life event covering most of 2014-2015, and not doing all of it each year for almost two decades, I have got piles and bags of paperwork that needs filing away so if it is ever needed I can find specific items. This will take me probably up to 80 hours which isn't a lot of time but always seems to be a lower priority than everything else. Trouble is that it gnaws away at me and clogs up my work area. I managed to do about 10 hours of it in December, however, I would love to say by Christmas 2017 the issue no longer exists.
Ditto. Although fortunately I haven't got piles, just bags of paperwork ;-). Just remortgaging seems to give you an extra 6 inches thick of A4 paperwork, and you have to do it every 2 years or so to get the deals. I'm just happy not to get paper statements anymore for most things.
Exercise I love doing and do as much as possible. For me I need to make the effort to connect with people.
January 5, 2017 at 7:24 am
thierry.vandurme (1/5/2017)
A triathlon? Respect...My goal is to run 365km this year. That doesn't sound like much to a pro but if you come to think of it: I may not be able to run every week (illness, holidays, family matters, I've had surgery more than once, age :)).
Good advice says to set realistic goals. I think this one's realistic for me. It mostly depends on your personal situation.
Good luck to everyone in achieving your goal!
Well that's over a couple hundred miles. I used to run all the time. Now at my age I don't run at all. I would like to say I have walked that much by the end of the year.
January 5, 2017 at 7:48 am
I like hard work. Always have.
I have, however, found that just hard work is not always the best path. A very good case can be made for the straight path and the hard path being divergent and this is where I'd think we need to look for efficiencies - the proper balance between the two.
I crossed paths with one Carey Goldson when I worked at WebMD a few years back. I actually never met him for a one-on-one other than a couple of exchanged emails. However what struck me was how his leadership skills just showed. Call it an intangible, learned skill, whatever but when he would condense the two thoughts I see currently in this thread by asserting, "Two dots and a dash. Where are we, where do we want to go and what is the shortest path to get there?"
I think the whole lean startup mentality is a large explanation of Carey's succinct phrase. Hard work is inferred by the verbalized commitment contained in "getting there". "Whatever it takes." The same for the triathlete I'd wager. It's all about "getting there" in the shortest time and with the lease effort expended. Two dots and a dash.
The notion of creating the 'leanest' code is the same. It is easier to maintain, understand and use for multiple situations. The whole notion of idempotency is in the background here - no extra moves and if there are no additional result. In other words; efficiency.
My cousin Brian swims like a fish. He had some swim school training. His chest is ever so slightly convex and he has long fingers. Man, he just glides through the water. I, on the other hand, can certainly swim but not at all like my cousin. I am much less efficient. Lots of extra effort and energy. 🙂
On the other hand, this last year I was up at 5:30 and often to bed at 1:30 AM coding and moving about 15 tons of material in my yard. No sweat.
Both are needed but in the framework of the thought "Two dots and a dash."
January 5, 2017 at 10:38 am
I'd encourage every IT professional to learn some form of Powershell! A useful and easy to learn tool.
January 5, 2017 at 10:54 am
What is something hard that you have been putting off doing?
Saying "No" to my spouse... 😛
I need to get the home office back in order and complete some electronics and radio projects.
January 6, 2017 at 5:54 am
I'd say the hardest thing I keep putting off, is actually getting started on relatively easy things...
I want / need to go to the gym on a regular basis, but I tend to get home and zone out...
I want to write up an article for here, but I tend to get distracted by other projects...
Maybe what I should do is, make a short list of projects / tasks I want to accomplish, then just plan to work on one of them each week, rather than my current "shotgun" approach...
April 28, 2017 at 4:33 pm
I've reached the age where the triathlon that Ben describes is quite beyond me, in fact I doubt if I could do any one of its three parts although I would have been able to do it 50 years ago (the swim would have been easy, the run would have been work, and the bike would have been a pain because I hated cycling, but I could do it). Eleven years ago, when Ann and I first bought our house over here in Puerto del Carmen, I heard there was an annual triathlon here and had a look to see if I might be interested; I discovered that it was way beyond me, and I couldn't have done it even when I was young and fit. The swim is 3.8km (I could probably have done that in 1962, if I'd possessed a wet-suit), the bike is 182.2 km and is pretty hilly (with total height gain and total height loss each just over 2.55 km - the route and altitude charts are at http://eu.ironman.com/~/media/bdb433c2361d4d34877e067675264db6/map%20bike%202017.pdf) and would have been totally beyond me anytime in my life, and the run is 42.2km (a standard marathon) over fairly flat terrain (total height gain and loss 259 metres) which I might have been able to jog when I was young and fit but certainly couldn't ever have run. I guess it's a triathlon for real athletes.
I don't object to a bit of hard work (or even to a lot of hard work, in fact) but I do object to pointless hard work. There's a lot of pointless hard work in the computing game, sadly. Someone decides to do a new product the hard way and ends up spending 20 man years when the product could have been done the easy way for 4; of course than means that 5 times as many people have to be working on it at the same time so as not to make the availability date too late. That's somethong over an extra 2 million pounds in development cost (including overhead) perhaps quite a lot over depending on the company. The resulting product is a bit of a mess - it's hopelessly complex, bug-ridden, slow, and has a foul UI. So it costs a lot more in customer support (first line, second line, and third line) than it would if done the easy way - there goes an extra million pounds a year in support costs. The customers don't like it, they are fed up with bug after bug, they are fed up with the poor response from support, and the company's reputation takes a dive; some customers drop this supplier and turn elsewhere; some non-customers who were thinking of becoming customers see the reputation damage, maybe see existing customers departing, and decide to go elsewhere; so growth stops and revenue takes a dive. That's the cost of doing it the hard way, and it can be the beginning of the end for a company.
This can happen when some know-it-all "solution architect" (or pick your own choice of buzz-title) decides to impose a "clever" architecture on something and claims it will reduce the work, not increase it; it can happen when a development insists that a product intended to run eventually on several platforms must run on all platforms at first release instead of getting it working for the main market first and adding the other platforms later; it can happen when some know-it-all manager insists that all code be done in assembler "because that will give better performance" when in fact the appropriate language is Common Lisp, or C, or Fortran (I haven't seen the "everything must be assembler" idiocy in the last 45 years, but maybe I'm just lucky, because I saw it a few times before them; but I've seen the "nothing can be assembler" version - which is equally stupid when it creates extra hrd work - a couple of times since then) - these are all cases where someone is deliberately choosing to do something the hard way instead of the easy way. Perhaps my favorite example is when someone decides not to normalise to 2NF (or higher) because all those extra constraints and joins will make it run slower, forgetting that being in 3NF (or EKNF in the rare cases where 3NF doesn't imply EKNF) will remove a lot of code that will otherwise be needed to check those restrictions and ensure that anomalousa large class of invalid data can't be inserted into the database (and if he thinks about it at all decides that, like normalisation, such code in the database is pointless as it can all be checked in the C++ application, after all that's the language real code is written in and which ought to control what is and isn't allowed). Last time I saw that (or actually the aftermath of that) was in 2002. There's a lot of hard work as a result and the end result can be that the company goes broke, the product has to be scrapped, or a lot more unwnted hard work has to be done to escape from the mess - any of which means a vast financial loss.
So let's not encourage hard work just because it's hard work, let's encourage instead what I call constructive laziness and Gary's professor called efficient laziness.
Tom
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