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Comment by ndriscoll

1 day ago

I have plenty of faults. Depending on your perspective, my entire point is a "fault": I'm lazy and unambitious and decided to top out and coast in my career when I was like 30.

I'm simply happy with that. I can't offer a situation where I've been humiliated because it hasn't happened. I've never seen anyone get humiliated at work. Most work is honestly pretty boring and straightforward. I'm not Leonardo da Vinci here hoping I don't get scooped.

I mean I suppose a week or two ago another engineer proposed some simplification to a problem that I'd prototyped a solution for that basically eliminated 90% of the work I was doing (basically smuggling some information into SNI so that I wouldn't have to build a bunch of code to track it), so I guess that happened? But I just said "oh, yeah, you're right. I can delete like 90% of my MR. Nice."

But then I do that to myself all the time too. I have some first approach, and then like a week later notice some simplification I missed. That's normal? I just join stand-up that day and day "good news I realized this problem is way simpler so I can delete half the work I did."

In fact that's why I like working with smart people. They can help see things you missed when you accidentally get stuck in a rabbit hole. I'm not going to be mad at someone for making my life easier. And as I've said, I go to work to support my family, not to fulfill some existential need. Whatever makes work simpler is good in my book. That's also why I've enjoyed adopting LLMs this year: they make it so I don't have to spend as much mental energy on things that are fundamentally not that interesting to me

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ndriscoll

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threethirtytwo  1 day ago

>I can't offer a situation where I've been humiliated because it hasn't happened.

Then how do you even know what the emotion of "humiliation" even feels like if you never been humiliated before? Perhaps you felt such emotions in childhood but as an adult you've never been humiliated ever? Or perhaps you're going to tell a story of slight trivial humiliation when you accidentally used the wrong gender pronoun and that's the totality of your understanding of humiliation?

Your story is too perfect. It's fake-ish and as you tell more of it you're starting to see holes in it like your claim that you've never been humiliated before.

>I mean I suppose a week or two ago another engineer proposed some simplification to a problem that I'd prototyped a solution for that basically eliminated 90% of the work I was doing (basically smuggling some information into SNI so that I wouldn't have to build a bunch of code to track it), so I guess that happened? But I just said "oh, yeah, you're right. I can delete like 90% of my MR. Nice."

this is your least tame example yet, but it's still not humiliation. I in actually can't believe you felt perfectly fine and serene when the other engineer schooled your approach. I think if you were more honest with the story you would've admitted to slight to mild feelings of embarrassment and you just ended up humble about it as most humans would.

At this point you're just trying to show off your claimed non-status seeking personality... but your signaling has gone to the point where it's just a little too perfect. You should probably reply and add more realism to that story man, go ahead if you want: