The most important subsection is "Most moments of distraction are caused by internal triggers." But that section lacks anything approaching concrete advice. It just repeats already written ideas then offers this:
> So if you want to deal with distraction the first thing you have to do is deal with the negative emotional triggers that lead to it.
The next section, regardless of the title, is about routines rather than internal-emotional triggers and is primarily an anecdote about their writing with no larger take-aways.
I think it is an article with good ideas, going down the right road, but never quite reaches a useful destination. Too bad.
> But that section lacks anything approaching concrete advice.
Maybe because he wants to sell his book :)
Also notice he uses distraction instead of procrastination most of the time. The core ides is solid though that it's a emotion management problem. If you can control your emotions related to a given task, you can be more productive.
Sometimes one of the triggers is that it’s hard, and if it’s a hard thing you have to regularly do, you should be looking to find a way to do it easier.
Otherwise it becomes a suck-it-up-and-just-do-it strategy, which is a fine when used reasonably, but it too can be exhausted as a strategy.
But anyway, all of our tools and progress flys in the face of the author’s suggestion. We are at this point in society because we put a lot of thought into not having to work hard.
I think it's worth distinguishing between hard work (working long hours), rote work (doing lots of menial work) and challenging work (important work that requires attention/concentration).
I agree with you that rote work should be minimized with better tools and processes. I can delegate the bookkeeping for example.
Hard work seems like a matter of culture. There might be the expectation from your organisation, family, community etc. that working long hours is the only right way of working. But I don't think that's what the author is addresssing here.
So that leaves challenging work, like writing, marketing, cold-calling, etc. I should be cold-calling much more for example, but I've become quite proficient in finding excuses not to do it (one of them is that it's illegal here in Germany for my product in many cases). I certainly see the author's point about avoiding the discomfort for these types of activities.
Sometimes completely eliminating rote work is a mistake. If there’s a lot of challenging work to be done, doing some rote work can be used to rest some while still staying basically on-task and minimizing context-switching costs.
It's not about working hard, but about accepting that it's okay to feel challenged by work. Reducing the amount of work is, of course, great, but unless you completely automate your job it's never going to be always easy.
On the contrary, I feel pretty comfortable after reading the whole article. It's well written and examples provided by the author are really illuminating. Anyway, there's no universally applicable advice for everyone. I think we just need some patience and effort to find the right path for ourselves. Try not to make the hard work easy. :)
I got the following concrete advice from this article:
- Procrastination/distractions are reactions to discomfort: “They’re not character flaws, they’re emotional regulation problems”. So: try to to develop better internal tools to manage discomfort.
- Things like email or items checked off TODO lists are more pernicious, because they feel productive. Recognize this.
- Set a routine (e.g. work 2 hours on writing), not targets (word count).
- When you do sit down to work, expect discomfort, e.g. from boredom, frustration, anxiety, uncertainty. When it arises, instead of trying to get away from it, lean into it: approach it with curiosity, like a scientist.
- When you get an itch to go look up something, instead of acting immediately, set it aside for 10 minutes (I'd say an hour) — and see if you still care at the end of it.
- For urges that don't go away, “surf the urge”: sit with the sensation and examine it.
- Once you have made some progress in managing your internal triggers (e.g. can deal with some discomfort), try to understand your values (the kind of person you want to be/become). Then create a schedule for tomorrow that fits it.
- Remove external triggers, those that tend to distract you.
- For tasks where all this still doesn't help, try some “pacts”, like the one in the article about the $100 bill.
This may not seem “anything approaching concrete advice” but his defence in the article is that this is his strategy: “There isn’t going to be one tactic that works for everyone. You use the strategy to try individual tactics until you find the right formula for you.”
On the contrary, I really found this article insightful.
Yes, there are few concrete pieces of advice to tackle the "internal triggers" of distraction. These are to be found in ourself and any tricks, like turning off all of the notifications, will only address the surface of the problem. Any concrete advice would risk here to conceal the truth that that hard word is not easy.
I like the path proposed by the article.
* searching in oneself for the deep obstacles toward our goals. boredom? loneliness? fatigue? uncertainty?
* clarifying our priorities into a concrete daily schedule;
* imposing ourselves a routine on what matters
* and even using pacts with ourselves.
Looking closely at my own current habits, this helped me to better understand what I already do well and what I need to improve.
ITIL and anything related to providing support and services, is diametrically opposed to the idea of blocking out and being unhelpful to other peoples' progress. Support and being supportive, even assisting with organizing workflows, is work too.
I wish technical people would stop using the words hard and easy. In general use when developers use the word easy is it supposed to mean simple, convenient, done by somebody else, low timeframe, fewer steps, less research, faster learning, something else, or all of the above?
Even more, the words “bad” and “good”. Yes we should be using the words “simpler”, “more maintainable”, “more approachable for newcomers” etc and their opposites.
Engineering is all tradeoffs- let’s be precise on our adjectives unless we’re talking about things that are like 95% of the time a bad idea (eg goto statements?)
But I remember a funny quote, once: "Laziness is the mother of invention."
I'm big on Personal Integrity, Habit, and Personal Challenge.
1) I Have Integrity.
This means that I have a "personal code." There's things that I will do, every time, and things that I won't do, ever. There's conscious, considered postures on various aspects of life, accompanied by rigorous self-inventory, and immediate correction/amends when I stray from beam.
I often think about why I do something, as well as how I do it. I'm constantly applying my Integrity Lens on what I do.
It's also important that I apply this lens only to myself. Life gets fairly miserable, if I am constantly measuring everyone else with my lens. There was an episode of "The Adventures of Pete and Pete," where they encountered "Inspector 34."
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." -Aristotle
I cannot stress enough how important habit is to everything I do.
My GitHub ID is solid green. I'm coding many, many hours a day.
I want to be a good coder, so I code. There's no substitute.
Ever watch a really good musician at work? Watch their hands, as they do it? They have a relaxed, casual demeanor, as they play a cheap, beat-up old Univox, and we say to ourselves "That's so easy! I could do it!"
Then we run out, buy a PRS guitar and a top-shelf amp, and sound like a couple of cats..."having fun."
That musician spends several hours a day, practicing the most boring stuff imaginable. I have a friend that picks up his guitar, every chance he gets, and just runs through scales, constantly. It's completely automatic and without any thought.
Also, a bit maddening...
3) I Challenge Myself
I try to always be "biting off more than I can chew." If I habitually work on stuff that makes me sweat and worry, then the basics are almost thoughtless. Works like a charm.
None of those three things are unique to me. They are patterns, not inventions. I hang around a lot of folks that are always doing them, and we seem to be a fairly happy bunch.
I think that a lot of the reasons for "making hard work easy" is a sincere effort to "commoditize" experience. Corporations, especially in the Software Development industry, are obsessed with hiring cheap, inexperienced engineers (often, quite brilliant, but inexperienced), and expecting them to have output like experienced, top-shelf developers that have been doing the 3 things I mentioned above for decades.
Also, there's what I call a "cargo cult" mentality, where we think that if we dress the part, and learn the lingo, it will somehow make us what we want to be.
It makes sense, when we think about it, but never seems to actually work.
In my experience, there's no substitute for Integrity, Habit and Challenge.
"There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."
-H. L. Mencken
"Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think."
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the TEX project is that software is hard. It's harder than anything else I've ever had to do."
Now that deploying a website is 1 click, what kinds of mistakes go away, what other processes you can integrate with that deploy, and what is the gain of deploying more often?
For the specific case of deployment, just by the chance of error, I would say it's already above break-even on the first deployment.
> For example; If I spend 10 hours making a website deployable in 1 click, how many websites do I have to deploy before it's worth doing?
How many times do you need to deploy a website? At certain stages of development, probably many times a day. Automating it would not only pay for itself in few days, it also enables CI/CD and a whole new category of tests to be run.
I don't buy any of his arguments other than pointing out the obvious: distractions are caused by internal triggers. We've known that attention deficit disorders have been caused by emotional disregulation for a long time and you don't even need to look at the studies to figure it out: just sit your butt down and look at the chaos of your own self bloom, AKA meditate.
I also don't buy into the title's command to stop trying to make hard work easy. Apart from reproduction, that's literally what organisms are wired to do: make biologically demanding processes less demanding so we can free up more energy so we can have more babies.
This is a new person reiterating old ideas in a broken way.
Work becomes hard when you allow yourself to become an agent of your own negative internal triggers. It's not hard if you possess the techniques to judo it to the ground (see meditation).
Distractions are definitely caused by internal triggers and sometimes there is no perfect way to deal with them.
I'm adding features to an existing service, and it causes me emotional distress, because there are 3 layers of legacy code next to the stuff I'm adding. I so want to go hog wild and rip up the old stuff. The only problem being, we're short on time and devs right now, so I have to add these strategic features.
Here's how I deal with it: Chunk up the work, and think of the next small piece I can accomplish. Get started on something, and leave the last easy piece sitting there while I take a break. When I come back and finish that chunk I have a positive reward feeling for finishing a chunk of code. Then I feel more like starting the next piece.
How do you establish a no-tech-distractions policy?
I can relate to your experience. However, I struggle with keeping digital entertainment away from me. On good days, I keep away from entertainment until I'm done with work. On unproductive days, I start one thing piece of entertainment and collapse through a series of distractions. It's like, I start with Instagram, find myself on reddit, then on Youtube, then on Netflix, then on porn. I have this problem of the dopamine train which I unwillingly get on. Can you offer some advice?
I think it's important to have something to return to after your break. It's also important to feel like you are making progress.
If you can think of your breaks as breaks, that may help. It is important to recognize and deal with the emotions that are keeping you away from work. The time away from work/code/whatever is not the problem.
But really, this is the key problem of my digital worklife. I used to work construction and I was able to stay on task all day. For a long time I thought I was able to do that because I was away from distractions; and that is definitely part of it. But another part is the fact that software development is creative work and technical in a league almost by itself.
You have to be creative, but you also have to be correct. It's hard to be both at the same time. Maybe if you split your time between being creative and correct it could help?
I suppose y'all pumping this story are aware this concept was already started by someone else? Which probably makes sense, given the pre-loading of key terms "stp tring mae har eas" in this new user's post.
Can we get a "request title change" button similar to "flag"? A significant number of articles get to the front page due to a flashy title and are a complete bait-and-switch when you read the actual content.
>“Well, I have news for you: some things are just hard. There’s no way of getting around it.”
If you think this, but I have a way to make something 10x easier that you can't or don't know how to do then I can sell my idea to you as a service for a monthly subscription fee.
Don't change the topic. We're talking about you and your entire career spent making systems that only exist because of sales people have insider connections with big companies.
Then ERP locks in their tech in by tightly integrating your shit system with business processes so the company can never leave without a massive overhaul. ERP is another word for technical debt that can never be removed.
Nobody would be using your shit product otherwise.
It was the first 7 years of my career - not my whole career.
Of course there is a large amount of lock in, how else would it work? You're modelling every business process on software, to move away from that would be costly. That's the very nature of software, especially complex software modelling real world complex critical processes. This isn't some ticketing app written in node that you can change as easily as your socks. This is the system that powers the worlds finance systems and supply chains.
I'm aware of the downsides, I've written whole chapters in books about the downsides. DO you think your 22 year old smart arse ignorance is somehow impressing me?
It's easy to hate something that's too complex for you to understand. Idiots have done that throughout history.
>DO you think your 22 year old smart arse ignorance is somehow impressing me?
Get off your high horse. Do you think your words would make anyone want to impress you? I assure you 100% I absolutely give 0 shits about anything that you've done.
Let me tell you what's going on in my mind so you can understand your fellow humans better:
I fucking hate you. I want to end you. Do you fucking get it? I think you represent one of the worst examples of how low humanity can sink. Lack of respect for other people, complete arrogance and inability to communicate respectfully with another person.
>t's easy to hate something that's too complex for you to understand.
I don't hate something I don't understand, I ask questions, try to find out more. What I hate it people who lack common human decency (you).
We've banned this account for obvious reasons spanning multiple threads. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
We've banned this account for obvious reasons spanning multiple threads. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
I'm sad to ban someone who's been here for 9 years and made many positive contributions, but the damage you did in the last 24 hours on HN is outrageous, and this has been a problem more than once in the past (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17791870).
It's ok. I expected this. Consider this a criticism of HN. Maybe one day I'll email you and give you a reason. But I can always just make a new account.
Basically I tried using the flag multiple times when I'm insulted and you have failed repeatedly to remedy the situation and there were even times you basically unflagged the people who have been offensive. I'm left in a situation where I invested a lot of time into writing comments and I have to just take it and I have no mechanism to protect myself because every response I make is an opening for them to subtract my karma.
It's emotionally taxing to invest time into writing comments here and emotionally taxing to read insulting criticism and just sit there and take the insult when you've basically been ignoring my flags.
The fact that you selectively moderate everything has led me to realize that it's not worth it to invest time to write my opinions on HN. What's outrageous is that I've been here 9 years and I just decided it's not worth it to let this bad actor insult me and sit here while you basically ignore the whole situation.
The only reason you responded is because I decided to defend my self and this amped up the situation two fold. Other than that his rude responses would have been completely ignored even if I flagged his posts.
>I'm sad to ban someone who's been here for 9 years and made many positive contributions,
This is just not true. You aren't even aware of what positive contributions I have made to HN. I've just been here for a while.
Why am I even writing this. It's not like you care enough to change.
I care enough to respond to you, for what it's worth. I think the main problem here is the experience of being insulted and the wish to defend against insults. Because we have so little information about each other in these little internet comments, it's extremely easy to perceive insults where there wasn't anything much. More importantly though, even if someone does post an insult, it's just a shitty internet comment. Why respond in kind? It's beneath your dignity and does no good. It feeds the other person's inclination to go further, and damages the container here. I'm not suggesting that you turn the other cheek exactly; just that it's in your and HN's interest for you to just ignore it when people post nasty things.
I believe readers (intelligent ones at least) look to see who stopped replying first and extend greater respect to that one. It feels exactly the opposite in the moment: I have to defend myself lest the other comment stand unrefuted. But actually the commenter with the greater strength to ignore insults and/or walk away is the one who looks better on the internet. I'm writing this for myself as much as anything, since I find this a difficult lesson to learn.
I disagree with the author. Yes,there are some things out there that are very difficult and people don't try to pretend they are not(e.g. quantum physics, biochemistry,etc.). However,very often,it's the middle part between you and the subject. For instance a poorly written book can make any subject challenging.A poor teacher can make even elementary things hard to grasp. Poor communication can lead to situations where nobody would have a clue anymore and etc.And the worst part, especially in our so beloved tech industry,is that quite often the loudest voices are exactly the ones that should be kept quiet at all costs to make things less difficult.
57 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadThe most important subsection is "Most moments of distraction are caused by internal triggers." But that section lacks anything approaching concrete advice. It just repeats already written ideas then offers this:
> So if you want to deal with distraction the first thing you have to do is deal with the negative emotional triggers that lead to it.
The next section, regardless of the title, is about routines rather than internal-emotional triggers and is primarily an anecdote about their writing with no larger take-aways.
I think it is an article with good ideas, going down the right road, but never quite reaches a useful destination. Too bad.
Maybe because he wants to sell his book :)
Also notice he uses distraction instead of procrastination most of the time. The core ides is solid though that it's a emotion management problem. If you can control your emotions related to a given task, you can be more productive.
> Nir is also an advisor to several Bay Area start-ups, venture capitalists, and incubators.
Good it's on the front page of HN ;)
Otherwise it becomes a suck-it-up-and-just-do-it strategy, which is a fine when used reasonably, but it too can be exhausted as a strategy.
But anyway, all of our tools and progress flys in the face of the author’s suggestion. We are at this point in society because we put a lot of thought into not having to work hard.
The irony of working hard to not work hard.
I agree with you that rote work should be minimized with better tools and processes. I can delegate the bookkeeping for example.
Hard work seems like a matter of culture. There might be the expectation from your organisation, family, community etc. that working long hours is the only right way of working. But I don't think that's what the author is addresssing here.
So that leaves challenging work, like writing, marketing, cold-calling, etc. I should be cold-calling much more for example, but I've become quite proficient in finding excuses not to do it (one of them is that it's illegal here in Germany for my product in many cases). I certainly see the author's point about avoiding the discomfort for these types of activities.
I guess the widely availability of free sources has skewed perspective on what is of value.
- Procrastination/distractions are reactions to discomfort: “They’re not character flaws, they’re emotional regulation problems”. So: try to to develop better internal tools to manage discomfort.
- Things like email or items checked off TODO lists are more pernicious, because they feel productive. Recognize this.
- Set a routine (e.g. work 2 hours on writing), not targets (word count).
- When you do sit down to work, expect discomfort, e.g. from boredom, frustration, anxiety, uncertainty. When it arises, instead of trying to get away from it, lean into it: approach it with curiosity, like a scientist.
- When you get an itch to go look up something, instead of acting immediately, set it aside for 10 minutes (I'd say an hour) — and see if you still care at the end of it.
- For urges that don't go away, “surf the urge”: sit with the sensation and examine it.
- Once you have made some progress in managing your internal triggers (e.g. can deal with some discomfort), try to understand your values (the kind of person you want to be/become). Then create a schedule for tomorrow that fits it.
- Remove external triggers, those that tend to distract you.
- For tasks where all this still doesn't help, try some “pacts”, like the one in the article about the $100 bill.
This may not seem “anything approaching concrete advice” but his defence in the article is that this is his strategy: “There isn’t going to be one tactic that works for everyone. You use the strategy to try individual tactics until you find the right formula for you.”
Yes, there are few concrete pieces of advice to tackle the "internal triggers" of distraction. These are to be found in ourself and any tricks, like turning off all of the notifications, will only address the surface of the problem. Any concrete advice would risk here to conceal the truth that that hard word is not easy.
I like the path proposed by the article.
* searching in oneself for the deep obstacles toward our goals. boredom? loneliness? fatigue? uncertainty?
* clarifying our priorities into a concrete daily schedule;
* imposing ourselves a routine on what matters
* and even using pacts with ourselves.
Looking closely at my own current habits, this helped me to better understand what I already do well and what I need to improve.
The is the first time I have seen it.
Engineering is all tradeoffs- let’s be precise on our adjectives unless we’re talking about things that are like 95% of the time a bad idea (eg goto statements?)
But I remember a funny quote, once: "Laziness is the mother of invention."
I'm big on Personal Integrity, Habit, and Personal Challenge.
1) I Have Integrity.
This means that I have a "personal code." There's things that I will do, every time, and things that I won't do, ever. There's conscious, considered postures on various aspects of life, accompanied by rigorous self-inventory, and immediate correction/amends when I stray from beam.
I often think about why I do something, as well as how I do it. I'm constantly applying my Integrity Lens on what I do.
It's also important that I apply this lens only to myself. Life gets fairly miserable, if I am constantly measuring everyone else with my lens. There was an episode of "The Adventures of Pete and Pete," where they encountered "Inspector 34."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyEzVEvQYEc
2) I Establish good habits.
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." -Aristotle
I cannot stress enough how important habit is to everything I do.
My GitHub ID is solid green. I'm coding many, many hours a day.
I want to be a good coder, so I code. There's no substitute.
Ever watch a really good musician at work? Watch their hands, as they do it? They have a relaxed, casual demeanor, as they play a cheap, beat-up old Univox, and we say to ourselves "That's so easy! I could do it!"
Then we run out, buy a PRS guitar and a top-shelf amp, and sound like a couple of cats..."having fun."
That musician spends several hours a day, practicing the most boring stuff imaginable. I have a friend that picks up his guitar, every chance he gets, and just runs through scales, constantly. It's completely automatic and without any thought.
Also, a bit maddening...
3) I Challenge Myself
I try to always be "biting off more than I can chew." If I habitually work on stuff that makes me sweat and worry, then the basics are almost thoughtless. Works like a charm.
I write about that here: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-...
TL;DR
None of those three things are unique to me. They are patterns, not inventions. I hang around a lot of folks that are always doing them, and we seem to be a fairly happy bunch.
I think that a lot of the reasons for "making hard work easy" is a sincere effort to "commoditize" experience. Corporations, especially in the Software Development industry, are obsessed with hiring cheap, inexperienced engineers (often, quite brilliant, but inexperienced), and expecting them to have output like experienced, top-shelf developers that have been doing the 3 things I mentioned above for decades.
Also, there's what I call a "cargo cult" mentality, where we think that if we dress the part, and learn the lingo, it will somehow make us what we want to be.
It makes sense, when we think about it, but never seems to actually work.
In my experience, there's no substitute for Integrity, Habit and Challenge.
"There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong." -H. L. Mencken
"Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think." -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
However, the sections on dealing with external triggers and pacts are pretty practical advice in the current climate.
This works for him for writing, you see what applies for your field of work.
Donald Knuth
What I always seem to forget is that; Making the hard work easy has diminishing returns.
For example; If I spend 10 hours making a website deployable in 1 click, how many websites do I have to deploy before it's worth doing?
Of course it depends, but usually it's important to work on the problem that matters, not the meta problem.
[1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving
[2] https://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization
There is of course a xkcd for that:
https://xkcd.com/1205/
I think there's definitely a time and a place for the problem vs the meta problem.
Now that deploying a website is 1 click, what kinds of mistakes go away, what other processes you can integrate with that deploy, and what is the gain of deploying more often?
For the specific case of deployment, just by the chance of error, I would say it's already above break-even on the first deployment.
How many times do you need to deploy a website? At certain stages of development, probably many times a day. Automating it would not only pay for itself in few days, it also enables CI/CD and a whole new category of tests to be run.
https://wiki.c2.com/?SharpenTheSaw
http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/TheParableOfTheToaster.html
I also don't buy into the title's command to stop trying to make hard work easy. Apart from reproduction, that's literally what organisms are wired to do: make biologically demanding processes less demanding so we can free up more energy so we can have more babies.
This is a new person reiterating old ideas in a broken way.
Work becomes hard when you allow yourself to become an agent of your own negative internal triggers. It's not hard if you possess the techniques to judo it to the ground (see meditation).
I'm adding features to an existing service, and it causes me emotional distress, because there are 3 layers of legacy code next to the stuff I'm adding. I so want to go hog wild and rip up the old stuff. The only problem being, we're short on time and devs right now, so I have to add these strategic features.
Here's how I deal with it: Chunk up the work, and think of the next small piece I can accomplish. Get started on something, and leave the last easy piece sitting there while I take a break. When I come back and finish that chunk I have a positive reward feeling for finishing a chunk of code. Then I feel more like starting the next piece.
I can relate to your experience. However, I struggle with keeping digital entertainment away from me. On good days, I keep away from entertainment until I'm done with work. On unproductive days, I start one thing piece of entertainment and collapse through a series of distractions. It's like, I start with Instagram, find myself on reddit, then on Youtube, then on Netflix, then on porn. I have this problem of the dopamine train which I unwillingly get on. Can you offer some advice?
I think it's important to have something to return to after your break. It's also important to feel like you are making progress.
If you can think of your breaks as breaks, that may help. It is important to recognize and deal with the emotions that are keeping you away from work. The time away from work/code/whatever is not the problem.
But really, this is the key problem of my digital worklife. I used to work construction and I was able to stay on task all day. For a long time I thought I was able to do that because I was away from distractions; and that is definitely part of it. But another part is the fact that software development is creative work and technical in a league almost by itself.
You have to be creative, but you also have to be correct. It's hard to be both at the same time. Maybe if you split your time between being creative and correct it could help?
Sorry I can't help more.
You need to find your own method as you better understand the problem. Ie., stop trying to make hard things easy...
https://medium.com/swlh/stop-trying-to-make-everything-easy-...
If you think this, but I have a way to make something 10x easier that you can't or don't know how to do then I can sell my idea to you as a service for a monthly subscription fee.
Then ERP locks in their tech in by tightly integrating your shit system with business processes so the company can never leave without a massive overhaul. ERP is another word for technical debt that can never be removed.
Nobody would be using your shit product otherwise.
Of course there is a large amount of lock in, how else would it work? You're modelling every business process on software, to move away from that would be costly. That's the very nature of software, especially complex software modelling real world complex critical processes. This isn't some ticketing app written in node that you can change as easily as your socks. This is the system that powers the worlds finance systems and supply chains.
I'm aware of the downsides, I've written whole chapters in books about the downsides. DO you think your 22 year old smart arse ignorance is somehow impressing me?
It's easy to hate something that's too complex for you to understand. Idiots have done that throughout history.
Get off your high horse. Do you think your words would make anyone want to impress you? I assure you 100% I absolutely give 0 shits about anything that you've done.
Let me tell you what's going on in my mind so you can understand your fellow humans better:
I fucking hate you. I want to end you. Do you fucking get it? I think you represent one of the worst examples of how low humanity can sink. Lack of respect for other people, complete arrogance and inability to communicate respectfully with another person.
>t's easy to hate something that's too complex for you to understand.
I don't hate something I don't understand, I ask questions, try to find out more. What I hate it people who lack common human decency (you).
I'm sad to ban someone who's been here for 9 years and made many positive contributions, but the damage you did in the last 24 hours on HN is outrageous, and this has been a problem more than once in the past (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17791870).
Basically I tried using the flag multiple times when I'm insulted and you have failed repeatedly to remedy the situation and there were even times you basically unflagged the people who have been offensive. I'm left in a situation where I invested a lot of time into writing comments and I have to just take it and I have no mechanism to protect myself because every response I make is an opening for them to subtract my karma.
It's emotionally taxing to invest time into writing comments here and emotionally taxing to read insulting criticism and just sit there and take the insult when you've basically been ignoring my flags.
The fact that you selectively moderate everything has led me to realize that it's not worth it to invest time to write my opinions on HN. What's outrageous is that I've been here 9 years and I just decided it's not worth it to let this bad actor insult me and sit here while you basically ignore the whole situation.
The only reason you responded is because I decided to defend my self and this amped up the situation two fold. Other than that his rude responses would have been completely ignored even if I flagged his posts.
>I'm sad to ban someone who's been here for 9 years and made many positive contributions,
This is just not true. You aren't even aware of what positive contributions I have made to HN. I've just been here for a while.
Why am I even writing this. It's not like you care enough to change.
I believe readers (intelligent ones at least) look to see who stopped replying first and extend greater respect to that one. It feels exactly the opposite in the moment: I have to defend myself lest the other comment stand unrefuted. But actually the commenter with the greater strength to ignore insults and/or walk away is the one who looks better on the internet. I'm writing this for myself as much as anything, since I find this a difficult lesson to learn.