
The Little Printf - lelf
https://ferd.ca/the-little-printf.html
======
mcguire
" _It is; and because you 're the most familiar person with these fires, you
get to only work on them more and more, until your employer hires someone else
to cover your old job, the one you loved. If you care hard enough about your
work to be the one doing the stuff everyone else hates, you're thanked by
doing more and more of that work you don't like, until that's all you do. And
then there's nothing left for you to enjoy._"

Sigh.

~~~
deadmik3
This stood out as the most realistic advice in the story to me. I've seen a
lot of people stuck working on stuff they don't like just because they're the
one who knows the most about it. The farther you go down that path, the harder
it is to get away.

~~~
Kalium
This one stood out to me as well. Like you, I agree that it's accurate. I've
both seen and lived it.

The others bother me because they're essentially malicious caricatures. This
one feels like a dose of sympathy.

~~~
mononcqc
Yeah. They're malicious caricatures, but as mentioned in the text, they're all
different sub-personalities I've at least had at some point in my career.

Also do note that the text is heavily copying The Little Prince, to the extent
that all characters are also malicious caricatures of adults, with only one of
them actually being perceived positively, so I tried to play to the original.

------
bootsz
_" The games people play, the roles and reputations they chase and entertain,
the fleeting pleasure they derive from solving intricate problems, is all fun
for a while. Ultimately though, if you do not solve anything worthwhile, if
you forget about the people involved, it's never gonna be truly fulfilling."

"It is the time you have spent on your system that makes it so important", the
man added, "and when you lost sight of why it made sense to spend time on it,
when it became a game of pride, it caused more grief than relief.

"Developers have often forgotten this truth; If you lose sight of things,
working on your system becomes its own problem, and the most effective
solution is to get rid of the system, given it's the problem."_

This story is easily one of the best depictions of the software engineering
profession I've ever come across. I originally got hooked on programming
because of the thrill of solving "intricate problems"... but the fleeting
nature of that thrill only becomes more and more apparent as time goes on.
Fundamentally I think it's necessary to have a deeper motivation, a bigger
"why" behind what you do, in order to sustain your satisfaction from day to
day.

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rdtsc
A real gem. If you have time check out his other work:

[https://ferd.ca/](https://ferd.ca/)

Some of it is Erlang specific but other posts are quite general about
distributed systems, overload handling, etc.

He is also the author of
[https://learnyousomeerlang.com/](https://learnyousomeerlang.com/)

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jlg23
Priceless if you read "the little prince"[1] - if not, stop now and invest the
hour to do that first. I make all my (adult) guests listen to the audiobook
when driving through Tarfaya, where the author was working as a pilot for
French aerial post.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Prince](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Prince)

~~~
klipt
There's also a musical!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViK7qT8TS5w#t=3m58s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViK7qT8TS5w#t=3m58s)

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klodolph
I know that this article is fiction, but there's a common misconception about
the Dunning-Kruger effect presented in the story that is worth understanding.
People think that Dunning and Kruger showed that less competent people think
that they're more competent than more competent people think they are, but
this is not what Dunning and Kruger showed, if you'll excuse the complicated
sentence construction (the article linked below has a graph and explains this
a bit better).

Actually, Dunning and Kruger simply showed that a person's estimate of their
own skill tends to be _closer to the mean, plus a little_ than their actual
skill level.

The Dunning-Kruger effect has probably been a bit distorted because we like
the idea that thinking you are good at something is evidence that you are not,
in fact, good at that thing.

See also "what the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t" \-
[https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-
dunning-...](https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-
kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/)

~~~
mjw1007
Hm, that relationship is also what you'd get if people were perfect at
estimating their own skill while the proxy being used by the researchers was
imperfect, isn't it?

~~~
klodolph
Well, you would get _broadly speaking_ a similar relationship. General error
in the measurement would appear as a regression to the mean. However, Dunning
and Kruger addressed this in their paper, directly, in section 4.1.3. The
actual metric that the researchers measured was actual class rank and
estimated class rank. Class rank is well-defined, and estimated class rank is
also well-defined. That's not to say that class rank is a perfect choice of
metric, but you _are_ asking students to estimate something which can be
exactly measured.

The paper showed a difference in the size of the error between top and bottom
quartile students that was larger than you would expect if it were just
uniform error. When you think about it, this seems pretty damn obvious... if
you are bad at something, you are also bad at knowing that you are bad at it.
But if you are good at something, you have a more accurate understanding of
your own skills. In short, if you're good at something, you probably know that
you are good at it.

This is what goes against the popular notion of the Dunning Kruger effect.
Many people seem to use Dunning Kruger as some kind of twisted justification
for impostor syndrome, where you are not permitted to think you are good at
something because it would paradoxically imply that you are not good at it. I
say this, just because I know too many people suffering from impostor
syndrome, and this incorrect impression of Dunning Kruger seems to be a
contributing factor.

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clort
I find it a little sad that he did not credit Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who
wrote this story and created the drawings in 1943 after he crashed his
aeroplane in the sahara desert and and met the real little prince there. Also,
that the comments so far are very complimentary but it is not clear that the
writers know the original story and I am most concerned that the warning about
the Baobabs is not included!

    
    
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Prince

~~~
mononcqc
because Le Petit Prince is one of the most translated and sold books ever, and
that the title was a very direct reference, I just didn't feel it would be
necessary to include a note saying it's based on the little prince story since
it felt obvious to me. My bad.

~~~
nyghtly
You're right, it is obvious

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anonlastname
it took me until the 5th chapter to realize this is a parody of "The Little
Prince"

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aronowb14
:,)

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sifoobar
I call my little Printf Snigl [0], but (s)he's been telling me the same story.

Can't do it any more, I have no more fucks to give about saving the world and
awesome profits.

[https://gitlab.com/sifoo/snigl](https://gitlab.com/sifoo/snigl)

