- I've never been motivated by external acknowledgement of anything I've done.
- I don't like getting attention.
- I'd gladly accept a non-trivial cash bonus instead of a trophy.
The company for whom I work does not officially have any such trophies but some managers-of-managers in some departments tend to publicly acknowledge some achievements now and then. This is not structured and not regular. However, I know many people who _are_ motivated by praise and kudos. I suppose a good manager will try to ensure everyone in his/her team will feel appreciated in a way that works for that person.
The company has entered a growth stage, and sales is killing it. Every update is about this quota exceeded, that deal closed, or that person bringing in another stellar contract. Overall, it is a nice place to be.
However, the dev team is having some negative feelings. On the one hand, people tend to be more humble and not prone to self-promotion or auto-marketing. On the other, the word in the hallway is that developers no longer feel appreciated.
I don't know what the solution is. Right now, I am taking the approach of encouraging people out of their comfort zone and owning what they contribute. It is a lot more difficult to make a developer's achievement understood and properly appreciated company-wide, but it is a challenge that I am taking on myself. My goal is to help each dev team member come up with one achievement per week, and we will spend a little bit of time making it presentable and easy to understand.
From personal experience, I feel that I don't want to step out and praise myself. It feels like it won't be a net win. However, if someone else praises me in a balanced fashion, it does feel good. Kind of like getting a bouquet of flowers. I would never think that a bunch of flowers would make me feel good. However, on the rare occasion I did get one, it felt strangely fantastic.
I guess it's important to evaluate how you think you will feel when you get praise vs. how it actually feels when it is delivered tactfully and honestly. Sometimes, we do a poor job predicting how we will feel. I suggest stepping outside of your comfort zone and being a bit vocal about your contribution.
The key (for me) to feel appreciated is in performance reviews and (hopefully) logically leading to a promotion if the work is that good. Also, getting greater technical challenges and freedom. The odd occasion where praise or acknowledgement of quality of work did matter to me was when it came from those I considered far superior to me in skills that mattered to my work.
EDIT: In your case, if you have developers working for you, who are doing good work, one thing you could do is to ensure you mention that to your superiors. It really helps if you can help them understand how the good work makes an impact on the business.
"pretend you don't have solutions" is not a realistic approach. The strength of people's conviction to this will probably fall on a bell curve and few can resist the temptation when the problems get really tough. Accounting for how humans are, I do not see how one can easily say "Having solutions is strictly better". I can easily think of cases where it is indeed better to have solutions but to say "strictly" requires a bit more diligence.
Don’t rob the self-learner that doesn’t have access to TAs, fellow students, and professors the ability to check their work, just because someone else doesn’t have the discipline to not abuse it.
Textbook solutions are good for those that aren’t in school, aren’t in formal programs and have no other way of receiving feedback.
The “you should know if you’re right” mentality doesn’t necessarily fit a person that’s been working for 10-years and has been out of the academic mindset. One that is a beginner and could easily fool themselves into thinking they have a correct answer.
It doesn’t allow for correction of false thinking. Anyone can think their proof is correct. But fewer beginners can properly recognize when they are wrong.
This sort of mentality is a bit elitist and gate keeping.
I had a girlfriend who was doing her PhD in Physics. I remember one night she and her classmates spent all night working on a problem, that was essentially unsolvable. The next day they go to class and all of them made their best attempt, but no one could complete it. The problem? The professor accidentally used the wrong metric on one of the numbers meaning that they couldn't do the steps to what should have been an easy solution. Now they noticed this, they are a smart group of people, but that's not what the problem was, so they spent hours and hours trying to solve what he gave them without any hope of actually doing it.
In the end, he was like "Oh my bad," and corrected his mistake. The point of the story is that they were able to essentially ask him for the solution and they were able to check what they'd done, and in the end he made the mistake. In situations like this, he should provide the answer if nothing else to show that he didn't make a mistake in the problem set. People are fallible, no matter how brilliant you are.
I had a similar thing happen in high school physics. We were were suppose to figure out where and when a projectile was going to land. The only problem was that it was never going to land—-the initial velocity was too high.
In retrospect I think it was a great lesson for my future career as a data engineer. Doesn’t matter what the source is, any datum can be just plain wrong.
That professor probably had produced the answer already, using the metric he had initially intended. Having a set of answers doesn't mean you didn't make a mistake in the questions.
There's a story of a prof injecting one error into every test.
I had a industrial engineering teacher that did something similar. Every team had a (fake money) budget for each project and bought materials from him (sole source). He'd randomly cut corners, to keep everyone on their toes. Good lesson for the real world.
On the other hand, struggling all night to solve an un-solvable problem is a valuable learning experience, too. In the real world we struggle all the time with problems that don't have solutions.
I took a quick look through the first set of exercises and a lot of the problems are open-ended and don't have specific answers. Seeing a different answer than yours doesn't tell you much about whether your answer is correct.
Even if you do have a similar proof to the one in the answer key, that doesn't mean your proof is correct. Correctness can often hinge on very subtle distinctions. You really need a TA or instructor to read your proof if you want meaningful feedback.
As I've said elsewhere, I'm looking out for my own students first.
One of my colleagues suggested setting up a "club" on PerusAll (https://app.perusall.com/welcome) or something similar that would allow people to discuss to book and/or work through problems collectively. (They have a club for CLRS, for example.) Right now all their "clubs" are restricted to books with Reputable Publishers (ptui), so they might need some persuasion.
Presumably nothing's stopping you from putting a book of solutions and posting them online. It seems like a much easier task than writing this book, with all its problem sets, and then posting it online for free for the world to read.
It might be an elitist and gate keeping mentality but I have to say that calling providing a free resource to someone, but not tailoring it to fit their exact situation, "robbing" is a very entitled one.
It is absolutely a realistic approach, what are you talking about? Is it also not a realistic approach to eat your vegetables or perform routine exercise like walking around the block?
Without solutions at the back of the book, self-directed learners can't verify their own work. Don't cut out the less privileged learners from bettering themselves just because you have no concept of discipline.
Given that many decisions and choices are irreversible, life is indeed a journey that takes you somewhere. However, at any point in time, you can only be in one place. This is just how it is. There is no good or bad about this fact by itself. It is just reality. Happiness does strongly depend on whether one accepts reality.
Wow that's a profound statement that hit me pretty hard.
The internet is able to transfer you to any piece of information instantly, but you can only consume information at one time. So the concept still holds.
There is no good or bad about this fact by itself. It is just reality. Happiness does strongly depend on whether one accepts reality.
Attitudes like the one expressed in the comment you're replying to is exactly why STEM majors should have a required humanities/liberal arts component.
Rather, why there should be more humanities / liberal arts outreach (and funding), so that STEM majors are more likely to have access to, engage with, and fall in love with them.
I understand the impulse behind such comments, but making something "required" is generally a poor way to get people to love or appreciate something. (Think of all the people who "hate mathematics".) In education, often the system is broken, good instructors are to find, etc. (Consider Lockhart's Lament, and its generalization: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=410.) We see this in politics too (I don't mean just electoral politics, but e.g. open-source communities with codes of conduct etc), where even simple basic human kindness, when made mandatory, often seems to provoke backlash. We can't require people to be nice, and we can't require people to appreciate the humanities. We have to do the hard work of gently persuading.
Anything made mandatory always becomes unpleasant.
Consider sex, sounds fun when spontaneous and free, but slave-staffed prostitution is not so fun from the slave's perspective.
Consider food, how could a nice meal be unpleasant, but force feeding has been used for torture, not so cool anymore.
Consider religion, or politics, or housework, etc...
To some extent if you're allowing people into higher ed who are not higher-quality people, they're not going to appreciate a wide ranging education and a wide education is useless for most vocational training (engineering, programming, etc) anyway. Historically higher vocational training was only pursued by the highest class of people; not so much anymore; probably time to remove legacy nobility from higher ed for the masses.
I'd be more enthusiastic about such requirements if humanities/lib-arts courses actually provided a solid answer to how one should live and what one should want. But they don't. They provide lots of different answers, with no great way to choose between them. Going through a mass of required reading only to reach the conclusion that living for bling+bitches is actually a pretty OK idea doesn't seem like a good use of time.
Hedonism is respectable enough that textbooks in ethics keep presenting it. The other ethical approaches kick it in the shins pretty hard, but no one seems to have a decisive refutation. Ethicists from other traditions just think hedonists are punks.
>They provide lots of different answers, with no great way to choose between them.
...that's the point.
The entire purpose of a liberal arts education is to learn about what is important to you personally, what it means to be a person in a world full of other people making that same journey, how to understand the events that lead to where we are today, how to think about and approach new ideas, how to evaluate and process new information and so on. Your comment that shows a misunderstanding of the liberal arts reflects a core failure of the education system that is unfortunately all too common.
I've seen this attitude in engineering majors who have been required to take humanities and liberal arts classes. Maybe such a requirement helps some people, but I suspect resentment is a more common outcome amongst people already predisposed to devalue the humanities.
I've seen that happen personally, but I think that's a failure of the instructor or the system (or both), not of the subject matter itself. The liberal arts should be fascinating if taught in a compelling way. It's the story about what it means to be a person, which is the only universal activity of humans both present and past.
Unfortunately, many don't seem to see the point of things as learning "what it means to be a person". They want everything to boil down to a nice engineering problem that, while complex, is solvable with one solution being better/easier. I remember reading an HN post about "Not everything is an engineering problem" and, if I'm not mistaken, the top comment was basically "Like hell it isn't." That's the bigger issue, imo, the mindset we've pushed into people about STEM being the end-all-be-all, and how it's the One True Way, or whatnot. We have, as a group, completely devalued the liberal arts and now are seeing the effects of that and wondering why people don't see the need for them (and I say that as a former STEM-Lord convert).
As a physics major who the requirements helped, especially my philosophy courses (an intro one and a Philosophy of Science course), I think a lot of it comes down to teachers, and how the material is presented. It was never presented to me as boring, and the teachers never tried to claim it was more important than science or the end-all-be-all of the future. And all of that eventually led me down the road where I'd rather do more work in the humanities than anything science related, and would love to do humanities/liberal arts research professionally.
That said, I think some of the problem is the mindset STEM people are kinda forced into -- one solution, and it has to be a scientific one. It makes the whole world boil down into an engineering problem, and anyone who doesn't like it/doesn't agree can be damned because "look at what science has done"/
In the spirit of the comment with the quote which includes this part: "teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea", I think a lot of what you suggest can be learnt if one adopts a different mindset while communicating. I learnt a lot just by consciously practicing "what set of assumptions or circumstances would make this person's statements correct/valid" instead of "let me see how I can explain to this person that s/he is wrong". Even if the other person is holding on to a position which is objectively incorrect, it makes it much easier to see how s/he came to that position. Anyway, the gist of what I'm trying to say is that without a change in mindset, there is no motivation to function in a different manner. So, it might appear that some people will always work in a certain way but I think if they are motivated to change, then it's not really an extraordinary thing for them to undergo a notable transformation.
I'm afraid I do not see this part of the rule explained enough. Why is the identity important there? Wouldn't the content of the messages suffice? Often I do not even look at the name of the poster.
They're saying identity is important because only relating to an identity creates a community. But that's wrong of course, as many anonymous communities prove. I don't recognize 99% of the posters here either; it is indeed the content that makes the community.
I believe the real explanation of why identity is important to them is a bit of social psychology. The theory is that identifying with people makes them less mean to each other. So they probably want consistent identities so people will be more civil, which is one of their stated goals.
In the search link I posted above, there are lots of explanations of this, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17996295. The point is that HN is a community and a community consists of people relating to one another. The fact that you can pick whatever name you want and it needn't be your real one doesn't change that.
It's also the way HN has always worked. A collection of nameless posts would be a very different kind of forum. Anyone is welcome to start one, but not to turn this one into that one.
- Kinesis Advantage USB keyboard. (The only ergonomic layout keyboard with mechanical switches when I bought it).
- A trackball that is 'semi-vertical' in orientation. I use logitech's M570. I am considering switching to a fully vertical orientation trackball or a vertical mouse.
- A significant help was having an ergonomic specialist visit my desk at work and help me understand how to sit correctly, how to adjust the chair correctly, at what height the monitor ought to be set up etc. Most of my pains went away after this.
- Another factor to bear in mind is that no amount of 'conscious effort' will help maintain posture as much as a few minutes of exercises done regularly. When I do some basic compound movements even with light-weights, my posture naturally gets better without me even having to think about it.
- They'll try to make you feel guilty about something that is otherwise not a big deal
- They tend to be negative about almost everything and invite drama from all spheres of their life
This is in contrast to:
- When you mess up, they'll either call you out on it or let you know without really making it personal (it's about what you did and not about you). I believe a true friend is one who tries to make you hear what you need to hear and not just what you want to.
- I don't like getting attention.
- I'd gladly accept a non-trivial cash bonus instead of a trophy.
The company for whom I work does not officially have any such trophies but some managers-of-managers in some departments tend to publicly acknowledge some achievements now and then. This is not structured and not regular. However, I know many people who _are_ motivated by praise and kudos. I suppose a good manager will try to ensure everyone in his/her team will feel appreciated in a way that works for that person.