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Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

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Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#111

Post by StavrosK »

byteface wrote: post #80
beforeolives wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can. My point is that I can do it without having been explicitly taught touch typing. It's just a skill I developed over time and I thought that it happened for everyone else too.

So you feel for the 'home keys' instincitvely without looking? every time you type? and never had a single lesson?

I don't use the home keys, I just know where the keys are. I type with my first three fingers and use the pinky for Shift and Ctrl. I can do 120 wpm and am very accurate at it.

When I don't touch-type. I learned touch-typing years ago and use that too when I'm at my ortho keyboard, but I'm much slower and less accurate than my home brew technique.

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#112

Post by chriswait »

byteface wrote: post #80
beforeolives wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can. My point is that I can do it without having been explicitly taught touch typing. It's just a skill I developed over time and I thought that it happened for everyone else too.

So you feel for the 'home keys' instincitvely without looking? every time you type? and never had a single lesson?

I don't think this is very unusual for people who spend a lot of time typing.

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#113

Post by StavrosK »

beforeolives wrote: post #69
byteface wrote: post #61

I was inspired by a guy from Brazil to learn to touch-type. It not on the national curriculum in the UK. I'd say well over half of UK coders can't touch-type. I can easily do 90+ words per minute without trying. I just think and my fingers wobble and words appear. It's like magic. I'd say everyone should learn. I learned to run code without re-reading it from a bad coder. I used to spend a few mins reading code I'd w…

I never understood this way of thinking about touch typing as a distinct skill from typing. My experience was that when you're kid and use a computer for the first time, you need to look at the keys, and then over time you look less and eventually you can type without looking at all. I never saw it as a distinct skill that needs it's own name or needs to be taught in school (apparently I'm wrong about this). It's jus…

I agree with you, I've always thought of it like learning to ride a bike without training wheels. It's not "riding a bike without training wheels", it's "riding a bike". If you need to look at the keyboard, you aren't good at typing yet.

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#114

Post by avinassh »

quanto wrote: post #28

Best: It was a lesson I got as a fresh grad. I was losing sleep over stress from work. "This is just a job," an older colleague told me. In reality, he really did his job -- he was always on time, his code was impeccable, and he used cool logic to solve any problem. And yet, he was never too emotionally attached to work. He always welcomed criticism of his work. He had the demeanor of a cool-headed hitman finishing h…

> He always welcomed criticism of his work.

What are some ways to do this effectively?

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#115

Post by StavrosK »

Best: We do not speak of mistakes in the active voice ("Stavros made a mistake and added a bug"). We use the passive voice, or the collective "we" ("a bug was mistakenly committed to the code"). Assigning blame only hurts the team, and you should be reviewing each other's code and actions anyway.

Worst: Sucking up to people and repeating competent people's advice can get you a looong way up to being a C-level while the competent people remain at the lowest levels of the hierarchy.

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#116

Post by gwn7 »

stavros wrote: post #109
gwn7 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never understood this way of thinking about touch typing as a distinct skill from typing. Touch typing is a special technique. Typing and touch typing being distinct things isn't a "way of thinking", it's a clear fact. It's not open to interpretation. The keyboard is an instrument. Anyone can use it without learning the proper technique, but the technique helps a great deal. That's the whole point. It is greatly…

I could easily do 120 wpm at 98% accuracy before I switched to touch typing years ago. Now I'm at 80wpm at 95%.

You are the exception, you know that right? There will always be outliers. What we should care about is what the technique can do for the majority of the people.

But since you are an interesting exception, I'm curious of your take actually. Maybe please offer us some more information:

- Why do you think you did slow down after the switch to touch typing?

- Why did you feel the need to switch to touch typing if the skill you already had was so good?

- Do you think there are any benefits of touch typing over your old technique?

- Do you regret switching to touch typing? Why?

- How many years did it take you to get to 120 wpm at 98%?

- Is there anything you miss from your old technique (beside the higher stats)?

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#117

Post by Aachen »

pacomerh wrote: post #24

Best: When someone asks you a question always answer something. If you don't have time, say let's reconnect later. But never leave people in limbo. Worst: Letting toxic people get away with insults because they're good at their job.

> Worst: Letting toxic people get away with insults because they're good at their job.

Okay, that's what happened, but what did you learn from it? Presumably you're not always their boss and in a position to single-handedly do something about it. How should one deal with it instead? Or was the lesson about recognizing the situation?

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#118

Post by variable11 »

quanto wrote: post #28

Best: It was a lesson I got as a fresh grad. I was losing sleep over stress from work. "This is just a job," an older colleague told me. In reality, he really did his job -- he was always on time, his code was impeccable, and he used cool logic to solve any problem. And yet, he was never too emotionally attached to work. He always welcomed criticism of his work. He had the demeanor of a cool-headed hitman finishing h…

Classic corporate psychopath. Doesn't do the work, gets you to do his work, attacks you for doing it, and probably took credit for the fix behind your back. Once we can screen these people out of positions of power through MRIs or whatever, the world will improve in a big way.

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#119

Post by a_bonobo »

applepple wrote: post #98
bufferoverflow wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you teach us some of his best lessons please?

There are so many. Sometimes they're big picture stuff, sometimes they're more detailed. One of the lessons I learned in my junior years is that I used to write CSS with a lot of nesting and relatively short class names (I used SCSS which made nesting easier) - The CTO kept telling me that I should avoid using more than 2 levels of nesting and to use long descriptive class names. I felt that was against the whole poi…

Sounds similar to Ousterhout's Philosophy of Software Design!

https://www.amazon.com.au/Philosophy-Software-Design-John-Ou...

The main point is that a software developer's job is to fix stuff so you end up introducing complexity, but you will have a much easier life if you realise when you're about to introduce more complexity, and try to minimise it by thinking about your implementation choices. KISS, I guess.

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#120

Post by noud »

wiether wrote: post #63
plank_time wrote: post #21

One of my mentors at the first company I worked for in Silicon Valley never said “no” to one of my ideas. He said “okay, we’ll try it out and see what happens.” He was inherently supportive of new ideas and as a junior engineer it felt very refreshing to not have to argue my way into a feature that I felt strongly about. I’ve carried that same mentality throughout my career. My worst colleagues were the exact opposit…

> One of my mentors at the first company I worked for in Silicon Valley never said “no” to one of my ideas. He said “okay, we’ll try it out and see what happens.” He was inherently supportive of new ideas and as a junior engineer it felt very refreshing to not have to argue my way into a feature that I felt strongly about. I’ve carried that same mentality throughout my career. I try to always have this kind of mindse…

I actually agree with this. Although I try to give the people I supervise as much freedom to come up with ideas and solutions as possible, there are some that almost always come up with outrageous ideas that will never work or they overestimate their own skills and over promise. I think that it is my responsibility to tell them that their ideas are not going to work and that's not a good idea to pursue them. It will only lead to disappointments and wasted time in the end.

That said, some of the people I manage are clearly better at dealing with the freedom to come up with solutions than others. I feel like it's often the same people over and over again that try to install barbecues everywhere. I tend to give some colleges more freedom than others, because I know from previous events (i.e. I have a bias towards them) that their ideas might not be so crazy as I think they are. But I tend to stop other colleges, that have tried to install barbecues in the office several times in the past, when they come up with ideas that I think are probably not going to work.

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