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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?

#141

Post by ozim »

chrisgp wrote: post #19

Best: Good research is about the quantity and throughput of ideas you can test, not the quality of individual ideas. Worst: Code should be designed for users, not any individual engineer's philosophical preference.

The best one I understand and agree. If one tries to work only on "good" ideas he might never work on anything. Trying stuff out is super important even if it is a bit silly idea to work out.

Worst, the way it is written left me a bit confused.

I understood:

If someone wants "perfect code" because of "software craftsmanship". Where "users are stupid" because they should learn how to use the software. It is really bad way to do software.

Quotations mean beliefs of person having such of a approach.

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

#142

Post by _qzu4 »

kjakm wrote: post #71
codecutter wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't play it emotionally and report it to HR. Folks from HR are there to take care of the manager and employer. Such a step could be suicidal.

I find this attitude to be the same as kids not telling on the bully because it’ll make things worse. The guy lost a four figure bonus for no sane reason. Keeping quiet isn’t going to make anything better. You either speak with HR or firstly maybe your boss’s boss. Maybe things are a bit different if you work in one of the places where you can be fired at will but generally you have employment rights that will protec…

Never talk to the bosses boss without going to your boss first. By doing so, you are ignoring the chain of command and likely will you fired. How would you feel if someone you managed went behind your back to talk to your boss?

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

#143

Post by jawns »

I notice that the vast majority of comments here are lessons learned about office dynamics and interpersonal relationships. Which either indicates that soft skills are much more important than tech skills or that HN's mostly technical audience has had more to learn about soft skills than hard skills.

To buck the trend, I'm going to add a few "hard skills" lessons I've learned from managers.

From the best: "Every if statement is death" was an adage of one. He encouraged me to think deeper about whether conditionals were really needed, and at what place they were needed. That mindset helped me write clearer and more easily testable code.

From the worst: In code, "brilliant" solutions are like poems: they're beautiful, they're terse, and they pack a lot of meaning into each line. To mid-level engineers, they have an intoxicating appeal, because they seem like a good way to flaunt their talents. But more often than not, what is really needed is the code version of ordinary prose: straightforward, with a preference for clarity over succinctness, easy for others to understand, easy to edit, and with fewer surprises and deviations from convention than a poem. Your goal should not be to impress your code reviewer with your cleverness but to impress the person who needs to maintain your code three years from now.

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

#144

Post by Leherenn »

avinassh wrote: post #114
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?

Personally, I try to detach it from myself and think in term of process, even if they are just internal processes (as in processes I created for myself).

Why was this bug not prevented? Did I follow the processes? If yes, why did they fail, and how can I change them not to fail next time? If not, why did I not follow them? How can I ensure that this will not happen again?

Also, can I share my experience? Can I learn from someone else experience? I think it's very good to say "I did this and that, which I thought would be enough, but it wasn't, how do you guys do it?".

Not saying it's perfect, and I always feel bad whenever there's a bug in code I wrote, but I'd rather hear about it, if only just to try to reduce the amount of time this happens in the future.

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

#145

Post by kjakm »

_qzu4 wrote: post #142
kjakm wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this attitude to be the same as kids not telling on the bully because it’ll make things worse. The guy lost a four figure bonus for no sane reason. Keeping quiet isn’t going to make anything better. You either speak with HR or firstly maybe your boss’s boss. Maybe things are a bit different if you work in one of the places where you can be fired at will but generally you have employment rights that will protec…

Never talk to the bosses boss without going to your boss first. By doing so, you are ignoring the chain of command and likely will you fired. How would you feel if someone you managed went behind your back to talk to your boss?

Agreed, I thought that was implied in my comment but reading back it isn’t.

I disagree that going above your boss first would lead to getting fired though (again with the exception of at will employment).

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

#147

Post by 300bps »

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…

Does this company use any form of stack ranking to determine bonuses?

It sounds like one possibility is your boss may have been trying to prevent you from getting to his level which would mean he would have to compete with you.

Stack ranking incentivizes people at higher levels to only allow incompetent people to get to their level because they’ll look better in comparison.

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

#148

Post by jiggawatts »

avinassh wrote: post #114
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?

I like to think of criticism as scientific peer review. The purpose of that is not to criticise the person, but to strengthen the validity of their research by eliminating any remaining errors they may have missed.

Your peers aren't harming you by finding fault, they're strengthening your position by doing so.

I personally hate it when a bug slips through to production, and I always profusely thank anyone that spots one before it does. Or after. Whatever, as long as it gets fixed...

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

#149

Post by ubercow13 »

applepple wrote: post #91
brazzy wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is such a bullshit meme that needs to die. HR's exact goals vary between companies, but unless the company culture is toxic all the way to the top, part of their job is usually to reduce staff turnover (which is very expensive for the company), and in pretty much any company their job is to protect the company against lawsuits. Abusive managers are not well liked by HR.

That doesn't align with my experience. In my experience, they pretend to care about the employee, but when the employer is in the wrong, even in an obvious way, they will side with the employer in the blink of an eye every time instead of trying to reason with the employer.

The abusive boss is just an employee too

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

#150

Post by tomasyany »

Bad colleagues tend to come to you with far more problems than solutions. Any colleague that is constantly complaining about everything, but never suggesting solutions (nor wanting to discuss them) is a major flag IMO.

Best colleagues I have had would point out something to be fixed / improved, and immediately suggest a tentative solution. Worst colleagues would just blame others (major red flag) for any issue they encounter, and never put energy in solving them.

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