181–190 of 270 posts
Best colleague taught me that if someone needs help, it is always worth my time to stop what I'm doing and give it to them. Worst colleague taught me to be loyal to people and not to companies. You can be friends with people, but not companies. Friends will reward loyalty and sacrifice, companies just want you to think they will.
How did the worst colleague teach you that? Did they do the opposite of that?
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Not the original poster but I think things are just radically different by the sounds of it. Every company I have worked at, once the code is in the main revision everyone is responsible for it. At that stage the code has gone through many people from reviewers to testers, its not one single persons fault. Easiest thing to do ia not to blame but to just find a solution and see as a team if it was a genuine mistake th…
This is exactly why we don't put @author comments in our code. Once the code is in the main line it's owned by the team. It also helps to promote quality within the team because if you see something unreasonable you are empowered to take action (that may not be possible immediately because we all have our day jobs but at least adding a TODO for it) The standard you scroll past is the standard you accept.
If the code is owned by 4-30 people, its good.
If the code is owned by 120 people, then it takes way to long to tell what the quality standard is.
> The standard you scroll past is the standard you accept.
The challenge is how to get work done without spending 60 hours a week pointing out or solving code quality problems. To overcome this challenge requires accepting some standard of crappy code.
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…
Looks like he set you up to fail no matter what you would have said back then.
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 s…
Prioritize your backlog to reduce/eliminate 2 AM pages. That's the metric you care about; not tickets, not test coverage, not logging/metrics. All those others are gameable metrics. The only thing that matters other than reducing pages are features, and you'll find that by prioritizing the former, you end up delivering faster on the latter over the long haul.
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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 sk…
> You are the exception, you know that right? Sure, but I don't agree that touch typing is "the" technique and that it's impossible that someone else has come up with a better one independently. Touch typing is a good way to type well, but I don't think it's distinct from "typing", it's one way to type. Just like you can play the guitar even if you don't know the technique. > - Why do you think you did slow down afte…
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So you feel for the 'home keys' instincitvely without looking? every time you type? and never had a single lesson?
that was my point. the two little lumps on 'f' and 'j' are so you know where to put your pointer fingers in the dark. touch typers feel for them so they can type without looking. It's cool that you can just do that, without knowing, over time.
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> You are the exception, you know that right? Sure, but I don't agree that touch typing is "the" technique and that it's impossible that someone else has come up with a better one independently. Touch typing is a good way to type well, but I don't think it's distinct from "typing", it's one way to type. Just like you can play the guitar even if you don't know the technique. > - Why do you think you did slow down afte…
I'm the same way, and the reason is simple - I played MUDs as a kid. I can hit > 100 wpm easily if my brain can keep up. Occasionally something will throw me; a weird bit of punctuation, like the shift + number keys, but that's about it. I've tried to learn to touch type, but the drop in speed, and the promise of ending up basically where I am now means I just don't care. The way I move my hands and wrists and such p…
Best: in my first role, shadowing an experienced contractor, after I quietly suggested the company was a little disorganized, "Don't worry, they're all like that." Also memorable was in one of my first contract roles from another, excellent, contractor, "Spend half the day on their stuff, and half the day on your own work. You don't want to raise their expectations." To clarify that last bit of advice: a contractor s…
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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 sk…
There’s a reason we’re not all learning touch typing and using Dvorak keyboards.
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What do you mean by 10x, 100x, 1000x?
A single developer who can complete projects in the same amount of time as 10 or 100 or 1000 regular developers to at least the same quality standard (but usually to a higher quality standard because code quality is key to getting that productivity gain in the first place and code quality usually translates to project quality). That said there are projects for which a developer could be infinity-x compared to other r…