At the company I am employed with the ideology is the time an employee spends in cube + salary earned + company resources must = maximum profits. So this means the amount of time a prospective employee takes to ascertain a solution is way more valuable then the times he/she takes to fix the problem.
Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
441–450 of 460 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
#442Read the error messages. Reread them. Extract every piece of information from them. Never close an error popup without having read and understood what it means. Always read stack traces when you're blessed enough to have them. 100% of the juniors (and an awful lot of seniors) I've ever trained simply ignore those and then come ask for help debugging. 99% of the time, the explanation for their problem is literally the…
I work in QA and I wish more developers thought this way. Also run your code before hand off. Please. If I had a nickel for every time I got a user story or bug to validate and it immediately crashes then I would have a bunch of nickels. Which wouldn't be super helpful, but still. Please at least run your code, or ideally you should have CI/CD with unit tests, but we all know that isn't always the case especially in…
As a developer this bugs me too. I once was team lead on a team which had two developers (bad hires) who seemed to believe that it was only their job to write the code, someone else's job to run it and test it. I started putting "and test the code" in the tasks; a team member successfully lobbied our manager that that was another task. So now I had to write 2x as many tasks, and the predictable result happened: the developers who didn't test their own code grabbed all the "write the feature" tasks and banged them out rapidly (easy to do when you don't make sure it works!) The more experienced developers were left to pick up the "and test what you wrote" tasks, which really amounted to rewriting the bad code. Then management said, "Why are you (senior developers) wasting so much time testing code? It generally seems to work and we can always fix it later."
There was just no way to win. I'm glad I don't work in that environment anymore.
Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
#443The company where I am employed the ideology is time an employee spends in cube + salary paid + company resources used must produce maximum profits. So the time a prospective employee takes to ascertain a problem and implement a fix is far more valuable then the amount of times he/ she takes to solve the problem.
Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
I eschewed QBasic early on because it wasn't "real" or it was derived from Basic. This was a mistake. I spent a long time trying to become good at C++. This was also a mistake. I ignored Python for a good 2 years because of indentation. Again, a huge mistake. Great suggestion on anger inducing articles/comment sections. I was just thinking it would be nice to do sentiment analysis and incorporate the emotional vector…
I'm curious - could you elaborate on your mistake regarding spending too much time on C++?
It was too large and too complex for the kinds of things I needed to do. I over focused on getting better with my tools rather than working on domain problems.
Since it has affordances for speed, it encourages one to make fast code, but this is rarely needed. Making fast code is a trap.
Trying to become good or very good at something also puts you in direct competition with others doing the same thing. I did not have time to compete, so it wasn't a big differentiator for me.
C++ helped me learn when do give up, and when to refocus my attention in areas where I can have greater impact. I wish I was a little more technically and philosophically mature before I undertook C++. Having concrete goals is a huge clarifier and allows one to judge something with a much better light.
Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't young people allowed to, well, be young though? When you don't go to nightclubs, don't have friends to call at 1am and can't play guitar in your 400sqft apartment with neighbors on all sides of the world's thinnest walls, is it a terrible thing if coding all day and all night on relatively minor problems to make somebody else five figures a week is your primary source of excitement? Does it not beat alcohol an…
When I was in my early twenties, hungry and looking to prove myself, it was fun for me to stay up all night programming, put in wild hours to get stuff done, lose myself in overly ambitious projects etc. At some point I realized I kept hitting a wall (which was just actually me burning out, but I didn't recognize it at the time) and finding it basically impossible to care or get even the simplest things done for week…
This resonates for me, particularly the description of falling into bursty-then-herculean-then-barely anything. So what did you do when you were hitting that wall? Myself I've started putting more time the last few years into non-computing hobbies when outside of work. It's a hard decision because that feels like an abandonment of things I used to like to do or of creative things I had high hopes for producing. But it's probably necessary.
I know that taking a vacation is important too, but it's hard to take enough time off when you only get 10 days' a year. And I have a crap immune system so I end up using half of that to cover for when I run out of sick days every winter. (At my last job they started "hemorrhaging" developers because a local startup put out a standing offer to higher people for 20% less pay, but 20 days starting vacation. So many people took them up on it that our branch office dwindled from 12 to 2-3 people and retention of new hires went to the basement as well. The impression we got from management was they'd let the company burn to the ground before making "more vacation" a negotiable, probably because they had a vesting scheme and existing senior employees had worked there 10+ years to earn comparable amounts.) At my now-job I have the option to work 9 hour days and get a day off every other week, which helps make my "real" vacation hours stretch longer but the downside is that 9 hour days are not easy, either.
Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
#446Spend time with the code before you ask for help. Try different things, break things locally and understand how the code stands in a bigger system level picture. If you are in a good organization, they will support you breaking things in staging as it will provide them a better picture of code reviews etc. So break things and learn fast.
Most importantly, junior software engineers and interns often complain that the work they do is not impactful - it may seem that those around you are doing impactful work (and it might actually be true in a very few cases), but don't let this effect your peace of mind and not let you give your best. Every work you do must show a characteristic of your quality. Engineers must be able to provide anything in their field, at all levels of their stack, regardless of how important they feel their work might be. Always respect your work and be grateful for getting an opportunity for working on it because someone did not get that chance.
Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't young people allowed to, well, be young though? When you don't go to nightclubs, don't have friends to call at 1am and can't play guitar in your 400sqft apartment with neighbors on all sides of the world's thinnest walls, is it a terrible thing if coding all day and all night on relatively minor problems to make somebody else five figures a week is your primary source of excitement? Does it not beat alcohol an…
I believe that most of us that 'made it' (past the kickstart/young-ish phase) have experienced burnout at some point, and we know how much it can delay us from making progress... That's why I think we should at least try to warn our younger friends that all that eagerness to 'make it there' might actually hurt them in the process. Consistency is key and will take you far, because you'll keep on delivering. Your boss…
Truer words have never been spoken.
Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
#448Read the error messages. Reread them. Extract every piece of information from them. Never close an error popup without having read and understood what it means. Always read stack traces when you're blessed enough to have them. 100% of the juniors (and an awful lot of seniors) I've ever trained simply ignore those and then come ask for help debugging. 99% of the time, the explanation for their problem is literally the…
I really like your last point "whatever the computer is telling is true from the computer point of view". In a surprising number of coding interviews that I've conducted, I've seen a candidate write an incorrect solution that generates an exception and then attempt to figure out the error almost on first principles, rather than actually reading the exception carefully and thinking about what coding errors could have…
I had a candidate once. They were having trouble getting the message body on a 400 level error during the technical interview. They had chosen to solve it in Java. I'm not a Java developer (and I let the candidate know ahead of time and that I could only help with naive suggestions). Their exception message was pretty clear. After they prodded around for a bit getting nowhere, I pointed out the exception message. He ignored my suggestions multiple times (multiple angles of "your exception says blah"). After the interview, I took his solution and fixed it per the exception message. Boom. Worked. After the interview, his feedback to our recruiter was that it was obvious I did not know Java. Some people are bad at reading and listening :(. Also, this was a former Googler. It helped shatter an (unconscious?) bias that somehow Googlers were a breed above the rest.
Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
#449Don't agree to work for peanuts. Young developers are easy target for "startup" or predatory corporations as they can do mindless coding for hours and if you throw in free pizza on Fridays, they'll work day and night for almost nothing. Once you get burnt out you get replaced with another young wannabe developer. But you'll have damaged health and no savings. If offer is low and you think you'll get experience - you…
Nonstarter, obviously no one wants to work for peanuts, and it's easy for people with established careers to give that advice but not very useful for most younger people with little resources
My advice then would be to live frugally, do personal projects and save and save, then leave the company if you have 3-6 months of living covered. You can spend more time on getting your CV right and searching for offers. If recruiters and/or companies see you have a company known for paying peanuts, they'll unlikely to hire you unless they are the same predatory company. Nobody wants a burnt out employee that won't respect him/herself. That's why you wouldn't put such company on a CV and should have a good personal project to show instead for that time frame.
Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
#450A bit late to this thread, and this is coming from someone who used to code, but does not anymore, atleast not actively.
Avoid what is known as 'Somebody Else's Problem Field' behavior. (Here is the link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_else%27s_problem)
What I mean to say is, a lot of times developers have an attitude which says "I'm done with my work, now if its not working, it's somebody else's task" or variants of that dialogue. As a developer, I understand and concur with your position that you might have done all the things right, but as a team, you are not helping matters by saying that. Volunteer to check your code, do more, and try to figure out where the problem is, like what input you are getting, what is the output, where is the code failing. the more you help in these cases, the faster the things get done.
This is also a common behavior, when someone asks you for a data or a piece of code, and you send her a straight forward export/import in the raw format. Occasionally, that might need the other person to do a lot of clean up and other operations, (with a bit less context), and would have been easy for you to do in the first place. As a developer I did that a lot. On the receiving end, this is one of the most frustrating things, since I need to account for it in my tasks beforehand. (Example would be a simple dataset, given to me at SKU level - cos requires a straightforward query - while if extracted aggregated, would have taken 5-10 more minutes for the developer, but now the asker is expected to spend sometime cleaning up and aggregating that data set. Might not always be this, but I hope you get the point.).
my 2 cents.