Most of the code you write will probably be dead and gone within a few years. Get used to not being able to point at something and say "I did that."
Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?
91–100 of 538 posts
Re: Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?
#92If I could go back in time and give myself advice it would be: 0) Nothing is too hard to do, no matter how much those doing it might seem like towering titans many levels above you, or how out of your reach it may seem. Nothing is too hard, there are only things that take time, and things that take more time. If you put in the work, those titans will be your peers before you realise it. Of course, you can't do everyt…
Regarding 2, how do you suggest I avoid "spinning my wheels and learning nothing"? Over the last 6 months I've becoming increasingly aware of this problem with me, but I don't know how to fix it.
In addition to what others said, make sure you realize when you're learning or not. If it's painful to do something, you're learning. If it's easy going, you're not learning.
More here: https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/04/17/learning-without-a-m...
Re: Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> which compares to a clearly achievable outcome which tens of thousands of people of similar skill levels get offered every year Are you asserting that those five turn over a majority of their mid-career engineers annually? That's the only way I see the tens of thousands number being accurate. As for "mere mortals", I think most of us realize these companies hire them. Hell, I've been interviewing for my company a l…
That's the only way I see the tens of thousands number being accurate. What's your over/under for how many engineers AppAmaGooBookSoft will hire this year? Mine is 50k. I did a back of the envelope calculation for this last year but can't find it. 90% retention rates imply a 5 year survivorship of ~60%; feel free to take any of several thousand HNers out to coffee if you want to confirm what competent, worksmanlike e…
The five combined have a total headcount of roughly 660k, meaning they would need to be hiring annually roughly 7.5% of their total just in software engineers. At that level I don't buy it.
Since the number is dominated by Amazon, who has a huge logistics contingent, I'm not sure specifically about engineers. I'd say roughly half of that total is engineers that have something to do with software (not necessarily software engineers). That bumps your number to over 15% of the total engineering headcount. I'll be conservative and say 25% of the engineers are not software (with most being in Apple and Amazon). Now we're looking at 50k being 19% of the total software engineers.
You seem to be talking about hired at all levels, while I was talking about only senior hires. In that case, I am closer to you than I indicated. My (possibly wrong) impression is that the majority of hiring by these companies is new grads and juniors, since that is what their interview processes are heavily biased towards. I put the total number of senior hires at 10k - 15k.
As for total hires overall, I'll buy either your total hires or your retention rate, but not both. These companies are not growing headcount fast enough to be doing that much hiring at that retention rate in software engineers alone.
Re: Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?
#94Make sure you're not the only person who can work with your code. Make yourself easily replaceable, on a project level.
Otherwise you will get calls during your vacation; you may not be able to work on other projects, switch teams or even get promoted - or if you do, you will still be supporting the code you wrote years ago on the side.
Re: Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
- Don't use the next big thing before actually understanding the benefits only because someone else tells you to. (Looking at you, Angular and Docker!) I'm curious, what do you not like about Docker?
I followed the call of an employee with 10yrs more experience than I have and he proposed we move our infrastructure towards docker containers for easier deployment / management. Generally containerization of our app was a good step at this point, but we made the mistake to also put redis / postgresql into docker, which obviously is an stupid idea if you're trying to scale things. On top of that, docker networking wa…
I'm really not the biggest fan of docker, but it seems like everything y'all did was wrong: improper image caching, so you wouldn't have to continually build the same base images for your services; putting databases in the container, instead of somewhere else; not using cgroups/docker fundamentals to restrict space on the container level; storing state (something) on disk within a container.
Re: Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you using a java framework on the backend? Something like Spring maybe? I'm just curious, I've been thinking about using Java for the backend of my own projects.
I have used Spring before and I like it quite a bit. I have tended to use vanilla Servlets for most of my projects recently and use libraries like Gson, Apache Commons, PdfBox etc etc where appropriate. I think if anyone wants to go down the route of using Spring, Play or similar then you MUST spend the time learning it in pretty deep detail. I've seen so many people with "Spring experience" on their CV who can make…
I appreciate the reply, thanks!
Perhaps I will try to use vanilla servlets for one of my personal projects. I'll have to start reading the docs!
Re: Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really hope this has some elements of satire in it.
I wish... I worked for many companies everyone wanted to get in, and am still approached by big 4 ones G/FB/AP/AM (no MS as I rejected their offer already). What I observed is that consistently the ones that move to the top are the ones that master the practice of appearance, backstabbing, instigating fear of "missing the train" in superiors, throwing peers under the bus when fitting, betraying trust, sensing and ada…
I have noticed there is a stark contrast between those who are aware of the political environment and those who aren't. You seem to be hyper aware and 'plugged in' to hear these stories. Most developers just write code and post memes on the team slack/hipchat channel, completely oblivious to things going on around them.
You should blog about some of this, changing names and obfuscating to "protect the innocent" so to speak. Also, read up on the Gervais Principal if you have not :)
Re: Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?
#98That shipping stable software that works and meets requirements is what people really want. In other words, what the non-tech business people want, or your customers want, is software that fixes their problems, makes their lives easier or makes them more money. It's easy for us programmers to become fixated on using a newer JS framework, a slightly tighter Java loop or the latest cool language. Took me a few years to…
It took you 10 years to understand this?
Re: Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?
#99This is more true now than it was back 10 years ago, but there is simply too much tech out there to have a solid understanding of it all. Be okay with not understanding the latest thing or cool new field because many times they fade away, no matter how popular they seem to be, and you simply can't understand all of it.
On this and other forums it seems like everyone knows everything, but that's only because there's a lot of people here.
Re: Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?
#100If I could go back in time and give myself advice it would be: 0) Nothing is too hard to do, no matter how much those doing it might seem like towering titans many levels above you, or how out of your reach it may seem. Nothing is too hard, there are only things that take time, and things that take more time. If you put in the work, those titans will be your peers before you realise it. Of course, you can't do everyt…
What you call "Language Wars" I call not wanting to work with a shitty language like Java. It's slow. So it's never the right tool for the job.