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Not Just Any Old Geek

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Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#231

Post by GrumpyYoungMan »

bitwize wrote: post #168
crdoconnor wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I wouldn't worry. We can actually Get Stuff Done, which at the end of the day is what really counts. This is a myth. It doesn't count for that much. Programmer productivity cannot be effectively measured even by other programmers and certainly can't be measured by non-technical managers. The fact that you are doing something can be easily verified. The fact that you are doing it effectively at an appropriate speed a…

If you are correctly following an Agile process such as Scrum, the productivity of each team member can indeed be quantified. You may think it's pure bullshit numbers, but the ratio of story points to hours worked tends to stabilize over time and give management an idea of how productive you really are.

>If you are correctly following an Agile process such as Scrum, the productivity of each team member can indeed be quantified.

No, no, no, a thousand times no. Tracking story points by developer is the diametric opposite of "correctly following an Agile process". It gives team members, individually and collectively, an incentive to game the system, thereby corrupting your metrics and estimates. You are literally begging your team members to lie to you.

Any competent lead should be able to identify who is more and less productive without using what is essentially micromanagement by story point. Story points should only ever be tracked by team for overall velocity measurements.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#232

Post by pmoriarty »

cerrelio wrote: post #222
hanginghyena wrote: post #170

Another old geezer here (43!); had a good run in my twenties and wound up in technical management a few years ago. A couple of tips: - The "hands on" technical skills that launched your career have capped (top salary) and declining value - If you take time to learn / think about how the underlying technology works (vs. just cut / paste / edit code), you can master related new technologies faster than the average bear…

I'm 38, and I now find myself being coaxed into management. I was away from the Valley for about a decade and returned 4 years ago. My career has basically continued from where I left it despite not knowing most of the hot technologies when I returned. I simply learned them, and avoided the fads. Experience definitely helps you sidestep cargo cult development, spinning your wheels and wasting company time. I've worke…

"You might feel uncomfortable moving away from your vim window into the meeting room, but that's where the greater rewards are"

Greater financial rewards, maybe. But not necessarily greater intellectual or emotional rewards. Not everyone's cut out for or enjoys management or running a business.

There are people who just love getting their hands dirty in tech and hate meetings, power point presentations, kissing up to and hobnobbing with upper management, making up budgets and writing reports, herding cats, giving pep talks, dealing with HR issues, and the rest of the things that managers often have to do to be "successful".

I'm happiest when I can just go nose down working on interesting technical problems, when I'm collaborating with other engineers on the same, or mentoring junior engineers, with all the corporate BS taken care of by my manager.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#233

Post by rcurry »

bshimmin wrote: post #119
clockwerx wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuff that hasnt changed markedly: geometry math, statistics. SQL - 1970s. SOLID - parts of that are late 1980. C still looks like C. Unix like environments. Awk/sed/etc. Go read about the history of the web or XML; you get a very strong sense that these things have been thought about for a long time - data interchange has varied formats, but there is still a lot of tedious ETL type work. The importance of naming thi…

One thing I've found that's significantly changed since I began my career, before my beard went grey, is that projects are now in general run much better. People never make a total mess of estimating timings, and the Agile methodology (and Kanban boards, and Trello, and JIRA, and of course Slack) really fix all organisational and prioritisation problems such that projects never end in disaster; gone are the days of f…

This made my day. I only wish I could have read it around 3:00 this morning when I was still up writing code.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#235

Post by [deleted] »

rubber_duck wrote: post #181
coldtea wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The stuff you did in software 20 years ago has absolutely nothing to do with the stuff that's being done today. Like holly shit most people weren't even using source control back, unit testing and automated testing in general was SciFi, it was done by QA departments if you were big enough to do it. That stuff a competent graybeard knows already. You don't think they disappeared in 1990 and re-appeared magically tod…

I mean if you were a good dev in the 90s chances are right now you're in some senior architect/management/consultant position. If you're competing for the same jobs as 20 something devs then you've probably screwed up somewhere in your career. I started programming in late 90s but not professionally until 2006 I think, this was probably the late phase of transition to internet as a dominant factor in computing - so I…

[deleted]

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#236

Post by ccallebs »

pc86 wrote: post #117
dexterdog wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of people who worked on Y2K bugs who are not even old enough to be a US President.

I mean that sounds neat but the math doesn't match up. You have to be 35 to be President, so being generous let's take a 35 year old now, so they were born in 1982 give or take (2017-35). They would have had to get a programming job right out of HS and even then best case it would have been halfway through 1999. More accurately, they likely didn't enter the workforce until 2004 or 2005.

Y2K bugs didn't disappear when the clock struck midnight on December 31. Many appeared for the first time.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#237

Post by emodendroket »

rubber_duck wrote: post #176
emodendroket wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in high school and didn't know the first thing about programming 20 years ago. But it seems to me that "design patterns," SCM, and automated testing aren't the hard part of this discipline.

Sure they are. They are the "hard part" of what every 9-5 LOB dev has to do, and even in the more CS heavy fields from my experience the algorithms and the fancy CS is 20% of the work and the rest is implementing mundane details, bug fixing, testing, cooperating with team members, etc. And that's the stuff that improved since the 90s. Delivering reliable software is hard - but we've gotten a lot better at it in the l…

We also do a lot of typing but nobody's arguing that that should be the primary yardstick by which we measure.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#238

Post by emodendroket »

emodendroket wrote: post #166
rubber_duck wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stuff you learned in your CS course is still just as relevant as it was 20 years ago. The things you did in your development career are nowhere near so. Did you use SCM, automated testing and design patterns 20 years ago ? If yes do you think this was the norm in the industry ? I'm not saying those things are the only relevant things, I'm just pointing out the obvious examples of how much things have changed sinc…

I was in high school and didn't know the first thing about programming 20 years ago. But it seems to me that "design patterns," SCM, and automated testing aren't the hard part of this discipline.

I wasn't in high school 20 years ago; I wasn't even ten. I dunno why I said that. Whoops.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#239

Post by sotojuan »

czep wrote: post #85
uola wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, even as I'm getting older, this isn't at all obvious to me. Someone with five years solid experience with web development might very well be far more effective than someone with twenty years experience of working in corners of large companies with various technologies, especially when you consider the expected salary. I think it good that people are talking about these things, but sometime it seem like peop…

If you were having cardiac surgery, would you prefer your surgeon to be a year out of med school having done the operation oh 3 or 4 times, or the proverbial graybeard who has done it a thousand times? If you were wrongly convicted and awaiting a death sentence, would you pick a 22 year old attorney fresh from law school to defend you? If you have a field full of tomatoes that needs picking, do you save a few dollars…

Engineering might be the former. Programming and software "engineering" is definitely the latter.

Re: Not Just Any Old Geek

#240

Post by okreallywtf »

I don't work anywhere near silicon valley but I am in a very small (I have noticed some minor ageism towards younger developers but it tends to be more jovial teasing and joking about how lucky younger devs are to have the tech ecosystems that we do as opposed to 10-20 years ago. Most of the ageism I see is related to popular culture (music, movies, etc) which can still be somewhat toxic when any age group assumes that only the media from their generation was good and everything else is crap. I have noticed more bias against devs without formal education (which everyone else has with either bachelors or masters in CS) but if a well self-taught dev without a degree came in I don't think it would be an issue.

For the most part though the "older" (its hard to think of people in their early-mid 40's as old right now) devs have a wealth of experience from whom I parasitically absorb as much as I can. It doesn't hurt that they are as competent in new tech stacks as most younger devs (even if they are more conservative about when to adopt new tools, giving them time to mature). The culture here is that someone has to make a really good case for why we should pull a ton of overtime, more often than not someone made promises they shouldn't have and its not our job to deliver on timeframes we were not consulted on. What OT work I have done I have been compensated extra for but it is partly the influence of the older devs that makes me feel like I should expect compensation when I go above and beyond. Thats not to say I'm not willing to do it to help the company (which helps us all), but I think I was able to pass the naive stage a lot quicker and I could have been taken advantage of much more in a bigger company without our developer culture.

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