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What Makes a Great Software Engineer? [pdf]

faculty.washington.edu

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Re: What Makes a Great Software Engineer? [pdf]

#101

Post by mcny »

jwdunne wrote: post #81
enraged_camel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>In any case, my kids are my number one. The day my first was born was the day my motivations and my reason for being shifted. Your kids should be your number one priority, absolutely. Make no mistake though: when you have kids you are trading off professional development outside of work for raising a family. Nothing wrong with that, but the trade off definitely is there. People who ambitiously work on personal proj…

Yep and I'd have it no other way. Before kids, I used to be like that. If I "ambitiously worked on side projects", I'd at best miss times I'll never get back and at worse be downright neglectful. That's a "trade off" I haven't thought twice about making. There is no mistake. As I said, my kids are number one. In fact, I'd argue it isn't much of a trade off at all. Time with my kids is infinitely more valuable than ti…

I wish it was more socially acceptable to not have children. In many parts of the world, there is still so much stigma if you marry and don't have a child within a couple of years. I am hopeful things will change and we can swing down the total fertility rate to below one.

Re: What Makes a Great Software Engineer? [pdf]

#102

Post by ido »

mcny wrote: post #101
jwdunne wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep and I'd have it no other way. Before kids, I used to be like that. If I "ambitiously worked on side projects", I'd at best miss times I'll never get back and at worse be downright neglectful. That's a "trade off" I haven't thought twice about making. There is no mistake. As I said, my kids are number one. In fact, I'd argue it isn't much of a trade off at all. Time with my kids is infinitely more valuable than ti…

I wish it was more socially acceptable to not have children. In many parts of the world, there is still so much stigma if you marry and don't have a child within a couple of years. I am hopeful things will change and we can swing down the total fertility rate to below one.

I'm 34 and living in Berlin - I know a low of people within ±10 years of my age here and MANY have no kids and aren't planning on having any. The norms are changing in a lot of major urban areas.

Re: What Makes a Great Software Engineer? [pdf]

#103

Post by saltedmd5 »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #92
jwdunne wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each to their own - I don't see it as a bad thing. Having children has made me happier and more fulfilled in ways that I could never have imagined. You cannot know the feeling of it until you do. You cannot really understand it until you do. It changes your world.

> Having children has made me happier and more fulfilled in ways that I could never have imagined. That's my main problem with it, it's super selfish to procreate. I don't feel I have the right to force new life (with all the pain and suffering that entails) onto this world for the sake of making me happy. I love my potential children too much to do that to them.

I think this is probably the most self-indulgent thing I've ever read.

Re: What Makes a Great Software Engineer? [pdf]

#104

Post by jwdunne »

mcny wrote: post #99
jwdunne wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's not for me to recommend. I don't recommend it if you don't feel you've got where you need to be and that matters very much. There's tonnes of reasons why I wouldn't recommend parenthood. I don't think I was ready by any margin. All I'm saying is that I don't regret it and I consider it the best decision of my life.

I'll say the selfish thing. There isn't (and rightly so) any law that requires us to have children. I say use it. Let the suckers who want children raise the children we need to take care of us when we are to old. My personal recommendation us when in doubt, err on the side of not having children. Don't make life harder on you than it has to be.

Sensible advice if not coloured with the chalk of Ayn Rand!

Hopefully I do a good job and it'll be my honour when my children look after the old when they grow up.

Re: What Makes a Great Software Engineer? [pdf]

#105

Post by austincheney »

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #57
austincheney wrote: post #35

You make a great software engineer by practicing solving hard problems. There isn't any secret formula or mystique. It is thousands of hours spent solving problems of ever greater difficulty. If you confine your practice to the 9 to 5 job then you are investing fewer hours than somebody who writes open source at night, and will likely be a weaker programmer. If you aren't independently finding new problems to solve t…

Write your shit in assembly then. Everything else is bound to be slower than assembly. See, I can move goalposts too.

Whenever I mention competence is a direct correlation to quantity and quality of practice people cry and create bullshit excuses. :(

Re: What Makes a Great Software Engineer? [pdf]

#106

Post by jwdunne »

ido wrote: post #102
mcny wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish it was more socially acceptable to not have children. In many parts of the world, there is still so much stigma if you marry and don't have a child within a couple of years. I am hopeful things will change and we can swing down the total fertility rate to below one.

I'm 34 and living in Berlin - I know a low of people within ±10 years of my age here and MANY have no kids and aren't planning on having any. The norms are changing in a lot of major urban areas.

I certainly felt no pressure to have children. In fact, up until the moment I decided to have children, I always said I didn't want them.

What changed was my partner's boy, and now my boy for all intents and purposes. It made me rethink my stance and I decided to expand my family.

Re: What Makes a Great Software Engineer? [pdf]

#107

Post by austincheney »

yeukhon wrote: post #39
austincheney wrote: post #35

You make a great software engineer by practicing solving hard problems. There isn't any secret formula or mystique. It is thousands of hours spent solving problems of ever greater difficulty. If you confine your practice to the 9 to 5 job then you are investing fewer hours than somebody who writes open source at night, and will likely be a weaker programmer. If you aren't independently finding new problems to solve t…

> If you lack confidence and need frameworks, abstractions, and other bullshit to write a couple lines of code you will be a weaker programmer So you like to reinvent everything? Do you reinvent HTML & CSS because they are FRAMEWORKS, one of the foundational frameworks of today's web. If your job only ask you to fix a bug, there here is how to make yourself valuable AND technically challenging: * go through the bugs…

Perhaps if you wrote software in addition to doing that which is strictly assigned to you your question would answer itself. This isn't rocket science.

Re: What Makes a Great Software Engineer? [pdf]

#108

Post by shrimp_emoji »

jwdunne wrote: post #104
mcny wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll say the selfish thing. There isn't (and rightly so) any law that requires us to have children. I say use it. Let the suckers who want children raise the children we need to take care of us when we are to old. My personal recommendation us when in doubt, err on the side of not having children. Don't make life harder on you than it has to be.

Sensible advice if not coloured with the chalk of Ayn Rand! Hopefully I do a good job and it'll be my honour when my children look after the old when they grow up.

Ideally, they won't look after the old; their robots will.

Re: What Makes a Great Software Engineer? [pdf]

#109

Post by erickj »

Well obviously compiling a 10 page PDF, replete with references to 37 other sources, in order to establish the core 53 traits to identify the next great SWE is the simplest way to identify great engineers.

Just hand this doc over the HR and ask all hiring managers to memorize it.

Re: What Makes a Great Software Engineer? [pdf]

#110

Post by vectorEQ »

if you enjoy what you can do, only then you can master it. that would of been much simpler explenation ;D.... goes for all things too! And to be honest, 9 to 5 would make you a nice engineer. a lot of people like code, all day and night, but really, 8 hours of productive learning and coding each day is plenty to become very good at it...

I always reccomend anyone to learn whatever is below their current interest in the 'stack'. for example if you like to learn java code, learn what assembly code and perhaps even C code is, learn to implement oop systems in C or assembly and you will have a much finer understanding of why certain decisions are made in your platform, and what motivates these decisions oposed to others. for a web developer, learning what your browser is doing is very important, and to understand why certain things work that way in the end, you might want to learn about cpus, network hardware, assembly code and all that jazz. dig deeper and deeper for greater understanding. it might seem like a lot of work, but if you enjoy what you do, it's never to much and never to deep ;D

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