The title should be: Things i didn't need to know as of 2018.
Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
151–160 of 226 posts
Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
#152There's a risk of being a "Jack of all trades, master of none" in Software Engineering. Companies pressure Engineers to be "Generalists" because it lowers salary rates and makes people more replaceable. But it's the Specialists (like Dan) that drive actual innovation.
And the data proving this is where?
Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is disgusting. I’m not condemning you for finding a gap in the market — that’s totally fair play. But the fact that this can exist and that we have a culture of celebrity in software development at all (especially in such a dishonest way) is just disgusting.
Yes, this is hacker news. We've to find hacks in the capitalism to get ahead in life. As long as it's legal, it's good for us. Since we pay well, don't see any problem.
I wasn’t clear enough. I have no problem with the “ghost-coding” business.
I have a problem with the culture in which we will hear about some open-source coder and then idolise them to the point that they aren’t held to an equal standard, for example in the hiring process.
It certainly flies in the face of the ideals of a meritocracy [spare me the “meritocracy is a myth!” trope] when we hire for a technical role on the basis of being a personality in the industry. I knew this happened to some degree as I think I’ve taken advantage of it myself, but I didn’t know it’s so prevalent that people can start “ghost-coding” businesses off the back of it.
To be absolutely clear: I am not implying this applies specifically to Dan Abramov.
Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
#154There's a risk of being a "Jack of all trades, master of none" in Software Engineering. Companies pressure Engineers to be "Generalists" because it lowers salary rates and makes people more replaceable. But it's the Specialists (like Dan) that drive actual innovation.
What about 'T-shaped' people?
Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
#155Hi Dan, I'm surprised and amazed by your patience and cool-headedness here. In my opinion that's the foundational quality of every good developer, everything else comes out of that. Seeing your replies here tells me all I need to know.
Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don’t think that’s a problem? I don’t think there’s any value in being a name in programming. There is certainly value in a dollar sense (to their own career prospects at least), but I don’t understand why people would be like “wow! It’s $name! They’re famous!” If someone non-junior knew no shell scripting and had no FP knowledge — or thought that JavaScript counts as FP [spoiler alert: it doesn’t] — I wouldn’t h…
Personally I’m not saying JavaScript “counts” as FP — which is why the post says “unless _you_ count”. ;-) But there are certainly FP subcultures in the JS community which only use the functional subset: https://github.com/jfmengels/eslint-plugin-fp https://github.com/fantasyland/fantasy-land https://ramdajs.com/ That subculture is what I was referring to. If you’re splitting hairs over such definitions without ackno…
Culture means different things to different people. If a candidate were to suggest they were only interested in the “pragmatic parts of FP”, implying that developing an understanding of category theory is somehow frivolous and not pragmatic (which I think you did earlier), I would acknowledge this as a poor culture fit.
Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, hearing that a core contributor to React doesn’t know much of anything about basic engineering topics is disheartening, not encouraging. Not memorizing the algorithm book is one thing, but being considered a “rockstar” when you don’t know basic sorting algorithms...
Being a rockstar is more often a matter of being able to work in your field effectively and efficiently. He's not a savant, and he's not working in a space where knowing sorting algorithms is meaningful to his day to day activity. He's still great at how job and the space he works in, and not knowing these things doesn't heavily affect that
That’s mostly just an indictment of the Javascript space, not a defense of lacking fundamental knowledge.
I don’t routinely write sorting algorithms either, but I know what they are, how they differ, and how to implement them. And it’s useful knowledge - it comes up often in lots of domains.
I see lots of comments about how this is a bold stance against “imposter syndrome”, but at some point, it isn’t a syndrome. There really is basic knowledge that defines professional competence in this field, and it can’t be replaced by github stars.
Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
#158That's pretty much exactly the list I would come up with myself.
I'm very surprised by how accurate this is...
Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
#159It's on tangent but I owned an agency before and my employees under NDA wrote opensource projects for celebrity developers. It was effectively a GhostCoders for hire service. Out of them a few developers got very popular. It was a matter of luck more than anything. Anything can catch wind anytime, we just needed to keep up with the trend. One way to catch this is coding style. Since, we employed GhostCoders - style v…
This is disgusting. I’m not condemning you for finding a gap in the market — that’s totally fair play. But the fact that this can exist and that we have a culture of celebrity in software development at all (especially in such a dishonest way) is just disgusting.
It also didn’t happen. This guy is trolling HN. Maybe it breaks the guidelines to post this, but take a look through his history, he just posts conflicting, self aggrandising statements and low content noise. It’s a shame to see people wasting their effort replying to him.
Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
#160I was really surprised to see algorithms on this list. I would have presumed everyone at Facebook would be a cover-to-cover expert at the sorts of algorithms you'd see in coding interviews.
According to his tweet [1], there is a separate hiring track for front end engineers that does not include that much algorithmic knowledge. I was surprised too. [1] https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1078658656344903683?s...
Facebook can afford (nay, NEEDS) to rise to that level of specialization. But that's only going to be true at the level of a megacorp, like Facebook, or Google, or Microsoft.
For even moderately sized companies, someone with wider knowledge will fare better, because such companies aren't going to spend $500k/yr on someone who doesn't know algorithms (or on someone who ONLY knows algorithms). The marginal cost to Facebook is near zero, the marginal cost to a smaller company certainly is not.