Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer

monicalent.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 534 posts

Re: Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer

#71

Post by dotnetdemon »

GordonS wrote: post #65
beat wrote: post #15

Admittedly, my first days as a junior programmer were before some of you were born, but I'm thinking of a particular format here... Learned as junior: If you report an OS bug or some other deep problem, seniors will not believe you and assume you're making excuses for your own bugs and lack of understanding. Understood as senior: If a junior programmer tells me they found a system-level bug, I won't believe them and…

> Understood as senior: Legacy code that I wrote myself is hard to read. Ha, yes, I occasionally come across code I wrote years before and have a few "WTF moments"!

I always find myself saying “Who is the shithead who wrote... oh...”

Re: Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer

#72

Post by docker_up »

beat wrote: post #15

Admittedly, my first days as a junior programmer were before some of you were born, but I'm thinking of a particular format here... Learned as junior: If you report an OS bug or some other deep problem, seniors will not believe you and assume you're making excuses for your own bugs and lack of understanding. Understood as senior: If a junior programmer tells me they found a system-level bug, I won't believe them and…

> Understood as senior: Legacy code that I wrote myself is hard to read.

For me, any code that I wrote more than 3 weeks, I forgot. That's why I comment the hell out of my code. The younger programmers have routinely told me "commented code means the code isn't very good." I chuckle and ignore them and wait for them to hit their mid-30s and older.

Re: Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer

#73

Post by criley2 »

onion2k wrote: post #53
patagonia wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This bothers me. As code continues to eat the world, this is akin to saying “building codes don’t matter”. That is dangerous. And it isn’t professional.

Experienced developers know when to spend time making sure code is actually good and when a terrible crufty hack is fine. If you think "All code must be perfect" then you're not a pro yet.

>If you think "All code must be perfect" then you're not a pro yet

Or they're a pro in a very different field than you.

When I worked in web development, I was gobsmacked at what professionals considered "good enough to ship". Now that I work in Medical EHR, the standards for 'good enough to ship' when lives could be on the line is very, very, very different.

I imagine a NASA engineer creating famously low-defect code or perhaps an engineer creating control systems for a nuclear power plant would similarly look at our medical code and think we too ship far too many hacks and defects.

Re: Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer

#74

Post by pdpi »

taneq wrote: post #7

The big one for me was the realisation that the code doesn't matter . I mean sure, it does, to us. It's what we do. But really, code doesn't matter. To the end user, what matters is that we solve their problem. We let them do their job, and we make that job as easy as possible. And that's what they pay us for. And to the company we work for, what matters is that we solve the end user's problem, and that we do so in a…

This is why calling people "coders" annoys the hell out of me. There was a popular blog post a long way back[1] about how you shouldn't call yourself a "programmer" because that builds the expectation that programs are the key output of your work. "Coder" takes this problem even further — your job is no longer to build a program (with all the thought and design work that entails), but rather to type out code.

I'm not a coder, or a programmer. I'm a problem solver, and I tend to specialise in the sort of software infrastructure-y problems that are usually solved through code. If you think of yourself as a problem solver first and foremost, then you'll often realise that the best solution involves zero code.

This ${problem}-solver versus ${solution}-user gets even worse when people go beyond define themselves as technology-du-jour users, doesn't matter if it's Rails, React, blockchains, big data, ML, AI...

1. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...

Re: Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer

#75

Post by cntlzw »

taneq wrote: post #7

The big one for me was the realisation that the code doesn't matter . I mean sure, it does, to us. It's what we do. But really, code doesn't matter. To the end user, what matters is that we solve their problem. We let them do their job, and we make that job as easy as possible. And that's what they pay us for. And to the company we work for, what matters is that we solve the end user's problem, and that we do so in a…

True. Oh man, I was so angry about that. You read all them books, refactor anything, use that functional programming, but in the end: who cares! A shiny new button gets more attention than you refactoring that SQL statement.

Re: Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer

#76

Post by robomartin »

beat wrote: post #15

Admittedly, my first days as a junior programmer were before some of you were born, but I'm thinking of a particular format here... Learned as junior: If you report an OS bug or some other deep problem, seniors will not believe you and assume you're making excuses for your own bugs and lack of understanding. Understood as senior: If a junior programmer tells me they found a system-level bug, I won't believe them and…

All excellent points. I got used to filling my code with comments in the spirit of having a conversation with someone to whom I am explaining how an why. Thirty years later I can look at any of my code and quickly understand it. In sharp contrast to this I find most open source code to be difficult and laborious to understand due to the almost total lack of useful comments.

Re: Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer

#77

Post by afiori »

patagonia wrote: post #47
taneq wrote: post #7

The big one for me was the realisation that the code doesn't matter . I mean sure, it does, to us. It's what we do. But really, code doesn't matter. To the end user, what matters is that we solve their problem. We let them do their job, and we make that job as easy as possible. And that's what they pay us for. And to the company we work for, what matters is that we solve the end user's problem, and that we do so in a…

This bothers me. As code continues to eat the world, this is akin to saying “building codes don’t matter”. That is dangerous. And it isn’t professional.

"code doesn't matter" is more like "code beauty doesn't matter", in the same way that beautiful foundations for a building do not matter (or are incidental) to its stability.

Re: Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer

#78

Post by mlent »

docker_up wrote: post #67

Overall a good article, but I completely disagree with the notion that "good enough is good enough". I've been in a lot of code reviews where developers push back because it's "good enough". You need to maintain a defined level of quality otherwise codebases go to shit very, very fast. I was recently told in a code review that a Cassandra read before a write (to ensure there were no duplicates) was "good enough" beca…

Hey! OP here. I definitely don't mean "good enough is good enough" as an excuse -- pushing for quality is extremely important.

My point was more about nitpicking line by line for perfection. What you're talking about sounds like a legitimate performance issue.

I think we're on the same page, but maybe my point wasn't clear enough. I tried to make it clear in my last point that "code is quality is important" but it's important not to confuse code quality with things that are more minor like idiosyncratic coding style.

Thanks for reading!

Re: Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer

#79

Post by andreareina »

tombert wrote: post #40

About two years ago, I didn't get a promotion to "senior engineer" that I thought I was going to, and I had a huge temper-tantrum to my boss about it as a result (I'm still surprised to this day that I didn't quit on the spot, to be honest). I was upset, because people that seemed to be contributing less and were less-qualified (at least from my admittedly-biased perspective at the time) were promoted to a higher lev…

Senior is as senior does.

Re: Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer

#80

Post by RussianCow »

pdpi wrote: post #74
taneq wrote: post #7

The big one for me was the realisation that the code doesn't matter . I mean sure, it does, to us. It's what we do. But really, code doesn't matter. To the end user, what matters is that we solve their problem. We let them do their job, and we make that job as easy as possible. And that's what they pay us for. And to the company we work for, what matters is that we solve the end user's problem, and that we do so in a…

This is why calling people "coders" annoys the hell out of me. There was a popular blog post a long way back[1] about how you shouldn't call yourself a "programmer" because that builds the expectation that programs are the key output of your work. "Coder" takes this problem even further — your job is no longer to build a program (with all the thought and design work that entails), but rather to type out code. I'm not…

This is why I always respond to questions about what I do with "software engineer". I've noticed people seem to perceive "engineering" as more serious than "programming", and it helps to promote the idea that I build things to solve problems and don't just sit there turning designs into code.
Post reply on HN