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New Grad vs. Senior Dev

ericlippert.com

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Re: New Grad vs. Senior Dev

#291

Post by capableweb »

lordleft wrote: post #2

This is a great story. I feel like talented CS students are particularly prone to this sort of myopic thinking; their professors introduce them to functional programming, or the philosophy of UNIX, and they carry that approach everywhere, in a very blunt way. They also carry this little-examined conviction that the world consists of mediocrities and mediocre code and sometimes aren't charitable with the work of other…

> They also carry this little-examined conviction that the world consists of mediocrities and mediocre code and sometimes aren't charitable with the work of others.

Hear hear. CS students fresh out of school seems to carry the notion that they are superior to people who haven't studied CS, even though those people been in the industry for many years. Once the ex-students are now working in a professional environment with deadlines and stakeholders, it takes them a couple of months before they realize they have to actually learn how to work as a software engineer now, and that has nothing to do with CS.

Re: New Grad vs. Senior Dev

#292

Post by joshwa »

dmurray wrote: post #212
heymijo wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like the phenomenon dubbed Chesterton's Fence [0]. A core component of making great decisions is understanding the rationale behind previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse. So you helped the new dev understand the current lay of the land. They listened, then suggested an improvement based on their new understanding. You agreed and together…

This isn't really Chesterton's Fence. It doesn't take any soul searching or insight to answer "why was this not written in Python3 in the first place" - the answer is almost certainly that Python3 or some key libraries didn't exist. It's a pure cost/benefit analysis question. Switching has some cost, and some benefits, and you have to decide which are likely greater.

Knowing how so many devs are hungry to move to the new shiny thing, the question is often more like "why hasn't this been rewritten in Python3 already?".

Possible answers:

• Legit technical or cost/benefit reasons

• Probably a good idea but no budget/time for the effort

• Somebody already tried and it was a disaster

• No manager has been stupid enough to humor the devs

Re: New Grad vs. Senior Dev

#293

Post by capableweb »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #45
Ididntdothis wrote: post #23

I always envy people who work on this level instead of cobbling systems together that integrate several systems all with their own set of flaws and you can be happy if you can make them work together somehow. The algorithm stuff seems pretty simple in comparison. A very local problem that can be profiled well and you can understand most of the factors at play.

The "cobbling systems together" stuff is code bureaucracy rather than programming. You're no longer dealing with constraints of physics, mathematics and sound system design - you're building a bit-pushing layer in between Kafkaesque monstrosities that were never truly intended to work together. Sadly, most programming jobs seem to primarily involve code bureaucracy rather than the "algorithmic" level.

I've always seen the "cobbling systems together" stuff as actually software engineering, as that's what you need to have a final production system running. What you describe as "programming" I would say is computer science.

And for me, the work that solves real-world problems tends to be software engineering (using my own definition), rather than computer science (again, using my own definition), which seems to be more about optimizations.

Re: New Grad vs. Senior Dev

#295

Post by temac »

vardump wrote: post #75
thedance wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be faster than some alternatives under some circumstances. A loop would probably be more code (== icache pressure) and would consume at least a register and a BTB entry.

It's certainly been a while since I last optimized for the original Pentium architecture. Still faintly remember U & V pipes, unexplained causes for stalls, etc. As even nowadays, it would likely depend on the particular algorithm and data set. I'd be surprised if you can't do better than 4 cycles per char for sufficiently long strings. Most likely for short strings, REP SCASB wins due to setup costs. (Actually that…

You would be surprised about what is happening in modern computers. I don't know about REP SCASB, but IIRC, REP MOVSB is now an insanely efficient way to memcpy on last Intel microarchs (not necessarily always the fastest, but really fast enough for tons of scenario, and very I cache friendly). But it might be less interesting on some other x86 processors.

It makes sense to delegate some of the microoptims to the hardware.

But regular scalar instructions are also optimized like crazy. Write a small loop, and your state of the art microarch might sort of unroll it by using register renaming and speculative execution, so sometimes basically multiple iterations are executed at the same time (and on top of that you sometimes get uOP cache locking, which then improves energy and hyperthreading efficiency).

Re: New Grad vs. Senior Dev

#296

Post by quickthrower2 »

maliker wrote: post #136

I'm the senior dev on my team, and whenever a new dev joined my team they would look at the codebase and go "ew, python2? Just use python3." That gave me a chance to explain the testing and refactoring cost that would come with changing python versions, and how the benefits to users would be almost zero. And then at some point one of the new juniors said, "hey, there's a lot of filesystem performance improvements and…

And maybe the Junior developer is allowed to do this because they cost less, so if it gets abandoned the company can take it, but a senior out for a month would impact other areas.

Re: New Grad vs. Senior Dev

#297

Post by lioeters »

sergiotapia wrote: post #171
xenocyon wrote: post #76

Admittedly clueless question: what does 'brrr' mean? (I'm not a software dev and idioms that may be obvious to others are unfamiliar to me.)

It originated from a meme of the Federal Reserve printing more monopoly money. "Printing machine goes brrrr". As they turn the crank ever faster making the printing machines smoke.

Additional context: https://brrr.money/

Re: New Grad vs. Senior Dev

#298

Post by pc86 »

cameronfraser wrote: post #173
bogdanu wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reverse of this also happens: new team manager joins a team of 4-5 dev and goes "eww... a monolith, we'll write an MVP in 3 weeks with microservices, CQRS and all". Long story short, one year and a half passes and the mvp is still not finished, the architect leaves the company and some poor guys (from an outsourcing company) are still going at it with the same architecture.

CQRS and microservices has so much overhead, I'm amazed at how many companies adopt microservices without having anyone know a single thing about distributed systems. I think people underestimate the glue required to make microservices be useful. I had a similar situation at my last company where they spent a year and a half converting their monolith into half ass microservices and it still wasn't working properly. T…

Is anyone surprised that a "half assed" implementation of anything doesn't work properly, though?

Re: New Grad vs. Senior Dev

#299

Post by ljm »

maliker wrote: post #136

I'm the senior dev on my team, and whenever a new dev joined my team they would look at the codebase and go "ew, python2? Just use python3." That gave me a chance to explain the testing and refactoring cost that would come with changing python versions, and how the benefits to users would be almost zero. And then at some point one of the new juniors said, "hey, there's a lot of filesystem performance improvements and…

I'm a senior dev/tech lead and I empower my junior team mates/reports to do what they think is right. As such, I get shot down just as much as I shoot them down.

I learn a lot from them, because I'm asking them to do a lot, and they also learn from me when I review the code or advise them on an alternative. They push back a lot and that's what I want. I want my reports to prove me wrong and show me better.

This approach means that if I really have to put my foot down or enforce something, then there is enough mutual trust to allow that to happen.

Re: New Grad vs. Senior Dev

#300

Post by gullyfur »

redis_mlc wrote: post #279
bcrosby95 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A monolith can handle millions of daily unique users. The database is the hard part. In the web world, if you have less than 10s of millions of daily users, as long as you design an application that holds no state itself, the architecture is usually more important for scaling your team and the size of your codebase rather than the number of users you can handle.

With microservices, you lose the ability to use database transactions across services/tables. Later on, when people realize this, it's too late. It's priceless to see their expressions when senior mgmt. and business owners finally find out.

Could you elaborate what you mean by transactions?
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