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Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

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Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#361

Post by wolco »

wonderwonder wrote: post #139
mozey wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?" -Brian Kernighan Over time I've come to appreciate this sentiment. Banging out clever code super fast isn't that important... Spending some time up front thinking about types and architecture pays off in the long run. Especially for server side c…

I very much like this quote. Used to work with a team of contractors out of Eastern Europe. They were exceptional programmers but wrote code using obscure language features and in such an odd way that now that they are gone, every time someone has to debug some of their code its a very frustrating process. There are definitely times to use 'clever' coding practices but nine times out of 10, just write it simply and f…

We all used to do this (ii feels right) until we got burned or had to upgrade and rewrite. Now I try to make everything as simple and straightforward. Really helps you scale because yesterdays work doesn' t need to change.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#362

Post by LargeWu »

paypalcust83 wrote: post #326
nickff wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those tests aren't really about engineering skill. The interviewer is checking to see how much you want the position, how hard of a worker you are, and how smart you are. If you really want the position, you will put a lot of effort into researching what the interview will entail. If you're a hard worker, you will intensively study for the interview. If you're smart, you'll be able to apply the material you studied t…

If Trivial Pursuit: Code Monkey and Engineering Edition is the interview game, that's not a place a sensible person would want to work. A sensible knowledge and performance evaluation would involve pair coding on limited scope, immediate, real problems, not BS trivia. Interviewing is a two-way street.. the signals given-off in the interview process should be taken in as a totality by the interviewee as well. If they…

This is one of the reasons I haven't applied to work at Amazon, even though I'm sure I could do the work. The signal they're sending by interviewing this way says "We want people who are willing to put up with bullshit".

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#363

Post by A21z »

"Rule 11: Which database technology to choose: Choose SQL when you need to do ad hoc queries and/or you need support for ACID and transactions. Otherwise choose no-SQL"

I think it should be the contrary: SQL by default, no-SQL if you have a specific need and know what you are doing.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#364

Post by cambalache »

dang wrote: post #343
jamespollack wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

exactly! if you're taking home the same salary whether you're creating massive value for the company, why bother?

Self-respect?

If you tie your self-respect on how useful are you to the company that pays you, you are fucked. For them you are just a number.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#365

Post by mediascreen »

kumarvvr wrote: post #63
deweller wrote: post #44

> PHP is banned at Amazon due to security reasons, but its successor, Hack, runs a lot of.. Just to be clear, Hack is not PHP's successor. Hack is a fork of PHP developed by Facebook. Hack will not overtake PHP any time soon. PHP has had security issues in the past. Sure you can do stupid things with it if you want, but modern PHP is security conscious out of the box. Frameworks like Laravel make great default choice…

A small question. Is PHP still a preferred platform for any sort of complex web development? I have never even looked at the php site or docs, but I am curious. In this day and age, is there a subset of Apps that PHP is suited for?

I would say that PHP is pretty similar to Ruby and Python. It has a messier history and some inconsistent syntax that people like to complain about. On the other hand it has a huge community, a wide selection of web frameworks, a big set of useful built in functions and libraries, an ecosystem of useful services (for example around Symfony and Laravel) and excellent performance for a scripting language. Both the language and the ecosystem is still developing at a good pace.

In addition there are CMS:es like WordPress, Magento and Drupal with huge market shares that can be used for everything from small blogs where you to pick a theme and get a site up in minutes, to large e-commerce sites up to advanced headless backends for large publishing platforms.

It is declining in use, but the way I see it it's only because there are more alternatives nowadays, not because it's not a good option.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#366

Post by AnimalMuppet »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #250
noad wrote: post #21

I used to get called a 10x developer, I was also called a rockstar and a ninja and a 100x dev and every other compliment that was hip. Then I hit 30. That type of talk stopped. Then I hit 40. Now I will not be considered for any entry level, mid level, or senior level software dev job anywhere in the United States, despite being very desperate and willing to relocate for anything. Doesn't matter. Too old. I'm suppose…

Embedded development is safe from the young turks in the US. Nobody is being taught how to competently develop in C and work with hardware. There is no apparent ageism where I work because older devs are in demand for skills that aren't available in a younger cohort.

This. Embedded isn't in love with the latest web framework. Skills live for decades, not for minutes.

Now, even in embedded, not every employer sees the value in 30 years of experience. Those that do, though, understand that such a person is more valuable than someone with 5 years, and will pay accordingly.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#367

Post by microtherion »

_ah wrote: post #305
noad wrote: post #21

I used to get called a 10x developer, I was also called a rockstar and a ninja and a 100x dev and every other compliment that was hip. Then I hit 30. That type of talk stopped. Then I hit 40. Now I will not be considered for any entry level, mid level, or senior level software dev job anywhere in the United States, despite being very desperate and willing to relocate for anything. Doesn't matter. Too old. I'm suppose…

The best developers only have 10 years experience. 10 years is enough to understand software, process, and the rest at a deep level. You may have expertise in a particular area. You know pretty much all the things that are available to know. After 10 years, the previous experience becomes irrelevant and "drops off". The languages you learned? Gone. The APIs and weird hardware limitations? Irrelevant. Nothing beyond 1…

I agree with your gist of "keep learning", but some of what you say about obsolescence of knowledge seems overstated to me.

> The languages you learned? Gone.

I'm not sure if I'll ever get to write Modula-2 again. But every few years, knowing some PostScript can come in handy. FORTH has a tendency to pop up on every resource constrained platform for a while. Tcl has preserved some niches.

And C++ is both old and new technology. Some details have stuck around for 35 years, but if you don't reinvent your style every 10 years or so, you risk becoming obsolete.

> The APIs and weird hardware limitations? Irrelevant.

Hardware limitations tend to come in cycles. Just when resource constraints on macOS seemed irrelevant, along came iOS with its murderous daemons baying for the blood of resource hungry processes. Just when resource constraints in iOS seemed irrelevant, along came watches.

And a Commodore PET with its 7167 bytes of available RAM and fairly accessible hardware ports has some similarity with an Arduino Uno.

So while I think it's unwise to bank on some knowledge never ceasing to be useful, or that no new technology is ever worth learning, knowing old stuff in itself is not a drawback.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#368

Post by strgcmc »

hamburga wrote: post #359
strgcmc wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a roughly ~12,000-word postmortem document that took an additional 2+ months to produce after the fact, which the OP has lightly quoted or summarized from in his post (including what you quoted). It really is an impressively magnificent failure at scale, but there's nothing really fundamentally earth-shattering about how this project went so far off the rails. Mistakes were made, but IMO nobody was outrageous…

OP here: take another look at the first sentence of that post-mortem doc. I don't think it's misleading to say that this was primarily driven by InfoSec. Though I don't disagree that the purported benefits of XWiki technology were considered as maybe a secondary factor.

Fair enough (though executive summaries are by nature, lossy contextually).

I don't disagree that InfoSec was a driving force behind the project, and may have given it an unhelpful level of urgency (i.e. pushing for the team to make early decisions/plans too quickly, which anyways resulted in this banned PHP thing lasting 4+ years, seems counterproductive). But even if InfoSec was not a factor, the team knew that staying on MediaWiki was not sustainable, and some kind of migration would've happened eventually.

So I guess what I'm saying is, IMO the perceived pressure from the InfoSec mandate was poorly managed by this team, and ended up exacerbating the problem, but fundamentally the choice to migrate to a different wiki platforms was something the team wanted to do (just maybe on a different schedule or with different plans/priorities, in an alternate universe). Migrating off MediaWiki was not done against their will.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#369

Post by discreteevent »

war1025 wrote: post #309
imron wrote: post #164

Rules of Thumb for a 1x Developer During work hours stay away from: * HN * Facebook * Twitter * Reddit * Any other thing constantly distracting you and taking away your attention from your job Congratulations, you are now 3-10x developer.

> Congratulations, you are now 3-10x developer. Congratulations. You are still getting paid the same. Boosts in productivity need to come with boosts in pay, otherwise the logical thing to do is to scale back your effort to a point where the amount you get done matches the amount you get paid for.

Programming is a marathon, not a sprint. That will catch up on you some day. Plus, personally, it just makes life hell. The day passes faster when you get into it and those things prevent me from getting into it (not true of everyone from what I've observed)

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#370

Post by discreteevent »

cambalache wrote: post #364
dang wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-respect?

If you tie your self-respect on how useful are you to the company that pays you, you are fucked. For them you are just a number.

So is every professional you pay money to. But you will still recommend some and not others. When times get tight, those guys still make a living.
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