Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#191

Post by luckylion » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 2:54 PM UTC

loopbit wrote: post #131

luckylion wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I've never had a negative response when I joined a project and discovered obvious problems when I explained why I think that they are or are going to be a problem and offered to help fix them. Nobody likes the guy that shows up, says "that's all shit, you need to fix it", and vanishes again. But I've never seen anyone hate the guy that shows up, says "I've noticed there's a lot of friction around X. I think we…

I'm of the same opinion. I love getting feedback, better if it's constructive, but all kind of honest feedback is useful and welcome. And it doesn't always come from people with more experience, sometimes a greenhorn will see things that a greybeard like me doesn't. But I've seen people giving negative responses to the best feedback. Hell, I've had people complaining for hours because someone else replaced their manu…

Yeah, I've seen that as well. I believe it's mostly fear-driven, in a way of "if this gets automated, why would they need to keep me around". It's a terrible mindset for everybody involved. It really slows the team down, and it's a major issue for the person themselves. It's like impostor syndrome on steroids. Not only do they worry that they might be found out, they worry they might be replaced by a script.

I've never personally seen somebody getting fired because a script can do their job. I've seen them being freed from doing the same repetitive bullshit day after day though, and finally being able to actually tackle new challenges.

But unfortunately, that kind of mindset is not something you can change through rational arguments, at least in my experience.

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#192

Post by karatestomp » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 2:54 PM UTC

hliyan wrote: post #166

phyzome wrote: post #99

Align it with business needs and observable outcomes. Does the company suffer from outages? (Not just have them—but actually suffer from them.) When there's a production incident, do a root cause analysis. If some of the root causes are related to coding and deployment practices, make notes of that. Start aggregating that information. Soon you'll have evidence that you can reduce outages by changing practices. Does P…

Agreed. I've found that part of the problem is how we (engineers) communicate value to non-engineers. It's not right to get upset with a laymen/business people without putting some effort into explaining. I've always found this type of communication effective: - This database change will improve our page load time from 3s to 1s at the cost of 25% of a sprint's capacity. - This library version change takes X amount of…

I've noticed that (low- to mid-level, at least) business, marketing, and other folks are generally a whole lot looser with their numbers than developers are. That is, they'll toss around measures that aren't meaningful—and not just in some quibbling sense of "well technically maybe these could possibly be wrong" but truly are very likely to be way off the mark—because they didn't properly control for confounders or are clearly measuring the wrong thing or whatever. They'll assign meaning to measures that could easily have nothing to do with what they're saying they mean, or mean the opposite.

... but this usually goes over just fine. Rarely questioned. I think if they didn't do this they'd be just as bad off as developers, if not worse due to (again, generalizing) having a worse understanding of how to measure things well.

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#193

Post by phailhaus » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

JamesBarney wrote: post #172

zests wrote: post #105

Near the start of my career I was at a small/medium sized company on a tiny engineering team (3.5 people). We also had a lot of responsibility. Naturally we did the only thing we could and formed silos and worked in our individual silos without too much regard for testing or pull requests. We had a lot of communication and I personally owned the "back-end" and was able to ship stuff fast. I knew how every piece of co…

100% this. For instance I'm an engineer who cares far more for business/technical alignment than software practices. If I had to choose between company A where I work closely with domain experts but the software practices are awful, vs company B where we understand the problem domain through 4 layers of management and business analysts but the software practices are top notch. I'd choose company A every time. Also po…

(Did you mean you'd choose company B?)

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#194

Post by rrradical » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 2:59 PM UTC

Random_ernest wrote: post #121

ransom1538 wrote: post #56

Me as a manager at a startup: "Look, we have 5 months of runway. Does that make sense?" Young dev from large corp: "Yes. But if you don't use Terraform we wont be able to see our infrastructure changes over time. We don't even have a proper code review process." Me as a manager at a startup: "We have two micro instances. Do not install Terraform. Finish the import prototype... now." Young dev from large corp: "Sigh,…

For some years I was the developer you talk about, who always knew everything better, now I am a manager at a startup. So I was able to see both sides of the discussion. I feel like it always comes down to a communication issue. Team members need to feel heard, and feel acknowledged that you fully understood what they are suggesting. On the other hand they need to understand that there are constraints that force a de…

A coworker introduced me to the concept of a 'novelty budget', and I find it really useful. If my team is taking on a new project, there are many ways to improve on how things have been done in the past. But doing anything new carries some risk. If every part of the project is new, it will be very risky.

So I use the idea of a novelty budget to negotiate with my engineers. "What things do you really want to change? Let's focus on that, and use tried and true, albeit suboptimal, methods for the other stuff, to stay within our novelty budget." Down the road, once you can handle more risk, you can introduce one of those changes that were originally punted.

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#195

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 3:01 PM UTC

badpun wrote: post #80

> I know how fast it is to develop when people write good code with discipline. Interestingly, IMO writing good code with discipline is also slow (CI breaks, code review takes forever, updating unit tests takes time, integration tests take a long time to run etc.). The main advantage of disciplined process over the cowboy approach is that, in cowboy approach, the code can become unworkable after a couple of years, wh…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#196

Post by karatestomp » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 3:01 PM UTC

nakovet wrote: post #130

My suggestion as a candidate remember that you are also in charge of interviewing the company you are applying for. Joel Spolsky had "The Joel Test" and it was written decades ago This author tries to revise it: https://dev.to/checkgit/the-joel-test-20-years-later-1kjk The interview is often seen as a one-sided interaction you are on the "I hope they like me", and the company is like "can they do the job?" when in my…

> The interview is often seen as a one-sided interaction you are on the "I hope they like me", and the company is like "can they do the job?" when in my experience you should treat more like a date: do we have similar tastes, what we have in common, where we differ, can we make this relationship work?

The more you manage to flip the interview, the better you're likely to come across, too. 1) people like talking about themselves and what they do and will like you more as a result, and 2) it puts them in a mindset of trying to impress/sell-to you which does a bunch of stuff psychologically that works in your favor.

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#197

Post by toshk » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 3:02 PM UTC

loopbit wrote: post #131

luckylion wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I've never had a negative response when I joined a project and discovered obvious problems when I explained why I think that they are or are going to be a problem and offered to help fix them. Nobody likes the guy that shows up, says "that's all shit, you need to fix it", and vanishes again. But I've never seen anyone hate the guy that shows up, says "I've noticed there's a lot of friction around X. I think we…

I'm of the same opinion. I love getting feedback, better if it's constructive, but all kind of honest feedback is useful and welcome. And it doesn't always come from people with more experience, sometimes a greenhorn will see things that a greybeard like me doesn't. But I've seen people giving negative responses to the best feedback. Hell, I've had people complaining for hours because someone else replaced their manu…

Yes I think the not feeling attacked part is a responsibility of both parties. And therefore sometimes unavoidable.

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#198

Post by kmarc » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 3:04 PM UTC

Yes, your expectations are too high.

I'm trying to hire a devops engineer. Applicants have the shiniest CVs with even 10 years of devopsy stuff on it.

Then I ask the following question: "Explain me the relation between a VM, linux container, docker containers, kubernetes pods. Whatever you find important"

And they have no clue.

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#199

Post by karatestomp » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 3:08 PM UTC

LatteLazy wrote: post #42

In my engineering days there was a saying: you can have it quick and cheap and high quality, but you can only have 2 of those 3. Spunss like you work somewhere quick and cheap. That's not wrong per se. If lives depend on the outcome, you need quality. But I worked in plenty of financial places that were quick and cheap. Especially back office. Ask yourself: would the organisation be better off if we were higher quali…

Skipping tooling & processes below a certain (not very low) point isn't doing it "cheap and fast". It's saying "I want you to build my house but I want it to be cheap so don't buy any more hammers, it's too much money and we can't afford the time for you to run to the hardware store, just all share the one hammer you already have".

It's doing it cheap (but actually expensive) and slow and low-quality.

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#200

Post by chousuke » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 3:12 PM UTC

p_l wrote: post #181

ransom1538 wrote: post #56

Me as a manager at a startup: "Look, we have 5 months of runway. Does that make sense?" Young dev from large corp: "Yes. But if you don't use Terraform we wont be able to see our infrastructure changes over time. We don't even have a proper code review process." Me as a manager at a startup: "We have two micro instances. Do not install Terraform. Finish the import prototype... now." Young dev from large corp: "Sigh,…

Experience recently went the other way around. "It's just simple project, don't bring out the big guns". Somehow, a simple requirement of "make sure we can backup it all and load it elsewhere, manually, nothing fancy" made it so that I lost 5 days purely due to acceptance of manual work at the start.

I'm gravitating towards trying to pick automation tools that I can replace easily, but I don't skip automating things.

Often, creating things using proper automation tools ends up being significantly faster than doing things manually, and the result is better.

If I'm setting up a proof-of-concept, I'll at the very least try to write a shell script that contains whatever it is I did to get a host set up.

If doing stuff for production, I might have one instance where I set up things manually while simultaneously writing the appropriate automation to get another instance up and running. That allows me to iterate the set-up quickly while allowing me to verify the result by recreating it from scratch using the automation I made.