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What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry

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Re: What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry

#181

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

justinwp wrote: post #52
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #19

This is very wise: "When I was at GM, you were a failure if your next move was not up—managing more people or taking on bigger, more complex projects. For many, this made for a miserable career path" As I've said before, I think this is a corrosive aspect of the perf/promo process at many FAANGs. The "level" system encourages/pushes people to "upgrade" in this manner, and I think contributes to a number of problems.…

Having been employed at Google for about nearly two years, your take doesn't seem accurate at all. > And that reward / grading structure may not at all correspond to either the monetary or cultural success of a corporation. The key feedback/suggestions I see for my own performance review is to define my impact on both the monetary and cultural success of my org. Exactly the opposite of what you are saying. > being as…

> "to define my impact on both the monetary and cultural success of my org"

What you get out of that is people frantically chasing impact and visibility instead of focusing on the humdrum drudgery of keeping the lights on. The result is penny wise and pound foolish behavior that definitely does not correspond to the monetary or cultural success of the corporation. People who are good at gaming the system in this can create their "impact", collect the rewards, and make an internal transfer before the costs or superficiality of their "impact" catch up with them.

Re: What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry

#182

Post by watwut »

sli wrote: post #140
duxup wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First real job I had there was this guy who had one specialization. He was in charge of some software that drove tape drives. Every outside new manager would come in and in some form or another look down on this guy in some form due to his age and generally not doing "a lot" of tasks and new products. It took the local VP to come down and regularly high five him after his product git rave reviews from customers (regu…

> Meanwhile the guys who were doing all the new stuff, sucked at trying to juggle 12 things because it looked good on a resume. This isn't helped by the current trend of trying to hire mostly fullstack developers, also known as hiring one person to do the job of three people. It does almost nothing but incentivize packing resumes to hopefully make the cut and burn people out from switching modes.

Fullstack does not mean that you will burn out. Fullstack can mean 40 hours a week, never overtime. Also, for smaller apps, after you had at least few months of experience with all technologies, it is not difficult to switch modes.

People who specialize will be better at their specialization, but you will be good enough for majority of apps.

Re: What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry

#183

Post by watwut »

Accujack wrote: post #32
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #19

This is very wise: "When I was at GM, you were a failure if your next move was not up—managing more people or taking on bigger, more complex projects. For many, this made for a miserable career path" As I've said before, I think this is a corrosive aspect of the perf/promo process at many FAANGs. The "level" system encourages/pushes people to "upgrade" in this manner, and I think contributes to a number of problems.…

Expecting a talented software engineer to "upgrade" to become a manager of a development team makes exactly the same amount of sense as expecting a talented accountant to gain a bit more skill and suddenly become a lawyer.

But also, the non technical managers I have seen were mostly toxic. And none of them were good - not even those who were decent people.

It is not that all or most engineers would be good manager, but without that background you are guaranteed to not be good.

Re: What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry

#184

Post by waldrews »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #81

What I'd be really interested in is how tech churn is perceived by people older than me. I'm only 30 years in, so I tend to defend my generation's choices such as POSIX, SQL, XML, SOA, Java, and C/C++ before that (plus special-purpose pet peeves of mine such as markup/SGML and logic programming which came before) though I'm also claiming to be proficient in and generally open towards new tech. I consider most of supp…

Curious how logic programming fits in with the rest of that list?

Re: What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry

#185

Post by usefulcat »

one2know wrote: post #102
xyzelement wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're saying is important for everyone to internalize. I'll spin it like this: Your job satisfaction/pay are a function of your impact. Your impact is a function of your leverage. If you're a "pure coder" who doesn't have any of the other skills you mentioned, your output is incredibly limited. At best, you produce a day's worth of code in a day, but you also require someone to manage you closely to make sure y…

Found the manager. This is just more developer hate drivel. Yes, if you think managers are more valuable, then obviously you are going to say engineering work is "incredibly limited" and manager activities are "orders of magnitude more impactful" Listen, no amount of ass kissing and brown nosing is going to solve actual tech problems.

It sounds like you're making assumptions in bad faith. I'm a SWE (i.e., not a manager) and I didn't read the comment at all like you did. On the contrary, I quite agree with it.

Re: What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry

#186

Post by that_guy_iain »

xyzelement wrote: post #22
lrossi wrote: post #6

Something that I find interesting is that career advice coming from professionals having many years of experience focuses almost exclusively on the people aspects and not the technology: communication, trust, teamwork, documentation, clarity. The advice is clear, precise and honest. This is the opposite of what you get from new hires/juniors: they tend to focus on which stacks matter, what to learn, how to develop, d…

What you're saying is important for everyone to internalize. I'll spin it like this: Your job satisfaction/pay are a function of your impact. Your impact is a function of your leverage. If you're a "pure coder" who doesn't have any of the other skills you mentioned, your output is incredibly limited. At best, you produce a day's worth of code in a day, but you also require someone to manage you closely to make sure y…

> If you're a "pure coder" who doesn't have any of the other skills you mentioned, your output is incredibly limited. At best, you produce a day's worth of code in a day, but you also require someone to manage you closely to make sure you code the right stuff.

This seems to miss the point of teams. Everyone should have a role if you hire someone as a software engineer and they spend all their time doing devops because they like it more you've made a bad hire. If all your engineers are having product meetings with various departments then you've again made bad hires. Everyone should have their role and fullfill that role to work as a successful team. People thinking they're above fullfilling the role they were hired for is one of the fast ways to have a poor performant team. To put this into sports you don't want your defender to be constantly hanging around the other team's goal mouth.

Re: What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry

#187

Post by irrational »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #19

This is very wise: "When I was at GM, you were a failure if your next move was not up—managing more people or taking on bigger, more complex projects. For many, this made for a miserable career path" As I've said before, I think this is a corrosive aspect of the perf/promo process at many FAANGs. The "level" system encourages/pushes people to "upgrade" in this manner, and I think contributes to a number of problems.…

I think of it as vertical vs horizontal career path. Vertical is becoming a manager of more and more people and/or projects. Horizontal is becoming an expert at more and more technologies/languages/etc.

Re: What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry

#188

Post by mathattack »

guytv wrote: post #126
mathattack wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The challenge is how to measure individual contributors. It’s easy in Sales, which is why salespeople can do very well without being managers. Harder with engineers, whose work is very interconnected.

Team mates, usually know who is a good engineer, and who's not - much more accurately than management. When I was in Google, Perf process was based on peers feedback, and it worked well.

How much variable in rewards and comp are based on the peer reviews?

Another challenge with large firms is the overall lack of variance.

Re: What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry

#189

Post by larrik »

noir_lord wrote: post #90
duxup wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First real job I had there was this guy who had one specialization. He was in charge of some software that drove tape drives. Every outside new manager would come in and in some form or another look down on this guy in some form due to his age and generally not doing "a lot" of tasks and new products. It took the local VP to come down and regularly high five him after his product git rave reviews from customers (regu…

It's similar to the systems administrator dilemma. Do your job well, it looks you are not doing very much, why are we paying you? Everything is on fire, it looks you are not doing your job properly, why are we paying you? I've worked with a few engineers over my career like the person you described and frankly they are worth their weight in gold, been able to bank on their output working reliably and consistently ove…

On the other hand, lots of places have people who they _think_ are this guy, and who are actually just a bad dev who is good at building an impenetrable moat for job security...

Re: What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry

#190

Post by macintux »

one2know wrote: post #155
macintux wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This tone is unwelcome on HN, which is probably why your previous comments have often been downvoted and flagged.

Bashing and shit talking software engineering profession is welcome on HN?

Let me paraphrase the original comment to make my next question easier to answer:

Effective software engineering in a business context requires awareness of business needs.

Which part of that is “bashing and shit talking”?

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