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Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

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Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#601

Post by jmiserez »

rebeccaskinner wrote: post #542
jmiserez wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> deeply unpleasant to use, such a profoundly nightmarish vampire of morality, so utterly and irredeemably cruel in it's ability to strip all joy out of the art of software development... Oh my... As a Java developer, I'm curious. Can you elaborate a bit? Was this some really old version of Java, a horrible IDE, crazy frameworks, something else? Am I living in a nightmare and just haven't woken up yet? I realize that…

I’m sure a lot of it comes down to taste and personal preference, but for me everything about java is just very high friction. I find the docs and standard library deeply unintuitive and hard to navigate, the language itself feels verbose, inflexible, and the spec for the language is very large and complex. The type system is inexpressive and overly limited. The applications themselves, by virtue of the jvm, feel dee…

Interesting points, and I have to say they do ring true. The type system is definitely limited and if you compare it to Haskell I understand 100% why you'd be frustrated. And the docs are overly verbose while simultaneously not being detailed enough.

For me, I'm currently at a point where a lot of these things are „known issues“, and they don't affect my day-to-day too much. I think the last time they did matter was during the Java 1.7 -> 8 switch, but I see what you mean.

It's funny that you mention not being fond of Python & Javascript, because those are the two most "mainstream" alternatives I thought you'd compare Java to, with plenty of warts themselves.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#602

Post by Shish2k »

dijit wrote: post #567
lillecarl wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the upside of a higly diversified worksforce? Where I work we're all white males age 20-60 except accounting, they're white females around age 30. What's bad about this? What value does it bring to diversify, what should we look for and why is it important? Or are we too small to need diversifying yet with only about 30 employees?

It depends. I’m famously non-PC, but there are certainly scenarios where diversity is actually a large benefit. If you are making a product, it makes sense to have a diverse team working on it so that it had the broadest appeal or usability- Apple Watch not identifying the heart rate of black people and the Facebook image identifier misclassifying black people as monkeys being the most famous or prominent examples.

> Facebook image identifier misclassifying black people as monkeys

Tangential, but it’s interesting that facebook’s reputation is now so bad, it’s become a black hole that distorts responsibility enough that google’s bugs are pinned on them too :P

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#603

Post by User23 »

Shorel wrote: post #204
windowshopping wrote: post #82

Have never agreed with a blog post more. Every single bullet point, 10/10. Okay, okay, actually I have one qualm~ > Standups are actually useful for keeping an eye on the newbies. Unfair. Standups are useful for communication between a team in general, if kept brief. If senior engineer X is working on Y and other engineer M has already dealt with Y (unbeknowst to X), it's a great chance for X to say "I'm currently lo…

Every time I mention the goodness of pencil and paper I get downvoted by so many youngsters. Some people will always disagree about some points. It's in their nature.

Some of the greatest scientific work of all time was done on paper. Doing algorithm design on paper really brings home that you’re working with a mathematical object that just happens to have a mechanical interpretation.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#604

Post by dagmx »

dstola wrote: post #598
dagmx wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has to be one of the most outright bigoted posts I've seen on HN. It implies that only outright homogeneous cultures are good. So a white woman is a negative to be in a work culture with a white man, because she cannot relate to being a man? Or a black man can't work with a white man because he can't relate to being white? Or do you mean if I'm from a foreign country, legally allowed to work in America, that I a…

Asking rhetorical questions of this nature is not achieving anything except airing your hurt sensibilities. People can have opinions other than the ones you hold and I already outlined fairly clearly in my original post what I think. Heterogeneity is bad for startups because of the need to have no friction communication and shared goals/ideals/experiences. It does _not_ mean that diversity is bad in a big company or…

You haven't outlined where you consider the extents of "being homogeneous".

Otherwise homogeneous is whatever demographic you prescribe to and is entirely a self serving concept.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#605

Post by bena »

amai wrote: post #590

I haven't done 100 coding interviews. But here is a suggestion to fix the interviews: Let the candidate bring their own code! First this gives you a unique inside in the programming style the candidate prefers. Second the candidate knows the code very well and is probably more relaxed when he needs to answer your questions about the code (given that she/he didn't copy-paste the code from somewhere). It is similar to…

The problem with that is that we can't be sure that it is their code.

And let's be honest, it doesn't really work for designers either. Because the problems of hiring programmers isn't unique to programmers. Hiring gets harder the more you need out of your workers.

Take any reasonably skilled position, hiring is incredibly difficult because it's hard to evaluate a person's skill in the blind. Hell, it can be difficult even when we do have ways to evaluate skill.

Take any major sports league. The draft is essentially teams hiring players. And they've spent the entire year evaluating hundreds, if not thousands of players to find out which ones are good enough to be hired. They have games to look at, stats to pore over, people to talk to about these players. And they get it wrong often.

Finding good people is a hard problem to solve.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#606

Post by dijit »

Shish2k wrote: post #602
dijit wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends. I’m famously non-PC, but there are certainly scenarios where diversity is actually a large benefit. If you are making a product, it makes sense to have a diverse team working on it so that it had the broadest appeal or usability- Apple Watch not identifying the heart rate of black people and the Facebook image identifier misclassifying black people as monkeys being the most famous or prominent examples.

> Facebook image identifier misclassifying black people as monkeys Tangential, but it’s interesting that facebook’s reputation is now so bad, it’s become a black hole that distorts responsibility enough that google’s bugs are pinned on them too :P

Wow. I totally misremembered that. Good catch!

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#607

Post by bena »

hermitcrab wrote: post #600

>People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia are insane weirdos Counterpoint: People whose source is sloppy (inconsistent naming, indentation, brace placement etc) are almost certainly bad programmers.

True. But I don't think he's talking about that. I don't particularly care if you prefer tabs over spaces, or if you do brace on the line or on the next line, or one of the many other trivial details that don't affect the code quality.

I do care that you have a preference though. I do care that you're consistent in applying that preference and have reasons where you break with that preference.

I have my own preferences, but if I were in a shop where the style guide was to do the opposite of them, I'd do the opposite of them because it's not worth fighting over. It's more important for the code to be uniformly styled so it's easier to read and maintain rather than it to be styled in a way I prefer.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#608

Post by fedorareis »

amai wrote: post #590

I haven't done 100 coding interviews. But here is a suggestion to fix the interviews: Let the candidate bring their own code! First this gives you a unique inside in the programming style the candidate prefers. Second the candidate knows the code very well and is probably more relaxed when he needs to answer your questions about the code (given that she/he didn't copy-paste the code from somewhere). It is similar to…

This has implications that the candidate has code they can bring in. 99% of the code I have written over the last few years has been for work and therefore can’t be shared. The little code I have written outside of work falls into 2 categories, minor tweaks to existing code bases or experimental bits of code to try something out. Neither of those are really useful to this situation. If I was looking for code that I fully wrote myself that would work for this I’d have to look at projects from a number of years ago which means my ability to answer questions would be significantly diminished as I don’t remember why/how I made the choices I made.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#609

Post by dagmx »

dijit wrote: post #591
dagmx wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has to be one of the most outright bigoted posts I've seen on HN. It implies that only outright homogeneous cultures are good. So a white woman is a negative to be in a work culture with a white man, because she cannot relate to being a man? Or a black man can't work with a white man because he can't relate to being white? Or do you mean if I'm from a foreign country, legally allowed to work in America, that I a…

To be perfectly fair with the parent; It _is_ a very western ideal about heterogeneity being highly valued. I think tying emotions to it does us little favours - a prominent successful country that does not value heterogenity at all is Japan. Does Japan outcompete per capita? (The answer is no). Not sure if there are other examples of note here.

There's a difference between not valuing heterogeneous work forces versus valuing homogenous ones. The parents comment is the latter.

Also you have to view the concept of heterogeneous work forces relative to the make up of the countries demographics makeup.

A diverse country having a non diverse work force make up is odd statistically.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#610

Post by clintonb »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #521
clintonb wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Common sense isn’t common, and sometimes it helps to write down the obvious. Obviously planes should only land with the gear down, yet not all planes have. Hence the use of checklists stating the obvious: lower the gear.

Is lowering the gear something you have changed your mind on though? ;)

Lowering gear is a strong belief tightly held. I don’t think I’ll change my mind on that. :)
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