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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

#611

Post by SkyPuncher »

fedorareis wrote: post #608
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 f…

> 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

Agreed whole heartedly with this. When I'm writing code for fun, I'm not spending time thinking about spec coverage, architecture, or great data design. I'm just screwing around getting things working.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#612

Post by dstola »

dagmx wrote: post #604
dstola wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Whats wrong with this? I like working closely with people that understand me just by body language and completely frictionless communication. You'd be surprised how valuable that is when you're solving a P0 breakage at 3am.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#613

Post by twic »

dagmx wrote: post #584
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?

Lots of advantages to diversity: - you get a wider range of product ideas coming from all parts of the org. You'd be surprised how many engineering decisions only favor the group of people who develop them, you are less likely to consider non-white-male demographics as a homogeneous group, leaving those users out as prospective clients. - you have a less diverse QA and testing without diversity. That means you're onl…

> you get a wider range of product ideas coming from all parts of the org

> you're only testing your products against white people

I think these depend strongly on the kind of software you're building. This may be a benefit if you're building a highly user-facing consumer app, a TikTok kind of thing. It's less likely to be useful if you're building an interbank payment platform.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#614

Post by akdas »

asiando wrote: post #347
akdas wrote: post #303

> After performing over 100 interviews: interviewing is thoroughly broken. I also have no idea how to actually make it better. This has been my gut feeling for a long time, and in the last year, I finally took the time to write down my thoughts on the topic. Every week since February 2020, I wrote about some aspect of interviewing that could be improved [0], and I now feel confident there are actionable improvements…

The blog you mentioned has interesting articles. Do you have by chance also something similar but for the person on the other side of the desk? I’d like to sharpen my skills to be interviewed. I’m the developer who never has questions at the end.

Thanks! That newsletter does have articles geared toward candidates as well, though a lot fewer.

The topic of what to ask at the end is one I floated around, but I didn't find it to be a priority. In an ideal world, the questions at the end wouldn't be part of the evaluation anyway, so it should be a time for you to ask whatever you want. Unfortunately, I'm sure interviewers do judge based on those questions, so if anyone has insight into what "good" questions are, I'd love to know.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#615

Post by namirez »

lillecarl wrote: post #487
mabbo wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't see the value in having a diverse workforce and company at any scale, I doubt anything I can say will convince you. There's enough research out there showing the benefits, if you're willing to take just a few minutes to go look for it. Your competitors will read that research. edit: carlhjerpe is right- this is super condescending. Downvote me.

That's very condescending. I'm asking because I don't see why my colleagues would be any better than they are if they were black, brown, jewish, muslim, female in various combinations, maybe I hold my colleaguestoo high?

Now this is what I call a tone deaf question! You shouldn’t be asking if a minority or person of color would perform the job any better? The real question is whether there are competent workers who are not white? And if your workforce is entirely white, you should be asking if you’re mixing up competence with familiarity. People usually trust what is familiar.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#616

Post by twic »

kenhwang wrote: post #334
orobinson wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, for what reasons would you choose MySQL over Postgres?

Personally, when I want speed or easy upkeep and intend on doing dumb simple things. Postgres is more featureful, but if you don't intend on using those features, MySQL is consistently faster and historically smoother to update and keep running.

> MySQL is consistently faster

Unless you want to do a join.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#617

Post by dagmx »

dstola wrote: post #612
dagmx wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Otherwise homogeneous is whatever demographic you prescribe to and is entirely a self serving concept Whats wrong with this? I like working closely with people that understand me just by body language and completely frictionless communication. You'd be surprised how valuable that is when you're solving a P0 breakage at 3am.

So you're saying you can't get on equally well with people outside your demographic? You wouldn't even give them a chance based on not being part of your demographics?

There's also a difference between how you pick your friends and how you hire employees. You were advocating that hiring homogeneously is beneficial. In and off itself, that's discriminatory.

And still you refuse to commit to what is the extents of "homogeneous". Is it ethnicity? Language? Gender? Sexuality? Nationality?

Your post also suggested that heterogeneous work forces , even if you qualify it as applying only to startups, work at an interior level to homogeneous ones. Again, that's implying that different demographics can't work well together. But clearly that can't apply across the board. Or women and men could never work together. So what's the extents of your statement?

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#618

Post by twic »

blabitty wrote: post #51
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineer-turned-manager, I spend a lot of time asking engineers how we can simplify their ambitious plans. Often it’s as simple as asking “What would we give up by using a monolith here instead of microservices?” Forcing people to justify, out loud, why they want to use a specific technology or trendy design pattern is usually sufficient to scuttle complex plans. Frankly, many engineers want to use the latest t…

I like to half jokingly assert that microservices are a pysop to sell cloud hosting

Not a joke. When i worked at Pivotal Labs, sales / executives were very excited about the synergy between helping clients build microservice architectures and selling them Cloud Foundry.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#619

Post by conradfr »

submeta wrote: post #563

> People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia are insane weirdos He seem to have not seen messed up code written and changed by a dozen programmers over the course of years with various notions about indenting, placing parentheses and comments and whatnot. I‘ve seen code with tabs and spaces mixed, wrongly indented code where following the logic is hard, code with no comments at all or code wit…

At my last workplace someone made a change that was preventing you to commit if your imports ("use") where not sorted alphabetically. They are so irrelevant that the IDE (PhpStorm) hide them by default.

It used to make me so mad.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#620

Post by deanCommie »

dstola wrote: post #554
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?

Politically incorrect opinion incoming: the most efficient teams are homogeneous for the same reasons that military battalions are best off being homogeneous. 1. it improves communication 2. shared experiences and culture 3. overall better team cohesion and culture building I would go almost as far as saying that diversity is a red flag for a startup and that diversity starts to have benefits only in bigger companies

The research doesn't support that at all: https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter
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