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All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)

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Re: All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)

#61

Post by ajdude »

BossingAround wrote: post #52
bambax wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is cheap and easy to set up a blog on your own custom domain True. But you can defeat all of Medium's annoying features by just disabling JavaScript.

While true, I'd say a lot of people just won't even bother. I've seen people refuse to download whole books because they needed to put in email. "You can create a 10-minute email" you say. True, and a lot of people do while also a lot of people simply don't want the book that much.

I’m kind of like that but in the other direction. I disable JavaScript on everything by default, and if I run into a website or a blog that won’t work without JavaScript, most of the time I just give up and leave the site instead of enabling JavaScript for that specific domain.

Re: All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)

#62

Post by steverb »

lwhi wrote: post #40
MattGaiser wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was on a team where the lead had issues like that Ran into a lot of situations like this: https://xkcd.com/1425/ The other common issue was that the non-technicals didn't grasp the need for absolutes and specificity. One common issue revolved around dates. So we would get a ticket that "such and such permission should expire at a reasonable time on the date specified." Reasonable time was not defined and it turned…

I think the problem here is often down to non-technical users defining the solution, rather than the problem (or aim).

Yes, I've found that a useful way around this is to go back to the non-technical user and ask them why. Why do you want to do this? Why do you want to do this in this manner?

That usually either gives the implementor enough information to wholeheartedly agree with the proposed solution, or to suggest something more appropriate.

Re: All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)

#63

Post by bendergarcia »

valeron102 wrote: post #26

Do you guys think that managers should have some tech background so they could assess any situation and get better decisions. I've been involved in a few projects were the lead senior developer was having difficult times with the manager. Any thoughts?

There’s only the minimal amount of knowledge needed. I think a manager is no different than a soccer manager. Their role is to train the player for the role they’re best fit for. A manager has to build a team with the right skill sets. And I don’t mean just technical skill sets. You coach the player during one on ones and give feedback, and then during game time, you maybe yell strategic advice but the ball is at their feet, they’re now autonomous unit that needs to work cohesively. A good manager gets out of the way and steps in only when necessary. The more coaching and autonomy is given the more your players develop. The more they develop the more they’re capable of doing, and the more time the manager can spend thinking about higher level ideas and goals. It’s a nice feedback cycle.

I do think when the team is more technical than the manager, he has to coach the team to communicate the useful information to him. It’s his job to be able to synthesize information and to ask questions that make the team think outside the scope of their work, try to find or tease out any gotchas. Lastly a manager should be aware of the impacts their teams work will have on others and intervene when he thinks something might go wrong.

It’s always positive when the manager has a very technical background or deep knowledge of the tech stack, but they should be aware of micro managing.

Re: All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)

#64

Post by vehementi »

booleandilemma wrote: post #57
RHSman2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good manager doesn’t need to be technical as they are a managing people. That is the hard part. Not tech.

If you’re a manager and not technical you’re not going to understand what your people are doing, you’re only going to understand what they tell you. Also, you’re going to be manipulated and hoodwinked by the managers around you who are technical. Lastly, the engineers you’re managing are going to laugh at you behind your back. I’ve seen all of this happen before.

Hmm, am I writing posts in my sleep?

Re: All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)

#65

Post by CharlesW »

ivanche wrote: post #39
nrvn wrote: post #31

Kind advice to everyone willing to share their write ups: avoid Medium. I can’t read the article because of the signup wall. It is cheap and easy to set up a blog on your own custom domain.

In situations like these, Bypass Paywalls extension for Firefox comes really handy! Especially in combination with uMatrix and uBlock Origin.

> Bypass Paywalls extension for Firefox

There's a few of these. Can anyone confirm that https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywal... is the "real" one and is safe?

Re: All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)

#66

Post by jhncls »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #44
bjornjajayaja wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moral of the story: any public interfaces should be peer reviewed by various stakeholders if possible :) If no one is available, stepping away from ones own work and reviewing it with a fresh mind can have a similar affect

Absolutely. In this case, I was the only person working on it, and reviewing the code long after the fact is what did it. But doing it right the first time would have been better. That comes from establishing habit. "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." -Some guy that habitually wore a bedsheet.

It's a quote from Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers (1926)

[0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aristotle#Misattributed

Re: All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)

#67

Post by Beldur »

bushbaba wrote: post #2

“Before you can make things better, you have to stop making them worse” Incredibly great advice. Especially when trying to resolve an already broken situation.

While playing the game of GO, I learned something related:

Don't go on a hunt when your house is on fire

Re: All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)

#68

Post by wheelinsupial »

lwhi wrote: post #40
MattGaiser wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was on a team where the lead had issues like that Ran into a lot of situations like this: https://xkcd.com/1425/ The other common issue was that the non-technicals didn't grasp the need for absolutes and specificity. One common issue revolved around dates. So we would get a ticket that "such and such permission should expire at a reasonable time on the date specified." Reasonable time was not defined and it turned…

I think the problem here is often down to non-technical users defining the solution, rather than the problem (or aim).

Where I work, for larger projects, we have business analysts or product managers who are supposed to help with converting the user request into some sort of specification.

If the project is a smaller one, then the developer is supposed to be acting in an analyst-developer type role. In my fairly limited experience the analyst part tends to take a back seat in these smaller projects.

I believe, though people are free to disagree, that it’s on the people developing the solution to ensure it satisfies the users needs. If the user is jumping to a solution, then it’s up to the team to take a step back and ensure the problem has been satisfactorily defined.

Note: I work on internal business apps used in a large corporation, and I have never worked on consumer facing apps.

Re: All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)

#69

Post by C-x_C-f »

ajdude wrote: post #61
BossingAround wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While true, I'd say a lot of people just won't even bother. I've seen people refuse to download whole books because they needed to put in email. "You can create a 10-minute email" you say. True, and a lot of people do while also a lot of people simply don't want the book that much.

I’m kind of like that but in the other direction. I disable JavaScript on everything by default, and if I run into a website or a blog that won’t work without JavaScript, most of the time I just give up and leave the site instead of enabling JavaScript for that specific domain.

This. I've also noticed that websites that don't run without JS are either interactive apps (for which it is understandable) or sites that want to load JS from so many places that I simply can't be bothered figuring out which ones to whitelist.

Re: All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)

#70

Post by ivanche »

CharlesW wrote: post #65
ivanche wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In situations like these, Bypass Paywalls extension for Firefox comes really handy! Especially in combination with uMatrix and uBlock Origin.

> Bypass Paywalls extension for Firefox There's a few of these. Can anyone confirm that https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywal... is the "real" one and is safe?

Yes, that's the one.
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