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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)

#71

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

jhncls wrote: post #66
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I did not know who did that. Thanks! I knew it was misattributed, but was really just a "cliff's notes" of a speech ARIS-stot-ly made.

I have never really cared who said it. It's a great quote.

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

#72

Post by staunch »

anticristi wrote: post #22
staunch wrote: post #21

> "The turning point in my life was the day I realized to run great engineering teams I didn’t need to be the best engineer in the world, I needed to get good at advertising my people and their stories up the chain of command. I needed to improve their observability so that we can keep bureaucracy at bay by maintaining a high level of trust. " Poof. Another Big Tech middle manager got their wings. This cynical surren…

> Good work can be judged by good managers, and rewarded, without anyone having to play bureaucratic games. I lost hope this is possible. Even as a non-manager architect, I struggle to see good work if it's not made visible. Fortunately, making good work visible takes little effort from the doer: take "before" and "after" screenshots; update the docs; if you improved performance, leave some plots behind; talk about y…

A non-manager architect should have some sense. They should know all the open problems in their domain and recognize who is solving them and how well they're doing it.

But, yeah, the scope is basically limited to each employee's direct manager. No one else can reasonably maintain all the context and perspective required to judge accurately.

The fundamental requirement is a high level of competence in the manager. It usually requires significant self-confidence, technical skill, and experience solving similar problems.

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

#73

Post by lwhi »

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.

Fair enough, but this doesn't have much to do with the article.

I don't understand why it's the top comment.

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

#74

Post by marcosdumay »

mandeepj wrote: post #19
hinkley wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See also: if you’re standing in a hole, stop digging.

Maybe, it’s not easy to realize, you are in a hole. Or, at least, not during early stage

Well, of course you can only stop digging after you realize you are on a hole.

This phrase is intended for people that once discover they are in an always deepening hole panic and do nothing (or worse) because they see no way to completely fix the situation.

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

#75

Post by n00bdude »

tl;dr preview -

1. “People like us make our money in the seams of things”

2. “Know what people are asking you to be an expert in”

3. “Before you can make things better, you have to stop making them worse”

4. “To go left, turn right”

5. “Thinking is also work”

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

#77

Post by jay3ss »

bambax wrote: post #34
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.

> 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.

That didn't work for me. Going to incognito mode worked, but it's very annoying to have to do these workarounds, even if they are minor

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

#78

Post by mbrodersen »

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?

Do you think a military commander should know anything about the military/weapons/etc.? Do you think a ship building manager should know anything about ships? Yes of course! It is a myth that you can have a manager managing something that he/she doesn’t understand. Without actually delegating their job to people who do (and then take the credit).

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

#79

Post by mbrodersen »

zoltrix303 wrote: post #28
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?

Good managers should focus on taking the best decisions they can with the available information. Sure if they have a tech background, some of that information is easier to process if technical, but good decisions rely on much more than just what is good in the opinion of the tech lead. If a manager starts analyzing the technical information in front of them without the background to do so, they are missing the point.…

If the manager simply does what the tech lead think is the best decision then the tech lead should be managing instead. If the manager makes technical decisions without knowing tech then he should be fired for incompetency.

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

#80

Post by watwut »

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?

The managers without tech background are making bad decisions. But the advantage of tech background is not that you are able to assess any situation. It is more that you are less stupid and make less unenforced clueless basic mistaskes.
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