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The Programmer's Brain

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Re: The Programmer's Brain

#71

Post by runawaybottle »

mbfg wrote: post #18

The most important skills i wish someone had taught me when i was a young developer was how to interact with people in all areas of the organization, and how to deal with the politics. I was (as a young person), strongly against really wanting to know about these aspects, and instead wanted to be purely technical, but in the end that will mean more for your career than anything else, unfortunately.

There is a way out of politics. People hate being seen through. The more of a ‘ok, I see what you are about’ vibe you have going, the more self conscious they become. They often regulate down their politics. Just give people a solid death-stare, and I promise you they adjust.

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#72

Post by nathias »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #64
nathias wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it will have to be read, what makes you think you can guess what people will have to read? This seems such an anti-pattern, instead of writing readable code that lives inside the domain where its used, you make an unnecessary abstraction. This is exactly how redundant complexity gets made and you wind up with 16 abstraction layers where each is used just once and a completely unreadable mess.

The advantage of good abstracting is you can unit test one layer and make it super solid, then build the next layer with less mental load. I am not advocating making “unnecessary” abstractions. I’m not even advocating abstracting from the get go: sometimes you need to see the messy to appreciate the abstracted. This is modulo all common sense trade offs!

Making things into units and making things in generalities is something very different. There is no such thing as a new introduction of a generality that would lessen the mental load in itself, it is both a source of bugs and an obstacle to reading but of course sometimes the tradeoffs are worth it. It just that your solution to reading seems to imply that generalization as such is helpful, and I think its the main cause of redundant complexity.

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#73

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

YZF wrote: post #21
mbfg wrote: post #18

The most important skills i wish someone had taught me when i was a young developer was how to interact with people in all areas of the organization, and how to deal with the politics. I was (as a young person), strongly against really wanting to know about these aspects, and instead wanted to be purely technical, but in the end that will mean more for your career than anything else, unfortunately.

It doesn't hurt but I got a great career out of just being a hands-on kind of technical developer. I tried, and mostly succeeded to avoid places where politics play a big role. That said working well with others is important and I also do that well (If I may say so myself ;) ). Politics as in scheming for power are a total turn off for me. Never been interested and not interested in working with others that operate t…

Politics is inherent to any system comprised of human beings. There is no avoiding it and it always plays a big role.

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#74

Post by bitexploder »

jbluepolarbear wrote: post #46

I need the version for programmers with extremely bad ADHD.

I have a lot of anecdotes. The thing that tricked my brain was a project I /really/ enjoyed. I could hit flow state working on it pretty often, even as a heavily distracted teenager. This led to me prioritizing a lot of things about software dev in my 20s. Not “follow your passion” but find something really engrossing. It can be hard. But seriously start buying and reading well reviewed book on ADHD, there is so much better knowledge about managing it these days than when I was a kid. Just understanding the problem at a neurological level can help you build strategies to deal with it. You won’t ever find a magical cure, other than medication, but that’s another discussion. You probably will find ways to win, even if it’s a ugly fight.

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#75

Post by criddell »

oatmealsnap wrote: post #16
anoncoward125 wrote: post #13

Interesting that it specifies "speed reading". I think speed reading for code is actually an anti pattern since it is encouraging your biases and guesses instead of actually reading the damn output. If you ever wondered how people ended up programming stochastically and just making random changes I'd say speed reading is part of it

I mean, there's a time and a place for speed reading. Part of being good at speed reading is identifying the areas you need to slow down for and pay attention to. Another aspect of writing code is to think about future speed readers. Can your code be skimmed and understood on a cursory level?

For me, speed reading is trusting that the comments are correct.

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#76

Post by sbarre »

_hzrk wrote: post #67
mbfg wrote: post #18

The most important skills i wish someone had taught me when i was a young developer was how to interact with people in all areas of the organization, and how to deal with the politics. I was (as a young person), strongly against really wanting to know about these aspects, and instead wanted to be purely technical, but in the end that will mean more for your career than anything else, unfortunately.

> but in the end that will mean more for your career than anything else, unfortunately. I strongly disagree. In my organisation engineers have higher salaries than "people persons" like managers, product owners etc. Maybe it is something Eastern Europe (Romania) does better. In my country, people become managers when they don't know what to do in life, when they have not mastered any skill in 12 years of mandatory ed…

You know the very common complaint from technical people that goes "my manager/leader doesn't understand what I do"?

This is the same thing but from the other side.

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#77

Post by sbarre »

arthur_sav wrote: post #51
mbfg wrote: post #18

The most important skills i wish someone had taught me when i was a young developer was how to interact with people in all areas of the organization, and how to deal with the politics. I was (as a young person), strongly against really wanting to know about these aspects, and instead wanted to be purely technical, but in the end that will mean more for your career than anything else, unfortunately.

Not sure i agree with this one. Plenty of places where purely technical people are appreciated, you just have to be willing to move around companies until you find a good fit. That is not to say that you won't interact with other people within the org but politics will be less relevant.

In my 25 years of experience, I've observed that anywhere that a strong purely technical person thrives like that, there's an equally strong manager or leader behind the scenes supporting them, protecting them and clearing a path for them, even if they don't necessarily see it themselves.

That "good fit" you describe is (typically) the existence of that other person.

I don't say this to diminish the talent or accomplishments of that technical person in any way, but in most companies no one succeeds in a vacuum. It's almost always a team effort.

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#78

Post by specialist »

lelanthran wrote: post #56
msolujic wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I also wished we learned more about this in my CS degree college classes. Luckily, there is pretty good podcast series that helped me structure team leadership, management and other non technical skills. It is called: Manager tools. Here is the list of all topics on politics [1] with intro to 101 series saying this: "Your organization is MUCH more political than most of us realize. For those who know it's polit…

> I highly recommend this series at least. > > [1] https://www.manager-tools.com/map-universe/politics# From reading the topic overview, that looks great, genuinely good. However, there are about 30 x 25m podcasts, or about 12.5 hours of listening to do. In written form I expect that to be about 2 hours of reading (probably less). Do you have any recommendations in written form?

Many podcasts have transcripts, show notes.

I just checked. This publisher charges for those. An interesting monetization strategy.

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#79

Post by specialist »

YZF wrote: post #21
mbfg wrote: post #18

The most important skills i wish someone had taught me when i was a young developer was how to interact with people in all areas of the organization, and how to deal with the politics. I was (as a young person), strongly against really wanting to know about these aspects, and instead wanted to be purely technical, but in the end that will mean more for your career than anything else, unfortunately.

It doesn't hurt but I got a great career out of just being a hands-on kind of technical developer. I tried, and mostly succeeded to avoid places where politics play a big role. That said working well with others is important and I also do that well (If I may say so myself ;) ). Politics as in scheming for power are a total turn off for me. Never been interested and not interested in working with others that operate t…

Those who don't do politics get done by politics.

What you found are orgs with win-win (nonzero) cultures, where everyone's incentives were better aligned.

Identifying those safe harbors is a great skill.

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#80

Post by noir_lord »

MrDresden wrote: post #59
agbell wrote: post #10

Felienne is also a host on Software Engineering Radio. If you are curious about the content I think a teaser of it is covered in this interview: https://www.se-radio.net/2021/06/episode-462-felienne-on-the...

I appreciate that there are other people taking the time to create something like SE-radio, getting interesting individuals on to talk about interesting topics and then giving it away for free (I do not consider it payment to listen to an occasional ad for 10 seconds). But I have tried so many times to start listening to SE-radio and always given up do to the audio quality. It is so grating when the interviewer and i…

https://corecursive.com/ is brilliant and typically has better audio quality.
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