The Programmer's Brain • Hacker News Board

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#81

Post by petercooper » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 1:25 PM UTC

Sr_developer wrote: post #4

woleium wrote: post #2

are Manning books any better these days? They always used to rush the most awful poorly edited and planned content to market to be the first ones with a book on $NewTechnology

I was to comment the same the other day , but the post was about some book the author was promoting so I didnt want to be a party popper but the book was totally mediocre. It seems to me the inevitable destiny of all "tech" press, start with strong titles and devolve into crap, or to be fairer a crap-shoot. So now you have: ALWAYS HAVE BEEN "CRAP" = Packt and Apress STARTED OK,GOOD NOW MOSTLY CRAP = Pragmatic, Mannin…

Where's the No Starch judgment coming from? While they seem to have started veering into more mainstream/maker-y type stuff over the years, I've never had a single bad book off of them, and in terms of actual physical quality I'm not sure there's any publisher that's better.

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#82

Post by linklater » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 1:29 PM UTC

_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…

Your livelihood depends on those with people skills. If products don't get marketed, you don't eat. If products don't get sold, you don't eat. If your leader doesn't make the hard and right decisions on where to take the company, you don't eat.

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#83

Post by javier10e6 » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 1:32 PM UTC

Eternal dialog: Ethos: Is it right to leave that pointer un-checked? Pathos: It makes me angry that code reviewers let this through. Logos: The code has bugs, don't act surprised, if you can, fix this one, otherwise put it in the team to-do list and move on.

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#84

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 1:35 PM UTC

lostcolony wrote: post #22

YZF wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 as in scheming for power are a total turn off for me." Most people don't actually scheme for power in an organization. Not directly, anyway. Most people who appear to do that are coming from the perspective of "my (and my team's) needs are the most important here for the business' success"; the purpose isn't actually power, but to get their perceived needs met. Playing politics, then, is being able to under…

I wonder if there's a Maslov pyramid hidden in there. That is, people are first optimizing for their own comfort, then for the comfort of their team, and only then, for company goals.

People will fight their own company, throw other people under the bus, to ensure they're not being overworked and scapegoated, that they have enough budget to operate, some autonomy and say in the things they're working on. Conversely, when they don't feel threatened and aren't in the "survival mode", they'll start helping other teams and talk more about organizational goals, become proactive - whether because they care about the higher goals, or want to earn more status, autonomy or power.

There are, of course, sociopaths everywhere, but my gut tells me that for most people, it may be as simple as the model described above.

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#85

Post by Terretta » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 1:51 PM UTC

Or, try this starting point:

Brain and autonomic nervous system activity measurement in software engineering: A systematic literature review

Abstract

In the past decade, brain and autonomic nervous system activity measurement received increasing attention in the study of software engineering (SE). This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) to survey the existing NeuroSE literature.

Highlights

• First comprehensive review on use of neurophysiological methods in software engineering.

• Investigation of 89 articles and detailed analysis of the 47 completed empirical studies.

• Identification of code comprehension as the most frequently studied NeuroSE topic.

• Increasing trend towards multi-modal measurements of neurophysiological data.

• Identification of the most productive authors in the field of NeuroSE.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2021.110946

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016412122...

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#86

Post by spdionis » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 2:22 PM UTC

_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…

Being familiar with this situation, I can tell you that this type of manager is only viable/typical in the outsourcing business.

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#87

Post by Sr_developer » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 2:25 PM UTC

petercooper wrote: post #81

Sr_developer wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was to comment the same the other day , but the post was about some book the author was promoting so I didnt want to be a party popper but the book was totally mediocre. It seems to me the inevitable destiny of all "tech" press, start with strong titles and devolve into crap, or to be fairer a crap-shoot. So now you have: ALWAYS HAVE BEEN "CRAP" = Packt and Apress STARTED OK,GOOD NOW MOSTLY CRAP = Pragmatic, Mannin…

Where's the No Starch judgment coming from? While they seem to have started veering into more mainstream/maker-y type stuff over the years, I've never had a single bad book off of them, and in terms of actual physical quality I'm not sure there's any publisher that's better.

Check out the last titles, I am barely exaggerating with these fictitious ones to not crap on actual ones:

- How to make palindromes with python

- A CSS lexicon,900 terms defined (120 pages)

- The buttons of a PS5 controller

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#88

Post by throwaway284534 » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 2:43 PM UTC

bravetheheat wrote: post #40

throwaway284534 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconding the Manager Tools podcast. I used to teach devs coming out of boot camps and half our time was spent on how to manage your manager. IMO, schools of all kinds need to teach their students how power dynamics are in the real world, how most jobs are about navigating through difficult personalities, and how “being a professional” is not really about winning or losing, but how you play the game. And look, I get…

Do you have any resources that you recommend for a dev who's only been in tiny startups (10 people or less)

Personally, I’d aim for a new role at a medium or large sized company. Small startups are great if you want to wear a lot of hats and be close to the customer. Once a company starts getting around 50 people is when most of your job is abstracted through different fiefdoms of stakeholders, usually your project managers.

And at mega corps with 400+ people, most projects are being bolted onto a multi million dollar money printer. There’s so much more process to getting big changes out. But if you’re on the right team, you can build something novel and immediately have a market to test it out.

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#89

Post by johnnycerberus » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 3:05 PM UTC

linklater wrote: post #82

_hzrk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Your livelihood depends on those with people skills. If products don't get marketed, you don't eat. If products don't get sold, you don't eat. If your leader doesn't make the hard and right decisions on where to take the company, you don't eat.

There's a clear delimitation between the leader which takes decisions that impact the organisation and a project manager that barely has any skin in the game. In my experience, the one that takes decisions is not the one that manages people.

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#90

Post by pronik » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 3:19 PM UTC

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

Speed reading is training your field of view. I would agree that speed reading code is not really useful (even though skimming code looking for interesting stuff is), but what is immensely useful is being able to notice changes on your screen in general. Did something go from green to orange in your IDE? Was there an interesting keyword in the logs flowing by? Did this icon just blink? Has this counter just gone up?

I'm often astonished by the stuff people don't see on their screens when helping them debug something. Replying to "how did you know?!" by pointing to the edge of the screen where some small blob went from green to orange or to red is something that happens more often that I'd expect.