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Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

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Re: Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

#161

Post by Jensson »

jkaptur wrote: post #62
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The studies I've seen about pairing show that it's OK for beginners or lower-skill developers, but absolutely less productive for expert/senior developers. So yes, you're correct.

There are high-profile cases of world-class developers pairing: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...

Right, if you have a really good friend who just clicks with you pairing is great. But that isn't how pair programming at companies is done, they put you together with some other member of the team and tell you to do work, you didn't choose each other you just happened to be there and now you have to be mentally intimate with each other.

But you are right that voluntary pair programming can be a good thing, so we shouldn't ban programmers from pairing if they want to. But the discussion is whether it makes sense to force programmers to pair program. I really doubt that for example pairing John Carmack and Linus Torvalds would be productive, and that is the kind of personal pairings you get at work.

Re: Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

#162

Post by RussianCow »

gleenn wrote: post #19

People always struggle or avoid doing pair programming, and people always think it means that the developers' time now costs twice as much, but this is a total lie. When I worked at a place that did 100% pair programming with rotation every day, a new developer could hit the ground flying . Sitting next to someone who knows the system and can answer your question immediately means you get up to speed millions of time…

> When I worked at a place that did 100% pair programming with rotation every day

Putting aside whether or not it actually makes you more productive, that sounds awful to me. Part of the reason I work from home is so that I don't have to constantly interact with my peers, and can put my head down and concentrate on my work without having my train of thought constantly broken. I have no problem with pair programming as needed, but I would never work at a company that forced it all day. To each their own, though.

Re: Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

#163

Post by Jensson »

wwweston wrote: post #13
bcbrown wrote: post #4

Relevant to this article is Peter Naur's paper on Programming as Theory building: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf He argues that the biggest determinant on whether maintainers on a system they did not build will succeed is whether they will have access to the original developers: "The conclusion seems inescapable that at least with certain kinds of large programs, the continued adaptation, modification, and…

See also Bill Thurston's commentary on the nature of mathematical knowledge: "mathematical understanding does not expand in a monotone direction. Our understanding frequently deteriorates as well. There are several obvious mechanisms of decay. The experts in a subject retire and die, or simply move on to other subjects and forget. Mathematics is commonly explained and recorded in symbolic and concrete forms that are…

Mathematicians die but their papers lives on. Newton discovered variational calculus, but at the time nobody else in the world understood his work so it was forgotten for a century when he died. But it was later picked up again. It might take a while, but it isn't the same thing as the knowledge not existing.

Re: Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

#164

Post by RussianCow »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #110
gleenn wrote: post #19

People always struggle or avoid doing pair programming, and people always think it means that the developers' time now costs twice as much, but this is a total lie. When I worked at a place that did 100% pair programming with rotation every day, a new developer could hit the ground flying . Sitting next to someone who knows the system and can answer your question immediately means you get up to speed millions of time…

It's hard to be scientific about this because there's no control group. If we clone your team and forbid them from using pair programming, in 5 years, which team will allow new developers to hit the ground faster? Which will have greater velocity. Which will have better code quality? Some downsides to pair programming I've noticed: 1) People can tend to jump to the first solution they find, in order to not look slow…

I'll add another: you tend to miss out on some of the inner workings of the system when you have someone there to answer questions instead of diving in and figuring it out yourself. Yes, in an ideal world you have both, but doing lots of pair programming makes it too easy to take the shortcut and just ask how to do something, instead of learning the fine details of the system such that you don't have to ask those questions anymore in the future.

Re: Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

#165

Post by epolanski »

giantg2 wrote: post #102

In my experience, the biggest obstacle in understanding the system is that the underlying business process is not properly documented. A technical system is only as good as the business system it's implementing. Knowing the business process makes it much easier to understand the technical implementation, especially if you're trying to find bugs in the technical system since you can more easily see the mismatch betwee…

Heavily agree. So many times rewriting a feature from scratch is faster than figuring out from code, and there is a lot of really hard to understand code out there.

I remember once in a consultancy job for a bank having to maintain a form with a file uploader made of dozens and dozens redux actions interwhining in the most complex way one could imagine. There were atleast 4 folders of sagas.

No one could understand the code, I fought it a few days before deciding to manually document its cases by trying all input combinations I could think of and just rewrote it fromscratch in less than 250 locs. Took me an afternoon to rewrite it and do the maintenance task.

If I had e2es since the beginning I could've figured it out sooner..

Re: Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

#166

Post by decebalus1 »

gleenn wrote: post #19

People always struggle or avoid doing pair programming, and people always think it means that the developers' time now costs twice as much, but this is a total lie. When I worked at a place that did 100% pair programming with rotation every day, a new developer could hit the ground flying . Sitting next to someone who knows the system and can answer your question immediately means you get up to speed millions of time…

> a place that did 100% pair programming with rotation every day

Sounds like a nightmare. I interviewed once for a company where the team did exactly that, and it was the moment in the interviews I realized I don't want to work there.

ad-hoc peer programming is perfectly fine. Debugging something tricky or helping someone ramp up is great. But peer programming as-a-process is literally peer-micromanaging and outright insulting IMHO.

Re: Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

#167

Post by fantod »

epolanski wrote: post #158
wwweston wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See also Bill Thurston's commentary on the nature of mathematical knowledge: "mathematical understanding does not expand in a monotone direction. Our understanding frequently deteriorates as well. There are several obvious mechanisms of decay. The experts in a subject retire and die, or simply move on to other subjects and forget. Mathematics is commonly explained and recorded in symbolic and concrete forms that are…

I don't really buy that. Mathematics is by far the biggest and longest running open source project on this planet and we are absolutely able to traverse it by centuries or millenia. This works across languages and cultures. Mathematics is built on a small set of axioms and everything else is defined on top of it and proved. Your comment makes it sound like there is some magic knowledge linked to arcane symbols, when…

> if everyone forgot all they knew about math today we would be easily able to get back to where we are in a just by reading

If your definition of "easily" is the amount of work required to become a mathematician, then sure.

Re: Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

#168

Post by kayodelycaon »

DenisM wrote: post #144
kayodelycaon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you worked at a place that did 100% pair programming, anyone who couldn’t succeed at pair programming would be filtered out. Personally, whether or not I can do pair programming has a lot to do who I’m working with, what I’m doing, and what kind of day I’m having. The same thing goes for test-driven development. I have ADHD and short-term memory issues. This causes me to work by feel on some tasks because I don’t…

You don’t really have to fit things into logical registers before you can speak of them. If you stop trying to do that you will find that you can speak your mind directly, which requires a lot less effort. The recipient of your message is also a human mind and while you will lose the handrails of logical clarity you will gain the safety net in abundance of bandwidth and feedback loops. It’s a trained skill tho.

I guarantee you, my mind does not work like yours and I need to translate.

If you want me to explain code as I see it, I'll start in the middle of a function, where you have no context what it happening and jump to another line of code that is two functions removed. Repeat. You will have absolutely no idea what's going on as I flip through tab after tab of code.

My brain does not like doing things in order. I have to force it. Hence the processing overhead.

My friends find it entertaining to listen to me tell a story, because none of it is in order. I frequently backtrack or go down "irrelevant" paths, before returning to one of several previous threads.

Fortunately for this comment and the second and third novels I'm working on simultaneously, editing exists.

Re: Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

#169

Post by epolanski »

fantod wrote: post #167
epolanski wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really buy that. Mathematics is by far the biggest and longest running open source project on this planet and we are absolutely able to traverse it by centuries or millenia. This works across languages and cultures. Mathematics is built on a small set of axioms and everything else is defined on top of it and proved. Your comment makes it sound like there is some magic knowledge linked to arcane symbols, when…

> if everyone forgot all they knew about math today we would be easily able to get back to where we are in a just by reading If your definition of "easily" is the amount of work required to become a mathematician, then sure.

We started from the assertion that if a software project loses all of its devs it will not be maintainable anymore by new hires.

Not only this is far from a general truth, we all maintained codebases we knew nothing about I guess, but it applies even less to mathematics, which is a language based on definitions built on few concepts rather than vague and buggy business requirements.

Re: Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

#170

Post by kayodelycaon »

cromka wrote: post #128
kayodelycaon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you worked at a place that did 100% pair programming, anyone who couldn’t succeed at pair programming would be filtered out. Personally, whether or not I can do pair programming has a lot to do who I’m working with, what I’m doing, and what kind of day I’m having. The same thing goes for test-driven development. I have ADHD and short-term memory issues. This causes me to work by feel on some tasks because I don’t…

By reading this I think I just realized I have AHDH, and also problem with short-term memory. Damn, need to talk to a specialist about it.

ADHD isn't the only thing that can cause this type of thinking.
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