Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer (2019)

> what you need is often not known ahead of time

Well that's kind of the point of software engineering, isn't it? Actually typing code is only a small part of software engineering, and if you don't know what you need yet, then you're probably not ready to write code. That doesn't mean you're not being a productive software engineer! It just means you're still working toward that point.

I could be more clear about "what you need" actually means. Let's say I sit down to (A) prove the four-color theorem, which says that no more than 4 colors are needed to color in a 2D map with no two adjacent regions having the same color; (B) write a function to color a map using as few colors as possible. Before I can start on the meat of it, I have to decide exactly what I mean by "map". Anything that (A) relies on my proof or (B) calls my function is going to need to turn their data into the kind of "map" I'm working with.

Oh, I know what a map is: it's an ArcGIS Pro 10.7 Geodatabase with a Polygon layer! Hand me one of those and I'll assign a 32-bit ARGB value to each polygon. What? You don't have ArcGIS Pro 10.7? Well, sucks to be you. Obviously it has to be that, since I need insert esoteric proprietary feature in order to color it.

Hmm, well, okay, maybe I don't need every feature of ArcGIS Pro 10.7 Geodatabase Polygon layers. In fact, I really just need a list of regions and how they're connected. Do I need literally every wiggle-waggle of every border between each region? Well, not really ... in fact all I really need to know is which ones touch, and which ones don't. In fact, it turns out what I need is a Planar Graph. It probably shouldn't have any loops (nodes connected to themselves) either. A loopless planar graph. If you hand me one of those, I can color it for you -- in fact, I'll just assign each node 1 through (up to) 4 to represent the colors, and you can do whatever you want with that information, rather than me picking the actual ARGB values for you.

The reason I associated it with a math proof is because it's more clear in that case that reducing the preconditions on the objects you accept increases the power of your proof. Proving something interesting about all multiples of 5 is less powerful than proving it about all integers, and less powerful than proving it about all elements of an Abelian Group, etc. Writing your code to work on any loopless planar graph is much more powerful than writing it to only work on .

And we settled on "loopless planar graph" not because we had a bunch of graphs lying around -- we probably didn't! We probably actually had a map representation we've used elsewhere. We settled on "loopless planar graph" because that is the minimal possible description of the objects we can run our code on. That's what I mean by "what we need to do our job". That is the birth of an abstraction.

Not exactly - there are about three things in play

1. You cannot alter a company with code in the way you can with written words. If we split the compmay-as-a-machine and company-as-people-operating-(in)-the-machine and compmay-as-people-adjusting-the-machine then the difference is more stark.

a company as a machine does run on written (and often unwritten) policies that humans adhere to. More and more now there is code doing the actual machine but but it is rare if ever it is a whole piece - maybe there are whole companies totally automated but so doubt it.

As such a big important part of being a manager - changing the machine to be more efficient - is just not (yet) possible with code. but when it is, managers will talk code and write code.

2. I am not sure where to go with the filing part. Yes in many companies there are so many jobs to get done that anyone getting their hands in and automating anything is a huge help. That person would be making a part of the company-as-machine. good. presumably they would do it ten hours a week to a professional standard.

is it the best way to organise things. No - again torvalds had hierarchical arrangement and hardly ever write code - but that belies the reams of code he wrote as examples, discussion documents, strawman and just test code.

Manager should be writing test frameworks or tools to build the documentation in Japan or whatever

3. The whole "pointing people at someone else who is expert". scream bottleneck to me. Screams that people are in silos, there is not enough brown bag lunches ot other ways to discover / get repeatedly told about how other areas of codebase work.

4. things like weird bugs and effects of the tech stack are great - exactly the sort of thing to put in a code review. Or a code review of reviews (which I think is another good managerial practise)

As long as you'll be staying young, forever, you're sorted, bouncing around.

I have been around long enough to watch others that have bounced around, suddenly hit the "Boomer Wall," where they get ghosted by recruiters.

It's very sudden, and quite jarring. Absolutely terrifying. I hit it, but it wasn't the same shock as others have felt, because I hadn't been job-hopping.

Make sure to save a nest egg, folks. I did, and that's why I'm in a fairly enviable position (if you count surviving being treated as radioactive by tech recruiters as "enviable").

> About 400k (USD I assume) - where I live you could easily get really nice house with that in less than a year, with zero mortgage and without limiting your daily spending too much.

That's not the way to think about it when looking at leveraged assets. A house where you live.

> I'm happy for you if you have ability to earn that, but with such expectations and altitude - no wonder US corps are so eager to outsource to our side of the pond :-)

Are they? Last time I looked there was a lot of Europeans looking to move to America, but the reverse was exceedingly rare.

I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, but just to the specific narrow example of UE’s ACharacter: there’s nothing stopping you using APawn as your “player” and composing the collision, mesh, movement and functionality as you please - in fact, I suspect the majority of people using Unreal Engine for anything other than toy projects would do just that. I think the “pre-composed” ACharacter exists mainly to help with quick prototyping.