281–290 of 553 posts
> Programming-related jobs have high rates of skill turnover True, but there are fundamental patterns that remain the same. And if we are talking about the level-of-abstraction type of change, then having experience in the underlying techs certainly helps.
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We can’t even push to a git repo unless it has a linked work item/story/task/bug. So, in order to say, upgrade packages or refactor difficult to read code, the work item needs to be approved by a non-tech PO. Guess how much gets done outside of planned/micromanaged? Answer: next to nothing.
Guess how much would get done if you learned to explain why that work is important to a non-technical colleague? Lots. People don't always understand code, but they do understand problems, and why those problems are important to keep on top of. If your PO is sensible then a couple of paragraphs explaining why refactoring is important with a closing line that says spending a week catching up on refactoring now will sa…
There isn't a shortage of software developers. The pay isn't great--the kids getting $300K packages out of Stanford are an exception; it's a marketing expense. In fact, if you control for the level of intelligence it takes to be any good, SWEs make less (and get far less autonomy--do you think lawyers work on Jira tickets?) than any other professional, and they hit a salary/challenge plateau quick... after which, the…
Cry me a river. Software development is some of the easiest, highest paid work in history. The majority of the population is grinding away in tough physical labor or abusive service jobs getting paid pennies while software devs moan about only making low six figures and getting a few boring jira tickets while they sit in their home office reading hacker news for half the day.
There isn't a shortage of software developers. The pay isn't great--the kids getting $300K packages out of Stanford are an exception; it's a marketing expense. In fact, if you control for the level of intelligence it takes to be any good, SWEs make less (and get far less autonomy--do you think lawyers work on Jira tickets?) than any other professional, and they hit a salary/challenge plateau quick... after which, the…
Many lawyers have to religiously time track everything. Because hours attributable to a specific client are billed and billable hours are where the revenue comes from.
It's not the 6 minutes I heard lawyers do, but I definitely have been asked to track intervals of 15 minutes.
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I've dreamed about a 20% policy like google had, except it's where you can work on anything, including code debt. I've tried to stress to managers in the past that developers feel the pain of code debt. It makes us slower! Enable us to spend time sharpening our tools and managing our codebase. One problem of course is, not all SWE can do this well. I wouldn't necessarily trust a junior hire to recognize and execute a…
How does a junior become a senior? By trying stuff that cannot do well yet and making mistakes.
There isn't a shortage of software developers. The pay isn't great--the kids getting $300K packages out of Stanford are an exception; it's a marketing expense. In fact, if you control for the level of intelligence it takes to be any good, SWEs make less (and get far less autonomy--do you think lawyers work on Jira tickets?) than any other professional, and they hit a salary/challenge plateau quick... after which, the…
Cry me a river. Software development is some of the easiest, highest paid work in history. The majority of the population is grinding away in tough physical labor or abusive service jobs getting paid pennies while software devs moan about only making low six figures and getting a few boring jira tickets while they sit in their home office reading hacker news for half the day.
Any engineer who has enough EQ and people skills to give some demos on Zoom is going to find that Sales Engineering/Solutions Engineering is an easier job with more earning potential, all with no on-call rotation.
On top of that, the company treats you like you're valuable rather than a cost center (especially relevant to people doing infrastructure and IT engineering). Sales teams go on vacation to team-build, engineers are shoved in a conference room with some lukewarm sandwiches.
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I get why bureaucracy is a total pain, getting work approved by stakeholders constantly ... But the actual ticketing/PR system? Change requires control. The actual issue is not _using_ that control tool to get the right things done. If basic technical debt issues are not an easy sell in your org, that's the real problem and one that should be handled by senior/dev manager. A big red flag for me is any org that doesn'…
> Change requires control. But code, unit tests, git commit messages and merge requests are already providing 4x documentation of code changes. Adding Jira tickets and production deployment documentation gets you to 6x documentation. In my experience, if your company's problems weren't solved with 4x documentation, they won't be solved by going to 6x documentation.
- Ticket: Description of the requirement
- Code: How it was done
- Review: Peer-learning, change evolution
- Unit test: Testing of implementation as understood by SWE
- QA: Did the change match the requirement, did the SWE understand it? Is the outcome the right one?
Each "item" should serve a distinct purpose, have distinct value and be justified. If they seem like duplicates, then that probably points at issues elsewhere.
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>The six figure salary is diluted by spending weekends constantly having to learn new technology off the clock You don't need to do this forever. Usually you can just focus on a stack and related technologies and do well. Once you have experience and a clearly defined need, ad-hoc research is good enough.
> You don't need to do this forever The thesis of the linked article is that you do. For the most part, it matches my experience. I'm 30 years in and already wondering how useful the Hadoop/Spark/Scala stuff I spent the last few years mastering is going to be in the next 5 years.
* Scala introduced us old Java hands to a whole different world of modern languages. If you know it you get Kotlin or the latest Java changes for free (probably TypeScript-like other ecosystems too).
* Spark introduced a generation of backend developers to distributed query engine technology (my generation is unlikely to delve into postgress codebase in comparison) and made ETL trivial in real life systems
Hadoop clearly died in the last few years or so (outside of EMR where it's mostly invisible anyway). But it's a perfect example of a complete technology lifecycle - it had a good run for a decade starting around 2010 which in our line of business is incredibly long time. Not to mention how many things about distributed systems people like me learned from that stack over time.
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Yeah, but in trades you have to climb in hot attics, deal with sewers, work outside, etc. And you have to put in a full days work. How many of us developers actually put in a full 8+ hours? I know that I don’t. I can usually get my assigned work done in about four hours. Can you imagine an electrician or plumber or doctor or lawyer only working 4 hours a day? It’s insane how much I get paid for what I actually do.
>doctor or lawyer only working 4 hours a day I'm absolutely sure that lawyers and doctors only work 20 hours a week.
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The backlash is the same as the one against standardized testing methods in school. People that don’t fit the mold of the testing method will fail regardless of how competent they are at their actual job. It’s good you like that I suppose, but it sounds absolutely bonkers to me.
> don’t fit the mold of the testing method will fail regardless of how competent they are at their actual job. The mold being answering questions about their supposed area of expertise. I think people really like to claim that they are misunderstood geniuses who just don't fit the mold of being able to answer questions about the things they know. I have no doubt that such people exist, but I would not want to scrap a…
you seem very confident about that. In my experience LC/FAANG style interview don't keep bad people out.