141–150 of 199 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's a split in the industry; outside of FAANG senior means "certain amount of time spent in front of the computer getting paid", inside FAANG, it's a set of behaviors encapsulated in a particular mid-career job title.
Inside FAANG, it is literally a job title.
I've noticed many of these articles about what it takes to be a good software engineer talk about code quality. I recently started to work in a team of very senior engineers (with relatively little experience) and what I've noticed is that code quality is rarely mentioned. Everybody write "good enough" code and there's never much discussion around code quality (occasionally a few remarks in code reviews) or design. G…
> Everybody write "good enough" code and there's never much discussion around code quality (occasionally a few remarks in code reviews) or design. This approach probably works out because you have senior engineers laying out a lot of the core structure and architecture for how things built. There's a tendency for newer people to tacitly adopt patterns that already exist and replicate. However, this approach can be re…
There are days, weeks really, when I can't tell you what I've done. The business just chugs along. If I'm gone a day, though, my phone will ring by 10 a.m.
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I used to work with a guy who took "gets shit done" to a level I'd never seen before. It changed the way I look at programming. He was actually a pretty good engineer. Wrote good-enough code. But he wasn't precious about anything and he didn't care all that much about finding the 100%-guaranteed-socially-approved-correct way to do things. What he had was an incredible ability to diagnose and fix problems quickly, str…
In my experience it is useful to have such people on the team, but if they make up most of the team then the codebase becomes a gigantic mess over time, and it negatively impacts everyone else.
Ultimately it gets done faster than it would if the whole team was my personality, but with higher quality than if the whole team was their personality.
> Static typing is really a form of testing
No! Static typing is not a form of testing. Static typing or static analysis, is an approximation of you program behavior, because it is undecidable in general. Depending on the properties of the type system, you can guarantee that you program doesn't go wrong if it is well-typed, where the definition of 'go wrong' depends on the type system. On the contrary, testing can check the behavior of your program with respect to a set of inputs, and it doesn't guarantee anything outside that set of input. You are doing state partitioning by doing a static analysis over your code to determine what tests you may need, and test some of them.
I've noticed many of these articles about what it takes to be a good software engineer talk about code quality. I recently started to work in a team of very senior engineers (with relatively little experience) and what I've noticed is that code quality is rarely mentioned. Everybody write "good enough" code and there's never much discussion around code quality (occasionally a few remarks in code reviews) or design. G…
This is touching on something I have been thinking a lot about as I progress in my career. The thing good and bad code have in common is the fact that it needs to updated. Either for bugs or changing business need. So focusing on the operational side becomes much more important. Code is the trivial part. Creating systems that can be modified reliably is the hard part. I rather have ownership over a "poorly" coded ser…
Making any of that work for spaghetti is rough, since it lacks the boundaries and entry points those things rely on. And even if you ostensibly have it for “bad” code, it tends to be fragile and unreliable. (As my many, many overnight pages have shown.)
Of course, that may be different perceptions of “good”.
I've noticed many of these articles about what it takes to be a good software engineer talk about code quality. I recently started to work in a team of very senior engineers (with relatively little experience) and what I've noticed is that code quality is rarely mentioned. Everybody write "good enough" code and there's never much discussion around code quality (occasionally a few remarks in code reviews) or design. G…
I used to work with a guy who took "gets shit done" to a level I'd never seen before. It changed the way I look at programming. He was actually a pretty good engineer. Wrote good-enough code. But he wasn't precious about anything and he didn't care all that much about finding the 100%-guaranteed-socially-approved-correct way to do things. What he had was an incredible ability to diagnose and fix problems quickly, str…
> Long verbose names don't cost anything They absolutely do have a cost. The question is whether the benefit they bring in implicit documentation is worth their cost. > Even beyond the DX of readable names, it also acts like a type-checker. By reading the code, you can verify at least the semantics make sense. I would strongly prefer that the actual type system do this job instead. As a toy example, if a function is…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah its pretty scary, 6 years mean you've either only understood on one or two big systems, or you've job hopped more projects and never understood them in depth.
According to this[0] John carmack released 22 games before Doom all in the span of 5 years. Years of experience means nothing, working on real products that get shipped means a lot. I know plenty of programmers with 10+ years of experience that may never reach the level of expertise that Carmack reached in 5 years "professionally". [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack
6 years of experience does not make one a senior engineer. I`ll be polite and say that most engineers with 6 years of experience I know are not seniors.
I agree 1000%, but at my company and many I've looked into(not FAANG), it's the way they structure it. Senior is level II, one above Junior. Then all kind of inflated things above that like Lead, Principal, Architect, Principal Architect, Master. Just waiting for them to add Physician or something...it fits in line with our industry stealing other job titles to feel important.